LINCOLN, ABRAHAM (1809-1865), sixteenth president of the United States, was born on Feb. 12, 1809, on a farm in Kentucky. In early childhood he was moved to another farm "in the valley (of Knob creek) surrounded," in his own words, "by high hills and deep gorges"; a rocky unfruitful soil where the furious washing of a "big rain in the hills" would sometimes sweep new planting "clear off the field." Here, in virtually peasant con ditions, his childhood was spent.
The paternal descent, though unknown to him beyond the third generation back, has been traced by enthusiastic genealogists to a lost or strayed member of a distinguished New England family of the same name. On his mother's side he was descended from an east Virginia family of the name of Hanks who were of humble station. His grandmother, Lucy Hanks, migrated with her parents in 1782 to the Virginia mountains. There soon after ward she had a natural child, Nancy Hanks, who eventually removed to Kentucky and married in i8o6 Thomas Lincoln. Their second child but first son was Abraham Lincoln. Nothing is known of the father of Nancy Hanks, though there is a persistent tradition that he was a Virginia aristocrat. Nancy's famous son appears to have believed this story and to have felt that whatever distinction he possessed had come to him from this unacknowl edged heritage of aristocracy. Lincoln's parents have become the subject of sentimental controversy to such a degree that it is hard to remove the clouds of myth surrounding them and uncover the actual humanity which their son inherited. It seems tolerably certain that the father, Thomas, was a shiftless person who tried this and that, both carpentering and farming, who had something of the vagabond in his blood, also something of the dreamer, and was always at heart a rolling stone. Besides shifting from farm to farm in Kentucky he subsequently took his family far afield, settling in Indiana when Abraham was eight years old, and moving on to Illinois when his son was 21. Nancy Hanks is even more shadowy. Though enthusiasts talk of her as "a forest madonna," it is impossible to say what they mean. It may be believed that she was good-looking, sensitive, pious, with an air about her that seemed to bespeak a different social world from the one in which she moved. She also seems to have been something of a dreamer. Many, if not all, frontier women of the old days were that. Their lives were hard, their emotions in the main were sealed up, but all around them was the mystery of the primitive forest ; they treasured it in silence and gave vent to it only now and then in the ecstasies of religious revival. It is not fanciful to
perceive in Abraham Lincoln all the characteristics of these two nor to believe that during much of his life they were appearing and disappearing in a way that is sometimes bewildering and that not until late in life were theyblended coherently.
In 1816 Thomas Lincoln insisted on taking to the road. Tra dition has it that Nancy was loath to go, that she was oppressed by a sense of unhappiness. The winter of 1816-17 was spent by the Lincolns in a "half-faced camp"—that is, a cabin with but three walls, the fourth side being entirely open—on land for which Thomas had contracted in the valley of Pigeon Creek in southern Indiana. His son remembered long afterward that their settlement was "in an unbroken forest" and that, young as he was, "an ax was put into his hands" at once, and that all of them ac cepted as their chief task the clearing of the wood. A cheerless life ensued—"pretty pinching times," he says. After two years of dreary struggle, Nancy Lincoln broke down and was carried off by an epidemic which swept the country-side in the autumn of 1818. The pathetic note that somehow is present always in her story closes with a glimpse of her husband returning to his former trade as a carpenter and fashioning her coffin out of green lumber.
Lincoln's home was in Indiana from his eighth year until shortly after his twenty-first birthday. During this period his father married secondly a Kentucky widow, Sarah Bush Johnson. In his stepmother, Lincoln found a kind, practical, understanding friend. To her, doubtless, may be traced an increase of general comfort in the family's way of living. Nevertheless, they con tinued to be poor people in a poor community. Thomas Lincoln never rose above the estate of a peasant farmer. Abraham had less than a year's schooling. Such as he had was mainly in Indiana, though a very little elementary schooling had been given him in Kentucky. None of it went beyond "readin', writin' and cipherin'." Although, in his own words, "there was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education" he had an innate hunger for it and would lie before the fire at night doing sums with a piece of wood for a slate. A few books which early came his way were eagerly devoured. Pilgrim's Progress, Aesop, Robinson Crusoe, Weem's Life of Washington and Franklin's Autobiog raphy were the earliest foundations of that sense of style which later was one of his characteristics.