THE SOUL OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN

BY

WILLIAM E. BARTON

AUTHOR OF "A HERO IN HOMESPUN,"
"THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER," "PINE KNOT,"
ETC.

NEW

YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MY FOUR SONS
BRUCE, CHARLES, FREDERICK, ROBERT
AND MY SON-IN-LAW, CLYDE

PREFACE

The author is aware that he is dipping his net into a stream already darkened by too much ink. The fact that there are so many books on the religion of Abraham Lincoln is a chief reason why there should be one more. Books on this subject are largely polemic works which followed the publication of Holland's biography in 1865, and multiplied in the controversies growing out of that and the Lamon and Herndon biographies in 1872 and 1889 respectively. Within that period and until the death of Mr. Herndon in 1892 and the publication of his revised biography of Lincoln in 1893, there was little opportunity for a work on this subject that was not distinctively controversial. The time has come for a more dispassionate view. Of the large number of other books dealing with this topic, nearly or quite all had their origin in patriotic or religious addresses, which, meeting with favor when orally delivered, were more or less superficially revised and printed, in most instances for audiences not greatly larger than those that heard them spoken. Many of these are excellent little books, though making no pretense of original and thorough investigation.

Of larger and more comprehensive works there are a few, but they do not attempt the difficult and necessary task of critical analysis.

So much has been said, and much of it with such intensity of feeling, on the subject of Lincoln's religion, that a number of the more important biographies, including the great work of Nicolay and Hay, say as little on the subject as possible.

The author of this volume brings no sweeping criticism against those who have preceded him in the same field. He has eagerly sought out the books and speeches of all such within his reach, and is indebted to many of them for valuable suggestions. A Bibliography at the end of this volume contains a list of those to whom the author knows himself to be chiefly indebted, but his obligation goes much farther than he can hope to acknowledge in print. With all due regard for these earlier authors, the present writer justifies himself in the publication of this volume by the following considerations, which seems to him to differ in important respects from earlier works in the same field:

(1) He has made an effort to provide an adequate historical background for the study of the religious life of Abraham Lincoln in the successive periods of his life; and without immediately going too deeply into the material of the main subject, to relate the man to his environment. In this the author has been aided not only by books and interviews with men who knew Lincoln, but by some years of personal experience in communities where the social, educational, and religious conditions were in all essential respects similar to those in which Mr. Lincoln lived during two important epochs of his career. The author was not born in this environment, but he spent seven years of his youth and young manhood as a teacher and preacher in a region which give him somewhat exceptional opportunities for a discriminating judgment.

(2) The author has assembled what is, so far as he knows, all the essential evidence that has appeared in print concerning the religious life and opinions of Mr. Lincoln, a larger body, as he believes, than any previous writer has compiled. He has added to this all evidence available to him from written and personal testimony.

He has subjected this evidence to a critical analysis, in an effort to determine the degree of credibility with which its several portions may reasonably be received. The author is not unaware that this is the most disputable, as it is the most difficult part of his task, and, as he believes, the most valuable part of it. Unless some such analysis is made, the evidence resolves itself into chaos.

(3) Several entirely new avenues of investigation have been opened and lines of evidence adduced which find no place in any previous book on Mr. Lincoln's religious life, and very scant reference, and that without investigation, in one or two of the biographies.

(4) The book also contains a constructive argument, setting forth the conviction to which the author has come with regard to the faith of Abraham Lincoln.

It is entirely possible that some readers will find themselves in essential agreement with the author in the earlier parts of the book, but will dissent in whole or in part from his own inferences. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with the author in his conclusions, he will find in this book some material not elsewhere available for the formation of an independent judgment. Nevertheless the author counts himself justified not only in adducing the evidence but in stating frankly the conclusion which to his mind this evidence supports.

This book treats of the religion of Abraham Lincoln; but it does not consider his religion as wholly expressed in his theological opinions. Important as it is that a man should think correctly on all subjects, and especially on a subject of such transcendent value, religion is more than a matter of opinion. We cannot adequately consider religion apart from life. Abraham Lincoln's life was an evolution, and so was his religion. In a way which this volume will seek to set forth, Lincoln was himself a believer in evolution, and his life and religion were in accord with this process as he held it.

This book is, therefore, more than an essay on the religion of Lincoln, unless religion be understood as inclusive of all that is normal in life. It deals, therefore, with the life, as well as with the opinions, of Lincoln; and it considers both life and opinion as in process of development in each of the successive stages of his career.

In this respect the present book may claim some distinctive place in the literature of this subject. Other books have drawn sharp contrasts between the supposed religious opinions of Lincoln's youth and those which he is believed to have cherished later. This book undertakes what may be termed a study of the evolution of the spiritual life of Abraham Lincoln. The author is not aware that this has been done before in quite this way.

The author acknowledges his obligations to many friends for their assistance in the preparation of this volume. Mr. Jesse W. Weik, of Greencastle, Indiana, associate of Mr. Herndon in the preparation of his Life of Lincoln, and owner of the Herndon manuscripts, has been generous to me. Mrs. Clark E. Carr, of Galesburg, Illinois, widow of my honored friend, and the friend of Lincoln, Colonel Carr, author of "Lincoln at Gettysburg," has placed at my disposal all her husband's books and papers. Mr. Judd Stewart, of New York City, owner of one of the largest collections of Lincolniana, has assisted me. President John W. Cook of the Northern Illinois State Normal School has suggested important lines of research. Mr. John E. Burton, of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, whose collection of Lincoln books was once the largest in America, has sold me some of his chief treasures, and imparted to me much of the fruit of his experience. Mr. O. H. Oldroyd, of Washington, owner of the famous Lincoln Collection, and custodian of the house where Lincoln died, has, on two visits, placed all that he has within my reach. To these, and to a considerable number of men and women who knew Lincoln while he was yet living, and to many others whom I cannot name, my thanks are due.

I regret that one great collection, consisting, however, more largely of relics than of manuscripts, is so largely packed away that it has not been of much use to me. Mr. Charles F. Gunther of Chicago has, however, produced for me such Lincoln material as seemed to him to bear upon my quest, and I acknowledge his courtesy.

Mr. Oliver P. Barrett of Chicago has given me great joy in the examination of his fine collection of Lincoln manuscripts.

I have spent a few pleasant and profitable hours in the collection of Honorable Daniel Fish, the noted Lincoln bibliographer, of Minneapolis, and thank him for his friendly interest in this undertaking.

Among libraries, my largest debt is to those of the Chicago Historical Society, the Illinois State Historical Society at Springfield, and the Library of Congress in Washington. In each of these I have had not only unrestricted access to the whole Lincoln material possessed by them, but the most generous and courteous assistance. I have examined every rare Lincoln book, and many manuscripts, in these three collections. I have had occasion also to use the Chicago Public Library, the Newberry Library, and the Library of the University of Chicago, as well as those of Chicago Theological Seminary and McCormick Theological Seminary. In certain important local matters, I have been assisted by the libraries of Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, Illinois College, Jacksonville, Illinois, the Public Library of Peoria, Illinois, and the library of Transylvania University at Lexington, Kentucky. I also visited the Public Library of Louisville, with its historical collections, but most that I found there I had already consulted elsewhere. The New York Public Library and the Library of Columbia University supplemented my research at a few important points. The Oak Park Public Library has been constantly at my service. The Library of Berea College, Kentucky, has given me very valuable assistance in finding for me a large amount of periodical literature bearing on my study. The five great Boston libraries would have yielded me much had I come to them earlier. While the book was undergoing revision, I visited the Athenaeum, the Massachusetts State, the Boston Public, the Massachusetts Historical, and the Harvard University libraries. It was gratifying to discover that even in the last named of these, enriched as it is with the collections of Charles Sumner, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and the Lincoln collection of my friend Alonzo Rothschild, author of "Lincoln, Master of Men," there was practically nothing relating to this subject which I had not already seen and examined. In the Massachusetts Historical Library, however, I discovered some manuscripts, and that quite unexpectedly, which afford me much aid in a collateral study.

In addition to the foregoing, I have my own Lincoln library, which, while a working collection rather than one of incunabula, and modest in size as compared with some that I have used, is still not small. The Bibliography at the end of the volume is virtually a catalogue of my own Lincoln books.

Claims of completeness are dangerous, and I make none. But I have been diligent in pursuit of all probable sources of knowledge of this subject, and I do not now know where to look for any other book of manuscript that would greatly alter or add to the material which this book contains. I am glad, therefore, at this stage, to share the fruits of my investigations with the reader.

W. E. B.

The First Church Study
Oak Park, Illinois

CONTENTS

PART I: A STUDY OF RELIGIOUS
ENVIRONMENTS

CHAPTER I

THE CONFLICT OF TESTIMONY

Of no other American have so many biographies been written as of Abraham Lincoln. No other question concerning his life has evoked more interest than that of his religious faith and experience. What Abraham Lincoln believed has been told by many who knew him and whose varied relations to him during his lifetime rendered it not unreasonable to suppose that they could give some assured answer to the question of his belief. The answers are not only varied, but hopelessly contradictory. It is stated on apparently good authority that in his young manhood he read Volney's Ruins and Paine's Age of Reason, and it is affirmed that he accepted their conclusions, and himself wrote what might have been a book or pamphlet denying the essential doctrines of the Christian faith as he understood them. Friends of his who knew him well enough to forbid the throwing of their testimony out of court have affirmed that he continued to hold these convictions; and that, while he became more cautious in the matter of their expression, he carried them through life and that they never underwent any radical change. On the other hand, there are declarations, made by those who also knew Lincoln well, that these views became modified essentially, and that Lincoln accepted practically the whole content of orthodox Christian theology as it was then understood; that he observed daily family worship in his home; that he carried a Bible habitually upon his person; and that he was in short in every essential a professed Christian, though never a member of a Christian church.

There is more than a conflict of testimony; there is positive chaos. Every recent biographer has felt the inherent difficulties involved in it. One or two of them have passed it over with practically no mention; others have become fierce partisans of the one extreme or the other.

Besides the formal biographies, a literature of this special topic has grown up. Entire books and many pamphlets and magazine articles have been written on this one question. The Chicago Historical Society and the Chicago Public Library have each devoted a principal division in the Lincoln material to the literature relating to his religion. It has been the writer's privilege to examine in both these libraries and in several others the whole known body of literature of the subject.

In this investigation the writer came face to face with utterly contradictory testimony from men who had known Abraham Lincoln intimately.

Of him Mr. Herndon, for twenty years his law partner, said:

"As to Mr. Lincoln's religious views, he was, in short, an infidel.... Mr. Lincoln told me a thousand times that he did not believe the Bible was the revelation of God as the Christian world contends."—Lamon: Life of Lincoln, p. 489.

The direct antithesis of this statement is found in a narrative of Hon. Newton Bateman, who knew Mr. Lincoln from 1842 until Mr. Lincoln's death, and whose office was in the State House at Springfield next-door to that which, for a period of eight months from the time of his nomination till his departure for his inauguration, was occupied by Mr. Lincoln. He affirmed (or at least was so quoted by Holland) that Mr. Lincoln said to him:

"I know there is a God, and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If He has a place and work for me—and I think He has—I believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is everything. I know I am right because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God."—J. G. Holland: Life of Lincoln, p. 237.

Popular oratory has carried even farther these two extremes of irreconcilable contradiction. On the one hand are to be found scurrilous publications, shockingly offensive against all good taste, declaring Lincoln to have been an atheist, a mocker, a hypocrite, a man of unclean mind, and a violator in his speech of all canons of decency. We will not quote from any of these at present; but of the length to which the other extreme can go, has gone, and continues to go, let the following incident, gleaned from a recent English book, serve as an illustration:

"In the year 1861 the Southern States of America were filled with slaves and slaveholders. It was proposed to make Abraham Lincoln president. But he had resolved that if he came to that position of power he would do all he could to wipe away the awful scourge from the page of his nation's history. A rebellion soon became imminent, and it was expected that in his inaugural address much would be said respecting it. The time came. The Senate House was packed with people; before him was gathered the business skill and the intellectual power of the States. With one son lying dead in the White House, whom he loved with a fond father's affection; another little boy on the borders of eternity; with his nation's eternal disgrace or everlasting honor resting upon his speech, he speaks distinctly, forcefully, and without fear. Friend and foe marvel at his collected movements. They know of the momentous issues which hang on his address. They know the domestic trials that oppress his heart. But they do not know that, before leaving home that morning, the President had taken down the family Bible and conducted their home worship as usual, and then had asked to be left alone. The family withdrawing, they heard his tremulous voice raised in pleadings with God, that He whose shoulder sustains the government of worlds would guide him and overrule his speech for His own glory. Here was the power of this man's strength."—G. H. Morgan: Modern Knights-Errant, p. 104; quoted in Hastings' Great Texts of the Bible, volume on "Isaiah," pp. 237-38.

This incident is now an integral part of the best and most recent homiletic work in the English language, and will be used in thousands of sermons and addresses. It is a story that carries its own refutation in almost every line. Mr. Lincoln had no son either sick or dead and lying in the White House or anywhere else at the time of his first inaugural, nor had he as yet entered the White House; and the hours of that day are fairly well accounted for; but this and similar incidents illustrate the length to which the oratorical imagination may carry a speaker either in the pulpit or on the platform, and not only be preserved in books but pass the supposedly critical eye of a careful compiler of material for sermons and lectures.

If another book is justified, it should be one that does more than compile that part of the evidence which appears to support a particular theory. The compilation should be as nearly complete as is humanely possible. But it must do more than plunge the reader into this swamp of conflicting testimony. It must somehow seek to evaluate the evidence and present a reasonable conclusion.

Moreover, in the judgment of the present writer, religion is more than opinion, and cannot be considered as a detachable entity. Lincoln's religion was more than his belief, his conjecture, his logical conclusion concerning particular doctrines. It can only be properly appraised in connection with his life. While, therefore, the writer does not now undertake a complete biography of Lincoln, though cherishing some hope that he may eventually write a book of that character, this present work endeavors to study the religion of Lincoln not in detachment, but as part and parcel of his life.

A word may be said concerning the author's point of view and the experience which lies behind it. In his early manhood he had an experience of several years which he considers of value as affording a background for the interpretation of the Lincoln material. For several years the author taught school and afterward preached in the mountain region of Kentucky and Tennessee amid social conditions essentially parallel to those in which Mr. Lincoln was born and amid which he spent his manhood up to the time of his going to Washington. The same kind of preaching that Lincoln heard, not only in Kentucky but in the backwoods of Indiana and the pioneer villages of central and southern Illinois, the present author heard in his own young manhood as a teacher in district schools far back beyond the sound of the locomotive's whistle or the inroads of modern civilization. How that kind of preaching affected the inquiring mind of the young Lincoln, the author is sure he knows better than most of Lincoln's biographers have known. The fierce theological controversies that waged between the old-time Baptists and the itinerant Methodists, together with the emphatic dogmatism of the Southern type of Presbyterianism as it was held and preached in the Kentucky mountains forty years ago and in southern Illinois and Indiana eighty years ago are part of the vivid memory of the present writer. A young man who refused to accept this kind of teaching might be charged with being an infidel, and might easily suppose himself to be one; but whether that would be a just or fair classification depends upon conditions which some of the controversialists appear not to have known or to have been capable of appreciating through lack of experience of their own.

This book attempts, therefore, to be a digest of all the available evidence concerning the religious faith of Abraham Lincoln. It undertakes also to weigh that evidence and to pass judgment, the author's own judgment, concerning it. If the reader's judgment agrees with the author's, the author will be glad; but if not at least the facts are here set forth in their full essential content.

CHAPTER II

WHY THE BIOGRAPHIES DIFFER

The many biographies of Abraham Lincoln differ widely in their estimate of his religious opinions and life, partly because the biographers approach the subject from widely differing angles, and some of them are seeking in advance the establishment of particular conclusions. But apart from that personal bias, from which no author can claim to be wholly free, the biographical study of Abraham Lincoln was itself an evolution whose main outlines and processes it will be profitable briefly to consider.

The first printed biographies of Mr. Lincoln appeared in 1860. They were the familiar campaign biography, such as is issued for every candidate for the Presidency. The first man who approached Mr. Lincoln with a proposal to write his Life was J. L. Scripps of the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Lincoln deprecated the idea of writing any biography.

"Why, Scripps, [said he] it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Grey's 'Elegy':

'The short and simple annals of the poor.'

That's my life, and that's all you or anyone else can make out of it."—Herndon, I, 2.

Lincoln felt the meagerness of his biographical material, but the biographers succeeded in making books about him, Scripps wrote his booklet, and it appeared in thirty-two closely printed double-column pages, and sold at twenty-five cents. It is now excessively rare. Lincoln read the proof and approved it. The "Wigwam" Life of Lincoln appeared simultaneously with the Scripps booklet, and it is not quite certain which of the two emerged first from the press. It contained 117 pages, of which the last seven were devoted to Hannibal Hamlin, Republican candidate for Vice-President. This also had a wide sale, and is now very rare. That Lincoln did not read the proofs of this book is evidenced by the name "Abram" instead of "Abraham" on its title page and throughout the book. It relates that "when he was six years old, his father died, leaving a widow and several children, poor and almost friendless"; and in other respects shows that Lincoln did not furnish the data of it, and also indicates how meager was the biographical material at hand outside the little sketch which Lincoln prepared for Scripps.

Another pamphlet, containing 216 pages, was "The Authentic Edition" by J. H. Barrett, and still another, the "Authorized" edition by D. W. Bartlett, which extended to 354 pages and was bound in cloth. Perhaps the best of these campaign biographies of 1860 was that written by William Dean Howells, then a young man and unknown to fame. Apparently Lincoln furnished to each of these writers—except the Wigwam edition—essentially the same material which he had given to Scripps, or else they borrowed from Scripps, with permission, and to this extent they were "authorized" or "authentic." But there is no indication that Lincoln read any of them except that of Scripps. Even this must have surprised him when he beheld how his little sketch could be spread out over as many as thirty-two pages.

The campaign of 1864 brought out a new crop of campaign biographies, and these used essentially the same material up to 1860, and found their new matter in the history of the Civil War up to the date of their publication.

This campaign material still stood in type or stereotyped pages when Lincoln was killed, and was hastily used again. The author, who owns all the books cited above, has also others which came from the press in May or June of 1865, whose main part was taken over bodily from the campaign biographies of 1864 and speaks of Lincoln as still living, while the back part is made up of material concerning the assassination, the funeral, and the trial of the conspirators. These called themselves "Complete" biographies, but they were merely revamped campaign booklets of 1864 with appended matter and virtually no revision.

These works represent the first stage of the attempt to make books out of the life of Abraham Lincoln. The outline of the life itself is meager in all of them, and they are well padded with campaign speeches; and the last of them, with full and interesting details of the funeral services of Lincoln, the death of Booth, and other matter lifted from the newspapers of the period.

The second epoch began with the publication of the Life of Abraham Lincoln by John G. Holland in 1865. It was by all odds the best of the books that undertook within a few years after his death to tell the story of the life of Lincoln, with some estimate of his place in history. It is also the book which began the controversy concerning Lincoln's religion.

The third period was introduced by the biography of Abraham Lincoln by Ward Hill Lamon, which was issued in 1872. It was based upon manuscripts that had been collected by William H. Herndon, who was supposed to have had a considerable share in the work of its preparation. Herndon emphatically denied writing any part of it, and said in a letter to Mr. Horace White that it was written for Lamon by Chauncey F. Black, son of J. S. Black, a member of Buchanan's cabinet and a political enemy of Lincoln (Newton: Lincoln and Herndon, p. 307). This valuable but unwisely written book, containing many things offensive to good taste, occasioned much controversy for its stark realism and what seemed to many of Lincoln's friends misrepresentations. Some of the intimate friends of Lincoln are alleged to have bought a considerable part of the edition and destroyed the books, but copies are in the principal libraries and in the best private collections.

Unterrified by the reception which had been accorded Lamon's work, William H. Herndon, for twenty years Lincoln's law partner, assisted by Jesse W. Weik, published in 1889 a Life of Lincoln, in three volumes.[1] The storm of denunciation that beat upon Herndon's head was fierce and long. The greater part of the edition disappeared. Libraries that contain it keep it under lock and key, and the prices bid for it at occasional book auctions contrast strikingly with those for which it went begging immediately after it was issued. Four years later, assisted by Mr. Horace White, Mr. Herndon reissued the book in two volumes, with those passages elided which had given greatest offense.

These two biographies mark the rise and high-water mark of the demand for "the real Lincoln"; and nobody can deny that they were quite sufficiently realistic.

The next stage in the Lincoln biography was the ten-volume Life of Lincoln by his former secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay. It was issued in 1890, and called itself "a history." It is a history rather than a biography; the biographical material in it was condensed into a single volume by Mr. Nicolay in 1904. This work is monumental, and may be said to attempt the giving of materials for the complete Lincoln rather than to be in itself an effort within the proper limits of biography.

The two-volume biography by John T. Morse, Jr., issued in 1893, was the first constructive piece of work in this field after the Nicolay and Hay material had become available; and it remains in some respects the best short Life of Abraham Lincoln; though the author's New England viewpoint militates against his correct appraisal of many features of the life of Lincoln.

The next period may be said to be the period of the magazine Lincoln, and to be represented at its best by the work of Ida M. Tarbell, which first appeared in McClure's Magazine, beginning in 1895, and was subsequently issued in book form in several editions beginning in 1900. This was a pictorial biography, with much new illustrative and documentary material, and is of permanent value.

Since 1900 the biographies that have been issued have largely been devoted to specialized studies, as of Lincoln as a lawyer, Lincoln as a political leader, Lincoln as a statesman; and there have been innumerable books and articles made up of reminiscences of the men who knew Lincoln more or less intimately.

None of the biographies before Holland attempted anything that could be called a critical analysis of Lincoln's character. There is virtually nothing in the earliest Lives of Lincoln concerning his religion or any other important aspect of his private and personal life. In the nature of the case those books were superficial.

Furthermore, some of the more important biographies of more recent years have made no attempt at systematic character study. While there is something about Lincoln's religion in almost every one of them, that topic has been quite incidental and subordinate to the main purpose of most of the larger books. The authors have been content to take for the most part the ready-formed judgment of those whose views most nearly accorded with their own.

The field of inquiry concerning Lincoln's religion is both more narrow and broader than it would at first appear. Many even of the more important biographical works about Lincoln yield nothing of any real value, so far as this topic is concerned. On the other hand, the subject has been exploited in magazine articles, newspaper contributions, lectures and addresses almost innumerable and by no mean consistent.

The task, then, is more and other than that of making a scrapbook of what different authorities have said about Abraham Lincoln's religion. A vast amount has been said by people who had no personal knowledge of the subject they were discussing and no adequate power of historical analysis. The volume of really first-hand evidence is not so vast as at first it appears; and while it cannot all be reconciled nor its direct contradictions eliminated, it is not hopelessly beyond the limits of constructive probability. It is possible to determine some facts about the religion of Abraham Lincoln with reasonable certainty and to interpret others in the light of their probable bearing upon the subject as a whole.

CHAPTER III

THE ENVIRONMENT OF LINCOLN'S BOYHOOD

We have read Buckle's History of Civilization to little effect if we have not learned that the development of an individual or a nation is profoundly influenced by environment. The biographers of Lincoln would appear to have kept this fact carefully in mind, for they have been at great pains to give to us detailed descriptions of the houses in which Lincoln lived and the neighborhoods where from time to time he resided. Although the camera and the descriptive power of the biographers have done much for us, they leave something to be desired in the way of sketching a background from which the Abraham Lincoln of the successive periods emerged into conditions of life and thought that were more or less religious. For the purpose of this present study the life of Lincoln divides itself into four parts.

The first is the period of his boyhood, from his birth in Kentucky until his coming of age and the removal of his family from Indiana into Illinois.

The second is the period of his early manhood, from the time he left his father's home until he took up his residence in Springfield.

The third is the period of his life in Springfield, from his first arrival on April 15, 1837, until his final departure on February 11, 1861, for his inauguration as President.

The fourth is the period covered by his presidency, from his inauguration, March 4, 1861, until his death, April 15, 1865.

Before considering at length the testimony of the people who knew him, except as that testimony relates to these particular epochs, we will consider the life of Lincoln as it was related to the conditions in which he lived in these successive periods.

The first period in the life of Abraham Lincoln includes the twenty-one years from his birth to his majority, and is divided into two parts,—the first seven and one-half years of his life in the backwoods of Kentucky, and the following thirteen years in the wilderness of southern Indiana.

Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky, on Sunday, February 12, 1809. He was the second child of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who were married near Beechland, Washington County, Kentucky, on June 12, 1806, when Thomas was twenty-eight and Nancy twenty-three. Nine days before the birth of Abraham Lincoln the territory of Illinois was organized by Act of Congress; the boy and the future State were twin-born. For four years the family lived on the Rock Spring farm, three miles from Hodgenville, in Hardin, now Larue County, Kentucky. When he was four years old his parents moved to a better farm on Knob Creek. Here he spent nearly four years more, and he and his sister, Sarah, began going to school. His first teacher was Zachariah Riney; his second, Caleb Hazel.

In the autumn of 1816, Thomas Lincoln loaded his household goods upon a small flatboat of his own construction and floated down Knob Creek, Salt River, and the Ohio, and landed on the northern bank of the Ohio River. He thence returned and brought his family, who traveled on horseback. The distance to where the goods had been left was only about fifty miles in a straight line from the old home in Kentucky, but was probably a hundred miles by the roads on which they traveled. Thomas doubtless rode one horse with a child behind him, and Nancy rode the other, also carrying a child behind her saddle.

When the family arrived at the point where the goods had been left, a wagon was hired, and Thomas Lincoln, with his wife, his two children, and all his worldly possessions, moved sixteen miles into the wilderness to a place which he had already selected, and there made his home. That winter and the greater part of the following year were spent in a "half-faced camp" from which the family moved in the following autumn to a log cabin, erected by Thomas Lincoln. For more than a year he was a squatter on this farm, but subsequently entered it and secured title from the government. Here Nancy Hanks Lincoln died, October 5, 1818, when Abraham was less than ten years old. A year later Thomas Lincoln returned to Kentucky and married Sally Bush Johnson, a widow, with three children. She brought with her better furniture than the cabin afforded, and also brought a higher type of culture than Thomas Lincoln had known. She taught her husband so that he was able with some difficulty to read the Bible and to sign his own name. On this farm in the backwoods in the Pigeon Creek settlement, with eight or ten families as neighbors, and with the primitive village of Gentryville a mile and a half distant, Abraham Lincoln grew to manhood. Excepting for a brief experience as a ferryman on the Ohio River and a trip to New Orleans which he made upon a flatboat, his horizon was bounded by this environment from the time he was eight until he was twenty-one.

The cabin in which the Lincoln family lived was a fairly comfortable house. It was eighteen feet square and the logs were hewn. It was high enough to admit a loft, where Abe slept, ascending to it by wooden pins driven into the logs. The furniture, excepting that brought by Sally Bush, was very primitive and made by Thomas Lincoln. Three-legged stools answered for chairs, and the bedsteads had only one leg each, the walls supporting the other three corners.

Of the educational advantages, Mr. Lincoln wrote in 1860:

"It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some schools so-called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond readin', writin', and cipherin' to the Rule of Three. If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education."—Nicolay, p. 10.

Here he attended school for three brief periods. The first school was taught by Azel W. Dorsey, when Abraham was ten years old; the next by Andrew Crawford, when he was fourteen; and the third by a teacher named Swaney, whose first name Mr. Lincoln was unable to recall in later life. His schooling was under five different teachers, two in Kentucky and three in Indiana. It was scattered over nine years and embraced altogether less than twelve months of aggregate attendance.

In Kentucky it is probable that his only textbook was Webster's Elementary Speller. It was popularly known as the "Old Blueback."

Webster's Speller is a good speller and more. Each section of words to be spelled is followed by short sentences containing those words, and at the end of the book are three illustrated lessons in Natural History—one on The Mastiff, another on The Stag, and the third on The Squirrel. Besides these are seven fables, each with its illustration and its moral lesson. I used this book in teaching school in the backwoods of Kentucky, and still have the teacher's copy which I thus employed.

The two Kentucky schools which Lincoln attended were undoubtedly "blab" schools. The children were required to study aloud. Their audible repetition of their lessons was the teacher's only assurance that they were studying;[2] and even while he was hearing a class recite he would spend a portion of his time moving about the room with hickory switch in hand, administering frequent rebuke to those pupils who did not study loud enough to afford proof of their industry.

In Indiana, Lincoln came under the influence of men who could cipher as far as the Rule of Three. He also learned to use Lindley Murray's English Reader, which he always believed, and with much reason, to be the most useful textbook ever put into the hands of an American youth (Herndon, I, 37). He also studied Pike's Arithmetic. Grammar he did not study in school, but later learned it under Mentor Graham in Illinois.

The first of these schools was only about a mile and a half distant from his home; the last was four miles, and his attendance was irregular.

In the second school, taught by Andrew Crawford, he learned whatever he knew of the usages of polite society; for Crawford gave his pupils a kind of drill in social usages (Herndon, I, 37).

In Swaney's school he probably learned that the earth was round. A classmate, Katy Roby, afterward Mrs. Allen Gentry, between whom and Abraham a boy-and-girl attachment appears to have existed, and who at the time was fifteen and Abe seventeen, is authority for the statement that as they were sitting together on the bank of the Ohio River near Gentry's landing, wetting their bare feet in the flowing water and watching the sun go down, he told her that it was the revolution of the earth which made the moon and sun appear to rise and set. He exhibited what to her appeared a profound knowledge of astronomy (Herndon, I, 39; Lamon's Life, p. 70).

It is not necessary for us to assume that Abraham knew very much more about astronomy than the little which he told to Katy Roby; but it is worth while to note in passing that when Abraham Lincoln learned that the earth was round, he probably learned something which his father did not know and which would have been admitted by no minister whom Abraham had heard preach up to this time.

We are ready now to consider the character of the preaching which Abraham Lincoln heard in his boyhood. Direct testimony is fragmentary of necessity; but it is of such character that we are able without difficulty to make a consistent mental picture of the kind of religious service with which he was familiar.

A recent author has said that Lincoln never lived in a community having a church building until he went to the legislature in Vandalia in 1834 (Johnson, Lincoln the Christian, p. 31). This is probably true if we insist upon its meaning a house of worship owned exclusively by one denomination, but the same author reminds us that there was a log meeting-house[3] within three miles of Lincoln's childhood home in Kentucky (p. 22).

Dr. Peters says:

"The prayers that Parson Elkin said above the mound of Nancy Hanks were the first public prayers to which Abraham ever listened"—Abraham Lincoln's Religion, p. 24.

This is absurdly incorrect. Abraham Lincoln almost certainly heard public prayers at intervals, probably from the time he was three months old.

Abraham Lincoln was born in February, or his mother probably would have taken him to church earlier; but by May or June, when there was monthly preaching at the log meeting-house three miles away, she mounted a horse and Thomas Lincoln another, he with Sarah sitting before him at the saddlebow and she with Abraham in her arms, and they rode to meeting. If they had had but one horse instead of two they would have gone just the same. She would have sat behind Thomas with Abraham in her arms and Thomas would have had Sarah on the horse before him. Thomas Lincoln was too shiftless to have a horse-block, but Nancy could mount her horse from any one of the numerous stumps in the vicinity of the home. She and every other young mother in the neighborhood knew how to ride and carry a baby, and having once learned the art, the young mother was not permitted to forget it for several years.

Arrived at the log meeting-house, they hitched their horses to swinging limbs, where the animals could fight flies without breaking the bridle-reins. Nancy went inside immediately and took her seat on the left side of the room; Thomas remained outside gossiping with his neighbors concerning "craps" and politics, and maybe swapping a horse before the service had gotten fairly under way. After a while he heard the preacher in stentorian tones lining and singing the opening hymn, the thin, high voices of the women joining him feebly at first but growing a little more confident as the hymn proceeded. Then Thomas and his neighbors straggled in and sat on the right side of the house. The floor was puncheon and so were the seats; they were rudely split slabs, roughly hewn, and the second sitting from either end had an added element of discomfort in the projection of the two legs that had been driven in from the under side and were not sawed off flush with the surface of the slab. There were no glass windows. On either side of the house one section of a log may have been sawed out about four feet from the floor; but most of the light of the interior came in through the open door in mild weather, or was afforded by the fireplace in cold weather.

On the rude pulpit lay the preacher's Bible and hymn book, if he had a hymn book—no one else had one; and beside these were a bucket of water and a gourd. There was no time in the service when Thomas Lincoln did not feel free to walk up to the pulpit and drink a gourd of water, and the same was true of every other member of the congregation, the preacher included. As for Nancy, she spread her riding-skirt on the seat under her and when her baby grew hungry she nursed him just as the other women nursed their babies.

To such congregations the author of this present book preached hundreds of times in the woods of Kentucky; and there is no essential feature of the church services which he does not know.

In the autumn, just before fodder-pulling time, there was an occasional camp-meeting or big revival, followed by a baptizing, which brought multitudes of people from long distances. They brought their provisions, or they stayed with friends, one cabin proving elastic enough to accommodate two or three households. Under these conditions the author of this book has slept many nights in houses of one room, with as many beds as the room could well contain, inhabited not only by the family but by visitors of both sexes; and in all that experience he is unable to recall any incident that was immodest.

When the converts of the camp-meeting or revival were baptized, they were led into the water with due solemnity; but as each one came to the surface he or she was likely to break forth into shouting, a proceeding which, as the author can testify, was sometimes embarrassing, if not indeed perilous,[4] to the officiating clergyman.

Herndon tells us of the fondness of the Hanks girls for camp-meeting and describes one in which Nancy appears to have participated a little time before her marriage (I, 14). We have no reason to believe that that was her last camp-meeting.

Thomas Lincoln is alleged by Herndon to have been a Free-will Baptist in Kentucky, a Presbyterian in the latter part of his life in Indiana, and finally a Disciple (I, 11). He does not state where he obtained his information, but it is almost certain that he got it from Sally Bush Lincoln on the occasion of his visit to her in 1865; as she is the accredited source of most of the information of this character.

I am more than tempted to believe that either she or Herndon was incorrect in speaking of Thomas Lincoln's earliest affiliation as a Free-will Baptist. There were more kinds of Baptists in heaven and on earth than were understood in her philosophy; and I question whether the Free-will Baptists, who originated in New England, had by this time penetrated to so remote a section of Kentucky. What she probably told Herndon was that he was not of the most reactionary kind—the so-called "Hardshell" or anti-missionary Baptists. Of them we shall have something to say later. The Scripps biography, read and approved by Lincoln, said simply that his parents were consistent members of the Baptist Church. Nicolay and Hay do not record the membership of Thomas Lincoln in the Presbyterian Church, and one is more than tempted to question the accuracy of Herndon at this point. Presbyterianism had at that date very little part in the shaping of the life of the backwoods of Illinois and Indiana, as we shall see when we come to the life of Lincoln in Illinois. Nicolay and Hay tell us that "Thomas Lincoln joined the Baptist church at Little Pigeon in 1823. His oldest child, Sarah, followed his example three years later. They were known as consistent and active members of that communion" (Nicolay and Hay, I, 32-33). If Sarah joined the Baptist church in 1826, and the family was remembered as active in that church, the relation of Thomas Lincoln with the Presbyterians in Indiana must have been brief, for he left that State in 1830. We are assured that he observed religious customs in his home and asked a blessing at the table; for one day, when the meal consisted only of potatoes, Abraham said to his father, that he regarded those as "mighty poor blessings" (Herndon, I, 24). While Thomas Lincoln was not an energetic man, there is no reason to doubt the consistency of his religion, in which he was certainly aided by Sally Bush Lincoln. That he died in the fellowship either of the Disciples or of the New Lights is probably correct; but the Presbyterian membership in Indiana, while not impossible, appears more likely to have been a mistake in Herndon's interpretation of Mrs. Lincoln's narrative.

Herndon's statement concerning Thomas Lincoln's religion is as follows:

"In his religious belief he first affiliated with the Free-will Baptists. After his removal to Indiana he changed his adherence to the Presbyterians—or Predestinarians, as they were then called—and later united with the Christian—vulgarly called Campbellite—Church, in which latter faith he is supposed to have died" (I, 11-12).

I am satisfied that Herndon is mistaken in two if not in all three of these assertions. I am confident that Predestinarian was not a popular or commonly understood name for Presbyterians, but it was a name for one type of Baptists. Mrs. Lincoln probably told Herndon that her husband joined in Indiana, not the hardshell, or most reactionary kind of Baptists, but the Predestinarians. Knowing that predestination was a doctrine of Presbyterianism, Mr. Herndon assumed that that was what the name implied. It implied nothing of the sort. Thomas Lincoln probably belonged to the old Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists, not quite as hard in their shell as the Hardshells, but very different from the Free-will Baptists or the Presbyterians, the kind whose preachers were accustomed to shout—"I'd rather have a hard shell than no shell at all!"

Dennis Hanks[5] was far from being impeccable authority on matters where his imagination permitted him to enlarge, but he seldom forgot anything, and still less frequently made it smaller than it really was. If Thomas Lincoln had ever sustained any relation to the Presbyterian Church, he would surely have told it, or some member of his family, jealous as those members were for the reputation of "Grandfather Lincoln," would not have failed to report it. In his interview with Mrs. Eleanor Atkinson, in which his family participated, Dennis evinced a definite attempt to set forth Thomas Lincoln in as favorable a light as possible, and there was a high and deserved tribute to his "Aunt Sairy," Thomas Lincoln's second wife.

"Aunt Sairy sartainly did have faculty. I reckon we was all purty ragged and dirty when she got there. The fust thing she did was to tell me to tote one of Tom's carpenter benches to a place outside the door, near the hoss trough. Then she had me an' Abe an' John Johnson, her boy, fill the trough with spring water. She put out a gourd full of soft soap, and another one to dip water with, an' told us boys to wash up fur dinner. You just naturally had to be somebody when Aunt Sairy was around. She had Tom build her a loom, an' when she heerd o' some lime burners bein' round Gentryville, Tom had to mosey over an' git some lime an' whitewash the cabin. An' he made her an ash hopper fur lye, an' a chicken-house nothin' could git into. Then—te-he-he-he!—she set some kind of a dead-fall trap fur him, an' got Tom to jine the Baptist Church. Cracky, but Aunt Sally was some punkins!"—American Magazine, February, 1908, p. 364.

I am of opinion that what Mrs. Sarah Bush Lincoln told Herndon was that her husband sometimes attended the Presbyterian service, and that the church he joined was the Baptist, but not the Hardshell Baptist. But evidence is wholly lacking that he had any connection with the Presbyterian Church, or with the Free-will Baptists, of which latter sect he probably never heard.

The church at Farmington of which Thomas Lincoln became a member is not now in existence. I have endeavored through investigation in Farmington, and by correspondence with Mr. Robert T. Lincoln, to ascertain its denomination. It called itself "Christian," and Herndon did not doubt that that name indicated that it was a church of the denomination sometimes called "Campbellite." But that is not certain. Other denominations claim that as their distinctive name, and one of them was at that time active in that part of Illinois. My inquiries have brought me no certain knowledge on this point; but Mr. Jesse W. Weik is of opinion that the denomination was that known as "New Light." It is possible that Herndon was in error in every one of his three affirmations concerning the religion of Thomas Lincoln, and that the President's father was never a Free-will Baptist, never a Presbyterian, and never a Disciple or Campbellite. I have endeavored to learn whether his change from the Baptist to the "Christian" church was a matter of conviction or convenience, but on this I have found nothing except a statement from the minister who buried him, in which it would appear that his change of polity was a matter of conviction. This minister spoke very highly of Thomas Lincoln, whom he had known well in the latter years of his life.

There has been undue attempt to credit the pious boy Abraham with the religious service conducted over the grave of his mother by Rev. David Elkin[6] some months after her demise. There is no good authority for this legend. Herndon probably tells the truth about it:

"Within a few months, and before the close of the winter, David Elkin, an itinerant preacher whom Mrs. Lincoln had known in Kentucky, happened into the settlement, and in response to the invitation from the family and friends, delivered a funeral sermon over her grave. No one is able now to remember the language of Parson Elkin's discourse, but it is recalled that he commemorated the virtues and good phases of character, and passed in silence the few shortcomings and frailties of the poor woman sleeping under the winter's snow."
—Herndon, I, 28.

This does not compel us to believe that there had been no preacher in the Pigeon Creek settlement since the death of Nancy Hanks.[7] It was customary among these Kentucky-bred people to hold the funeral service some weeks or months after the burial. The author of this volume has attended many such services.

The reasons require some explanation. The dead were commonly buried on the day following death. There were, of course, no facilities for embalming or preserving the corpse for any great length of time. Preachers were nearly all farmers; and the particular minister with whose church the family was affiliated might be living at a considerable distance and be at that time at some distant place upon his wide circuit. No minister expected to preach every Sunday in any one place. A monthly appointment was the maximum attempted; and the more remote settlements were not reached statedly by any one preacher oftener than once in three months. There were occasional services, however, by other ministers riding through the country and preaching wherever they stayed overnight. It was the author's custom when coming unexpectedly into a valley to spread word up and down the creek that there would be preaching that night in the schoolhouse or in the home where he was entertained. The impromptu announcement never failed to bring a congregation.

What took David Elkin into Indiana we do not know. He may have been looking for a better farm than he had in Kentucky, where he could dig out a living between his preaching appointments. He may have been burdened for the souls of certain families formerly under his care and now gone out like the Lincolns into a howling wilderness. The late summer and early autumn between the end of corn-plowing and the beginning of fodder-pulling afforded such a minister opportunity to throw his saddlebags over his horse and start on a longer circuit than usual; and the winter gave him still another opportunity for long absence. He took no money and he collected none, or next to none, but he had free welcome everywhere with pork and corn pone for supper and fried chicken for breakfast. Many a time the author of this volume has ridden up to a house just before suppertime, has partaken with the family of its customary cornbread and bacon or ham, and after preaching and a good night's rest has been wakened in the morning before the rising of the sun by a muffled squawk and flutter as one or more chickens were pulled down out of the trees. After this fashion did the people of the backwoods welcome the messengers of the Lord.

Not necessarily on his next appearance in a settlement is the preacher requested to conduct the funeral service of persons deceased since his last visit. The matter is arranged with more of deliberation. A date is set some time ahead and word is sent to distant friends.[8] After a time of general sickness such as had visited Pigeon Creek in the epidemic of the "milk sick," Parson Elkin may have had several funerals to preach in the same cemetery or at the schoolhouse nearest at hand. I have known a half-dozen funerals to be included in one sermon with full biographical particulars of each decedent and detailed descriptions of all the deathbed scenes, together with rapturous forecasts of the future bliss of the good people who were dead and abundant warnings of the flaming hell that awaited their impenitent neighbors. Even those people who had not been noted for their piety during life were almost invariably slipped into heaven through a deathbed repentance or by grace of the uncovenanted mercies of God. It is the business of all preachers to be very stern with the living and very charitable toward the dead.[9]

I must add a further word about the custom of deferred funerals. Although the burial was conducted without religious service, it was not permitted to be celebrated in neglect. The news that a man was dying would bring the sympathetic neighbors from miles around, and horses would be tied up the creek and down while people waited in friendly sorrow and conversed in hushed voices in the presence of the solemn dignity of death. That night a group of neighbors would "sit up" with the dead, and keep the family awake with frequent and lugubrious song.

Next day the grave must be dug; and that required a considerable part of the male population of the settlement. If only two or three men came in the morning they would sit and wait for others and go home for the dinner and come back. It thus has happened more than once in my experience that we have brought the body to the burial and have had to wait an hour or more in sun or wind for the finishing of the digging of the grave.

I remember well an instance in which death occurred in the family of one of the county officials. His wife died suddenly, and under sad conditions. I mounted my horse and rode four or five miles to his home. I hitched my horse to the low-swinging limb of a beech tree and threaded my way among other horses into the yard, which was filled with men, and up to the porch, which was crowded with women. Passing inside, I spoke my word of sympathy to the grief-stricken husband and his children. Then I passed out into the yard and moved from group to group among the men. Presently a neighbor of the sorrowing husband approached me and asked me to step aside with him for private converse. This was strictly in accordance with the custom of the country, and I walked with him behind the corn-crib. He said to me: "Mr. McCune"—naming the bereaved husband—"wants to know whether you have come here as a preacher or as a neighbor?" I answered, "Tell him that I have come as a neighbor." With this word he returned to the house. Up on the hillside I could see the leisurely movements of the grave-diggers. From the shed behind the house came the rhythmic tap of the hammer driving in the tacks that fastened the white glazed muslin lining of the home-made coffin. We had some little time still to wait before either the grave or the coffin would be finished. Presently the neighbor returned to where I waited behind the corn-crib and brought with him Mr. McCune. The latter shook my hand warmly and said, in substance: "I appreciate your coming and the respect which you thus show for me and for my dead wife. I was glad to see you come when you entered the house, but was a little embarrassed because I knew it to be your custom to preach the funeral sermon at the time of the burial. I have no objection to that custom; and while we are Baptists [he pronounced it Babtist, and so I have no doubt did Thomas Lincoln], there is no man whom I would rather have preach my wife's sermon than you. We shall undoubtedly have a Baptist preacher when the time for the funeral comes, but I hope you also will be present and participate in the service. But it is not our custom to hold the service at the time of the burial, and we have distant friends who should be notified. Moreover, there is another consideration. I have been twice married, and I never yet have got round to it to have my first wife's funeral preached. It seems to me that it would be a discourtesy to my first wife's memory to have my second wife's sermon preached before the first. What I now plan to do is to have the two funerals at once, and I hope you will be present and participate."

I need only add that before I departed from that region he was comfortably married to his third wife, not having gotten round to it to have the funeral sermon of either of his first two wives. I am unable to say whether when he finally got round to it there was any increase in the number. It never was my fortune to conduct the joint funeral of two wives of the same man at the same time; but I have more than once been present where a second wife was prominent among the mourners; and I sometimes believed her to be sincerely sorry that the first wife was dead.

It is not easy for people who have not lived amid these conditions and at the same time to have known other conditions to estimate aright the religious life of a backwoods community. Morse, whose biography of Lincoln is to be rated high, is completely unable to view this situation from other than his New England standpoint. He says:

"The family was imbued with a peculiar, intense, but unenlightened form of Christianity, mingled with curious superstition, prevalent in the backwoods, and begotten by the influence of the vast wilderness upon illiterate men of a rude native force. It interests scholars to trace the evolution of religious faiths, but it might not be less suggestive to study the retrogression of religion into superstition. Thomas Lincoln was as restless in matters of creed as of residence, and made various changes in both during his life. These were, however, changes without improvement, and, so far as he was concerned, his son Abraham might have grown up to be what he himself was contented to remain" (I, 10).

This criticism is partly just, but not wholly so. There was superstition enough in the backwoods religion, and Abraham Lincoln never wholly divested himself of it; but it was not all superstition. There was a very real religion on Pigeon Creek.

In like manner, also, it is difficult for Lincoln's biographers to strike an even balance between adoring idealization of log-cabin life and horrified exaggeration of its squalor. Here again Morse is a classic example of the attempt to be so honest about Lincoln's poverty as to miss some part of the truth about it.

The Lincoln family was poor, even as poverty was estimated in the backwoods. Lincoln himself was painfully impressed with the memory of it, and Herndon and Lamon, who understood it better than most of his biographers, felt both for themselves and for Lincoln the pathos of his descent from "the poor whites"; but there is no evidence that Lincoln felt this seriously at the time. His melancholy came later, and was not the direct heritage of his childhood poverty. Life had its joys for families such as his. Poverty was accepted as in some sort the common lot, and also as a temporary condition out of which everybody expected sometime to emerge. Meantime the boy Abraham Lincoln had not only the joy of going to mill and to meeting, but also the privilege of an occasional frolic. We know of one or two boisterous weddings where he behaved himself none too well. Besides these there were other unrecorded social events on Pigeon Creek where the platter rolled merrily and he had to untangle his long legs from under the bench and move quickly when his number was called or pay a forfeit and redeem it. He played "Skip-to-My-Lou" and "Old Bald Eagle, Sail Around," and "Thus the Farmer Sows His Seed," and he moved around the room singing about the millwheel and had to grab quickly when partners were changed or stand in the middle and be ground between the millstones. As large a proportion of people's known wants were satisfied on Pigeon Creek as on some fashionable boulevards. We need not seek to hide his poverty nor idealize it unduly; neither is it necessary to waste overmuch of pity upon people who did not find their own condition pitiable.

What kind of man had been produced in this environment and as the result of the conditions of his heredity and of his inherent qualities? What do we know about the Abraham Lincoln who in 1830 took simultaneous leave of Indiana and his boyhood, and entered at once upon his manhood and the new State, that, twin-born with him, was waiting his arrival?

He was a tall, awkward, uncouth backwoodsman, strong of muscle, temperate and morally clean. He had physical strength and was not a bully; was fond of a fight but fought fairly and as a rule on the side of weakness and of right. He was free from bad habits of all kinds, was generous, sympathetic, and kind of heart. He was as yet uninfluenced by any women except his own dead mother and his stepmother. He was socially shy, and had not profited greatly by the meager lessons in social usage which had been taught in Andrew Crawford's school. He was fond of cock-fighting and of boisterous sports, and had a sufficient leadership to proclaim himself "the big buck of the lick" and to have that declaration pass unchallenged.

He could read, write, and cipher, and was eager for learning. He was ambitious, but his ambitions had no known focus. He was only moderately industrious, but could work hard when he had to do so. He had some ambition to write and to speak in public, but as yet he had little idea what he was to write or speak about. He was a great, hulking backwoodsman, with vague and haunting aspirations after something better and larger than he had known or seemed likely to achieve.

What do we know about the spiritual development of the young Boanerges who grew almost overnight in his eleventh year into a six-footer and was so wearied by the effort that he was slow of body and mind and was thought by some to be lazy ever afterward?

We know the books he read—the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, Æsop's Fables, Robinson Crusoe, and Weems' Life of Washington. It was a good collection, and he made the most of it. Sarah Bush Lincoln noted that while he did not like to work he liked to read, and she said, "I induced my husband to permit Abe to study" (Herndon, I, 36).

John Hanks said of him, "He kept the Bible and Æsop's Fables always within reach, and read them over and over again."

Sarah Bush did not claim that he showed any marked preference for the Bible. Lamon quotes her as saying, "He seemed to have a preference for the other books" (Life, pp. 34, 486). But he certainly read the Bible with diligence, as his whole literary style shows. Indeed, if we had only his coarse "First Chronicles of Reuben," which we could heartily wish he had never written, and whose publication in Herndon's first edition was one of the chief reasons for an expurgated edition,[10] we should know that even then Abe Lincoln, rough, uncouth and vulgar as he was, was modeling his style upon the Bible.

We are told that when he went to church he noted the oddities of the preachers and afterward mimicked them (Lamon: Life, pp. 55, 486). This might have been expected, for two reasons. First, he had a love of fun and of very boisterous fun at that; secondly, he had a fondness for oratory, and this was the only kind of oratory he knew anything about.

It is a remarkable fact that the Lincoln family appears never at any time in its history to have been strongly under the influence of Methodism.[11] This is not because they did not know of it; no pioneer could hide so deep in the wilderness as to be long hidden from the Methodist circuit riders. But the prevailing and almost the sole type of religion in that part of Indiana during Lincoln's boyhood was Baptist, and in spite of all that Mrs. Lincoln believed about the freedom of it, it was a very unprogressive type of preaching. The preachers bellowed and spat and whined, and cultivated an artificial "holy tone" and denounced the Methodists and blasphemed the Presbyterians and painted a hell whose horror even in the backwoods was an atrocity. Against it the boy Abe Lincoln rebelled. Many another boy with an active mind has been driven by the same type of preaching into infidelity.

Dr. Johnson quotes as indicative of the religious mind of the young Lincoln the four lines[12] which in his fourteenth year he wrote on the flyleaf of his schoolbook, and the two lines which he wrote in the copybook of a schoolmate:

"Abraham Lincoln
his hand and pen—
he will be good but
God knows When";

and

"Good boys who to their books apply
Will all be great men by and by."

Commenting on these Dr. Johnson says: "These show two things: First, that the youthful boy had faith in his mother's God; and, second, that he believed his mother's teachings."[13]

In like manner Dr. Johnson takes the four hymns which Dennis Hanks remembered to have been sung by himself and Abe and says:

"A soul that can appreciate these hymns must recognize, first, that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin; second, that Jesus Christ died upon the Cross for the salvation of the world; third, that life without the Saviour is an empty bubble, and, fourth, that loyal devotion to the Christ and his cause is man's highest calling, and the test of true character."—Lincoln the Christian, pp. 28-29.

This is very far-fetched. It shows only that Abe sang such songs, good, bad, and indifferent, as were current in his day, and without any very fine discrimination either in songs sacred or secular. If one were to make a creed out of any of his poetry in this period, it were better to find it in his jingle, about the Kickapoo Indian, Johnny Kongapod.[14] He was supposed to have composed an epitaph for himself that ran on this wise:

"Here lies poor Johnny Kongapod;
Have mercy on him, gracious God,
As he would do if he was God
And you were Johnny Kongapod."

It matters not for our purpose that these lines were not strictly original with Johnny Kongapod. We meet them in George Macdonald's story "David Elginbrod," and they have been used doubtless in rural England for generations. But they involve a certain rude and noble faith that the Judge of all the earth will do right and that divine justice and human justice have a common measure. Lincoln never forgot that, and he learned it on Pigeon Creek.

Herndon is our authority, if we needed any, that the Baptist preaching of Lincoln's boyhood made him a lifelong fatalist.[15] He emerged into manhood with the conviction that "whatever is to be will be," and Mrs. Lincoln declared that this was his answer to threats concerning his assassination; that it had been his lifelong creed and continued still to be the ruling dogma of his life.

It would have gladdened the heart of Sarah Bush if her stepson, whom she loved with a tenderness almost surpassing that which she bestowed upon her own flesh and blood, had manifested in his youth some signs of that irresistible grace which was supposed to carry the assurance of conversion as an act not of man but of the Holy Spirit. He did not manifest that grace in the form in which she desired. She could not consistently blame him very much, for, according to her own creed and that of Thomas Lincoln, nothing that he could have done of his own volition would have mattered very much.

Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture had not yet been written; and if it had there was not a preacher among the Baptists in southern Indiana who would not have denounced it as a creation of the devil. There were no Sunday schools in those churches, and when they began to appear they were vigorously opposed. There was no Christian nurture for the boy Abe Lincoln save the sincere but lethargic religion of his father and the motherly ministrations of his stepmother.

But "Abe was a good boy." With tears in her eyes Sarah Bush could remember that he never gave her a cross word. He was unregenerate, but not unlovable; and he had more faith than perhaps he realized.

CHAPTER IV

THE ENVIRONMENTS OF LINCOLN'S YOUNG
MANHOOD

The second period of Lincoln's religious life extends from his removal into Illinois in March of 1830 until the establishment of his residence in Springfield, April 15, 1837.

Thomas Lincoln was a thriftless farmer who blamed external conditions for his misfortunes. Following a second appearance of the "milk sick," which came to southern Indiana in the winter of 1829, he and his family removed in March of 1830 to Illinois. Abraham was twenty-one years of age. He assisted his father to get established in the new home, to which a wearying journey of fourteen days had brought the household, and then set out in life for himself. For several months he worked near home, but in the spring of 1831 he made his second flatboat trip to New Orleans. The boat stuck on a dam at Rutledge's mill at New Salem, and his ingenuity in getting it over the dam won him local fame and had something to do with his subsequent establishment of a home there. The flatboat stuck on April 19, 1831. In June he returned to New Salem and entered into business with Denton Offutt in a small and non-remunerative general store. While waiting for the opening of this store he became acquainted with Mentor Graham, a school teacher of local celebrity, whom Lincoln assisted as clerk of a local election, and through him learned the contents of Kirkham's Grammar, and also acquired the essential elements of surveying. New Salem was a sporadic town which had no good reason to exist. It was established in 1829 and lasted barely seven years. It was located on the Sangamon River, some fifteen miles from Springfield.

In February, 1832, this flatboat hand, then working as clerk, began his canvass for the Legislature, his formal announcement of candidacy appearing March 9. He was defeated, but received an encouraging local vote. In 1832 he had a brief experience as a soldier, serving in the Black Hawk War, starting in pursuit of the Indians on April 27 and returning in July. Excepting for his absences at the Black Hawk War and in attendance upon the meetings of the Legislature in Vandalia, he was in New Salem practically during the whole of the history of that little town. He established a partnership in the firm of Lincoln & Berry, keepers of a general store, a business for which he had no qualification, and he accumulated debts, which he was unable to pay in full until after his first term in Congress seventeen years later. On May 7, 1833, he became postmaster of the microscopic village of New Salem, and held that position until May 30, 1836, about which date the town disappeared. In August, 1834, he was elected to the Legislature, then sitting at Vandalia, and had an important share in the removal of the state capital from there to Springfield.

In New Salem occurred two of Lincoln's three recorded love affairs.[16] In 1834 he fell in love with Ann Rutledge, to whom he became engaged, and who died, August 25, 1835. In the autumn of 1836 he made love to Miss Mary Owens, who refused him. These two love affairs are related in detail by Lamon and by Herndon; the second of them gave rise to Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Browning, one of the least creditable things that ever came from his pen (Herndon, I, 192).

Heart-broken over the death of Ann Rutledge and ashamed of himself for his lack of gallantry in his love affair with Miss Owens, he saw New Salem doomed in all its hopes of being a city.

While sitting about the store waiting for business which did not come, he read law after a desultory fashion, becoming what he called not inappropriately "a mast-fed lawyer." For the benefit of any reader to whom this term conveys no meaning, it may be stated that "mast" consists of acorns, nuts, and other edible commodities, which hogs running at large in the wilderness are able to feed upon. Between a hog corn-fed in a stye and a backwoods mast-fed razor-back, there is a marked difference, and Lincoln's phrase was a very apt one. In the autumn of 1836 he obtained a law license. On March, 1837, he was admitted to the bar. On April 15, 1837, he moved to Springfield.

With his Springfield experience we shall deal later; that is an epoch by itself. We now consider the conditions of life in New Salem and their influence in shaking the religious character of Abraham Lincoln. New Salem, while an insignificant hamlet, was located on the Sangamon River and received its share of the travel to and from Springfield. Its central institutions were its tavern, where Lincoln boarded, and the store, where he read grammar and law, discussed politics, and occasionally sold goods.

The influence of life in New Salem upon the mind of Abraham Lincoln was very marked. We must not make the mistake of considering it solely in the character of a poor little frontier town destined to short life and in its day of no consequence to the world. To Lincoln it was a city, and it had its own ambitions to become a greater city. Although it had scarcely twenty houses, not one of them costing much over a hundred dollars, and not more than a hundred inhabitants, it was to him no mean city. Here Lincoln developed rapidly. He read, discussed, thought, wrote, and spoke on a wide variety of subjects. His style was that of florid declamation, a stump oratory with some affectation of erudition. He made the most of his few books, and every one of them left its deep impression upon him. He continued to read the Bible, and grew somewhat familiar with Shakespeare, Burns, and even Byron. While there was no church building in New Salem, and church services were irregular, such services as were held were generally in the tavern where he boarded, a tavern kept at first by James Rutledge and afterward by Henry Onstott. It is interesting to cull out of T. G. Onstott's reminiscences a number that are based on his own recollections, supplemented perhaps by traditions received from his father:

"After James Rutledge moved out of the log tavern, my father, Henry Onstott, moved in and occupied it from 1833 till 1835, and still had for a boarder Abraham Lincoln. It was at this time that my early impressions of him were formed. We did not know at that time that we were entertaining an angel unawares. My first knowledge of him was as a great marble player. He kept us small boys running in all directions gathering up the marbles he would scatter. During this time he followed surveying, having learned in six weeks from books furnished him by John Calhoun, of Springfield. About this time he commenced to read some law-books which he borrowed of Bowling Green, who lived one-half mile north of Salem. I think my father and Esquire Green did more than any other two men in determining Lincoln's future destiny."— T. G. Onstott: Lincoln and Salem—Pioneers of Menard and Mason Counties, p. 25.

Of Lincoln's habits he says:

"Lincoln never drank liquor of any kind and never chewed or smoked. We never heard him swear, though Judge Weldon said at the Salem Chautauqua that once in his life when he was excited he said, 'By Jing!'"—Onstott: Lincoln and Salem, p. 73.

Of Peter Cartwright, Onstott says:

"He was a great man for camp-meetings and prayer meetings. He was converted at a camp-meeting, and in his early ministry lived in a tented grove from two to three months in a year. He said: 'May the day be eternally distant when camp-meetings, class meetings, prayer meetings, and love feasts shall be laid aside in Methodist churches.'...

"There was sound preaching in those days. The preachers preached hell and damnation more than they do now. They could hold a sinner over the pit of fire and brimstone till he could see himself hanging by a slender thread, and he would surrender and accept the gospel that was offered to him."—Onstott: Lincoln and Salem, pp. 120, 127.

Of one of these preachers, Abraham Bale, Onstott says:

"He had a habit when preaching of grasping his left ear with his hand, then leaning over as far as he could and lowering his voice. He would commence to straighten up and his voice would rise to a high key. He would pound the Bible with his fist and stamp the floor, and carry everything before him. He created excitement in the first years of his ministry in Salem. He was a Baptist, though not of the hardshell persuasion."—Onstott: Lincoln and Salem, p. 149.

This was the general and accepted habit of Baptist preachers in that movement, and the author has heard scores of sermons delivered in this fashion.

Of the religious life of early Illinois and of frontier communities in general, Professor Pease says:

"Religion came to be the most universally persuasive intellectual force of the frontier. As might be expected, on the frontier the first tendency was toward a disregard of religious observances. The emigrant from the older settled regions left behind him the machinery and the establishment of sectarian religion. Until that machinery could be set up again on the frontier he lived without formal worship and often for the time at least the sense of the need of it passed out of his life. In cases where observance had been due to social convention, there was no doubt a welcome feeling of freedom and unrestraint.

"Normally the frontiersman was unreligious. Birkbeck noted with relish the absence of ceremony at baptism or funeral and the tolerance of all backwoods preachers alike, whether they raved or reasoned. Sunday was a day for riot and disorder. Other observers looked with horror on such a state of things, did their best to set up at least stated regular worship, and noted an improvement in morals as a result."—Pease: Centennial History of Illinois, II, 23.

There were, however, some compensations. Fordham wrote:

"This is not the land of hypocrisy. It would not here have its reward. Religion is not the road to wordly respectability, nor a possession of it the cloak of immorality."—Personal Narrative, p. 128.

Of the sporadic nature of much of the religious effort on the frontier, Professor Buck says:

"In spite of the tremendous exertions of the pioneer preachers, many of the remote settlements must have been practically devoid of religious observances, and even in the older settlements the influence of occasional visitations, however inspiring they might be, was often lacking in permanence."—Illinois in 1818, p. 179.

Of the lack of permanence there may be some room for a difference of judgment; there certainly was lack of continuity. As in Kentucky and southern Indiana, and for a time in southern Illinois, there was no expectation of a regular weekly religious service conducted by any one minister, but preachers moved in extended circuits and no considerable settlement was long without occasional religious service.

There was much godlessness in many of the early settlements. John Messenger wrote in 1815: "The American inhabitants in the villages appear to have very little reverence for Christianity or serious things in any point of view."

While there was some attempt at Sabbath observance, Reynolds says:

"In early times in many settlements of Illinois, Sunday was observed by the Americans only as a day of rest from work. They generally were employed in hunting, fishing, getting up their stock, hunting bees, breaking young horses, shooting at marks, horse and foot racing, and the like. When the Americans were to make an important journey they generally started on Sunday and never on Friday; they often said; 'the better the day the better the deed,'"—Reynolds: My Own Times, p. 80.

One must not infer from the irregularity of religious services that the people in these new regions were wholly without religion. Professor Buck says:

"The spiritual welfare of the Illinois pioneers was not neglected. The religious observances, with the exception of those of the French Catholics, were of the familiar type. The principal Protestant denominations at the close of the territorial period were the Methodists and the Baptists, the latter classified as 'regular,' or 'hardshell,' and separating. Presbyterianism was just beginning to get a foothold. The ministers were of two types—the circuit rider, who covered wide stretches of country and devoted all his time to religious work, and the occasional preacher who supplemented his meager income from the church by farming or some other occupation."—Buck: Illinois in 1818, p. 173.

Governor Ford has left an account of the unlearned but zealous frontier preachers, of their sermons, and of the results of their work, which cannot easily be improved upon:

"Preachers of the gospel frequently sprang up from the body of the people at home, without previous training, except in religious exercises and in the study of the Holy Scriptures. In those primitive times it was not thought to be necessary that a teacher of religion should be a scholar. It was thought to be his business to preach from a knowledge of the Scriptures alone, to make appeals warm from the heart, to paint heaven and hell to the imagination of the sinner, to terrify him with the one, and to promise the other as a reward for a life of righteousness. However ignorant these first preachers may have been, they could be at no loss to find congregations still more ignorant, so that they were still capable of instructing someone. Many of them added to their knowledge of the Bible, a diligent perusal of Young's Night Thoughts, Watts' hymns, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Hervey's Meditations, a knowledge of which gave more compass to their thoughts, to be expressed in a profuse, flowery language, and raised their feelings to the utmost height of poetical enthusiasm.

"Sometimes their sermons turned upon matters of controversy; unlearned arguments on the subject of free grace, baptism, free-will, election, faith, good works, justification, sanctification, and the final perseverance of the saints. But that in which they excelled, was the earnestness of their words and manner, leaving no doubt of the strongest conviction in their own minds, and in the vividness of the pictures which they drew of the ineffable blessedness of heaven, and the awful torments of the wicked in the fire and brimstone appointed for eternal punishment. These, with the love of God to sinful man, the sufferings of the Saviour, the dangerous apathy of sinners, and exhortations to repentance, furnished themes for the most vehement and passionate declamations. But above all, they continually inculcated the great principles of justice and sound morality.

"As many of these preachers were nearly destitute of learning and knowledge, they made up in loud hallooing and violent action what they lacked in information. And it was a matter of astonishment to what length they could spin out a sermon embracing only a few ideas. The merit of a sermon was measured somewhat by the length of it, by the flowery language of the speaker, and by his vociferation and violent gestures. Nevertheless, these first preachers were of incalculable benefit to the country. They inculcated justice and morality, and to the sanction of the highest human motives to regard them, added those which arise from a belief of the greatest conceivable amount of future rewards and punishments. They were truly patriotic also; for at a time when the country was so poor that no other kind of ministry could have been maintained in it, they preached without charge to the people, working week days to aid the scanty charities of their flocks, in furnishing themselves with a scantier living. They believed with a positive certainty that they saw the souls of men rushing to perdition; and they stepped forward to warn and to save, with all the enthusiasm and self-devotion of a generous man who risks his own life to save his neighbor from drowning. And to them are we indebted for the first Christian character of the Protestant portion of this people."—Thomas Ford: History of Illinois, pp. 38-40.

"Of the hostility of certain of the early Baptists to enlightenment, there is abundant evidence in their own fierce opposition to their ablest minister, John Mason Peck. He was born in 1789 in the Congregational atmosphere of Connecticut, but, becoming a Baptist by conviction, became a missionary to the West in 1817. His foes were they of his own household. They fiercely fought against Bible societies, Sunday schools, and missionary societies. In 1828, when Peter Cartwright and James Lemen endeavored to secure the passage of a bill for the prevention of vice and immorality, there was an attempt to amend it in the interests of certain of the Hardshell Baptists by adding to the section against the disturbance of public worship a clause to fine in any sum not less than five dollars or more than fifteen any person who on Sunday would sell any pamphlet or book or take up an offering 'for the support of missionary societies, Bible societies, or Sunday school.' There were not less than twelve members of the House of Representatives who voted for this bill."—Pease: Centennial History of Illinois, II, 28, 29.

One evidence of the hostility of many of the early inhabitants and especially of some who were active in politics toward organized religion, as well as the tendency of ministers of that period to participate in politics, is found in the fact that Illinois narrowly escaped having in her Constitution a provision disqualifying all ministers to hold office in the State. When the Constitutional Convention assembled at Kaskaskia this question was earnestly discussed, and the controversy was waged also in the columns of the Western Intelligencer, which was published in Kaskaskia from 1806 to 1814. A writer who signed himself "A Foe to Religious Tyranny" roundly denounced the political sermons of certain of the ministers, and charged that they intended to disqualify any citizens for office excepting "professors of religion."

When the first draft of the Constitution was submitted in August, 1818, Article II, Section 26, read: "Whereas the ministers of the gospel are by their profession dedicated to God and the care of souls, and ought not to be diverted from the great duties of their function: Therefore, no minister of the gospel or priest of any denomination whatever, shall be eligible to a seat in either house of the Legislature."

This article was warmly commended by a writer in the Intelligencer under date of August 12, 1818, who commended the framers of the Constitution for their provision "to exempt ministers of the gospel from the servile and arduous drudgery of legislation, and of electioneering to procure themselves seats in the Legislature," but urged the convention to extend the provision so as to disqualify ministers from holding any office whatever. A number of members of the Constitutional Convention favored this drastic proscription. On the first reading the proposed article was approved; but it was later reconsidered and voted down.

Ministers thus were left on a plane with other citizens as regarded the holding of public office; and their candidacy for the Legislature especially was not infrequent; indeed, one of the writers who engaged in this controversy considered the appalling possibility that the Constitutional Convention might have been composed entirely of ministers, and that some future session of the Legislature might find them in complete control. There never was any danger that ministers would make up a controlling faction in the Illinois Legislature; but they were not a negligible element in the early political life of the State.

Lincoln soon came into the political atmosphere which was thus affected by religious controversy, and it had an influence upon him. His most formidable and persistent opponent, until he met Douglas, was a Methodist preacher, the redoubtable Peter Cartwright who defeated him in a contest for the Legislature and whom he defeated in a race for Congress. Lincoln was quite familiar with religion in its relation to politics in early Illinois.

Of Lincoln's theological opinions, especially those which he cherished while at New Salem, and which Herndon believed he did not materially change, Herndon says:

"Inasmuch as he was often a candidate for public office Mr. Lincoln said as little as possible about his religious opinions, especially if he failed to coincide with the orthodox world. In illustration of his religious code, I once heard him say that it was like that of an old man named Glenn, in Indiana, whom he heard speak at a religious meeting, and who said, 'When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad; and that's my religion.' In 1834, while still living in New Salem, and before he became a lawyer, he was surrounded by a class of people exceedingly liberal in matters of religion. Volney's Ruins and Paine's Age of Reason passed from hand to hand, and furnished food for the evening's discussion in the tavern and village store. Lincoln read both these books, and assimilated them into his own being. He prepared an extended essay—called by many, a book—in which he made an argument against Christianity, striving to prove that the Bible was not inspired, and therefore not God's revelation, and that Jesus Christ was not the Son of God. The manuscript containing these audacious and comprehensive propositions he intended to have published or given a wide circulation in some other way. He carried it to the store, where it was read and freely discussed. His friend and employer, Samuel Hill, was among the listeners, and seriously questioning the propriety of a promising young man like Lincoln fathering such unpopular notions, he snatched the manuscript from his hands, and thrust it into the stove. The book went up in flames, and Mr. Lincoln's political future was secure. But his infidelity and his skeptical views were not diminished."—Herndon, III, 439-440.

We shall have occasion in a subsequent chapter to recur to this so-called book which Lincoln is alleged to have written while in New Salem. It is sufficient at this time to remember, and the fact must not be overlooked, that our knowledge of this book depends solely upon the testimony of Herndon. Herndon never saw the book, and so far as is known he never talked with anyone who had seen it. He affirms that Lincoln never denied having written a book on the subject of religion, but he nowhere claims that Lincoln told him in detail concerning its contents. Herndon's principal visit, and perhaps the only one which he made to New Salem in quest of literary material, was in October in 1866. He had attended the Circuit Court of Menard County on Saturday, October 13, and on Sunday morning at 11:20 A.M., as he tells us with painstaking and lawyer-like particularity, he visited the site of New Salem. That afternoon and a part of the next morning, which he says was misty, cloudy, foggy, and cold, he made inquiry of the oldest inhabitant of that part of the country and wrote out the substance of his lecture on Ann Rutledge. This was a whole generation after Lincoln had removed from the now depopulated New Salem, and there were very few people in the neighborhood who remembered him through any personal association. The town had completely disappeared, but Herndon found the site of the houses that once had stood there, and also found and identified the grave of Ann Rutledge. To that visit we are indebted for a good deal of our knowledge of the background of Lincoln's life during this formative epoch. But we are not bound to accept all of Mr. Herndon's inferences regarding it.

It must be remembered that Herndon's lecture did not pass unchallenged. So small was the audience when he delivered it and so uniformally unfavorable were the press comments that he never repeated this lecture, and some of its statements are open to question. It is not in this lecture that we learn of the essay which Lincoln is alleged to have written in criticism of the Bible, but that was the visit on which Herndon appears to have gathered his information concerning Lincoln's more intimate relations with New Salem.

There is no good reason to doubt that Lincoln during this period read Volney and Paine, and that having read them he rushed rather quickly to paper and set down his immature thoughts in argumentative fashion. It would divert us from our present purpose of portraying the environment if we were to consider in detail at this point the story of Lincoln's burnt book. The reader will do well to remember, however, that Herndon, though truthful, was not infallible nor on this point free from bias; that neither Herndon nor anyone else then living was known to have seen, much less to have read, the book alleged to have been burned thirty-two years before; and that there was abundant opportunity not only for exaggeration but even for a complete misunderstanding concerning the actual content of this book.

Indeed, this incident has been allowed to pass with too little criticism or challenge. Those who did not believe Lincoln to have been a man of faith were glad to accept the story; those who believed that he later was a man of faith were not wholly unwilling to believe that he had once been an infidel and later had undergone a marked change of opinion. There seemed no good reason to dispute Herndon, and no one else was supposed to know more about the subject than he. But we shall discover that Herndon may not have learned the whole truth. There is more than a possibility that the manuscript that was burned was a document of quite another sort.

If Lincoln was regarded as an infidel, and if he ever was tempted to think himself one, we should not be justified in accepting that judgment as final until we knew and considered what was required in that time and place to constitute a man an infidel.

In the mind of most if not all of the Baptist preachers whom Lincoln heard while he was at New Salem, a belief that the earth was round was sufficient to brand a man as an infidel. The Methodists, as a rule, would have admitted that the earth was round, but Peter Cartwright would probably have considered a man an infidel who believed that the earth was not created in seven literal days. At Vandalia, Lincoln heard some ministers of wider vision, such as Edward Beecher and Julian M. Sturtevant, who were occasionally there, and John Mason Peck; but these experiences were rare. His association with Methodists was largely in the political arena, where he crossed swords three times with Peter Cartwright. That doughty hero of the Cross was born in Virginia on September 1, 1786, and exerted a mighty influence for good in early Illinois. With a nominal salary of $80 a year, and an actual salary of $30 or $40, he rode thousands of miles through deep mud, baptized 8,000 children and 4,000 adults, conducted camp-meetings and political campaigns, and sang and shouted and in his own language whipped the devil round the stump and hit him a crack at every jump until his death at Pleasant Plains, Illinois, September 25, 1872. He defeated Lincoln for the Legislature, and was defeated by him for Congress in 1846. So far as we know, Lincoln left no record of his feeling toward Cartwright and the Methodists. He could not have failed to respect such men, but it is not altogether certain that he was tempted to love them.

By the time Lincoln was seventeen, and possibly earlier, he believed the earth to be round. I shall not succeed in making the reader understand the possible effect of this discovery upon him and certain of his associates without relating an experience of my own.

In the summer of 1881, being then a college student on vacation, I taught school in the mountains of Kentucky far beyond the end of the railroad. The school was a large and prosperous one and brought many students from other districts who paid a trifling tuition and were preparing to teach. The curriculum included everything from the alphabet to a simplified normal course. A majority of my pupils had but one textbook, Webster's Blueback Speller. I endeavored to make up for the lack of textbooks by lessons in the Natural Sciences and in such other branches of study as seemed adapted to the requirements of my pupils. After a few weeks one of my pupils, son of a Baptist minister, was taken out of school. His father being interviewed stated that he was sorry to have the boy lose his education, but could not afford to permit him to be converted to infidelity. What the boy had learned which disturbed his father was that the earth was round.

The subject provoked widespread discussion, and finally resulted in a joint debate between two school teachers and two Baptist preachers on the question:

"Resolved, That the earth is flat and stationary, and that the sun moves around it once in twenty-four hours."

At early candle-lighting on two successive Friday evenings this question was debated. On each night the procedure was the same. Each of the speakers spoke forty-five minutes, and each of the leaders spent a half-hour in rebuttal, a total of four hours each evening of solid oratory. I should like to relate, but it would unduly extend this narrative, the learned arguments of the two college students who stood for the rotundity of the earth, and how those arguments were met. I well remember the closing argument of my chief opponent, not the local preacher but an abler man whom he brought in, the cousin of a Confederate General of the same name (though himself a stanch Union man) who stood beside and above me with long descending gestures that threatened to crush my skull as he shouted:

"He's a college student-ah! And he's come out here to larn us and instruct us about the shape of the yarth-ah! And he knows more'n Joshua-ah! And he'd take Joshua into this here school and tell him he didn't know what he'd ort to pray for-ah! He'd tell Joshua that he hadn't orter said, 'Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon-ah, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon-ah!' He'd tell Joshua that he'd ort to have prayed, 'Yarth, stand thou still upon thine axle-tree-ah!' But I reckon God knowed what Joshua had ort to have prayed for, for it is written in the Word of God that the sun stood still-ah! I tell ye, brethering, hit's the doctrine of infidelity-ah! And any man that teaches it ort to be drove out of the country-ah!"

There is much more of the story, but this must suffice to illustrate an important point. Until he went to live in Springfield, Abraham Lincoln probably never had heard a Baptist preacher, unless it was John Mason Peck on some errand to Vandalia, who did not believe the earth flat, and who would not have classified Abraham Lincoln as an infidel for denying the declaration.

Now, I knew that I was not an infidel, even though I parted company with my friends in the Baptist ministry in my belief that the earth was round, and even though I had a similar debate with a well-informed Methodist preacher on the length of time that was required to make the earth. But Abraham Lincoln did not know. Thomas Paine and the preachers were agreed in their misinformation.

I count it a privilege to have lived with earnest and intelligent people who believed the earth flat, and to whom that belief was an important article of Christian faith. But I saw intelligent young men who had come to another opinion concerning some of these matters who accepted without protest the names that overzealous mountain preachers applied to them, and who, believing themselves to be infidels, in time became so.

Not many of Lincoln's biographers, if indeed any of them, have shared these advantages which for several profitable years I had in the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee; and I am less ready than some of even the most orthodox of them have been to accept the declaration that when Lincoln left New Salem he was an infidel. Even if I knew that he thought himself to be such, I should like before forming my final conclusion to know just what he thought constituted an infidel. I do not think that at this period of his history Abraham Lincoln possessed an adequate knowledge of the subject to have been altogether competent to classify himself.

A few things we know about him. He had established a reputation for courage, for kindness, and for honesty. "Honest Abe" was his sobriquet, and he deserved it. Whatever his opinions, he held them honestly; and neither on earth nor in heaven can any man be rightfully condemned for the holding of an honest opinion.

We shall have occasion later to refer to Mentor Graham, and to quote him. He came into Lincoln's life at this time, and taught him Kirkham's Grammar, and the study of surveying, and assisted him with his literary composition. He knew more of the mind of Abraham Lincoln during this period than any other man, and we shall hear from him in due time.

New Salem "winked out," as Lincoln was accustomed to say. It disappeared from the map. The post-office was discontinued. There was nothing to hold Lincoln there. But the great city of Springfield, with its one thousand inhabitants and its majestic pride in its new State Capitol, which Lincoln had done much to remove thither from Vandalia, beckoned to this ambitious young lawyer and politician, and on March 15, 1837, he borrowed a horse, rode to Springfield with all his worldly goods in his saddlebags, and the saddlebags none too full, and thereafter became a resident of the capital city of Illinois, and a permanent factor in its legal and political life.

Lincoln arrived in New Salem on April 19, 1831, a tall, lank flatboat hand, with his trousers rolled up "about five feet," and he left it on a borrowed horse with all his belongings in a pair of saddlebags, March 15, 1837. So far as worldly wealth was concerned, he was richer when he arrived at the age of twenty-two than when he left at the age of twenty-eight, for he was heavily in debt. It had fared better with him financially had he spent those six years in Illinois College at Jacksonville. He might have entered Springfield at the same time with a college diploma and a smaller debt. A college education was not impossible for him, and he might have had it had he cared for it as much as did the Green brothers or the brother of Ann Rutledge, or, among his later associates, Shelby M. Collum or Newton Bateman. It is a fair question whether an education under such good and great men as Julian M. Sturtevant and Edward Beecher would have been more or less valuable than what he actually got; in any event, it was not an impossibility if he had cared as much for it as did some other boys as poor as he.

But New Salem was his alma mater, as Mrs. Atkinson has aptly termed it, and there he got what had to stand as the equivalent of his academic course.

To have seen him entering New Salem on a flatboat and leaving it on a borrowed horse, one might easily have arrived at very erroneous conclusions as to what the six years had done for him. But the years were not lost.

He came to New Salem a strong pioneer, proud of his great height, and he always remained almost childishly proud of it, and ready to challenge any other tall man to back up to him and discover which was the taller. He was capable of hard work, and disinclined to perform it. Thomas Lincoln had taught him to work, but not to love work; and his employers declared that he loved labor far less than his meals and pay. If he must work, he preferred almost any kind of work rather than that of the farm, and he had welcomed the brief experiences of the river and had serious thoughts of being a blacksmith. He had prized his great strength less for the labor he might perform than for the supremacy which it gave him in physical contests; and it had made him the admired leader of the local wrestlers and the idol of the Clary Grove gang.

He had come to New Salem able to read, and to make what he called "rabbit tracks" as clerk on election day, assisting Mentor Graham, who rewarded him many fold in what he later taught to the young giant. He left New Salem a competent surveyor, a member of the bar, a representative in the Legislature, and, he might have called himself Captain, if he had chosen to do so, or even taken advantage of the frontier's ready system of post-bellum promotions and acquired higher rank as an officer who had seen actual military service. He had the good sense not to do this, and about the only commendable thing in his one important speech in Congress in later years was his mirthful description of his own military performance.

He had learned to think, to compose reasonably good English, to stand on his feet and debate. He had learned to measure his intellectual strength against that of other men, and to come out ahead at least part of the time. He was possessed of almost inordinate ambition, and had no false notion that in his case the office was to seek the man;[17] he was more than ready for any office that would support him, enable him to reduce his "national debt," and advance him toward something higher. He was entering the profession of the law, but law was to him as yet a means to an end, and that end was office. Politics was the vocation and law the avocation in a large percentage of the law offices in Illinois and other new States; and Lincoln was a politician long before he was a lawyer.

His residence in New Salem had tested his moral character and confirmed his personal habits. He did not drink nor swear nor use tobacco.

In a state of society such as then existed, there was almost nothing which such a young man might not have aspired to, and Lincoln had high self-esteem and large aspiration. From this distance we see him leaving New Salem to "wink out" while he rode his borrowed steed far beyond Springfield, to tether him at last where Thomas Jefferson is alleged to have hitched his horse, to the palings of the White House.

But it was no exultant mood which possessed the soul of Lincoln as he turned his back upon his alma mater and went forth to conquer the world. He was a briefless lawyer, and bedless as well as briefless. He had met and mastered men, but had become painfully aware of his own poverty, his lack of education, his utter ignorance of the usages of even such polite society as had been in New Salem, to say nothing of that in Springfield.

He was unsettled in love and unsettled in religion, though he had been on speaking terms with both. He had loved and lost Ann Rutledge, and he did not love Mary Owens and could not lose her. He was about to begin one of the loneliest periods of his very lonely life. For a year only one woman in Springfield spoke to him, and she would rather not have done so. He did not go to church nor mingle in society, but faced the hard and bitter problems that confronted him in earning a living, making some small payments on his debt, settling his relations with Mary Owens, and possibly giving some thought to his soul. But this was not a time of one of his spiritual high water-marks.

If we had seen Abraham Lincoln as he entered New Salem and again six years later as he left it, we should have found small reason to anticipate very much of what afterward occurred. But looking back upon him in the light of what occurred afterward, we discern the "promise and potency" of the great man he afterward became in the sad young man who already had become a leader of men, and had earned the right to be called "Honest Abe."

CHAPTER V

THE ENVIRONMENT OF LINCOLN'S LIFE IN
SPRINGFIELD

Abraham Lincoln became a resident of Springfield on Wednesday, March 15, 1837, and continued to live there until his removal, Saturday, February 11, 1860, to assume his duties as President of the United States. He was accepted as partner by his friend and former commander, Major John T. Stuart, and shared an office in which politics was the major interest and law was incidentally practiced. His partnership with Stuart continued for four years, from April 27, 1837, until April 14, 1841. His next partnership was with Judge Stephen T. Logan, and extended from April 14, 1841, to September 20, 1843.

He then formed a partnership with William H. Herndon which began on the day of the dissolution of the partnership with Judge Logan and was never formally dissolved. Lincoln had a working alliance with some lawyer in almost every county seat which he habitually visited, whereby the local lawyer secured the cases and worked them up, and Lincoln took them in charge as senior counsel when they came to trial.[18] These were not formal partnerships, though they were often so spoken of. This method gave him a large practice, and brought him into contact and collision with the ablest lawyers in central and southern Illinois.

In 1838 and again in 1840 he was re-elected to the Legislature, and showed little of the ability which he later manifested, but was a faithful member, and he flung himself with ardor into the noisy campaign of 1840.

In 1842 he had his "duel" with James T. Shields, and later had the good sense to be ashamed of it.

In 1846 he ran for Congress, and at this third attempt was elected, taking his seat December 6, 1847, and continuing for two years.

The slavery issue was becoming dominant. Lincoln was not at the outset an abolitionist, and was unwilling to be placed in a position where he would be compelled to imperil his political chances by taking too definite a stand on this divisive measure; but on March 3, 1837, he introduced into the Legislature a vigorous protest against the aggressions of the pro-slavery party, a protest which probably failed to affect his political future because it contained only one signature beside his own. Only a few months later occurred the martyrdom of Owen Lovejoy at Alton, and the slavery issue was no longer one to be kept in the background. It is good to be able to remember that Lincoln's first protest against it was recorded before it had become so burning an issue. He himself dated his hostility to slavery to what he saw of a slave market in New Orleans when he visited that city as a boat hand. But he was unable to remember a time when he had not believed that slavery was wrong.

On other moral questions he now began to speak. He delivered an address on Temperance on Washington's Birthday in 1842. His first notable oratorical flight outside the spheres of politics and law was delivered before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield on January 27, 1837, and was on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions." It took him longer to say it than it did at Gettysburg, and it was not so well said, but the rather florid lecture was intended to mean essentially the same thing which he later expressed much more simply and effectively.

His most important case that had a bearing on the slavery issue was that of Bailey vs. Cromwell, when he was thirty-two years of age. In preparing to argue before the Supreme Court of Illinois in favor of the freedom of a slave girl, he learned the legal aspects of the question which later he was to decide on its military and ethical character.

In 1858 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate against Stephen A. Douglas, and conducted that series of debates which made him known throughout the nation as the champion of freedom in the territories, and of the faith that the nation could not forever endure half slave and half free. In the autumn of 1859 he visited Kansas, and was hailed as the friend of freedom.

On Tuesday evening, February 27, 1860, he delivered an address in Cooper Union in New York City, an address which greatly extended his fame. On the preceding Sunday he attended Plymouth Church and heard and met Henry Ward Beecher.

On May 16, 1860, he was nominated for the Presidency of the United States by a great convention meeting in a temporary structure known as "the Wigwam" standing on Lake and Market Streets near the junction of the two branches of Chicago River. On November 7, 1860, he was elected President.

On Friday, November 4, 1842, he was married to Miss Mary Todd. She was born in Lexington, Kentucky, December 13, 1818, and had come to Springfield to be with her sister, Mrs. Ninian W. Edwards, in whose home the marriage occurred. Concerning this marriage and the events which went before and after, much has been written and nothing need here be repeated.

When Lincoln arrived in Springfield, he found himself for the first time in his life living in a town with churches that held service every Sunday, and each church under the care of its own minister. Springfield had several churches, and he did not at first attend any of them. This does not seem to have been on account of any hostility which he entertained toward them, but his first months in Springfield were months of great loneliness and depression. He was keenly conscious of his poverty and of his social disqualifications. He was still tortured by his unhappy love affair with Mary Owens. More than a year after his arrival in Springfield he wrote to her that he had not yet attended church and giving as the reason that he would not know how to behave himself:

"This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business, after all; at least, it is so to me. I am quite as lonesome here as I ever was anywhere in my life. I have been spoken to by but one woman since I have been here, and should not have been by her if she could have avoided it. I have never been to church yet, nor probably shall not be soon. I stay away because I am conscious I should not know how to behave myself. I am often thinking about what we said of your coming to live at Springfield. I am afraid you would not be satisfied. There is a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without sharing it. You would have to be poor, without the means of hiding your poverty."

Lincoln's habit with respect to churchgoing underwent no very marked improvement after his marriage until the year 1850. He came, however, to know a number of ministers[19] and to sustain somewhat pleasant relations with some of them.

Mary Todd had been reared a Presbyterian. For a time after her marriage she attended and was a member of the Episcopal Church. On February 1, 1850,[20] their second son, Edward Baker Lincoln, died. The little boy was between three and four years old. The rector of the Episcopal Church was absent from the city and the funeral service was conducted by Rev. James Smith, D.D., of the First Presbyterian Church. A friendship was established between them, and Mr. Lincoln took a pew in Dr. Smith's church and he and Mrs. Lincoln attended there regularly.

In a later chapter we shall have occasion to consider more directly and at length the influence of Dr. Smith upon Mr. Lincoln. We now confine ourselves to the fact that Lincoln now became a church attendant under the ministry of a preacher quite different from any he had previously known.

James Smith was a large and stalwart Scotchman. He is described as Websterian in appearance and in the strength of logical argument. Lamon speaks of him in contemptuous phrase which reflects little credit upon Lamon, describing him as a man of slender ability. Whatever Dr. Smith was, he was not a man of meager intellectual power. He had a massive mind and one well trained. He had a voice of great carrying power and was accustomed to speaking to large congregations both indoors and out. He was a wide reader and a skilled controversialist. In his own young manhood he had been a deist, and when he was converted he entered with great ardor into various discussions with men who opposed the Christian faith. One such discussion he had engaged in with a widely known infidel author. The debate had continued evening after evening in a Southern city for nearly three weeks and Dr. Smith had emerged from it triumphant.

Dr. Smith was just the kind of man to win the admiration of Lincoln at that time. There is some reason to believe that Dr. Smith's three weeks' debate with C. G. Olmsted at Columbus, Mississippi, suggested to Lincoln the idea of his debate with Stephen A. Douglas.

That Lincoln's views underwent some change at this time there is the best reason to believe. Lincoln himself declared to his brother-in-law, Ninian W. Edwards, that his views had been modified.

Lamon and Herndon both seek to represent Dr. Smith as an officious, self-advertising meddler, who sought to win renown for himself by proclaiming Mr. Lincoln's conversion through his personal influence. The claims and conduct of Dr. Smith do not seem to merit any such rebuke. Whatever Dr. Smith claimed, Mr. Lincoln knew about it and was not offended by it. Subsequently he appointed Dr. Smith's son United States Consul to Dundee, Scotland, and on the son's return to the United States Mr. Lincoln appointed his father, who by that time had retired from the ministry, to succeed him in that position. Even Lamon is compelled to admit that Dr. Smith's claims were made with Mr. Lincoln's knowledge, and says:

"Mr. Lincoln permitted himself to be misunderstood and misrepresented by some enthusiastic ministers and exhorters with whom he came in contact. Among these was the Rev. Mr. Smith, then pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Springfield, and afterward consul at Dundee, in Scotland, under Mr. Lincoln's appointment."—Lamon, Life of Lincoln, p. 498.

This statement is thoroughly discreditable, and that which follows in Lamon's account of Mr. Lincoln's relations with Dr. Smith is a thorough misrepresentation, as we shall later discover. Lamon was not a deliberate liar; neither was he in this matter free from prejudice; and he wrote with reckless disregard of some facts which he did not know but ought to have known, and which the reader of this book shall know.

About this time Mr. Lincoln received word that his own father was dying, and was prevented from making him a personal visit, which, apparently, he was not wholly sorry for. On January 12, 1851, he wrote to his stepbrother, John D. Johnson:

"I sincerely hope father may recover his health, but, tell him to remember to call upon and confide in our great and good and merciful Maker, who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our head, and He will not forget the dying man who puts his trust in Him. Say to him that if we could meet now it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant, but that if it be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous meeting with many loved ones gone before, and where the rest of us, through the help of God, hope ere long to join them."

Even Herndon grew indignant when anyone attempted to explain away that letter, or to make it seem anything less than it purported to be. He said in his letter to Mr. Abbott, under date of February 18, 1870:

"It has been said to me that Mr. Lincoln wrote the above letter to an old man simply to cheer him up in his last moments, and that the writer did not believe what he said. The question is, Was Mr. Lincoln an honest and truthful man? If he was, he wrote that letter honestly, believing it. It has to me the sound, the ring, of an honest utterance. I admit that Mr. Lincoln, in his moments of melancholy and terrible gloom, was living on the border land between theism and atheism, sometimes quite wholly dwelling in atheism. In his happier moments he would swing back to theism, and dwell lovingly there.... So it seems to me that Mr. Lincoln believed in God and immortality as well as heaven—a place."—Lamon, p. 495.

Another incident comes to us from this period and is related by Captain Gilbert J. Greene. He was a young printer living in Springfield, and at the time of this incident was eighteen years of age. Whether the story was in any way exaggerated we may not certainly know, but it is here given as he himself furnished it for publication and is now printed with one or two other Lincoln stories in a small volume in limited edition:

"'Greene,' said Lincoln to him one day on the streets of Springfield, 'I've got to ride out into the country tomorrow to draw a will for a woman who is believed to be on her deathbed. I may want you for a witness. If you haven't anything else to do I'd like to have you go along.'

"The invitation was promptly accepted.

"On the way to the farmhouse the lawyer and the printer chatted delightfully, cementing a friendship that was fast ripening into real affection. Arriving at the house, the woman was found to be near her end.

"With great gentleness Lincoln drew up the document disposing of the property as the woman desired. Neighbors and relatives were present, making it unnecessary to call on Greene to witness the instrument. After the signing and witnessing of the will the woman turned to Lincoln and said, with a smile:

"'Now I have my affairs for this world arranged satisfactorily. I am thankful to say that long before this I have made preparation for the other life I am so soon to enter. Many years ago I sought and found Christ as my Saviour. He has been my stay and comfort through the years, and is now near to carry me over the river of death. I do not fear death, Mr. Lincoln. I am really glad that my time has come, for loved ones have gone before me and I rejoice in the hope of meeting them so soon.'

"Instinctively the friends drew nearer the bedside. As the dying woman had addressed her words more directly to Lincoln than to the others, Lincoln, evincing sympathy in every look and gesture, bent toward her and said:

"'Your faith in Christ is wise and strong; your hope of a future life is blessed. You are to be congratulated in passing through life so usefully, and into the life beyond so hopefully.'

"'Mr. Lincoln,' said she, 'won't you read a few verses out of the Bible for me?'

"A member of the family offered him the family Bible. Instead of taking it, he began reciting from memory the twenty-third Psalm, laying emphasis upon 'Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.' Still without referring to the Bible, Lincoln began with the first part of the fourteenth chapter of John:

"'Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me.

"'In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

"'And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.'

"After he had given these and other quotations from the Scriptures, he recited various familiar comforting hymns, closing with 'Rock of Ages, cleft for me.' Then, with a tenderness and pathos that enthralled everyone in the room, he spoke the last stanza—

"'While I draw this fleeting breath,
When mine eyes shall close in death,
When I rise to worlds unknown,
See Thee on Thy judgment throne,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.'

"While Lincoln was reciting this stanza a look of peace and resignation lit up the countenance of the dying woman. In a few minutes more, while the lawyer and the printer were there, she passed away.

"The journey back to Springfield was begun in silence. It was the younger man who finally said:

"'Mr. Lincoln, ever since what has just happened back there in the farmhouse, I have been thinking that it is very extraordinary that you should so perfectly have acted as pastor as well as attorney.'

"When the answer to this suggestion finally was given—and it was not given at once—Lincoln said:

"'God, and Eternity, and Heaven were very near to me today.'"—Charles T. White, Lincoln the Comforter, pp. 11-16.

Reference should be made in our review of this period to Lincoln's stories as exhibiting an important phase of his character.

It is not easy to decide what stories actually were Lincoln's. Very few of them are to be found in their original setting, for he did not commonly tell stories when he made speeches. They were told in personal interviews, in hours of recreation, and especially in taverns and other loafing places. The period of their greatest vogue was that in which Lincoln traveled the circuit. Most of the successful lawyers of that day were story-tellers; and in the evenings of court-week they swapped yarns with local wits. Lincoln was the most famous of a considerable group of noted Illinois story-tellers.

During his lifetime he was asked about how many of the stories attributed to him were his own, and he said he thought about half. A much larger discount would need to be made now. Many such stories Lincoln probably never heard.

The stories which lawyers told to each other and to groups of men were not all of them overnice; and Lincoln's stories were like the rest. He did not always confine himself to strictly proper stories. But in those that are authentic and not quite proper, it is to be observed that the coarseness was incidental to the real point of the story. I have not heard any story, authenticated as Lincoln's, which is actually obscene.

It has been my privilege to examine a considerable quantity of unpublished writing of Lincoln's, including some manuscripts that have been withheld for the reason that they were not quite proper. Of these I can say that they are few in number, and that the element of vulgarity is very small. Excepting only the "First Chronicles of Reuben," which was a rude backwoods joke, written in his boyhood, and in full accord with the standards of humor current in the time and general environment, there is not very much that one could wish had been destroyed.

The frankest piece of questionable literature from Lincoln's pen in mature years, so far as I am aware, is in a private collection, and its owner does not permit it to be copied. Not many people are permitted to see it. It is probably the least attractive scrap of Lincoln's writing extant that dates from his mature years. It is undated, but belongs to the period of his life on the circuit. It is a piece of extravagant nonsense, written in about twenty lines on a quarter sheet of legal cap, and is probably the effort to recall and record something that he had heard and which amused him. Its whole point is in the transposition of the initial letters of compound words, or words in juxtaposition in a sentence, such as a speaker sometimes makes in a moment of mental confusion. Thus a cotton-patch is a "potten-catch" and a fence-corner is a "cence-forner." Every clause contains one or more of these absurdities, until a sense of boisterous mirth is awakened at the possibility that there should be so many of them. Most of them are harmless as the two above quoted, but there are two or three that are not in good taste. They are not vile nor obscene, but not very pretty. Lincoln wasted ten minutes of spare time in writing out this rather ingenious bit of nonsense, and it is not worth more than that length of discussion. It is probably the worst bit of extant writing of Lincoln's mature years, written in the period of his circuit-riding, and it has little to commend it and not a great deal to condemn.

Lincoln's religious life in Springfield has been and is the subject of violent controversy. Much that has been written on both sides bears the marks of prejudice and exhibits internal evidence of having been consciously or unconsciously distorted. In a later chapter it will come before us for review and analysis. Of it we may now remind ourselves that in this period covering nearly a quarter of a century Lincoln was developing in many ways. He emerged from grinding poverty into a condition in which he owned a home and had a modest sum of money in the bank. From an ill-trained fledgling lawyer, compelled by his poverty to share a bed in a friend's room above the store, he had come to be a leader at the Illinois bar. From an obscure figure in State politics he had come to be the recognized leader of a political party that was destined to achieve national success and to determine the policies of the nation with little interruption for more than half a century. Out of a condition of great mental uncertainty in all matters relating to domestic relations he had come into a settled condition as the husband of a brilliant and ambitious woman and the father of a family of sons to whom he was devotedly attached. For the first time in his life he lived in a community where there were buildings wholly dedicated to the purposes of public worship; and after a considerable period of non-church attendance, and perhaps another of infrequent or irregular attendance, he had become a regular attendant and supporter of a church whose minister was his personal friend and whom he greatly admired.

During his years in Springfield, Mr. Lincoln's political ideals had undergone marked change. His experience in the Illinois Legislature is not discreditable; neither does it manifest any notably high ideals. Nor was he brilliantly successful in his one term in Congress. Lincoln was an honest politician, in the sense that he kept his promises and stood by his announced convictions. But it is impossible to read into his legislative history any such lofty purpose as later possessed him. He and the other members of the "Long Nine" log-rolled in orthodox political fashion, and won from Governor Ford the title "spared monuments of popular wrath."[21]

As a jury lawyer, also, his arts were those of the successful trial lawyer of the period. So far as the author has been able to find, there was no unworthy chapter in all this long history. The story, for instance, that in the trial of Armstrong Lincoln used an almanac of another year and won his case by fraud, has, as the author is convinced, no foundation whatever in fact. On the contrary, Lincoln was at a serious disadvantage in any case in whose justice he did not fully believe.

But there came a time when Lincoln was more than a shrewd and honest politician; more than a successful jury lawyer. In the brief autobiographical sketch which he prepared for Mr. Fell, he speaks of his work at the end of his term in Congress, and says:

"In 1846 I was once elected to the lower House of Congress. Was not a candidate for re-election. From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, practiced law more assiduously than ever before. Always a Whig in politics, and generally on the Whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses, I was losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since is pretty well known."

He expanded this brief statement somewhat in the sketch which he furnished a little later to Scripps as a basis of his campaign biography:

"Upon his return from Congress, he went to the practice of the law with greater earnestness than ever before.... In 1854 his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused him as he had never been before."