Abraham Lincoln: A Biography

1. "The Short and Simple Annals of the Poor"

CHAPTER I -e. "The Short and Simple Annals of the Poor" As 0 N E travels south from Louisville, Kentucky, one comes, ~ after some forty miles, to a high, steep, craggy elevation known as Muldraugh's Hill, through which Knob Creek, a clear, swift-flowing stream, has gouged a pass to make its way to the Rolling Fork. Branches of Knob Creek have cut deep gorges into the escarpment on either side, eroding out and washing down the limestone to form small, delta-like patches of rich silt at intervals along the stream. On one of these fertile patches two and one-half miles above the Rolling Fork, Thomas Lincoln had established a homestead, where he lived with his wife, Nancy, and their young son and daughter. His farm contained ~30 acres, but only thirty acres along the creek bottom were tillable; the rest was scarred by deep ravines and overgrown with scrub trees and tangled underbrush. Spring had brought a warm softness to the air, and the surrounding hills, which had loomed so bleakly sinister all winter, seemed to enfold the valley with new friendliness. It was cornplanting time. Tom Lincoln was out in the bottom land plying a crude hoe, and behind him toddled his small son, dropping two pumpkin seeds into every other hill of corn in alternate rows. The planting finished, the whole family rested on the Sabbath, when up in the hills a terrific cloudburst came. No rain fell in the valley, ABRAHAM LINCOLN but down the gorges rushed a swirling flood, washing out corn and pumpkin seeds and carrying them along with much of the loose topsoil down the creek to the Rolling Fork. It was the first home and the first incident of his life that Abraham Lincoln could remember when he had grown to be a man. Of Lincoln's childhood in Kentucky we know little more than he. Born on February 12, 1809, in a backwoods cabin three miles south of Hodgenville, he was brought to the Knob Creek place when he was two years old, and lived there more than five years. A neighbor boy saved him from drowning in the creek; otherwise his childhood years in Kentucky were uneventful. He knew the numbing cold of winter that seeped through the chinks of the rude cabin and defied the efforts of the roaring fire to force it out. He knew the friendly warmth of the Kentucky sun, the touch of cool, soft earth against bare feet. His food was coarse and plain. His clothes were such as his mother spun and wove or fashioned from the skins of animals brought down by his father's gun. He did the simple tasks of a small boy-running errands, bringing in wood and water, weeding the garden, picking grapes and wild berries on the surrounding bluffs, dropping the seeds at plantingtime . In later years, when Abraham Lincoln was a candidate for President of the United States, and John Locke Scripps, a campaign biographer, asked him about his boyhood years, he replied: "Why, Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence and that sentence you will find in Gray's Elegy- 'The short and simple annals of the poor.' " Abraham's father, Thomas Lincoln, was born in Rockingham County, Virginia, on January 6, 1778, the youngest son of a prosperous pioneer farmer, also named Abraham Lincoln, who brought his family from Virginia to Kentucky about 1782 and settled near Hughes Station, in Jefferson County, some twenty miles east of Louisville. A few years afterward this grandfather of young Abraham was killed from ambush by a skulking Indian, and the eldest son, Mordecai, witnessing the murder from the "The Short and Simple Annals of the Poor" 5 family cabin, shot the savage just as he was making off into the forest with the younger brother, Thomas, who had accompanied his father to the woods. After Abraham Lincoln came to manhood, he tried to trace his Lincoln ancestry, but could never follow it beyond his grandfather and namesake. After Lincoln achieved greatness, biographers , seeking an explanation of his capacities in terms of heredity, traced the Lincolns in unbroken line back through Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to Samuel Lincoln, a weaver's apprentice, who emigrated from England to Hingham, Massachusetts , in 1637. Without exception...