by Eric P. Olsen

"...he'll never come to much, fur I'll tell you he wuz the puniest, cryin'est little youngster I ever saw." -- Said by Dennis Hanks, a first cousin of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, on the day Abraham Lincoln was born.

he Hardin County courthouse in Elizabethtown is the hub of a once-bustling town center that has fallen on hard times. A scattering of storefront shops tender their wares to a few indifferent patrons. A police cruiser circles warily, a keen glance thrown my way as I loiter about the historic square.
         North of town, car dealerships, gas stations, and super retail outlets file along U.S. 31 W before petering away into the rolling countryside. I turn right onto an insignificant road behind the new Walmart. Over a low ridge, and surviving through a couple of tumultuous centuries, stands a rustic log cabin, constructed in part by the pioneer settler Thomas Lincoln in 1806. Thomas lived close by with his wife, Nancy, and two-year-old daughter, Sarah.
         I step into a narrow corridor between the cabin and an adjacent structure. I examine the aged logs and primitive mud calking, listening for ghosts trapped in the close confines of the passageway. Did little Sarah Lincoln scamper through the corridor where I now stood, I wonder? Did Nancy call on her neighbors to share the latest family news?
         For Nancy was carrying another child, a boy, who would begin his sojourn in the world some fifteen miles to the south. The boy would suffer tragedy in his youth, yet come out of the frontier to save the nation, free a race of people held in slavery, and shine the light of freedom into the far corners of the earth.
         This child of Thomas and Nancy, named Abraham, would rise to the presidency as storm clouds of civil war were gathering. Few knew or had time to consider his obscure origins as the crisis of disunion settled over the land. But from these origins a man matured to whom was entrusted the inheritance of self government, won through bloody revolution.
         The English statesman William Gladstone, upon hearing Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address just months before the president's assassination, was moved to remark, "I am taken captive by so striking an utterance as this. I see in it the effect of sharp trial when rightly borne to raise men to a higher level of thought and feeling. . . . Mr. Lincoln's words show that upon him anxiety and sorrow wrought their true effect. The address gives evidence of a moral elevation most rare in a statesman, or indeed in any man."
         Yet for Lincoln, sharp trials rightly born were not merely the occasions when history took note; they were the tempering experiences of boyhood, adolescence and young manhood when the character needed by the age was forged.
         Lincoln was twenty-one when he moved to Illinois. Behind him were seven formative years on the Kentucky frontier and fourteen years in the Indiana wilderness. Thus it is not in the Land of Lincoln we must look to fathom the man but to Kentucky and Indiana-and a life of trials far removed from those confronted by the aspiring Springfield lawyer.

Beginnings

braham Lincoln was born February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on Nolin Creek three miles south of Hodgen's mill, today's Hodgenville, Kentucky. Abraham's grandfather came in Kentucky in 1782, following the trail cut by Daniel Boone seven years earlier. Thomas Lincoln continued the westward migration and eventually purchased property in Elizabethtown, but sold it for a loss upon learning that the land title included fewer acres than he believed.
         Problems with inaccurate surveys and conflicting titles were a vexing problem for many Kentucky pioneers-Thomas Lincoln more than most. Moving his young family to Nolin Creek near Hodgen's mill occasioned further litigation, which drove him to move to a third farm on Knob Creek, about ten miles northeast. This property eventually came under the cloud of an earlier claim as well.
         Hodgen's mill has long since vanished, while Hodgenville has grown into a picturesque small town that honors Lincoln without the crass commercialism that could predictably be spawned by the memory of a famous man. There are no souvenir shops with plastic Abe figurines and imitation stovepipe hats, no Lincoln theme parks or Lincoln look-a-likes trolling for tourist dollars.
         Or so it seemed. The community does observe Lincoln Day on the second Saturday of October, I learned, which includes a Lincoln look-a-like contest and draws 25 to 30 thousand people. Otherwise, Hodgenville remembers the sixteenth president with a graceful statue in the town square, a small museum with dioramas of Lincoln's life, and the two important sites at the location of his birthplace and boyhood home.
         Lincoln's birthplace is now a national park, and a marble and granite memorial building encloses the reassembled cabin of Lincoln's birth. The logs themselves changed hands several times, went on tour, and languished in a New York warehouse before an association of investors purchased both the logs and original property. The cabin was reassembled at or very near the original site and dedicated by President Taft in 1911.
         In a fitting tribute to the Great Emancipator, a descendant of a Hodgenville slave now works as a ranger and site guide for the park. "My great-great-great grandmother lived just about four miles from here," park ranger Patsy Cobb says. "She was 114 years old when she died in 1963."

The Lincoln Birthplace National Memorial in Hodgenville

         Cobb walks me around the grounds, now upgraded with paved paths, interpretive displays and a visitor's center with the Lincoln Bible and a few period artifacts on display. Although the park today little suggests the time or experience of Lincoln, knowledge of what would come to pass from these beginnings lends emotion to any visit.
         "I believe God always has somebody for the time he needs them," Cobb says with a thoughtful pause. "The first book Lincoln ever knew was the Bible and that boy learned an early lesson about right and wrong. I believe it was his faith that he learned at a very young age that guided his decisions."

'Annals of the poor'

Abraham lived just two years on Nolin Creek before moving ten miles northeast to Knob Creek farm. Lincoln later said that his earliest memories were of Knob Creek farm. Unlike later chroniclers, though, he had no romanticized images of his boyhood, but seemed painfully aware of the deficiencies of his upbringing and showed the greatest reticence in talking of his early background, his family, and most particularly, his mother.
         "It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life," Lincoln wrote in 1860, in response to inquiries following his nomination for president. "It can be all condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray'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."
         If he ever discussed his boyhood or his parents, said Lincoln's law partner and longtime associate William Herndon, "it was with great reluctance and the greatest reserve."

Lincoln's near total silence on his feelings toward his mother are one of the many enigmas of this complex man.

         Lincoln's mother remains a shadowy figure. Nancy was illiterate, and she died when Abraham was ten, leaving few traces. Scholars have speculated that Lincoln's refusal to talk about his mother perhaps was due to her murky origins-she was raised by relatives and guardians-and the suspicion that she was illegitimate. Yet there can be little doubt that this forgotten, unlettered pioneer woman not only shaped the pliant character of her son but, indirectly, the future course of American history.
         Neighbors were unanimous in their estimation of Nancy Lincoln in later reminiscences. According to one, "she was a woman of deep religious feeling, of the most exemplary character, and most tenderly and affectionately devoted to her family.
         Dennis Hanks, a close friend of Abraham and constant visitor to the Lincoln homestead in Indiana, offered a moving testimonial that cannot fail to suggest qualities of character known to posterity in the person of her famous son:

She seemed to be unmovably calm; she was keen, shrewd, and smart, & I do say highly intellectual by nature. Her memory was strong, her perception was quick, her judgment was acute almost. She was spiritually and ideally inclined, not dull, not material, not heavy in thought feeling or action . . . . She was one of the very best women in the whole race known for kindness, tenderness, charity, and love to the world.

Nancy Hanks Lincoln (drawn by Lloyd Ostendorf)

Thomas Lincoln

An emerging awareness

sat on the rustic porch of the Knob Creek Boyhood Home, joined by property owners Milburn Howard and Lois Wimsett. Their lilting Kentucky drawl and engaging openness underscored their deep roots in the community. The Lincoln cabin, a weathered and crumbling structure, stands on the original site-the logs taken from a neighboring homestead from Lincoln's time and reconstructed according to the remembrance of an early settler.
         The proximity of the farm to the Old Cumberland Road was a significant factor in the child's emerging awareness of the world around him. For traversing the road were local militias on the move, pioneers and their families making their way westward in search of a better life, and slaves, shackled and marching grimly en route to a cruel destiny. In front of the Boyhood Home U.S. 31E largely follows the pioneer road of Lincoln's time, and in the prolonged intervals between passing cars, the quiet of the early afternoon conjured spirits of long-lost days.

The Spring House

Learning 'by littles'

incoln's world also extended at least two miles west along the road to a subscription school he attended briefly with his sister. Although only learning "by littles," as Lincoln later described his infrequent schooling, young Abraham was not deprived relative to other pioneer children in Kentucky. In fact, that his parents took advantage of the school speaks to their enlightened sense that learning was profitable, even though it contributed nothing to planting, harvesting, husbandry, or any of the other daily demands of pioneer life.
         Abraham's principal textbook was Dilworth's Speller, which in addition to a spelling primer, imparted lessons that reinforced the moral education the child received at home. Thus, for example, children were taught simple sentences such as "No man may put off the law of God," "My joy is in God all the day," or "A bad man is a foe of God."
         Before Dilworth of course was the Bible-often the only book in many pioneer homes. It would be hard to overestimate the significance of this one book in the character development of Abraham Lincoln. It could be seen even as a third parent in the Lincoln household, providing guidance, establishing boundaries, offering encouragement, and conveying wisdom into the paradoxes of human life.
         Beyond its moral authority, the holy scripture expressed precepts in a simple and direct language and surely imparted to Lincoln the eloquence and dignity of expression that lifts the sixteenth president above all other chief executives in our national history. Lincoln's use of the English language, the rolling biblical cadences and stirring rhetoric, has become a holy grail of presidential speech writers, yet spring from the commonest sources-Hebrew scripture and pioneer life.

Into the wilderness

n the fall of 1819, after five years at Knob Creek, the Lincoln family piled their earthly belongings into a wagon and trudged north into the Indiana territory. Frustration with property disputes and bitterness over slavery drove the Lincolns across the Ohio River to a land whose ordinances excluded slavery and where property titles were being issued directly from the territorial, soon to be state, government.
         Abraham Lincoln would soon turn eight years old. Behind him were formative years that would prove inordinately significant as he rose to the national stage. For to Kentucky Lincoln would return to find his wife, Mary Todd; his Illinois law partner, William Herndon; and his political mentor, Henry Clay. From these years dawned a deep-rooted hostility toward slavery, a condition which he knew degraded master and slave alike. And from this time stirred an ambition that would not be proscribed by the harsh limitations of the frontier farm.
         As the pioneer family hacked their way into the virgin forests and wintered in a primitive lean-to, young Abraham little imagined either the tragedies or arresting new perceptions of the unfolding national experiment that awaited him as he entered adolescence. From both would emerge a man who could bear the nation through the turmoil of civil war and reaffirm a national purpose-that a nation of self-governing citizens would not perish from the earth.