Though he appears to have had little enough--at least in later years--of the fierce independence of the forest,he resented a Quaker ancestry as an insult.He had no suspicion that in after years the zeal of genealogists would track his descent until they had linked him with a lost member of a distinguished Puritan family,a certain Mordecai Lincoln who removed to New Jersey,whose descendants became wanderers of the forest and sank speedily to the bottom of the social scale,retaining not the slightest memory of their New England origin.[2]Even in the worst of the forest villages,few couples started married life in less auspicious circumstances than did Nancy and Thomas.
Their home in one of the alleys of Elizabethtown was a shanty fourteen feet square.[3]Very soon after marriage,shiftless Thomas gave up carpentering and took to farming.Land could be had almost anywhere for almost nothing those days,and Thomas got a farm on credit near where now stands Hodgenville.Today,it is a famous place,for there,February 12,1809,Abraham Lincoln,second child,but first son of Nancy and Thomas,was born.[4]
During most of eight years,Abraham lived in Kentucky.His father,always adrift in heart,tried two farms before abandoning Kentucky altogether.A shadowy figure,this Thomas;the few memories of him suggest a superstitious nature in a superstitious community.He used to see visions in the forest.
Once,it is said,he came home,all excitement,to tell his wife he had seen a giant riding on a lion,tearing up trees by the roots;and thereupon,he took to his bed and kept it for several days.
His son Abraham told this story of the giant on the lion to a playmate of his,and the two boys gravely discussed the existence of ghosts.Abraham thought his father "didn't exactly believe in them,"and seems to have been in about the same state of mind himself.He was quite sure he was "not much"afraid of the dark.This was due chiefly to the simple wisdom of a good woman,a neighbor,who had taught him to think of the night as a great room that God had darkened even as his friend darkened a room in her house by hanging something over the window.[5]
The eight years of his childhood in Kentucky had few incidents.
A hard,patient,uncomplaining life both for old and young.
The men found their one deep joy in the hunt.In lesser degree,they enjoyed the revivals which gave to the women their one escape out of themselves.A strange,almost terrible recovery of the primitive,were those religious furies of the days before the great forest had disappeared.What other figures in our history are quite so remarkable as the itinerant frontier priests,the circuit-riders as they are now called,who lived as Elijah did,whose temper was very much the temper of Elijah,in whose exalted narrowness of devotion,all that was stern,dark,foreboding--the very brood of the forest's innermost heart--had found a voice.Their religion was ecstasy in homespun,a glory of violent singing,the release of a frantic emotion,formless but immeasurable,which at all other times,in the severity of the forest routine,gave no sign of its existence.
A visitor remembered long afterward a handsome young woman who he thought was Nancy Hanks,singing wildly,whirling about as may once have done the ecstatic women of the woods of Thrace,making her way among equally passionate worshipers,to the foot of the rude altar,and there casting herself into the arms of the man she was to marry.[6]So did thousands of forest women in those seasons when their communion with a mystic loneliness was confessed,when they gave tongue as simply as wild creatures to the nameless stirrings and promptings of that secret woodland where Pan was still the lord.And the day following the revival,they were again the silent,expressionless,much enduring,long-suffering forest wives,mothers of many children,toilers of the cabins,who cooked and swept and carried fuel by sunlight,and by firelight sewed and spun.
It can easily be understood how these women,as a rule,exerted little influence on their sons.Their imaginative side was too deeply hidden,the nature of their pleasures too secret,too mysterious.Male youth,following its obvious pleasure,went with the men to the hunt The women remained outsiders.The boy who chose to do likewise,was the incredible exception.In him had come to a head the deepest things in the forest life:the darkly feminine things,its silence,its mysticism,its secretiveness,its tragic patience.Abraham was such a boy.
