August 19, 2025 • 19 mins
In Story of Abraham Lincoln, Mary A. Hamilton offers a unique British perspective on the life of the 16th President of the United States, presenting a heartfelt tribute to “Honest Abe.” She explores Lincoln’s ancestral roots, his humble beginnings in Kentucky, his formative years in Indiana, and his impactful adult life in Illinois, culminating in his presidency and the trials of the White House. The biography also delves into the American Civil War, providing valuable context on its causes and developments. While Hamilton’s narrative is engaging, it does contain some historical inaccuracies, such as misidentifying Jefferson Davis as the Southern Democratic candidate in the 1860 election instead of John C. Breckinridge. Nevertheless, The Story of Abraham Lincoln remains an intriguing and accessible account of Lincolns life, principles, and political legacy. Please note Chapter 7 includes a single use of an epithet for African-Americans from a British magazine quote, and Chapter 8 features an example of a stereotypical Southern black dialect that may be considered offensive. (Summary by John Lieder.)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter one of the Story of Abraham Lincoln. This is
a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Recording by John Leader. The Story of Abraham Lincoln by
Mary A. Hamilton, Chapter one, Boyhood. In this little book,
(00:26):
I am going to try to tell you something about
Abraham Lincoln. There is far more to say about him.
Thancoln be fitted into so small a space, And perhaps
when you are older, you will read about him for
yourselves and read his wonderful speeches. The greatest names in
American history are those of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
(00:47):
These two men are great in the true sense of
the word. They are great because they love their country
purely and passionately, better than themselves, and gave their lives
to its service. They thought nothing of their own honor
and glory to the last. They were simple and true.
Americans may well be proud of two such patriots, and
(01:10):
from them every one may be glad to learn what
real greatness means. Their work has made America what it is.
Less than forty years before Abraham Lincoln was born, America
belonged to England. In the time of Charles, the first
numbers of people who loved freedom and hated the wrongful
(01:30):
government of the king left their country and sailed to
the New World. Samuel Lincoln was one of these men.
For a long time, they were few in number. The
greatest part of the country was unknown forest, inhabited by
wild beasts or vast plains, which belonged to fierce tribes
of Red Indians. Life for the early settlers was very
(01:53):
hard and rough. They had to cut down trees to
build their houses and to kill wild animals to get
their food. Nevertheless, they soon grew to love the country
where they lived, where they married and brought up their children,
and their wild open life made freedom more precious to
them than anything else. They began to resent the action
(02:14):
of the English government, which wanted to tax them to
pay for wars, which were agreed upon in the Parliament
in London, where America had no voice to speak for her.
On July fourth, seventeen seventy six, in the reign of
George the Third, the chief citizens met together and declared
(02:34):
that America was a free, united country with a right
to govern itself. The fourth of July Independence Day is
the greatest day of all in America. For seven years
there was war. In this war, Abraham's great grandfather, John Lincoln,
served as a soldier. The Americans were led by George Washington.
(02:59):
England was defeated, and America, the United States of America,
was a free country. From this time on, America belonged
to the Americans, but a great many years had to
pass before they made of the country the America that
we know now. There are towns everywhere. You can get
(03:19):
from one end to the other of the great country,
far bigger than the whole of Europe by trains that
traveled day and night from north to south and east
to west. Then there were very few towns, most of
them along the coast, and no railways. All the west
was unknown. After the war was over, bands of explorer
(03:42):
set out to fight the Indians and to find new
homes for themselves, and Abraham Lincoln's grandfather, after whom he
was named, was one of the first of these explorers.
He sold his little piece of land in Virginia and
tramped through the forest till he found a place to
build a new home, Carrying his youngest son, Thomas on
one shoulder, and with his loaded rifle in his other hand,
(04:06):
ready to shoot any Indian who should attack him. In Kentucky,
some white men had already settled and built a small
fort near it. Lincoln cut down trees and built a
hut for himself and his wife and his three sons
to live in. When Abraham was a small boy, he
used to listen to the stories which his father Thomas
(04:28):
told of their life there, in the constant fear of
Indian attack. There was one story which Thomas told very often,
the story of his father's death. He was at work
cutting down the trees so as to clear an open
space near the house which he could plow and then
sew with seed. One morning he set out as usual
(04:49):
with his three boys. They were talking together as they walked,
and none of them saw that behind one of the
trees an Indian was hiding, his dark skin, strangely painted
with arrows and circles in white and scarlet, and on
his head a tuft of black feathers, standing upright and
waving as he moved. In his hand, he had a gun.
(05:12):
As soon as the father had passed, the Indian came
out from behind the tree, moving without making any sound.
He shot at Abraham from behind, and the bullet passed
right through his heart. The father fell down dead before
the eyes of his sons. They were terrified. The two
eldest ran off, one to the house and the other
(05:35):
to the fort to bring help. Thomas, the youngest, was
only six. He could not run so fast as his
brother's and he was too much frightened to try. He
stood still beside his father's body, not understanding what had happened.
His eldest brother, Mordechai, made all speed to the house.
As soon as he reached it, he took down a gun,
(05:57):
loaded it, and jumped up to the window so that
he might shoot at the Indian out of it. As
he looked out, he saw the Indian walk up to
the place where the dead body lay, look at it
for a moment, then pick up little Thomas, put him
under his arm, and turned to walk away with him.
Mordechai felt his heart stand still with fear, but he
(06:19):
was a brave boy, and his father had taught him
how to shoot at a long distance. He aimed straight
at the white star painted on the Indian's naked chest.
There was an awful moment, then the Indian fell back
dead upon the ground, dropping the child from his arms.
Thomas ran to the house as fast as his legs
(06:39):
would carry him, screaming with fear. For now several other
Indians began to appear from the wood. Mordechai fired again
and again at them from the house, and people came
from the fort, brought by his brother, and drove the
Indians away. Mordechai, when he grew up, spent his life
in waging war upon the Indians, killing them wherever he
(07:01):
met them. Thomas was neither so strong nor so clever
as his brother. He became a carpenter, but he was
never a very good carpenter. He was not very good
at anything but sitting by the fire telling stories. He
did that very well, indeed, and people generally were fond
of him, but he was not a successful person. He
(07:23):
had none of his son's wonderful power of work. He
always wanted to do something else, not the thing before him,
and living somewhere else, not settled down to work where
he was. He built himself a log cabin at Elizabethtown,
on the edge of the forest, and when he was
twenty eight he got married and took his wife to
(07:45):
live there. It is said that all great men have
had great mothers. Nancy Hanks had much more character than
her husband, and her son was much more like her.
She had a very sweet, unselfish nature, and everyone loved her.
She had had more education than her husband, and could
(08:06):
read and write. She taught him to sign his name.
After the first child came a daughter called Sarah. Thomas Lincoln,
who always thought he could make a fortune somewhere else,
moved farther west to a place called Noland's Creek. The
place was not at all attractive, but it was cheap.
(08:26):
The soil was hard, it was rocky and barren, and
nothing but weeds seemed to grow in it. Only a
very energetic man could have made much out of it,
and Thomas was not very energetic. They were very poor.
It was here, in an uncomfortable log cabin, that his
son Abraham was born on the twelfth of February eighteen
(08:48):
o nine, and here he lived until he was seven.
The hut had only one room. It was very roughly built.
Stout logs had been laid on top of one another,
then bound together with twigs, and the holes filled up
with clay and grass and handfuls of dead leaves. There
was no ceiling, only the log roof. The two children
(09:11):
climbed up a shaky ladder to aloft in the roof,
where they slept on a bed of dry leaves covered
with an old deer skin, lying close together to keep
themselves warm. As they lay there, they could count the
stars that looked in through the spaces between the logs
that made the roof. The windows had no glass. The
door was only an opening over which a deer skin
(09:34):
was hung as a curtain. In winter, it was terrible.
The wind blew in icy cold. There was nothing to
keep it out, except when Sometimes the entrance was blocked
with snow, and no one could go out or come
in until a pathway had been dug. In the autumn,
the house used to be full of dead leaves that
(09:55):
whirled about in the middle of the floor. The only
comfort in the high was the huge fire. It filled
up nearly the whole of one side, and in front
of it was a great bare skin rug. On this
the two children spent the days in winter playing together
or kneeling against their mother's knee while she told them
(10:16):
stories fairy tales or true stories about Indians. And old
American history, or parables from the Bible. In the winter,
you could not keep warm anywhere else, and in the
autumn there were damp fogs that made it unwholesome outside,
or heavy rains that came through the roof. The only
thing to do was to get as near the fire
(10:38):
as possible. Above it were arranged all the household pots
and pans. The meat a haunch of venison or a
couple of rabbits, hung from the roof. Cooking was very simple,
for there was no choice of food. It consisted of
game shot in the forest or fish caught in the streams,
(10:58):
roots and berries from the wood. Bread was made of
flour ground from Indian corn, which was the only thing
that grew in the rough fields. Until he was a
grown man, Abraham had never tasted any other sort of bread.
The life was uncomfortable, often dangerous, for an Indian attack
was possible at any time, and always the same. No
(11:22):
visitors came to see the Lincolns. There were few friends
for them to go and see, only the scattered settlers
living in huts like their own. Abraham soon learned to
make himself useful. He would cut and bring home wood
for the fire, help his mother in the house or
his father out of doors. In summer, he spent long
(11:44):
hours roaming about the woods. He soon learned to use
a rifle, for it was not safe to go far unarmed,
and he became a good shot. He remembered very little
about this time when he grew older. One day he
had been out fishing, and at the end of it
he caught a single fish. With this, he was walking
home to supper when he met a soldier. His mother
(12:07):
had taught him he must always be good to soldiers
who fought for their country, and therefore the little boy
gave the soldier his fish. His father always thought that
he should be better off somewhere else. He heard that
across the Ohio River there was rich land which anyone
could have who chose to go and take it. So,
(12:28):
when Abraham was seven and his sister nine, they moved.
The father built a raft and put his family into
all the goods he had after selling his house on
to it, and they sailed down the river, getting food
on the way by shooting and fishing, till they came
to a place they liked called Little Pigeon Creek. It
(12:49):
was simply an opening in the forest. Here they disembarked,
and for a year they lived in a roughly built
shelter without a floor or doors of windows, while the
father and his son built a better cabin and cut
down trees and shrubs to clear a place for planting corn.
When it was finished, Abraham's aunt and uncle, Mister and
(13:10):
Missus Sparrow, and two cousins, John and Dennis Hanks, came
to live with them. The three boys were great friends,
and they worked together on the farm until they all
grew up. Abe, as they called him, was a very
tall boy for his age. His long legs were always
in his way, and they seemed to get longer every day.
(13:32):
He never wore stockings until he was a young man,
but moccasins, such as the Indians, wear shoes of leather
with a fringe round the top, and long deer skin leggings,
a deerskin shirt which his mother had made him, and
a cap which was seldom on his head, it being
covered enough by his thick black hair. His hair was
(13:54):
never tidy, always in his eyes at having to be
pushed back. Abe was clever with his axe and a
good workman. His mother had taught him to spell, but
there was little chance of learning. In Pigeon's Creek. For
a year, the little family lived there very happily. That
a mysterious sickness broke out in the place. No one
(14:17):
knew why or how to cure it. They called it
the milk sickness. Many people fell ill of it, and
hardly anyone recovered. Mister and Missus Sparrow both died of
it in the autumn, and a few days afterwards, Missus
Lincoln sickened and died too. To her children, this was
(14:37):
a terrible grief. Abraham, though a boy when she died,
never forgot his mother. She had taught him his first lessons,
and from her came that sweetness of nature, that power
of thinking first of others, that made everyone who knew
him love him. It was at the time of his
mother's death that the sadness which never left him came
(15:00):
upon him. In later life, people who really knew him
said that, in spite of his fun and power of
making other people laugh, he was the saddest man they
ever knew. A dreary winter followed. At the end of it,
Thomas Lincoln brought home a new wife to his little cabin,
(15:20):
Sallie Bush was a widow with three children. She was
a good and kind woman, and Abe really loved her
and she him. She said afterwards that he had never
all his life given her a cross word or look,
or refused to do anything. She asked him that he
was the best boy she had ever seen. He was
indeed the sunshine of the house, but in many ways
(15:44):
he was very lonely. He was hungry for knowledge, for
books and teaching. All the schooling he ever had was
a month now and then with a traveling teacher who
passed through Pigeon's Creek on his way to somewhere else.
But none of these his teachers knew much beyond the
three rs. One who knew Latin was regarded as a
(16:05):
sort of magician. In all, he had not so much
as one year at school, taught by five different teachers.
But Abe was not the sort of boy to learn
nothing because there was nobody to teach him. He had
a few books that had been his mother's, and he
read them again and again until he knew everything that
was in them. John Hanks, his cousin, says of him.
(16:28):
When Abe and I returned to the house from work,
he would go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of
corn bread, take down a book, sit down, cock his
legs as high as his head, and read the Bible
and Pilgrim's Progress, Aesop's Fables, and Robertson Crusoe. These were
his books. He knew them by heart. In the intervals
(16:51):
of work, he used to tell them to his companions.
He thought over every word until he understood it. In
this way, he learned more from a few books than
many people do from whole libraries. Because he learned to think.
He questioned everything and asked himself if he thought so too,
and why he thought so. One day he borrowed the
(17:14):
Life of George Washington from a farmer who lived near.
As he lay in the loft, he read it with eagerness.
In the middle he was called away to work, and
in the meantime the rain came in and ruined the book.
Abraham went in despair to the farmer and told him
what had happened. Never mind, said the farmer. You do
(17:37):
three days work for me for nothing, and you may
keep the book. I don't want it. To his joy,
he thus became possessed of a new treasure to be
studied again. And again. This book, more than any other,
made him a patriot. He longed to get out into
the great, big world where he could serve his country.
In the evenings, he used to sit silent for hours thinking.
(18:00):
Sometimes he did sums of all sorts on the wooden shovel,
making figures on it with a piece of charcoal. When
it was quite full, he shaved off the top with
his knife so as to have a clean slate in
the morning. All his companions liked abe, but admired him.
He worked very hard, but farm work did not interest him.
(18:21):
He liked dinner and play better. And sometimes he used
to stop work and climb on to a gate or
a dead tree stump and make absurd speeches or comic
sermons to his companions, or recite passages from his favorite books.
They thought him a quaint fellow with some strange ideas.
(18:41):
One of these strange ideas was his tenderness to animals.
He never cared much for sport, because it seemed to
him cruel. He showed his tenderness to animals when quite
a small boy. One day he was playing in the
woods with a boy called John Davis. In their game,
they ran a hedgehog ug into a crevice between two rocks,
(19:02):
and it got caught fast. For two hours, they tried
every sort of plan to get it out, but without
any success. They were not able to pull it out,
and it could not move itself. Abraham could not bear
to leave the poor thing to die in pain. He
ran off to the blacksmith shop, quite a quarter of
(19:22):
a mile away and borrowed a pull with an iron
hook fastened to the end. With this they were able
to set the animal free. This care for animals was
only one sign of Abraham's tenderness of heart. All little
children and old people trusted him in his word. He
was very soon known as honest Abe and of Chapter
(19:44):
one recording by John Leader, Bloomington, Illinois,
Chapter one of the Story of Abraham Lincoln. This is
a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Recording by John Leader. The Story of Abraham Lincoln by
Mary A. Hamilton, Chapter one, Boyhood. In this little book,
(00:26):
I am going to try to tell you something about
Abraham Lincoln. There is far more to say about him.
Thancoln be fitted into so small a space, And perhaps
when you are older, you will read about him for
yourselves and read his wonderful speeches. The greatest names in
American history are those of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
(00:47):
These two men are great in the true sense of
the word. They are great because they love their country
purely and passionately, better than themselves, and gave their lives
to its service. They thought nothing of their own honor
and glory to the last. They were simple and true.
Americans may well be proud of two such patriots, and
(01:10):
from them every one may be glad to learn what
real greatness means. Their work has made America what it is.
Less than forty years before Abraham Lincoln was born, America
belonged to England. In the time of Charles, the first
numbers of people who loved freedom and hated the wrongful
(01:30):
government of the king left their country and sailed to
the New World. Samuel Lincoln was one of these men.
For a long time, they were few in number. The
greatest part of the country was unknown forest, inhabited by
wild beasts or vast plains, which belonged to fierce tribes
of Red Indians. Life for the early settlers was very
(01:53):
hard and rough. They had to cut down trees to
build their houses and to kill wild animals to get
their food. Nevertheless, they soon grew to love the country
where they lived, where they married and brought up their children,
and their wild open life made freedom more precious to
them than anything else. They began to resent the action
(02:14):
of the English government, which wanted to tax them to
pay for wars, which were agreed upon in the Parliament
in London, where America had no voice to speak for her.
On July fourth, seventeen seventy six, in the reign of
George the Third, the chief citizens met together and declared
(02:34):
that America was a free, united country with a right
to govern itself. The fourth of July Independence Day is
the greatest day of all in America. For seven years
there was war. In this war, Abraham's great grandfather, John Lincoln,
served as a soldier. The Americans were led by George Washington.
(02:59):
England was defeated, and America, the United States of America,
was a free country. From this time on, America belonged
to the Americans, but a great many years had to
pass before they made of the country the America that
we know now. There are towns everywhere. You can get
(03:19):
from one end to the other of the great country,
far bigger than the whole of Europe by trains that
traveled day and night from north to south and east
to west. Then there were very few towns, most of
them along the coast, and no railways. All the west
was unknown. After the war was over, bands of explorer
(03:42):
set out to fight the Indians and to find new
homes for themselves, and Abraham Lincoln's grandfather, after whom he
was named, was one of the first of these explorers.
He sold his little piece of land in Virginia and
tramped through the forest till he found a place to
build a new home, Carrying his youngest son, Thomas on
one shoulder, and with his loaded rifle in his other hand,
(04:06):
ready to shoot any Indian who should attack him. In Kentucky,
some white men had already settled and built a small
fort near it. Lincoln cut down trees and built a
hut for himself and his wife and his three sons
to live in. When Abraham was a small boy, he
used to listen to the stories which his father Thomas
(04:28):
told of their life there, in the constant fear of
Indian attack. There was one story which Thomas told very often,
the story of his father's death. He was at work
cutting down the trees so as to clear an open
space near the house which he could plow and then
sew with seed. One morning he set out as usual
(04:49):
with his three boys. They were talking together as they walked,
and none of them saw that behind one of the
trees an Indian was hiding, his dark skin, strangely painted
with arrows and circles in white and scarlet, and on
his head a tuft of black feathers, standing upright and
waving as he moved. In his hand, he had a gun.
(05:12):
As soon as the father had passed, the Indian came
out from behind the tree, moving without making any sound.
He shot at Abraham from behind, and the bullet passed
right through his heart. The father fell down dead before
the eyes of his sons. They were terrified. The two
eldest ran off, one to the house and the other
(05:35):
to the fort to bring help. Thomas, the youngest, was
only six. He could not run so fast as his
brother's and he was too much frightened to try. He
stood still beside his father's body, not understanding what had happened.
His eldest brother, Mordechai, made all speed to the house.
As soon as he reached it, he took down a gun,
(05:57):
loaded it, and jumped up to the window so that
he might shoot at the Indian out of it. As
he looked out, he saw the Indian walk up to
the place where the dead body lay, look at it
for a moment, then pick up little Thomas, put him
under his arm, and turned to walk away with him.
Mordechai felt his heart stand still with fear, but he
(06:19):
was a brave boy, and his father had taught him
how to shoot at a long distance. He aimed straight
at the white star painted on the Indian's naked chest.
There was an awful moment, then the Indian fell back
dead upon the ground, dropping the child from his arms.
Thomas ran to the house as fast as his legs
(06:39):
would carry him, screaming with fear. For now several other
Indians began to appear from the wood. Mordechai fired again
and again at them from the house, and people came
from the fort, brought by his brother, and drove the
Indians away. Mordechai, when he grew up, spent his life
in waging war upon the Indians, killing them wherever he
(07:01):
met them. Thomas was neither so strong nor so clever
as his brother. He became a carpenter, but he was
never a very good carpenter. He was not very good
at anything but sitting by the fire telling stories. He
did that very well, indeed, and people generally were fond
of him, but he was not a successful person. He
(07:23):
had none of his son's wonderful power of work. He
always wanted to do something else, not the thing before him,
and living somewhere else, not settled down to work where
he was. He built himself a log cabin at Elizabethtown,
on the edge of the forest, and when he was
twenty eight he got married and took his wife to
(07:45):
live there. It is said that all great men have
had great mothers. Nancy Hanks had much more character than
her husband, and her son was much more like her.
She had a very sweet, unselfish nature, and everyone loved her.
She had had more education than her husband, and could
(08:06):
read and write. She taught him to sign his name.
After the first child came a daughter called Sarah. Thomas Lincoln,
who always thought he could make a fortune somewhere else,
moved farther west to a place called Noland's Creek. The
place was not at all attractive, but it was cheap.
(08:26):
The soil was hard, it was rocky and barren, and
nothing but weeds seemed to grow in it. Only a
very energetic man could have made much out of it,
and Thomas was not very energetic. They were very poor.
It was here, in an uncomfortable log cabin, that his
son Abraham was born on the twelfth of February eighteen
(08:48):
o nine, and here he lived until he was seven.
The hut had only one room. It was very roughly built.
Stout logs had been laid on top of one another,
then bound together with twigs, and the holes filled up
with clay and grass and handfuls of dead leaves. There
was no ceiling, only the log roof. The two children
(09:11):
climbed up a shaky ladder to aloft in the roof,
where they slept on a bed of dry leaves covered
with an old deer skin, lying close together to keep
themselves warm. As they lay there, they could count the
stars that looked in through the spaces between the logs
that made the roof. The windows had no glass. The
door was only an opening over which a deer skin
(09:34):
was hung as a curtain. In winter, it was terrible.
The wind blew in icy cold. There was nothing to
keep it out, except when Sometimes the entrance was blocked
with snow, and no one could go out or come
in until a pathway had been dug. In the autumn,
the house used to be full of dead leaves that
(09:55):
whirled about in the middle of the floor. The only
comfort in the high was the huge fire. It filled
up nearly the whole of one side, and in front
of it was a great bare skin rug. On this
the two children spent the days in winter playing together
or kneeling against their mother's knee while she told them
(10:16):
stories fairy tales or true stories about Indians. And old
American history, or parables from the Bible. In the winter,
you could not keep warm anywhere else, and in the
autumn there were damp fogs that made it unwholesome outside,
or heavy rains that came through the roof. The only
thing to do was to get as near the fire
(10:38):
as possible. Above it were arranged all the household pots
and pans. The meat a haunch of venison or a
couple of rabbits, hung from the roof. Cooking was very simple,
for there was no choice of food. It consisted of
game shot in the forest or fish caught in the streams,
(10:58):
roots and berries from the wood. Bread was made of
flour ground from Indian corn, which was the only thing
that grew in the rough fields. Until he was a
grown man, Abraham had never tasted any other sort of bread.
The life was uncomfortable, often dangerous, for an Indian attack
was possible at any time, and always the same. No
(11:22):
visitors came to see the Lincolns. There were few friends
for them to go and see, only the scattered settlers
living in huts like their own. Abraham soon learned to
make himself useful. He would cut and bring home wood
for the fire, help his mother in the house or
his father out of doors. In summer, he spent long
(11:44):
hours roaming about the woods. He soon learned to use
a rifle, for it was not safe to go far unarmed,
and he became a good shot. He remembered very little
about this time when he grew older. One day he
had been out fishing, and at the end of it
he caught a single fish. With this, he was walking
home to supper when he met a soldier. His mother
(12:07):
had taught him he must always be good to soldiers
who fought for their country, and therefore the little boy
gave the soldier his fish. His father always thought that
he should be better off somewhere else. He heard that
across the Ohio River there was rich land which anyone
could have who chose to go and take it. So,
(12:28):
when Abraham was seven and his sister nine, they moved.
The father built a raft and put his family into
all the goods he had after selling his house on
to it, and they sailed down the river, getting food
on the way by shooting and fishing, till they came
to a place they liked called Little Pigeon Creek. It
(12:49):
was simply an opening in the forest. Here they disembarked,
and for a year they lived in a roughly built
shelter without a floor or doors of windows, while the
father and his son built a better cabin and cut
down trees and shrubs to clear a place for planting corn.
When it was finished, Abraham's aunt and uncle, Mister and
(13:10):
Missus Sparrow, and two cousins, John and Dennis Hanks, came
to live with them. The three boys were great friends,
and they worked together on the farm until they all
grew up. Abe, as they called him, was a very
tall boy for his age. His long legs were always
in his way, and they seemed to get longer every day.
(13:32):
He never wore stockings until he was a young man,
but moccasins, such as the Indians, wear shoes of leather
with a fringe round the top, and long deer skin leggings,
a deerskin shirt which his mother had made him, and
a cap which was seldom on his head, it being
covered enough by his thick black hair. His hair was
(13:54):
never tidy, always in his eyes at having to be
pushed back. Abe was clever with his axe and a
good workman. His mother had taught him to spell, but
there was little chance of learning. In Pigeon's Creek. For
a year, the little family lived there very happily. That
a mysterious sickness broke out in the place. No one
(14:17):
knew why or how to cure it. They called it
the milk sickness. Many people fell ill of it, and
hardly anyone recovered. Mister and Missus Sparrow both died of
it in the autumn, and a few days afterwards, Missus
Lincoln sickened and died too. To her children, this was
(14:37):
a terrible grief. Abraham, though a boy when she died,
never forgot his mother. She had taught him his first lessons,
and from her came that sweetness of nature, that power
of thinking first of others, that made everyone who knew
him love him. It was at the time of his
mother's death that the sadness which never left him came
(15:00):
upon him. In later life, people who really knew him
said that, in spite of his fun and power of
making other people laugh, he was the saddest man they
ever knew. A dreary winter followed. At the end of it,
Thomas Lincoln brought home a new wife to his little cabin,
(15:20):
Sallie Bush was a widow with three children. She was
a good and kind woman, and Abe really loved her
and she him. She said afterwards that he had never
all his life given her a cross word or look,
or refused to do anything. She asked him that he
was the best boy she had ever seen. He was
indeed the sunshine of the house, but in many ways
(15:44):
he was very lonely. He was hungry for knowledge, for
books and teaching. All the schooling he ever had was
a month now and then with a traveling teacher who
passed through Pigeon's Creek on his way to somewhere else.
But none of these his teachers knew much beyond the
three rs. One who knew Latin was regarded as a
(16:05):
sort of magician. In all, he had not so much
as one year at school, taught by five different teachers.
But Abe was not the sort of boy to learn
nothing because there was nobody to teach him. He had
a few books that had been his mother's, and he
read them again and again until he knew everything that
was in them. John Hanks, his cousin, says of him.
(16:28):
When Abe and I returned to the house from work,
he would go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of
corn bread, take down a book, sit down, cock his
legs as high as his head, and read the Bible
and Pilgrim's Progress, Aesop's Fables, and Robertson Crusoe. These were
his books. He knew them by heart. In the intervals
(16:51):
of work, he used to tell them to his companions.
He thought over every word until he understood it. In
this way, he learned more from a few books than
many people do from whole libraries. Because he learned to think.
He questioned everything and asked himself if he thought so too,
and why he thought so. One day he borrowed the
(17:14):
Life of George Washington from a farmer who lived near.
As he lay in the loft, he read it with eagerness.
In the middle he was called away to work, and
in the meantime the rain came in and ruined the book.
Abraham went in despair to the farmer and told him
what had happened. Never mind, said the farmer. You do
(17:37):
three days work for me for nothing, and you may
keep the book. I don't want it. To his joy,
he thus became possessed of a new treasure to be
studied again. And again. This book, more than any other,
made him a patriot. He longed to get out into
the great, big world where he could serve his country.
In the evenings, he used to sit silent for hours thinking.
(18:00):
Sometimes he did sums of all sorts on the wooden shovel,
making figures on it with a piece of charcoal. When
it was quite full, he shaved off the top with
his knife so as to have a clean slate in
the morning. All his companions liked abe, but admired him.
He worked very hard, but farm work did not interest him.
(18:21):
He liked dinner and play better. And sometimes he used
to stop work and climb on to a gate or
a dead tree stump and make absurd speeches or comic
sermons to his companions, or recite passages from his favorite books.
They thought him a quaint fellow with some strange ideas.
(18:41):
One of these strange ideas was his tenderness to animals.
He never cared much for sport, because it seemed to
him cruel. He showed his tenderness to animals when quite
a small boy. One day he was playing in the
woods with a boy called John Davis. In their game,
they ran a hedgehog ug into a crevice between two rocks,
(19:02):
and it got caught fast. For two hours, they tried
every sort of plan to get it out, but without
any success. They were not able to pull it out,
and it could not move itself. Abraham could not bear
to leave the poor thing to die in pain. He
ran off to the blacksmith shop, quite a quarter of
(19:22):
a mile away and borrowed a pull with an iron
hook fastened to the end. With this they were able
to set the animal free. This care for animals was
only one sign of Abraham's tenderness of heart. All little
children and old people trusted him in his word. He
was very soon known as honest Abe and of Chapter
(19:44):
one recording by John Leader, Bloomington, Illinois,
Popular Podcasts
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com