Evening Star Newspaper, February 9, 1930, Page 93

— — THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, FEBRUARY 09, When LINCOLN Was TWENTY-ONE This Is a Story of Young Abraham Lincoln, Who Just a Hundred Years Ago This Month Was Coming of Age in His Home on the Frontier of Indiana. EAR noon on the 12th of Feb- ruary, 1830, a long-legged young man was working around an unhitched wagon in the yard of a log cabin in Southern Indiana. Long-legged he surely was—he was six feet four, and as he moved about his tasks he took strides that made him ap- pear to be in rapid action, although as a matter of fact he moved with slowness and deliberation. A plump gray-haired woman came to the cabin door and called him. *“Abe! Come in now. Dinner's on.” Abe’s long, rangy back, stooped over a rooster that he was tying by the legs, straightened itself. “This critter thinks I'm going to eat him, I guess,” he said with a whimsical grin, as he placed the strugeling fowl into the wagon box. Then he went into the cabin. There was chicken for dinner that day, a rare treat. But it was Abe’s twenty- first birthday, and there had to be some kind of celebration. Besides, with the packing nearly done, one chicken more on the table was just one less to haul along on the trip on which the family was to embark the following morning. Hot flapjacks deftly turned by Abe Lincoln’s good-natured stepmother, who conked and served that birthday dinner; hot corn bread with pork drippings, fresh doughnuts, a fat berry pie and chicken— what a feast! “Well,” young Abe re- marked, looking over the table after his father had seid the blessing, “I'm sure glad I was born.” AND as he “set-t0” the fun began. Sarah Lincoln, busy between stove and ‘table, and all who sat at table were kept in Jlaughter between mouthfuls. ‘There was, you can surmise, quite a crowd ‘at that birthday party. But that was nothing unusual in the Thomas Lin- coln cabin, for easy-going Tom was, as records show, always feeding his rela- tives and keeping himself poor in the process. Abe's cousin, Dennis Hanks, with his wiie, who was Abe’s stepsister Elizabeth; Levi Hall, with his wife, Abe’s other step- sister, Matilda; his stepbrother, John D. Johnston—all of these very likely saé around the table that day. Perhaps others. And they all had fun. This was, in fact, more than a birth- day party. It was the last family gath- ering of the Lincoln clan before they left Pigeon Creek, Ind., for their migration to Illinois. Their hearts were light with hope of the new world they faced. THUS Abraham Lincoln celebrated his coming of age with more than a chicken dinner. He crossed the threshold of manhood by crossing a new threshold of life. Abz had laughed and joked at the birthday table. But late that night, when every one was asleep and the whole world around was stilled, his long strides took him on a solitary walk to a hillside nearby. There, in the dark, under the thawing February moon, he stood for a long time, thinking. At his feet were the graves of his mother, Nancy Hanks, and his only sister, Sarah, the playmate of his child- hood. He hadn’t said a word, but he had missed them at his birthday dinner. When Abe came down the hill, there was a purposeful set to his jaw, a light in his melancholy young eyes. The big world that he had dreamed of was before him. This was good-by not only to home and the graves of loved ones, but good-by to all the old life of boyhood. He was 21, and the world belonged to him. E meant to put that life of the past positively behind him. He meant to make something of himself besides a day laborer in the clearing. The long trip that was to begin early the next morning was to take him to more than just Illinois. He meant this to be so. He was a man grown. He meani to make something of himself. H~ knew a little already of the world out- side of the Indiana wilderness. Most of his life so far had bcen spent, when it wasn’t spent working at home, at odd jobs for neigh- bors—plowing, woodcutting, planting, hoeing. Even butchering. He had been the main earn- ing power of the family since he was able to work, and his father had rigidly exacted his legal right to his earnings right up to this twenty-first birthday of his. But Abe had made cne or two escapes. He hated butchering. He was too soft- heartod for that sort of rough and bloody work. Nancy Hanks had left her tender mark in him, He had grown to hate all the endless back- breaking toil of the wilderness that got him nowher>. So he had ventured once or twice into ot worlds, Four years before, at 17, he had got a job alonz with Dennis Hanks and Levi Hall cutting wood fuel for the Ohio River boats down at Poseys Landing.. He had earned his first white shirt -at that job, being paid in “white do- mestic” at 25 cents a yard. Three years before he had got another short- time job at Louisville, where the Portland Canal was building, He had earned silver dollars there, BY CHARLES PHILLIPS. (Author of “Lincoln Comes of Age”) Sketches by Joe King. l}lNALLY, aged 19, he had made a real ven- ture into the world. He had gone down to New Orleans with a cargo barge. Down the Ohio, down the Mississippi—he had seen the world then! That's what had settled things for him. Leaving the lonely graves on the hillside, he was glad in his heart to be getting away to- morrow, Perhaps no young fellow of 21 ever entered manhood with more handicaps and yet with better mental and bodily equipment than Abra- ham Lincoin that 12th of February, 1830. His enemies were poverly and ignorance. Yet he was far from being an ignorant young man, in spite of the fact that everything in his environment had been conducive to ignorance, He had had less than one year's schooling, all told. He had had no books, or, at best, so few books that when he came of age he could count on his fingers the volumes he had read. Yet he could figure rapidly and accurately, he could write a beautifully legible hand, he could compose prose and verse, he could read the books that were closed worlds to his illiterate elders. The year’s schooling was in the “blab” schools of his day. “Blab” schools, as he called them, were schools where everything was learned by heart, the pupils usually reciting the lessons in chorus, aloud, UT young Lincoln was not like his school- mates. Most of them only memorized. Abe learned. He was born with an inquisitive mind. He once told of how, as a very small child, he would lie awake in his cabin loft after he had been sent to bed and puzzle over the talk he had heard around the fireplace downstairs. “I could not sleep, although I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for an idea, until I had caught it; and when I had got it, I was not satisfled until I had repeated it over and over again.”™ These are his own words, He was his own “blab school.” “Whilst other boys were idling away their time,” one of his schoolmates once testified, “Lincoln was studying his books. He read and thoroughly read his books whilst we played.” The “blab school” habit of memorizing served him well. Sometimes he read by the flickering light of the fireplace, burning shavings to brighten his page. Buf, as his stepmother told, he didn't study “after night much; went to bed early, got up early and then read.” He walked miles to borrow a book, some- times in the frosty morning before breakfast. He worked for days once to pay for a borrowed book that had been wet by the snow blowing in through the cracks of his cabin loft. He kept that book. His love for reading frequently got him into trouble. People called him lazy because he liked to lie on his back with a book. But his mind was not lazy. His mind was not lying down. It was standing up. It was alive, alert, grappling feverishly with the thoughts it met with on the printed page, YOUNG Lincoln’s mind acted like a porous plaster on a page of type. He drew every- thing that was in it out of it. When Sarah Bush Johinston, Abe's stepmother, had married Abe’s father she brought four or five books with her into the Lincoln cabin. She couldn't read them herself, but she reverenced learning. She encouraged Abe to study and read. His father thought it was all wasteful nonsense. Abe had to struggle with his father for the privilege and pleasure of reading. Making researches recently for a de- tailed study of Lincoln's formative years, I found that in these years young Abe had had access to not more than a dozen books. “Robinson Crusoe,” ‘“Aesop’s Fables,” “Pilgrim’'s Progress,” “The Kene tucky Preceptor,” “Sinbad the Sailor,” Grimshaw's “History of the United States,” Scott’s “Lessons in Elocution,” Weem's “Life of Washington” and “Life of Marion™ and, of course, the Bible, were among these. He knew his “Pilgrim's Progress” so well that he used to tease his Grand- mother Hanks by interpolating whole passages from Bunyan while reading her Bible to her. The old lady got onto his trick after a while. “Abe, I've hearn the Bible read a many times in my life, but I never yet hearn them things in it!" IT was when he got hold of Scott's “Lessons in Elocution” that young Lincoln’s habit of memorizing served him best. In that book were many selections from classic literature—Shakespeare, the Greek orators, Caesar, Cicero, Chatham. He learned them all by heart. Marc Antony's oration, Hamlet’s so- liloquy, Henry V at Agincourt, Cicero’s. .. denunciation of Cataling, Pemosthenes’ . “On the Crown,” all these grand old ut- . terances were woven into .the texture of Lincoln’s youthful mind. b -uF By the time he was 15 he was him- self “orating,” making speeches from tree stumps and fence posts to delighted com- panions. - His father gave him a sound cufiing for that one day. The potatoes had to be hoed. No time for speechest Is it any wonder that, when the time came, Lincoln could himself give the world masterpieces of oratory, of thought and diction? That he took his own place among the immortals with the Gettys- burg speech? At 21, with the texture of his mind strengthened and tightened by the fine- drawn threads of such reading and mem- orizing and thinking as this, is it any wonder that he was ambitious? The struggle that he had to make agaiost the odds of meager opportunity and paternal disfavor to get this reading and enjoy it only increased the vigor of his mentality and the ardor of his am- bition. Yet, with all his passion for reading, young Lincoln at 21 was anything but a bookworm. He didn't have a paper mind. He had the healthy normal mind of a growing youth. He did not always study while others played. Because he, too, could play, and beat every one else at play, he was the most admired and most popular young fellow in the whole country. He was admired for his book learn- ing. But he was also admired because he was a first-rate fighter and a gor- geous wrestler, GOOD-NATURED, he was not quarrel- some. He never sought a fight in his life. The greatest of all the fights of his life, the Civil War, was not sought by him. But when the occasion came, how he could fight! When there was some one else to be defended, what a fighter he was! When William Grigsby was beat- ing up Abe’s stepbrother, John D. John- ston, one day in the Spring of 1829, Abe broke through the crowd, pulled Grigsby off, thrashed him soundly and threw him 10 feet into the road. 3 More than once he used those long, strong arms to toss an opponent, like & Sack of wheat, through the air. At wood cute ting he could sink an ax deeper into a tree tham any man in Indiana. But it was not often tha§ he fought. Wrestling was the favorite pastime of his day, and he was the champion of the whole country roundabout. Many the cheer he god§ for that. His long legs were a good match for his long arms. He could outrun any one in five coun- ties. He could outswim any one, for the same reason—Ilong, strong legs and long, strong arms. But he was awkward at dancing, and many were the laughs he raised at parties when he circled through a Virginia reel with those rangy shanks and that long back bending gracelessly, his big hands reaching for the gliggling girls. A'r husking bees and barn raisings he was the center of fun. He was always “help= ing around,” watching babies for busy mothersy, fooling with the youngsters, doing errands— bringing in wood from the woodpile, hauling water from the spring. The men and boyg relished him heartily. Ty His stdries and jokes kept the crowd in gal of laughter. Sometimes his practical jokes him into trouble. His sister Sarah, whom he deeply loved, had married Aaron Grigsby when Abe was 17. A . year later she had died in childbirth, and Abe, . Continued on Thirteehth Page