In The Boyhood of Lincoln: A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black HawkButterworth, Hezekiah
General
In The Boyhood of Lincoln: A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk
Butterworth, Hezekiah
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Fiction
"No, Waubeno. There was an old grandmother there, a sick woman, and a
little coffin. This is a sad world sometimes. I pity everybody, and I
would that all men were brothers. Go, look into the wagon, Waubeno."
The Indian went, and soon returned.
"Do you pity them, Waubeno?"
"Yes; but--"
"What, Waubeno?"
"I pity the Indian mother too. Your people drove her from her
corn-fields at Rock Island, and she left the graves of her children
behind her."
There was a shadow of sadness in the hearts of the Lincoln family as
they turned away forever from the grave of Nancy Lincoln under the
trees. The poor woman who rested there in the spot soon to be
obliterated, little thought on her dying bed that the little boy she was
leaving to poverty and adventure would be one day ranked with great men
of the ages--with Servius Tullius, Pericles, Cincinnatus, Cromwell,
Hampden, Washington, and Bolivar; that he would sit in the seat of a
long line of illustrious Presidents, call a million men to arms, or that
his rude family features would find a place among the grand statues of
every liberated country on earth.
Poor Nancy Hanks! Every one who knew her had felt the warmth of her
kindness and marked her sadness. She was an intellectual woman, was
deeply religious, and is believed to have been a very emotional
character in the old Methodist camp-meetings. Her family, the Hankses,
were among the best singers and loudest shouters at the camp-meetings,
and she was in sympathy with them.
Her heart lived on in Abraham. When she fell sick of the epidemic fever,
Abraham, then a boy of ten years of age, waited upon her and nursed
her. There was no doctor within twenty-five miles. She was so slender,
and had been so ill-sustained that the fever-fires did their work in a
week. Finding her end near, she called Abraham and his little sister to
her, and said:
"Be good to one another."
Her face looked into Abraham's for the last time.
"Live," she said, "as I have taught you. Love your kindred, and worship
God."
She faded away, and her husband made her coffin with a whip-saw out of
green wood, and on a changing October day they laid her away under the
trees. They were leaving her grave now, the humblest of all places then,
but a shrine to-day, for her son's character has glorified it.
He must have always remembered the hymns that she used to sing. Some of
them were curious compositions. In the better class of them were; "Am I
a soldier of the cross," "Alas! and did my Saviour bleed," and "How
tedious and tasteless the hour." The camp-meeting melodies were simple,
mere movements, like the negro songs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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