The Republican

February 13, 1903

 

LINCOLN’S LIFE.

Characteristics of the Great Emancipator as Told In Paragraphs.

 

            The familiar cabin of Lincoln’s childhood could more properly be termed a camp, for instead of being made of logs, it was built of poles, was about fourteen feet square and had no floor.

           

In youth he was an ardent advocate of temperance, and delivered discourses on cruelty to animals and the horrors of war.  He liked stump-speaking much more than the ax he had to wield so often.

 

            Among the first situations he obtained after coming of age and striking out for himself was as a flat-boat hand to New Orleans.  The slave auction he witnessed there bore the ripe fruit of after years.  It is said that then and there, in May, 1831, the iron against slavery entered his soul.

                       

            Tall, lanky, sallow, dark and slightly stooping he was in appearance, being a muscular 6 feet 4 at 17.  His dress in those days was all tanned deer hide, coat, trousers, and moccasins.  The luxury of wearing garments of fur and wool, dyed with the juice of the butternut or white walnut, was just being adopted in his neighborhood, and Lincoln was not a person to take the lead in elegance.

 

            Lincoln had very little actual school education, his first goings, at the age of 10, were in Indiana, to a woman named Hazel Dorsey.  He was often taken from school to work or hire out.  At 14 he went again to Andrew Crawford’s school, and at 17 he saw the last of his school days under a man named Swaney.  All the education he obtained afterward was through his own exertions.  “Education defective” was his own definition given to the compiler of the Dictionary of Congress, although it was not a pleasant thought to him.

           

            Being raised in a community superstitious in the extreme, Lincoln believed in supernatural portents all his life.  Friday he considered fatal to every enterprise, and, as it turned out, well he might.  He had many dreams which he considered forecasts of coming events, once sending a telegram to his wife to take away “Tad’s” pistol, as he had had a bad dream about him.  A good dream presaged the victories of Antietam, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg and Vicksburg.  He related an ill one just before his assassination.