Lincoln's Stepmother

Sat Apr 5 18:16:09 PDT 2008

*"TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE" MINISTRIES *

*Jim & Marie Watt*

*PO Box **25116 – Federal Way** **WA** **98093-2116***

*Tel: 253.874.4256 – Email: jmbetter at gmail.com*

*Web: www.2rbetter.org  -- **April 5, 2008***

* *

*"HE LOVED ME TRULY" – **Lincoln**'s Step-mother.*

*By Bernadine Bailey & Dorothy Walworth*

*The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. (February 1945 issue)*

* *

THE BRIDE rode with her husband on the high front seat of the jolting wagon.
She was 31 years old, and, in 1819, that was middle-aged, for most pioneer
women died early. It was a December day, cold for Kentucky, and they were
headed north toward forest country. "I reckon it'll be fine weather," she
said, for she was the sort to make the best of things.

Yesterday Tom had arrived on horseback, all the way from his Indiana farm,
at her house in Elizabethtown. He had come straight to the point: "Miss
Sally, I have no wife and you no husband. I came a-purpose to marry you. I
knowed you from a girl and you knowed me from a boy. I've no time to lose.
If you're willin', let it be done straight off."

That morning they had been married at the Methodist parsonage. The preacher
wrote down that she, Sarah Bush Johnston, had been three years a widow and
Tom's wife had died last winter. The horses and wagon Tom had borrowed
waited outside. The wagon was piled high with her household goods, so that
there was scarcely room for her three children. Tom had two children of his
own; he hadn't told them he was bringing back a new mother. There was a
shadow in her blue-gray eyes when she thought about that. Maybe they'd feel
she didn't belong.

A raft ferried the wagon across the half-frozen Ohio River. The air
sharpened; the wheels sank to their hubs in snow. After five days they came
to a log cabin in a small clearing on Little Pigeon River. It had no
windows, and the door was only a deerskin-covered opening. A stick chimney
plastered with clay ran up the outside.

Tom hallooed and a little boy ran out of the door. He was thin as a
scarecrow, and wore a ragged shirt and tattered deerskin pants. But it was
the look in his eyes that went to Sarah's heart, although it was a look she
couldn't put a name to. She got down from the wagon, opened her arms and
folded him close.

"I reckon we'll be good friends," she said. "Howdy, Abe Lincoln."

She had never been in the wilderness before; she had known small-town
comfort. This was a one-room cabin, with no real floor, only packed dirt.
The bedstead was a makeshift of boards laid on sticks against the wall, with
a mattress of loose cornhusks. The bedcovers were skins and cast-off
clothing. Ten-year-old Abe and his 12-year-old sister had always slept on
piles of leaves up in the loft, to which they climbed by pegs fastened to
the wall. The furniture was some three-legged stools and a table axed smooth
on top, bark side under. Dennis Hanks, an 18-year-old cousin of Tom's first
wife, Nancy Hanks, was living with the family and had been trying to cook
with the help of a Dutch oven, one battered pot, and a couple of iron
spoons. Although she must have expected a place far better than this, all
Sarah said was, "Tom, fetch me a load of firewood. I aim to heat some
water."

This new stepmother with the rosy face and the bright curly hair wasted no
time. As soon as the water steamed, she brought out of her own belongings a
gourd full of homemade soap. Then, in front of the hot fire, she scrubbed
Abe and his sister and combed their matted hair with her own clean shell
comb. When the wagon was unpacked, little Abe, who had not said a word, ran
his bony fingers over such wonderful things as a walnut bureau, a clothes
chest, a loom and real chairs. And that night, when he went to bed in the
loft, he did not find the leaves; she had thrown them outdoors. He had a
feather mattress and a feather pillow, and enough blankets so he was warm
all night.

In a couple of weeks, a body wouldn't have known the place. Sarah had what
folks called "faculty"; she worked hard and she could make other people
work, too. Even Tom, who meant well but was likely to let things slide. She
never said he must do thus and so; she was too wise and too gentle. But
somehow Tom found himself making a real door for the cabin and cutting a
window, like she wanted. He put down a floor, chinked up the cracks between
the logs, white-washed the inside walls. Abe couldn't get over how sightly
it was. And she wove Abe shirts out of homespun cloth, coloring them with
dye she steeped out of roots and barks. She made him deerskin breeches that
really fitted, and moccasins, and a coonskin cap. She had a mirror and she
rubbed it bright and held it up so's he could see himself – it was the first
time he had ever seen himself – and he said, "Land o'Goshen, is that *me*?"

Sometimes, in the early mornings, when Sarah laid a new fire in the ashes,
she got to thinking it was queer how things come about. When Tom Lincoln had
courted her, 14 years ago, she had turned him down for Daniel Johnston. Tom
had been 12 years married to Nancy Hanks, who died so sudden from the "Milk
sick." And now, after all these years, Tom and she were together again, with
his children and her children to feed and do for.

The cabin was 18 feet square and there were eight people under its flimsy
roof. Sarah was taking what was left of two households, along with the
orphan boy, Dennis Hanks. Somehow she must make them into a family of folks
who loved each other; she wanted them to feel like they had always been
together. There was plenty of chance for trouble, what with the two sets of
young'uns who had never laid eyes on each other till now, and all the
stories Abe and his sister had heard folks tell about stepmothers. Those
first weeks, Sarah felt mighty anxious. Especially about Abe, though he did
what she said and never answered her back. Once she saw him looking at her
real serious when she was putting some johnnycake into the oven. "All my
life I'm goin' to like johnnycake best," he said suddenly, and then scooted
through the door. You couldn't figure Abe out. As Dennis said, "There's
somethin' peculiarsome about Abe."

Maybe, if it hadn't been for her, he wouldn't have lived to be a man. He had
always grown so fast and never had enough to eat. But now, when he had eaten
enough johnnycake and meat and potatoes that were cooked through and not
just burned on top, he stopped looking so pinched and putty-color. And he
wasn't so quiet any more. Now he had some flesh on his bones, he wasn't
solemn. Why, he was fuller of fun than anybody. He learned to tell yarns,
like his father, but he tried them out on Sarah first, and she laughed in
the right places. She stood up for him, too, when he'd laugh out loud, all
of a sudden, at things nobody else could understand, and Tom thought he was
being sassy. "Abe's got a right to his own jokes," Sarah said.

Sometimes Sarah thought, all to herself, that she loved Abe more than her
own children. But she didn't really. It was just that she knew, deep down in
her heart where she told nobody but God, that Abe was somebody special, who
didn't belong to her but was hers to keep for a while.

When Abe was little, Tom hadn't minded his walking nine miles to the "blab
school"
 where the scholars learned their letters by saying them over and over out
loud. But now Abe was older and stronger, Tom didn't see why he shouldn't
stay home and chop down trees and cradle wheat or hire out to the neighbors
for husking corn at 30 cents a day. Of course, he felt kind of proud when
the neighbors came to have Abe write their letters with the pen he had made
out of a buzzard's quill and the brier-root ink. But Abe was "reachin' too
fur" when he kept reading books instead of clearing swamps; Tom told Abe you
didn't need to know so almighty much to get along.

If Sarah hadn't taken Abe's part against his father, Abe wouldn't have got
as much schooling as he did, though goodness knows it wasn't much. He
learned, as the folks said, "by littles." But through the years she held out
against Tom, no matter if Tom said she was plumb crazy.

Abe would rather read than eat. He'd read in the morning, soon's it was
light enough to see; he'd read in the evening when the chores were done;
he'd read when he plowed, while the horse was resting at the end of the row.
He walked 17 miles to borrow books from Lawyer Pitcher at Rockport. *Aesop's
Fables. Robinson Crusoe. Pilgrim's Progress. Shakespeare. The Statutes of **
Indiana**.* When his borrowed Weeks' *Life of Washington* got rained on, he
worked three full days to pay for it. Once he gave a man 50 cents for an old
barrel and found Blackstone's *Commentaries* at the bottom of it, and you'd
think he'd found a gold mine. He began reading late at night by the fire,
and when Tom complained, Sarah said, "Leave the boy be." She always let him
read until he quit of his own accord, and if he fell asleep there on the
floor she would get a quilt and wrap it gently around him.

He did his ciphering on a board, and when the board got too black, he'd
plane it off and start again. If he read something he liked a lot, he'd
write it down. He was always writing, and was most always out of paper. He'd
put charcoal marks on a board, for a sign of what he wanted to write, and
when he got paper he'd copy it all down. And he'd read it out loud to Sarah
by the fire, after Tom and the rest had gone to bed. "Did I make it plain?"
he always asked her. It made her real proud when he asked her about his
writing, and she answered him as well as anybody could who didn't know how
to read or write.

They told each other things they told nobody else. He had dark spells when
nobody but her could make him hear. Spells when he thought it was no use to
hope and to plan. Abe needed a lot of encouraging.

In 1830, Tom decided to look for better farm land in Illinois, and the
family moved to Coles County on Goose Nest Prairie. There Abe helped his
father build the two-room cabin where Sarah and Tom were to spend the rest
of their lives. The place was hardly built when the day came that Sarah had
foreseen, the day when Abe would leave home. He was a man grown, 22 years
old, and he had a chance to clerk in Denton Offut's store over in New Salem.
There was nothing more she could do for Abe; for the last time she had
braved out Tom so's Abe could learn; for the last time she had kept the
cabin quiet so's Abe could do his reading.

At first he came back often, and, later on, after he got to be a lawyer, he
visited Goose Nest Prairie twice a year. Every time Sarah saw him, it seemed
like his mind was bigger. Other folks' minds got to a place and then
stopped, but Abe's kept on growing. He told her about his law cases, and, as
time went on, he told her about his going to the state legislature and his
marrying Mary Todd. After Tom died, in 1851, Abe saw to it that she didn't
want for anything.

When she heard Abe was going to Charleston for his fourth debate with
Stephen A. Douglas, she went there, too, without saying a word to Abe. It
would be enough – it had always been enough – just to watch him. She was one
of the crowd on the street as the parade went by. There was a big float
drawn by a yoke of oxen, carrying three men splitting rails, and a big sign,
"Honest Abe, the Rail Splitter, the Ox Driver, the Giant Killer." Was that
her Abe? And now here he came, riding in a shiny black carriage, and tipping
his tall black hat right and left. Was that her Abe? She tried to make
herself small, but he saw her and made the carriage stop. Then, right in
front of everybody, he got out of the carriage and came over and put his
arms around her and kissed her. Yes, that was her Abe.

She wasn't the crying kind, but she cried when he was elected President.
Alone, where nobody could see her. In the winter of 1861, before he went to
Washington, he crossed the state to see her, coming by train and carriage in
the mud and slush to say good-bye. He brought her a present, a length of
black alpaca for a dress; it was too beautiful to put scissors into; after
Abe went she'd just take it out and feel of it once in a while.

Abe looked tired, and he had a lot on his mind, but they had a fine talk.
Even when they were silent, they still said things to each other, and he
still set store by what she thought. When he kissed her good-bye, he said
he'd see her soon, but she knew somehow that she would not see him again.

Four years later, they came and told her he was dead. The newspapers wrote
the longest pieces about his real mother, and that was like it should be,
but some folks came and asked her what sort of boy Abe had been. And she
wanted to tell them, but it was hard to find the words. "Abe was a good
boy," she said. "He never gave me a cross word or look. His mind and mine,
what little I had, seemed to run together." And then she added, "He loved me
truly, I think."

Often, during the four years that remained to her, she would sit of an
evening and think of Abe. Being a mother, she did not think about him as
President, as the man about whom they sang, "We are coming, Father Abraham,
three hundred thousand strong." She remembered him as a little boy. She was
baking johnnycake for him; she was weaving him a shirt; she was covering him
with a blanket when he had fallen asleep over his books, trying to keep him
safe from the cold.

*Sarah Bush **Lincoln** was buried beside her husband in **Shiloh** **
Cemetery**. Her death, on **December 10, 1869**, passed unnoticed by the
nation. For many years she was not even mentioned by historians and
biographers. Not until 1924 were the graves of Thomas and Sarah Bush **
Lincoln** marked with a suitable stone. More recently, their Goose Nest
Prairie home site has been made into a state park, with a reproduction of
the two-room cabin which Abraham Lincoln helped to build. And only in the
last few years have Americans come to know that, when Abraham Lincoln said,
"All that I am I owe to my angel mother," he was speaking of his stepmother.
*

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*NOTE:**  *So how does the above touch you? It shows a side of Lincoln that
is most real, and that meant much to him – to the depths of his being.  I
trust it touched you as deeply as it touched me.

Jim Watt

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