Читать книгу Why We Love Lincoln онлайн

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The forest swarmed with game and the carpenter’s rifle kept his family supplied with venison and deer hides for clothing. They relied on the rifle and the corn patch for life. Little Lincoln “climbed at night to his bed of leaves in the loft by a ladder of wooden pins driven into the logs.”

Not only were the means of life hard to get, but it was a malarial country, and in 1818 the small group of pioneers who came to dwell at Pigeon Creek near the Lincolns were attacked by a pestilence known as the milk-sickness.

In October the mother of Abraham Lincoln died. Her husband sawed a coffin out of the forest trees and buried her in a little clearing. Several months later a wandering frontier clergyman preached a sermon over her lonely, snow-covered grave.

No wonder the countenance of the great Emancipator moved all who beheld it by its deep melancholy. He knew what sorrow was forty-five years before he paced his office in the White House all night, with white face and bowed head, sorrowing over the bloody defeat of Chancellorsville, wondering whether he was to be the last President of the United States, and praying for the victory that came at Gettysburg.