Daughters of Genius/Chapter 1
SALLY BUSH.
I.
SALLY BUSH—ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S GOOD STEP-MOTHER.
SIXTY-FIVE years ago, on a grassy hillock in the magnificent primeval forest of Southern Indiana, a few miles from the Ohio River, stood the small, unhewn, half-finished and most forlorn log-cabin of Thomas Lincoln. The father of the president was an idle, shiftless, worthless carpenter, who had taken up land in the wilderness, and lived by half cultivating a few acres and shooting the wild turkeys, the deer, and other game with which the region teemed. The occupants of the cabin were himself, his wife, whose maiden name was Nancy Hanks, and two children, Nancy, eleven years of age, and Abraham, the future president, nine.
I suppose there never was a more beautiful country than this part of Indiana, as it was before the settlers disfigured it. Imagine an undulating country covered with trees of the largest size, oaks, beeches, maples, walnuts, without that intertangled mass of undergrowth which we find in the primeval forests of the Eastern States.
This land had probably been, within a few centuries, a prairie. The forest had gained upon the grass; but, here and there, there was a small portion of the original prairie left, which, besides furnishing good pasture, gave to the region the aspect of an ancient, heavily-wooded park, the result of labor, wealth, and taste expended for ages. Upon some of these oases of emerald, the deer found salt springs to which they resorted in great numbers; on the wider expanses, the buffaloes had recently fed; on others, the arriving pioneer had fixed his camp and built his cabin.
The knoll on which Thomas Lincoln had placed his house was free from trees, and sloped gently away on every side. The spot had every charm and every advantage except one: there was no good water within a mile, and it fell to the lot of these children to bring from that distance the water required for drinking.
Carpenter as he was, Thomas Lincoln had not taken the trouble either to finish or to furnish his house. It had no floor, no door, no windows. There were three or four three-legged stools in the house, and no other seats. The table was a broad slab supported by four legs, with the flat side upward. There was a bedstead made of poles stuck in the cracks of the logs in one corner of the cabin, the other ends being supported by forked sticks sunk in the earthen floor. On these poles some boards were laid, upon which was thrown a covering of leaves, and these in turn were covered with skins and old clothes. For cooking utensils the family possessed a Dutch oven and a skillet. There was a loft in the upper part of the cabin; but as this shiftless pioneer had not made either stairs or ladder, little Abe was obliged to climb to his perch at night by pegs driven into the logs.
The children were no better cared for than the house. They were ill-clad, ill-fed, untaught, and harshly treated. The father, naturally disposed to indolence, found it so easy to subsist in that rich country by his rifle, with which he was extremely expert, and from his patch of corn and potatoes, which his wife and children cultivated, that he gave way to his natural disposition, and passed his time, when he was not hunting, in telling stories to his neighbors. He was the great story-teller of the county, a character in much request on the frontier in the early days.
Some readers have doubtless visited the richly wooded parks of Germany, France, or England, where the game is carefully preserved, where droves of clean, glistening black pigs and great herds of deer are seen, and where, as you walk along, there is heard at every step the rustle of a startled hare, and where broods of partridges are following their mother in search of food, as tame as chickens. Now, it was as easy for the settler to subsist his family in this Indiana forest, as it would be for one of the huntsmen to live in a great park, if he could shoot as much game as he liked. Thomas Lincoln, therefore, being such a man as he was, destitute of ambition either for himself or his children, took life very easily, and any one acquainted with the family would have foretold for Abraham no higher destiny than that of a squatter on the frontier, or a flat-boat hand on the rivers.
A terrible and mysterious epidemic swept over that country, called the milk disease, one of the numerous maladies caused by the settlers' total disregard of sanitary conditions. One of the victims was Nancy Lincoln, the wife of Thomas and the mother of Abraham. The husband, who had been her only nurse and only physician, was now her undertaker also. He sawed and hammered some green boards into a long box. The few neighbors, about twenty in all, carried and followed her remains to a little eminence half a mile away, and there buried her in the virgin soil of the wilderness. There was no ceremony performed at her funeral, because there was no one competent to perform it. Some months after, when a roving preacher came along, Thomas Lincoln induced him to preach a funeral sermon for his wife, and thus this omission was made good.
Thirteen months passed. The widower, who was not disposed to be both father and mother to his children, started for his native Kentucky in quest of a wife, and there he found Sally Bush, who had once rejected his suit, had married his rival Johnstone, and was now a widow with three children. He called upon her, and proposed, without beating about the bush.
"Well, Miss Johnstone," said Thomas, "I have no wife, and you have no husband. I came a purpose to marry you. I knowed you from a gal, and you knowed me from a boy. I have no time to lose, and if you are willing, let it be done straight off."
"Tommy," was her reply, "I know you well, and have no objections to marrying you; but I cannot do it straight off, as I owe some debts that must first be paid."
The ceremony, however, took place on the following morning, the debts having been paid in the meantime, and very speedily the married pair and all the goods which the widow had possessed, were placed upon a wagon, and drawn by four horses, a journey of some days, to Thomas Lincoln's cabin in Indiana. These goods were of considerable value. There was a bureau which had cost forty dollars, and which Thomas considered sinfully magnificent, and urged her to sell it. But she was no Lincoln and refused to do this. There was a table, a set of chairs, a large clothes chest, some cooking utensils, knives and forks, bedding, and other articles essential to civilized living.
Abraham Lincoln never forgot the wonder and delight with which he beheld the arrival and unpacking of this wagon-load of unimagined treasure. Neither he nor his sister had ever heard of such things. The new mother, on her part, was wofully disappointed on seeing the wretched cabin in which she was to pass her days; for it seems that Thomas Lincoln had drawn upon his 
SATURDAY NIGHT.
imagination in describing his abode; and, indeed, the rude hovel was a great advance upon the half-inclosed wigwam in which he had lived during the first year's residence in the wilderness.
But Sally Bush, unlettered as she was, had in her some of the best qualities of a civilized being. She was a natural enemy of chaos and all disorder. She was a woman of high principle, genuine intelligence, and good sense. She, therefore, accepted the dismal lot to which Thomas Lincoln had brought her, and at once set about making the best of it.
She made her idle husband put a floor to the cabin; then windows and doors, welcome appendages in that cold month of December. She made up warm beds for the children, now five in number by the addition of her three. The little Lincolns, even in that wintry season, were half naked, and she clothed them from fabrics saved for her own wardrobe. They had never been used to cleanliness; she washed them, and taught them how to wash themselves. They had been treated with hardness; she opened her heart to them, treated them as she did her own children, and made them feel that they had a mother. Moreover, she had a talent, not merely for industry, but for making the most of everything. She was a good manager, a good economist, very neat in her own person, orderly and regular in her housekeeping. The whole aspect of the home, within and without, was changed; even the land was better cultivated, and Thomas Lincoln was a somewhat less dilatory provider.
Happily, too, she took a particular liking to Abe, then nine years old, utterly ignorant, wholly unformed, but good-humored and affectionate. He became warmly attached to her, and, as she often said, never once disobeyed her, or gave her a disrespectful reply. She soon had him nicely dressed in new clothes from head to foot, and it appeared to make a new boy of him. Being now decently clad, he could attend school, which he had never previously done, and very soon he showed those indications of intelligence which led to his entering the profession of the law. Sometimes the boy had to walk four miles and a half to school, and when he reached it the instruction given him was not of a very high quality. Every winter, however, added something to his knowledge and widened his view.
His gratitude to this excellent woman was pleasing to witness. He used to speak of her as his "saintly mother," of his "angel of a mother," of "the woman who first made him feel like a human being," who taught him that there was something else for him in the world besides blows, ridicule, and shame. After his father's death he paid the mortgage on his farm, assisted her children, and sent her money as long as he lived.
After he was elected to the presidency, and before he started for Washington, he paid her a visit. She was then very old and infirm, and he marked the change in her appearance. She had been a very tall woman, straight as an Indian, handsome, sprightly, talkative, with beautiful hair that curled naturally; she was now bent and worn with labor and sorrow, and he bade her farewell with a presentiment that he should see her no more. She, too, was oppressed with a vague fear of the future. When Mr. Herndon, the law partner of Mr. Lincoln, visited her after the assassination of the president, she was not able to speak of him without tears.
"Abe," said she, "was a poor boy, and I can say, what scarcely one woman can say in a thousand, Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused, in fact or appearance, to do anything I requested him. His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run together. I had a son John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys; but, I must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw. I did not want Abe to run for president; did not want him elected; was afraid somehow; and when he came down to see me after he was elected president, I still felt that something would befall Abe, and that I should see him no more."
She died soon after, and lies buried in an obscure grave, while the son whom she rescued from squalor, ignorance, and degradation, has a monument which pierces the skies. The much-maligned sisterhood of step-mothers might well combine to place a memorial over her tomb.