Lincoln green

“ Lincoln was not a type. He stands alone—no ancestors, no fellows, and no successors. ”

“ I understand, I hope, quite as well as Judge Douglas or anybody else, that the variety in the soil and climate and face of the country, and consequent variety in the industrial pursuits and productions of a country, require systems of law conforming to this variety in the natural features of the country. I understand quite as well as Judge Douglas that if we here raise a barrel of flour more than we want, and the Louisianians raise a barrel of sugar more than they want, it is of mutual advantage to exchange. That produces commerce, brings us together, and makes us better friends. ”

“ The farm at Knob Creek seems to have been a little more fertile than the other two places on which his father had chosen to live.
Once while living in the White House, President Lincoln was asked if he could remember his "old Kentucky home." He replied with considerable feeling:
"I remember that old home very well. Our farm was composed of three fields. It lay in the valley, surrounded by high hills and deep gorges. Sometimes, when there came a big rain in the hills, the water would come down through the gorges and spread all over the farm. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the south bank of Nolin Creek, three miles from what is now Hodgenville, Kentucky, was a little log cabin. About it stretched barren grass and straggly bushes. The land was slightly rolling with scarcely any foliage to break the monotony.
All about was desolate. Just why anyone would select this as a home site is hard to understand. The soil was so "poor" that only with the hardest labor could it be made sufficiently productive to repay the labor of sowing.
Here came Thomas and Nancy Lincoln and here on February 12, 1809, was born a son, Abraham Lincoln. ”

“ At the end of that time Thomas and Betsy Sparrow followed, bringing with them Dennis Hanks; and to them Thomas Lincoln surrendered the "half-faced camp," while he moved into a more pretentious structure—a cabin enclosed on all sides. The country was thickly covered with forests of walnut, beech, oak, elm, maple, and an undergrowth of dog-wood, sumac, and wild grape-vine. In places where the growth was not so thick grass came up abundantly, and hogs found plenty of food in the unlimited quantity of mast the woods afforded. ”

“ It is quite as probable that, like other men of his temperament, he thought he could do better in a new place; like other rolling stones, that he could gather more moss in a new soil. He found a purchaser for his farm who gave him in payment twenty dollars in money and ten barrels of whiskey, which Thomas Lincoln loaded upon a flat-boat, with his household furniture, floating it down Knob Creek to Rolling Fork, to Salt River, to the Ohio River, and down the Ohio to Thompson's Ferry in Perry County, Indiana. ”

“ All the highways and the byways, the streets and lanes, wherever I go, from the sea to the tops of the hills, are strewn with orange-peel; so that one, looking above and below, comes back from a walk with a golden dazzle in his eyes,—a sense that yellow is the prevailing color. Perhaps the kerchiefs of the dark-skinned girls and women, which take that tone, help the impression. The inhabitants are all orange-eaters. The high walls show that the gardens are protected with great care; yet the fruit seems to be as free as apples are in a remote New England town about cider-time. ”

“ Lincoln in his log-cabin home, splitting rails, working on the farm, hunting coons, driving the horses and cattle, must have found a glorious opportunity to become acquainted with this great mother of ours. The son of a pioneer who, with his great covered wagon, cattle, family, and household belongings, wanders over the country, whose only neighbors for hundreds of miles are the birds in the woods, the rabbits in the field, and the fish in the stream, the son of such a man certainly sees nature as few of our city-bred, World's Fair, Paris Exposition young people, can imagine it. ”

“ Offices are opened for the sale of public lands, at Mineral Point and Green Bay, and a large amount has been sold, and some at a high price. The country immediately bordering on lake Michigan, is well timbered, with various trees. Here are red, white, black and burr oaks, beech, ash, linden, poplar, walnut, hickory, sugar and white maple, elm, birch, hemlock, and pine, with many other kinds. The soil is not so deep and dark a mould as in the prairies of Illinois, but is fertile and easily cultivated ”

“ Green enough, indeed, in the spring-fed meadows and folds of the hills, where the early grass flashes into vividest emerald, but in the woods the soft mist-colored mazes of multitudinous twigs still show through their veilings and dustings of color—palest green of birches, gray-green of poplar, yellow-green of willows, and redder tones of the maples; and along the fence-lines and roadsides—blessed, untidy fence-lines and roadsides of New England—a fine penciling of red stems—the cut-back [pg 119] maple bushes and tangled vines alive to their tips and just bursting into leaf. ”

“ All winter the blue-grass continues green—it is always green, of course, never blue—and it even grows a little, except when the ground is frozen. Thus, year after year, drawing needful nourishment from the constantly disintegrating limestone below, flourishes here as nowhere else in the world this wonderful grass. ”

“ That portion of the earth's surface which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States is well adapted to be the home of one national family, and it is not well adapted for two or more. Its vast extent and its variety of climate and productions are of advantage in this age for one people, whatever they might have been in former ages. ”

“ It was in this camp that the family spent their first winter in Indiana. How very cold and dreary that winter must have been! Think of the stormy nights, of the shrieking wind, of the snow and the sleet and the bitter frost! It is not much wonder if, before the spring months came, the mother's strength began to fail.
But it was a busy winter for Thomas Lincoln. Every day his ax was heard in the woods. He was clearing the ground, so that in the spring it might be planted with corn and vegetables. ”

“ Some gentlemen fresh from a western tour, during a call at the White House, referred in the course of conversation to a body of water in Nebraska which bore an Indian name signifying “weeping water.” Mr. Lincoln instantly responded: “As ‘laughing water,’ according to Longfellow, is ‘Minnehaha,’ this evidently should be ‘Minneboohoo.’”
A farmer from one of the border counties went to the President on a certain occasion with the complaint that the Union soldiers in passing his farm had helped themselves not only to hay but to his horse ”

“ Some morning, not many days later, the farmer, walking out into his barn lot and casting a look in the direction of his field, sees—or does he not see?—the surface of it less dark. What is that uncertain flush low on the ground, that irresistible rush of multitudinous green? A fortnight, and the field is brown no longer. Overflowing it, burying it out of sight, is the shallow tidal sea of the hemp, ever rippling. Green are the woods now with their varied greenness. Green are the pastures. Green here and there are the fields: with the bluish green of young oats and wheat ”

“ Sometimes a green is obtained simply by lightening up, with white, a stock commercial green, for example, pea green may easily be obtained by lightening pale Brunswick green. In some cases greens are produced by an admixture of two or more colours, such, for instance, as Willow Green, which is made from ochre and indigo, and Olive Green from ochre and French ultramarine. Others have the addition of white, such as Grass Green, which is white ochre [45] and cobalt, and Spring Green, which is white, middle chrome and black. ”

“ It is true, that heretofore we have had better crops, with no better cultivators; but I believe it is also true that the soil has never been pushed up to one-half of its capacity.
What would be the effect upon the farming interest, to push the soil up to something near its full capacity? Unquestionably it will take more labor to produce fifty bushels from an acre, than it will to produce ten bushes from the same acre. But will it take more labor to produce fifty bushes from one acre, than from five? Unquestionably, thorough cultivation will require more labor to the acre ”

“ John Kemp, my old friend and a highly-respected citizen, now sixty-three years old, who was born and reared on a farm adjoining Henry Brooner, told me in July, 1903, in Washington, Indiana, that north of the [Pg 81] old Brooner farm there is an old farm still known as the "Dutton farm," and that he remembered seeing, often, when a small boy, near a spring, an old, dilapidated building called the "old still-house." He had never heard of John Johnston or of Abraham Lincoln working there, for that was before he was born. ”

“ His cotton umbrella, without a handle, and tied together with a coarse string to keep it from flapping, which he carried on his circuit rides, is said to be remembered still by some of his surviving neighbors. This rusticity of habit was utterly free from that affected contempt of refinement and comfort which self-made men sometimes carry into their more affluent circumstances. To Abraham Lincoln it was entirely natural, and all those who came into contact with him knew it to be so. ”

“ It is to be hoped that the steam-plow will be finally successful, and if it shall be, "thorough cultivation"—putting the soil to the top of its capacity, producing the largest crop possible from a given quantity of ground—will be most favorable for it. Doing a large amount of work upon a small quantity of ground, it will be as nearly as possible stationary while working, and as free as possible from locomotion, thus expending its strength as much as possible upon its work, and as little as possible in traveling. ”

“ Several iron-foundries and manufactories of portable steam-engines and agricultural machines, as well as large steam flour-mills, are in operation here, and there is an active trade in corn and wool. Lincoln is an important livestock market, and horse and cattle fairs are annually held. ”

“ It is well known that the coarse and rough side of life among the pioneers had its reaction in a reserved and at times morose habit, nearly akin to sadness, at least in those who frequented the wilderness; it was the expression of the influence of the vast, desolate, and lonely nature amid which they passed their lives. It is true that Lincoln was never a backwoodsman, and never roved alone for long periods among the shadowy forests and the limit-less 046 prairies, so that their powerful and weird influences, though not altogether remote, never bore upon him in full force ”

“ In examining a purple or an orange secondary, for instance, the component primaries can always be distinguished, but in green it is not always possible to detect the primary components at a glance. The brightness and luminosity of the yellow tone into the strength and coolness of the blue with the result that the secondary green is cool and refreshing in aspect and proves what has been termed a sociable blending colour, it is not difficult to harmonize and is not too fastidious as to its associates. ”

“ In the earliest spring nothing is sooner afield to contest possession of the land than the blue-grass. Its little green spear-points are the first to pierce the soft rich earth, and array themselves in countless companies over the rolling landscapes, while its roots reach out in every direction for securer foothold. ”

“ Then before the marsh folk knew what they were doing, the merchants of Lincoln had bought the stored corn, giving prices that should have told men that it was precious to those who sold as to the buyers; and then the grass failed in the drought, and the farmers were glad to sell the cattle and sheep for what they could gain, rather than see them starve. ”

“ The farm of Abraham Lincoln, I, in the Shenandoah Valley, was on the great national highway along which the course of empire took its westward way, and, infected by continual contact with the emigrants and encouraged by the greatest of American pioneers, he sold the property his father had given him, packed his wife and five children into a Conestoga wagon, and followed the great migration until it led him to what is now Hughes Station, Jefferson County, Kentucky, where he entered a large tract of land and paid for it one hundred and sixty pounds "in current money." ”

“ NO OTHERS LIKE THEM.
One day an old lady from the country called on President Lincoln, her tanned face peering up to his through a pair of spectacles. Her errand was to present Mr. Lincoln a pair of stockings of her own make a yard long. Kind tears came to his eyes as she spoke to him, and then, holding the stockings one in each hand, dangling wide apart for general inspection, he assured her that he should take them with him to Washington, where (and here his eyes twinkled) he was sure he should not be able to find any like them. ”

“ For some years yet he must continue to earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, having absolutely no means, no home, no friend to consult. More farm work as a hired hand, a clerkship in a village store, the running of a mill, another trip to New Orleans on a flatboat of his own contriving, a pilot's berth on the river—these were the means by which he subsisted until, in the summer of 1832, when he was twenty-three years of age, an event occurred which gave him public recognition. ”