He met curious inquiry with reticence, but
with no attempt to mislead. Some of his biographers, however, while
shunning direct false statements, have used alleviating adjectives with
literary skill, and have drawn fanciful pictures of a pious frugal
household, of a gallant frontiersman endowed with a long catalogue of
noble qualities, and of a mother like a Madonna in the wilderness.[17]
Yet all the evidence that there is goes to show that this romantic
coloring is purely illusive. Rough, coarse, low, ignorant, and
poverty-stricken surroundings were about the child; and though we may
gladly avail ourselves of the possibility of believing his mother to
have been superior to all the rest of it, yet she could by no means
leaven the mass. The father[18] was by calling a carpenter, but not good
at his trade, a shiftless migratory squatter by invincible tendency,
and a very ignorant man, for a long while able only to form the letters
which made his signature, though later he extended his accomplishments a
little. He rested not much above the very bottom of existence in the
pioneer settlements, apparently without capacity or desire to do better.
The family was imbued with the peculiar, intense, but unenlightened form
of Christianity, mingled with curious superstition, prevalent in the
backwoods, and begotten by the influence of the vast wilderness upon
illiterate men of a rude native force.
Pages:
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31