The ugly butcher's knife and
tomahawk, which had been essential as was the rapier to the costume of
gentlemen two centuries earlier, began now to be more rarely seen at the
belt about the waist. The women wore linsey-woolsey gowns, of home
manufacture, and dyed according to the taste or skill of the wearer in
stripes and bars with the brown juice of the butternut. In the towns it
was not long before calico was seen, and calfskin shoes; and in such
populous centres bonnets decorated the heads of the fair sex. Amid these
advances in the art of dress Lincoln was a laggard, being usually one of
the worst attired men of the neighborhood; not from affectation, but
from a natural indifference to such matters. The sketch is likely to
become classical in American history of the appearance which he
presented with his scant pair of trousers, "hitched" by a single
suspender over his shirt, and so short as to expose, at the lower end,
half a dozen inches of "shinbone, sharp, blue, and narrow."
In the clearings the dwellings of these men were the "half-faced camp"
open upon one side to the weather, or the doorless, floorless, and
windowless cabin which, with prosperity, might be made luxurious by
greased paper in the windows, and "puncheon" floors. The furniture was
in keeping with this exterior. At a corner the bed was constructed by
driving into the ground crotched sticks, whence poles extended to the
crevices of the walls; upon these poles were laid boards, and upon these
boards were tossed leaves and skins and such other alleviating material
as could be found.
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