Encounters
''pecuniary'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜_encounter｜ENC｜20260904120411-12-•
William G. Greene spent time at the Lincolns’ farm at Goosenest Prairie, in Coles County, Illinois, and observed that Thomas was barely able to eke out a living. Greene found Thomas residing “in a little cabin that cost perhaps $15, and with many evidences of poverty about him.” The cabin “looked so small and humble” that Greene “felt embarrassed.” It had no stable, no outhouse, and no shrubbery or trees. An early historian of Coles County, who interviewed acquaintances of Thomas Lincoln, called him “one of those easy, honest, commonplace men, who take life as they find it, and, as a consequence, generally find it a life of poverty.” He “possessed no faculty whatever of preserving his money, when he made any, hence he always remained poor. He was easily contented, had few wants, and those of a primitive nature. He was a foe to intemperance, strictly honest, and, supposing others the same, often suffered pecuniary losses.” Sophie Hanks, who lived in the Lincoln family’s Indiana cabin for several years, had a son who attributed Thomas’s lack of ambition to frontier isolation: “he was like the other people in that country. None of them worked to get ahead. There wasn’t no market for nothing unless you took it across two or three states. The people raised just what they needed.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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''omnium-gatherum'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜_encounter｜ENC｜20260904172645-05-•
Lincoln read only a tiny percentage of the letters that poured into the White House, for most business correspondence was routed to the appropriate departments. At his request, White House secretaries summarized the incoming mail for him. “Mr. Nicolay, please run over this & tell me what is in it,” he endorsed a 15-page missive. One of those secretaries, William O. Stoddard, recalled that “there never was on earth such another omnium gatherum as the President’s mail.” It consisted of “applications for office, for contracts, for pardons, for pecuniary aid, for advice, for information, for autographs, voluminous letters of advice, political disquisitions, religious exhortations, the rant and drivel of insanity, bitter abuse, foul obscenity, slanderous charges against public men, police and war information, military reports,” and a “large number of threatening letters.” Stoddard could not get the president to take seriously the threats, which averaged one a day. If Lincoln bothered to notice them at all, he responded with “contemptuous ridicule.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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