Sometimes it is a wife, sometimes a mother, who is the formative, decisive influence in a great man’s life. In Abraham Lincoln's life it was his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, who was the most important single factor in his development. Had it not been for her, it is possible that the world might never have heard of the man Abraham Lincoln. It was she, the stepmother, who mothered the boy and molded the man, who helped him to achieve that greatness of soul that made him a man for the ages.
When Abe Lincoln was nine years old, his own mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died. A year later his father married the widow, Sarah Bush Johnston, and brought her and her three children from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to the humble Lincoln cabin in southern Indiana. With characteristic energy and courage she set about making that floorless cabin into a livable home. The motherless ten-year-old boy she took to her heart at once, and there sprang up between them an affection that deepened with the years. More than anything else in the world, this boy needed an understanding mother. Such a one, and more, he found in his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln.
During the formative years from ten to twenty-one, Abraham Lincoln lived in the home with his father and stepmother. At the age of twenty-one, when the Lincolns moved to Illinois, he left that home to make his own way in the world. By that time, however, the direction of his life had been determined, the twig had been bent in the way it was to grow.
All too little credit has been given to Sarah Bush Lincoln, whose unfaltering courage, whose insight and understanding, whose abundant maternal love helped to make Abraham Lincoln a great man. This book is the story of her life as an individual, not just as a stepmother, beginning with her young girlhood in Kentucky. Woven into the story, of course, are many familiar episodes in the life of Abraham Lincoln, but they are presented from the standpoint of this woman who loved him as her own son, this “other mother” to him he, in turn, gave the deepest devotion.
—from the dust jacket
Did you find this review helpful?