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Abraham Lincoln: a History — Volume 01

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Title: Abraham Lincoln: a History — Volume 01

Author: John G. Nicolay
        John Hay


        
Release date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #6812]
                Most recently updated: December 30, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6812

Credits: Produced by Robert Nield, Tom Allen, David Moynihan, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


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Produced by Robert Nield, Tom Allen, David Moynihan, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A HISTORY
BY JOHN G. NICOLAY AND JOHN HAY

VOLUME ONE




TO THE HONORABLE ROBERT TODD LINCOLN

  THIS WORK IS DEDICATED
    IN TOKEN OF
  A LIFE-LONG FRIENDSHIP
    AND ESTEEM




AUTHORS' PREFACE


A generation born since Abraham Lincoln died has already reached
manhood and womanhood. Yet there are millions still living who
sympathized with him in his noble aspirations, who labored with him in
his toilsome life, and whose hearts were saddened by his tragic death.
It is the almost unbroken testimony of his contemporaries that by
virtue of certain high traits of character, in certain momentous lines
of purpose and achievement, he was incomparably the greatest man of
his time. The deliberate judgment of those who knew him has hardened
into tradition; for although but twenty-five years have passed since
he fell by the bullet of the assassin, the tradition is already
complete. The voice of hostile faction is silent, or unheeded; even
criticism is gentle and timid. If history had said its last word, if
no more were to be known of him than is already written, his fame,
however lacking in definite outline, however distorted by fable, would
survive undiminished to the latest generations. The blessings of an
enfranchised race would forever hail him as their liberator; the
nation would acknowledge him as the mighty counselor whose patient
courage and wisdom saved the life of the republic in its darkest hour;
and illuminating his proud eminence as orator, statesman, and ruler,
there would forever shine around his memory the halo of that tender
humanity and Christian charity in which he walked among his fellow-
countrymen as their familiar companion and friend.

It is not, therefore, with any thought of adding materially to his
already accomplished renown that we have written the work which we now
offer to our fellow-citizens. But each age owes to its successors the
truth in regard to its own annals. The young men who have been born
since Sumter was fired on have a right to all their elders know of the
important events they came too late to share in. The life and fame of
Lincoln will not have their legitimate effect of instruction and
example unless the circumstances among which he lived and found his
opportunities are placed in their true light before the men who never
saw him.

To write the life of this great American in such a way as to show his
relations to the times in which he moved, the stupendous issues he
controlled, the remarkable men by whom he was surrounded, has been the
purpose which the authors have diligently pursued for many years. We
can say nothing of the result of our labor; only those who have been
similarly employed can appreciate the sense of inadequate performance
with which we regard what we have accomplished. We claim for our work
that we have devoted to it twenty years of almost unremitting
assiduity; that we have neglected no means in our power to ascertain
the truth; that we have rejected no authentic facts essential to a
candid story; that we have had no theory to establish, no personal
grudge to gratify, no unavowed objects to subserve. We have aimed to
write a sufficiently full and absolutely honest history of a great man
and a great time; and although we take it for granted that we have
made mistakes, that we have fallen into such errors and inaccuracies
as are unavoidable in so large a work, we claim there is not a line in
all these volumes dictated by malice or unfairness.

Our desire to have this work placed under the eyes of the greatest
possible number of readers induced us to accept the generous offer of
"The Century Magazine" to print it first in that periodical. In this
way it received, as we expected, the intelligent criticism of a very
large number of readers, thoroughly informed in regard to the events
narrated, and we have derived the greatest advantage from the
suggestions and corrections which have been elicited during the serial
publication, which began in November, 1886, and closed early in 1890.
We beg, here, to make our sincere acknowledgments to the hundreds of
friendly critics who have furnished us with valuable information.

As "The Century" had already given, during several years, a
considerable portion of its pages to the elucidation and discussion of
the battles and campaigns of the civil war, it was the opinion of its
editor, in which we coincided, that it was not advisable to print in
the magazine the full narrative sketch of the war which we had
prepared. We omitted also a large number of chapters which, although
essential to a history of the time, and directly connected with the
life of Mr. Lincoln, were still episodical in their nature, and were
perhaps not indispensable to a comprehension of the principal events
of his administration. These are all included in the present volumes;
they comprise additional chapters almost equal in extent and fully
equal in interest to those which have already been printed in "The
Century." Interspersed throughout the work in their proper connection
and sequence, and containing some of the most important of Mr.
Lincoln's letters, they lend breadth and unity to the historical
drama.

We trust it will not be regarded as presumptuous if we say a word in
relation to the facilities we have enjoyed and the methods we have
used in the preparation of this work. We knew Mr. Lincoln intimately
before his election to the Presidency. We came from Illinois to
Washington with him, and remained at his side and in his service--
separately or together--until the day of his death. We were the daily
and nightly witnesses of the incidents, the anxieties, the fears, and
the hopes which pervaded the Executive Mansion and the National
Capital. The President's correspondence, both official and private,
passed through our hands; he gave us his full confidence. We had
personal acquaintance and daily official intercourse with Cabinet
Officers, Members of Congress, Governors, and Military and Naval
Officers of all grades, whose affairs brought them to the White House.
It was during these years of the war that we formed the design of
writing this history and began to prepare for it. President Lincoln
gave it his sanction and promised his cordial cooperation. After
several years' residence in Europe, we returned to this country and
began the execution of our long-cherished plan. Mr. Robert T. Lincoln
gave into our keeping all the official and private papers and
manuscripts in his possession, to which we have added all the material
we could acquire by industry or by purchase. It is with the advantage,
therefore, of a wide personal acquaintance with all the leading
participants of the war, and of perfect familiarity with the
manuscript material, and also with the assistance of the vast bulk of
printed records and treatises which have accumulated since 1865, that
we have prosecuted this work to its close.

If we gained nothing else by our long association with Mr. Lincoln we
hope at least that we acquired from him the habit of judging men and
events with candor and impartiality. The material placed in our hands
was unexampled in value and fullness; we have felt the obligation of
using it with perfect fairness. We have striven to be equally just to
friends and to adversaries; where the facts favor our enemies we have
recorded them ungrudgingly; where they bear severely upon statesmen
and generals whom we have loved and honored we have not scrupled to
set them forth, at the risk of being accused of coldness and
ingratitude to those with whom we have lived on terms of intimate
friendship. The recollection of these friendships will always be to us
a source of pride and joy; but in this book we have known no
allegiance but to the truth. We have in no case relied upon our own
memory of the events narrated, though they may have passed under our
own eyes; we have seen too often the danger of such a reliance in the
reminiscences of others. We have trusted only our diaries and
memoranda of the moment; and in the documents and reports we have
cited we have used incessant care to secure authenticity. So far as
possible, every story has been traced to its source, and every
document read in the official record or the original manuscript.

We are aware of the prejudice which exists against a book written by
two persons, but we feel that in our case the disadvantages of
collaboration are reduced to the minimum. Our experiences, our
observations, our material, have been for twenty years not merely
homogeneous--they have been identical. Our plans were made with
thorough concert; our studies of the subject were carried on together;
we were able to work simultaneously without danger of repetition or
conflict. The apportionment of our separate tasks has been dictated
purely by convenience; the division of topics between us has been
sometimes for long periods, sometimes almost for alternate chapters.
Each has written an equal portion of the work; while consultation and
joint revision have been continuous, the text of each remains
substantially unaltered. It is in the fullest sense, and in every
part, a joint work. We each assume responsibility, not only for the
whole, but for all the details, and whatever credit or blame the
public may award our labors is equally due to both.

We commend the result of so many years of research and diligence to
all our countrymen, North and South, in the hope that it may do
something to secure a truthful history of the great struggle which
displayed on both sides the highest qualities of American manhood, and
may contribute in some measure to the growth and maintenance
throughout all our borders of that spirit of freedom and nationality
for which Abraham Lincoln lived and died.

John G. Nicolay
John Hay
[signatures]




ILLUSTRATIONS

VOL. I


ABRAHAM LINCOLN From a photograph taken about 1860 by Hesler, of
Chicago; from the original negative owned by George B. Ayres,
Philadelphia.

LAND WARRANT, ISSUED TO ABRAHAM LINKHORN (LINCOLN)

FAC-SIMILE FROM THE FIELD-BOOK OF DANIEL BOONE

SURVEYOR'S CERTIFICATE FOR ABRAHAM LINKHORN (LINCOLN)

HOUSE IN WHICH THOMAS LINCOLN AND NANCY HANKS WERE MARRIED

FAC-SIMILE OF THE MARRIAGE BOND OF THOMAS LINCOLN

CERTIFICATE, OR MARRIAGE LIST, CONTAINING THE NAMES OF THOMAS LINCOLN
AND NANCY HANKS

SARAH BUSH LINCOLN AT THE AGE OF 76 From a photograph in possession of
William H. Herndon.

CABIN ON GOOSE-NEST PRAIRIE, ILL., IN WHICH THOMAS LINCOLN LIVED AND
DIED

MODEL OF LINCOLN'S INVENTION FOR BUOYING VESSELS

FAC-SIMILE OF DRAWINGS IN THE PATENT OFFICE

LEAF FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S EXERCISE BOOK

SOLDIER'S DISCHARGE FROM THE BLACK HAWK WAR, SIGNED BY A. LINCOLN,
CAPTAIN

BLACK HAWK. From a portrait by Charles B. King, from McKenny & Hall's
"Indian Tribes of North America."

STEPHEN T. LOGAN From the portrait in possession of his daughter, Mrs.
L. H. Coleman.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S SURVEYING INSTRUMENTS, SADDLE BAG, ETC

PLAN OF ROADS SURVEYED BY A. LINCOLN AND OTHERS

FAC-SIMILE OF LINCOLN'S REPORT OF THE ROAD SURVEY

O. H. BROWNING From a photograph by Waide.

MARTIN VAN BUREN From a photograph by Brady.

COL. E. D. BAKER From a photograph by Brady, about 1861.

LINCOLN AND STUART'S LAW-OFFICE, SPRINGFIELD

LINCOLN'S BOOKCASE AND INKSTAND From the Keyes Lincoln Memorial
Collection, Chicago.

GLOBE TAVERN, SPRINGFIELD Where Lincoln lived after his marriage.

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON From a painting, in 1841, by Henry Inman, owned
by Benjamin Harrison.

FAC-SIMILE OF MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

JOSHUA SPEED AND WIFE From a painting by Healy, about 1864.

HOUSE IN WHICH ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS MARRIED

GEN. JAMES SHIELDS From a photograph owned by David Delany.

HENRY CLAY After a photograph by Rockwood, from the daguerreotype
owned by Alfred Hassack.

ZACHARY TAYLOR From the painting by Vanderlyn in the Corcoran Gallery.

JOSHUA R. GIDDINGS From a photograph by Brady.

DAVID DAVIS From a photograph by Brady.

JAMES K. POLK From a photograph by Brady.

FRANKLIN PIERCE From a photograph by Brady.

LYMAN TRUMBULL Prom a photograph by Brady.

OWEN LOVEJOY From a photograph.

DAVID E. ATCHISON From a daguerreotype.

ANDREW H. REEDER From a photograph by R. Knecht.

JAMES H. LANE By permission of the Strowbridge Lithographing Co. MAPS

MAP SHOWING LOCALITIES CONNECTED WITH EARLY EVENTS IN THE LINCOLN
FAMILY

MAP OF NEW SALEM, ILL., AND VICINITY

MAP OF THE BOUNDARIES OF TEXAS

HISTORICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1854




TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOL. I


CHAPTER I. LINEAGE The Lincolns in America. Intimacy with the Boones.
Kentucky in 1780. Death of Abraham Lincoln the Pioneer. Marriage of
Thomas Lincoln. Birth and Childhood of Abraham

CHAPTER II. INDIANA Thomas Lincoln leaves Kentucky. Settles at
Gentryville. Death of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Sarah Bush Johnston.
Pioneer Life in Indiana. Sports and Superstitions of the Early
Settlers. The Youth of Abraham. His Great Physical Strength. His
Voyage to New Orleans. Removal to Illinois

CHAPTER III. ILLINOIS IN 1830 The Winter of the Deep Snow. The Sudden
Change. Pioneer Life. Religion and Society. French and Indians.
Formation of the Political System. The Courts. Lawyers and
Politicians. Early Superannuation

CHAPTER IV. NEW SALEM Denton Offutt. Lincoln's Second Trip to New
Orleans. His Care of His Family. Death of Thomas Lincoln. Offutt's
Store in New Salem. Lincoln's Initiation by the "Clary's Grove Boys."
The Voyage of the _Talisman_

CHAPTER V. LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAR Black Hawk. The Call for
Volunteers. Lincoln Elected Captain. Stillman's Run. Lincoln
Reenlists. The Spy Battalion. Black Hawk's Defeat. Disbandment of the
Volunteers

CHAPTER VI. SURVEYOR AND REPRESENTATIVE Lincoln's Candidacy for the
Legislature. Runs as a Whig. Defeated. Berry and Lincoln Merchants.
Lincoln Begins the Study of Law. Postmaster. Surveyor. His Popularity.
Elected to the Legislature, 1834

CHAPTER VII. LEGISLATIVE EXPERIENCE Lincoln's First Session in the
Legislature. Douglas and Peek. Lincoln Reelected. Bedlam Legislation.
Schemes of Railroad Building. Removal of the Capital to Springfield

CHAPTER VIII. THE LINCOLN-STONE PROTEST The Pro-Slavery Sentiment in
Illinois. Attempt to Open the State to Slavery. Victory of the Free-
State Party. Reaction. Death of Lovejoy. Pro-Slavery Resolutions. The
Protest

CHAPTER IX. COLLAPSE OF "THE SYSTEM" Lincoln in Springfield. The
Failure of the Railroad System. Fall of the Banks. First Collision
with Douglas. Tampering with the Judiciary

CHAPTER X. EARLY LAW PRACTICE Early Legal Customs. Lincoln's
Popularity in Law and Politics. A Speech in 1840. The Harrison
Campaign. Correspondence with Stuart. Harrison Elected. Melancholia

CHAPTER XI. MARRIAGE Courtship and Engagement, The Pioneer
Temperament. Lincoln's Love Affairs. Joshua F. Speed. Lincoln's Visit
to Kentucky. Correspondence with Speed. Marriage

CHAPTER XII. THE SHIELDS DUEL A Political Satire. James Shields.
Lincoln Challenged. A Fight Arranged and Prevented. Subsequent
Wranglings. The Whole Matter Forgotten. An Admonition

CHAPTER XIII. THE CAMPAIGN OF 1844 Partnership with Stephen T. Logan.
Lincoln Becomes a Lawyer. Temperance Movement. Baker and Lincoln
Candidates for the Whig Nomination to Congress. Baker Successful. Clay
Nominated for President. The Texas Question. Clay Defeated

CHAPTER XIV. LINCOLN'S CAMPAIGN FOR CONGRESS Schemes of Annexation.
Opposition at the North. Outbreak of War. Lincoln Nominated for
Congress. His Opponent Peter Cartwright. Lincoln Elected. The Whigs in
the War. E. D. Baker in Washington and Mexico

CHAPTER XV. THE THIRTIETH CONGRESS Robert C. Winthrop Chosen Speaker.
Debates on the War. Advantage of the Whigs. Acquisition of Territory.
The Wilmot Proviso. Lincoln's Resolutions. Nomination of Taylor for
President. Cass the Democratic Candidate. Lincoln's Speech, July 27,
1848. Taylor Elected

CHAPTER XVI. A FORTUNATE ESCAPE Independent Action of Northern
Democrats. Lincoln's Plan for Emancipation in the District of
Columbia. His Bill Fails to Receive Consideration. A Similar Bill
Signed by Him Fifteen Years Later. Logan Nominated for Congress and
Defeated. Lincoln an Applicant for Office. The Fascination of
Washington

CHAPTER XVII. THE CIRCUIT LAWYER The Growth and Change of Legal
Habits. Lincoln on the Circuit. His Power and Value as a Lawyer.
Opinion of David Davis. Of Judge Drummond. Incidents of the Courts.
Lincoln's Wit and Eloquence. His Life at Home

CHAPTER XVIII. THE BALANCE OF POWER Origin of the Slavery Struggle.
The Ordinance of 1787. The Compromises of the Constitution. The
Missouri Compromise. Cotton and the Cotton-Gin. The Race between Free
and Slave States. The Admission of Texas. The Wilmot Proviso. New
Mexico and California. The Compromise Measures of 1850. Finality

CHAPTER XIX. REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE Stephen A. Douglas. Old
Fogies and Young America. The Nomination of Pierce. The California
Gold Discovery. The National Platforms on the Slavery Issue.
Organization of Western Territories. The Three Nebraska Bills. The
Caucus Agreement of the Senate Committee. Dixon's Repealing Amendment.
Douglas Adopts Dixon's Proposition. Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act

CHAPTER XX. THE DRIFT OF POLITICS The Storm of Agitation. The Free
Soil Party. The American Party. The Anti-Nebraska Party. Dissolution
of the Whig Party. The Congressional Elections. Democratic Defeat.
Banks Elected Speaker

CHAPTER XXI. LINCOLN AND TRUMBULL The Nebraska Question in Illinois.
Douglas's Chicago Speech. Lincoln Reappears in Politics. Political
Speeches at the State Fair. A Debate between Lincoln and Douglas.
Lincoln's Peoria Speech. An Anti-Nebraska Legislature Elected.
Lincoln's Candidacy for the Senate. Shields and Matteson. Trumbull
Elected Senator. Lincoln's Letter to Robertson

CHAPTER XXII. THE BORDER RUFFIANS The Opening of Kansas Territory.
Andrew H, Reeder Appointed Governor. Atchison's Propaganda. The
Missouri Blue Lodges. The Emigrant Aid Company. The Town of Lawrence
Founded. Governor Reeder's Independent Action. The First Border
Ruffian Invasion. The Election of Whitfield

CHAPTER XXIII. THE BOGUS LAWS Governor Reeder's Census. The Second
Border Ruffian Invasion. Missouri Voters Elect the Kansas Legislature.
Westport and Shawnee Mission. The Governor Convenes the Legislature at
Pawnee. The Legislature Returns to Shawnee Mission. Governor Reeder's
Vetoes. The Governor's Removal. Enactment of the Bogus Laws. Despotic
Statutes. Lecompton Founded

CHAPTER XXIV. THE TOPEKA CONSTITUTION The Bogus Legislature Defines
Kansas Politics. The Big Springs Convention. Ex-Governor Reeder's
Resolutions. Formation of the Free-State Party. A Constitutional
Convention at Topeka. The Topeka Constitution. President Pierce
Proclaims the Topeka Movement Revolutionary. Refusal to Recognize the
Bogus Laws. Chief-Justice Lecompte's Doctrine of Constructive Treason,
Arrests and Indictment of the Free-State Leaders. Colonel Sumner
Disperses the Topeka Legislature

CHAPTER XXV. CIVIL WAR IN KANSAS Wilson Shannon Appointed Governor.
The Law and Order Party Formed at Leavenworth. Sheriff Jones. The
Branson Rescue. The Wakarusa War. Sharps Rifles. Governor Shannon's
Treaty. Guerrilla Leaders and Civil War. The Investigating Committee
of Congress. The Flight of Ex-Governor Reeder. The Border Ruffians
March on Lawrence. Burning of the Free-State Hotel




ABRAHAM LINCOLN




CHAPTER I

LINEAGE


[Sidenote: 1780.]

In the year 1780, Abraham Lincoln, a member of a respectable and well-
to-do family in Rockingham County, Virginia, started westward to
establish himself in the newly-explored country of Kentucky. He
entered several large tracts of fertile land, and returning to
Virginia disposed of his property there, and with his wife and five
children went back to Kentucky and settled in Jefferson County. Little
is known of this pioneer Lincoln or of his father. Most of the records
belonging to that branch of the family were destroyed in the civil
war. Their early orphanage, the wild and illiterate life they led on
the frontier, severed their connection with their kindred in the East.
This, often happened; there are hundreds of families in the West
bearing historic names and probably descended from well-known houses
in the older States or in England, which, by passing through one or
two generations of ancestors who could not read or write, have lost
their continuity with the past as effectually as if a deluge had
intervened between the last century and this. Even the patronymic has
been frequently distorted beyond recognition by slovenly pronunciation
during the years when letters were a lost art, and by the phonetic
spelling of the first boy in the family who learned the use of the
pen. There are Lincolns in Kentucky and Tennessee belonging to the
same stock with the President, whose names are spelled "Linkhorn" and
"Linkhern." All that was known of the emigrant, Abraham Lincoln, by
his immediate descendants was that his progenitors, who were Quakers,
came from Berks County, Pennsylvania, into Virginia, and there throve
and prospered. [Footnote: We desire to express our obligations to
Edwin Salter, Samuel L. Smedley, Samuel Shackford, Samuel W.
Pennypacker, Howard M. Jenkins, and John T. Harris, Jr., for
information and suggestions which have been of use to us in this
chapter.] But we now know, with sufficient clearness, through the
wide-spread and searching luster which surrounds the name, the history
of the migrations of the family since its arrival on this continent,
and the circumstances under which the Virginia pioneer started for
Kentucky.

The first ancestor of the line of whom we have knowledge was Samuel
Lincoln, of Norwich, England, who came to Hingham, Massachusetts, in
1638, and died there. He left a son, Mordecai, whose son, of the same
name,--and it is a name which persists in every branch of the family,
[Footnote: The Lincolns, in naming their children, followed so strict
a tradition that great confusion has arisen in the attempt to trace
their genealogy. For instance, Abraham Lincoln, of Chester County, son
of one Mordecai and brother of another, the President's ancestors,
left a fair estate, by will, to his children, whose names were John,
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Mordecai, Rebecca, and Sarah--precisely the
same names we find in three collateral families.]--removed to
Monmouth, New Jersey, and thence to Amity township, now a part of now
a part of Berks County, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1735, fifty
years old. From a copy of his will, recorded in the office of the
Register in Philadelphia, we gather that he was a man of considerable
property. In the inventory of his effects, made after his death, he is
styled by the appraisers, "Mordecai Lincoln, Gentleman." His son John
received by his father's will "a certain piece of land lying in the
Jerseys, containing three hundred acres," the other sons and daughters
having been liberally provided for from the Pennsylvania property.
This John Lincoln left New Jersey some years later, and about 1750
established himself in Rockingham County, Virginia. He had five sons,
to whom he gave the names which were traditional in the family:--
Abraham, the pioneer first mentioned,--Isaac, Jacob, Thomas, and John.
Jacob and John remained in Virginia; the former was a soldier in the
War of the Revolution, and took part as lieutenant in a Virginia
regiment at the siege of Yorktown. Isaac went to a place on the
Holston River in Tennessee; Thomas followed his brother to Kentucky,
lived and died there, and his children then emigrated to Tennessee
[Footnote: It is an interesting coincidence for the knowledge of which
we are indebted to Colonel John B. Brownlow, that a minister named
Mordecai Lincoln a relative of the President, performed, on the 17th
of May, 1837, the marriage ceremony of Andrew Johnson, Mr. Lincoln's
succesor, in the Presidency.] With the one memorable exception the
family seem to have been modest, thrifty, unambitious people. Even the
great fame and conspicuousness of the President did not tempt them out
of their retirement. Robert Lincoln, of Hancock County, Illinois, a
cousin--German, became a captain and commissary of volunteers; none of
the others, so far as we know, ever made their existence known to
their powerful kinsman during the years of his glory. [Transcriber's
Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.]

It was many years after the death of the President that his son
learned the probable circumstances under which the pioneer Lincoln
removed to the West, and the intimate relations which subsisted
between his family and the most celebrated man in early Western
annals. There is little doubt that it was on account of his
association with the, famous Daniel Boone that Abraham Lincoln went to
Kentucky. The families had for a century been closely allied. There
were frequent intermarriages [Footnote: A letter from David J.
Lincoln, of Birdsboro, Berks County, Pennsylvania, to the writers,
says, "My grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, was married to Anna Boone, a
first cousin of Daniel Boone, July 10, 1760." He was half-brother of
John Lincoln, and afterwards became a man of some prominence in
Pennsylvania, serving in the Constitutional Convention in 1789-90.]
among them--both being of Quaker lineage. By the will of Mordecai
Lincoln, to which reference has been made, his "loving friend and
neighbor" George Boone was made a trustee to assist his widow in the
care of the property. Squire Boone, the father of Daniel, was one of
the appraisers who made the inventory of Mordecai Lincoln's estate.
The intercourse between the families was kept up after the Boones had
removed to North Carolina and John Lincoln had gone to Virginia.
Abraham Lincoln, son of John, and grandfather of the President, was
married to Miss Mary Shipley [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote
relocated to chapter end.] in North Carolina. The inducement which led
him to leave Virginia, where his standing and his fortune were
assured, was, in all probability, his intimate family relations with
the great explorer, the hero of the new country of Kentucky, the land
of fabulous richness and unlimited adventure. At a time when the
Eastern States were ringing with the fame of the mighty hunter who was
then in the prime of his manhood, and in the midst of those
achievements which will forever render him one of the most picturesque
heroes in all our annals, it is not to be wondered at that his own
circle of friends should have caught the general enthusiasm and felt
the desire to emulate his career.

Boone's exploration of Kentucky had begun some ten years before
Lincoln set out to follow his trail. In 1769 he made his memorable
journey to that virgin wilderness of whose beauty he always loved to
speak even to his latest breath. During all that year he hunted,
finding everywhere abundance of game. "The buffalo," Boone says, "were
more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on
the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on these extensive
plains, fearless because ignorant of the violence of man. Sometimes we
saw hundreds in a drove, and the numbers about the salt springs were
amazing." In the course of the winter, however, he was captured by the
Indians while hunting with a comrade, and when they had contrived to
escape they never found again any trace of the rest of their party.
But a few days later they saw two men approaching and hailed them with
the hunter's caution, "Hullo, strangers; who are you?" They replied,
"White men and friends." They proved to be Squire Boone and another
adventurer from North Carolina. The younger Boone had made that long
pilgrimage through the trackless woods, led by an instinct of doglike
affection, to find his elder brother and share his sylvan pleasures
and dangers. Their two companions were soon waylaid and killed, and
the Boones spent their long winter in that mighty solitude
undisturbed. In the spring their ammunition, which was to them the
only necessary of life, ran low, and one of them must return to the
settlements to replenish the stock. It need not be said which assumed
this duty; the cadet went uncomplaining on his way, and Daniel spent
three months in absolute loneliness, as he himself expressed it, "by
myself, without bread, salt, or sugar, without company of my fellow-
creatures, or even a horse or dog." He was not insensible to the
dangers of his situation. He never approached his camp without the
utmost precaution, and always slept in the cane-brakes if the signs
were unfavorable. But he makes in his memoirs this curious reflection,
which would seem like affectation in one less perfectly and simply
heroic: "How unhappy such a situation for a man tormented with fear,
which is vain if no danger comes, and if it does, only augments the
pain. It was my happiness to be destitute of this afflicting passion,
with which I had the greatest reason to be afflicted." After his
brother's return, for a year longer they hunted in those lovely wilds,
and then returned to the Yadkin to bring their families to the new
domain. They made the long journey back, five hundred miles, in peace
and safety.

For some time after this Boone took no conspicuous part in the
settlement of Kentucky. The expedition with which he left the Yadkin
in 1773 met with a terrible disaster near Cumberland Gap, in which his
eldest son and five more young men were killed by Indians, and the
whole party, discouraged by the blow, retired to the safer region of
Clinch River. In the mean time the dauntless speculator Richard
Henderson had begun his occupation with all the pomp of viceroyalty.
Harrodsburg had been founded, and corn planted, and a flourishing
colony established at the Falls of the Ohio. In 1774 Boone was called
upon by the Governor of Virginia to escort a party of surveyors
through Kentucky, and on his return was given the command of three
garrisons; and for several years thereafter the history of the State
is the record of his feats of arms. No one ever equaled him in his
knowledge of Indian character, and his influence with the savages was
a mystery to him and to themselves. Three times he fell into their
hands and they did not harm him. Twice they adopted him into their
tribes while they were still on the war-path. Once they took him to
Detroit, [Footnote: Silas Farmer, historiographer of Detroit, informs
us that Daniel Boone was brought there on the 10th of March, 1778, and
that he remained there a month.] to show the Long-Knife chieftains of
King Greorge that they also could exhibit trophies of memorable
prowess, but they refused to give him up even to their British allies.
In no quality of wise woodcraft was he wanting. He could outrun a dog
or a deer; he could thread the woods without food day and night; he
could find his way as easily as the panther could. Although a great
athlete and a tireless warrior, he hated fighting and only fought for
peace. In council and in war he was equally valuable. His advice was
never rejected without disaster, nor followed but with advantage; and
when the fighting once began there was not a rifle in Kentucky which
could rival his. At the nine days' siege of Boonesboro' he took
deliberate aim and killed a negro renegade who was harassing the
garrison from a tree five hundred and twenty-five feet away, and whose
head only was visible from the fort. The mildest and the quietest of
men, he had killed dozens of enemies with his own hand, and all this
without malice and, strangest of all, without incurring the hatred of
his adversaries. He had self-respect enough, but not a spark of
vanity. After the fatal battle of the Blue Licks,--where the only
point of light in the day's terrible work was the wisdom and valor
with which he had partly retrieved a disaster he foresaw but was
powerless to prevent,--when it became his duty, as senior surviving
officer of the forces, to report the affair to Governor Harrison, his
dry and naked narrative gives not a single hint of what he had done
himself, nor mentions the gallant son lying dead on the field, nor the
wounded brother whose gallantry might justly have claimed some notice.
He was thinking solely of the public good, saying, "I have encouraged
the people in this country all that I could, but I can no longer
justify them or myself to risk our lives here under such extraordinary
hazards." He therefore begged his Excellency to take immediate
measures for relief. During the short existence of Henderson's
legislature he was a member of it, and not the least useful one. Among
his measures was one for the protection of game.

[Illustration:   LAND WARRANT ISSUED TO ABRAHAM LINKHORN (LINCOLN). The
original, of which this is a reduced fac-simile, is in the possession
of Colonel R. T, Durrett, Louisville, Ky.]

[Sidenote: Jefferson County Records.]

Everything we know of the emigrant Abraham Lincoln goes to show that
it was under the auspices of this most famous of our pioneers that he
set out from Rockingham County to make a home for himself and his
young family in that wild region which Boone was wresting from its
savage holders. He was not without means of his own. He took with him
funds enough to enter an amount of land which would have made his
family rich if they had retained it. The county records show him to
have been the possessor of a domain of some seventeen hundred acres.
There is still in existence [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote
relocated to chapter end.] the original warrant, dated March 4, 1780,
for four hundred acres of land, for which the pioneer had paid "into
the publick Treasury one hundred and sixty pounds current money," and
a copy of the surveyor's certificate, giving the metes and bounds of
the property on Floyd's Fork, which remained for many years in the
hands of Mordecai Lincoln, the pioneer's eldest son and heir. The name
was misspelled "Linkhorn" by a blunder of the clerk in the
land-office, and the error was perpetuated in the subsequent record.

Kentucky had been for many years the country of romance and fable for
Virginians. Twenty years before Governor Spotswood had crossed the
Alleghanies and returned to establish in a Williamsburg tavern that
fantastic order of nobility which he called the Knights of The Golden
Horseshoe, [Footnote: Their motto was _Sic jurat transcendere
montes_.] and, with a worldly wisdom which was scarcely consistent
with these medieval affectations, to press upon the attention of the
British Government the building of a line of frontier forts to guard
the Ohio River from the French. Many years after him the greatest of
all Virginians crossed the mountains again, and became heavily
interested in those schemes of emigration which filled the minds of
many of the leading men in America until they were driven out by
graver cares and more imperative duties. Washington had acquired
claims and patents to the amount of thirty or forty thousand acres of
land in the West; Benjamin Franklin and the Lees were also large
owners of these speculative titles. They formed, it is true, rather an
airy and unsubstantial sort of possession, the same ground being often
claimed by a dozen different persons or companies under various grants
from the crown or from legislatures, or through purchase by
adventurers from Indian councils. But about the time of which we are
speaking the spirit of emigration had reached the lower strata of
colonial society, and a steady stream of pioneers began pouring over
the passes of the mountains into the green and fertile valleys of
Kentucky and Tennessee. They selected their homes in the most eligible
spots to which chance or the report of earlier explorers directed
them, with little knowledge or care as to the rightful ownership of
the land, and too often cleared their corner of the wilderness for the
benefit of others. Even Boone, to whose courage, forest lore, and
singular intuitions of savage character the State of Kentucky owed
more than to any other man, was deprived in his old age of his hard-
earned homestead through his ignorance of legal forms, and removed to
Missouri to repeat in that new territory his labors and his
misfortunes.

[Illustration:   FAC-SIMILE FROM THE FIELD BOOK OF DANIEL BOONE. This
record of the Lincoln Claim on Licking River is from the original in
posession of Lyman C. Draper, Madison, Wis.]

[Sidenote: 1780.]

The period at which Lincoln came West was one of note in the history
of Kentucky. The labors of Henderson and the Transylvania Company had
begun to bear fruit in extensive plantations and a connected system of
forts. The land laws of Kentucky had reduced to something like order
the chaos of conflicting claims arising from the various grants and
the different preemption customs under which settlers occupied their
property. The victory of Boone at Boonesboro' against the Shawnees,
and the capture of Kaskaskia and Vincennes by the brilliant audacity
of George Rogers Clark, had brought the region prominently to the
attention of the Atlantic States, and had turned in that direction the
restless and roving spirits which are always found in communities at
periods when great emigrations are a need of civilization. Up to this
time few persons had crossed the mountains except hunters, trappers,
and explorers--men who came merely to kill game, and possibly Indians,
or to spy out the fertility of the land for the purpose of
speculation. But in 1780 and 1781 a large number of families took up
their line of march, and in the latter year a considerable contingent
of women joined the little army of pioneers, impelled by an instinct
which they themselves probably but half comprehended. The country was
to be peopled, and there was no other way of peopling it but by the
sacrifice of many lives and fortunes; and the history of every country
shows that these are never lacking when they are wanted. The number of
those who came at about the same time with the pioneer Lincoln was
sufficient to lay the basis of a sort of social order. Early in the
year 1780 three hundred "large family boats" arrived at the Falls of
the Ohio, where the land had been surveyed by Captain Bullitt seven
years before, and in May the Legislature of Virginia passed a law for
the incorporation of the town of Louisville, then containing some six
hundred inhabitants. At the same session a law was passed confiscating
the property of certain British subjects for the endowment of an
institution of learning in Kentucky, "it being the interest of this
commonwealth," to quote the language of the philosophic Legislature,
"always to encourage and promote every design which may tend to the
improvement of the mind and the diffusion of useful knowledge even
among its remote citizens, whose situation in a barbarous neighborhood
and a savage intercourse might otherwise render them unfriendly to
science." This was the origin of the Transylvania University of
Lexington, which rose and flourished for many years on the utmost
verge of civilization.

[Illustration:   SURVEYOR'S CERTIFICATE (SLIGHTLY REDUCED), TAKEN FROM
RECORD BOOK "B," PAGE 60, IN THE OFFICE OF JEFFERSON COUNTY,
KENTUCKY.]

The "barbarous neighborhood" and the "savage intercourse" undoubtedly
had their effect upon the manners and morals of the settlers; but we
should fall into error if we took it for granted that the pioneers
were all of one piece. The ruling motive which led most of them to the
wilds was that Anglo-Saxon lust of land which seems inseparable from
the race. The prospect of possessing a four-hundred-acre farm by
merely occupying it, and the privilege of exchanging a basketful of
almost worthless continental currency for an unlimited estate at the
nominal value of forty cents per acre, were irresistible to thousands
of land-loving Virginians and Carolinians whose ambition of
proprietorship was larger than their means. Accompanying this flood of
emigrants of good faith was the usual froth and scum of shiftless
idlers and adventurers, who were either drifting with a current they
were too worthless to withstand, or in pursuit of dishonest gains in
fresher and simpler regions. The vices and virtues of the pioneers
were such as proceeded from their environment. They were careless of
human life because life was worth comparatively little in that hard
struggle for existence; but they had a remarkably clear idea of the
value of property, and visited theft not only with condign punishment,
but also with the severest social proscription. Stealing a horse was
punished more swiftly and with more feeling than homicide. A man might
be replaced more easily than the other animal. Sloth was the worst of
weaknesses. An habitual drunkard was more welcome at "raisings" and
"logrollings" than a known faineant. The man who did not do a man's
share where work was to be done was christened "Lazy Lawrence," and
that was the end of him socially. Cowardice was punished by inexorable
disgrace. The point of honor was as strictly observed as it ever has
been in the idlest and most artificial society. If a man accused
another of falsehood, the ordeal by fisticuffs was instantly resorted
to. Weapons were rarely employed in these chivalrous encounters, being
kept for more serious use with Indians and wild beasts; nevertheless
fists, teeth, and the gouging thumb were often employed with fatal
effect. Yet among this rude and uncouth people there was a genuine and
remarkable respect for law. They seemed to recognize it as an absolute
necessity of their existence. In the territory of Kentucky, and
afterwards in that of Illinois, it occurred at several periods in the
transition from counties to territories and states, that the country
was without any organized authority. But the people were a law unto
themselves. Their improvised courts and councils administered law and
equity; contracts were enforced, debts were collected, and a sort of
order was maintained. It may be said, generally, that the character of
this people was far above their circumstances. In all the accessories
of life, by which we are accustomed to rate communities and races in
the scale of civilization, they were little removed from primitive
barbarism. They dressed in the skins of wild beasts killed by
themselves, and in linen stuffs woven by themselves. They hardly knew
the use of iron except in their firearms and knives. Their food
consisted almost exclusively of game, fish, and roughly ground corn-
meal. Their exchanges were made by barter; many a child grew up
without ever seeing a piece of money. Their habitations were hardly
superior to those of the savages with whom they waged constant war.
Large families lived in log huts, put together without iron, and far
more open to the inclemencies of the skies than the pig-styes of the
careful farmer of to-day. An early schoolmaster says that the first
place where he went to board was the house of one Lucas, consisting of
a single room, sixteen feet square, and tenanted by Mr. and Mrs.
Lucas, ten children, three dogs, two cats, and himself. There were
many who lived in hovels so cold that they had to sleep on their shoes
to keep them from freezing too stiff to be put on. The children grew
inured to misery like this, and played barefoot in the snow. It is an
error to suppose that all this could be undergone with impunity. They
suffered terribly from malarial and rheumatic complaints, and the
instances of vigorous and painless age were rare among them. The lack
of moral and mental sustenance was still more marked. They were
inclined to be a religious people, but a sermon was an unusual luxury,
only to be enjoyed at long intervals and by great expense of time.
There were few books or none, and there was little opportunity for the
exchange of opinion. Any variation in the dreary course of events was
welcome. A murder was not without its advantages as a stimulus to
conversation; a criminal trial was a kind of holiday to a county. It
was this poverty of life, this famine of social gratification, from
which sprang their fondness for the grosser forms of excitement, and
their tendency to rough and brutal practical joking. In a life like
theirs a laugh seemed worth having at any expense.

[Illustration:   HOUSE NEAR BEECHLAND, KENTUCKY, IN WHICH THOMAS LINCOLN
AND NANCY HANKS WERE MARRIED.]

But near as they were to barbarism in all the circumstances of their
daily existence, they were far from it politically. They were the
children of a race which had been trained in government for centuries
in the best school the world has ever seen, and wherever they went
they formed the town, the county, the court, and the legislative power
with the ease and certainty of nature evolving its results. And this
they accomplished in the face of a savage foe surrounding their feeble
settlements, always alert and hostile, invisible and dreadful as the
visionary powers of the air. Until the treaty of Greenville, in 1795,
closed the long and sanguinary history of the old Indian wars, there
was no day in which the pioneer could leave his cabin with the
certainty of not finding it in ashes when he returned, and his little
flock murdered on his threshold, or carried into a captivity worse
than death. Whenever nightfall came with the man of the house away
from home, the anxiety and care of the women and children were none
the less bitter because so common.

[Illustration:   MAP SHOWING VARIOUS LOCALITIES CONNECTED WITH EARLY
EVENTS IN THE LINCOLN FAMILY.]

The life of the pioneer Abraham Lincoln soon came to a disastrous
close. He had settled in Jefferson County, on the land he had bought
from the Government, and cleared a small farm in the forest.
[Footnote: Lyman C. Draper, of the Wisconsin Historical Society, has
kindly furnished us with a MS account of a Kentucky tradition
according to which the pioneer Abraham Lincoln was captured by the
Indians, near Crow's Station, in August, 1782, carried into captivity,
and forced to run the gauntlet. The story rests on the statement of a
single person, Mrs. Sarah Graham.] One morning in the year 1784, he
started with his three sons, Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas, to the edge
of the clearing, and began the day's work. A shot from the brush
killed the father; Mordecai, the eldest son, ran instinctively to the
house, Josiah to the neighboring fort, for assistance, and Thomas, the
youngest, a child of six, was left with the corpse of his father.
Mordecai, reaching the cabin, seized the rifle, and saw through the
loophole an Indian in his war-paint stooping to raise the child from
the ground. He took deliberate aim at a white ornament on the breast
of the savage and brought him down. The little boy, thus released, ran
to the cabin, and Mordecai, from the loft, renewed his fire upon the
savages, who began to show themselves from the thicket, until Josiah
returned with assistance from the stockade, and the assailants fled.
This tragedy made an indelible impression on the mind of Mordecai.
Either a spirit of revenge for his murdered father, or a sportsmanlike
pleasure in his successful shot, made him a determined Indian-stalker,
and he rarely stopped to inquire whether the red man who came within
range of his rifle was friendly or hostile. [Footnote: Late in life
Mordecai Lincoln removed to Hancock County, Illinois, where his
descendants still live.]

[Illustration:   FAC-SIMILE OF THE MARRIAGE BOND OF THOMAS LINCOLN.]

The head of the family being gone, the widow Lincoln soon removed to a
more thickly settled neighborhood in Washington County. There her
children grew up. Mordecai and Josiah became reputable citizens; the
two daughters married two men named Crume and Brumfield. Thomas, to
whom were reserved the honors of an illustrious paternity, learned the
trade of a carpenter. He was an easy-going man, entirely without
ambition, but not without self-respect. Though the friendliest and
most jovial of gossips, he was not insensible to affronts; and when
his slow anger was roused he was a formidable adversary. Several
border bullies, at different times, crowded him indiscreetly, and were
promptly and thoroughly whipped. He was strong, well-knit, and sinewy;
but little over the medium height, though in other respects he seems
to have resembled his son in appearance.

On the 12th of June, 1806, [Footnote: All previous accounts give the
date of this marriage as September 23d. This error arose from a
clerical blunder in the county record of marriages. The minister, the
Rev. Jesse Head, in making his report, wrote the date before the
names; the clerk, copying it, lost the proper sequence of the entries,
and gave to the Lincolns the date belonging to the next couple on the
list.] while learning his trade in the carpenter shop of Joseph Hanks,
in Elizabethtown, he married Nancy Hanks, a niece of his employer,
near Beechland, in Washington County. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy
footnote (1) relocated to chapter end.] She was one of a large family
who had emigrated from Virginia with the Lincolns and with another
family called Sparrow. They had endured together the trials of pioneer
life; their close relations continued for many years after, and were
cemented by frequent intermarriage.

Mrs. Lincoln's mother was named Lucy Hanks; her sisters were Betty,
Polly, and Nancy who married Thomas Sparrow, Jesse Friend, and Levi
Hall. The childhood of Nancy was passed with the Sparrows, and she was
oftener called by their name than by her own. The whole family
connection was composed of people so little given to letters that it
is hard to determine the proper names and relationships of the younger
members amid the tangle of traditional cousinships. [Footnote: The
Hanks family seem to have gone from Pennsylvania and thence to
Kentucky about the same time with the Lincolns. They also belonged to
the Communion of Friends.--"Historical Collections of Gwynnedd," by H.
M. Jenkins.] Those who went to Indiana with Thomas Lincoln, and grew
up with his children, are the only ones that need demand our
attention.

There was no hint of future glory in the wedding or the bringing home
of Nancy Lincoln. All accounts represent her as a handsome young woman
of twenty-three, of appearance and intellect superior to her lowly
fortunes. She could read and write,--a remarkable accomplishment in
her circle,--and even taught her husband to form the letters of his
name. He had no such valuable wedding gift to bestow upon her; he
brought her to a little house in Elizabethtown, where he and she and
want dwelt together in fourteen feet square. The next year a daughter
was born to them; and the next the young carpenter, not finding his
work remunerative enough for his growing needs, removed to a little
farm which he had bought on the easy terms then prevalent in Kentucky.
It was on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in what was then Hardin
and is now La Rue County, three miles from Hodgensville. The ground
had nothing attractive about it but its cheapness. It was hardly more
grateful than the rocky hill slopes of New England. It required full
as earnest and intelligent industry to persuade a living out of those
barren hillocks and weedy hollows, covered with stunted and scrubby
underbrush, as it would amid the rocks and sands of the northern
coast.

Thomas Lincoln settled down in this dismal solitude to a deeper
poverty than any of his name had ever known; and there, in the midst
of the most unpromising circumstances that ever witnessed the advent
of a hero into this world, Abraham Lincoln was born on the 12th day of
February, 1809.

Four years later, Thomas Lincoln purchased a fine farm of 238 acres on
Knob Creek, near where it flows into the Rolling Fork, and succeeded
in getting a portion of it into cultivation. The title, however,
remained in him only a little while, and after his property had passed
out of his control he looked about for another place to establish
himself.

[Illustration:   This Certificate, or Marriage List (here shown in
reduced fac-simile), written by the Rev. Jesse Head, was lost sight of
for many years, and about 1886 was discovered through the efforts of
W. F. Booker, Clerk of Washington County, Kentucky.]

Of all these years of Abraham Lincoln's early childhood we know almost
nothing. He lived a solitary life in the woods, returning from his
lonesome little games to his cheerless home. He never talked of these
days to his most intimate friends. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy
footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.] Once, when asked what he
remembered about the war with Great Britain, he replied: "Nothing but
this. I had been fishing one day and caught a little fish which I was
taking home. I met a soldier in the road, and, having been always told
at home that we must be good to the soldiers, I gave him my fish."
This is only a faint glimpse, but what it shows is rather
pleasant--the generous child and the patriotic household. But there is
no question that these first years of his life had their lasting
effect upon the temperament of this great mirthful and melancholy man.
He had little schooling. He accompanied his sister Sarah [Footnote:
This daughter of Thomas Lincoln is sometimes called Nancy and
sometimes Sarah. She seems to have borne the former name during her
mother's life-time, and to have taken her stepmother's name after Mr.
Lincoln's second marriage.] to the only schools that existed in their
neighborhood, one kept by Zachariah Riney, another by Caleb Hazel,
where he learned his alphabet and a little more. But of all those
advantages for the cultivation of a young mind and spirit which every
home now offers to its children, the books, toys, ingenious games, and
daily devotion of parental love, he knew absolutely nothing.

[Relocated Footnote: Soon after Mr. Lincoln arrived in Washington in
1861, he received the following letter from one of his Virginia
kinsmen, the last communication which ever came from them. It was
written on paper adorned with a portrait of Jefferson Davis, and was
inclosed in an envelope emblazoned with the Confederate flag:

"To ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Esq., _President of the Northern Confederacy_.

"SIR: Having just returned from a trip through Virginia, North
Carolina, and Tennessee, permit me to inform you that you will get
whipped out of your boots. To-day I met a gentleman from Anna,
Illinois, and although he voted for you he says that the moment your
troops leave Cairo they will get the spots knocked out of them. My
dear sir, these are facts which time will prove to be correct.

"I am, sir, with every consideration, yours respectfully,

"MINOR LINCOLN,

"Of the Staunton stock of Lincolns."

There was a young Abraham Lincoln on the Confederate side in the
Shenandoah distinguished for his courage and ferocity. He lay in wait
and shot a Drunkard preacher, whom he suspected of furnishing
information to the Union army. (Letter from Samuel W. Pennypacker.)]

[Relocated Footnote: In giving to the wife of the pioneer Lincoln the
name of Mary Shipley we follow the tradition in his family. The Hon.
J. L. Nall, of Missouri, grandson of Nancy (Lincoln) Brumfield,
Abraham Lincoln's youngest child, has given us so clear a statement of
the case that we cannot hesitate to accept it, although it conflicts
with equally positive statements from other sources. The late Gideon
Welles, Secretary of the Navy, who gave much intelligent effort to
genealogical researches, was convinced that the Abraham Lincoln who
married Miss Hannah Winters, a daughter of Ann Boone, sister of the
famous Daniel, was the President's grandfather. Waddell's "Annals of
Augusta County" says he married Elizabeth Winter, a cousin of Daniel
Boone. The Boone and Lincoln families were large and there were
frequent intermarriages among them, and the patriarchal name of
Abraham was a favorite one. There was still another Lincoln, Hannaniah
by name, who was also intimately associated with the Boones. His
signature appears on the surveyor's certificate for Abraham Lincoln's
land in Jefferson County, and he joined Daniel Boone in 1798 in the
purchase of the tract of land on the Missouri River where Boone died.
(Letter from Richard V. B. Lincoln, printed in the "Williamsport
[Pa.] Banner," Feb. 25, 1881.)]

[Relocated Footnote: In the possession of Colonel Reuben T. Durrett,
of Louisville, a gentleman who has made the early history of his State
a subject of careful study, and to whom we are greatly indebted for
information in regard to the settlement of the Lincolns in Kentucky.
He gives the following list of lands in that State owned by Abraham
Lincoln:

1. Four hundred acres on Long Run, a branch of Floyd's Fork, in
Jefferson County, entered May 29, 1780, and surveyed May 7, 1785. We
have in our possession the original patent issued by Governor Garrard,
of Kentucky, to Abraham Lincoln for this property. It was found by
Col. A. C. Matthews, of the 99th Illinois, in 1863, at an abandoned
residence near Indianola, Texas.

2. Eight hundred acres on Green River, near Green River Lick, entered
June 7, 1780, and surveyed October 12, 1784.

3. Five hundred acres in Campbell County, date of entry not known, but
surveyed September 27, 1798, and patented June 30, 1799--the survey
and patent evidently following his entry after his death. It is
possible that this was the five-hundred-acre tract found in Boone's
field-book, in the possession of Lyman C. Draper, Esq., Secretary of
the Wisconsin Historical Society, and erroneously supposed by some to
have been in Mercer County. Boone was a deputy of Colonel Thomas
Marshall, Surveyor of Fayette County.]

[Relocated Footnote (1): The following is a copy of the marriage bond:

"Know all men by these presents, that we, Thomas Lincoln and Richard
Berry, are held and firmly bound unto his Excellency, the Governor of
Kentucky, in the just and full sum of fifty pounds current money to the
payment of which well and truly to be made to the said Governor and his
successors, we bind ourselves, our heirs, etc., jointly and severally,
firmly by these presents, sealed with our seals and dated this 10th day
of June, 1806. The condition of the above obligation is such that
whereas there is a marriage shortly intended between the above bound
Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, for which a license has issued, now if
there be no lawful cause to obstruct the said marriage, then this
obligation to be void, else to remain in full force and virtue in law.

  "THOMAS LINCOLN [Seal].
  "RICHARD BERRY [Seal].
  "_Witness_, JOHN H. PARROTT, Guardian."

Richard Berry was a connection of Lincoln; his wife was a Shipley.]

[Relocated Footnote (2): There is still living (1886) near Knob Creek
in Kentucky, at the age of eighty, a man who claims to have known
Abraham Lincoln in his childhood--Austin Gollaher. He says he used to
play with Abe Lincoln in the shavings of his father's carpenter shop.
He tells a story which, if accurate, entitles him to the civic crown
which the Romans used to give to one who saved the life of a citizen.
When Gollaher was eleven and Lincoln eight the two boys were in the
woods in pursuit of partridges; in trying to "coon" across Knob Creek
on a log, Lincoln fell in and Gollaher fished him out with a sycamore
branch--a service to the Republic, the value of which it would be
difficult to compute.]




CHAPTER II

INDIANA


[Sidenote: 1818.]

By the time the boy Abraham had attained his seventh year, the social
condition of Kentucky had changed considerably from the early pioneer
days. Life had assumed a more settled and orderly course. The old
barbarous equality of the earlier time was gone; a difference of
classes began to be seen. Those who held slaves assumed a distinct
social superiority over those who did not. Thomas Lincoln, concluding
that Kentucky was no country for a poor man, determined to seek his
fortune in Indiana. He had heard of rich and unoccupied lands in Perry
County in that State, and thither he determined to go. He built a rude
raft, loaded it with his kit of tools and four hundred gallons of
whisky, and trusted his fortunes to the winding water-courses. He met
with only one accident on his way: his raft capsized in the Ohio
River, but he fished up his kit of tools and most of the ardent
spirits, and arrived safely at the place of a settler named Posey,
with whom he left his odd invoice of household goods for the
wilderness, while he started on foot to look for a home in the dense
forest. He selected a spot which pleased him in his first day's
journey. He then walked back to Knob Creek and brought his family on
to their new home. No humbler cavalcade ever invaded the Indiana
timber. Besides his wife and two children, his earthly possessions
were of the slightest, for the backs of two borrowed horses sufficed
for the load. Insufficient bedding and clothing, a few pans and
kettles, were their sole movable wealth. They relied on Lincoln's kit
of tools for their furniture, and on his rifle for their food. At
Posey's they hired a wagon and literally hewed a path through the
wilderness to their new habitation near Little Pigeon Creek, a mile
and a half east of Gentryville, in a rich and fertile forest country.

Thomas Lincoln, with the assistance of his wife and children, built a
temporary shelter of the sort called in the frontier language "a half-
faced camp"; merely a shed of poles, which defended the inmates on
three sides from foul weather, but left them open to its inclemency in
front. For a whole year his family lived in this wretched fold, while
he was clearing a little patch of ground for planting corn, and
building a rough cabin for a permanent residence. They moved into the
latter before it was half completed; for by this time the Sparrows had
followed the Lincolns from Kentucky, and the half-faced camp was given
up to them. But the rude cabin seemed so spacious and comfortable
after the squalor of "the camp," that Thomas Lincoln did no further
work on it for a long time. He left it for a year or two without
doors, or windows, or floor. The battle for existence allowed him no
time for such superfluities. He raised enough corn to support life;
the dense forest around him abounded in every form of feathered game;
a little way from his cabin an open glade was full of deer-licks, and
an hour or two of idle waiting was generally rewarded by a shot at a
fine deer, which would furnish meat for a week, and material for
breeches and shoes. His cabin was like that of other pioneers. A few
three-legged stools; a bedstead made of poles stuck between the logs
in the angle of the cabin, the outside corner supported by a crotched
stick driven into the ground; the table, a huge hewed log standing on
four legs; a pot, kettle, and skillet, and a few tin and pewter dishes
were all the furniture. The boy Abraham climbed at night to his bed of
leaves in the loft, by a ladder of wooden pins driven into the logs.

This life has been vaunted by poets and romancers as a happy and
healthful one. Even Dennis Hanks, speaking of his youthful days when
his only home was the half-faced camp, says, "I tell you, Billy, I
enjoyed myself better then than I ever have since." But we may
distrust the reminiscences of old settlers, who see their youth in the
flattering light of distance. The life was neither enjoyable nor
wholesome. The rank woods were full of malaria, and singular epidemics
from time to time ravaged the settlements. In the autumn of 1818 the
little community of Pigeon Creek was almost exterminated by a
frightful pestilence called the milk-sickness, or, in the dialect of
the country, "the milk-sick." It is a mysterious disease which has
been the theme of endless wrangling among Western physicians, and the
difficulty of ascertaining anything about it has been greatly
increased by the local sensitiveness which forbids any one to admit
that any well-defined case has ever been seen in his neighborhood,
"although just over the creek (or in the next county) they have had it
bad." It seems to have been a malignant form of fever--attributed
variously to malaria and to the eating of poisonous herbs by the
cattle--attacking cattle as well as human beings, attended with
violent retching and a burning sensation in the stomach, often
terminating fatally on the third day. In many cases those who
apparently recovered lingered for years with health seriously
impaired. Among the Pioneers of Pigeon Creek, so ill-fed, ill-housed,
and uncared for, there was little prospect of recovery from such a
grave disorder. The Sparrows, husband and wife, died early in October,
and Nancy Hanks Lincoln followed them after an interval of a few days.
Thomas Lincoln made the coffins for his dead "out of green lumber cut
with a whipsaw," and they were all buried, with scant ceremony, in a
little clearing of the forest. It is related of young Abraham, that he
sorrowed most of all that his mother should have been laid away with
such maimed rites, and that he contrived several months later to have
a wandering preacher named David Elkin brought to the settlement, to
deliver a funeral sermon over her grave, already white with the early
winter snows. [Footnote: A stone has been placed over the site of the
grave "by P. E. Studebaker, of South Bend, Indiana." The stone bears
the following inscription: "Nancy Hanks Lincoln, mother of President
Lincoln, died October 5th, A. D. 1818, aged 35 years. Erected by a
friend of her martyred son, 1879."]

This was the dreariest winter of his life, for before the next
December came his father had brought from Kentucky a new wife, who was
to change the lot of all the desolate little family very much for the
better. Sarah Bush had been an acquaintance of Thomas Lincoln before
his first marriage; she had, it is said, rejected him to marry one
Johnston, the jailer at Elizabethtown, who had died, leaving her with
three children, a boy and two girls. When Lincoln's widowhood had
lasted a year, he went down to Elizabethtown to begin again the wooing
broken off so many years before. He wasted no time in preliminaries,
but promptly made his wishes known, and the next morning they were
married. It was growing late in the autumn, and the pioneer probably
dreaded another lonely winter on Pigeon Creek. Mrs. Johnston was not
altogether portionless. She had a store of household goods which
filled a four-horse wagon borrowed of Ralph Grume, Thomas Lincoln's
brother-in-law, to transport the bride to Indiana. It took little time
for this energetic and honest Christian woman to make her influence
felt, even in those discouraging surroundings, and Thomas Lincoln and
the children were the better for her coming all the rest of their
lives. The lack of doors and floors was at once corrected. Her honest
pride inspired her husband to greater thrift and industry. The goods
she brought with her compelled some effort at harmony in the other
fittings of the house. She dressed the children in warmer clothing and
put them to sleep in comfortable beds. With this slight addition to
their resources the family were much improved in appearance, behavior,
and self-respect.

[Illustration:   SARAH BUSH LINCOLN AT THE AGE OF SEVENTY-SIX.]

Thomas Lincoln joined the Baptist church at Little Pigeon in 1823; his
oldest child, Sarah, followed his example three years later. They were
known as active and consistent members of that communion. Lincoln was
himself a good carpenter when he chose to work at his trade; a walnut
table made by him is still preserved as part of the furniture of the
church to which he belonged.

[Sidenote: MS. letter from the Rev. T.V. Robertson, pastor of the
Little Pigeon Baptist church.]

Such a woman as Sarah Bush could not be careless of so important a
matter as the education of her children, and they made the best use of
the scanty opportunities the neighborhood afforded. "It was a wild
region," writes Mr. Lincoln, in one of those rare bits of
autobiography which he left behind him, "with many bears and other
wild animals still in the woods. There were some schools so-called,
but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond 'readin',
writin', and cipherin' to the Rule of Three.' If a straggler supposed
to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was
looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite
ambition for education." But in the case of this ungainly boy there
was no necessity of any external incentive. A thirst for knowledge as
a means of rising in the world was innate in him. It had nothing to do
with that love of science for its own sake which has been so often
seen in lowly savants, who have sacrificed their lives to the pure
desire of knowing the works of God. All the little learning he ever
acquired he seized as a tool to better his condition. He learned his
letters that he might read books and see how men in the great world
outside of his woods had borne themselves in the fight for which he
longed. He learned to write, first, that he might have an
accomplishment his playmates had not; then that he might help his
elders by writing their letters, and enjoy the feeling of usefulness
which this gave him; and finally that he might copy what struck him in
his reading and thus make it his own for future use. He learned to
cipher certainly from no love of mathematics, but because it might
come in play in some more congenial business than the farm-work which
bounded the horizon of his contemporaries. Had it not been for that
interior spur which kept his clear spirit at its task, his schools
could have done little for him; for, counting his attendance under
Riney and Hazel in Kentucky, and under Dorsey, Crawford, and Swaney in
Indiana, it amounted to less than a year in all. The schools were much
alike. They were held in deserted cabins of round logs, with earthen
floors, and small holes for windows, sometimes illuminated by as much
light as could penetrate through panes of paper greased with lard. The
teachers were usually in keeping with their primitive surroundings.
The profession offered no rewards sufficient to attract men of
education or capacity. After a few months of desultory instruction
young Abraham knew all that these vagrant literati could teach him.
His last school-days were passed with one Swaney in 1826, who taught
at a distance of four and a half miles from the Lincoln cabin. The
nine miles of walking doubtless seemed to Thomas Lincoln a waste of
time, and the lad was put at steady work and saw no more of school.

But it is questionable whether he lost anything by being deprived of
the ministrations of the backwoods dominies. When his tasks ended, his
studies became the chief pleasure of his life. In all the intervals of
his work--in which he never took delight, knowing well enough that he
was born for something better than that--he read, wrote, and ciphered
incessantly. His reading was naturally limited by his opportunities,
for books were among the rarest of luxuries in that region and time.
But he read everything he could lay his hands upon, and he was
certainly fortunate in the few books of which he became the possessor.
It would hardly be possible to select a better handful of classics for
a youth in his circumstances than the few volumes he turned with a
nightly and daily hand--the Bible, "Aesop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe,"
"The Pilgrim's Progress," a history of the United States, and Weem's
"Life of Washington." These were the best, and these he read over and
over till he knew them almost by heart. But his voracity for anything
printed was insatiable. He would sit in the twilight and read a
dictionary as long as he could see. He used to go to David Turnham's,
the town constable, and devour the "Revised Statutes of Indiana," as
boys in our day do the "Three Guardsmen." Of the books he did not own
he took voluminous notes, filling his copy-book with choice extracts,
and poring over them until they were fixed in his memory. He could not
afford to waste paper upon his original compositions. He would sit by
the fire at night and cover the wooden shovel with essays and
arithmetical exercises, which he would shave off and then begin again.
It is touching to think of this great-spirited child, battling year
after year against his evil star, wasting his ingenuity upon devices
and makeshifts, his high intelligence starving for want of the simple
appliances of education that are now offered gratis to the poorest and
most indifferent. He did a man's work from the time he left school;
his strength and stature were already far beyond those of ordinary
men. He wrought his appointed tasks ungrudgingly, though without
enthusiasm; but when his employer's day was over, his own began. John
Hanks says: "When Abe and I returned to the house from work he would
go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn-bread, take down a book,
sit down, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read." The picture
may be lacking in grace, but its truthfulness is beyond question. The
habit remained with him always. Some of his greatest work in later
years was done in this grotesque Western fashion,--"sitting on his
shoulder-blades."

[Sidenote: W. H. Lamou "Life of Lincoln," p. 37.]

[Sidenote: Damon, p. 80.]

Otherwise his life at this time differed little from that of ordinary
farm-hands. His great strength and intelligence made him a valuable
laborer, and his unfailing good temper and flow of rude rustic wit
rendered him the most agreeable of comrades. He was always ready with
some kindly act or word for others. Once he saved the life of the town
drunkard, whom he found freezing by the roadside, by carrying him in
his strong arms to the tavern, and working over him until he revived.
It is a curious fact that this act of common humanity was regarded as
something remarkable in the neighborhood; the grateful sot himself
always said "it was mighty clever of Abe to tote me so far that cold
night." It was also considered an eccentricity that he hated and
preached against cruelty to animals. Some of his comrades remember
still his bursts of righteous wrath, when a boy, against the wanton
murder of turtles and other creatures. He was evidently of better and
finer clay than his fellows, even in those wild and ignorant days. At
home he was the life of the singularly assorted household, which
consisted, besides his parents and himself, of his own sister, Mrs.
Lincoln's two girls and boy, Dennis Hanks, the legacy of the dying
Sparrow family, and John Hanks (son of the carpenter Joseph with whom
Thomas Lincoln learned his trade), who came from Kentucky several
years after the others. It was probably as much the inexhaustible good
nature and kindly helpfulness of young Abraham which kept the peace
among all these heterogeneous elements, effervescing with youth and
confined in a one-roomed cabin, as it was the Christian sweetness and
firmness of the woman of the house. It was a happy and united
household: brothers and sisters and cousins living peacefully under
the gentle rule of the good stepmother, but all acknowledging from a
very early period the supremacy in goodness and cleverness of their
big brother Abraham. Mrs. Lincoln, not long before her death, gave
striking testimony of his winning and loyal character. She said to Mr.
Herndon: "I can say, what scarcely one mother in a thousand can say,
Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused in fact or
appearance to do anything I asked him. His mind and mine--what little
I had--seemed to run together.... I had a son John, who was raised
with Abe. Both were good boys, but I must say, both now being dead,
that Abe was the best boy I ever saw or expect to see." Such were the
beginnings of this remarkable career, sacred as we see from childhood,
to duty and to human kindliness.

"We are making no claim of early saintship for him. He was merely a
good boy, with sufficient wickedness to prove his humanity. One of his
employers, undazzled by recent history, faithfully remembers that
young Abe liked his dinner and his pay better than his work: there is
surely nothing alien to ordinary mortality in this. It is also
reported that he sometimes impeded the celerity of harvest operations
by making burlesque speeches, or worse than that, comic sermons, from
the top of some tempting stump, to the delight of the hired hands and
the exasperation of the farmer. His budding talents as a writer were
not always used discreetly. He was too much given to scribbling coarse
satires and chronicles, in prose, and in something which had to him
and his friends the air of verse. From this arose occasional heart-
burnings and feuds, in which Abraham bore his part according to the
custom of the country. Despite his Quaker ancestry and his natural
love of peace, he was no non-resistant, and when he once entered upon
a quarrel the opponent usually had the worst of it. But he was
generous and placable, and some of his best friends were those with
whom he had had differences, and had settled them in the way then
prevalent,--in a ring of serious spectators, calmly and judicially
ruminant, under the shade of some spreading oak, at the edge of the
timber. Before we close our sketch of this period of Lincoln's life,
it may not be amiss to glance for a moment at the state of society
among the people with whom his lot was cast in these important years.

In most respects there had been little moral or material improvement
since the early settlement of the country. Their houses were usually
of one room, built of round logs with the bark on. We have known a man
to gain the sobriquet of "Split-log Mitchell" by indulging in the
luxury of building a cabin of square-hewn timbers. Their dress was
still mostly of tanned deer-hide, a material to the last degree
uncomfortable when the wearer was caught in a shower. Their shoes were
of the same, and a good Western authority calls a wet moccasin "a
decent way of going barefoot." About the time, however, when Lincoln
grew to manhood, garments of wool and of tow began to be worn, dyed
with the juice of the butternut or white walnut, and the hides of
neat-cattle began to be tanned. But for a good while it was only the
women who indulged in these novelties. There was little public
worship. Occasionally an itinerant preacher visited a county, and the
settlers for miles around would go nearly in mass to the meeting. If a
man was possessed of a wagon, the family rode luxuriously; but as a
rule the men walked and the women went on horseback with the little
children in their arms. It was considered no violation of the
sanctities of the occasion to carry a rifle and take advantage of any
game which might be stirring during the long walk. Arriving at the
place of meeting, which was some log cabin if the weather was foul, or
the shade of a tree if it was fair, the assembled worshipers threw
their provisions into a common store and picnicked in neighborly
companionship. The preacher would then take off his coat, and go at
his work with an energy unknown to our days.

There were few other social meetings. Men came together for
"raisings," where a house was built in a day; for "log-rollings,"
where tons of excellent timber were piled together and wastefully
burned; for wolf-hunts, where a tall pole was erected in the midst of
a prairie or clearing, and a great circle of hunters formed around it,
sometimes of miles in diameter, which, gradually contracting with
shouts and yells, drove all the game in the woods together at the pole
for slaughter; and for horse-races, which bore little resemblance to
those magnificent exhibitions which are the boast of Kentucky at this
time. In these affairs the women naturally took no part; but weddings,
which were entertainments scarcely less rude and boisterous, were
their own peculiar province. These festivities lasted rarely less than
twenty-four hours. The guests assembled in the morning. There was a
race for the whisky bottle; a midday dinner; an afternoon of rough
games and outrageous practical jokes; a supper and dance at night,
interrupted by the successive withdrawals of the bride and of the
groom, attended with ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian
crudeness; and a noisy dispersal next day.

[Sidenote: O. H. Smith, "Early Indiana Trials," p. 285.]

The one point at which they instinctively clung to civilization was
their regard for law and reverence for courts of justice. Yet these
were of the simplest character and totally devoid of any adventitious
accessories. An early jurist of the country writes: "I was Circuit
Prosecuting Attorney at the time of the trials at the falls of Fall
Creek, where Pendleton now stands. Four of the prisoners were
convicted of murder, and three of them hung, for killing Indians. The
court was held in a double log cabin, the grand jury sat upon a log in
the woods, and the foreman signed the bills of indictment, which I had
prepared, upon his knee; there was not a petit juror that had shoes
on; all wore moccasins, and were belted around the waist, and carried
side-knives used by the hunters." Yet amidst all this apparent
savagery we see justice was done, and the law vindicated even against
the bitterest prejudices of these pioneer jurymen.

[Sidenote: Lamon, p. 44.]

They were full of strange superstitions. The belief in witchcraft had
long ago passed away with the smoke of the fagots from old and New
England, but it survived far into this century in Kentucky and the
lower halves of Indiana and Illinois--touched with a peculiar tinge of
African magic. The pioneers believed in it for good and evil. Their
veterinary practice was mostly by charms and incantations; and when a
person believed himself bewitched, a shot at the image of the witch
with a bullet melted out of a half-dollar was the favorite curative
agency. Luck was an active divinity in their apprehension, powerful
for blessing or bane, announced by homely signs, to be placated by
quaint ceremonies. A dog crossing the hunter's path spoiled his day,
unless he instantly hooked his little fingers together, and pulled
till the animal disappeared. They were familiar with the ever-
recurring mystification of the witch-hazel, or divining-rod; and the
"cure by faith" was as well known to them as it has since become in a
more sophisticated state of society. The commonest occurrences were
heralds of death and doom. A bird lighting in a window, a dog baying
at certain hours, the cough of a horse in the direction of a child,
the sight, or worse still, the touch of a dead snake, heralded
domestic woe. A wagon driving past the house with a load of baskets
was a warning of atmospheric disturbance. A vague and ignorant
astronomy governed their plantings and sowings, the breeding of their
cattle, and all farm-work. They must fell trees for fence-rails before
noon, and in the waxing of the moon. Fences built when there was no
moon would give way; but that was the proper season for planting
potatoes and other vegetables whose fruit grows underground; those
which bore their product in the air must be planted when the moon
shone. The magical power of the moon was wide in its influence; it
extended to the most minute details of life.

[Sidenote: Lamon, p. 52.]

Among these people, and in all essential respects one of them, Abraham
Lincoln passed his childhood and youth. He was not remarkably
precocious. His mind was slow in acquisition, and his powers of
reasoning and rhetoric improved constantly to the end of his life, at
a rate of progress marvelously regular and sustained. But there was
that about him, even at the age of nineteen years, which might well
justify his admiring friends in presaging for him an unusual career.
He had read every book he could find, and could "spell down" the whole
county at their orthographical contests. By dint of constant practice
he had acquired an admirably clear and serviceable handwriting. He
occasionally astounded his companions by such glimpses of occult
science as that the world is round and that the sun is relatively
stationary. He wrote, for his own amusement and edification, essays on
politics, of which gentlemen of standing who had been favored with a
perusal said with authority, at the cross-roads grocery, "The world
can't beat it." One or two of these compositions got into print and
vastly increased the author's local fame. He was also a magnanimous
boy, with a larger and kindlier spirit than common. His generosity,
courage, and capability of discerning two sides to a dispute, were
remarkable even then, and won him the admiration of those to whom such
qualities were unknown. But perhaps, after all, the thing which gained
and fixed his mastery over his fellows was to a great degree his
gigantic stature and strength. He attained his full growth, six feet
and four inches, two years before he came of age. He rarely met with a
man he could not easily handle. His strength is still a tradition in
Spencer County. One aged man says that he has seen him pick up and
carry away a chicken-house weighing six hundred pounds. At another
time, seeing some men preparing a contrivance for lifting some large
posts, Abe quickly shouldered the posts and took them where they were
needed. One of his employers says, "He could sink an axe deeper into
wood than any man I ever saw." With strength like this and a brain to
direct it, a man was a born leader in that country and at that time.
There are, of course, foolish stories extant that Abraham used to
boast, and that others used to predict, that he would be President
some day. The same thing is daily said of thousands of boys who will
never be constables. But there is evidence that he felt too large for
the life of a farmhand on Pigeon Creek, and his thoughts naturally
turned, after the manner of restless boys in the West, to the river,
as the avenue of escape from the narrow life of the woods. He once
asked an old friend to give him a recommendation to some steamboat on
the Ohio, but desisted from his purpose on being reminded that his
father had the right to dispose of his time for a year or so more. But
in 1828 an opportunity offered for a little glimpse of the world
outside, and the boy gladly embraced it. He was hired by Mr. Gentry,
the proprietor of the neighboring village of Gentryville, to accompany
his son with a flat-boat of produce to New Orleans and intermediate
landings. The voyage was made successfully, and Abraham gained great
credit for his management and sale of the cargo. The only important
incident of the trip occurred at the plantation of Madame Duchesne, a
few miles below Baton Rouge. The young merchants had tied up for the
night and were asleep in the cabin, when they were aroused by
shuffling footsteps, which proved to be a gang of marauding negroes,
coming to rob the boat. Abraham instantly attacked them with a club,
knocked several overboard and put the rest to flight; flushed with
battle, he and Allen Gentry carried the war into the enemy's country,
and pursued the retreating Africans some distance in the darkness.
They then returned to the boat, bleeding but victorious, and hastily
swung into the stream and floated down the river till daylight.
Lincoln's exertion in later years for the welfare of the African race
showed that this nocturnal battle had not led him to any hasty and
hostile generalizations.

The next autumn, John Hanks, the steadiest and most trustworthy of his
family, went to Illinois. Though an illiterate and rather dull man, he
had a good deal of solidity of character and consequently some
influence and consideration in the household. He settled in Macon
County, and was so well pleased with the country, and especially with
its admirable distribution into prairie and timber, that he sent
repeated messages to his friends in Indiana to come out and join him.
Thomas Lincoln was always ready to move. He had probably by this time
despaired of ever owning any unencumbered real estate in Indiana, and
the younger members of the family had little to bind them to the place
where they saw nothing in the future but hard work and poor living.
Thomas Lincoln handed over his farm to Mr. Gentry, sold his crop of
corn and hogs, packed his household goods and those of his children
and sons-in-law into a single wagon, drawn by two yoke of oxen, the
combined wealth of himself and Dennis Hanks, and started for the new
State. His daughter Sarah or Nancy, for she was called by both names,
who married Aaron Grigsby a few years before, had died in childbirth.
The emigrating family consisted of the Lincolns, John Johnston, Mrs.
Lincoln's son, and her daughters, Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Hanks, with their
husbands.

Two weeks of weary tramping over forest roads and muddy prairie, and
the dangerous fording of streams swollen by the February thaws,
brought the party to John Hanks's place near Decatur. He met them with
a frank and energetic welcome. He had already selected a piece of
ground for them a few miles from his own, and had the logs ready for
their house. They numbered men enough to build without calling in
their neighbors, and immediately put up a cabin on the north fork of
the Sangamon River. The family thus housed and sheltered, one more bit
of filial work remained for Abraham before assuming his virile
independence. With the assistance of John Hanks he plowed fifteen
acres, and split, from the tall walnut-trees of the primeval forest,
enough rails to surround them with a fence. Little did either dream,
while engaged in this work, that the day would come when the
appearance of John Hanks in a public meeting, with two of these rails
on his shoulder, would electrify a State convention, and kindle
throughout the country a contagious and passionate enthusiasm, whose
results would reach to endless generations.




CHAPTER III

ILLINOIS IN 1830


[Sidenote: Roy. J. M. Sturtevant, "Address to Old Settlers of Morgan
County."]

[Sidenote: Thomas Buckles, of McLean County.]

[Sidenote: J.C. Power, "Early Settlers of Sangamon County," p. 62.]

[Sidenote: "Old Times in McLean County," p. 414.]

[Illustration:   GOOSE-NEST PRAIRIE, NEAR FARMINGTON ILLINOIS, WHERE
THOMAS LINCOLN LIVED AND DIED.]

The Lincolns arrived in Illinois just in time to entitle themselves to
be called pioneers. When, in after years, associations of "Old
Settlers" began to be formed in Central Illinois, the qualification
for membership agreed upon by common consent was a residence in the
country before "the winter of the deep snow." This was in 1830-31, a
season of such extraordinary severity that it has formed for half a
century a recognized date in the middle counties of Illinois, among
those to whom in those days diaries and journals were unknown. The
snowfall began in the Christmas holidays and continued until the snow
was three feet deep on level ground. Then came a cold rain, freezing
as it fell, until a thick crust of ice gathered over the snow. The
weather became intensely cold, the mercury sinking to twelve degrees
below zero, Fahrenheit, and remaining there for two weeks. The storm
came on with such suddenness that all who were abroad had great
trouble in reaching their homes, and many perished. One man relates
that he and a friend or two were out in a hunting party with an ox-
team. They had collected a wagon-load of game and were on their way
home when the storm struck them. After they had gone four miles they
were compelled to abandon their wagon; the snow fell in heavy masses
"as if thrown from a scoop-shovel"; arriving within two miles of their
habitation, they were forced to trust to the instinct of their
animals, and reached home hanging to the tails of their steers. Not
all were so fortunate. Some were found weeks afterwards in the snow-
drifts, their flesh gnawed by famished wolves; and the fate of others
was unknown until the late spring sunshine revealed their resting-
places. To those who escaped, the winter was tedious and terrible. It
is hard for us to understand the isolation to which such weather
condemned the pioneer. For weeks they remained in their cabins hoping
for some mitigation of the frost. When at last they were driven out by
the fear of famine, the labor of establishing communications was
enormous. They finally made roads by "wallowing through the snow," as
an Illinois historian expresses it, and going patiently over the same
track until the snow was trampled hard and rounded like a turnpike.
These roads lasted far into the spring, when the snow had melted from
the plains, and wound for miles like threads of silver over the rich
black loam of the prairies. After that winter game was never again so
plentiful in the State. Much still remained, of course, but it never
recovered entirely from the rigors of that season and the stupid
enterprise of the pioneer hunters, who, when they came out of their
snow-beleaguered cabins, began chasing and killing the starved deer by
herds. It was easy work; the crust of the snow was strong enough to
bear the weight of men and dogs, but the slender hoofs of the deer
would after a few bounds pierce the treacherous surface. This
destructive slaughter went on until the game grew too lean to be worth
the killing. All sorts of wild animals grew scarce from that winter.
Old settlers say that the slow cowardly breed of prairie wolves, which
used to be caught and killed as readily as sheep, disappeared about
that time and none but the fleeter and stronger survived.

Only once since then has nature shown such extravagant severity in
Illinois, and that was on a day in the winter of 1836, known to
Illinoisans as "the sudden change." At noon on the 20th of December,
after a warm and rainy morning, the ground being covered with mud and
slush, the temperature fell instantly forty degrees. A man riding into
Springfield for a marriage license says a roaring and crackling wind
came upon him and the rain-drops dripping from his bridle-reins and
beard changed in a second into jingling icicles. He rode hastily into
the town and arrived in a few minutes at his destination; but his
clothes were frozen like sheet iron, and man and saddle had to be
taken into the house together to be thawed apart. Geese and chickens
were caught by the feet and wings and frozen to the wet ground. A
drove of a thousand hogs, which were being driven to St. Louis, rushed
together for warmth, and became piled in a great heap. Those inside
smothered and those outside froze, and the ghastly pyramid remained
there on the prairie for weeks: the drovers barely escaped with their
lives. Men killed their horses, disemboweled them, and crept into the
cavity of their bodies to escape the murderous wind. [Footnote:
Although the old settlers of Sangamon County are acquainted with these
facts, and we have often heard them and many others like them from the
lips of eye-witnesses, we have preferred to cite only these incidents
of the sudden change which are given in the careful and conscientious
compilation entitled "The Early Settlers of Sangamon County," by John
Carroll Power.]

The pioneer period of Illinois was ending as Thomas Lincoln and his
tall boy drove their ox-team over the Indiana line. The population of
the State had grown to 157,447. It still clung to the wooded borders
of the water-courses; scattered settlements were to be found all along
the Mississippi and its affluents, from where Cairo struggled for life
in the swamps of the Ohio to the bustling and busy mining camps which
the recent discovery of lead had brought to Galena. A line of villages
from Alton to Peoria dotted the woodland which the Illinois River had
stretched, like a green baldric, diagonally across the bosom of the
State. Then there were long reaches of wilderness before you came to
Fort Dearborn, where there was nothing as yet to give promise of that
miraculous growth which was soon to make Chicago a proverb to the
world. There were a few settlements in the fertile region called the
Military Tract; the southern part of the State was getting itself
settled here and there. People were coming in freely to the Sangamon
country. But a grassy solitude stretched from Galena to Chicago, and
the upper half of the State was generally a wilderness. The earlier
emigrants, principally of the poorer class of Southern farmers,
shunned the prairies with something of a superstitious dread. They
preferred to pass the first years of their occupation in the wasteful
and laborious work of clearing a patch of timber for corn, rather than
enter upon those rich savannas which were ready to break into
fertility at the slightest provocation of culture. Even so late as
1835, writes J. F. Speed, "no one dreamed the prairies would ever be
occupied." It was thought they would be used perpetually as grazing-
fields for stock. For years the long processions of "movers" wound,
over those fertile and neglected plains, taking no hint of the wealth
suggested by the rank luxuriance of vegetable growth around them, the
carpet of brilliant flowers spread over the verdant knolls, the
strong, succulent grass that waved in the breeze, full of warm and
vital odor, as high as the waist of a man. In after years, when the
emigration from the Northern and Eastern States began to pour in, the
prairies were rapidly taken up, and the relative growth and importance
of the two sections of the State were immediately reversed. Governor
Ford, writing about 1847, attributes this result to the fact that the
best class of Southern people were slow to emigrate to a State where
they could not take their slaves; while the settlers from the North,
not being debarred by the State Constitution from bringing their
property with them, were of a different class. "The northern part of
the State was settled in the first instance by wealthy farmers,
enterprising merchants, millers, and manufacturers. They made farms,
built mills, churches, school-houses, towns, and cities, and
constructed roads and bridges as if by magic; so that although the
settlements in the southern part of the State are from twenty to fifty
years in advance on the score of age, yet are they ten years behind in
point of wealth and all the appliances of a higher civilization."

[Sidenote: Thomas Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 280.]

At the time which we are specially considering, however, the few
inhabitants of the south and the center were principally from what
came afterwards to be called the border slave States. They were mostly
a simple, neighborly, unambitious people, contented with their
condition, living upon plain fare, and knowing not much of anything
better. Luxury was, of course, unknown; even wealth, if it existed,
could procure few of the comforts of refined life. There was little or
no money in circulation. Exchanges were effected by the most primitive
forms of barter, and each family had to rely chiefly upon itself for
the means of living. The neighbors would lend a hand in building a
cabin for a new-comer; after that he must in most cases shift for
himself. Many a man arriving from an old community, and imperfectly
appreciating the necessities of pioneer life, has found suddenly, on
the approach of winter, that he must learn to make shoes or go
barefoot. The furniture of their houses was made with an axe from the
trees of the forest. Their clothing was all made at home. The buckskin
days were over to a great extent, though an occasional hunting-shirt
and pair of moccasins were still seen. But flax and hemp had begun to
be cultivated, and as the wolves were killed off the sheep-folds
increased, and garments resembling those of civilization were spun and
woven, and cut and sewed, by the women of the family. When a man had a
suit of jeans colored with butternut-dye, and his wife a dress of
linsey, they could appear with the best at a wedding or a quilting
frolic. The superfluous could not have been said to exist in a
community where men made their own buttons, where women dug roots in
the woods to make their tea with, where many children never saw a
stick of candy until after they were grown. The only sweetmeats known
were those a skillful cook could compose from the honey plundered from
the hollow oaks where the wild bees had stored it. Yet there was
withal a kind of rude plenty; the woods swarmed with game, and after
swine began to be raised, there was the bacon and hoe-cake which any
south-western farmer will say is good enough for a king. The greatest
privation was the lack of steel implements. His axe was as precious to
the pioneer as his sword to the knight errant. Governor John Reynolds
speaks of the panic felt in his father's family when the axe was
dropped into a stream. A battered piece of tin was carefully saved and
smoothed, and made into a grater for green corn.

[Sidenote: William H. Herndon's speech at Old Settlers' Meeting,
Menard County.]

[Sidenote: "Old Times in McLean County," p. 194.]

They had their own amusements, of course; no form of society is
without them, from the anthropoid apes to the Jockey Club. As to the
grosser and ruder shapes taken by the diversions of the pioneers, we
will let Mr. Herndon speak--their contemporary annalist and ardent
panegyrist: "These men could shave a horse's mane and tail, paint,
disfigure, and offer it for sale to the owner. They could hoop up in a
hogshead a drunken man, they themselves being drunk, put in and nail
fast the head, and roll the man down hill a hundred feet or more. They
could run down a lean and hungry wild pig, catch it, heat a ten-plate
stove furnace hot, and putting in the pig, could cook it, they dancing
the while a merry jig." Wild oats of this kind seem hardly compatible
with a harvest of civilization, but it is contended that such of these
roysterers as survived their stormy beginnings became decent and
serious citizens. Indeed, Mr. Herndon insists than even in their hot
youth they showed the promise of goodness and piety. "They attended
church, heard the sermon, wept and prayed, shouted, got up and fought
an hour, and then went back to prayer, just as the spirit moved them."
The camp-meeting may be said, with no irreverent intention, to have
been their principal means of intellectual excitement. The circuit
preachers were for a long time the only circulating medium of thought
and emotion that kept the isolated settlements from utter spiritual
stagnation. They were men of great physical and moral endurance,
absolutely devoted to their work, which they pursued in the face of
every hardship and discouragement. Their circuits were frequently so
great in extent that they were forced to be constantly on the route;
what reading they did was done in the saddle. They received perhaps
fifty dollars from the missionary fund and half as much more from
their congregations, paid for the most part in necessaries of life.
Their oratory was suited to their longitude, and was principally
addressed to the emotions of their hearers. It was often very
effective, producing shouts and groans and genuflections among the
audience at large, and terrible convulsions among the more nervous and
excitable. We hear sometimes of a whole congregation prostrated as by
a hurricane, flinging their limbs about in furious contortions, with
wild outcries. To this day some of the survivors of that period insist
that it was the spirit of the Almighty, and nothing less, that thus
manifested itself. The minister, however, did not always share in the
delirium of his hearers. Governor Reynolds tells us of a preacher in
Sangamon County, who, before his sermon, had set a wolf-trap in view
from his pulpit. In the midst of his exhortations his keen eyes saw
the distant trap collapse, and he continued in the same intonation
with which he had been preaching, "Mind the text, brethren, till I go
kill that wolf!" With all the failings and eccentricities of this
singular class of men, they did a great deal of good, and are entitled
to especial credit among those who conquered the wilderness. The
emotions they excited did not all die away in the shouts and
contortions of the meeting. Not a few of the cabins in the clearings
were the abode of a fervent religion and an austere morality. Many a
traveler, approaching a rude hut in the woods in the gathering
twilight, distrusting the gaunt and silent family who gave him an
unsmiling welcome, the bare interior, the rifles and knives
conspicuously displayed, has felt his fears vanish when he sat down to
supper, and the master of the house, in a few fervent words, invoked
the blessing of heaven on the meal.

There was very little social intercourse; a visit was a serious
matter, involving the expenditure of days of travel. It was the custom
among families, when the longing for the sight of kindred faces was
too strong to withstand, to move in a body to the distant settlement
where their relatives lived and remain with them for months at a time.
The claims of consanguinity were more regarded than now. Almost the
only festivities were those that accompanied weddings, and these were,
of course, of a primitive kind. The perils and adventures through
which the young pioneers went to obtain their brides furnish forth
thousands of tales by Western firesides. Instead of taking the rosy
daughter of a neighbor, the enterprising bachelor would often go back
to Kentucky, and pass through as many adventures in bringing his wife
home as a returning crusader would meet between Beirut and Vienna. If
she was a young woman who respected herself, the household gear she
would insist on bringing would entail an Iliad of embarrassments. An
old farmer of Sangamon County still talks of a featherbed weighing
fifty-four pounds with which his wife made him swim six rivers under
penalty of desertion.

It was not always easy to find a competent authority to perform the
ceremony. A justice in McLean County lived by the bank of a river, and
his services were sometimes required by impatient lovers on the other
bank when the waters were too torrential to cross. In such cases,
being a conscientious man, he always insisted that they should ride
into the stream far enough for him to discern their features, holding
torches to their faces by night and by storm. The wooing of those days
was prompt and practical. There was no time for the gradual approaches
of an idler and more conventional age. It is related of one Stout, one
of the legendary Nimrods of Illinois, who was well and frequently
married, that he had one unfailing formula of courtship. He always
promised the ladies whose hearts he was besieging that "they should
live in the timber where they could pick up their own firewood."

Theft was almost unknown; property, being so hard to get, was
jealously guarded, as we have already noticed in speaking of the
settlement of Kentucky. The pioneers of Illinois brought with them the
same rigid notions of honesty which their environment maintained. A
man in Macoupin County left his wagon, loaded with corn, stuck in the
prairie mud for two weeks near a frequented road. When he returned he
found some of his corn gone, but there was money enough tied in the
sacks to pay for what was taken. Men carrying bags of silver from the
towns of Illinois to St. Louis rather made a display of it, as it
enhanced their own importance, and there was no fear of robbery. There
were of course no locks on the cabin doors, and the early merchants
sometimes left their stores unprotected for days together when they
went to the nearest city to replenish their stock. Of course there
were rare exceptions to this rule, but a single theft alarmed and
excited a whole neighborhood. When a crime was traced home, the family
of the criminal were generally obliged to remove.

[Sidenote: N.W. Edwards, "Life and Times of Ninian Edwards," p. 163.]

There were still, even so late as the time to which we are referring,
two alien elements in the population of the State--the French and the
Indians. The French settlements about Kaskaskia retained much of their
national character, and the pioneers from the South who visited them
or settled among them never ceased to wonder at their gayety, their
peaceable industry and enterprise, and their domestic affection, which
they did not care to dissemble and conceal like their shy and reticent
neighbors. It was a daily spectacle, which never lost its strangeness
for the Tennesseeans and Kentuckians, to see the Frenchman returning
from his work greeted by his wife and children with embraces of
welcome "at the gate of his door-yard, and in view of all the
villagers." The natural and kindly fraternization of the Frenchmen
with the Indians was also a cause of wonder to the Americans. The
friendly intercourse between them, and their occasional
intermarriages, seemed little short of monstrous to the ferocious
exclusiveness of the Anglo-Saxon. [Footnote: Michelet notices this
exclusiveness of the English, and inveighs against it in his most
lyric style. "Crime contre la nature! Crime contre l'humanite! Il sera
expie par la sterilite de l'esprit."] The Indians in the central part
of Illinois cut very little figure in the reminiscences of the
pioneers; they occupied much the same relation to them as the tramp to
the housewife of to-day. The Winnebago war in 1827 and the Black Hawk
war in 1831 disturbed only the northern portion of the State. A few
scattered and vagrant lodges of Pottawatomies and Kickapoos were all
the pioneers of Sangamon and the neighboring counties ever met. They
were spared the heroic struggle of the advance-guard of civilization
in other States. A woman was sometimes alarmed by a visit from a
drunken savage; poultry and pigs occasionally disappeared when they
were in the neighborhood; but life was not darkened by the constant
menace of massacre. A few years earlier, indeed, the relations of the
two races had been more strained, as may be inferred from an act
passed by the territorial Legislature in 1814, offering a reward of
fifty dollars to any citizen or ranger who should kill or take any
depredating Indian. As only two dollars was paid for killing a wolf,
it is easy to see how the pioneers regarded the forest folk in point
of relative noxiousness. But ten years later a handful only of the
Kickapoos remained in Sangamon County, the specter of the vanished
people. A chief named Machina came one day to a family who were
clearing a piece of timber, and issued an order of eviction in these
words: "Too much come white man. T'other side Sangamon." He threw a
handful of dried leaves in the air to show how he would scatter the
pale faces, but he never fulfilled his threats further than to come in
occasionally and ask for a drink of whisky. That such trivial details
are still related, only shows how barren of incident was the life of
these obscure founders of a great empire. Any subject of conversation,
any cause of sensation, was a godsend. When Vannoy murdered his wife
in Springfield, whole families put on their best clothes and drove
fifty miles through bottomless mud and swollen rivers to see him
hanged.

[Sidenote: Power, "Early Settlers of Sangamon County," p. 88.]

It is curious to see how naturally in such a state of things the
fabric of political society developed itself from its germ. The county
of Sangamon was called by an act of the Legislature in 1821 out of a
verdant solitude of more than a million acres, inhabited by a few
families. An election for county commissioners was ordered; three men
were chosen; they came together at the cabin of John Kelly, at Spring
Creek. He was a roving bachelor from North Carolina, devoted to the
chase, who had built this hut three years before on the margin of a
green-bordered rivulet, where the deer passed by in hundreds, going in
the morning from the shady banks of the Sangamon to feed on the rich
green grass of the prairie, and returning in the twilight. He was so
delighted with this hunters' paradise that he sent for his brothers to
join him. They came and brought their friends, so it happened that in
this immense county, several thousand square miles in extent, the
settlement of John Kelly at Spring Creek was the only place where
there was shelter for the commissioners; thus it became the temporary
county-seat, duly described in the official report of the
commissioners as "a certain point in the prairie near John Kelly's
field, on the waters of Spring Creek, at a stake marked Z and D (the
initials of the commissioners), to be the temporary seat of justice
for said county; and we do further agree that the said county-seat be
called and known by the name of Springfield." In this manner the
future capital received that hackneyed title, when the distinctive and
musical name of Sangamon was ready to their hands. The same day they
agreed with John Kelly to build them a court-house, for which they
paid him forty-two dollars and fifty cents. In twenty-four days the
house was built--one room of rough logs, the jury retiring to any
sequestered glade they fancied for their deliberation. They next
ordered the building of a jail, which cost just twice as much money as
the court-house. Constables and overseers of the poor were appointed,
and all the machinery of government prepared for the population which
was hourly expected. It was taken for granted that malefactors would
come and the constables have employment; and the poor they would have
always with them, when once they began to arrive. This was only a
temporary arrangement, but when, a year or two later, the time came to
fix upon a permanent seat of justice for the county, the resources of
the Spring Creek men were equal to the emergency. When the
commissioners came to decide on the relative merits of Springfield and
another site a few miles away, they led them through brake, through
brier, by mud knee-deep and by water-courses so exasperating that the
wearied and baffled officials declared they would seek no further, and
Springfield became the county-seat for all time; and greater destinies
were in store for it through means not wholly dissimilar. Nature had
made it merely a pleasant hunting-ground; the craft and the industry
of its first settlers made it a capital.

[Sidenote: "History Of Sangamon County," p. 83.]

[Sidenote: "Old Times in McLean County," p. 235.]

[Sidenote: Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 53.]

The courts which were held in these log huts were as rude as might be
expected; yet there is evidence that although there was no superfluity
of law or of learning, justice was substantially administered. The
lawyers came mostly from Kentucky, though an occasional New Englander
confronted and lived down the general prejudice against his region and
obtained preferment. The profits of the profession were inconceivably
small. One early State's Attorney describes his first circuit as a
tour of shifts and privations not unlike the wanderings of a mendicant
friar. In his first county he received a fee of five dollars for
prosecuting the parties to a sanguinary affray. In the next he was
equally successful, but barely escaped drowning in Spoon River. In the
third there were but two families at the county-seat, and no cases on
the docket. Thence he journeyed across a trackless prairie sixty
miles, and at Quincy had one case and gained five dollars. In Pike
County our much-enduring jurist took no cash, but found a generous
sheriff who entertained him without charge. "He was one of nature's
noblemen, from Massachusetts," writes the grateful prosecutor. The
lawyers in what was called good practice earned less than a street-
sweeper to-day. It is related that the famous Stephen A. Douglas once
traveled from Springfield to Bloomington and made an extravagant
speech, and having gained his case received a fee of five dollars. In
such a state of things it was not to be wondered at that the
technicalities of law were held in somewhat less veneration than what
the pioneer regarded as the essential claims of justice. The
infirmities of the jury system gave them less annoyance than they give
us. Governor Ford mentions a case where a gang of horse-thieves
succeeded in placing one of their confederates upon a jury which was
to try them; but he was soon brought to reason by his eleven
colleagues making preparations to hang him to the rafters of the jury
room. The judges were less hampered by the limitations of their legal
lore than by their fears of a loss of popularity as a result of too
definite charges in civil suits, or too great severity in criminal
cases. They grew very dexterous in avoiding any commitment as to the
legal or moral bearings of the questions brought before them. They
generally refused to sum up, or to comment upon evidence; when asked
by the counsel to give instructions they would say, "Why, gentlemen,
the jury understand this case as well as you or I. They will do
justice between the parties." One famous judge, who was afterwards
governor, when sentencing a murderer, impressed it upon his mind, and
wished him to inform his friends, that it was the jury and not the
judge who had found him guilty, and then asked him on what day he
would like to be hanged. It is needless to say that the bench and bar
were not all of this class. There were even at that early day lawyers,
and not a few, who had already won reputation in the older States, and
whose names are still honored in the profession. Cook, McLean,
Edwards, Kane, Thomas, Reynolds, and others, the earliest lawyers of
the State, have hardly been since surpassed for learning and ability.

[Sidenote: Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 31.]

[Sidenote: Ford, p. 81.]

In a community where the principal men were lawyers, where there was
as yet little commerce, and industrial enterprise was unknown, it was
natural that one of the chief interests of life should be the pursuit
of politics. The young State swarmed with politicians; they could be
found chewing and whittling at every cross-roads inn; they were busy
at every horse-race, arranging their plans and extending their
acquaintance; around the burgoo-pot of the hunting party they
discussed measures and candidates; they even invaded the camp-meeting
and did not disdain the pulpit as a tribune. Of course there was no
such thing as organization in the pioneer days. Men were voted for to
a great extent independently of partisan questions affecting the
nation at large, and in this way the higher offices of the State were
filled for many years by men whose personal character compelled the
respect and esteem of the citizens. The year 1826 is generally taken
as the date which witnessed the change from personal to partisan
politics, though several years more elapsed before the rule of
conventions came in, which put an end to individual candidacy. In that
year, Daniel Pope Cook, who had long represented the State in Congress
with singular ability and purity, was defeated by Governor Joseph
Duncan, the candidate of the Jackson men, on account of the vote given
by Cook which elected John Quincy Adams to the Presidency. The bitter
intolerance of the Jackson party naturally caused their opponents to
organize against them, and there were two parties in the State from
that time forward. The change in political methods was inevitable, and
it is idle to deplore it; but the former system gave the better men in
the new State a power and prominence which they have never since
enjoyed. Such men as Governor Ninian Edwards, who came with the
prestige of a distinguished family connection, a large fortune, a good
education, and a distinction of manners and of dress--ruffles, gold
buttons, and fair-topped boots--which would hardly have been pardoned
a few years later; and Governor Edward Coles, who had been private
secretary to Madison, and was familiar with the courts of Europe, a
man as notable for his gentleness of manners as for his nobility of
nature, could never have come so readily and easily to the head of the
government after the machine of the caucus had been perfected. Real
ability then imposed itself with more authority upon the ignorant and
unpretending politicians from the back timber; so that it is remarked
by those who study the early statutes of Illinois that they are far
better drawn up, and better edited, than those of a later period, when
illiterate tricksters, conscious of the party strength behind them,
insisted on shaping legislation according to their own fancy. The men
of cultivation wielded an influence in the Legislature entirely out of
proportion to their numbers, as the ruder sort of pioneers were
naturally in a large majority. The type of a not uncommon class in
Illinois tradition was a member from the South who could neither read
nor write, and whose apparently ironical patronymic was Grammar. When
first elected he had never worn anything except leather; but regarding
his tattered buckskin as unfit for the garb of a lawgiver, he and his
sons gathered hazelnuts enough to barter at the nearest store for a
few yards of blue strouding such as the Indians used for breech-
clouts. When he came home with his purchase and had called together
the women of the settlement to make his clothes, it was found that
there was only material enough for a very short coat and a long pair
of leggins, and thus attired he went to Kaskaskia, the territorial
capital. Uncouth as was his appearance, he had in him the raw material
of a politician. He invented a system--which was afterwards adopted by
many whose breeches were more fashionably cut--of voting against every
measure which was proposed. If it failed, the responsibility was
broadly shared; if it passed and was popular, no one would care who
voted against it; if it passed and did not meet the favor of the
people, John Grammar could vaunt his foresight. Between the men like
Coles and the men like Grammar there was a wide interval, and the
average was about what the people of the State deserved and could
appreciate. A legislator was as likely to suffer for doing right as
for doing wrong. Governor Ford, in his admirable sketch of the early
history of the State, mentions two acts of the Legislature, both of
them proper and beneficial, as unequaled in their destructive
influence upon the great folks of the State. One was a bill for a loan
to meet the honest obligations of the commonwealth, commonly called
"the Wiggins loan"; and the other was a law to prevent bulls of
inferior size and breed from running at large. This latter set loose
all the winds of popular fury: it was cruel, it was aristocratic; it
was in the interest of rich men and pampered foreign bulls; and it
ended the career of many an aspiring politician in a blast of
democratic indignation and scorn. The politician who relied upon
immediate and constant contact with the people certainly earned all
the emoluments of office he received. His successes were hardly
purchased by laborious affability. "A friend of mine," says Ford,
"once informed me that he intended to be a candidate for the
Legislature, but would not declare himself until just before the
election, and assigned as a reason that it was so very hard to be
clever for a long time at once." Before the caucus had eliminated the
individual initiative, there was much more of personal feeling in
elections. A vote against a man had something of offense in it, and
sometimes stirred up a defeated candidate to heroic vengeance. In 1827
the Legislature elected a State treasurer after an exciting contest,
and before the members had left the house the unsuccessful aspirant
came in and soundly thrashed, one after the other, four of the
representatives who had voted against him. Such energy was sure to
meet its reward, and he was soon after made clerk of the Circuit
Court. It is related by old citizens of Menard County, as a
circumstance greatly to the credit of Abraham Lincoln, that when he
was a candidate for the Legislature a man who wanted his vote for
another place walked to the polls with him and ostentatiously voted
for him, hoping to receive his vote in return. Lincoln voted against
him, and the act was much admired by those who saw it.

One noticeable fact is observed in relation to the politicians of the
day--their careers were generally brief. Superannuation came early. In
the latter part of the last century and the first half of this, men
were called old whom we should regard as in the prime of life. When
the friends of Washington were first pressing the Presidency upon him
in 1788, he urged his "advanced age" as an imperative reason for
declining it: he was fifty-six years old. When Ninian Edwards was a
candidate for Governor of Illinois in 1826, he was only fifty-one, and
yet he considered it necessary in his published addresses to refer to
the charge that he was too old for the place, and, while admitting the
fact that he was no longer young, to urge in extenuation that there
are some old things,--like old whisky, old bacon, and old friends,--
which are not without their merits. Even so late as 1848, we find a
remarkable letter from Mr. Lincoln, who was then in Congress, bearing
upon the same point. His partner, William H. Herndon, had written him
a letter, complaining that the old men in Sangamon County were
unwilling to let the young ones have any opportunity to distinguish
themselves. To this Lincoln answered in his usual tone of grave
kindness: "The subject of your letter is exceedingly painful to me;
and I cannot but think there is some mistake in your impression of the
motives of the old men. I suppose I am now one of the old men, and I
declare on my veracity, which I think is good with you, that nothing
could afford me more satisfaction than to learn that you and others of
my young friends at home were doing battle in the contest and
endearing themselves to the people and taking a stand far above any I
have ever been able to reach in their admiration. I cannot conceive
that other old men feel differently. Of course, I cannot demonstrate
what I say; but I was young once, and I am sure I was never
ungenerously thrust back." The man who thus counseled petulant youth
with the experienced calmness of age was thirty-nine years old. A
state of society where one could at that age call himself or be called
by others an old man, is proved by that fact alone to be one of
wearing hardships and early decay of the vital powers. The survivors
of the pioneers stoutly insist upon the contrary view. "It was a
glorious life," says one old patriarch; "men would fight for the love
of it, and then shake hands and be friends; there is nothing like it
now." Another says, "I never enjoy my breakfast now as I used to, when
I got up and ran down a deer before I could have anything to eat." But
they see the past through a rosy mist of memory, transfigured by the
eternal magic of youth. The sober fact is that the life was a hard
one, with few rational pleasures, few wholesome appliances. The strong
ones lived, and some even attained great length of years; but to the
many age came early and was full of infirmity and pain. If we could go
back to what our fore-fathers endured in clearing the Western
wilderness, we could then better appreciate our obligations to them.
It is detracting from the honor which is their due to say that their
lives had much of happiness or comfort, or were in any respect
preferable to our own.




CHAPTER IV

NEW SALEM


During the latter part of "the winter of the deep snow," Lincoln
became acquainted with one Denton Offutt, an adventurous and
discursive sort of merchant, with more irons in the fire than he could
well manage. He wanted to take a flat-boat and cargo to New Orleans,
and having heard that Hanks and Lincoln had some experience of the
river, he insisted on their joining him. John Johnston was afterwards
added to the party, probably at the request of his foster-brother, to
share in the golden profits of the enterprise; for fifty cents a day,
and a contingent dividend of twenty dollars apiece, seemed like a
promise of immediate opulence to the boys. In the spring, when the
rivers broke up and the melting snows began to pour in torrents down
every ravine and gully, the three young men paddled down the Sangamon
in a canoe to the point where Jamestown now stands; whence they walked
five miles to Springfield, where Offutt had given them rendezvous.
They met him at Elliott's tavern and far from happy. Amid the
multiplicity of his engagements he had failed to procure a flat-boat,
and the first work his new hands must do was to build one. They cut
the timber, with frontier innocence, from "Congress land," and soon
had a serviceable craft afloat, with which they descended the current
of the Sangamon to New Salem, a little village which seems to have
been born for the occasion, as it came into existence just before the
arrival of Lincoln, nourished for seven years while he remained one of
its citizens, and died soon after he went away. His introduction to
his fellow-citizens was effected in a peculiar and somewhat striking
manner. Offutt's boat had come to serious embarrassment on Rutledge's
mill-dam, and the unwonted incident brought the entire population to
the water's edge. They spent a good part of the day watching the
hapless flat-boat, resting midships on the dam, the forward end in the
air and the stern taking in the turbid Sangamon water. Nobody knew
what to do with the disaster except "the bow-oar," who is described as
a gigantic youth "with his trousers rolled up some five feet," who was
wading about the boat and rigging up some undescribed contrivance by
which the cargo was unloaded, the boat tilted and the water let out by
boring a hole through the bottom, and everything brought safely to
moorings below the dam. This exploit gained for young Lincoln the
enthusiastic admiration of his employer, and turned his own mind in
the direction of an invention which he afterwards patented "for
lifting vessels over shoals." The model on which he obtained this
patent--a little boat whittled by his own hand in 1849, after he had
become prominent as a lawyer and politician--is still shown to
visitors at the Department of the Interior. We have never learned that
it has served any other purpose.

[Illustration:   MODEL OF LINCOLN'S INVENTION, IN THE PATENT OFFICE,
WASHINGTON.]

[Illustration:   REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF DRAWINGS IN THE PATENT OFFICE.]

[Sidenote: Lamon, p. 83.]

They made a quick trip down the Sangamon, the Illinois, and the
Mississippi rivers. Although it was but a repetition in great part of
the trip young Lincoln had made with Gentry, it evidently created a
far deeper impression on his mind than the former one. The simple and
honest words of John Hanks leave no doubt of this. At New Orleans, he
said, they saw for the first time "negroes chained, maltreated,
whipped, and scourged. Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing
much, was silent, looked bad. I can say, knowing it, that it was on
this trip that he formed his opinion of slavery. It run its iron in
him then and there, May, 1831. I have heard him say so often." The
sight of men in chains was intolerable to him. Ten years after this he
made another journey by water with his friend Joshua Speed, of
Kentucky. Writing to Speed about it after the lapse of fourteen years,
he says: "In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip on a
steamboat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well
do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were on board
ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a
continual torment to me, and I see something like it every time I
touch the Ohio or any other slave border. It is not fair for you to
assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually
exercises, the power of making me miserable."

There have been several ingenious attempts to show the origin and
occasion of Mr. Lincoln's antislavery convictions. They seem to us an
idle waste of labor. These sentiments came with the first awakening of
his mind and conscience, and were roused into active life and energy
by the sight of fellow-creatures in chains on an Ohio River steamboat,
and on the wharf at New Orleans.

The party went up the river in the early summer and separated in St.
Louis. Abraham walked in company with John Johnston from St. Louis to
Coles County, and spent a few weeks there with his father, who had
made another migration the year before. His final move was to Goose
Nest Prairie, where he died in 1851, [Footnote: His grave, a mile and
a half west of the town of Farmington, Illinois, is surmounted by an
appropriate monument erected by his grandson, the Hon. Robert T.
Lincoln.] at the age of seventy-three years, after a life which,
though not successful in any material or worldly point of view, was
probably far happier than that of his illustrious son, being unvexed
by enterprise or ambition. Abraham never lost sight of his parents. He
continued to aid and befriend them in every way, even when he could
ill afford it, and when his benefactions were imprudently used. He not
only comforted their declining years with every aid his affection
could suggest, but he did everything in his power to assist his
stepbrother Johnston--a hopeless task enough. The following rigidly
truthful and yet kindly letters will show how mentor-like and
masterful, as well as generous, were the relations that Mr. Lincoln
held to these friends and companions of his childhood:

DEAR JOHNSTON: Your request for eighty dollars I do not think it best
to comply with now. At the various times when I have helped you a
little, you have said to me, "We can get along very well now," but in
a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now this
can only happen by some defect in your conduct.

What that defect is I think I know. You are not _lazy_, and still
you are an _idler_. I doubt whether, since I saw you, you have
done a good whole day's work in any one day. You do not very much
dislike to work, and still you do not work much, merely because it
does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of
uselessly wasting time is the whole difficulty, and it is vastly
important to you, and still more so to your children, that you should
break the habit. It is more important to them because they have longer
to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it
easier than they can get out after they are in.

You are now in need of some money; and what I propose is that you
shall go to work "tooth and nail" for somebody who will give you money
for it. Let father and your boys take charge of things at home,
prepare for a crop, and make the crop; and you go to work for the best
money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get;
and to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you that
for every dollar you will, between this and the first of next May, get
for your own labor, either in money or as discharging your own
indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if you
hire yourself at ten dollars a month, from me you will get ten more,
making twenty dollars a month for your work. In this I do not mean you
should go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines in
California; but I mean for you to go at it for the best wages you can
get close to home, in Coles County. Now, if you will do this you will
soon be out of debt, and, what is better, you will have a habit that
will keep you from getting in debt again. But if I should now clear
you out of debt, next year you would be just as deep in as ever. You
say you would almost give your place in heaven for seventy or eighty
dollars. Then you value your place in heaven very cheap, for I am sure
you can with the offer I make get the seventy or eighty dollars for
four or five months' work. You say if I will furnish you the money you
will deed me the land, and if you don't pay the money back you will
deliver possession. Nonsense. If you can't now live with the land, how
will you then live without it? You have always been kind to me, and I
do not mean to be unkind to you. On the contrary, if you will but
follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eighty times eighty
dollars to you.

Here is a later epistle, still more graphic and terse in statement,
which has the unusual merit of painting both confessor and penitent to
the life:

  SHELBYVILLE, Nov. 4, 1851.

DEAR BROTHER: When I came into Charleston, day before yesterday, I
learned that you were anxious to sell the land where you live and move
to Missouri. I have been thinking of this ever since, and cannot but
think such a notion is utterly foolish. What can you do in Missouri
better than here? Is the land any richer? Can you there, any more than
here, raise corn and wheat and oats without work? Will anybody there,
any more than here, do your work for you? If you intend to go to work,
there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not
intend to go to work, you cannot get along anywhere. Squirming and
crawling about from place to place can do no good. You have raised no
crop this year, and what you really want is to sell the land, get the
money, and spend it. Part with the land you have, and, my life upon
it, you will never after own a spot big enough to bury you in. Half
you will get for the land you will spend in moving to Missouri, and
the other half you will eat and drink and wear out, and no foot of
land will be bought. Now, I feel it is my duty to have no hand in such
a piece of foolery. I feel that it is so even on your own account, and
particularly on mother's account. The eastern forty acres I intend to
keep for mother while she lives; if you will not cultivate it, it will
rent for enough to support her; at least, it will rent for something.
Her dower in the other two forties she can let you have, and no thanks
to me. Now do not misunderstand this letter. I do not write it in any
unkindness. I write it in order, if possible, to get you to face the
truth, which truth is, you are destitute because you have idled away
all your time. Your thousand pretenses deceive nobody but yourself. Go
to work is the only cure for your case.

A volume of disquisition could not put more clearly before the reader
the difference between Abraham Lincoln and the common run of Southern
and Western rural laborers. He had the same disadvantages that they
had. He grew up in the midst of poverty and ignorance; he was poisoned
with the enervating malaria of the Western woods, as all his fellows
were, and the consequences of it were seen in his character and
conduct to the close of his life. But he had, what very few of them
possessed any glimmering notion of, a fixed and inflexible will to
succeed. He did not love work, probably, any better than John
Johnston; but he had an innate self-respect, and a consciousness that
his self was worthy of respect, that kept him from idleness as it kept
him from all other vices, and made him a better man every year that he
lived.

We have anticipated a score of years in speaking of Mr. Lincoln's
relations to his family. It was in August of the year 1831 that he
finally left his father's roof, and swung out for himself into the
current of the world to make his fortune in his own way. He went down
to New Salem again to assist Offutt in the business that lively
speculator thought of establishing there. He was more punctual than
either his employer or the merchandise, and met with the usual reward
of punctuality in being forced to waste his time in waiting for the
tardy ones. He seemed to the New Salem people to be "loafing"; several
of them have given that description of him. He did one day's work
acting as clerk of a local election, a lettered loafer being pretty
sure of employment on such an occasion. [Footnote: Mrs. Lizzie H. Bell
writes of this incident: "My father, Menton Graham, was on that day,
as usual, appointed to be a clerk, and Mr. McNamee, who was to be the
other, was sick and failed to come. They were looking around for a man
to fill his place when my father noticed Mr. Lincoln and asked if he
could write. He answered that 'he could make a few rabbit tracks.'"]
He also piloted a boat down the Sangamon for one Dr. Nelson, who had
had enough of New Salem and wanted to go to Texas. This was probably a
task not requiring much pilot-craft, as the river was much swollen,
and navigators had in most places two or three miles of channel to
count upon. But Offutt and his goods arrived at last, and Lincoln and
he got them immediately into position, and opened their doors to what
commerce could be found in New Salem. There was clearly not enough to
satisfy the volatile mind of Mr. Offutt, for he soon bought Cameron's
mill at the historic dam, and made Abraham superintendent also of that
branch of the business.

It is to be surmised that Offutt never inspired his neighbors and
customers with any deep regard for his solidity of character. One of
them says of him with injurious pleonasm, that he "talked too much
with his mouth." A natural consequence of his excessive fluency was
soon to be made disagreeably evident to his clerk. He admired Abraham
beyond measure, and praised him beyond prudence. He said that Abe knew
more than any man in the United States; and he was certainly not
warranted in making such an assertion, as his own knowledge of the
actual state of science in America could not have been exhaustive. He
also said that Abe could beat any man in the county running, jumping,
or "wrastling." This proposition, being less abstract in its nature,
was more readily grasped by the local mind, and was not likely to pass
unchallenged.

[Illustration:   MAP OF NEW SALEM AND VICINITY]

Public opinion at New Salem was formed by a crowd of ruffianly young
fellows who were called the "Clary's Grove Boys." Once or twice a week
they descended upon the village and passed the day in drinking,
fighting, and brutal horse-play. If a stranger appeared in the place,
he was likely to suffer a rude initiation into the social life of New
Salem at the hands of these jovial savages. Sometimes he was nailed up
in a hogshead and rolled down hill; sometimes he was insulted into a
fight and then mauled black and blue; for despite their pretensions to
chivalry they had no scruples about fair play or any such
superstitions of civilization. At first they did not seem inclined to
molest young Lincoln. His appearance did not invite insolence; his
reputation for strength and activity was a greater protection to him
than his inoffensive good-nature. But the loud admiration of Offutt
gave them umbrage. It led to dispute, contradictions, and finally to a
formal banter to a wrestling-match. Lincoln was greatly averse to all
this "wooling and pulling," as he called it. But Offutt's indiscretion
had made it necessary for him to show his mettle. Jack Armstrong, the
leading bully of the gang, was selected to throw him, and expected an
easy victory. But he soon found himself in different hands from any he
had heretofore engaged with. Seeing he could not manage the tall
stranger, his friends swarmed in, and by kicking and tripping nearly
succeeded in getting Lincoln down. At this, as has been said of
another hero, "the spirit of Odin entered into him," and putting forth
his whole strength, he held the pride of Clary's Grove in his arms
like a child, and almost choked the exuberant life out of him. For a
moment a general fight seemed inevitable; but Lincoln, standing
undismayed with his back to the wall, looked so formidable in his
defiance that an, honest admiration took the place of momentary fury,
and his initiation was over. As to Armstrong, he was Lincoln's friend
and sworn brother as soon as he recovered the use of his larynx, and
the bond thus strangely created lasted through life. Lincoln had no
further occasion to fight his own battles while Armstrong was there to
act as his champion. The two friends, although so widely different,
were helpful to each other afterwards in many ways, and Lincoln made
ample amends for the liberty his hands had taken with Jack's throat,
by saving, in a memorable trial, his son's neck from the halter.

This incident, trivial and vulgar as it may seem, was of great
importance in Lincoln's life. His behavior in this ignoble scuffle did
the work of years for him, in giving him the position he required in
the community where his lot was cast. He became from that moment, in a
certain sense, a personage, with a name and standing of his own. The
verdict of Clary's Grove was unanimous that he was "the cleverest
fellow that had ever broke into the settlement." He did not have to be
constantly scuffling to guard his self-respect, and at the same time
he gained the good-will of the better sort by his evident
peaceableness and integrity.

[Illustration:   LEAF FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S EXERCISE BOOK. The page
here shown in reduced fac-simile is from the Exercise Book presented
by William H. Herndon to the Keyes-Lincoln Memorial Collection. When
the book was written Lincoln was about seventeen.]

He made on the whole a satisfactory clerk for Mr. Offutt, though his
downright honesty must have seemed occasionally as eccentric in that
position as afterwards it did to his associates at the bar. Dr.
Holland has preserved one or two incidents of this kind, which have
their value. Once, after he had sold a woman a little bill of goods
and received the money, he found on looking over the account again
that she had given him six and a quarter cents too much. The money
burned in his hands until he locked the shop and started on a walk of
several miles in the night to make restitution before he slept. On
another occasion, after weighing and delivering a pound of tea, he
found a small weight on the scales. He immediately weighed out the
quantity of tea of which he had innocently defrauded his customer and
went in search of her, his sensitive conscience not permitting any
delay. To show that the young merchant was not too good for this
world, the same writer gives an incident of his shop-keeping
experience of a different character. A rural bully having made himself
especially offensive one day, when women were present, by loud
profanity, Lincoln requested him to be silent. This was of course a
cause of war, and the young clerk was forced to follow the incensed
ruffian into the street, where the combat was of short duration.
Lincoln threw him at once to the ground, and gathering a handful of
the dog fennel with which the roadside was plentifully bordered, he
rubbed the ruffian's face and eyes with it until he howled for mercy.
He did not howl in vain, for the placable giant, when his discipline
was finished, brought water to bathe the culprit's smarting face, and
doubtless improved the occasion with quaint admonition.

A few passages at arms of this sort gave Abraham a redoubtable
reputation in the neighborhood. But the principal use he made of his
strength and his prestige was in the capacity of peacemaker, an office
which soon devolved upon him by general consent. Whenever old feuds
blossomed into fights by Offutt's door, or the chivalry of Clary's
Grove attempted in its energetic way to take the conceit out of some
stranger, or a canine duel spread contagion of battle among the
masters of the beasts, Lincoln usually appeared upon the scene, and
with a judicious mixture of force and reason and invincible good-
nature restored peace.

While working with Offutt his mind was turned in the direction of
English grammar. From what he had heard of it he thought it a matter
within his grasp, if he could once fall in with the requisite
machinery. Consulting with Menton [Footnote: This name has always been
written in Illinois "Minter," but a letter from Mr. Graham's daughter,
Mrs. Bell, says that her father's name is as given in the text.]
Graham, the schoolmaster, in regard to it, and learning the
whereabouts of a vagrant "Kirkham's Grammar," he set off at once and
soon returned from a walk of a dozen miles with the coveted prize. He
devoted himself to the new study with that peculiar intensity of
application which always remained his most valuable faculty, and soon
knew all that can be known about it from rules. He seemed surprised,
as others have been, at the meager dimensions of the science he had
acquired and the ease with which it yielded all there was of it to the
student. But it seemed no slight achievement to the New Salemites, and
contributed not a little to the prevalent impression of his learning.

His name is prominently connected with an event which just at this
time caused an excitement and interest in Salem and the neighboring
towns entirely out of proportion to its importance. It was one of the
articles of faith of most of the settlers on the banks of the Sangamon
River that it was a navigable stream, and the local politicians found
that they could in no way more easily hit the fancy of their hearers
than by discussing this assumed fact, and the logical corollary
derived from it, that it was the duty of the State or the nation to
clear out the snags and give free course to the commerce which was
waiting for an opportunity to pour along this natural highway. At last
one Captain Vincent Bogue, of Springfield, determined to show that the
thing could be done by doing it. The first promise of the great
enterprise appears in the "Sangsmo Journal" of January 26, 1832, in a
letter from the Captain, at Cincinnati, saying he would ascend the
Sangamon by steam on the breaking up of the ice. He asked that he
might be met at the mouth of the river by ten or twelve men, having
axes with long handles, to cut away the overhanging branches of the
trees on the banks. From this moment there was great excitement,--
public meetings, appointment of committees, appeals for subscriptions,
and a scattering fire of advertisements of goods and freight to be
bargained for,--which sustained the prevailing interest. It was a day
of hope and promise when the advertisement reached Springfield from
Cincinnati that "the splendid upper-cabin steamer Talisman" would
positively start for the Sangamon on a given day. As the paper
containing this joyous intelligence also complained that no mail had
reached Springfield from the east for three weeks, it is easy to
understand the desire for more rapid and regular communications. From
week to week the progress of the _Talisman_, impeded by bad weather
and floating ice, was faithfully recorded, until at last the party
with long-handled axes went down to Beardstown to welcome her. It is
needless to state that Lincoln was one of the party. His standing as a
scientific citizen of New Salem would have been enough to insure his
selection even if he had not been known as a bold navigator. He
piloted the _Talisman_ safely through the windings of the Sangamon,
and Springfield gave itself up to extravagant gayety on the event that
proved she "could no longer be considered an inland town." Captain
Bogue announced "fresh and seasonable goods just received per
steamboat _Talisman_," and the local poets illuminated the columns of
the "Journal" with odes on her advent. The joy was short-lived. The
_Talisman_ met the natural fate of steamboats a few months later,
being burned at the St. Louis wharf. Neither State nor nation has ever
removed the snags from the Sangamon, and no subsequent navigator of
its waters has been found to eclipse the fame of the earliest one.




CHAPTER V

LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAR


[Sidenote: 1832.]

A new period in the life of Lincoln begins with the summer of 1832. He
then obtained his first public recognition, and entered upon the
course of life which was to lead him to a position of prominence and
great usefulness.

The business of Offutt had gone to pieces, and his clerk was out of
employment, when Governor Reynolds issued his call for volunteers to
move the tribe of Black Hawk across the Mississippi. For several years
the raids of the old Sac chieftain upon that portion of his patrimony
which he had ceded to the United States had kept the settlers in the
neighborhood of Rock Island in terror, and menaced the peace of the
frontier. In the spring of 1831 he came over to the east side of the
river with a considerable band of warriors, having been encouraged by
secret promises of cooperation from several other tribes. These failed
him, however, when the time of trial arrived, and an improvised force
of State volunteers, assisted by General E. P. Gaines and his
detachment, had little difficulty in compelling the Indians to re-
cross the Mississippi, and to enter into a solemn treaty on the 30th
of June by which the former treaties were ratified and Black Hawk
and his leading warriors bound themselves never again to set foot on
the east side of the river, without express permission from the
President or the Governor of Illinois.

[Sidenote: Reynolds, "Life and Times," p. 325.]

[Sidenote: Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 110.]

But Black Hawk was too old a savage to learn respect for treaties or
resignation under fancied wrongs. He was already approaching the
allotted term of life. He had been a chief of his nation for more than
forty years. He had scalped his first enemy when scarcely more than a
child, having painted on his blanket the blood-red hand which marked
his nobility at fifteen years of age. Peace under any circumstances
would doubtless have been irksome to him, but a peace which forbade
him free access to his own hunting-grounds and to the graves of his
fathers was more than he could now school himself to endure. He had
come to believe that he had been foully wronged by the treaty which
was his own act; he had even convinced himself that "land cannot be
sold," a proposition in political economy which our modern socialists
would be puzzled to accept or confute. Besides this, the tenderest
feelings of his heart were outraged by this exclusion from his former
domain. He had never passed a year since the death of his daughter
without making a pilgrimage to her grave at Oquawka and spending hours
in mystic ceremonies and contemplation. He was himself prophet as well
as warrior, and had doubtless his share of mania, which is the
strength of prophets. The promptings of his own broken heart readily
seemed to him the whisperings of attendant spirits; and day by day
these unseen incitements increased around him, until they could not be
resisted even if death stood in the way.

He made his combinations during the winter, and had it not been for
the loyal attitude of Keokuk, he could have brought the entire nation
of the Sacs and Foxes to the war-path. As it was, the flower of the
young men came with him when, with the opening spring, he crossed the
river once more. He came this time, he said, "to plant corn," but as a
preliminary to this peaceful occupation of the land he marched up the
Rock River, expecting to be joined by the Winnebagoes and
Pottawatomies. But the time was passed for honorable alliances among
the Indians. His oath-bound confederates gave him little assistance,
and soon cast in their lot with the stronger party.

This movement excited general alarm in the State. General Henry
Atkinson, commanding the United States troops, sent a formal summons
to Black Hawk to return; but the old chief was already well on his way
to the lodge of his friend, the prophet Wabokishick, at Prophetstown,
and treated the summons with contemptuous defiance. The Governor
immediately called for volunteers, and was himself astonished at the
alacrity with which the call was answered. Among those who enlisted at
the first tap of the drum was Abraham Lincoln, and equally to his
surprise and delight he was elected captain of his company. The
volunteer organizations of those days were conducted on purely
democratic principles. The company assembled on the green, an election
was suggested, and three-fourths of the men walked over to where
Lincoln was standing; most of the small remainder joined themselves to
one Kirkpatrick, a man of some substance and standing from Spring
Creek. We have the word of Mr. Lincoln for it, that no subsequent
success ever gave him such unmixed pleasure as this earliest
distinction. It was a sincere, unsought tribute of his equals to those
physical and moral qualities which made him the best man of his
hundred, and as such was accepted and prized.

[Sidenote: Reynolds, "Life and Times," p. 363.]

At the Beardstown rendezvous, Captain Lincoln's company was attached
to Colonel Samuel Thompson's regiment, the Fourth Illinois, which was
organized at Richland, Sangamon County, on the 21st of April, and
moved on the 27th, with the rest of the command under General Samuel
Whitesides, for Yellow Banks, where the boats with provisions had been
ordered to meet them. It was arduous marching. There were no roads and
no bridges, and the day's task included a great deal of labor. The
third day out they came to the Henderson River, a stream some fifty
yards wide, swift and swollen with the spring thaws, with high and
steep banks. To most armies this would have seemed a serious obstacle,
but these backwoodsmen swarmed to the work like beavers, and in less
than three hours the river was crossed with the loss of only one or
two horses and wagons. When they came to Yellow Banks, on the
Mississippi, the provision-boats had not arrived, and for three days
they waited there literally without food; very uncomfortable days for
Governor Reynolds, who accompanied the expedition, and was forced to
hear the outspoken comments of two thousand hungry men on his supposed
inefficiency. But on the 6th of May the _William Wallace_ arrived, and
"this sight," says the Governor with characteristic sincerity, "was, I
presume, the most interesting I ever beheld." From there they marched
to the mouth of Rock River, and thence General Whitesides proceeded
with his volunteers up the river some ninety miles to Dixon, where
they halted to await the arrival of General Atkinson with the regular
troops and provisions. There they found two battalions of fresh
horsemen under Majors Stillman and Bailey, who had as yet seen no
service and were eager for the fray. Whitesides's men were tired with
their forced march, and besides, in their ardor to get forward, they
had thrown away a good part of their provisions and left their baggage
behind. It pleased the Governor, therefore, to listen to the prayers
of Stillman's braves, and he gave them orders to proceed to the head
of Old Man's Creek, where it was supposed there were some hostile
Indians, and coerce them into submission. "I thought," says the
Governor in his memoirs, "they might discover the enemy."

[Illustration:   A SOLDIER'S DISCHARGE FROM THE BLACK HAWK WAR, SIGNED
BY A. LINCOLN, CAPTAIN. IN THE POSSESSION OF O. H. OLDROTD,
SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS.]

The supposition was certainly well founded. They rode merrily away,
came to Old Man's Creek, thereafter to be called Stillman's Run, and
encamped for the night. By the failing light a small party of Indians
was discovered on the summit of a hill a mile away, and a few
courageous gentlemen hurriedly saddled their horses, and, without
orders, rode after them. The Indians retreated, but were soon
overtaken, and two or three of them killed. The volunteers were now
strung along a half mile of hill and valley, with no more order or
care than if they had been chasing rabbits. Black Hawk, who had been
at supper when the running fight began, hastily gathered a handful of
warriors and attacked the scattered whites. The onset of the savages
acted like an icy bath on the red-hot valor of the volunteers; they
turned and ran for their lives, stampeding the camp as they fled.
There was very little resistance--so little that Black Hawk, fearing a
ruse, tried to recall his warriors from the pursuit, but in the
darkness and confusion could not enforce his orders. The Indians
killed all they caught up with; but the volunteers had the fleeter
horses, and only eleven were overtaken. The rest reached Dixon by twos
and threes, rested all night, and took courage. General Whitesides
marched out to the scene of the disaster the next morning, but the
Indians were gone. They had broken up into small parties, and for
several days they reaped the bloody fruit of their victory in the
massacre of peaceful settlements in the adjacent districts.

The time of enlistment of the volunteers had now come to an end, and
the men, seeing no prospect of glory or profit, and weary of the work
and the hunger which were the only certain incidents of the campaign,
refused in great part to continue in service. But it is hardly
necessary to say that Captain Lincoln was not one of these homesick
soldiers. Not even the trammels of rank, which are usually so strong
among the trailers of the saber, could restrain him from what he
considered his simple duty. As soon as he was mustered out of his
captaincy, he re-enlisted on the same day, May 27, as a private
soldier. Several other officers did the same, among them General
Whitesides and Major John T. Stuart. Lincoln became a member of
Captain Elijah Iles's company of mounted volunteers, sometimes called
the "Independent Spy Battalion," an organization unique of its kind,
if we may judge from the account given by one of its troopers. It was
not, says Mr. George M. Harrison, "under the control of any regiment
or brigade, but received orders directly from the Commander-in-Chief,
and always, when with the army, camped within the lines, and had many
other privileges, such as having no camp duties to perform and drawing
rations as much and as often as we pleased," which would seem to liken
this battalion as nearly as possible to the fabled "regiment of
brigadiers." With this _elite_ corps Lincoln served through his
second enlistment, though it was not his fortune to take part in
either of the two engagements in which General James D. Henry, at the
Wisconsin Bluffs and the Bad Axe, broke and destroyed forever the
power of Black Hawk and the British band of Sacs and Foxes.

After Lincoln was relieved of the weight of dignity involved in his
captaincy, the war became a sort of holiday, and the tall private from
New Salem enjoyed it as much as any one. He entered with great zest
into the athletic sports with which soldiers love to beguile the
tedium of camp. He was admitted to be the strongest man in the army,
and, with one exception, the best wrestler. Indeed, his friends never
admitted the exception, and severely blamed Lincoln for confessing
himself defeated on the occasion when he met the redoubtable Thompson,
and the two fell together on the turf. His popularity increased from
the beginning to the end of the campaign, and those of his comrades
who still survive always speak with hearty and affectionate praise of
his character and conduct in those rough yet pleasantly remembered
days.

[Sidenote: MS. Letters from Thomas, Gregg and others.]

The Spy Battalion formed no part of General Henry's forces when, by a
disobedience of orders as prudent as it was audacious, he started with
his slender force on the fresh trail which he was sure would lead him
to Black Hawk's camp. He found and struck the enemy at bay on the
bluffs of the Wisconsin River on the 21st of July, and inflicted upon
them a signal defeat. The broken remnant of Black Hawk's power then
fled for the Mississippi River, the whole army following in close
pursuit--General Atkinson in front and General Henry bringing up the
rear. Fortune favored the latter once more, for while Black Hawk with
a handful of men was engaging and drawing away the force under
Atkinson, General Henry struck the main trail, and brought on the
battle of the Bad Axe, if that could be called a battle which was an
easy slaughter of the weary and discouraged savages, fighting without
heart or hope, an army in front and the great river behind. Black Hawk
escaped the fate of his followers, to be captured a few days later
through the treachery of his allies. He was carried in triumph to
Washington and presented to President Jackson, to whom he made this
stern and defiant speech, showing how little age or disaster could do
to tame his indomitable spirit: "I am a man and you are another. I did
not expect to conquer the white people. I took up the hatchet to
avenge injuries which could no longer be borne. [Footnote: It is a
noteworthy coincidence that President Lincoln's proclamation at the
opening of the war calls for troops "to redress wrongs already long
enough endured."] Had I borne them longer my people would have said:
'Black Hawk is a squaw; he is too old to be a chief; he is no Sac.'
This caused me to raise the war-whoop. I say no more of it; all is
known to you." He returned to Iowa, and died on the 3d of October,
1838, at his camp on the river Des Moines. He was buried in gala
dress, with cocked hat and sword, and the medals presented him by two
governments. He was not allowed to rest even in his grave. His bones
were exhumed by some greedy wretch and sold from hand to hand till
they came at last to the Burlington Museum, where they were destroyed
by fire.

[Illustration:   BLACK HAWK]

It was on the 16th of June, a month before the slaughter of the Bad
Axe, that the battalion to which Lincoln belonged was at last mustered
out, at Whitewater, Wisconsin. His final release from the service was
signed by a young lieutenant of artillery, Robert Anderson, who,
twenty-nine years later, in one of the most awful crises in our
annals, was to sustain to Lincoln relations of prodigious importance,
on a scene illuminated by the flash of the opening guns of the civil
war. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to chapter end.]
The men started home the next day in high spirits, school-boys for
their holidays. Lincoln had need, like Horatio, of his good spirits,
for they were his only outfit for the long journey to New Salem, he
and his mess-mate Harrison [Footnote: George M. Harrison, who gives an
account of his personal experiences in Lamon, p. 116.] having had
their horses stolen the day before by some patriot over-anxious to
reach home. But, as Harrison says, "I laughed at our fate, and he
joked at it, and we all started off merrily. The generous men of our
company walked and rode by turns with us, and we fared about equal
with the rest. But for this generosity our legs would have had to do
the better work; for in that day this dreary route furnished no horses
to buy or to steal; and, whether on horse or afoot, we always had
company, for many of the horses' backs were too sore for riding." It
is not hard to imagine with what quips and quirks of native fancy
Lincoln and his friends beguiled the way through forest and prairie.
With youth, good health, and a clear conscience, and even then the
dawn of a young and undefiled ambition in his heart, nothing was
wanting to give zest and spice to this long, sociable walk of a
hundred leagues. One joke is preserved, and this one is at the expense
of Lincoln. One chilly morning he complained of being cold. "No
wonder," said some facetious cavalier, "there is so much of you on the
ground." [Footnote: Dr. Holland gives this homely joke (Life of
Lincoln, p. 71), but transfers it to a time four years later, when
Lincoln had permanently assumed shoes and had a horse of his own.] We
hope Lincoln's contributions to the fun were better than this, but of
course the prosperity of these jests lay rather in the liberal ears
that heard them than in the good-natured tongues that uttered them.

Lincoln and Harrison could not have been altogether penniless, for at
Peoria they bought a canoe and paddled down to Pekin. Here the
ingenious Lincoln employed his hereditary talent for carpentry by
making an oar for the frail vessel while Harrison was providing the
commissary stores. The latter goes on to say: "The river, being very
low, was without current, so that we had to pull hard to make half the
speed of legs on land; in fact, we let her float all night, and on the
next morning always found the objects still visible that were beside
us the previous evening. The water was remarkably clear for this river
of plants, and the fish appeared to be sporting with us as we moved
over or near them. On the next day after we left Pekin we overhauled a
raft of saw-logs, with two men afloat on it to urge it on with poles
and to guide it in the channel. We immediately pulled up to them and
went on the raft, where we were made welcome by various
demonstrations, especially by an invitation to a feast on fish, corn-
bread, eggs, butter, and coffee, just prepared for our benefit. Of
these good things we ate almost immoderately, for it was the only warm
meal we had made for several days. While preparing it, and after
dinner, Lincoln entertained them, and they entertained us for a couple
of hours very amusingly." Kindly human companionship was a luxury in
that green wilderness, and was readily appreciated and paid for.

The returning warriors dropped down the river to the village of
Havana--from Pekin to Havana in a canoe! The country is full of these
geographical nightmares, the necessary result of freedom of
nomenclature bestowed by circumstances upon minds equally destitute of
taste or education. There they sold their boat,--no difficult task,
for a canoe was a staple article in any river-town,--and again set out
"the old way, over the sand-ridges, for Petersburg. As we drew near
home, the impulse became stronger and urged us on amazingly. The long
strides of Lincoln, often slipping back in the loose sand six inches
every step, were just right for me; and he was greatly diverted when
he noticed me behind him stepping along in his tracks to keep from
slipping." Thus the two comrades came back from their soldierings to
their humble homes, from which Lincoln was soon to start on the way
marked out for him by Providence, with strides which no comrade, with
whatever goodwill, might hope to follow.

He never took his campaigning seriously. The politician's habit of
glorifying the petty incidents of a candidate's life always seemed
absurd to him, and in his speech, made in 1848, ridiculing the effort
on the part of General Cass's friends to draw some political advantage
from that gentleman's respectable but obscure services on the frontier
in the war with Great Britain, he stopped any future eulogist from
painting his own military achievements in too lively colors. "Did you
know, Mr. Speaker," he said, "I am a military hero! In the days of the
Black Hawk war I fought, bled, and came away. I was not at Stillman's
defeat, but I was about as near it as General Cass was to Hull's
surrender; and, like him, I saw the place very soon afterwards. It is
quite certain I did not break my sword, for I had none to break, but I
bent my musket pretty badly on one occasion. If General Cass went in
advance of me picking whortleberries, I guess I surpassed him in
charges on the wild onions. If he saw any live fighting Indians, it
was more than I did, but I had a good many bloody struggles with the
mosquitoes; and although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can
truly say I was often very hungry. If ever I should conclude to doff
whatever our Democratic friends may suppose there is of black-cockade
Federalism about me, and thereupon they shall take me up as their
candidate for the Presidency, I protest that they shall not make fun
of me, as they have of General Cass, by attempting to write me into a
military hero."

[Relocated Footnote: A story to the effect that Lincoln was mustered
into service by Jefferson Davis has for a long time been current, but
the strictest search in the records fails to confirm it. We are
indebted to General R. C. Drum, Adjutant-General of the Army, for an
interesting letter giving all the known facts in relation to this
story. General Drum says: "The company of the Fourth Regiment Illinois
Mounted Volunteers, commanded by Mr. Lincoln, was, with others, called
out by Governor Reynolds, and was organized at Richland, Sangamon
County, Illinois, April 21, 1832. The muster-in roll is not on file,
but the records show that the company was mustered out at the mouth of
Fox River, May 27, 1832, by Nathaniel Buckmaster, Brigade-Major to
General Samuel Whitesides's Illinois Volunteers. On the muster-roll of
Captain Elijah Iles's company, Illinois Mounted Volunteers, A. Lincoln
(Sangamon County) appears as a private from May 27, 1832, to June 16,
1832, when the company was mustered out of service by Lieutenant
Robert Anderson, Third United States Artillery and Colonel (Assistant
Inspector-General) Illinois Volunteers. Brigadier-General Henry
Atkinson, in his report of May 30, 1832, stated that the Illinois
Volunteers were called out by the Governor of that State, but in haste
and for no definite period of service. On their arrival at Ottawa they
became clamorous for their discharge, which the Governor granted,
retaining--of those who were discharged and volunteered for a further
period of twenty days--a sufficient number of men to form six
companies, which General Atkinson found at Ottawa on his arrival there
from Rock River. General Atkinson further reports that these companies
and some three hundred regular troops, remaining in position at Rock
River, were all the force left him to keep the enemy in check until
the assemblage of the three thousand additional Illinois militia
called out by the Governor upon his (General A.'s) requisition, to
rendezvous at Ottawa, June 12-15, 1832,

"There can be no doubt that Captain Iles's company, mentioned above,
was one of the six which served until June 16, 1832, while the fact is
fully established that the company of which Mr. Lincoln was a member
was mustered out by Lieutenant Robert Anderson, who, in April, 1861,
was in command of Fort Sumter. There is no evidence to show that it
was mustered in by Lieutenant Jefferson Davis. Mr. Davis's company (B,
First United States Infantry) was stationed at Fort Crawford,
Wisconsin, during the months of January and February, 1832, and he is
borne on the rolls as 'absent on detached service at the Dubuque mines
by order of Colonel Morgan.' From March 26 to August 18, 1832, the
muster-rolls of his company report him as absent on furlough."]




CHAPTER VI

SURVEYOR AND REPRESENTATIVE


[Sidenote: 1832.]

The discharged volunteer arrived in New Salem only ten days before the
August election, in which he had a deep personal interest. Before
starting for the wars he had announced himself, according to the
custom of the time, by a handbill circular, as a candidate for the
Legislature from Sangamon County. [Footnote: We are aware that all
former biographers have stated that Lincoln's candidacy for the
Legislature was subsequent to his return from the war, and a
consequence of his service. But his circular is dated March 9, 1832,
and the "Sangamo Journal" mentions his name among the July, and
apologizes candidates in for having accidentally omitted it in May.]
He had done this in accordance with his own natural bent for public
life and desire for usefulness and distinction, and not without strong
encouragement from friends whose opinion he valued. He had even then
considerable experience in speaking and thinking on his feet. He had
begun his practice in that direction before leaving Indiana, and
continued it everywhere he had gone. Mr. William Butler tells us that
on one occasion, when Lincoln was a farmhand at Island Grove, the
famous circuit-rider, Peter Cartwright, came by, electioneering for
the Legislature, and Lincoln at once engaged in a discussion with him
in the cornfield, in which the great Methodist was equally astonished
at the close reasoning and the uncouth figure of Mr. Brown's
extraordinary hired man. At another time, after one Posey, a
politician in search of office, had made a speech in Macon, John
Hanks, whose admiration of his cousin's oratory was unbounded, said
that "Abe could beat it." He turned a keg on end, and the tall boy
mounted it and made his speech. "The subject was the navigation of the
Sangamon, and Abe beat him to death," says the loyal Hanks. So it was
not with the tremor of a complete novice that the young man took the
stump during the few days left him between his return and the
election.

[Sidenote: Reynolds, "My Own Times," p. 291.]

He ran as a Whig. As this has been denied on authority which is
generally trustworthy, it is well enough to insist upon the fact. We
have a memorandum in Mr. Lincoln's own handwriting in which he says he
ran as "an avowed Clay man." In one of the few speeches of his, which,
made at this time, have been remembered and reported, he said: "I am
in favor of a national bank; I am in favor of the internal improvement
system, and of a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and
political principles." Nothing could be more unqualified or outspoken
than this announcement of his adhesion to what was then and for years
afterwards called "the American System" of Henry Clay. Other testimony
is not wanting to the same effect. Both Major Stuart and Judge Logan
[Footnote: The Democrats of New Salem worked for Lincoln out of their
personal regard for him. That was the general understanding of the
matter here at the time. In this he made no concession of principle
whatever. He was as stiff as a man could be in his Whig doctrines.
They did this for him simply because he was popular--because he was
Lincoln. STEPHEN T. LOGAN. July 6, 1875.] say that Lincoln ran in 1832
as a Whig, and that his speeches were unevasively in defense of the
principles of that party. Without discussing the merits of the party
or its purposes, we may insist that his adopting them thus openly at
the outset of his career was an extremely characteristic act, and
marks thus early the scrupulous conscientiousness which shaped every
action of his life. The State of Illinois was by a large majority
Democratic, hopelessly attached to the person and policy of Jackson.
Nowhere had that despotic leader more violent and unscrupulous
partisans than there. They were proud of their very servility, and
preferred the name of "whole-hog Jackson men" to that of Democrats.
The Whigs embraced in their scanty ranks the leading men of the State,
those who have since been most distinguished in its history, such as
S. T. Logan, Stuart, Browning, Dubois, Hardin, Breese, and many
others. But they were utterly unable to do anything except by dividing
the Jackson men, whose very numbers made their party unwieldy, and by
throwing their votes with the more decent and conservative portion of
them. In this way, in the late election, they had secured the success
of Governor Reynolds--the Old Ranger--against Governor Kinney, who
represented the vehement and proscriptive spirit which Jackson had
just breathed into the party. He had visited the General in
Washington, and had come back giving out threatenings and slaughter
against the Whigs in the true Tennessee style, declaring that "all
Whigs should be whipped out of office like dogs out of a meat-house";
the force of south-western simile could no further go. But the great
popularity of Reynolds and the adroit management of the Whigs carried
him through successfully. A single fact will show on which side the
people who could read were enlisted. The "whole-hog" party had one
newspaper, the opposition five. Of course it would have been
impossible for Reynolds to poll a respectable vote if his loyalty to
Jackson had been seriously doubted. As it was, he lost many votes
through a report that he had been guilty of saying that "he was as
strong for Jackson as any reasonable man should be." The Governor
himself, in his naive account of the canvass, acknowledges the
damaging nature of this accusation, and comforts himself with quoting
an indiscretion of Kinney's, who opposed a projected canal on the
ground that "it would flood the country with Yankees."

It showed some moral courage, and certainly an absence of the
shuffling politician's fair-weather policy, that Lincoln, in his
obscure and penniless youth, at the very beginning of his career, when
he was not embarrassed by antecedents or family connections, and when,
in fact, what little social influence he knew would have led him the
other way, chose to oppose a furiously intolerant majority, and to
take his stand with the party which was doomed to long-continued
defeat in Illinois. The motives which led him to take this decisive
course are not difficult to imagine. The better sort of people in
Sangamon County were Whigs, though the majority were Democrats, and he
preferred through life the better sort to the majority. The papers he
read were the Louisville "Journal" and the "Sangamo Journal," both
Whig. Reading the speeches and debates of the day, he sided with
Webster against Calhoun, and with Clay against anybody. Though his
notions of politics, like those of any ill-educated young man of
twenty-two, must have been rather crude, and not at all sufficient to
live and to die by, he had adopted them honestly and sincerely, with
no selfish regard to his own interests; and though he ardently desired
success, he never abated one jot or tittle of his convictions for any
possible personal gain, then or thereafter.

In the circular in which he announced his candidacy he made no
reference to national politics, but confined himself mainly to a
discussion of the practicability of improving the navigation of the
Sangamon, the favorite hobby of the place and time. He had no monopoly
of this "issue." It formed the burden of nearly every candidate's
appeal to the people in that year. The excitement occasioned by the
trip of the _Talisman_ had not yet died away, although the little
steamer was now dust and ashes, and her bold commander had left the
State to avoid an awkward meeting with the sheriff. The hope of seeing
Springfield an emporium of commerce was still lively among the
citizens of Sangamon County, and in no one of the handbills of the
political aspirants of the season was that hope more judiciously
encouraged than in the one signed by Abraham Lincoln. It was a well-
written circular, remarkable for its soberness and, reserve when we
consider the age and the limited advantages of the writer. It
concluded in these words: "Upon the subjects of which I have treated,
I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or
all of them; but holding it a sound maxim that it is better only
sometimes to be right than at all times wrong, so soon as I discover
my opinions to be erroneous I shall be ready to renounce them....
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or
not, I can say for one, that I have no other so great as that of being
truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their
esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to
be developed. I am young, and unknown to many of you. I was born and
have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy
or powerful relations or friends to recommend me. My case is thrown
exclusively upon the independent voters of the county; and, if
elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me, for which I shall
be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in
their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been
too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined."

This is almost precisely the style of his later years. The errors of
grammar and construction which spring invariably from an effort to
avoid redundancy of expression remained with him through life. He
seemed to grudge the space required for necessary parts of speech. But
his language was at twenty-two, as it was thirty years later, the
simple and manly attire of his thought, with little attempt at
ornament and none at disguise. There was an intermediate time when he
sinned in the direction of fine writing; but this ebullition soon
passed away, and left that marvelously strong and transparent style in
which his two inaugurals were written.

Of course, in the ten days left him after his return from the field, a
canvass of the county, which was then--before its division--several
thousand square miles in extent, was out of the question. He made a
few speeches in the neighborhood of New Salem, and at least one in
Springfield. He was wholly unknown there except by his few comrades in
arms. We find him mentioned in the county paper only once during the
summer, in an editorial note adding the name of Captain Lincoln to
those candidates for the Legislature who were periling their lives on
the frontier and had left their reputations in charge of their
generous fellow-citizens at home. On the occasion of his speaking at
Springfield, most of the candidates had come together to address a
meeting there to give their electors some idea of their quality. These
were severe ordeals for the rash aspirants for popular favor. Besides
those citizens who came to listen and judge, there were many whose
only object was the free whisky provided for the occasion, and who,
after potations pottle-deep, became not only highly unparliamentary
but even dangerous to life and limb. This wild chivalry of Lick Creek
was, however, less redoubtable to Lincoln than it might be to an urban
statesman unacquainted with the frolic brutality of Clary's Grove.
Their gambols never caused him to lose his self-possession. It is
related that once, while he was speaking, he saw a ruffian attack a
friend of his in the crowd, and the rencontre not resulting according
to the orator's sympathies, he descended from the stand, seized the
objectionable fighting man by the neck, "threw him some ten feet,"
then calmly mounted to his place and finished his speech, the course
of his logic undisturbed by this athletic parenthesis. Judge Logan saw
Lincoln for the first time on the day when he came up to Springfield
on his canvass this summer. He thus speaks of his future partner: "He
was a very tall, gawky, and rough-looking fellow then; his pantaloons
didn't meet his shoes by six inches. But after he began speaking I
became very much interested in him. He made a very sensible speech.
His manner was very much the same as in after life; that is, the same
peculiar characteristics were apparent then, though of course in after
years he evinced more knowledge and experience. But he had then the
same novelty and the same peculiarity in presenting his ideas. He had
the same individuality that he kept through all his life."

There were two or three men at the meeting whose good opinion was
worth more than all the votes of Lick Creek to one beginning life:
Stephen T. Logan, a young lawyer who had recently come from Kentucky
with the best equipment for a _nisi prius_ practitioner ever
brought into the State; Major Stuart, whom we have met in the Black
Hawk war, once commanding a battalion and then marching as a private;
and William Butler, afterwards prominent in State politics, at that
time a young man of the purest Western breed in body and character,
clear-headed and courageous, and ready for any emergency where a
friend was to be defended or an enemy punished. We do not know whether
Lincoln gained any votes that day, but he gained what was far more
valuable, the active friendship of these able and honorable men, all
Whigs and all Kentuckians like himself.

The acquaintances he made in his canvass, the practice he gained in
speaking, and the added confidence which this experience of measuring
his abilities with those of others gave, were all the advantages which
Lincoln derived from this attempt. He was defeated, for the only time
in his life, in a contest before the people. The fortunate candidates
were E. D. Taylor, J. T. Stuart, Achilles Morris, and Peter
Cartwright, the first of whom received 1127 votes and the last 815.
Lincoln's position among the eight defeated candidates was a very
respectable one. He had 657 votes, and there were five who fared
worse, among them his old adversary Kirkpatrick. What must have been
especially gratifying to him was the fact that he received the almost
unanimous vote of his own neighborhood, the precinct of New Salem, 277
votes against 3, a result which showed more strongly than any words
could do the extent of the attachment and the confidence which his
genial and upright character had inspired among those who knew him
best.

Having been, even in so slight a degree, a soldier and a politician,
he was unfitted for a day laborer; but being entirely without means of
subsistence, he was forced to look about for some suitable occupation.
We know he thought seriously at this time of learning the trade of a
blacksmith, and using in that honest way the sinew and brawn which
nature had given him. But an opening for another kind of business
occurred, which prevented his entering upon any merely mechanical
occupation. Two of his most intimate friends were the brothers
Herndon, called, according to the fashion of the time, which held it
unfriendly to give a man his proper name, and arrogant for him to
claim it, "Row" and "Jim." They kept one of those grocery stores in
which everything salable on the frontier was sold, and which seem to
have changed their occupants as rapidly as sentry-boxes. "Jim" sold
his share to an idle and dissolute man named Berry, and "Row" soon
transferred his interest to Lincoln. It was easy enough to buy, as
nothing was ever given in payment but a promissory note. A short time
afterwards, one Reuben Radford, who kept another shop of the same
kind, happened one evening to attract the dangerous attention of the
Clary's Grove boys, who, with their usual prompt and practical
facetiousness, without a touch of malice in it, broke his windows and
wrecked his store. The next morning, while Radford was ruefully
contemplating the ruin, and doubtless concluding that he had had
enough of a country where the local idea of neighborly humor found
such eccentric expression, he hailed a passer-by named Greene, and
challenged him to buy his establishment for four hundred dollars. This
sort of trade was always irresistible to these Western speculators,
and Greene at once gave his note for the amount. It next occurred to
him to try to find out what the property was worth, and doubting his
own skill, he engaged Lincoln to make an invoice of it. The young
merchant, whose appetite for speculation had just been whetted by his
own investment, undertook the task, and, finding the stock of goods
rather tempting, offered Greene $250 for his bargain, which was at
once accepted. Not a cent of money changed hands in all these
transactions. By virtue of half a dozen signatures, Berry and Lincoln
became proprietors of the only mercantile establishment in the
village, and the apparent wealth of the community was increased by a
liberal distribution of their notes among the Herndons, Radford,
Greene, and a Mr. Rutledge, whose business they had also bought.

Fortunately for Lincoln and for the world, the enterprise was not
successful. It was entered into without sufficient reflection, and
from the very nature of things was destined to fail. To Berry the
business was merely the refuge of idleness. He spent his time in
gossip and drank up his share of the profits, and it is probable that
Lincoln was far more interested in politics and general reading than
in the petty traffic of his shop. In the spring of the next year,
finding that their merchandise was gaining them little or nothing,
they concluded to keep a tavern in addition to their other business,
and the records of the County Court of Sangamon County show that Berry
took out a license for that purpose on the 6th of March, 1833.
[Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (1) relocated to chapter end.]
But it was even then too late for any expedients to save the moribund
partnership. The tavern was never opened, for about this time Lincoln
and Berry were challenged to sell out to a pair of vagrant brothers
named Trent, who, as they had no idea of paying, were willing to give
their notes to any amount. They soon ran away, and Berry expired,
extinguished in rum. Lincoln was thus left loaded with debts, and with
no assets except worthless notes of Berry and the Trents. It is
greatly to his credit that he never thought of doing by others as
others had done by him. The morality of the frontier was deplorably
loose in such matters, and most of these people would have concluded
that the failure of the business expunged its liabilities. But Lincoln
made no effort even to compromise the claims against him. He promised
to pay when he could, and it took the labor of years to do it; but he
paid at last every farthing of the debt, which seemed to him and his
friends so large that it was called among them "the national debt."

[Illustration:   JUDGE STEPHEN T. LOGAN.]

He had already begun to read elementary books of law, borrowed from
Major Stuart and other kindly acquaintances. Indeed, it is quite
possible that Berry and Lincoln might have succeeded better in
business if the junior member of the firm had not spent so much of his
time reading Blackstone and Chitty in the shade of a great oak just
outside the door, while the senior quietly fuddled himself within.
Eye-witnesses still speak of the grotesque youth, habited in homespun
tow, lying on his back with his feet on the trunk of the tree, and
poring over his book by the hour, "grinding around with the shade," as
it shifted from north to east. After his store, to use his own
expression, had "winked out," he applied himself with more continuous
energy to his reading, doing merely what odd jobs came to his hand to
pay his current expenses, which were of course very slight. He
sometimes helped his friend Ellis in his store; sometimes went into
the field and renewed his exploits as a farm-hand, which had gained
him a traditional fame in Indiana; sometimes employed his clerkly hand
in straightening up a neglected ledger. It is probable that he worked
for his board oftener than for any other compensation, and his hearty
friendliness and vivacity, as well as his industry in the field, made
him a welcome guest in any farmhouse in the county. His strong arm was
always at the disposal of the poor and needy; it is said of him, with
a graphic variation of a well-known text, "that he visited the
fatherless and the widow and chopped their wood."

In the spring of this year, 1833, he was appointed Postmaster of New
Salem, and held the office for three years. Its emoluments were
slender and its duties light, but there was in all probability no
citizen of the village who could have made so much of it as he. The
mails were so scanty that he was said to carry them in his hat, and he
is also reported to have read every newspaper that arrived; it is
altogether likely that this formed the leading inducement to his
taking the office. His incumbency lasted until New Salem ceased to be
populous enough for a post-station and the mail went by to Petersburg.
Dr. J. G. Holland relates a sequel to this official experience which
illustrates the quaint honesty of the man. Several years later, when
he was a practicing lawyer, an agent of the Post-office Department
called upon him, and asked for a balance due from the New Salem
office, some seventeen dollars. Lincoln rose, and opening a little
trunk which lay in a corner of the room, took from it a cotton rag in
which was tied up the exact sum required. "I never use any man's money
but my own," he quietly remarked. When we consider the pinching
poverty in which these years had been passed, we may appreciate the
self-denial denial which had kept him from making even a temporary use
of this little sum of government money.

[Illustration:   A. LINCOLN'S SURVEYING INSTRUMENTS AND SADDLE-BAG. IN
THE POSSESSION OF THE LINCOLN MONUMENT COLLECTION.]

John Calhoun, the Surveyor of Sangamon County, was at this time
overburdened with work. The principal local industry was speculation
in land. Every settler of course wanted his farm surveyed and marked
out for him, and every community had its syndicate of leading citizens
who cherished a scheme of laying out a city somewhere. In many cases
the city was plotted, the sites of the principal buildings, including
a courthouse and a university, were determined, and a sonorous name
was selected out of Plutarch, before its location was even considered.
For this latter office the intervention of an official surveyor was
necessary, and therefore Mr. Calhoun had more business than he could
attend to without assistance. Looking about for a young man of good
character, intelligent enough to learn surveying at short notice, his
attention was soon attracted to Lincoln. He offered young Abraham a
book containing the elements of the art, and told him when he had
mastered it he should have employment. The offer was a flattering one,
and Lincoln, with that steady self-reliance of his, accepted it, and
armed with his book went out to the schoolmaster's (Menton Graham's),
and in six weeks' close application made himself a surveyor.
[Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (2) relocated to chapter end.]

[Illustration:   AUTOGRAPH PLAN OF ROAD SURVEYED BY A. LINCOLN AND
OTHERS. The lower half is the right-hand side of the plan which, in
the original, is in one piece.]

[Illustration:   Fac-simile of Lincoln's Report of the road survey.]

It will be remembered that Washington in his youth adopted the same
profession, but there were few points of similarity in the lives of
the two great Presidents, in youth or later manhood. The Virginian had
every social advantage in his favor, and was by nature a man of more
thrift and greater sagacity in money matters. He used the knowledge
gained in the practice of his profession so wisely that he became
rather early in life a large land-holder, and continually increased
his possessions until his death. Lincoln, with almost unbounded
opportunities for the selection and purchase of valuable tracts, made
no use whatever of them. He employed his skill and knowledge merely as
a bread-winner, and made so little provision for the future that when
Mr. Van Bergen, who had purchased the Radford note, sued and got
judgment on it, his horse and his surveying instruments were taken to
pay the debt, and only by the generous intervention of a friend was he
able to redeem these invaluable means of living. He was, nevertheless,
an excellent surveyor. His portion of the public work executed under
the directions of Mr. Calhoun and his successor, T. M. Neale, was well
performed, and he soon found his time pretty well employed with
private business which came to him from Sangamon and the adjoining
counties. Early in the year 1834 we find him appointed one of three
"viewers" to locate a road from Salt Creek to the county line in the
direction of Jacksonville. The board seems to have consisted mainly of
its chairman, as Lincoln made the deposit of money required by law,
surveyed the route, plotted the road, and wr

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