THE LINCOLNS LEAVE INDIANA.—THE JOURNEY TO ILLINOIS.—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
STARTS OUT FOR HIMSELF.
In the spring of 1830, when Abraham was twenty-one years old, his
father, Thomas Lincoln, decided to leave Indiana. The reason Dennis
Hanks gives for this removal was a disease called the “milk-sick.”
Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and several of their
relatives who had followed them from Kentucky had died of it. The cattle
had been carried off by it. Neither brute nor human life seemed to be
safe. As Dennis Hanks says: “This was reason enough (ain’t it?) for
leaving.” Any one who has travelled through the portions of Spencer
County in which the Lincolns settled will respect Thomas Lincoln for his
energy in moving. When covered with timber, as the land was when he
chose his farm, it no doubt promised well; but fourteen years of hard
labor showed him that the soil was niggardly and the future of the
country unpromising. To-day, sixty-five years since the Lincolns left
Spencer County, the country remains as it was then, dull, commonplace,
unfruitful. The towns show no signs of energy or prosperity. There are
no leading streets or buildings; no man’s house is better than his
neighbor’s, and every man’s house is ordinary. For a long distance on
each side of Gentryville, as one passes by rail, no superior farm is to
be seen, no prosperous mine or manufactory. It is a dead, monotonous
country, where no possibilities of quick wealth have been discovered,
and which only centuries of tilling and fertilizing can make prosperous.
Thomas Lincoln did well to leave Indiana.
The place chosen for their new home was the Sangamon country in central
Illinois. It was at that day a country of great renown in the West, the
name meaning “The land where there is plenty to eat.” One of the
family—John Hanks, a cousin of Dennis—was already there, and the
inviting reports he had sent to Indiana were no doubt what led the
Lincolns to decide on Illinois as their future home.
Gentryville saw young Lincoln depart with real regret, and his friends
gave him a score of rude proofs that he would not be forgotten. Even
to-day there is not a family living in and around Gentryville, who
remembers the Lincolns at all, who has not some legend to repeat of
their departure. They tell how in those days “neighbors were like
relatives,” and everybody offered some kindly service to the movers as a
parting sign of good-will. The entire Lincoln family was invited to
spend the last night before starting, with Mr. Gentry. He was so loath
to part with Lincoln that he “accompanied the movers along the road a
spell.” After they were gone, one of his sons, James Gentry, planted a
cedar tree in memory of Abraham, which now marks the site of the Lincoln
home.
[Illustration:
JOHN E. ROLL, WHO HELPED LINCOLN BUILD THE FLATBOAT.
Born in Green Village, New Jersey, June 4, 1814. He went to Illinois
in 1830, the year in which Mr. Lincoln went, settling in Sangamon
town, where he had relatives. It was here he met Lincoln, and made
the “pins” for the flatboat. Later Mr. Roll went to Springfield. A
quarter of the city is now known as “Roll’s addition.” Mr. Roll was
well acquainted with Lincoln, and when the President left
Springfield he gave Mr. Roll his dog Fido. Mr. Roll knew Stephen A.
Douglas well, and carries a watch which once belonged to the “Little
Giant.”
]
The spot on the hill overlooking Buckthorn valley, where the Lincolns
said good-by to their old home and to the home of Sarah Lincoln Grigsby,
to the grave of the mother and wife, to all their neighbors and friends,
is still pointed out. Buckthorn valley held many recollections dear to
them all, but to no one of the company was the place dearer than to
Abraham. It is certain that he felt the parting keenly, and he certainly
never forgot his years in the Hoosier State. One of the most touching
experiences he relates in all his published letters is his emotion at
visiting his old Indiana home fourteen years after he had left it. So
strongly was he moved by the scenes of his first conscious sorrows,
efforts, joys, ambitions, that he put into verse the feelings they
awakened.[12]
Footnote 12:
Letter to —— Johnston, April 18, 1846. “Abraham Lincoln. Complete
Works.” Edited by John G. Nicolay and John Hay. Volume I., pages 86,
87. The Century Co.
[Illustration:
SANGAMON TOWN IN 1831.
Drawn for this work by J. McCan Davis, with the aid of Mr. John E.
Roll, a former resident.
]
While he never attempted to conceal the poverty and hardship of these
days, and would speak humorously of the “pretty pinching times” he saw,
he never regarded his life at this time as mean or pitiable. Frequently
he talked to his friends in later days of his boyhood, and always with
apparent pleasure. “Mr. Lincoln told this story” (of his youth), says
Leonard Swett, “as the story of a happy childhood. There was nothing sad
or pinched, and nothing of want, and no allusion to want in any part of
it. His own description of his youth was that of a joyous, happy
boyhood. It was told with mirth and glee, and illustrated by pointed
anecdote, often interrupted by his jocund laugh.”
And he was right. There was nothing ignoble or mean in this Indiana
pioneer life. It was rude, but with only the rudeness which the
ambitious are willing to endure in order to push on to a better
condition than they otherwise could know. These people did not accept
their hardships apathetically. They did not regard them as permanent.
They were only the temporary deprivations necessary in order to
accomplish what they had home into the country to do. For this reason
they endured hopefully all that was hard. It is worth notice, too, that
there was nothing belittling in their life; there was no pauperism, no
shirking. Each family provided for its own simple wants, and had the
conscious dignity which comes from being equal to a situation. If their
lives lacked culture and refinement, they were rich in independence and
self-reliance.
[Illustration:
LINCOLN IN 1859.
From a photograph in the collection of H. W. Fay, De Kalb, Illinois.
The original was made by S. M. Fassett of Chicago; the negative was
destroyed in the Chicago fire. This picture was made at the
solicitation of D. B. Cook, who says that Mrs. Lincoln pronounced it
the best likeness she had ever seen of her husband. Rajon used the
Fassett picture as the original of his etching, and Kruell has made
a fine engraving of it.
]
FROM INDIANA TO ILLINOIS.
The company which emigrated to Illinois included the family of Thomas
Lincoln and those of Dennis Hanks and Levi Hall, married to Lincoln’s
step-sisters—thirteen persons in all. They sold land, cattle, and grain,
and much of their household goods, and were ready in March of 1830 for
their journey. All the possessions which the three families had to take
with them were packed into a big wagon—the first one Thomas Lincoln had
ever owned, it is said—to which four oxen were attached, and the caravan
was ready. The weather was still cold, the streams were swollen, and the
roads were muddy; but the party started out bravely. Inured to
hardships, alive to all the new sights on their route, every day brought
them amusement and adventures, and especially to young Lincoln the
journey must have been of keen interest.
He drove the oxen on this trip, he tells us, and, according to a story
current in Gentryville, he succeeded in doing a fair peddler’s business
on the route. Captain William Jones, in whose father’s store Lincoln had
spent so many hours in discussion and in story-telling, and for whom he
had worked the last winter he was in Indiana, says that before leaving
the State Abraham invested all his money, some thirty-odd dollars, in
notions. Though the country through which they expected to pass was but
sparsely settled, he believed he could dispose of them. “A set of knives
and forks was the largest item entered on the bill,” says Captain Jones;
“the other items were needles, pins, thread, buttons, and other little
domestic necessities. When the Lincolns reached their new home, near
Decatur, Illinois, Abraham wrote back to my father, stating that he had
doubled his money on his purchases by selling them along the road.
Unfortunately we did not keep that letter, not thinking how highly we
would have prized it years afterwards.”
The pioneers were a fortnight on their journey. All we know of the route
they took is from a few chance remarks of Lincoln’s to his friends to
the effect that they passed through Vincennes, where they saw a
printing-press for the first time, and through Palestine, where they saw
a juggler performing sleight-of-hand tricks. They reached Macon County,
their new home, from the south. Mr. H. C. Whitney says that once in
Decatur he and Lincoln passed the court-house together. “Lincoln walked
out a few feet in front, and, after shifting his position two or three
times, said, as he looked up at the building, partly to himself and
partly to me: ‘Here is the exact spot where I stood by our wagon when we
moved from Indiana, twenty-six years ago; this isn’t six feet from the
exact spot.’ ... I asked him if he, at that time, had expected to be a
lawyer and practise law in that court-house; to which he replied: ‘No; I
didn’t know I had sense enough to be a lawyer then.’ He then told me he
had frequently thereafter tried to locate the route by which they had
come, and that he had decided that it was near the main line of the
Illinois Central Railroad.”
[Illustration:
MODEL OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S DEVICE FOR LIFTING VESSELS OVER SHOALS.
The inscription above this model, which is shown to all visitors to
the Model Hall of the Patent Office, reads: “6469, Abraham Lincoln,
Springfield, Illinois. Improvement in method of lifting vessels over
shoals. Patented May 22, 1849.” The apparatus consists of a bellows
placed in each side of the hull of the craft, just below the
water-line, and worked by an odd but simple system of ropes and
pulleys. When the keel of the vessel grates against the sand or
obstruction, the bellows is filled with air; and, thus buoyed up,
the vessel is expected to float over the shoal. The model is about
eighteen or twenty inches long, and looks as if it had been whittled
with a knife out of a shingle and a cigar box. There is no
elaboration in the apparatus beyond that necessary to show the
operation of buoying the vessel over the obstructions.
]
The party settled some ten miles west of Decatur, in Macon County. Here
John Hanks had the logs already cut for their new home, and Lincoln,
Dennis Hanks, and Hall soon had a cabin erected. Mr. Lincoln says in his
short autobiography of 1860, which he wrote in the third person: “Here
they built a log cabin, into which they removed, and made sufficient of
rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and
raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year. These are, or are
supposed to be, the rails about which so much is being said just now,
though these are far from being the first or only rails ever made by
Abraham.”
If they were far from being his “first and only rails,” they certainly
were the most famous ones he or anybody else ever split. This was the
last work he did for his father, for in the summer of that year (1830)
he exercised the right of majority and started out to shift for himself.
When he left his home, he went empty-handed. He was already some months
over twenty-one years of age, but he had nothing in the world, not even
a suit of respectable clothes; and one of the first pieces of work he
did was “to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed
with white-walnut bark that would be necessary to make him a pair of
trousers.” He had no trade, no profession, no spot of land, no patron,
no influence. Two things recommended him to his neighbors—he was strong,
and he was a good fellow.
His strength made him a valuable laborer. Not that he was fond of hard
labor. Mrs. Crawford says: “Abe was no hand to pitch into work like
killing snakes;” but when he did work, it was with an ease and
effectiveness which compensated his employer for the time he spent in
practical jokes and extemporaneous speeches. He would lift as much as
three ordinary men, and “My, how he would chop!” says Dennis Hanks. “His
axe would flash and bite into a sugar-tree or sycamore, and down it
would come. If you heard him fellin’ trees in a clearin’, you would say
there was three men at work by the way the trees fell.”
Standing six feet four, he could out-lift, out-work, and out-wrestle any
man he came in contact with. Friends and employers were proud of his
prowess, and boasted of it, never failing to pit him against any hero
whose strength they heard vaunted. He himself was proud of it, and
throughout his life was fond of comparing himself with tall and strong
men. When the committee called on him in Springfield, in 1860, to notify
him of his nomination as President, Governor Morgan of New York was of
the number, a man of great height and brawn. “Pray, Governor, how tall
may you be?” was Mr. Lincoln’s first question. There is a story told of
a poor man seeking a favor from him once at the White House. He was
overpowered by the idea that he was in the presence of the President,
and, his errand done, was edging shyly out, when Mr. Lincoln stopped
him, insisting that he _measure_ with him. The man was the taller, as
Mr. Lincoln had thought; and he went away evidently as much abashed that
he dared be taller than the President of the United States as that he
had dared to venture into his presence.
Governor Hoyt tells an excellent story illustrating this interest of
Lincoln’s in manly strength, and his involuntary comparison of himself
with whoever showed it. It was in 1859, after Lincoln had delivered a
speech at the Wisconsin State Agricultural Fair in Milwaukee. Governor
Hoyt had asked him to make the rounds of the exhibits, and they went
into a tent to see a “strong man” perform. He went through the ordinary
exercises with huge iron balls, tossing them in the air and catching
them, and rolling them on his arms and back; and Mr. Lincoln, who
evidently had never before seen such a combination of agility and
strength, watched him with intense interest, ejaculating under his
breath now and then, “By George! By George!” When the performance was
over, Governor Hoyt, seeing Mr. Lincoln’s interest, asked him to go up
and be introduced to the athlete. He did so; and, as he stood looking
down musingly on the man, who was very short, and evidently wondering
that one so much smaller than he could be so much stronger, he suddenly
broke out with one of his quaint speeches. “Why,” he said, “why, I could
lick salt off the top of your hat.”
His strength won him popularity, but his good-nature, his wit, his
skill in debate, his stories, were still more efficient in gaining him
good-will. People liked to have him around, and voted him a good
fellow to work with. Yet such were the conditions of his life at this
time that, in spite of his popularity, nothing was open to him but
hard manual labor. To take the first job which he happened
upon—rail-splitting, ploughing, lumbering, boating, store-keeping—and
make the most of it, thankful if thereby he earned his bed and board
and yearly suit of jeans, was apparently all there was before Abraham
Lincoln in 1830, when he started out for himself.
[Illustration:
LINCOLN, OFFUTT, AND GREEN ON THE FLATBOAT AT NEW SALEM.
From a painting in the State Capitol, Springfield, Illinois. This
picture is crude and inaccurate. The flatboat built by Lincoln, and
by him piloted to New Orleans, was larger than the one here
portrayed, and the structure over the dam belittles the real mill.
There was not only a grist-mill, but also a saw-mill. The mill was
built in 1829. March 5, 1830, we find John Overstreet averring
before the County Commissioners “that John Cameron and James
Rutledge have erected a mill-dam on the Sangamon River which
obstructs the navigation of said river;” and Cameron and Rutledge
are ordered to alter the dam so as to restore “safe navigation.”
James M. Rutledge of Petersburg, a nephew of the mill-owner, helped
build the mill, and says: “The mill was a frame structure, and was
solidly built. They used to grind corn mostly, though some flour was
made. At times they would run day and night. The saw-mill had an
old-fashioned upright saw, and stood on the bank.” For a time this
mill was operated by Denton Offutt, under the supervision of
Lincoln. A few stakes, a part of the old dam, still show at low
water.
]