Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
LINCOLN
An Account of His Personal Life, Especially of Its Springs of Action as
Revealed and Deepened by the Ordeal of War
By Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
Authority for all important statements of facts in the following pages
may be found in the notes; the condensed references are expanded in the
bibliography. A few controversial matters are discussed in the notes.
I am very grateful to Mr. William Roscoe Thayer for enabling me to use
the manuscript diary of John Hay. Miss Helen Nicolay has graciously
confirmed some of the implications of the official biography. Lincoln's
only surviving secretary, Colonel W. O. Stoddard, has given considerate
aid. The curious incident of Lincoln as counsel in an action to recover
slaves was mentioned to me by Professor Henry Johnson, through whose
good offices it was confirmed and amplified by Judge John H. Marshall.
Mr. Henry W. Raymond has been very tolerant of a stranger's inquiries
with regard to his distinguished father. A futile attempt to discover
documentary remains of the Republican National Committee of 1864 has
made it possible, through the courtesy of Mr. Clarence B. Miller, at
least to assert that there is nothing of importance in possession of
the present Committee. A search for new light on Chandler drew forth
generous assistance from Professor Ulrich B. Phillips, Mr. Floyd B.
Streeter and Mr. G. B. Krum. The latter caused to be examined, for
this particular purpose, the Blair manuscripts in the Burton Historical
Collection. Much illumination arose out of a systematic resurvey of the
Congressional Globe, for the war period, in which I had the
stimulating companionship of Professor John L. Hill, reinforced by many
conversations with Professor Dixon Ryan Fox and Professor David Saville
Muzzey. At the heart of the matter is the resolute criticism of Mrs.
Stephenson and of a long enduring friend, President Harrison Randolph.
The temper of the historical fraternity is such that any worker in
any field is always under a host of incidental obligations. There is
especial propriety in my acknowledging the kindness of Professor Albert
Bushnell Hart, Professor James A. Woodburn, Professor Herman V. Ames,
Professor St. George L. Sioussat and Professor Allen Johnson.
CONTENTS
FOUNDATIONS
I THE CHILD OF THE FOREST
II THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH
III A VILLAGE LEADER IV REVELATIONS
V PROSPERITY
VI UNSATISFYING RECOGNITION
PROMISES
VII THE SECOND START
VIII A RETURN TO POLITICS
IX THE LITERARY STATESMAN
X THE DARK HORSE
XI SECESSION
XII THE CRISIS
XIII ECLIPSE
CONFUSIONS
XIV THE STRANGE NEW MAN
XV PRESIDENT AND PREMIER
XVI "ON TO RICHMOND!"
XVII DEFINING THE ISSUE
XVIII THE JACOBIN CLUB
XIX THE JACOBINS BECOME INQUISITORS
XX IS CONGRESS THE PRESIDENT'S MASTER?
XXI THE STRUGGLE TO CONTROL THE ARMY
XXII LINCOLN EMERGES
AUDACITIES
XXIII THE MYSTICAL STATESMAN
XXIV GAMBLING IN GENERALS
XXV A WAR BEHIND THE SCENES
XXVI THE DICTATOR, THE MARPLOT, AND THE LITTLE MEN
XXVII THE TRIBUNE OF THE PEOPLE
XXVIII APPARENT ASCENDENCY
XXIX CATASTROPHE
XXX THE PRESIDENT VERSUS THE VINDICTIVES
VICTORY
XXXI A MENACING PAUSE
XXXII THE AUGUST CONSPIRACY
XXXIII THE RALLY TO THE PRESIDENT
XXXIV "FATHER ABRAHAM"
XXXV THE MASTER OF THE MOMENT
XXXVI PREPARING A DIFFERENT WAR
XXXVII FATE INTERPOSES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author and publisher make grateful acknowledgement to Ginn and
Company, Boston, for the photograph of St. Gaudens' Statue; to The
Century Company of New York for the Earliest Portrait of Lincoln, which
is from an engraving by Johnson after a daguerreotype in the possession
of the Honorable Robert T. Lincoln; and for Lincoln and Tad, which is
from the famous photograph by Brady; to The Macmillan Company of New
York for the portrait of Mrs. Lincoln and also for The Review of the
Army of the Potomac, both of which were originally reproduced in Ida M.
Tarbell's Life of Abraham Lincoln. For the rare and interesting portrait
entitled The Last Phase of Lincoln acknowledgment is made to Robert
Bruce, Esquire, Clinton, Oneida County, New York. This photograph was
taken by Alexander Gardner, April 9, 1865, the glass plate of which is
now in Mr. Bruce's collection.
I. THE CHILD OF THE FOREST
Of first importance in the making of the American people is that great
forest which once extended its mysterious labyrinth from tide-water to
the prairies when the earliest colonists entered warily its sea-worn
edges a portion of the European race came again under a spell it had
forgotten centuries before, the spell of that untamed nature
which created primitive man. All the dim memories that lay deep in
subconsciousness; all the vague shadows hovering at the back of the
civilized mind; the sense of encompassing natural power, the need to
struggle single-handed against it; the danger lurking in the darkness
of the forest; the brilliant treachery of the forest sunshine glinted
through leafy secrecies; the Strange voices in its illimitable murmur;
the ghostly shimmer of its glades at night; the lovely beauty of the
great gold moon; all the thousand wondering dreams that evolved the
elder gods, Pan, Cybele, Thor; all this waked again in the soul of the
Anglo-Saxon penetrating the great forest. And it was intensified by the
way he came,--singly, or with but wife and child, or at best in very
small company, a mere handful. And the surrounding presences were not
only of the spiritual world. Human enemies who were soon as well armed
as he, quicker of foot and eye, more perfectly noiseless in their tread
even than the wild beasts of the shadowy coverts, the ruthless Indians
whom he came to expel, these invisible presences were watching him, in
a fierce silence he knew not whence. Like as not the first signs of that
menace which was everywhere would be the hiss of the Indian arrow, or
the crack of the Indian rifle, and sharp and sudden death.
Under these conditions he learned much and forgot much. His deadly need
made him both more and less individual than he had been, released
him from the dictation of his fellows in daily life while it enforced
relentlessly a uniform method of self-preservation. Though the unseen
world became more and more real, the understanding of it faded. It
became chiefly a matter of emotional perception, scarcely at all a
matter of philosophy. The morals of the forest Americans were those of
audacious, visionary beings loosely hound together by a comradeship
in peril. Courage, cautiousness, swiftness, endurance, faithfulness,
secrecy,--these were the forest virtues. Dreaming, companionship,
humor,--these were the forest luxuries.
From the first, all sorts and conditions were ensnared by that silent
land, where the trails they followed, their rifles in their hands, had
been trodden hard generation after generation by the feet of the Indian
warriors. The best and the worst of England went into that illimitable
resolvent, lost themselves, found themselves, and issued from its
shadows, or their children did, changed both for good and ill,
Americans. Meanwhile the great forest, during two hundred years, was
slowly vanishing. This parent of a new people gave its life to its
offspring and passed away. In the early nineteenth century it had
withered backward far from the coast; had lost its identity all along
the north end of the eastern mountains; had frayed out toward the sunset
into lingering tentacles, into broken minor forests, into shreds and
patches.
Curiously, by a queer sort of natural selection, its people had
congregated into life communities not all of one pattern. There were
places as early as the beginning of the century where distinction
had appeared. At other places life was as rude and rough as could be
imagined. There were innumerable farms that were still mere "clearings,"
walled by the forest. But there were other regions where for many a mile
the timber had been hewn away, had given place to a ragged continuity
of farmland. In such regions especially if the poorer elements of
the forest, spiritually speaking, had drifted thither--the straggling
villages which had appeared were but groups of log cabins huddled along
a few neglected lanes. In central Kentucky, a poor new village was
Elizabethtown, unkempt, chokingly dusty in the dry weather, with muddy
streams instead of streets during the rains, a stench of pig-sties at
the back of its cabins, but everywhere looking outward glimpses of a
lovely meadow land.
At Elizabethtown in 1806 lived Joseph Hanks, a carpenter, also his niece
Nancy Hanks. Poor people they were, of the sort that had been sucked
into the forest in their weakness, or had been pushed into it by a
social pressure they could not resist; not the sort that had grimly
adventured its perils or gaily courted its lure. Their source was
Virginia. They were of a thriftless, unstable class; that vagrant
peasantry which had drifted westward to avoid competition with slave
labor. The niece, Nancy, has been reputed illegitimate. And though
tradition derives her from the predatory amour of an aristocrat, there
is nothing to sustain the tale except her own appearance. She had a
bearing, a cast of feature, a tone, that seemed to hint at higher social
origins than those of her Hanks relatives. She had a little schooling;
was of a pious and emotional turn of mind; enjoyed those amazing
"revivals" which now and then gave an outlet to the pent-up religiosity
of the village; and she was almost handsome.(1)
History has preserved no clue why this girl who was rather the best of
her sort chose to marry an illiterate apprentice of her uncle's, Thomas
Lincoln, whose name in the forest was spelled "Linkhorn." He was a
shiftless fellow, never succeeding at anything, who could neither read
nor write. At the time of his birth, twenty-eight years before, his
parents--drifting, roaming people, struggling with poverty--were
dwellers in the Virginia mountains. As a mere lad, he had shot an
Indian--one of the few positive acts attributed to him--and his father
had been killed by Indians. There was a "vague tradition" that his
grandfather had been a Pennsylvania Quaker who had wandered southward
through the forest mountains. The tradition angered him. Though he
appears to have had little enough--at least in later years--of the
fierce independence of the forest, he resented a Quaker ancestry as an
insult. He had no suspicion that in after years the zeal of genealogists
would track his descent until they had linked him with a lost member of
a distinguished Puritan family, a certain Mordecai Lincoln who removed
to New Jersey, whose descendants became wanderers of the forest and sank
speedily to the bottom of the social scale, retaining not the slightest
memory of their New England origin.(2) Even in the worst of the
forest villages, few couples started married life in less auspicious
circumstances than did Nancy and Thomas. Their home in one of the alleys
of Elizabethtown was a shanty fourteen feet square.(3) Very soon after
marriage, shiftless Thomas gave up carpentering and took to farming.
Land could be had almost anywhere for almost nothing those days, and
Thomas got a farm on credit near where now stands Hodgenville. Today, it
is a famous place, for there, February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln, second
child, but first son of Nancy and Thomas, was born.(4)
During most of eight years, Abraham lived in Kentucky. His father,
always adrift in heart, tried two farms before abandoning Kentucky
altogether. A shadowy figure, this Thomas; the few memories of him
suggest a superstitious nature in a superstitious community. He used
to see visions in the forest. Once, it is said, he came home, all
excitement, to tell his wife he had seen a giant riding on a lion,
tearing up trees by the roots; and thereupon, he took to his bed and
kept it for several days.
His son Abraham told this story of the giant on the lion to a playmate
of his, and the two boys gravely discussed the existence of ghosts.
Abraham thought his father "didn't exactly believe in them," and seems
to have been in about the same state of mind himself. He was quite sure
he was "not much" afraid of the dark. This was due chiefly to the simple
wisdom of a good woman, a neighbor, who had taught him to think of the
night as a great room that God had darkened even as his friend darkened
a room in her house by hanging something over the window.(5)
The eight years of his childhood in Kentucky had few incidents. A hard,
patient, uncomplaining life both for old and young. The men found their
one deep joy in the hunt. In lesser degree, they enjoyed the revivals
which gave to the women their one escape out of themselves. A strange,
almost terrible recovery of the primitive, were those religious furies
of the days before the great forest had disappeared. What other figures
in our history are quite so remarkable as the itinerant frontier
priests, the circuit-riders as they are now called, who lived as Elijah
did, whose temper was very much the temper of Elijah, in whose exalted
narrowness of devotion, all that was stern, dark, foreboding--the very
brood of the forest's innermost heart--had found a voice. Their religion
was ecstasy in homespun, a glory of violent singing, the release of a
frantic emotion, formless but immeasurable, which at all other times, in
the severity of the forest routine, gave no sign of its existence.
A visitor remembered long afterward a handsome young woman who he
thought was Nancy Hanks, singing wildly, whirling about as may once have
done the ecstatic women of the woods of Thrace, making her way among
equally passionate worshipers, to the foot of the rude altar, and there
casting herself into the arms of the man she was to marry.(6) So did
thousands of forest women in those seasons when their communion with a
mystic loneliness was confessed, when they gave tongue as simply as
wild creatures to the nameless stirrings and promptings of that secret
woodland where Pan was still the lord. And the day following the
revival, they were again the silent, expressionless, much enduring,
long-suffering forest wives, mothers of many children, toilers of
the cabins, who cooked and swept and carried fuel by sunlight, and by
firelight sewed and spun.
It can easily be understood how these women, as a rule, exerted little
influence on their sons. Their imaginative side was too deeply hidden,
the nature of their pleasures too secret, too mysterious. Male youth,
following its obvious pleasure, went with the men to the hunt. The women
remained outsiders. The boy who chose to do likewise, was the incredible
exception. In him had come to a head the deepest things in the forest
life: the darkly feminine things, its silence, its mysticism, its
secretiveness, its tragic patience. Abraham was such a boy. It is
said that he astounded his father by refusing to own a gun. He earned
terrible whippings by releasing animals caught in traps. Though he had
in fullest measure the forest passion for listening to stories, the
ever-popular tales of Indian warfare disgusted him. But let the tale
take on any glint of the mystery of the human soul--as of Robinson
Crusoe alone on his island, or of the lordliness of action, as in
Columbus or Washington--and he was quick with interest. The stories of
talking animals out of Aesop fascinated him.
In this thrilled curiosity about the animals was the side of him least
intelligible to men like his father. It lives in many anecdotes: of his
friendship with a poor dog he had which he called "Honey"; of pursuing
a snake through difficult thickets to prevent its swallowing a frog; of
loitering on errands at the risk of whippings to watch the squirrels in
the tree-tops; of the crowning offense of his childhood, which earned
him a mighty beating, the saving of a fawn's life by scaring it off just
as a hunter's gun was leveled. And by way of comment on all this, there
is the remark preserved in the memory of another boy to whom at the time
it appeared most singular, "God might think as much of that little fawn
as of some people." Of him as of another gentle soul it might have been
said that all the animals were his brothers and sisters.(7)
One might easily imagine this peculiar boy who chose to remain at home
while the men went out to slay, as the mere translation into masculinity
of his mother, and of her mothers, of all the converging processions
of forest women, who had passed from one to another the secret of their
mysticism, coloring it many ways in the dark vessels of their suppressed
lives, till it reached at last their concluding child. But this would
only in part explain him. Their mysticism, as after-time was to show, he
had undoubtedly inherited. So, too, from them, it may be, came another
characteristic--that instinct to endure, to wait, to abide the issue of
circumstance, which in the days of his power made him to the politicians
as unintelligible as once he had been to the forest huntsmen.
Nevertheless, the most distinctive part of those primitive women, the
sealed passionateness of their spirits, he never from childhood to the
end revealed. In the grown man appeared a quietude, a sort of tranced
calm, that was appalling. From what part of his heredity did this
derive? Was it the male gift of the forest? Did progenitors worthier
than Thomas somehow cast through him to his alien son that peace they
had found in the utter heart of danger, that apparent selflessness which
is born of being ever unfailingly on guard?
It is plain that from the first he was a natural stoic, taking his
whippings, of which there appear to have been plenty, in silence,
without anger. It was all in the day's round. Whippings, like other
things, came and went. What did it matter? And the daily round, though
monotonous, had even for the child a complement of labor. Especially
there was much patient journeying back and forth with meal bags between
his father's cabin and the local mill. There was a little schooling,
very little, partly from Nancy Lincoln, partly from another good woman,
the miller's kind old mother, partly at the crudest of wayside schools
maintained very briefly by a wandering teacher who soon wandered on; but
out of this schooling very little result beyond the mastery of the A B
C.(8) And even at this age, a pathetic eagerness to learn, to invade the
wonder of the printed book! Also a marked keenness of observation. He
observed things which his elders overlooked. He had a better sense of
direction, as when he corrected his father and others who were taking
the wrong short-cut to a burning house. Cool, unexcitable, he was
capable of presence of mind. Once at night when the door of the cabin
was suddenly thrown open and a monster appeared on the threshold, a
spectral thing in the darkness, furry, with the head of an ox, Thomas
Lincoln shrank back aghast; little Abraham, quicker-sighted and
quicker-witted, slipped behind the creature, pulled at its furry mantle,
and revealed a forest Diana, a bold girl who amused herself playing
demon among the shadows of the moon.
Seven years passed and his eighth birthday approached. All this while
Thomas Lincoln had somehow kept his family in food, but never had he
money in his pocket. His successive farms, bought on credit, were never
paid for. An incurable vagrant, he came at last to the psychological
moment when he could no longer impose himself on his community. He must
take to the road in a hazard of new fortune. Indiana appeared to him
the land of promise. Most of his property--such as it was--except his
carpenter's tools, he traded for whisky, four hundred gallons. Somehow
he obtained a rattletrap wagon and two horses.
The family appear to have been loath to go. Nancy Lincoln had long been
ailing and in low spirits, thinking much of what might happen to her
children after her death. Abraham loved the country-side, and he had
good friends in the miller and his kind old mother. But the vagrant
Thomas would have his way. In the brilliancy of the Western autumn, with
the ruined woods flaming scarlet and gold, these poor people took their
last look at the cabin that had been their wretched shelter, and set
forth into the world.(9)
II THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH
Vagrants, or little better than vagrants, were Thomas Lincoln and his
family making their way to Indiana. For a year after they arrived they
were squatters, their home an "open-faced camp," that is, a shanty with
one wall missing, and instead of chimney, a fire built on the open side.
In that mere pretense of a house, Nancy Lincoln and her children spent
the winter of 1816-1817. Then Thomas resorted to his familiar practice
of taking land on credit. The Lincolns were now part of a "settlement"
of seven or eight families strung along a little stream known as Pigeon
Creek. Here Thomas entered a quarter-section of fair land, and in the
course of the next eleven years succeeded--wonderful to relate--in
paying down sufficient money to give him title to about half.
Meanwhile, poor fading Nancy went to her place. Pigeon Creek was an
out-of-the-way nook in the still unsettled West, and Nancy during the
two years she lived there could not have enjoyed much of the consolation
of her religion. Perhaps now and then she had ghostly council of some
stray circuit-rider. But for her the days of the ecstasies had gone by;
no great revival broke the seals of the spirit, stirred its deep waters,
along Pigeon Creek. There was no religious service when she was laid
to rest in a coffin made of green lumber and fashioned by her husband.
Months passed, the snow lay deep, before a passing circuit-rider held
a burial service over her grave. Tradition has it that the boy Abraham
brought this about very likely, at ten years old, he felt that her
troubled spirit could not have peace till this was done. Shadowy as she
is, ghostlike across the page of history, it is plain that she was a
reality to her son. He not only loved her but revered her. He believed
that from her he had inherited the better part of his genius. Many years
after her death he said, "God bless my mother; all that I am or ever
hope to be I owe to her."
Nancy was not long without a successor. Thomas Lincoln, the next year,
journeyed back to Kentucky and returned in triumph to Indiana, bringing
as his wife, an old flame of his who had married, had been widowed, and
was of a mind for further adventures. This Sarah Bush Lincoln, of
less distinction than Nancy, appears to have been steadier-minded and
stronger-willed. Even before this, Thomas had left the half-faced camp
and moved into a cabin. But such a cabin! It had neither door, nor
window, nor floor. Sally Lincoln required her husband to make of it a
proper house--by the standards of Pigeon Creek. She had brought with her
as her dowry a wagonload of furniture. These comforts together with her
strong will began a new era of relative comfort in the Lincoln cabin.(1)
Sally Lincoln was a kind stepmother to Abraham who became strongly
attached to her. In the rough and nondescript community of Pigeon Creek,
a world of weedy farms, of miserable mud roads, of log farm-houses, the
family life that was at least tolerable. The sordid misery described
during her regime emerged from wretchedness to a state of by all the
recorders of Lincoln's early days seems to have ended about his twelfth
year. At least, the vagrant suggestion disappeared. Though the life
that succeeded was void of luxury, though it was rough, even brutal,
dominated by a coarse, peasant-like view of things, it was scarcely by
peasant standards a life of hardship. There was food sufficient, if not
very good; protection from wind and weather; fire in the winter time;
steady labor; and social acceptance by the community of the creekside.
That the labor was hard and long, went without saying. But as to
that--as of the whippings in Kentucky--what else, from the peasant point
of view, would you expect? Abraham took it all with the same stoicism
with which he had once taken the whippings. By the unwritten law of the
creekside he was his father's property, and so was his labor, until
he came of age. Thomas used him as a servant or hired him out to
other farmers. Stray recollections show us young Abraham working as
a farm-hand for twenty-five cents the day, probably with "keep" in
addition; we glimpse him slaughtering hogs skilfully at thirty-one cents
a day, for this was "rough work." He became noted as an axman.
In the crevices, so to speak, of his career as a farm-hand, Abraham got
a few months of schooling, less than a year in all. A story that has
been repeated a thousand times shows the raw youth by the cabin fire
at night doing sums on the back of a wooden shovel, and shaving off its
surface repeatedly to get a fresh page. He devoured every book that came
his way, only a few to be sure, but generally great ones--the Bible,
of course, and Aesop, Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and a few histories,
these last unfortunately of the poorer sort. He early displayed a bent
for composition, scribbling verses that were very poor, and writing
burlesque tales about his acquaintances in what passed for a Biblical
style.(2)
One great experience broke the monotony of the life on Pigeon Creek.
He made a trip to New Orleans as a "hand" on a flatboat. Of this trip
little is known though much may be surmised. To his deeply poetic nature
what an experience it must have been: the majesty of the vast river; the
pageant of its immense travel; the steamers heavily laden; the fleets of
barges; the many towns; the nights of stars over wide sweeps of water;
the stately plantation houses along the banks; the old French city with
its crowds, its bells, the shipping, the strange faces and the foreign
speech; all the bewildering evidence that there were other worlds
besides Pigeon Creek!
What seed of new thinking was sown in his imagination by this Odyssey
we shall never know. The obvious effect in the ten years of his life
in Indiana was produced at Pigeon Creek. The "settlement" was within
fifteen miles of the Ohio. It lay in that southerly fringe of Indiana
which received early in the century many families of much the same
estate, character and origin as the Lincolns,--poor whites of the edges
of the great forest working outward toward the prairies. Located on good
land not far from a great highway, the Ohio, it illustrated in its
rude prosperity a transformation that went on unobserved in many such
settlements, the transformation of the wandering forester of the lower
class into a peasant farmer. Its life was of the earth, earthy; though
it retained the religious traditions of the forest, their significance
was evaporating; mysticism was fading into emotionalism; the
camp-meeting was degenerating into a picnic. The supreme social event,
the wedding, was attended by festivities that filled twenty-four hours:
a race of male guests in the forenoon with a bottle of whisky for a
prize; an Homeric dinner at midday; "an afternoon of rough games and
outrageous practical jokes; a supper and dance at night interrupted
by the successive withdrawals of the bride and groom, attended by
ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian crudeness; and a noisy
dispersal next day."(3) The intensities of the forest survived in hard
drinking, in the fury of the fun-making, and in the hunt. The forest
passion for storytelling had in no way decreased.
In this atmosphere, about eighteen and nineteen, Abraham shot up
suddenly from a slender boy to a huge, raw-honed, ungainly man, six feet
four inches tall, of unusual muscular strength. His strength was one of
the fixed conditions of his development. It delivered him from all fear
of his fellows. He had plenty of peculiarities. He was ugly, awkward;
he lacked the wanton appetites of the average sensual man. And these
peculiarities without his great strength as his warrant might have
brought him into ridicule. As it was, whatever his peculiarities, in
a society like that of Pigeon Creek, the man who could beat all
competitors, wrestling or boxing, was free from molestation. But Lincoln
instinctively had another aim in life than mere freedom to be himself.
Two characteristics that were so significant in his childhood continued
with growing vitality in his young manhood: his placidity and his
intense sense of comradeship. The latter, however, had undergone a
change. It was no longer the comradeship of the wild creatures. That
spurt of physical expansion, the swift rank growth to his tremendous
stature, swept him apparently across a dim dividing line, out of the
world of birds and beasts and into the world of men. He took the new
world with the same unfailing but also unexcitable curiosity with which
he had taken the other, the world of squirrels, flowers, fawns.
Here as there, the difference from his mother, deep though their
similarities may have been, was sharply evident. Had he been wholly at
one with her religiously, the gift of telling speech which he now began
to display might have led him into a course that would have rejoiced
her heart, might have made him a boy preacher, and later, a great
revivalist. His father and elder sister while on Pigeon Creek joined the
local Baptist Church. But Abraham did not follow them. Nor is there a
single anecdote linking him in any way with the fervors of camp meeting.
On the contrary, what little is remembered, is of a cool aloofness.(4)
The inscrutability of the forest was his--what it gave to the stealthy,
cautious men who were too intent on observing, too suspiciously
watchful, to give vent to their feelings. Therefore, in Lincoln
there was always a double life, outer and inner, the outer quietly
companionable, the inner, solitary, mysterious.
It was the outer life that assumed its first definite phase in the years
on Pigeon Creek. During those years, Lincoln discovered his gift of
story-telling. He also discovered humor. In the employment of both
talents, he accepted as a matter of course the tone of the young
ruffians among whom he dwelt. Very soon this powerful fellow, who could
throw any of them in a wrestle, won the central position among them by a
surer title, by the power to delight. And any one who knows how peasant
schools of art arise--for that matter, all schools of art that are
vital--knows how he did it. In this connection, his famous biographers,
Nicolay and Hay, reveal a certain externality by objecting that a story
attributed to him is ancient. All stories are ancient. Not the tale, but
the telling, as the proverb says, is the thing. In later years, Lincoln
wrote down every good story that he heard, and filed it.(5) When it
reappeared it had become his own. Who can doubt that this deliberate
assimilation, the typical artistic process, began on Pigeon Creek?
Lincoln never would have captured as he did his plowboy audience, set
them roaring with laughter in the intervals of labor, had he not given
them back their own tales done over into new forms brilliantly beyond
their powers of conception. That these tales were gross, even ribald,
might have been taken for granted, even had we not positive evidence
of the fact. Otherwise none of that uproarious laughter which we may be
sure sounded often across shimmering harvest fields while stalwart young
pagans, ever ready to pause, leaned, bellowing, on the handles of their
scythes, Abe Lincoln having just then finished a story.
Though the humor of these stories was Falstaffian, to say the least,
though Lincoln was cock of the walk among the plowboys of Pigeon Creek,
a significant fact with regard to him here comes into view. Not an
anecdote survives that in any way suggests personal licentiousness.
Scrupulous men who in after-time were offended by his coarseness of
speech--for more or less of the artist of Pigeon Creek stuck to him
almost to the end; he talked in fables, often in gross fables--these
men, despite their annoyance, felt no impulse to attribute to him
personal habits in harmony with his tales. On the other hand, they
were puzzled by their own impression, never wavering, that he was
"pureminded." The clue which they did not have lay in the nature of his
double life. That part of him which, in our modern jargon, we call his
"reactions" obeyed a curious law. They dwelt in his outer life without
penetrating to the inner; but all his impulses of personal action were
securely seated deep within. Even at nineteen, for any one attuned to
spiritual meaning, he would have struck the note of mystery, faintly,
perhaps, but certainly. To be sure, no hint of this reached the minds
of his rollicking comrades of the harvest field. It was not for such as
they to perceive the problem of his character, to suspect that he was a
genius, or to guess that a time would come when sincere men would form
impressions of him as dissimilar as black and white. And so far as it
went the observation of the plowboys was correct. The man they saw was
indeed a reflection of themselves. But it was a reflection only. Their
influence entered into the real man no more than the image in a mirror
has entered into the glass.
III. A VILLAGE LEADER
Though placid, this early Lincoln was not resigned. He differed from the
boors of Pigeon Creek in wanting some other sort of life. What it was he
wanted, he did not know. His reading had not as yet given him definite
ambitions. It may well be that New Orleans was the clue to such stirring
in him as there was of that discontent which fanciful people have called
divine. Remembering New Orleans, could any imaginative youth be content
with Pigeon Creek?
In the spring of 1830, shortly after he came of age, he agreed for once
with his father whose chronic vagrancy had reasserted itself. The whole
family set out again on their wanderings and made their way in an oxcart
to a new halting place on the Sangamon River in Illinois. There Abraham
helped his father clear another piece of land for another illusive
"start" in life. The following spring he parted with his family and
struck out for himself.(1) His next adventure was a second trip as a
boatman to New Orleans. Can one help suspecting there was vague hope in
his heart that he might be adventuring to the land of hearts' desire?
If there was, the yokels who were his fellow boatmen never suspected
it. One of them long afterward asserted that Lincoln returned from New
Orleans fiercely rebellious against its central institution, slavery,
and determined to "hit that thing" whenever he could.
The legend centers in his witnessing a slave auction and giving voice to
his horror in a style quite unlike any of his authentic utterances. The
authority for all this is doubtful.(2) Furthermore, the Lincoln of 1831
was not yet awakened. That inner life in which such a reaction might
take place was still largely dormant. The outer life, the life of the
harvest clown, was still a thick insulation. Apparently, the waking of
the inner life, the termination of its dormant stage, was reserved for
an incident far more personal that fell upon him in desolating force a
few years later.
Following the New Orleans venture, came a period as storekeeper for
a man named Denton Offut, in perhaps the least desirable town in
Illinois--a dreary little huddle of houses gathered around Rutledge's
Mill on the Sangamon River and called New Salem.(3) Though a few of
its people were of a better sort than any Lincoln had yet known except,
perhaps, the miller's family in the old days in Kentucky--and still a
smaller few were of fine quality, the community for the most part was
hopeless. A fatality for unpromising neighborhoods overhangs like a doom
the early part of this strange life. All accounts of New Salem represent
it as predominantly a congregation of the worthless, flung together by
unaccountable accident at a spot where there was no genuine reason for
a town's existence. A casual town, created by drifters, and void of
settled purpose. Small wonder that ere long it vanished from the map;
that after a few years its drifting congregation dispersed to every
corner of the horizon, and was no more. But during its brief existence
it staged an episode in the development of Lincoln's character. However,
this did not take place at once. And before it happened, came another
turn of his soul's highway scarcely less important. He discovered, or
thought he discovered, what he wanted. His vague ambition took shape. He
decided to try to be a politician. At twenty-three, after living in New
Salem less than a year, this audacious, not to say impertinent, young
man offered himself to the voters of Sangamon County as a candidate for
the Legislature. At this time that humility which was eventually his
characteristic had not appeared. It may be dated as subsequent to New
Salem--a further evidence that the deep spiritual experience which
closed this chapter formed a crisis. Before then, at New Salem as
at Pigeon Creek, he was but a variant, singularly decent, of the
boisterous, frolicking, impertinent type that instinctively sought the
laxer neighborhoods of the frontier. An echo of Pigeon Creek informed
the young storekeeper's first state paper, the announcement of his
candidacy, in the year 1832. His first political speech was in a curious
vein, glib, intimate and fantastic: "Fellow citizens, I presume you all
know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by
many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are
short and sweet like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national
bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high
protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If
elected, I shall be thankful; if not it will be all the same."(4)
However, this bold throw of the dice of fortune was not quite so
impertinent as it seems. During the months when he was in charge of
Offut's grocery store he had made a conquest of New Salem. The village
grocery in those days was the village club. It had its constant
gathering of loafers all of whom were endowed with votes. It was the one
place through which passed the whole population, in and out, one time
or another. To a clever storekeeper it gave a chance to establish a
following. Had he, as Lincoln had, the gift of story-telling, the gift
of humor, he was a made man. Pigeon Creek over again! Lincoln's wealth
of funny stories gave Offut's grocery somewhat the role of a vaudeville
theater and made the storekeeper as popular a man as there was in New
Salem.
In another way he repeated his conquest of Pigeon Creek. New Salem had
its local Alsatia known as Clary's Grove whose insolent young toughs led
by their chief, Jack Armstrong, were the terror of the neighborhood. The
groceries paid them tribute in free drinks. Any luckless storekeeper
who incurred their displeasure found his store some fine morning a total
wreck. Lincoln challenged Jack Armstrong to a duel with fists. It was
formally arranged. A ring was formed; the whole village was audience;
and Lincoln thrashed him to a finish. But this was only a small part
of his triumph. His physical prowess, joined with his humor and his
companionableness; entirely captivated Clary's Grove. Thereafter, it was
storekeeper Lincoln's pocket borough; its ruffians were his body-guard.
Woe to any one who made trouble for their hero.
There were still other causes for his quick rise to the position of
village leader. His unfailing kindness was one; his honesty was another.
Tales were related of his scrupulous dealings, such as walking a
distance of miles in order to correct a trifling error he had made, in
selling a poor woman less than the proper weight of tea. Then, too, by
New Salem standards, he was educated. Long practice on the shovel at
Pigeon Creek had given him a good handwriting, and one of the first
things he did at New Salem was to volunteer to be clerk of elections.
And there was a distinct moral superiority. Little as this would have
signified unbacked by his giant strength since it had that authority
behind it his morality set him apart from his followers, different,
imposing. He seldom, if ever, drank whisky. Sobriety was already the
rule of his life, both outward and inward. At the same time he was
not censorious. He accepted the devotion of Clary's Grove without
the slightest attempt to make over its bravoes in his own image. He
sympathized with its ideas of sport. For all his kindliness to humans of
every sort much of his sensitiveness for animals had passed away. He was
not averse to cock fighting; he enjoyed a horse race.(5) Altogether, in
his outer life, before the catastrophe that revealed him to himself,
he was quite as much in the tone of New Salem as ever in that of Pigeon
Creek. When the election came he got every vote in New Salem except
three.(6)
But the village was a small part of Sangamon County. Though Lincoln
received a respectable number of votes elsewhere, his total was well
down in the running. He remained an inconspicuous minority candidate.
Meanwhile Offut's grocery had failed. In the midst of the legislative
campaign, Offut's farmer storekeeper volunteered for the Indian War
with Black Hawk, but returned to New Salem shortly before the election
without having once smelled powder. Since his peers were not of a
mind to give him immediate occupation in governing, he turned again to
business. He formed a partnership with a man named Berry. They bought on
credit the wreck of a grocery that had been sacked by Lincoln's friends
of Clary's Grove, and started business as "General Merchants," under the
style of Berry & Lincoln. There followed a year of complete unsuccess.
Lincoln demonstrated that he was far more inclined to read any chance
book that came his way than to attend to business, and that he had "no
money sense." The new firm went the way of Offut's grocery, leaving
nothing behind it but debt. The debts did not trouble Berry; Lincoln
assumed them all. They formed a dreadful load which he bore with his
usual patience and little by little discharged. Fifteen years passed
before again he was a free man financially.
A new and powerful influence came into his life during the half idleness
of his unsuccessful storekeeping. It is worth repeating in his own
words, or what seems to be the fairly accurate recollection of his
words: "One day a man who was migrating to the West, drove up in front
of my store with a wagon which contained his family and household
plunder. He asked me if I would buy an old barrel for which he had no
room in his wagon, and which he said contained nothing of special value.
I did not want it but to oblige him I bought it and paid him, I think,
a half a dollar for it. Without further examination I put it away in the
store and forgot all about it Sometime after, in overhauling things,
I came upon the barrel and emptying it upon the floor to see what it
contained, I found at the bottom of the rubbish a complete edition of
Blackstone's Commentaries. I began to read those famous works, and I had
plenty of time; for during the long summer days when the farmers were
busy with their crops, my customers were few and far between. The more I
read, the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was
my mind so thoroughly absorbed. I read until I devoured them."(7)
The majesty of the law at the bottom of a barrel of trash discovered at
a venture and taking instant possession of the discoverer's mind! Like
the genius issuing grandly in the smoke cloud from the vase drawn up out
of the sea by the fisher in the Arabian tale! But this great book was
not the only magic casket discovered by the idle store-keeper, the
broken seals of which released mighty presences. Both Shakespeare and
Burns were revealed to him in this period. Never after did either for a
moment cease to be his companion. These literary treasures were found
at Springfield twenty miles from New Salem, whither Lincoln went on foot
many a time to borrow books.
His subsistence, after the failure of Berry & Lincoln, was derived from
the friendliness of the County Surveyor Calhoun, who was a Democrat,
while Lincoln called himself a Whig. Calhoun offered him the post of
assistant. In accepting, Lincoln again displayed the honesty that was
beginning to be known as his characteristic. He stipulated that he
should be perfectly free to express his opinions, that the office should
not be in any respect, a bribe. This being conceded, he went to work
furiously on a treatise upon surveying, and astonishingly soon, with the
generous help of the schoolmaster of New Salem, was able to take up his
duties. His first fee was "two buckskins which Hannah Armstrong 'fixed'
on his pants so the briers would not wear them out."(8)
Thus time passed until 1834 when he staked his only wealth, his
popularity, in the gamble of an election. This time he was successful.
During the following winter he sat in the Legislature of Illinois; a
huge, uncouth, mainly silent member, making apparently no impression
whatever, very probably striking the educated members as a nonentity in
homespun.(9)
In the spring of 1835, he was back in New Salem, busy again with his
surveying. Kind friends had secured him the office of local postmaster.
The delivery of letters was now combined with going to and fro as a
surveyor. As the mail came but once a week, and as whatever he had to
deliver could generally be carried in his hat, and as payment was in
proportion to business done, his revenues continued small. Nevertheless,
in the view of New Salem, he was getting on.
And then suddenly misfortune overtook him. His great adventure, the
first of those spiritual agonies of which he was destined to endure so
many, approached. Hitherto, since childhood, women had played no part
in his story. All the recollections of his youth are vague in their
references to the feminine. As a boy at Pigeon Creek when old Thomas was
hiring him out, the women of the settlement liked to have him around,
apparently because he was kindly and ever ready to do odd jobs in
addition to his regular work. However, until 1835, his story is that of
a man's man, possibly because there was so much of the feminine in
his own make-up. In 1835 came a change. A girl of New Salem, a pretty
village maiden, the best the poor place could produce, revealed him to
himself. Sweet Ann Rutledge, the daughter of the tavern-keeper, was
his first love. But destiny was against them. A brief engagement was
terminated by her sudden death late in the summer of 1835. Of this
shadowy love-affair very little is known,--though much romantic fancy
has been woven about it. Its significance for after-time is in Lincoln's
"reaction." There had been much sickness in New Salem the summer in
which Ann died. Lincoln had given himself freely as nurse--the depth
of his companionableness thus being proved--and was in an overwrought
condition when his sorrow struck him. A last interview with the dying
girl, at which no one was present, left him quite unmanned. A period of
violent agitation followed. For a time he seemed completely transformed.
The sunny Lincoln, the delight of Clary's Grove, had vanished. In
his place was a desolated soul--a brother to dragons, in the terrible
imagery of Job--a dweller in the dark places of affliction. It was his
mother reborn in him. It was all the shadowiness of his mother's world;
all that frantic reveling in the mysteries of woe to which, hitherto,
her son had been an alien. To the simple minds of the villagers with
their hard-headed, practical way of keeping all things, especially love
and grief, in the outer layer of consciousness, this revelation of an
emotional terror was past understanding. Some of them, true to their
type, pronounced him insane. He was watched with especial vigilance
during storms, fogs, damp gloomy weather, "for fear of an accident."
Surely, it was only a crazy man, in New Salem psychology, who was heard
to say, "I can never be reconciled to have the snow, rains and storms
beat upon her grave."(10)