WHEREIN YOUNG MR. LINCOLN SAFELY PASSES TWO GREAT DANGER POINTS AND TURNS
INTO THE HIGHWAY OF HIS MANHOOD.
For days thereafter the people of New Salem were sorely troubled. Abe
Lincoln, the ready helper in time of need, the wise counselor, the friend
of all--"old and young, dogs and horses," as Samson was wont to say--the
pride and hope of the little cabin village, was breaking down under his
grief. He seemed to care no more for work or study or friendship. He
wandered out in the woods and upon the prairies alone. Many feared that
he would lose his reason.
There was a wise and merry-hearted man who lived a mile or so from the
village. His name was Bowlin Green. Every one on Salem Hill and in the
country round about it laid claim to the friendship of this remarkable
man. Those days when one of middle age had established himself in the
affections of a community, its members had a way of adopting him. So
Mr. Green had been adopted into many families from Beardstown to
Springfield. He was everybody's "Uncle Bowlin." He had a most unusual
circumference and the strength to carry it. He was indeed a man of
extended boundaries, embracing noble gifts, the best of which was good
nature. His jests, his loud laughter and his quaking circumference were
the three outstanding factors in his popularity. The loss of either would
have been a misfortune to himself and neighbors. His ruddy cheeks and
curling locks and kindly dark eyes and large head were details of
importance. Under all were a heart with the love of men, a mind of
unusual understanding and a hand skilled in all the arts of the Kentucky
pioneer. He could grill a venison steak and roast a grouse and broil a
chicken in a way which had filled the countryside with fond recollections
of his hospitality; he could kindle a fire with a bow and string, a pine
stick and some shavings; he could make anything from a splint broom to
a rocking horse with his jack-knife. Abe Lincoln was one of the many men
who knew and loved him.
On a warm, bright afternoon early in September, Bowlin Green was going
around the pasture to put his fence in repair, when he came upon young
Mr. Lincoln. The latter sat in the shade of a tree on the hillside. He
looked "terribly peaked," as Uncle Bowlin, has said in a letter.
"Why, Abe, where have you been?" he asked. "The whole village is scared.
Samson Traylor was here last night lookin' for ye."
"I'm like a deer that's been hurt," said the young man. "I took to the
woods. Wanted to be alone. You see, I had a lot of thinking to do--the
kind of thinking that every man must do for himself. I've got the brush
cleared away, at last, so I can see through. I had made up my mind to go
down to your house for the night and was trying to decide whether I have
energy enough to do it."
"Come on; it's only a short step," urged the big-hearted Bowlin. "The
wife and babies are over to Beardstown. We'll have the whole place to
ourselves. The feather beds are ladder high. I've got a haunch of venison
buried in the hide and some prairie chickens that I killed yesterday,
and, besides, I'm lonesome."
"What I feel the need of, just now, is a week or two of sleep," said Mr.
Lincoln, as he rose and started down the long hill with his friend.
Some time later Bowlin Green gave Samson this brief account of what
happened in and about the cabin:
"He wouldn't eat anything. He wanted to go down to the river for a dip,
and I went with him. When we got back, I induced him to take off his
clothes and get into bed. He was fast asleep in ten minutes. When night
came I went up the ladder to bed. He was still asleep when I came down in
the morning. I went out and did my chores. Then I cut two venison steaks,
each about the size o' my hand, and a half moon of bacon. I pounded the
venison to pulp with a little salt and bacon mixed in. I put it on the
broiler and over a bed o' hickory coals. I got the coffee into the pot
and up next to the fire and some potatoes in the ashes. I basted a bird
with bacon strips and put it into the roaster and set it back o' the
broiling bed. Then I made some biscuits and put 'em into the oven. I tell
you, in a little while the smell o' that fireplace would have 'woke the
dead--honest! Abe began to stir. In a minute I heard him call:
"'Say, Uncle Bowlin, I'm goin' to get up an' eat you out o' house and
home. I'm hungry and I feel like a new man. What time is it?'
"'It'll be nine o'clock by the time you're washed and dressed,' I says.
"'Well, I declare,' says he, 'I've had about sixteen hours o' solid
sleep. The world looks better to me this morning.'
"He hurried into his clothes and we sat down at the table with the steak
and the chicken and some wild grape jelly and baked potatoes, with new
butter and toffee and cream and hot biscuit and clover honey, and say, we
both et till we was ashamed of it.
"At the table I told him a story and got a little laugh out of him. He
stayed with me three weeks, choring around the place and taking it easy.
He read all the books I had, until you and Doc Allen came with the law
books. Then he pitched into them. I think he has changed a good deal
since Ann died. He talks a lot about God and the hereafter."
In October young Mr. Lincoln returned to his surveying, and in the last
month of the year to Vandalia for an extra session of the Legislature,
where he took a stand against the convention system of nominating
candidates for public office. Samson went to Vandalia for a visit with
him and to see the place before the session ended. The next year, in a
letter to his brother, he says:
"Vandalia is a small, crude village. It has a strong flavor of whisky,
profanity and tobacco. The night after I got there I went to a banquet
with Abe Lincoln. Heard a lot about the dam nigger-loving Yankees who
were trying to ruin the state and country with abolition. There were some
stories like those we used to hear in the lumber camp, and no end of
powerful talk, in which the names of God and the Savior were roughly
handled. A few of the statesmen got drunk, and after the dinner was over
two of them jumped on the table and danced down the whole length of it,
shattering plates and cups and saucers and glasses. Nobody seemed to be
able to stop them. I hear that they had to pay several hundred dollars
for the damage done. You will be apt to think that there is too much
liberty here in the West, and perhaps that is so, but the fact is these
men are not half so bad as they seem to be. Lincoln tells me that they
are honest almost to a man and sincerely devoted to the public good as
they see it. I asked Abe Lincoln, who all his life has associated with
rough tongued, drinking men, how he had managed to hold his own course
and keep his talk and habits so clean.
"'Why, the fact is,' said he, 'I have associated with the people who
lived around me only part of the time, but I have never stopped
associating with myself and with Washington and Clay and Webster and
Shakespeare and Burns and DeFoe and Scott and Blackstone and Parsons. On
the whole, I've been in pretty good company.'
"He has not yet accomplished much in the Legislature. I don't think that
he will until some big issue comes along. 'I'm not much of a hand at
hunting squirrels,' he said to me the other day. 'Wait till I see a
bear.' The people of Vandalia and Springfield have never seen him yet.
They don't know him as I do. But they all respect him--just for his good
fellowship, honesty and decency. I guess that every fellow with a foul
mouth hates himself for it and envies the man who isn't like him. They
begin to see his skill as a politician, which has shown itself in the
passage of a bill removing the capitol to Springfield. Abe Lincoln was
the man who put it through. But he has not yet uncovered his best
talents. Mark my word, some day Lincoln will be a big man.
"The death of his sweetheart has aged and sobered him. When we are
together he often sits looking down with a sad face. For a while not a
word out of him. Suddenly he will begin saying things, the effect of
which will go with me to my grave, although I can not call back the words
and place them as he did. He is what I would call a great Captain of
words. Seems as if I heard the band playing while they march by me as
well dressed and stepping as proud and regular as The Boston Guards. In
some great battle between Right and Wrong you will hear from him. I hope
it may be the battle between Slavery and Freedom, although at present he
thinks they must avoid coming to a clinch. In my opinion, it can not be
done. I expect to live to see the fight and to take part in it."
Late in the session of 1836-1837 the prophetic truth of these words began
to reveal itself. A bill was being put through the Legislature denouncing
the growth of abolition sentiment and its activity in organized societies
and upholding the right of property in slaves.
Suddenly Lincoln had come to a fork in the road. Popularity, the urge of
many friends, the counsel of Wealth and Power, and Public Opinion, the
call of good politics pointed in one direction and the crowd went that
way. It was a stampede. Lincoln stood alone at the corner. The crowd
beckoned, but in vain. One man came back and joined him. It was Dan
Stone, who was not a candidate for re-election. His political career was
ended. There were three words on the sign-board pointing toward the
perilous and lonely road that Lincoln proposed to follow. They were the
words Justice and Human Rights. Lincoln and Dan Stone took that road in a
protest, declaring that they "believed the institution of slavery was
founded upon injustice and bad policy." Lincoln had followed his
conscience, instead of the crowd. At twenty-eight years of age he had
safely passed the great danger point in his career. The declaration
at Decatur, the speeches against Douglas, the miracle of turning
4,000,000 beasts into 4,000,000 men, the sublime utterance at Gettysburg,
the wise parables, the second inaugural, the innumerable acts of mercy,
all of which lifted him into undying fame, were now possible. Henceforth
he was to go forward with the growing approval of his own spirit and the
favor of God.
BOOK THREE