When he was but a barefoot boy he would often make political speeches to
the boys in the neighborhood, and when he had reached young manhood
and was engaged in the labor of chopping wood or splitting rails
he continued this practice of speech-making with only the stumps and
surrounding trees for hearers.
At the age of seventeen he had attained his full height of six feet four
inches and it was at this time he engaged as a ferry boatman on the Ohio
river, at thirty-seven cents a day.
That he was seriously beginning to think of public affairs even at
this early age is shown by the fact that about this time he wrote
a composition on the American Government, urging the necessity for
preserving the Constitution and perpetuating the Union. A Rockport
lawyer, by the name of Pickert, who read this composition, declared that
“the world couldn’t beat it.”
When the dreaded disease, known as the “milk-sick” created such havoc
in Indiana in 1829, the father of Abraham Lincoln, who was of a roving
disposition, sought and found a new home in Illinois, locating near the
town of Decatur, in Macon county, on a bluff overlooking the Sangamon
river. A short time thereafter Abraham Lincoln came of age, and having
done his duty to his father, began life on his own account.
His first employer was a man named Denton Offut, who engaged Lincoln,
together with his step-brother and John Hanks, to take a boat-load of
stock and provisions to New Orleans. Offut was so well pleased with the
energy and skill that Lincoln displayed on this trip that he engaged him
as clerk in a store which Offut opened a few months later at New Salem.
It was while clerking for Offut that Lincoln performed many of those
marvelous feats of strength for which he was noted in his youth, and
displayed his wonderful skill as a wrestler. In addition to being six
feet four inches high he now weighed two hundred and fourteen pounds.
And his strength and skill were so great combined that he could
out-wrestle and out-lift any man in that section of the country.
During his clerkship in Offut’s store Lincoln continued to read and
study and made considerable progress in grammar and mathematics. Offut
failed in business and disappeared from the village. In the language of
Lincoln he “petered out,” and his tall, muscular clerk had to seek other
employment.