It is hard to realize that, even later in his career, and with all
his mighty strength and courage, the man who preserved “government of
the people, for the people, and by the people” to the world could earn
only thirty-seven cents a day, and that he had “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.”
When he was President of the United States he told Secretary Seward
the story of how he had once taken two men and their trunks to a river
steamer in a flatboat built by his own hands, and got a dollar for it.
“In these days it seems like a trifle to me,” he added, “but it was a
most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the
poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I
had earned a dollar.”
In 1828 Mr. Gentry, of Gentryville, loaded a flatboat with produce, put
his son in charge of it and hired Lincoln for eight dollars a month
and board to work the bow oars and take it to New Orleans. Near Baton
Rouge the young men tied the boat up at night and were asleep in a
cabin when they were awakened to find a gang of negroes attempting to
plunder the cargo. With a club Lincoln knocked several of the marauders
into the river and chased the rest for some distance, returning bloody
but victorious. The boat was then hurriedly cut loose, and they floated
on all night.
That voyage was Lincoln’s first brief glimpse of the great world. Till
then he had never seen a large city. In New Orleans he was yet to see
human beings bought and sold, and hear the groans that were afterwards
answered by the thunders of the Civil War.