Two years later the milk-sickness which had robbed Lincoln of his
mother again visited the Pigeon Creek settlers, and his father decided
to move to Illinois, where rich lands were to be had cheap. Dennis
Hanks and Levi Hall accompanied the Lincoln family.
The tall young woodchopper had just passed his twenty-first birthday,
and it was he, in buckskin breeches and coonskin cap, who goaded on the
oxen hitched to the clumsy wagon that creaked and lurched through the
March mud and partly frozen streams on that terrible two weeks’ journey
into the Sangamon country of Illinois.
He said good-bye to the old log-cabin. It was rude and mean, but, after
all, it was his home. He shook hands with his friends in Gentryville.
He took a last look at the unmarked grave of his mother. His boyhood
was over.
Before setting out for his new home, Lincoln spent all his money,
more than thirty dollars, in buying petty merchandise, knives, forks,
needles, pins, buttons, thread and other things that might appeal to
housewives. And on the voyage to Illinois the future President of the
United States peddled his little wares so successfully that he doubled
his money. Thus Abraham Lincoln entered the State which saw him rise to
greatness--woodchopper, ox-driver, peddler, pioneer.
Even in that rough, heroic pilgrimage, the tender heart of the man
showed itself again and again. One loves to remember Lincoln as Mr.
Herndon, his law-partner, has described him, pulling off his shoes and
stockings and wading a stream through broken ice to save a pet dog left
whining on the other side.
“I could not bear to abandon even a dog,” he explained.
Presently the emigrants settled on a bluff overlooking the Sangamon
River, five miles from Decatur, in Macon County. All promptly set to
work. A clearing was made, trees felled, and a cabin built. Abraham and
his cousin, John Hanks, ploughed fifteen acres of sod and split rails
enough to fence the space in.
Some of the rails split by Lincoln at that time were thirty years later
carried into the convention which nominated him for President.
Having reached his majority and seen his father and family safely
housed, Lincoln started out to shift for himself. Among other things,
he split three thousand rails for a Major Warnick, walking three miles
a day to his work.
Then came the winter of “the deep snow,” a season so terrible that John
Hay has thus described its effects:
“Geese and chickens were caught by the feet and wings and frozen to the
wet ground. A drove of a thousand hogs, which were being driven to St.
Louis, rushed together for warmth, and became piled in a great heap.
Those inside smothered and those outside froze, and the ghastly pyramid
remained there on the prairie for weeks; the drovers barely escaped
with their lives. Men killed their horses, disemboweled them, and crept
into the cavities of their bodies to escape the murderous wind.”
Lincoln left his father’s house empty-handed, save for his axe, and
he had to face that blizzard winter as best he could. No man or woman
ever heard him complain. In all his after years he looked back upon the
struggles of his early career without a word of self-pity. Those were
iron days, but they were not without romance, and life was honest and
strengthening.
It is doubtful, after all, whether Lincoln’s son, who became rich,
dined with kings and queens, and came to be president of the
hundred-million-dollar Pullman Company, ever in his comfortable and
successful career once felt half the sense of life in its deepest,
grandest moods that thrilled his gaunt father facing that fearful
winter.
Let the discouraged American, whose heart grows faint in the presence
of “bad luck,” think of that rude frontiersman, to whom hardship
brought only strength and renewed courage. In spite of everything,
the sources of a man’s success are within him, and none can stay him
but himself. Lincoln knew famine, and cold, and wandering. But he did
not pity himself. Axe in hand, he confronted his fate in that smitten
country with as great a soul as when he faced the armed Confederacy and
saw his country riven and bleeding.
In the spring of 1831 Denton Offut hired Lincoln to go with him on a
boat, with a load of stock and provisions, to New Orleans, and, after
many adventures, in which his strength and ingenuity saved boat
and cargo several times, he again found himself at the mouth of the
Mississippi.
Here he first saw the hideous side of slavery. His law-partner thus
refers to one of the scenes he witnessed:
“A vigorous and comely mulatto girl was being sold. She underwent a
thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they pinched her
flesh and made her trot up and down the room like a horse.... Bidding
his companions follow him, he said, ‘By God, boys, let’s get away from
this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing I’ll hit it hard.’”
The grandest and bloodiest page of modern history is a record of how
Lincoln fulfilled that promise.
That very summer he went to the village of New Salem, on the Sangamon
River--a village that has long since vanished--and became clerk in a
log-house general store opened by Offut, who was a restless commercial
adventurer. Lincoln and an assistant slept in the store.
Here the tall clerk became famous for his stories and homely wit. His
immense stature, his strength, his humor and his penetrating logic
attracted attention at once. He talked in quaint, waggish parables, but
he never failed to reach the heart or brain.
Offut’s store grew to be the common meeting place of the frontiersmen,
and long-legged, droll, kindly Lincoln developed his natural genius for
story-telling and argument.
But Offut bragged of his clerk’s strength. That angered the rough,
rollicking youths of a nearby settlement known as Clary’s Grove,
who picked out Jack Armstrong, their leader and a veritable giant,
to “throw” Lincoln. At first Lincoln declined the challenge on the
ground that he did not like “wooling and pulling.” But, although his
inheritance of Quaker blood inclined him to avoid violence, he was
finally taunted into the struggle. In the presence of all New Salem
and Clary’s Grove he partly stripped his two hundred and fourteen
pounds of muscle-ribbed body and conquered the bully of Sangamon County.
After that exhibition of strength and pluck, Lincoln was the hero of
the community. Braggarts became silent in his presence. A ruffian swore
one day in the store before a woman. Lincoln bade him stop, but he
continued his abuse. “Well, if you must be whipped,” said the clerk, “I
suppose I might as well whip you as any man.” And he did it. That was
Lincoln.
His honesty became a proverb. It is said that, having overcharged a
customer six cents, he walked three miles in the dark, after the store
was closed, to give back the money. By mistake he sold four ounces of
tea for a half-pound, and the next day trudged to the customer’s cabin
with the rest of the tea.
Just when Lincoln became a conscious politician no man can say. His
endless anecdotes and jokes, his winning honesty and good nature, his
readiness to accept or stop a fight, his willingness to do a good turn
for man, woman or child, and his open scorn for meanness, cruelty
or deceit, were the simple overflowings of his natural character.
He was coarse in his speech and manners. But behind the joking and
buffoonery, the primitive man in him was true, gentle, chivalrous. His
tender-heartedness was real. His kindliness was not merely the result
of a desire to catch friends.
He once illustrated himself by quoting an old man at an Indiana church
meeting: “When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and
that’s my religion.”
But in New Salem it soon became evident that Lincoln was not satisfied
to remain a clerk in a general store, and that the strivings of
leadership were in him. He borrowed books. He asked Menton Graham, the
schoolmaster, for advice. He read, read, read. He walked many miles
at night to speak in debating clubs. He trudged twelve miles to get
Kirkham’s Grammar, and often asked his assistant in the store to keep
watch with the book while he said the lesson. It was a common thing
to find him stretched out on the counter, head on a roll of calicos,
grammar in hand. His desire to master language became a passion. The
whole village “took notice.” Even the cooper would keep a fire of
shavings going at night that Lincoln might read.
The young frontiersman of six-feet-four, who could outlift, outwrestle
and outrun any man in Sagamon County, rising from an almost hopeless
abyss of ignorance and poverty, was, by his own resolute efforts,
acquiring the power that made him the hero of civilization and the
savior of a race.
[Illustration:
From “Abraham Lincoln.” Copyright, 1892, D. Appleton & Co.