It was on the 27th of April that the force of sixteen hundred men
organized at Beardstown started out. The spring was cold, the roads
heavy, the streams turbulent. The army marched first to Yellow Banks
on the Mississippi, then to Dixon on the Rock River, which they
reached on May 12th. None but hardened pioneers could have
endured what Lincoln and his followers did in this march. They had
insufficient supplies; they waded in black mud for miles; they swam
rivers; they were almost never dry or warm; but, hardened as they
were, they made the march gayly. At Dixon they camped, and near here
occurred the first bloodshed of the war.
A body of about three hundred and forty rangers, not of the regular
army, under Major Stillman, asked to go ahead as scouts, to look for
a body of Indians under Black Hawk, rumored to be about twelve miles
away. The permission was given, and on the night of the 14th of
May Stillman and his men went into camp. Black Hawk heard of their
presence. By this time the poor old chief had discovered that the
promises of aid from the Indian tribes and the British were false,
and, dismayed, he had resolved to recross the Mississippi. When he
heard of the whites near he sent three braves with a white flag to ask
for a parley and permission to descend the river. Behind them he sent
five men to watch proceedings. Stillman's rangers were in camp when
the bearers of the flag of truce appeared. The men were many of them
half drunk, and when they saw the Indian truce-bearers, they rushed
out in a wild mob, and ran them into camp. Then catching sight of
the five spies, they started after them, killing two. The three who
reached Black Hawk reported that the truce-bearers had been killed
as well as their two companions. Furious at this violation of faith,
Black Hawk "raised a yell," and declared to the forty braves, all he
had with him, that they must have revenge. The Indians immediately
sallied forth, and met Stillman's band of over three hundred men,
who by this time were out in search of the Indians. Black Hawk, too
maddened to think of the difference of numbers, attacked the whites.
To his surprise the enemy turned, and fled in a wild riot. Nor
did they stop at their camp, which from its position was almost
impregnable; they fled in complete panic, _sauve qui peut_, through
their camp, across prairie and rivers and swamps, to Dixon, twelve
miles away, where by midnight they began to arrive. The first arrival
reported that two thousand savages had swept down on Stillman's camp
and slaughtered all but himself. Before the next night all but eleven
of the band had arrived.
Stillman's defeat, as this disgraceful affair is called, put all
notion of peace out of Black Hawk's mind, and he started out in
earnest on the warpath. Governor Reynolds, excited by the reports of
the first arrivals from the Stillman stampede, made out that night,
"by candle-light," a call for more volunteers, and by the morning of
the 15th had messengers out and his army in pursuit of Black Hawk. But
it was like pursuing a shadow. The Indians purposely confused their
trail. Sometimes it was a broad path, then it suddenly radiated to all
points. The whites broke their bands, and pursued the savages here and
there, never overtaking them, though now and then coming suddenly on
some terrible evidences of their presence--a frontier home deserted
and burned, slaughtered cattle, scalps suspended where the army could
not fail to see them.
This fruitless warfare exasperated the volunteers; they threatened
to leave, and their officers had great difficulty in making them obey
orders. On reaching a point in the Rock River, beyond which lay the
Indian country, a company under Colonel Zachary Taylor refused to
cross, and held a public indignation meeting, urging that they had
volunteered to defend the State, and had the right, as independent
American citizens, to refuse to go out of its borders. Taylor heard
them to the end, and then said: "I feel that all gentlemen here are
my equals; in reality, I am persuaded that many of them will, in a
few years, be my superiors, and perhaps, in the capacity of members of
Congress, arbiters of the fortunes and reputation of humble
servants of the republic, like myself. I expect then to obey them as
interpreters of the will of the people; and the best proof that I will
obey them is now to observe the orders of those whom the people have
already put in the place of authority to which many gentlemen around
me justly aspire. In plain English, gentlemen and fellow-citizens, the
word has been passed on to me from Washington to follow Black Hawk
and to take you with me as soldiers. I mean to do both. There are the
flatboats drawn up on the shore, and here are Uncle Sam's men drawn up
behind you on the prairie." The volunteers were quick-witted men,
and knew true grit when they met it. They dissolved their meeting and
crossed the river without Uncle Sam's men being called into action.
[Illustration: A FACSIMILE OF AN ELECTION RETURN WRITTEN BY LINCOLN AS
CLERK IN 1832. NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From the original now on file in the County Clerk's office,
Springfield, Illinois. The first civil office Lincoln ever held
was that of election clerk, and the return made by him, of which a
facsimile is here presented, was his first official document. The New
Salem election of September 20, 1832, has the added interest of having
been held at "the house of John McNeil," the young merchant who was
then already in love with Ann Rutledge, the young girl to whom Lincoln
afterwards became engaged. All the men whose names appear on this
election return are now dead except William McNeely, now residing at
Petersburg. John Clary lived at Clary's Grove; John R. Herndon was
"Row" Herndon, whose store Berry and Lincoln purchased, and at whose
house Lincoln for a time boarded; Baxter Berry was a relative of
Lincoln's partner in the grocery business, and Edmund Greer was a
school-teacher, and afterward a justice of the peace and a surveyor.
James Rutledge was the keeper of the Rutledge tavern and the father
of Ann Rutledge; Hugh Armstrong was the head of the numerous Armstrong
family; "Uncle Jimmy" White lived on a farm five miles from New Salem,
and died about thirty years ago in the eightieth year of his age;
William Green (spelled by the later members of the family with a
final "e") was the father of William G. Greene, Lincoln's associate
in Offutt's store; and as to Bowling Green, more is said elsewhere.
In the following three or four years, very few elections were held
at which Lincoln was not a clerk. It is a somewhat singular fact
that Lincoln, though clerk of this election, is not recorded as
voting.--_J. McCan Davis._]
The march in pursuit of the Indians led the army to Ottawa, where the
volunteers became so dissatisfied that on May 27th and 28th Governor
Reynolds mustered them out. But a force in the field was essential
until a new levy was raised; and a few of the men were patriotic
enough to offer their services, among them Lincoln, who on May 29th
was mustered in at the mouth of the Fox River by a man in whom, thirty
years later, he was to have a keen interest--General Robert Anderson,
commander at Fort Sumter in 1861. Lincoln became a private in Captain
Elijah Iles's company of Independent Rangers, not brigaded--a company
made up, says Captain Iles in his "Footsteps and Wanderings,"
of "generals, colonels, captains, and distinguished men from the
disbanded army." General Anderson says that at this muster Lincoln's
arms were valued at forty dollars, his horse and equipment at one
hundred and twenty dollars. The Independent Rangers were a favored
body, used to carry messages and to spy on the enemy. They had no
camp duties, and "drew rations as often as they pleased." So that as a
private Lincoln was really better off than as a captain.[C]
With the exception of a scouting trip to Galena and back, fruitful of
nothing more than Indian scares, Major Iles's company remained quietly
in the neighborhood of the Rapids of the Illinois until June 16th,
when Major Anderson mustered it out. Four days later, June 20th,
at the same place, he mustered Lincoln in again as a member of an
independent company under Captain Jacob M. Early. His arms were
valued this time at only fifteen dollars, his horse and equipment at
eighty-five dollars.[D] The army moved up Rock River soon after the
middle of June. Black Hawk was overrunning the country, and scattering
death wherever he went. The settlers were wild with fear, and most
of the settlements were abandoned. At a sudden sound, at the
merest rumor, men, women, and children fled. "I well remember these
troublesome times," says one old Illinois woman. "We often left our
bread dough unbaked to rush to the Indian fort near by." When Mr.
John Bryant, a brother of William Cullen Bryant, visited the colony in
Princeton in 1832, he found it nearly broken up on account of the
war. Everywhere the crops were neglected, for the able-bodied men were
volunteering. William Cullen Bryant, who travelled on horseback in
June from Petersburg to near Pekin and back, wrote home: "Every few
miles on our way we fell in with bodies of Illinois militia proceeding
to the American camp, or saw where they had encamped for the night.
They generally stationed themselves near a stream or a spring in the
edge of a wood, and turned their horses to graze on the prairie.
Their way was barked or girdled, and the roads through the uninhabited
country were as much beaten and as dusty as the highways on New York
Island. Some of the settlers complained that they made war upon the
pigs and chickens. They were a hard-looking set of men, unkempt and
unshaved, wearing shirts of dark calico and sometimes calico capotes."
Soon after the army moved up the Rock River, the independent spy
company, of which Lincoln was a member, was sent with a brigade to the
northwest, near Galena, in pursuit of the Hawk. The nearest Lincoln
came to an actual engagement in the war was here. The skirmish of
Kellogg's Grove took place on June 25th; Lincoln's company came up
soon after it was over, and helped bury the five men killed. It was
probably to this experience that he referred when he told a friend
once of coming on a camp of white scouts one morning just as the sun
was rising. The Indians had surprised the camp, and had killed and
scalped every man.
"I remember just how those men looked," said Lincoln, "as we rode up
the little hill where their camp was. The red light of the morning sun
was streaming upon them as they lay heads towards us on the ground.
And every man had a round red spot on the top of his head about as big
as a dollar, where the redskins had taken his scalp. It was frightful,
but it was grotesque; and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything
all over." Lincoln paused, as if recalling the vivid picture, and
added, somewhat irrelevantly, "I remember that one man had buckskin
breeches on."[E]
By the end of the month the troops crossed into Michigan
Territory--what is now Wisconsin--and July was spent in floundering
through swamps and stumbling through forests, in pursuit of the now
nearly exhausted Black Hawk. A few days before the last battle of
the war, that of Bad Axe on August 2d, in which the whites finally
massacred most of the Indian band, Lincoln's company was disbanded at
Whitewater, Wisconsin, and he and his friends started for home. The
volunteers in returning, in almost every case, suffered much from
hunger. Mr. Durly, of Hennepin, Illinois, who walked home from Rock
Island, says all he had to eat on the journey was meal and water baked
in rolls of bark laid by the fire. Lincoln was little better off. The
night before his company started from Whitewater he and one of his
mess-mates had their horses stolen; and, excepting when their more
fortunate companions gave them a lift, they walked as far as Peoria,
Illinois, where they bought a canoe, and paddled down the Illinois
River to Havana. Here they sold the canoe, and walked across the
country to New Salem.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE SANGAMON RIVER NEAR NEW SALEM.