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ABRAHAM LINCOLN

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN

A HISTORY

BY JOHN G. NICOLAT AND JOHN HAT

VOLUME ONE

NEW YORK

THE CENTUEY CO.

1890

Ti

Ccf>Z

696441

Copyright, 1886 and 1890,

by John O. Nicola y

and John Hay.

• k

• • «

• •

TO THE HONORABLE

ROBERT TODD LINCOLN

THIS WORK IS DEDICATED

IN TOKEN OF A LIFE-LONG FRIENDSHIP

AND ESTEEM

AUTHORS' PREFACE

A GENERATION bom since Abraham Lincoln died has already reached manhood and womanhood. Yet there are millions still living who sympathized with him in his noble aspirations, who labored with him in his toilsome Uf e, and whose hearts were saddened by his tragic death. It is the almost unbroken testimony of his contemporaries that by virtue of certain high traits of character, in certain momentous lines of purpose and achievement, he was incomparably the greatest man of his time. The deliberate j udgment of those who knew him has hardened into tradition ; for although but twenty-flve years have passed since he fell by the bullet of the assassin, the tradition is already complete. The voice of hostile faction is silent, or unheeded; even criticism is gentle and timid. If history had said its last word, if no more were to be known of him than is already written, his fame, however lacking in definite outline, however dis- torted by fable, would survive undiminished to the latest generations. The blessings of an enfranchised race would forever haQ him as their liberator; the nation would ac- knowledge him as the mighty counselor whose patient courage and wisdom saved the life of the republic in its darkest hour; and illuminating his proud eminence as

ix

I

X AUTHOBS' PBEFACE

orator, statesman, and ruler, there would forever shine around his memory the halo of that tender humanity and Christian charity in which he walked among his fellow- countrymen as their familiar companion and friend.

It is not, therefore, with any thought of adding mate- rially to his already accomplished renown that we have written the work which we now offer to our fellow-citizens. But each age owes to its successors the truth in regard

•

to its own annals. The young men who have been bom since Sumter was flred on have a right to all their elders know of the important events they came too late to share in. The life and fame of Lincoln will not have their legitimate effect of instruction and example unless the circumstances among which he lived and found his opportunities are placed in their true light before the men who never saw him.

To write the life of this great American in such a way as to show his relations to the times in which he moved, the stupendous issues he controlled, the remarkable men by whom he was surrounded, has been the purpose which the authors have diligently pursued for many years. We can say nothing of the result of our labor ; only those who have been similarly employed can appreciate the sense of inadequate performance with which we regard what we have accomplished. We claim for our work that we have devoted to it twenty years of almost unremitting assiduity; that we have neglected no means in our power to ascertain the truth ; that we have rejected no authentic facts essential to a candid story ; that we have had no theory to establish, no personal grudge to gratify, no unavowed objects to subserve. We have aimed to write a suf&ciently f uU and absolutely honest history of a great man and a great time; and although we take it for

AUTHOBS' PBEFAOE xi

granted that we have made mistakes, that we have fallen into such errors and inaccnracies as are unavoidable in so large a work, we claim there is not a line in all these volumes dictated by malice or unfairness.

Our desire to have this work placed under the eyes of the greatest possible number of readers induced us to accept the generous offer of ''The Century Magazine'' to print it first in that periodical. In this way it re- ceived, as we expected, the intelligent criticism of a very large number of readers, thoroughly informed in regard to the events narrated, and we have derived the greatest advantage from the suggestions and corrections which have been elicited during the serial publication, which began in November, 1886, and closed early in 1890. We beg, here, to make our sincere acknowledgments to the hundreds of friendly critics who have furnished us with valuable information.

As " The Century " had already given, during several years, a considerable portion of its pages to the elucida- tion and discussion of the battles and campaigns of the civil war, it was the opinion of its editor, in which we coincided, that it was not advisable to print in the maga- zine the full narrative sketch of the war which we had prepared. We omitted also a large number of chapters which, although essential to a history of the time, and directly connected with the life of Mr. Lincoln, were still episodical in their nature, and were perhaps not indis- pensable to a comprehension of the principal events of lus administration. These are all included in the present volumes; they comprise additional chapters almost equal in extent and fully equal in interest to those which have already been printed in "The Century." Interspersed throughout the work in their proper connection and

Xii AUTH0B8' PBEFAOE

sequence, and containing some of the most important of Mr. Lincoln's letters, they lend breadth and unity to the historical drama.

We trust it will not be regarded as presumptuous if we say a word in relation to the facilities we have enjoyed and the methods we have used in the preparation of this work. We knew Mr. Lincoln intimately before his elec- tion to the Presidency. We came from Illinois to Wash- ington with him, and remained at his side and in his service — separately or together — until the day of his death. We were the daily and nightly witnesses of the incidents, the anxieties, the fears, and the hopes which pervaded the Executive Mansion and the National Capital. The President's correspondence, both of&cial and private, passed through our hands ; he gave us his full confidence. We had personal acquaintance and daily of&cial intercourse with Cabinet Ofllcers, Members of Congress, Governors, and Military and Naval Officers of all grades, whose affairs brought them to the White House. It was during these years of the war that we formed the design of writing this history and began to prepare for it. President Lincoln gave it his sanction and promised his cordial cooperation. After several years' residence in Europe, we returned to this country and began the execution of our long-cherished plan. Mr. Robert T. Lincoln gave into our keeping all the official and private pax)ers and manuscripts in his possession, to which we have added all the material we could acquire by industry or by purchase. It is with the advantage, therefore, of a wide personal acquaintance with all the leading participants of the war, and of perfect familiarity with the manuscript material, and also with the assist- ance of the vast bulk of printed records and treatises

AUTHOBS' PBBFAOE Xlii

which have accnmnlated since 1865, that we have prose- cuted this work to its close.

If we gained nothing else by our long association with Mr. Lincoln we hope at least that we acquired from him the habit of judging men and events with candor and impartiality. The material placed in our hands was un- exampled in value and fullness; we have felt the obliga- tion of using it with perfect fairness. We have striven to be equally just to friends and to adversaries ; where the facts favor our enemies we have recorded them ungrudg- ingly; where they bear severely upon statesmen and gen- erals whom we have loved and honored we have not scrupled to set them forth, at the risk of being accused of coldness and ingratitude to those with whom we have lived on terms of intimate friendship. The recollection of these friendships will always be to us a source of pride and joy ; but in this book we have known no allegiance but to the truth. We have in no case relied upon our own memory of the events narrated, though they may have i)assed under our own eyes ; we have seen too often the danger of such a reliance in the reminiscences of others. We have trusted only our diaries and memoranda of the moment; and in the documents and reports we have cited we have used incessant care to secure authen- ticity. So far as possible, every story has been traced to its source, and every document read in the of&cial record or the original manuscript

We are aware of the prejudice which exists against a book written by two persons, but we feel that in our case the disadvantages of collaboration are reduced to the minimum. Our experiences, our observations, our ma- terial, have been for twenty years not merely homoge- neous— they have been identical Our plans were made

I

XIV

AUTHOBS' PREFACE

with thorough concert; our studies of the subject were carried on together ; we were able to work simultaneously without danger of repetition or conflict. The apportion- ment of our separate tasks has been dictated purely by convenience ; the division of topics between us has been sometimes for long periods, sometimes almost for alter- nate chapters. Each has written an equal portion of the work ; while consultation and joint revision have been con- tinuous, the text of each remains substantially unaltered. It is in the fullest sense, and in every part, a joint work. We each assume responsibility, not only for the whole, but for all the details, and whatever credit or blame the public may award our labors is equally due to both.

We commend the result of so many years of research and diligence to all our countrymen. North and South, in the hope that it may do something to secure a truthful history of the great struggle which displayed on both sides the highest qualities of American manhood, and may contribute in some measure to the growth and maintenance throughout all our borders of that spirit of freedom and nationality for which Abraham Lincoln lived and died.

ILLUSTRATIONS Vol. I

Abraham Likooln I^ronUspieoe,

From a photograph taken about 1860 by Healer, of Chicago ; from the original negative owned by G^rge B. Ayrea, Phila- delphia.

PAQB

Land Warrant, issxtkd to Abrahax Linkhorn (Lincoln). . . 10

Fao-sdcile from the Fikld-Book of Danibl Boone 12

Surveyor's Certifioate for Abraham Linkhorn (Lincoln). 14

House in which Thomas Lincoln and Nanct Hanks were

Married 16

Fac-simile OF THE Marriage Bond OF Thomas Lincoln 22

Certificate, or Marriage List, containing the names of

Thomas Lincoln and Nanct Hanks 26

Sarah Bush Lincoln at the Age of 76 32

From a photograph in possession of William H. Hemdon.

Cabin on Qoose-Nest Prairie, III., in which Thomas

Lincoln Litsd and Died 48

Model of Lincoln's Invention for Buoying Vessels 72

Fac-simile of Drawings in the Patent Office 73

Leaf from Abraham Lincoln's Exercise Book 82

Soldier's Discharge from the Black Hawk War, signed

BY A. Lincoln, Captain 92

Black Hawk 96

From a i "Indian

From a portrait by Charles B. King, from McKenny & Hall's an Tribes of North America.''

XV

0

XVI ILLUSTBATIONS

PAQB

Stephen T. Logan 112

From the portrait in possession of his daughter, Birs. L. H. Coleman.

Abraham Lincoln's Subyetino Instbumsnts, Saddle Bag,

ETC 114

Plan of Boads Subveted bt A. Lincoln and othebs 116

Fac-simile of Lincoln's Repobt of the Boad Subvet 118

O. H. Bbowning 128

From a photograph by Waide.

Mabtin Van Buben 144

From a photograph by Brady.

Col. E. D. Bakeb 160

From a photograph by Brady, about 1861.

Lincoln and Stuabt's Law-Office, Spbingfield 168

Lincoln's Bookcase and Inkstand 170

From the Keyes Lincoln Memorial Collection, Chicago.

Globe Taysbn, Spbingfield 174

Where Lincoln lived after his marriage.

William Henbt Habbison 176

From a* painting, in 1841, by Henry Inman, owned by Benja- min Hamson.

Fao-sdcile of Mabbtage Cebtificate of Abbaham Lincoln . 188

Joshua Speed and Wife 192

From a painting by Healy, about 1864.

House in which Abbaham Lincoln was Mabbied 208

Gen. James Shields 224

From a photograph owned by David Delany.

Henbt Clay 240

After a photograph by Rookwood, from the daguerreotype owned by Alfred Hassaok.

Zachabt Taylob 256

From the painting by Vanderlyn in the Corcoran Gallery.

Joshua B. Giddings 288

From a photograph by Brady.

David Davis 304

From a photograph by Brady.

James K. Polk 320

From a photograph by Brady.

Fbanklin Piebce 336

From a photograph by Brady.

ILLnSTRATIONS xvu

PAGE

Lticak Tbuhbull 368

From a photograph by Brady.

OWBN LOYSJOT 384

From a photograph.

David B. Atchison 400

From a daguerreotype.

Andrew H. Reedeb 416

From a photograph by B. Enecht.

James H. Lane 432

By permiasion of the Strowbridge Lithographing Go.

MAPS Vol. I

PAQB

Map showinq Localities connected with Early Events in

THE Lincoln Family 20

Map of New Salem, 111., and Vicinity 80

Map op the Boundaries of Texas 256

Historical Map of the United States in 1854 354

i

TABLE OF CONTENTS Vol. I Chapter L Lineage

The Lincolns in America. Intimacy with the Boones. Kentucky in 1780. Death of Abraham Lincofai Ihe Pioneer. Marriage of Thomas Lincobi. Birth and Childhood of Abraham 1

Chapteb n. Indiana

Thomas Lincohi leaves Kentucky. Settles at G^ntry- ville. Death of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Sarah Bush Johnston. Pioneer Life in Indiana. Sports and Superstitions of the Early Settiers. The Youth of Abraham. His Great Physical Strength. His Voyage to New Orleans. Removal to Illinois 28

Chapter IIL Lllinois in 1830

The Winter of the Deep Snow. The Sudden Change. Pioneer Life. ReUg^on and Society. French and Indians. Formation of the PoUtical System. The Courts. Lawyers and PoUticians. Early Super- annuation 47

Chapter IV. New Salem

Denton Ofifutt. Lincoln's Second Trip to New Orleans. His Care of His Family. Death of Thomas Lincoln. Ofifutt's Store in New Salem. Lincoln's Initiation by the "Clary's Grove Boys." The Voyage of the

TaUsman 70

xlx

r

^ TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter V. Lincoln in the Black Hawk Wab

Black Hawk. The Call for Volunteers. Lincoln Elected Captain. Stillman^s Bun. Lincoln Beenlists. The Spy Battalion. Black Hawk's Defeat. Disband- ment of the Volunteers 87

Chapter VI. Surveyor and Representative

Lincoln's Candidacy for the Legislature. Buns as a Whig. Defeated. Berry and Lincoln Merchants. Lincoln Begins the Study of Law. Postmaster. Surveyor. His Popularity. Elected to the Legb- lature, 1834 101

Chapter Vn. Legislative Experience

Lincoln's First Session in the Legislature. Douglas and Peck. Lincoln Reelected. Bedlam Legislation. Schemes of Railroad Building. Removal of the Capi- tal to Springfield 123

Chapter VIII. The Lincoln-Stone Protest

The Pro-Slavery Sentiment in Hlinois. Attempt to Open the State to Slavery. Victory of the Free- State Party. Reaction. Death of Lovejoy. Pro- Slavery Resolutions. The Protest 140

Chapter EX. Collapse of "The System''

Lincoln in Springfield. The Failure of the Railroad System. Fall of the Banks. First Collision with Douglas. Tampering with the Judiciary 153

Chapter X. Early Law Practice

Early Legal Customs. Lincoln's Popularity in Law and Politics. A Speech in 1840. The Harrison Campaign. Correspondence with Stuart. Harrison Elected. Melancholia 167

Chapter XI. Marriage

Courtship and Engagement. The Pioneer Tempera- ment. Lincoln^s Love AfiEairs. Joshua F. Speed. Lincoln's Visit to Kentucky. Correspondence with Speed. Marriage 186

TABLE OF CONTENTS XZl

Chapter Xn. The Shields Duel

A Politioal Satire. James Shields. Lincoln Chal- lenged. A Fight Arranged and Prevented. Subse- quent Wranglings. The Whole Matter Forgotten. An Admonition 203

Chapter XTTT, The Campaign of 1844

Partnership with Stephen T. Logan. Lincoln Becomes a Lawyer. Temperance Movement. Baker and Lin- coln Candidates for the Whig Nomination to Congress. Baker Successful. Clay Nominated for President. The Texas Question. Clay Defeated 213

Chapter XIV. Lincoln's Campaign fob Congress

Schemes of Annexation. Opposition at the North. Outbreak of War. Lincoln Nominated for Congress. His Opponent Peter Cartwright. Lincoln Elected. The Whigs in the War. E. D. Baker in Washington and Mexico 237

Chapter XV. The Thirtieth Congress

Robert C. Winthrop Chosen Speaker. Debates on the War. Advantage of the Whigs. Acquisition of Terri- tory. The Wiknot Proviso. Lincoln's Resolutions. Nomination of Taylor for President. Cass the Demo- cratic Candidate. Lincoln's Speech, July 27, 1848. Taylor Elected 258

Chapter XVI. A Fortunate Escape

Independent Action of Northern Democrats. Lin- coln's Plan for Emancipation in the District of Co- lumbia. His Bill Fails to Receive Consideration. A Similar Bill Signed by Him Fifteen Years Later. Logan Nominated for Congress and Defeated. Lin- coln an Applicant for Ofice. The Fascination of Washington 283

Chapter XVil. The Circuit Lawyer

The Growth and Change of Legal Habits. Lincoln on the Circuit. His Power and Value as a Lawyer.

^

XXU TABLE OF CONTENTS

Opinion of David Davis. Of Judge Drummond. In- cidents of the Courts. Lineoln^s Wit and Eloquence. His Life at Home 298

Chapteb XVIIL The Balance of Poweb

Origin of the Slavery Struggle. The Ordinance of 1787. The Compromises of the Constitution. The Missouri Compromise. Cotton and the Cotton-Gin. The Race between Free and Slave States. The Admis- sion of Texas. The Wilmot Proviso. New Mexico and California. The Compromise Measures of 1850. FinaUty 310

Chapteb XIX. Eepeal of the Missoubi

COMPBOMISE

Stephen A. Douglas. Old Fogies and Young America. The Nomination of Pierce. The California Gold Dis- covery. The National Platforms on the Slavery Issue. Organization of Western Territories. The Three Ne- braska Bills. The Caucus Agpreement of the Senate Committee. Dixon's Repealing Amendment. Douglas Adopts Dixon's Proposition. Passage of the Kansas- Nebraska Act 330

Chapteb XX. The Dbift of Politics

The Storm of Agitation. The Free Soil Party. The American Party. The Anti-Nebraska Party. Dissolu- tion of the Whig Party. The Congressional Elections. Democratic Defeat. Banks Elected Speaker .... 352

Chapteb XXI. Lincoln and Tbumbull

The Nebraska Question in Illinois. Douglas's Chicago Speech. Lincoln Beappears in Politics. Political Speeches at the State Fair. A Debate between Lincoln and Douglas. Lincoln's Peoria Speech. An Anti- Nebraska Legislature Elected. Lincoln's Candidacy for the Senate. Shields and Matteson. Trumbull Elected Senator. Lincoln's Letter to Robertson. . . 365

Chapteb XXTE. The Bobdeb Euffians

The Opening of Kansas Territory. Andrew H. Boeder Appointed Governor. Atchison's Propaganda.. The

TABLE OF GONTENTS xziii

Missonri Blae Lodges. The Emigrant Aid Company. The Town of Lawrence Founded. Governor Boeder's Independent Action. The First Border Bnffian In- vasion. The Election of Whitfield. 393

Chapter XXin. The Bogus Laws

Governor Boeder's Census. The Second Border Buffian Invasion. Missouri Voters Elect the Kansas Leg^- lature. Westport and Shawnee Mission. The Governor Convenes the Legislature at Pawnee. The Legislature Betums to Shawnee Mission. Governor Boeder's Vetoes. The GK>vemor's BemovaL Enactment of the Bogus Laws. Despotic Statutes. Lecompton Founded 408

Chapter XXTY, The Topeka Constitution

k The Bogus Legislature Defines Kansas Politics. The Big Springs Convention. Ex-GK>vemor Boeder's Bes- olutions. Formation of the Free-State Party. A Constitutional Convention at Topeka. The Topeka Constitution. President Pierce Proclaims the Topeka Movement Bevolutionary. Befusal to Becognize the Bogus Laws. Chief -Justice Lecompte's Doctrine of Constructive Treason. Arrests and Indictment of the Free-State Leaders. Colonel Sumner Disperses the Topeka Legislature 425

Chapteb XXV. Civil Wab in Kansas

Wilson Shannon Appointed Governor. The Law and Order Party Formed at Leavenworth. Sheriff Jones. The Branson Bescue. The Wakarusa War. Sharps Bifies. Gk>vemor Shannon's Treaty. Guerrilla Leaders and Civil War. The Investigating Committee of Con- gress. The Flight of Ez-Govemor Boeder. The Border Buffians March on Lawrence. Burning of the Free-State Hotel 438

/

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

CHAPTEE I

LINEAGE

IN the year 1780, Abraham Lincoln, a member of chap. i. a respectable and well-to-do family in Rocking- nao. ham County, Virginia, started westward to establish himself in the newly-explored country of Kentucky. He entered several large tracts of fertile land, and returning to Virginia disposed of his property there, and with his wife and five children went back to Kentucky and settled in Jeflferson County. Little is known of this pioneer Lincoln or of his father. Most of the records belonging to that branch of the family were destroyed in the civil war. Their early orphanage, the wild and iUiterate life they led on the frontier, severed their con- nection with their kindred in the East. This often happened; there are hundreds of families in the West bearing historic names and probably descended from well-known houses in the older States or in England, which, by passing through one or two generations of ancestors who could not read or write, have lost their continuity with the past as effectually as if a deluge had intervened Vol. I.— 1

/^

: ABBAHAM LINCOLN

CHAP. L between the last century and this. Even the patro- nymic has been frequently distorted beyond recog- nition by slovenly pronunciation during the years when letters were a lost ai% and by the phonetic spelling of the first boy in the family who learned the use of the pen. There are Lincolns in Ken- tucky and Tennessee belonging to the same stock with the President, whose names are spelled " Link- horn'' and "Linkhern.'' All that was known of the emigrant, Abraham Lincoln, by his immediate descendants was that his progenitors, who were Quakers, came from Berks County, Pennsylvania, into Virginia, and there throve and prospered.^ But we now know, with suflBcient clearness, through the wide-spread and searching luster which surrounds the name, the history of the migrations of the family since its arrival on this continent, and the circumstances under which the Virginia pioneer started for Kentucky. 188& The first ancestor of the line of whom we have

knowledge was Samuel Lincoln, of Norwich, Eng- land, who came to Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1638, and died there. He left a son, Mordecai, whose son, of the same name, — and it is a name which persists in every branch of the family,^ — removed to Mon- mouth, New Jersey, and thence to Amity township,

1 We desire to express our obli- arisen in the attempt to trace

gations to Edwin Salter, Samuel their genealogy. For instance,

L. Smedley, Samuel Shackford, Abraham Lincoln, of Chester

Samuel W. Pennypacker, How- County, son of one Mordecai and

ard M. Jenkins, and John T. brotberof another, the President's

Harris, Jr., for information and ancestors, left a fair estate, by

suggestions which have been of will, to his children, whose names

use to us in this chapter. were John, Abraham, Isaac,

s The Lincolns, in naming their Jacob, Mordecai, Rebecca, and

children, followed so strict a tra- Sarah — precisely the same names

dition that great confusion has we find in three collateral families.

LINEAGE <

now a part of Berks County, Pennsylvania, where chap. i. he died in 1735, fifty years old. From a copy of his will, recorded in the office of the Eegister in Phila- delphia, we gather that he was a man of considerable property. In the inventory of his effects, made after his death, he is styled by the appraisers, " Mordecai Lincoln, Gentleman.** His son John received by his father's will " a certain piece of land lying in the Jerseys, containing three hundred acres,** the other sons and daughtei^ having been Uberally provided for from the Pennsylvania property. This John Lincoln left New Jersey some years later, and about 1750 established himself in Bockingham County,' nw. Virginia. He had five sons, to whom he gave the names which were traditional in the family : Abra- ham,— the pioneer first mentioned, — Isaac, Jacob, Thomas, and John. Jacob and John remained in Vir- ginia ; the former was a soldier in the War of the Revolution, and took part as lieutenant in a Virginia regiment at the siege of Yorktown. Isaac went to a place on the Holston Eiver in Tennessee ; Thomas followed his brother to Kentucky, lived and died there, and his children then emigrated to Ten- nessee.^ With the one memorable exception the family seem to have been modest, thrifty, unambi- tious people. Even the great fame and conspicu- ousness of the President did not tempt them out of their retirement. Robert Lincoln, of Hancock County, Illinois, a cousin-german, became a captain and commissary of volunteers ; none of the others,

1 It ifl an interestixig coinci- tive of the President, performed,

denee, for the knowledge of which on the 17th of May, 1837, the

we are indebted to Colonel John marriage ceremony of Andrew

B. Brownlow, that a minister Johnson, Mr. Lincoln's succes-

named Mordecai Lincoln, a rela- sor in the Presidency.

[ ABRAHAM UNCOLN

Chap, t SO far OS w6 kno w, ever made their existence known to their powerful kinsman daring the years of his glory.^

It was many years after the death of the Presi- dent that his son learned the probable circum- stances under which the pioneer Lincohi removed to the West, and the intimate relations which sub- sisted between his family and the most celebrated man in early Western annals. There is little doubt that it was on account of his association with the famous Daniel Boone that Abraham Lincoln went to Kentucky. The families had for a century been * closely allied. There were frequent intermarriages * among them — both being of Quaker lineage. By the will of Mordecai Lincoln, to which reference has been made, his " loving friend and neighbor "

I Soon after Mr. Ldncoln arrived ''I am, Bir, with every coDsid-

in Washington in 1861, he re- eration, yonrs respectfally, ceived the following letter from ''Minor Lincoln,

one of his Virginia kinsmen, the ** Of the Stannton stock of lAn- last communication which ever coins."

came from them. It was written There was a yonng Abraham

on paper adorned with a portrait Lincoln on the Confederate side

of Jefferson Davis, and was in- in the Shenandoah distingoished

closed in an envelope emblazoned fop his courage and ferocity. He

with the Confederate flag : lay in wait and shot a Dunkard

** To Abraham Lincoln, Esq., preacher, whom he suspected of

President of the Northern Con- furnishing information to the

federacy. Union army. (Letter from Samuel

"Sir: Having just returned W. Pennypacker.) from a trip through Virginia, a A letter from David J. Lincoln,

North Carolina, and Tennessee, ofBirdsboro, Berks County, Penn-

permit me to inform you that you sylvania, to the writers, says, " My

will get whipped out of your boots, grandfather, Abraham Lincoln,

To-day I met a gentleman from was married to Anna Boone, a

Anna, niinois, and although he first cousin of Daniel Boone, July

voted for you he says that the 10, 1760." He was half-brother

moment your troops leave Cairo of John Lincoln, and afterwards

they will get the spots knocked became a man of some prominence

out of them. My dear sir, these in Pennsylvania, serving in the

are facts which time will prove to Constitutional Convention in

be correct. 1789-90.

LINEAGE ;

G^rge Boone was made a trustee to assist his chap. i. widow in the care of the property. Squire Boone, the father of Daniel, was one of the appraisers who made the inventory of Mordecai Lincoln's estate. The intercourse between the families was kept up after the Boones had removed to North Carolina and John Lincoln had gone to Virginia. Abraham Lincoln, son of John, and grandfather of the Presi- dent, was married to Miss Mary Shipley ^ in North Carolina. The inducement which led him to leave Virginia, where his standing and his fortune were assured, was, in aU probabiUty, his intimate family relations with the great explorer, the hero of the new country of Kentucky, the land of fabulous richness and unlimited adventure. At a time when the Eastern States were ringing with the fame of the mighty hunter who was then in the prime of his manhood, and in the midst of those achieve- ments which wiU forever render him one of the

iln giying to the wife of the Angosta County" says he married pioneer Lincoln the name of Mary Elizabeth Winter, a cousin of Shipley we follow the tradition Daniel Boone. The Boone and in his family. The Hon. J. L. Lincoln families were large and Nail, of Missouri, grandson of there were frequent intermar- Nancy (Lincoln) Brumfield, Abra- riages among them, and the patri- ham Lincoln's youngest child, has arohal name of Abraham was a given us so clear a statement of favorite one. There was still the ease that we cannot hesitate another Lincoln, Haunaniah by to accept it, although it conflicts name, who was also intimately as- with equally positive statements sociated with the Boones. Hissig- from other sources. The late nature appears on the surveyor's Gideon Welles, Secretary of the certificate for Abraham Lincoln's Navy, who gave much intelligent land in Jefferson County, and he effort to genealogical researches, joined Daniel Boone in 1798 in was convinced that the Abraham the purchase of the tract of land Lincoln who married Miss Han- on the Missouri River where nah Winters, a daughter of Boone died. (Letter from Rich- Ann Boone, sister of the famous ard V. B. Lincoln, printed in the Danieljwas the President's grand- " Williamsport [Pa.] Banner,'' father. Waddell's << Annals of Feb. 26, 1881.)

) ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Chap. I. most picturesque heroes in all our annals^ it is not to be wondered at that his own circle of friends should have caught the general enthusiasm and felt the desire to emulate his career.

Boone's exploration of Kentucky had begun some ten years before Lincoln set out to follow his trail. In 1769 he made his memorable journey to that virgin wilderness of whose beauty he always loved to speak even to his latest breath. During all that year he hunted, finding everywhere abundance of game. " The buffalo," Boone says, "were more fre- quent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on these extensive plains, fearless because ignorant of the violence of man. Sometimes we saw hundreds in a drove, and the numbers about the salt springs were amazing.** In the course of the winter, however, he was captured by the Indians while hunting with a comrade, and when they had contrived to escape they never found again any trace of the rest of their party. But a few days later they saw two men approaching and hailed them with the hunter's caution, " Hullo, strangers ; who are you t ^ They replied, " White men and friends." They proved to be Squire Boone and another adventurer from North Carolina. The younger Boone had made that long pilgrimage through the trackless woods, led by an instinct of doglike affection, to find his elder brother and share his sylvan pleasures and dangers. Their two com- panions were soon waylaid and killed, and the Boones spent their long winter in that mighty solitude undisturbed. In the spring their ammuni- tion, which was to them the only necessary of life.

LINEAGE I

ran low, and one of them must return to the settle- chap. i. ments to replenish the stock. It need not be said which assumed this duty ; the cadet went uncom- plaining on his way, and Daniel spent three months in absolute loneliness, as he himself expressed it, " by myself, without bread, salt, or sugar, without company of my fellow-creatures, or even a horse or dog.** He was not insensible to the dangers of his situation. He never approached his camp without the utmost precaution, and always slept in thfe cane- brakes if the signs were unfavorable. But he makes in his memoirs this curious reflection, which would seem like affectation in one less perfectly and simply heroic : " How xmhappy such a situation for a man tormented with fear, which is vain if no danger comes, and if it does, only augments the pain. It was my happiness to be destitute of this afflicting passion, with which I had the greatest reason to be afflicted." After his brother's return, for a year longer they hunted in those lovely wilds, and then returned to the Yadkin to bring their families to the new domain. They made the long journey back, five hundred miles, in peace and safety.

For some time after this Boone took no con- spicuous part in the settlement of Kentucky. The expedition with which he left the Yadkin in 1773 met with a terrible disaster near Cumberland Gap, in which his eldest son and five more young men were killed by Indians, and the whole party, dis- couraged by the blow, retired to the safer region of Clinch Eiver. In the mean time the dauntless spec- ulator Bichard Henderson had begun his occupation with all the pomp of viceroyalty. Harrodsburg had been founded, and com planted, and a flourishing

8 ABBAHAM LINCOLN

CHAP. I. colony established at the Falls of the Ohio. In 1774 Boone was called upon by the Governor of Virginia to escort a party of surveyors through Kentucky, and on his return was given the command of three garrisons; and for several years thereafter the history of the State is the record of his feats of arms. No one ever equaled him in his knowledge of Indian character, and his influence with the savages was a mystery to him and to themselves. Three times he fell into their hands and they did not harm him. Twice they adopted him into their tribes while they were still on the war-path. Once they took him to Detroit,^ to show the Long-Knife chieftains of King George that they also could ex- hibit trophies of memorable prowess, but they refused to give him up even to their British allies. In no quality of wise woodcraft was he wanting. He could outrun a dog or a deer ; he could thread the woods without food day and night; he could find his way as easily as the panther could. Al- though a great athlete and a tireless warrior, he hated fighting and only fought for peace. In coun- cil and in war he was equally valuable. His advice was never rejected without disaster, nor followed but with advantage ; and when the fighting once began there was not a rifle in Kentucky which could rival his. At the nine days' siege of Boonesboro' he took deliberate aim and killed a negro renegade who was harassing the garrison from a tree five hundred and twenty-five feet away, and whose head only was visible from the fort. The mildest and the quietest of men, he had killed dozens of enemies

1 Silas Farmery historiographer on the 10th of March, 1778, of Detroit, informs us that Dan- and that he remained there a iel Boone was bronght there month.

LINEAGE [

with his own hand, and aU this without maUce and, chap.i. strangest of all, without incurring the hatred of his adversaries. He had self-respect enough, but not a spark of vanity. After the fatal battle of the Blue Licks, — where the only point of light in the day's terrible work was the wisdom and valor with which he had partly retrieved a disaster he foresaw but was powerless to prevent, — when it became his duty, as senior surviving officer of the forces, to report the affair to Governor Harrison, his dry and naked narrative gives not a single hint of what he had done himself, nor mentions the gallant son lying dead on the field, nor the wounded brother whose gallantry might justly have claimed some notice. He was thinking solely of the public good, saying, "I have encouraged the people in this country all that I could, but I can no longer justify them or myself to risk our lives here under such extraordinary hazards.'' He therefore begged his Excellency to take immediate measures for relief. During the short existence of Henderson's legis- lature he was a member of it, and not the least useful one. Among his measures was one for the protection of game.

Everything we know of the emigrant Abraham Lincoln goes to show that it was under the auspices of this most famous of our pioneers that he set out from Rockingham County to make a home for him- self and his young family in that wild region which Boone was wresting from its savage holders. He was not without means of his own. He took with him funds enough to enter an amount of land which would have made his family rich if they had retained it. The county records show him to have

t-AXD WARKAHT H

Xhe origliial, of -which thli la a redDoed rso-slmlle, la In the iioueulon ot Colonel B. T. Duirett, LoaliTlUe, Kj.

LINEAGE 11

been the possessor of a domain of some seventeen chap. i. hundred acres. There is still in existence^ the original warrant, dated March 4, 1780, for four hundred acres of land, for which the pioneer had paid " into the publick Treasury one hundred and sixty pounds current money,'' and a copy of the jeflbrson surveyor's certificate, giving the metes and bounds B«m& of the -property on Floyd's Fork, which remained for many years in the hands of Mordecai Lincoln, the pioneer^s eldest son and heir. The name was misspelled " Linkhom '^ by a blunder of the clerk in the land-office, and the error was perpetuated in the subsequent record.

Kentucky had been for many years the country of romance and fable for Virginians. Twenty years before Governor Spotswood had crossed the Alle- ghanies and returned to establish in a Williams- burg tavern that fantastic order of nobility

* I In the i>088e8sion of Colonel 2. Eight hundred acres on

Reuben T. Durrett, of Lonisyille, Green River, near Qreen River

a gentleman who has made the Lick, entered June 7, 1780,

early history of his State a sub- and surveyed October 12,

ject of careful study, and to 1784.

whom we are greatly indebted 3. Fivehundred acres in Camp- for information in regard to the bell County, date of entry not settlement of the Lincolns in known, but surveyed September Kentucky. He gives the follow- 27, 1798, and patented June ing list of lands in that State 30, 1799 — the survey and owned by Abraham Ldneoln : patent evidently following his 1. Four hundred acres on Long entry after his death. It is pos- Run, a branch of Floyd's Fork, in sible that this was the five-him- Jefferson County, entered May dred-acre tract found in Boone's 29, 1780, and surveyed May 7, field-book, in the i>ossession of 1785. We have in our posses- Lyman C. Draper, Esq., Secre- sion the original patent issued by tary of the Wisconsin Historical Governor Garrard, of Kentucky, Society, and erroneously sup- to Abraham Lincoln for this prop- posed by some to have been in erty. It was found by Col. A. C. Mercer County. Boone was a Matthews, of the 99th Illinois, deputy of Colonel Thomas Mar- in 1863, at an abandoned resi- shall. Surveyor of Fayette dence near Indianola, Texas. County.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

which he caUed the Knights of The Gold- en Horseshoe,* and, with a worldly wisdom which was scarcely consistent with these medieval affecta- tions, to press upon the attention of the British Government the building of a line of frontier forts to guard the Ohio River from the French. Many years after him the greatest of all Vir- ^ians crossed the mountains again, and became heavily inter- ested in those schemes of emigration which filled the minds of many of the leading men in America un- til they were driven out by graver cares and more imperative duties. Washington had acquired claims and patents to the amount of thirty or forty thousand acres of land in the West ;

1 Their motto wka

Siefitral Iraiueettdtn montn.

LINEAGE 13

Benjamin Franklin and the Lees were also large chap, l owners of these speculative titles. They formed, it is true, rather an airy and unsubstantial sort of possession, the same ground being often claimed by a dozen different persons or companies under various grants from the crown or from legislatures, or through purchase by adventurers from Indian councils. But about the time of which we are speak- ing the spirit of emigration had reached the lower strata of colonial society, and a steady stream of pioneers began pouring over the passes of the moun- tains into the green and fertile valleys of Kentucky and Tennessee. They selected their homes in the most eligible spots to which chance or the report of earlier explorers directed them, with little knowl- edge or care as to the rightful ownership of the land, and too often cleared their comer of the wil- derness for the benefit of others. Even Boone, to whose courage, forest lore, and singular intuitions of savage character the State of Kentucky owed more than to any other man, was deprived in his old age of his hard-earned homestead through his ignorance of legal forms, and removed to Missouri to repeat in that new territory his labors and his misfortunes.

The period at which Lincoln came West was one nao of note in the history of Kentucky. The labors of Henderson and the Transylvania Company had begun to bear fruit in extensive plantations and a connected system of forts. The land laws of Ken- tucky had reduced to something like order the chaos of conflicting claims arising from the various grants and the different preemption customs under which settlers occupied their property. The victory

«i

x,h\tai

'h^i^^^^J

LINEAGE 15

of Boone at Boonesboro' against the Shawnees, and chap. i. the capture of Kaskaskia and Vincennes by the brill- iant audacity of George Eogers Clark, had brought the region prominently to the attention of the At- lantic States, and had turned in that direction the restless and roving spirits which are always found in communities at periods when great emigrations are a need of civilization. Up to this time few persons had crossed the mountains except hunters, trappers, and explorers — men who came merely to kill game, and possibly Indians, or to spy out the fertility of the land for the purpose of speculation. But in 1780 and 1781 a large number of families took up their line of march, and in the latter year a considerable contingent of women joined the little army of pioneers, impelled by an instinct which they themselves probably but half comprehended. The country was to be peopled, and there was no other way of peopUng it but by the sacrifice of many lives and fortunes ; and the history of every country shows that these are never lacking when they are wanted. The number of those who came at about the same time with the pioneer Lincoln was sufficient to lay the basis of a sort of social order. Early in the year 1780 three hundred "large family boats" arrived at the Falls of the Ohio, where the land had been surveyed by Captain Bul- litt seven years before, and in May the Legislature of Virginia passed a law for the incorporation of the town of Louisville, then containing some six hundred inhabitants. At the same session a law was passed confiscating the property of certain British subjects for the endowment of an institu- tion of learning in Kentucky, " it being the interest

16 ABRAHAM LINGOLN

CHAP. I. of this commonwealth,'' to quote the language of the philosophic Legislature, " always to encourage and promote every design which may tend to the improvement of the mind and the diffusion of use- ful knowledge even among its remote citizens, whose situation in a barbarous neighborhood and a savage intercourse might otherwise render them unfriendly to science." This was the origin of the Transylvania University of Lexington, which rose and flourished for many years on the utmost verge of civilization.

The " barbarous neighborhood" and the " savage intercourse " undoubtedly had their effect upon the manners and morals of the settlers ; but we should fall into error if we took it for granted that the pioneers were all of one piece. The ruling motive which led most of them to the wilds was that Anglo- Saxon lust of land which seems inseparable from the race. The prospect of possessing a four- hundred-acre farm by merely occupying it, and the privilege of exchanging a basketful of almost worth- less continental currency for an unlimited estate at the nominal value of forty cents per acre, were irresistible to thousands of land-lo^^g Vir^nians and Carolinians whose ambition of proprietorship was larger than their means. Accompanying this flood of emigrants of good faith was the usual froth and scum of shiftless idlers and adventurers, who were either drifting with a current they were too worthless to withstand, or in pursuit of dishonest gains in fresher and simpler regions. The vices and virtues of the pioneers were such as proceeded from their environment. They were careless of human life because life was worth comparatively

L

LINEAGE 17

little in that hard struggle for existence ; but they chap. t. had a remarkably clear idea of the value of property, and visited theft not only with condign punish- ment, but also with the severest social proscrip- tion. Stealing a horse was punished more swiftly and with more feeling than homicide. A man might be replaced more easily than the other animal. Sloth was the worst of weaknesses. An habitual drunkard was more welcome at *• raisings ^ and "log- rollings'* than a known faineant The man who did not do a man's share where work was to be done was christened " Lazy Lawrence," and that was the end of him socially. Cowardice was punished by inex- orable disgrace. The point of honor was as strictly observed as it ever has been in the idlest and most artificial society. If a man accused another of falsehood, the ordeal by fisticuffs was instantly resorted to. Weapons were rarely employed in these chivalrous encounters, being kept for more serious use with Indians and wild beasts ; neverthe- less fists, teeth, and the gouging thumb were often employed with fatal effect. Yet among this rude and uncouth people there was a genuine and re- markable respect for law. They seemed to recog- nize it as an absolute necessity of their existence. In the territory of Kentucky, and afterwards in that of niinois, it occurred at several periods in the transition from counties to territories and states, that the country was without any organized author- ity. But the people were a law unto themselves. Their improvised courts and councils administered law and equity; contracts were enforced, debts were collected, and a sort of order was maintained.

It may be said, generally, that the character of Vol. I.— 2

r

18 AHRAHAM liNOQLK

Chap. I. this people was far above their circumstances. In all the accessories of life, by which we are accus- tomed to rate communities and races in the scale of civilization, they were little removed from prim- itive barbarism. They dressed in the skins of wild beasts killed by themselves, and in linen stuffs woven by themselves. They hardly knew the use of iron except in their firearms and knives. Their food consisted almost exclusively of game, fish, and roughly ground corn-meal. Their exchanges were made by barter; many a child grew up without ever seeing a piece of money. Their habitations were hardly superior to those of the savages with whom they waged constant war. Large families lived in log huts, put together without iron, and far more open to the inclemencies of the skies than the pig-styes of the careful farmer of to-day. An early schoolmaster says that the first place where he went to board was the house of one Lucas, consisting of a single room, sixteen feet square, and tenanted by Mr. and Mrs. Lucas, ten children, three dogs, two cats, and himself. There were many who lived in hovels so cold that they had to sleep on their shoes to keep them from freezing too stiff to be put on. The children grew inured to misery like this, and played barefoot in the snow. It is an eri'or to suppose that all this could be undergone with impunity. They suffered terribly from malarial and rheumatic complaints, and the instances of vigorous and painless age were rare among them. The lack of moral and mental sustenance was still more marked. They were inclined to be a religious people, but a sermon was an unusual luxury, only to be enjoyed at long

i

LINEAGE 19

intervals and by great expense of time. There chap. i. were few books or none, and there was little oppor- tunity for the exchange of opinion. Any variation in the dreary course of events was welcome. A murder was not without its advantages as a stim- ulus to conversation ; a criminal trial was a kind of holiday to a county. It was this poverty of life, this famine of social gratification, from which sprang their fondness for the grosser forms of excitement, and their tendency to rough and brutal practical joking. In a life like theirs a laugh seemed worth having at any expense.

But near as they were to barbarism in all the circumstances of their daily existence, they were far from it politically. They were the children of a race which had been trained in government for centuries in the best school the world has ever seen, and wherever they went they formed the town, the county, the court, and the legislative power with the ease and certainty of nature evolving its results. And this they accomplished in the face of a savage foe surrounding their feeble settlements, always alert and hostile, invisible and dreadful as the visionary powers of the air. Until the treaty of Greenville, in 1795, closed the long and sanguinary history of the old Indian wars, there was no day in which the pioneer could leave his cabin with the certainty of not finding it in ashes when he re- turned, and his little fiock murdered on his thresh- old, or carried into a captivity worse than death. Whenever nightfall came with the man of the house away from home, the anxiety and care of the women and children were none the less bitter because so common.

LINEAGE 21

The life of the pioneer Abraham Lincoln soon chap. i. came to a disastrous close. He had settled in Jeflferson County, on the land he had bought from the Government, and cleared a small farm in the forest.^ One morning in the year 1784, he started im. with his three sons, Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas, to the edge of the clearing, and began the day's work. A shot from the brush killed the father ; Mordecai, the eldest son, ran instinctively to the house, Josiah to the neighboring fort, for assistance, and Thomas, the youngest, a child of six, was left with the corpse of his father. Mordecai, reaching the cabin, seized the rifle, and saw through the loop- hole an Indian in his war-paint stooping to raise the child from the ground. He took deliberate aim at a white ornament on the breast of the savage and brought him down. The little boy, thus re- leased, ran to the cabin, and Mordecai, from the loft, renewed his fire upon the savages, who began to show themselves from the thicket, until Josiah returned with assistance from the stockade, and the assailants fled. This tragedy made an indelible impression on the mind of Mordecai. Either a spirit of revenge for his murdered father, or a sportsmanlike pleasure in his successful shot, made him a determined Indian-stalker, and he rarely stopped to inquire whether the red man who came within range of his rifle was friendly or hostile.^

1 Lyman C. Draper, of the Wis- into captivity, and forced to run

consin Historical Society, has the gauntlet. The story rests on

kindly famished ns with a MS. the statement of a single person,

account of a Kentucky tradition Mrs. Sarah Graham,

according to which the pioneer ^ Late in life Mordecai Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was captured removed to Hancock County, Uli-

by the Indians, near Crow's Sta- nois, where his descendants still

tion, in August, 1782, carried live.

■ki

^^

LINEAGE

23

The head of the family being gone, the widow Ldneoln soon removed to a more thickly settled neighborhood in Washington County. There her children grew up. Mordecai and Josiah became reputable citizens ; the two daughters married two men named Crume and Brumfield. Thomas, to whom were reserved the honors of an illustrious paternity, learned the trade of a carpenter. He was an easy-going man, entirely without ambition, but not without self-respect. Though the friend- liest and most jovial of gossips, he was not insen- sible to affronts; and when his slow anger was roused he was a formidable adversary. Several border bullies, at different times, crowded him indiscreetly, and were promptly and thoroughly whipped. He was strong, weU-knit, and sinewy ; but little over the medium height, though in other respects he seems to have resembled his son in ap- pearance.

On the 12th of June, 1806,^ while learning his trade in the carpenter shop of Joseph Hanks, in Elizabethtown, he married Nancy Hanks, a niece of his employer, near Beechland, in Washington County.^ She was one of a large family who had

Chap. I.

1 All previons aecounts give the date of this marriage as Sep- tember 2dd. This error arose from a clerical blnnder in the eounty record of marriages. The minister, the Bev. Jesse Head, in making his report, wrote the date before the names; the clerk, in copying it, lost the proper se- qaence of the entries, and gave to the Lincolns the date belonging to the next couple on the list.

> The following is a copy of the marriage bond :

^'Know all men by these pres- ents, that we, Thomas Lincoln and Richard Berry, are held and firmly bound unto his Excellency, the Governor of Kentucky, in the just and full sum of fifty pounds current money, to the payment of which well and truly to be made to the said Governor and his succes- sors, we bind ourselves, our heirs, etc., jointly and severally, firmly by these presents, sealed with our seals and dated this 1 0th day of June, 1806. The condition of

r^

24 ABRAHAM LINGOLN

CHAP. I. emigrated from Virginia with the Lincolns and with another family called Sparrow. They had endured together the trials of pioneer life; their close relations continued for many years after, and were cemented by frequent intermarriage.

Mrs. Lincoln's mother was named Lucy Hanks ; her sisters were Betty, Polly, and Nancy who married Thomas Sparrow, Jesse Friend, and Levi HaU. The childhood of Nancy was passed with the Sparrows, and she was of tener called by their name than by her own. The whole family connec- tion was composed of people so little given to let- ters that it is hard to determine the proper names and relationships of the younger members amid the tangle of traditional cousinships.^ Those who went to Indiana with Thomas Lincoln, and grew up with his children, are the only ones that need demand our attention.

There was no hint of future glory in the wedding or the bringing home of Nancy Lincoln. All accounts represent her as a handsome young woman of twenty-three, of appearance and intel- lect superior to her lowly fortunes. She could read and write, — a remarkable accomplishment in her circle, — and even taught her husband to form the letters of his name. He had no such valuable

the above obligation is such that '' WitnesSy John H. Parrott,

whereas there is a marriage Guardian."

shortly intended between the Richard Berry was a connection

above bound Thomas Lincoln and of Lincoln ; his wife was a Shipley.

Nancy Hanks, for which a license ^ The Hanks family seem to

has issued, now if there be no have gone from Pennsylvania

lawful cause to obstruct the said and thence to Kentucky about

marriage, then this obligation to the same time with the Lincolns.

be void, else to remain in full They also belonged to the Com-

foroe and virtue in law. munion of Friends. — "Historical

Thomas Lincoln [Seal]. Collections of Gwynnedd,'' by H.

BiOHA&D Bebry [Seal]. M. Jenkins.

LINEAGE 25

wedding gift to bestow upon her ; he brought her to chap. i. a little house in Elizabethtown, where he and she and want dwelt together in fourteen feet square. The next year a daughter was born to them ; and the next the young carpenter, not finding his work remunerative enough for his growing needs, re- moved to a little farm which he had bought on the easy terms then prevalent in Kentucky. It was on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in what was then Hardin and is now La Rue County, three mUes from HodgensviUe. The ground had nothing attractive about it but its cheapness. It was hardly more grateful than the rocky hill slopes of New England. It required full as earnest and intelli- gent industry to persuade a living out of those barren hillocks and weedy hollows, covered with stimted and scrubby underbrush, as it would amid the rocks and sands of the northern coast.

Thomas Lincoln settled down in this dismal soli- tude to a deeper poverty than any of his name had ever known ; and there, in the midst of the most unpromising circumstances that ever witnessed the advent of a hero into this world, Abraham Lincoln was bom on the 12th day of February, 1809. moq.

Four years later, Thomas Lincoln purchased a fine farm of 238 acres on E[nob Creek, near where it flows into the Rolling Fork, and succeeded in getting a portion of it into cultivation. The title, however, remained in him only a little while, and after his property had passed out of his control he looked about for another place to establish himseK.

Of all these years of Abraham Lincoln's early childhood we know almost nothing. He lived a solitary life in the woods, returning from his lone-

/

Kj^ /^ V ' ^S!^^^^^

-

This Certifloate, or Marrla^ LUt (here shown in reduced ffto-simile), written by the

Bev. Jesae Head, was lost sight of for many years, and abont 1886 was disoovered

through the efforts of W. F. Booker, Clerk of Washington County, Kentucky.

26

LIN£AGE 27

some little games to his cheerless home. He never chap. i. talked of these days to his most intimate friends.^ Once, when asked what he remembered about the war with Great Britain, he replied : " Nothing but this. I had been fishing one day and caught a little &sh which I was taking home. I met a soldier in the road, and, having been always told at home that we must be good to the soldiers, I gave him my fish." This is only a faint glimpse, but what it shows is rather pleasant — the generous child and the patriotic household. But there is no question that these first years of his life had their lasting eflEect upon the temperament of this great mirthful and melancholy man. He had little schooling. He accompanied his sister Sarah ^ to the only schools that existed in their neighborhood, one kept by Zachariah Riney, another by Caleb Hazel, where he learned his alphabet and a little more. But of all those advantages for the cultivation of a yoimg mind and spirit which every home now oflEers to its children, the books, toys, ingenious games, and daily devotion of parental love, he knew absolutely nothing.

iTherei8Btillliyiiig(1886)near of partridges; in trying to "ooon'' E[nob Creek in Kentucky, at the across Knob Creek on a log, Lin- age of eighty, a man who claims coin fell in and GoUaher fished to have known Abraham Lincoln him out with a sycamore branch in his childhood — Austin Oolla- — a service to the Republic, the her. He says he used to play value of which it would be diffl- with Abe Lincoln in the shavings cult to compute, of his father's carpenter shop. ^ This daughter of Thomas Lin- He tells a story which, if accurate, coin is sometimes called Nancy entitles him to the civic crown and sometimes Sarah. She seems which the Bomans used to give to have borne the former name to one who saved the life of a during her mother's life-time, and citizen. When Gollaher was to have taken her stepmother's eleven and Lincoln eight the two name after Mr. Lincoln's second boys were in the woods in pursuit marriage.

CHAPTER n

INDIANA

CHAP. n. T)Y the time the boy Abraham had attained his lai. J3 seventh year, the social condition of Ken- tucky had changed considerably from the early pioneer days. Life had assumed a more settled and orderly course. The old barbarous equality of the earlier time was gone; a diflEerence of classes began to be seen. Those who held slaves assumed a distinct social superiority over those who did not. Thomas Lincoln, concluding that Kentucky was no country for a poor man, determined to seek his fortime in Indiana. He had heard of rich and un- occupied lands in Perry County in that State, and thither he determined to go. He built a rude raft, loaded it with his kit of tools and four hundred gallons of whisky, and trusted his fortunes to the Wing water-courses. He met with only one accident on his way : his raft capsized in the Ohio River, but he fished up his kit of tools and most of the ardent spirits, and arrived safely at the place of a settler named Posey, with whom he left his odd invoice of household goods for the wilderness, while he started on foot to look for a home in the dense forest. He selected a spot which pleased him in his first day's journey. He then walked

28

INDIANA 29

back to Knob Creek and brought his family on to chap. n. their new home. No humbler cavalcade ever in- vaded the Indiana timber. Besides his wife and two children, his earthly possessions were of the slightest, for the backs of two borrowed horses sufficed for the load. Insufficient bedding and clothing, a few pans and kettles, were their sole movable wealth. They relied on Lincoln's kit of tools for their furniture, and on his rifle for their food. At Posey's they hired a wagon and literally hewed a path through the wilderness to their new habitation near Little Pigeon Creek, a mile and a half east of Gentryville, in a rich and fertile forest country.

Thomas Lincoln, with the assistance of his wife and children, built a temporary shelter of the sort called in the frontier language "a haK-faced camp" ; merely a shed of poles, which defended the inmates on three sides from foul weather, but left them open to its inclemency in front. For a whole year his family lived in this wretched fold, while he was clearing a little patch of ground for planting com, and building a rough cabin for a permanent resi- dence. They moved into the latter before it was half completed ; for by this time the Sparrows had followed the Lincolns from Kentucky, and the half-faced camp was given up to them. But the rude cabin seemed so spacious and comfortable after the squalor of " the camp," that Thomas Lin- coln did no further work on it for a long time. He left it for a year or two without doors, or windows, or floor. The battle for existence allowed him no time for such superfluities. He raised enough com to support life; the dense forest around him

30 ABBAHAM LINCX)LN

Chap. II. aboTinded in every form of feathered game ; a little way from his cabin an open glade was full of deer- licks, and an hour or two of idle waiting was generally rewarded by a shot at a fine deer, which would furnish meat for a week, and material for breeches and shoes. His cabin was like that of other pioneers. A few three-legged stools; a bedstead made of poles stuck between the logs in the angle of the cabin, the outside comer supported ' by a crotched stick driven into the ground ; the table, a huge hewed log standing on four legs ; a pot, kettle, and skillet, and a few tin and pewter dishes were all the furniture. The boy Abraham climbed at night to his bed of leaves in the loft, by a ladder of wooden pins driven into the logs.

This life has been vaunted by poets and roman- cers as a happy and healthful one. Even Dennis Hanks, speaking of his youthful days when his only home was the half-faced camp, says, "I tell you, Billy, I enjoyed myself better then than I ever have since." But we may distrust the reminiscences of old settlers, who see their youth in the flattering light of distance. The life was neither enjoyable nor wholesome. The rank woods were full of ma- laria, and singular epidemics from time to time ravaged the settlements. In the autumn of 1818 the little community of Pigeon Creek was almost exterminated by a frightful pestilence called the milk-sickness, or, in the dialect of the country, "the milk-sick.'' It is a mysterious disease which has been the theme of endless wrangling among West- ern physicians, and the difficulty of ascertaining anything about it has been greatly increased by the local sensitiveness which forbids any one to admit

INDIANA 31

that any well-defined case has ever been seen m his chap. ii. neighborhood, " although just over the creek (or in the next county) they have had it bad." It seems to have been a malignant form of fever — attributed variously to malaria and to the eating of poisonous herbs by the cattle — attacking cattlp as well as human beings, attended with violent retching and a burning sensation in the stomach, often ter- minating fatally on the third day. In many cases those who apparently recovered lingered for years with health seriously impaired. Among the Pioneers of Pigeon Creek, so ill-fed, ill-housed, and uncared for, there was little prospect of recovery from such a grave disorder. The Sparrows, hus- band and wife, died early in October, and Nancy Hanks Lincoln followed them after an interval of a few days. Thomas Lincoln made the coffins for his dead "out of green lumber cut with a whip- saw,'' and they were all buried, with scant ceremony, in a little clearing of the forest. It is related of young Abraham, that he sorrowed most of all that his mother should have been laid away with such maimed rites, and that he contrived several months later to have a wandering preacher named David ElMn brought to the settlement, to deliver a funeral sermon over her grave, already white with the early winter snows.^

This was the dreariest winter of his life, for before the next December came his father had brought from Kentucky a new wife, who was to

^ A stone has been placed over Hanks Lincoln, mother of Presi- the site of the grave by P. E. dent Lincoln, died October 5th, Studebaker, of South Bend, In- A. D. 1818, aged 35 years, diana. The stone bears the Erected by a friend of her mar- following inscription: ''Nancy tyred son, 1879/'

32 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

chjlp. n. change the lot of all the desolate little family very much for the better. Sarah Bush had been an acquaintance of Thomas Lincoln before his first marriage ; she had, it is said, rejected him to marry one Johnston, the jailer at Elizabethtown, who had died,leaving^er with three children, a boy and two girls. When Lincobi's widowhood had lasted a year, he went down to Elizabethtown to begin again the wooing broken off so many years before. He wasted no time in preliminaries, but promptly made his wishes known, and the next morning they were married. It was growing late in the autumn, and the pioneer probably dreaded another lonely winter on Pigeon Creek. Mrs. Johnston was not altogether portionless. She had a store of household goods which filled a four-horse wagon borrowed of Balph Crume, Thomas Lincoln's brother-in-law, to transport the bride to Indiana. It took little time for this energetic and honest Christian woman to make her influence felt, even in those discouraging surroundings, and Thomas Lincoln and the children were the better for her coming all the rest of their lives. The lack of doors and floors was at once corrected. Her honest pride inspired her husband to greater thrift and industry. The goods she brought with her com- pelled some effort at harmony in the other fittings of the house. She dressed the children in warmer clothing and put them to sleep in comfortable beds. With this slight addition to their resources the fam- ily were much improved in appearance, behavior, and self-respect. Thomas Lincoln joined the Baptist church at 1898. Little Pigeon in 1823 ; his oldest child, Sarah, fol-

INDIANA 33

lowed his example three years later. They were chap. ii. known as active and consistent members of that communion. Lincohi was himseK a good carpenter ^^^*®'' when he chose to work at his trade ; a wahint table -^v. Itob- made by him is still preserved as part of the fund- ^tS?/^ ture of the church to which he belonged. pigeon

Such a woman as Sarah Bush could not be care- church, less of so important a matter as the education of her children, and they made the best use of the scanty opportunities the neighborhood afforded. " It was a wild region,^ writes Mr. Lincoln, in one of those rare bits of autobiography which he left behind him, " with many bears and other wUd ani- mals still in the woods. There were some schools so-called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond * readin', writin', and cipherin' to the Rule of Three.' If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education." But in the case of this ungainly boy there was no necessity of any external incen- tive. A thirst for knowledge as a means of rising in the world was innate in him. It had nothing to do with that love of science for its own sake which has been so often seen in lowly savants, who have sacrificed their lives to the pure desire of knowing the works of God. All the little learning he ever acquired he seized as a tool to better his condition. He learned his letters that he might read books and see how men in the great world outside of his woods had borne themselves in the fight for which he longed. He learned to write, first, that he might have an accomplishment his Vol. I.— 3

34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Chap. II. playmates had not ; then that he might help his elders by writing their letters, and enjoy the feel- ing of usefulness which this gave him ; and finally that he might copy what struck him in his reading and thus make it his own for future use. He learned to cipher certainly from no love of mathe- matics, but because it might come in play in some more congenial business than the farm-work which bounded the horizon of his contemporaries. Had it not been for that interior spur which kept his clear spirit at its task, his schools could have done little for him ; for, counting his attendance under Riney and Hazel in Kentucky, and imder Dorsey, Crawford, and Swaney in Indiana, it amounted to less than a year in all. The schools were much alike. They were held in deserted cabins of round logs, with earthen floors, and small holes for win- dows, sometimes illuminated by as much light as could penetrate through panes of paper greased with lard. The teachers were usually in keeping with their primitive surroundings. The profession oflEered no rewards sufficient to attract men of edu- cation or capacity. After a few months of desultory instruction yoimg Abraham knew all that these vagrant literati could teach him. His last school- days were passed with one Swaney in 1826, who taught at a distance of four and a half miles from the Lincoln cabin. The nine miles of walking doubtless seemed to Thomas Lincoln a waste of time, and the lad was put at steady work and saw no more of school.

But it is questionable whether he lost anything by being deprived of the ministrations of the back- woods dominies. When his tasks ended, his studies

INDIANA 35

became the chief pleasure of ' his life. In all the chap. ii. intervals of his work — in which he never took delight, knowing well enough that he was bom for something better than that — he read, wrote, and ciphered incessantly. His reading was naturally limited by his opportunities, for books were among the rarest of luxuries in that region and time. But he read everything he could lay his hands upon, and he was certainly fortunate in the few books of which he became the possessor. It would hardly be possible to select a better handful of classics for a youth in his circumstances than the few volumes he turned with a nightly and daily hand — the Bible, "iEsop's Fables," " Robinson Crusoe," "The Pilgrim's Progress," a history of the United States, and Weem's " Life of Washington." These were the best, and these he read over and over till he knew them almost by heart. But his voracity for anything printed was insatiable. He would sit in the twilight and read a dictionary as long as he could see. He used to go to David Turnham's, the town constable, and devour the " Revised Statutes of Indiana," as boys in our day do the "Three Guardsmen." Of the books he did not own he took voluminous notes, filling his copy-book with choice extracts, and poring over them until they were fixed in his memory. He could not aflford to waste paper upon his original compositions. He would sit by the fire at night and cover the wooden shovel with essays and arithmetical exercises, which he would shave off and then begin again. It is touch- ing to think of this great-spirited child, battling year after year against his evil star, wasting his ingenu- ity upon devices and makeshifts, his high intelli-

36 ABBAHAM LINCOLN

CHAP. II. gence starving for want of the simple appliances of education that are now ofEered gratis to the poorest and most indifferent. He did a man's work from the time he left school ; his strength and stature were already far beyond those of ordinary men. He wrought his appointed tasks ungrudgingly, though without enthusiasm; but when his em- ployer's day was over, his own began.

John Hanks says : ** When Abe and I returned to the house from work he would go to the cup- ^. H, board, snatch a piece of corn-bread, take down a •^^of book, sit down, cock his legs up as high as his "^fS?''* head, and read.'' The picture may be lacking in grace, but its tiTithf ulness is beyond question. The habit remained with him always. Some of his greatest work in later years was done in this gro- tesque Western fashion, — " sitting on his shoulder- blades."

Otherwise his life at this time differed little from that of ordinary farm-hands. His great strength and intelligence made him a valuable laborer, and his unfailing good temper and flow of rude rustic wit rendered him the most agreeable of comrades. He was always ready with some kindly act or word for others. Once he saved the life of the town drunkard, whom he found freezing by the roadside, by carrying him in his strong arms to the tavern, and working over him until he revived. It is a curious fact that this act of common human- ity was regarded as something remarkable in the neighborhood; the grateful sot himself always said " it was mighty clever of Abe to tote me so far that cold night." It was also considered an eccentricity that he hated and preached against

INDIANA 37

cruelty to animals. Some of his comrades r^mem- chap. ii. ber still his bursts of righteous wrath, when a boy, against the wanton murder of turtles and other creatures. He was evidently of better and finer clay than his fellows, even in those wild and igno- rant days. At home he was the life of the singularly assorted household, which consisted, besides his par- ents and himself, of his own sister, Mrs. Lincoln's two girls and boy, Dennis Hanks, the legacy of the dying Sparrow family, and John Hanks (son of the carpenter Joseph with whom Thomas Lincoln learned his trade), who came from Kentucky several years after the others. It was probably as much the inexhaustible good nature and kindly helpfulness of young Abraham which kept the peace among all these heterogeneous elements, eflEervescing with youth and confined in a one- roomed cabin, as it was the Christian sweetness and firmness of the woman of the house. It was a happy and united household : brothers and sisters and cousins living peacefully under the gentle rule of the good stepmother, but all acknowledging from a very early period the suprema<5y in goodness and cleverness of their big brother Abraham. Mrs. Lincoln, not long before her death, gave striking testimony of his winning and loyal character. She said to Mr. Hemdon : " I can say, what scarcely ^t^f ' one mother in a thousand can say, Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused in fact or appearance to do anything I asked him. His mind and mine — what little I had — seemed to run together. ... I had a son John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys, but I must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I

A

38 ABRAHAM LINCX)LN

CHAP. II. ever sAw or expect to see.'' Such were the begin- nings of this remarkable career, sacred as we see from childhood, to duty and to human kind- liness.

We are making no claim of early saintship for him. He was merely a good boy, with sufficient wickedness to prove his humanity. One of his employers, undazzled by recent history, faithfuUy remembers that young Abe liked his dinner and his pay better than his work : there is surely noth- ing aUen to ordinary mortaUty in this. It is also reported that he sometimes impeded the celerity of harvest operations by making burlesque speeches, or worse than that, comic sermons, from the top of some tempting stump, to the delight of the hired hands and the exasperation of the farmer. His budding talents as a writer were not always used discreetly. He was too much given to scribbling coarse satires and chronicles, in prose, and in some- thing which had to him and his friends the air of verse. From this arose occasional heart-burnings and feuds, in which Abraham bore his part accord- ing to the custom of the country. Despite his Quaker ancestry and his natural love of peace, he was no non-resistant, and when he once entered upon a quarrel the opponent usually had the worst of it. But he was generous and placable, and some of his best friends were those with whom he had had differences, and had settled them in the way then prevalent, — in a ring of serious spectators, calmly and judicially ruminant, under the shade of some spreading oak, at the edge of the timber.

Before we close our sketch of this period of Lincoln's life, it may not be amiss to glance for a

INDIANA 39

moment at the state of society among the people chap. ti. with whom his lot was cast in these important years.

In most respects there had been little moral or material improvement since the early settlement of the country. Their houses were usually of one room, built of round logs with the bark on. We have known a man to gain the sobriquet of " Split- log Mitchell ^ by indulging in the luxury of build- ing a cabin of square-hewn timbers. Their dress was still mostly of tanned deer-hide, a material to the last degfree uncomfortable when the wearer was caught in a shower. Their shoes were of the same, and a good Western authority calls a wet moccasin " a decent way of going barefoot.'^ About the time, however, when Lincoln grew to manhood, garments of wool and of tow began to be worn, dyed with the juice of the butternut or white walnut, and the hides of neat-cattle began to be tanned. But for a good while it was only the women who indulged in these noveltiei^. There was little public worship. Occasionally an itinerant preacher visited a county, and the settlers for miles around would go nearly in mass to the meeting. If a man was possessed of a wagon, the family rode luxuriously ; but as a rule the men walked and the women went on horse- back with the Uttle chUdren in their arms. It was considered no violation of the sanctities of the oc- casion to caiTy a rifle and take advantage of any game which might be stirring during the long walk. Arriving at the pla<5e of meeting, which was some log cabin if the weather was foul, or the shade of a tree if it was fair, the assembled worshipers threw their provisions into a common store and picnicked

40 ABRAHAM LIKCX)LN

CHAP. If. in neighborly companionship. The preacher would then take off his coat, and go at his work with an energy unknown to our days.

There were few other social meetings. Men came together for " raisings,^ where a house was built in a day; for " log-rollings,'' where tons of excellent timber were piled together and wastefully burned; for wolf-hunts, where a tall pole was erected in the midst of a prairie or clearing, and a g^eat circle of hunters formed around it, sometunes of mUes in diameter, which, gradually contracting with shouts and yells, drove all the game in the woods together at the pole for slaughter; and for horse-races, which bore little resemblance to those magnificent exhibitions which are the boast of Kentucky at this time. In these affairs the women naturally took no part ; but weddings, which were entertain- ments scarcely less rude and boisterous, were their own peculiar province. These festivities lasted rarely less than twenty-four hours. The guests as- sembled in the morning. There wa)3 a race for the whisky bottle ; a midday dinner ; an afternoon of rough games and outrageous practical jokes ; a sup- per and dance at night, interrupted by the successive withdrawals of the bride and of the groom, attended with ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian crudeness ; and a noisy dispersal next day.

The one point at which they instinctively clung to civilization was their regard for law and rever- ence for courts of justice. Yet these were of the simplest character and totally devoid of any ad- ^S. ventitious accessories. An early jurist of the in^M country writes: "I was Circuit Prosecuting At- p. 386. tomey at the time of the trials at the falls of Fall

INDIANA 41

Creek, where Pendleton now stands. Four of the chap. n. prisoners were convicted of murder, and three of them hung, for killing Indians. The court was held in a double log cabin, the g^and jury sat upon a log in the woods, and the foreman signed the bills of indictment, which I had prepared, upon his knee; there was not a petit juror that had shoes on ; all wore moccasins, and were belted around the waist, and carried side-knives used by the hunters." Yet amidst all this apparent savagery we see justice was done, and the law vindicated even against the bitterest prejudices of these pioneer jurymen.

They were full of strange superstitions. The belief in witchcraft had long ago passed away with the smoke of the fagots from old and New England, but it survived far into this century in Kentucky and the lower halves of Indiana and Illinois — touched with a peculiar tinge of African magic. The pioneers believed in it for good and evil. Their veterinary practice was mostly by charms and in- cantations ; and when a person beUeved himself bewitched, a shot at the image of the witch with a bullet melted out of a half-dollar was the favorite curative agency. Luck was an active divinity in their apprehension, powerful for blessing or bane, announced by homely signs, to be placated by quaint ceremonies. A dog crossing the hunter's path spoiled his day, unless he instantly hooked his little fingers together, and pulled till the animal disappeared. They were familiar with the ever- p.iJf' recurring mystification of the witch-hazel, or divin- ing-rod; and the "cure by faith ^ was as well known to them as it has since become in a more sophisti- cated state of society. The commonest occurrences

42 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Chap, il wero heralds of death and doom. A bird lighting in a window, a dog baying at certain hours, the cough of a horse in the direction of a child, the sight, or worse still, the touch of a dead snake, heralded domestic woe. A wagon driving past the house with a load of baskets was a warning of at- mospheric disturbance. A vague and ignorant astronomy governed their plantings and sowings, the breeding of their cattle, and all farm-work. They must fell trees for fence-rails before noon, and in the waxing of the moon. Fences built

W when there was no moon would give way; but that was the proper season for planting potatoes and other vegetables whose fruit gjrows underground; those which bore their product in the air must be planted when the moon shone. The magical power of the moon was wide in its influence; it extended to the most minute details of life.

Among these people, and in all essential respects one of them, Abraham Lincoln passed his childhood and youth. He was not remarkably precocious. His mind was slow in acquisition, and his powers of reasoning and rhetoric improved constantly to the end of his life, at a rate of progjress marvelously regular and sustained. But there was that about him, even at the age of nineteen years, which might well justify his admiring friends in presaging for him an unusual career. He had read every book he could find, and could " spell down ^ the whole county at their orthogjraphical contests. By dint of constant practice he had acquired an admi- rably clear and serviceable handwriting. He occa- sionally astounded his companions by such glimpses

INDIANA 43

of occult science as that the world is round and that chap. n. the sun is relatively stationary. He wrote, for his own amusement and edification, essays on politics, of which gentlemen of standing who had been favored with a perusal said with authority, at the cross-roads grocery, "The world cant beat it.'^ One or two of these compositions got into print and vastly increased the author's local fame. He was also a magnanimous boy, with a larger and kindUer spiriTthan common. His generosity, courage, and capability of discerning two sides to a dispute, were remarkable even then, and won him the admiration of those to whom such qualities were unknown. But perhaps, after all, the thing which gained and fixed his mastery over his f eUows was to a great degree his gigantic stature and strength. He attained his full growth, six feet and four inches, two years before he came of age. He rarely met with a man he could not easily handle. His strength is still a tradition in Spencer ^^f ' C!ounty. One aged man says that he has seen him pick up and carry away a chicken-house weigh- ing six hundred pounds. At another time, seeing some men preparing a contrivance for lifting some large posts, Abe quickly shouldered the posts and took them where they were needed. One of his employers says, " He could sink an axe deeper into wood than any man I ever saw.^ With strength like this and a brain to direct it, a man was a bom leader in that country and at that time.

There are, of course, foolish stories extant that Abraham used to boast, and that others used to predict, that he would be President some day. The same thing is daily said of thousands of boys

i

44 ABRAHAM LINCX)LN

CHAP. II. who will never be constables. But there is evi- dence that he felt too large for the life of a farm- hand on Pigeon Creek^ and his thoughts naturally turned, after the manner of restless boys in the West, to the river, as the avenue of escape from the narrow life of the woods. He once asked an old friend to give him a recommendation to some steamboat on the Ohio, but desisted from his pur- pose on being reminded that his father had the right to dispose of his time for a year or so more. 1828. But in 1828 an opportunity offered for a little glimpse of the world outside, and the boy gladly embraced it. He was hired by Mr. Gtentry, the proprietor of the neighboring village of Gentry- ville, to accompany his son with a flat-boat of produce to New Orleans and intermediate land- ings. The voyage was made successfully, and Abraham gained great credit for his management and sale of the cargo. The only important incident of the trip occurred at the plantation of Madame Duchesne, a few miles below Baton Bouge. The young merchants had tied up for the night and wereLlsep in the cabin, when they wereioueed by shuffling footsteps, which proved to be a gang of marauding negroes, coming to rob the boat. Abraham instantly attacked them with a club, knocked several overboard and put the rest to flight; flushed with battle, he and Allen Gentry carried the war into the enemy's country, and pur- sued the retreating Africans some distance in the darkness. They then returned to the boat, bleed- ing but victorious, and hastily swung into the stream and floated down the river till daylight. Lincoln's exertion in later years for the welfare of

INDIANA 45

the African race showed that this nocturnal battle chap. ii. had not led him to any hasty and hostile general- izations.

The next autumn, John Hanks, the steadiest and most trustworthy of his family, went to Illi- nois. Though an illiterate and rather dull man, he had a good deal of solidity of character and conse- quently some influence and consideration in the household. He settled in Macon County, and was so well pleased with the country, and especially with its admirable distribution into prairie and timber, that he sent repeated messages to his friends in Indiana to come out and join him. Thomas Lincoln was always ready to move. He had probably by this time despaired of ever own- ing any unencumbered real estate in Indiana, and the younger members of the family had little to bind them to the place where they saw nothing in the future but hard work and poor living. Thomas Lincoln handed over his farm to Mr. Gentry, sold isao. his crop of corn and hogs, packed his household goods and those of his children and sons-in-law into a single wagon, drawn by two yoke of oxen, the combined wealth of himself and Dennis Hanks, and started for the new State. His daughter Sarah or Nancy, for she was called by both names, who married Aaron Grigsby a few years before, had died in childbirth. The emigrating family consisted of the Lincolns, John Johnston, Mrs. Lincoln's son, and her daughters, Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Hanks, with their husbands.

Two weeks of weary tramping over forest roads and muddy prairie, and the dangerous ford- ing of streams swoUen by the February thaws.

46 ABRAHAM LINCX)LN

CHAP. n. brought the party to John Hanks's place near De- catur. He met them with a frank and energetic welcome. He had already selected a piece of ground for them a few miles from his own, and had the logs ready for their house. They num- bered men enough to bmld without calling in their neighbors, and immediately put up a cabin on the north fork of the Sangamon River. The family thus housed and sheltered, one more bit of filial work remained for Abraham before assuming his virile independence. With the assistance of John Hanks he plowed fifteen acres, and split, from the tall walnut-trees of the primeval forest, enough rails to surround them with a fence. Little did either dream, while engaged in this work, that the day would come when the appearance of John Hanks in a public meeting, with two of these rails on his shoulder, would electrify a State convention, and kindle throughout the country a contagious and passionate enthusiasm, whose results would reach to endless generations.

CHAPTER m

ILLINOIS IN 1830

THE Lincolns arrived in Illinois just in time to entitle themselves to be called pioneers. When, in after years, associations of " Old Settlers ^ began to be formed in Central Illinois, the qualifi- cation for membership agreed upon by common consent was a residence in the country before " the winter of the deep snow." This was in 1830-31, a season of such extraordinary severity that it has formed for half a century a recognized date in the middie counties of Illinois, among those to whom in those days diaries and journals were unknown. The snowfall began in the Christmas holidays and continued until the snow was three feet deep on level ground. Then came a cold rain, freezing as it fell, until a thick crust of ice gathered over the snow. The weather became intensely cold, the mercury sinking to twelve degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, and remaining there for two weeks. The storm came on with such suddenness that all who were abroad had great trouble in reaching their homes, and many perished. One man relates that he and a friend or two were out in a hunting party with an ox-team. They had collected a wagon-load of game and were on their way home

Chap. III.

Bey. J. M.

Bturteyant,

"AddreM

to Old

Settlers of

Morgan

Couiity.'*

■ ^»

Thomas

Buckles,

of McLean

County.

47

r

48 ABRAHAM LINCX)LN

Chap, iil when the storm struck them. After they had gone four nules they were compeUed to abandon their wagon; the snow fell in heavy masses "as if thrown from a scoop-shovel ^ ; arriving within two miles of their habitation, they were forced to trust to the instinct of their animals, and reached home hanging to the tails of their steers. Not all were so fortunate. Some were found weeks afterwards in the snow-drifts, their flesh gnawed by famished wolves ; and the fate of others was unknown until the late spring sunshine revealed their resting- places. To those who escaped, the winter was tedious and terrible. It is hard for us to under- stand the isolation to which such weather con- demned the pioneer. For weeks they remained in their cabins hoping for some mitigation of the frost. When at last they were driven out by the fear of famine, the labor of establishing communi- 'S-^"' cations was enormous. They finally made roads il^mon by "wallowing through the snow," as an Illinois pi^ea.' historian expresses it, and going patiently over the same track until the snow was trampled hard and rounded like a turnpike. These roads lasted far into the spring, when the snow had melted from the plains, and wound for miles like threads of silver over the rich black loam of the prairies. After that winter game was never again so plenti- ful in the State. Much still remained, of course, but it never recovered entirely from the rigors of that season and the stupid enterprise of the pio- neer hunters, who, when they came out of their snow-beleaguered cabins, began chasing and killing the starved deer by herds. It was easy work ; the crust of the snow was strong enough to bear the

ILLINOIS IN 1830 49

weight of men and dogs, but the slender hoofs of chap. m. the deer would after a few bounds pierce the treacherous surface. This destructive slaughter went on until the game grew too lean to be worth the kiUing. All sorts of wild animals grew scarce from that winter. Old settlers say that the slow cowardly breed of prairie wolves, which used to be 'i^iJoLSm caught and killed as readily as sheep, disappeared ^\it" about that time and none but the jQeeter and stronger survived.

Only once since then has nature shown such ex- travagant severity in Elinois, and that was on a day in the winter of 1836, known to lUinoisans as "the sudden change." At noon on the 20th of December, after a warm and rainy morning, the ground being covered with mud and slush, the temperature f eU instantly forty degrees. A man riding into Springfield for a marriage license says a roaring and crackling wind came upon him and the rain-drops dripping from his bridle-reins and beard changed in a second into jingling icicles. He rode hastily into the town and arrived in a few minutes at his destination ; but his clothes were frozen like sheet iron, and man and saddle had to be taken into the house together to be thawed apart. Gteese 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

Vol. L— 4

50 ABRAHAM LINCX)LN

CHAP. m. the cavity of their bodies to escape the murderous wind.^

The pioneer period of Ulinois was ending as Thomas Lincoln and his tall boy drove their ox-team over the Indiana line. The population of the State had grown to 157,447. It stiU clung to the wooded borders of the water-courses ; scattered settlements were to be found all along the Mississippi and its affluents, from where Cairo struggled for life in the swamps of the Ohio to the bustUng and busy min- ing camps which the recent discovery of lead had brought to Galena. A line of villages from Alton to Peoria dotted the woodland which the Illinois River had stretched, like agreen baldric, diagonally across the bosom of the State. Then there were long reaches of wilderness before you came to Fort Dearborn, where there was nothing as yet to give promise of that miraculous growth which was soon to make Chicago a proverb to the world. There were a few settlements in the fertile region called the Military Tract ; the southern part of the State was getting itself settled here and there. People were coming in freely to the Sangamon country. But a grassy solitude stretched from Galena to Chi- cago, and the upper half of the State was generally a wilderness. The earlier emigrants, principaQy of the poorer class of Southern farmers, shunned the prairies with something of a superstitious dread. They preferred to pass the first years of their occupation in the wasteful and laborious work

1 Although the old settlers of to cite only those incidents of the

Sangamon County are acquainted sudden change which are given

with these facts, and we have in the careful and conscientious

often heard them and many compilation entitled ''The Early

others like them from the lips of Settlers of Sangamon County,"

eye-witnesses, we have preferred by John Carroll Power.

ILLINOIS IN 1830 51

of clearing a patch of timber for corn, rather than chap. hi. enter upon those rich savannas which were ready to break into fertility at the slightest provocation of culture. Even so late as 1835, writes J. F. Speed, "no on^ dreamed the prairies would ever be occupied." It was thought they woidd be used perpetually as grazing-fields for stock. For years the long processions of " movers '^ wound over those fertile and neglected plains, taking no hint of the wealth suggested by the rank luxuriance of vegetable growth aroimd them, the carpet of brilliant flowers spread over the verdant knolls, the strong, succident grass that waved in the breeze, f uU of warm and vital odor, as high as the waist of a man. In after years, when the emigra- tion from the Northern and Eastern States began to pour in, the prairies were rapidly taken up, and the relative growth and importance of the two sections of the State were immediately reversed. Governor Ford, writing about 1847, attributes this residt to the fact that the best class of Southern people were slow to emigrate to a State where they could not take their slaves ; while the settlers from the North, not being debarred by the State Consti- tution from bringing their property with them, were of a different class. " The northern part of the State was settled in the first instance by wealthy farmers, enterprising merchants, miUers, and manufacturers. They made farms, built miUs, churches, school-houses, towns, and cities, and constructed roads and bridges as if by magic ; so that although the settlements in the southern part of the State are from twenty to fifty years in ad- vance on the score of age, yet are they ten years

i

52 ' ABRAHAM UNGOLN

CHAP. m. behind in point of wealth and aU the appUances

Thomiw of a higher civilization."

" Htetoiy^of At the time which we are specially considering, p. 980. however, the few inhabitants of the south and the center were principaUy from what c^me afterwards to be called the border slave States. They were mostly a simple, neighborly, unambitious people, contented with theiTcondition, Uving upo^lain fare, and knowing not much of anything better. Luxury was, of course, unknown; even wealth, if it existed, could procure few of the comforts of refined life. There was little or no money in circulation. Exchanges were effected by the most primitive forms of barter, and each family had to rely chiefly upon itself for the means of living. The neighbors would lend a hand in building a cabin for a new-comer ; after that he must in most cases shift for himself. Many a man arriving from an old community, and imperfectly appreciating the necessities of pioneer life, has found suddenly, on the approach of winter, that he must learn to make shoes or go barefoot. The furniture of their houses was made with an axe from the trees of the forest. Their clothing was all made at home. The buckskin days were over to a great extent, though an occasional hunting-shirt and pair of moccasins were still seen. But flax and hemp had begun to be cultivated, and as the wolves were killed off the sheep-folds increased, and garments resembliug those of civilization were spun and woven, and cut and sewed, by the women of the family. When a man had a suit of jeans colored with butternut- dye, and his wife a dress of linsey, they coidd appear with the best at a wedding or a quilting

N

ILLINOIS IN 1830 53

frolic. The superfluous could not have been said to chap. ui. exist in a community where men made their own buttons, where women dug roots in the woods to make their tea with, where many children never saw a stick of candy imtil after they were grown. The only sweetmeats known were those a skillful cook could compose from the honey plundered from the hollow oaks where the wild bees had stored it. Yet there was withal a kind of rude plenty ; the woods swarmed with game, and after swine began to be raised, there was the bacon and hoe-cake which any south-western farmer wiU say is good enough for a king. The greatest privation was the lack of steel implements. His axe was- as precious to the pioneer as his sword to the knight errant. Governor John Beynolds speaks of the panic felt in his father's family when the axe was dropped into a stream. A battered piece of tin was care- fully saved and smoothed, and made into a grater for green com.

They had their own amusements, of course ; no form of society is without them, from the anthro- poid apes to the Jockey Club. . As to the grosser and ruder shapes taken by the diversions of the pioneers, we will let Mr. Herndon speak — their contemporary annalist and ardent panegjrrist: " These men could shave a horse's mane and tail, paint, disfigure, and offer it for sale to the owner. They could hoop up in a hogshead a drunken man, they themselves being drunk, put in and nail fast the head, and roll the man down hill a hundred feet or more. They could run down a lean and hungry wild pig, catch it, heat a ten-plate stove furnace hot, and putting in the pig, could cook it.

54 ABRAHAM LINGOLN

CHAP. ILL they dancing the while a merry jig.** Wild oats of this kind seem hardly compatible with a harvest of civilization, but it is contended that such of these roysterers as survived their stormy begin- nings became decent and serious citizens. Indeed, Mr. Hemdon insists than even in their hot youth they showed the promise of goodness and piety. wiuinmH. "They attended church, heard the sermon, wept «MMhat and prayed, shouted, got up and fought an hour, tiSs^M^ and then went back to prayer, just as the spirit ^unty. moved them.^ The camp-meeting may be said, with no irreverent intention, to have been their principal means of intellectual excitement. The circuit preachers were for a long time the only cir- culating medium of thought and emotion that kept the isolated settlements from utter spiritual stag- nation. They were men of great physical and moral endurance, absolutely devoted to their work, which they pursued in the face of every hardship and discouragement. Their circuits were frequently SO great in extent that they were forced to be con- stantly on the route; what reading they did was done in the saddle. They received perhaps fifty dollars from the missionary fund and half as much in McLean morc from their congregations, paid for the most p. m.' part in necessaries of life. Their oratory was suited r their longitude, and was principal addressed to the emotions of their hearers. It was often very effective, producing shouts and groans and genu- flections among the audience at large, and terrible convulsions among the more nervous and excit- able. We hear sometimes of a whole congregation prostrated as by a hurricane, flinging their limbs about in furious contortions, with wild outcries.

^

ILLINOIS IN 1830 55

To this day some of the survivors of that period chap. hi. insist that it was the spirit of the Almighty, and nothing less, that thus manifested itself. The minister, however, did not always share in the de- lirium of his hearers. Governor Reynolds tells us of a preacher in Sangamon County, who, before his sermon, had set a wolf-trap in view from his pulpit In the midst of his exhortations his keen eyes saw the distant trap collapse, and he continued in the same intonation with which he had been preaching, " Mind the text, brethren, till I go kill that wolf ! ^ With all the failings and eccentricities of this singular class of men, they did a great deal of good, and are entitled to especial credit among those who conquered the wilderness. The emotions they excited did not all die away in the shouts and contortions of the meeting. Not a few of the cabins in the clearings were the abode of a fervent religion and an austere morality. Many a traveler, approaching a rude hut in the woods in the gather- ing twilight, distrusting the gaunt and silent family who gave him an unsmiling welcome, the bare interior, the rifles and knives conspicuously displayed, has felt his fears vanish when he sat down to supper, and the master of the house, in a few fervent words, invoked the blessing of heaven on the meaL

There was very little social intercourse ; a visit was a serious matter, involving the expenditure of days of travel. It was the custom among families, when the longing for the sight of kindred faces was too strong to withstand, to move in a body to the distant settlement where their relatives lived and remain with them for months at a time. The

f

56 ABRAHAM LINGOLN

CHAP. lu. claiius of consangoinity were more regarded than now. Almost the only festivities were those that accompanied weddings, and these were, of course, of a primitive kind. The perils and adventures through which the young pioneers went to obtain their brides furnish forth thousands of tales by Western flreddee. I^U^A of Wdng the rosy daughter of a neighbor, the enterprising bachelor would often go back to Kentucky, and pass through as many adventures in bringing his wife home as a returning crusader woidd meet between Beirut and Vienna. K she was a young woman who respected herself, the household gear she would insist on bringing would entaU an Iliad of embarrassmentB. An old farmer of Sangamon Coimty still talks of a feather-bed weighing fifty- four pounds with which his wife made him swim six rivers under penalty of desertion.

It was not always easy to find a competent au- thority to perform the ceremony. A justice in McLean County lived by the bank of a river, and his services were sometimes required by impatient lovers on the other bank when the waters were too torrential to cross. In such cases, being a consci- entious man, he always insisted that they should ride into the stream far enough for him to discern their features, holding torches to their faces by night and by storm. The wooing of those days was prompt and practical. There was no time for the gradual approaches of an idler and more conven- tional age. It is related of one Stout, one of the legendary Nimrods of Illinois, who was well and frequently married, that he had one unfailing for- mula of courtship. He always promised the ladies

HJilKOIS IN 1830 57

whose hearts he was besieging that ^^ they should chap. m. live in the timber where they could pick up their own firewood.''

Theft was almost unknown ; property, being so hard to get, was jealously guarded, as we have already noticed in speaking of the settlement of Kentucky. The pioneers of Illinois brought with them the same rigid notions of honesty which their environment maintained. A man in Macoupin County left his wagon, loaded with com, stuck in the prairie mud for two weeks near a frequented road. When he returned he f oimd some of his com gone, but there was money enough tied in the sacks to pay for what was taken. Men carrying bags of silver from the towns of Illinois to St. Louis rather made a display of it, as it enhanced their own importance, and there was no fear of robbery. There were of course no locks on the cabin doors, and the early merchants sometimes left their stores unprotected for days together when they went to the nearest city to replenish their stock. Of course there were rare exceptions to this rule, but a single theft alarmed and excited a whole neighborhood. When a crime was traced home, the family of the criminal were generaUy obliged to remove.

There were still, even so late as the time to which we are referring, two alien elements in the popula- tion of the State — the French and the Indians. The French settlements about Kaskaskia retained much of their national character, and the pioneers from the South who visited them or settled among them never ceased to wonder at their gayety, their peaceable industry and enterprise, and their domes-

r

58 ABBAHAM LINGOLN

CHAP. III. tic affection, which they did not care to dissemble and conceal like their shy and reticent neighbors. It was a daily spectacle, which never lost its strangeness for the Tennesseeans and Kentuckians, to see the Frenchman returning from his work greeted by his wife and children with embraces of welcome "at the gate of his door-yard, and in view of all the villagers.^ The natural and kindly fraternization of the Frenchmen with the Indians was also a cause of wonder to the Americans. The friendly intercourse between them, and their occasional intermarriages, seemed mtle short of monstrous to the ferocious exclusiveness of the Anglo-Saxon.^ The Indians in the central part of Illinois cut very little figure in the reminiscences of the pioneers ; they occupied much the same relation to them as the tramp to the housewife of to-day. The Winnebago war in 1827 and the Black Hawk war in 1831 disturbed only the northern portion of the State. A few scattered and vagrant lodges of Pottawatomies and Kickapoos were all the pioneers of Sangamon and the neighboring counties ever met. They were spared the heroic struggle of the advance-guard of civilization in other States. A woman was sometimes alarmed by a visit from a drunken savage; poultry and pigs occasionally disappeared when they were in the neighborhood ; but life was not darkened by the constant menace of massacre. A few years earlier, indeed, the re- lations of the two races had been more strained, as may be inferred from an act passed by the territo- rial Legislature in 1814, offering a reward of fifty

1 Bfichelet notices this exolu- style. *' Crime contre la natiire ! siveness of the English, and in- Crime oontre Phumanit^ ! U sera veighs against it in his most lyric ezpi^ par la st^rilit^ de Pesprit.''

ILLINOIS IN 1830

59

N. W.

Edwards,

** Life and

Times of

p. 168.

dollars to any citizen or ranger who should kill chap.iii. or take any depredating Indian. As only two dollars was paid for killing a wolf, it is easy to see how the pioneers regarded the forest folk in point sihlSiS/' of relative noxiousness. But ten years later a handful only of the Kiekapoos remained in San- gamon County, the specter of the vanished people. A chief named Machina came one day to a family who were clearing a piece of timber, and issued an order of eviction in these words : " Too much come white man. T'other side Sangamon.'' He threw a handful of dried leaves in the air to show how he would scatter the pale faces, but he never fulfilled his threats further than to come in occasionally and ask for a drink of whisky. That such trivial details are still related, only shows how barren of incident was the life of these obscure founders of a great empire. Any subject of conversation, any cause of sensation, was a godsend. When Vannoy murdered his wife in Springfield, whole f amiUes put on their best clothes and drove fifty miles through bottomless mud and swollen rivers to see him hanged.

It is curious to see how naturally in such a state of things the fabric of political society developed itself from its germ. The county of Sangamon was called by an act of the Legislature in 1821 out of a verdant solitude of more than a million acres, inhabited by a few families. An election for county commissioners was ordered ; three men were chosen; they came together at the cabin of John Kelly, at Spring Creek. He was a roving bachelor from North Carolina, devoted to the chase, who had built this hut three years before on the margin

r

60 ABRAHAM UNGOLN

CHAP.m. of a green-bordered rivulet, where the deer passed by in hundreds, going in the morning from the shady banks of the Sangamon to feed on the rich green grass of the prairie, and returning in the twilight. He was so delighted with this Power, hunters' paradise that he sent for his brothers to

"Early Bet- ^

eU&on J^^ ^"^- They came and brought their friends, ^^^'^^ and so it happened that in this immense county, several thousand square miles in extent, the settle- ment of John Kelly at Spring Creek was the only place where there was shelter for the commis- sioners; thus it became the temporary county- seat, duly described in the official report of the commissioners as ^^a certain point in the prairie near John Kelly's field, on the waters of Spring Creek, at a stake marked Z and D (the initials of the commissioners), to be the temporary seat of justice for said county ; and we do further agree that the said county-seat be called and known by the name of Springfield." In this manner the future capital received that hackneyed title, when the distinctive and musical name of Sangamon was ready to their hands. The sariie day they agreed with John Kelly to build them a court-house, for which they paid him forty-two doUars and fifty cents. In twenty-four days the house was built — one room of rough logs, the jury retiring to any sequestered glade they fancied for their deliberation, They next ordered the building of a jail, which cost just twice as much money as the court-house. Constables and overseers of the poor were ap- pointed, and all the machinery of government prepared for the population which was hourly expected. It was taken for granted that malefactors

ILLINOIS IN 1830 61

would come and the constables have employment ; chap. hi. and the poor they would have always with them, when once they began to arrive. This was only a temporary arrangement, but when, a year or two later, the time came to fix upon a permanent seat of justice for the coimty, the resources of the Spring Creek men were equal to the emergency. When the commissioners came to decide on the rel- ative merits of Springfield and another site a few miles away, they led them through brake, through brier, by mud knee-deep and by water-courses so exasperating that the wearied and baffled officials declared they woidd seek no further, and Spring- field became the county-seat for all time; and greater destinies were in store for it through means not wholly dissimilar. Nature had made it merely a pleasant hunting-ground; the craft and the industry of its first settlers made it a capital.

The courts which were held in these log huts were as rude as might be expected ; yet there is evidence that although there was no superfluity of law or of learning, justice was substantially administered. The lawyers came mostly from Kentucky, though an occasional New Englander confronted and lived down the general prejudice against his region and obtained preferment. The profits of the profession were inconceivably small. One early State's At- torney describes his first circuit as a tour of shifts "History of and privations not unlike the wanderings of a ^^S^? mendicant friax. In his first coimty he received a fee of five dollars for prosecuting the parties to a sanguinary aflfray. In the next he was equally successful, but barely escaped drowning in Spoon River. In the third there were but two families at

i

62 ABRAHAM, LINGOLN

CHAP.ni. the county-seat, and no cases on the docket. Thence he journeyed across a trackless prairie sixty miles, and at Quincy had one case and gained five doUars. In Pike County our much-enduring jurist took no cash, but found a generous sheriff who entertained him without charge. " He was one of nature's noblemen, from Massachusetts,'' writes the grateful prosecutor. The lawyers in what was called good practice earned less than a street-sweeper to-day. It is related that the famous Stephen A. Douglas once traveled from Springfield to Bloom- ington and made an extravagant speech, and hav- "oid Times iug gained his case received a fee of five dollars.

coimty/' In such a state of things it was not to be wondered at that the technicalities of law were held in some- what less veneration than what the pioneer regarded as the essential claims of justice. The infirmities of the jury system gave them less annoy- ance than they give us. Gk)vemor Ford mentions a case where a gang of horse-thieves succeeded in placing one of their confederates upon a jury which was to try them ; but he was soon brought to reason by his eleven colleagues making prepara- tions to hang him to the rafters of the jury room. The judges were less hampered by the Umitations of their legal lore than by their fears of a loss of popularity as a result of too definite charges in civil suits, or too great severity in criminal cases. They grew very dexterous in avoiding any com- mitment as to the legal or moral bearings of the questions brought before them. They generally refused to sum up, or to comment upon evidence ; when asked by the counsel to give instructions they would say, " Why, gentlemen, the jury under-

ILLINOIS IN 1830 63

stand this case as well as you or I. They will do chap. hi. justice between the parties.'' One famous judge, «H£tS?yof who was afterwards governor, when sentencing a ™f «?•" murderer, impressed it upon his mind, and wished him to inf oiin his friends, that it was the jury and not the judge who had found him guilty, and then asked him on what day he would like to be hanged. It is needless to say that the bench and bar were not all of this class. There were even at that early day lawyers, and not a few, who had already won reputation in the older States, and whose names are still honored in the profession. Cook, McLean, Edwards, Kane, Thomas, Reynolds, and others, the earliest lawyers of the State, have hardly been since surpassed for learning and ability.

In a commimity where the principal men were lawyers, where there was as yet little commerce, and industrial enterprise was imknown, it was natural that one of the chief interests of Uf e should be the pursuit of politics. The young State swarmed with politicians; they could be found chewing and whittling at every cross-roads inn; they were busy at every horse-race, arranging their plans and extending their acquaintance; around the burgoo-pot of the hunting party they discussed measures and candidates; they even invaded the camp-meeting and did not disdain the pulpit as a tribune. Of course there was no such thing as organization in the pioneer days. Men were voted for to a great extent independently of partisan questions affecting the nation at large, and in this way the higher offices of the State were filled for many years by men whose personal character com- pelled the respect and esteem of the citizens. The

64 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

CHAP.iu. year 1826 is generally taken as the date which witnessed the change from personal to partisan politics, though several years more elapsed before the rule of conventions came in, which put an end to individual candidacy. In that year, Daniel Pope Cook, who had long represented the State in Congress with singular ability and purity, was de- feated by Governor Joseph Duncan, the candidate of the Jackson men, on account of the vote given by Cook which elected John Quincy Adams to the Presidency. The bitter intolerance of the Jackson party naturally caused their opponents to organize against them, and there were two parties in the State from that time forward. The change in polit- ical methods was inevitable, and it is idle to deplore it ; but the former system gave the better men in the new State a power and prominence which they have never since enjoyed. Such men as Governor Ninian Edwards, who came with the prestige of a distinguished family connection, a large fortune, a good education, and a distinction of manners and of dress — ruffles, gold buttons, and fair-topped boots — which would hardly have been pardoned a few years later; and Governor Edward Coles, who had been private secretary to Madison, and was familiar with the courts of Europe, a man as notable for his gentleness of manners as for his nobility of nature, could never have come so readily and easily to the head of the government after the machine of the caucus had been perfected. Eeal ability then imposed itself with more authority upon the ignorant and unpretending politicians from the back timber ; so that it is remarked by those who study the early

ILLINOIS IN 1830 65

statutes of Illinois that they are far better drawn chap. m. up, and better edited, than those of a later period, «HSS5yof when illiterate tricksters, conscious of the party ^Sl'" strength behind them, insisted on shaping legisla- tion according to their own fancy. The men of cultivation wielded an influence in the Legislature entirely out of proportion to their numbers, as the ruder sort of pioneers were naturally in a large majority. The type of a not uncommon class in Illinois tradition was a member from the South who coidd neither read nor write, and whose appar- ently ironical patronymic was Grammar. When first elected he had never worn anything except leather; but regarding his tattered buckskin as unfit for the garb of a lawgiver, he and his sons gathered hazel-nuts enough to barter at the nearest store for a few yards of blue strouding such as the Indians used for breech-clouts. When he came home with his purchase and had called together the women of the settlement to make his clothes, it was found that there was only material enough for a very short coat and a long pair of leggins, and thus attired he went to Kaskaskia, the territorial capital. Uncouth as was his appearance, he had in him the raw material of a politician. He invented a system — which was afterwards adopted by many whose breeches were more fashionably cut — of voting against every measure which was proposed. If it failed, the responsibility was broadly shared ; if it passed and was popidar, no one would care who voted against it ; if it passed and did not meet the favor of the people, John Grammar could vaunt his foresight. Between the men like Coles and the men like Grammar there was a wide interval, and Vol. I.— 5

66 ABRAHAM LINGOLN

Chap. III. the average was about what the people of the State deserved and could appreciate. A legislator was as likely to suffer for doing right as for doing wrong. Governor Ford, in his admirable sketch of the early history of the State, mentions two acts of the Legislature, both of them proper and bene- ficial, as unequaled in their destructi\re influence upon the great folks of the State. One was a bill for a loan to meet the honest obligations of the commonwealth, commonly called " the Wiggins loan " ; and the other was a law to prevent buUs of inferior size and breed from running at large. This latter set loose all the winds of popular fury : it was cruel, it was aristocratic ; it was in the interest of rich men and pampered foreign bulls ; and it ended the career of many an aspiring politician in a blast of democratic indignation and scorn. The poli- tician who relied upon immediate and constant contact with the people certainly earned all the emoluments of office he received. His successes were hardly purchased by laborious affability. "A friend of mine,^ says Ford, "once informed me that he intended to be a candidate for the Legisla- ture, but would not declare himself until just before the election, and assigned as a reason that it was so very hard to be clever for a long time at once.'' Before the caucus had eliminated the individual initiative, there was much more of personal feeling in elections. A vote against a man had something of offense in it, and sometimes stirred up a defeated candidate to heroic vengeance. In 1827 the Legis- lature elected a State treasm^er after an exciting contest, and before the members had left the house the unsuccessful aspirant came in and soundly

ILLINOIS IN 1880 67

thrashed, one after the other, four of the represent- chap. hi. atives who had voted against him. Such energy Ford, p. si. was sure to meet its reward, and he was soon after made clerk of the Circuit Court. It is related by- old citizens of Menard County, as a circumstance greatly to the credit of Abraham Lincoln, that when he was a candidate for the Legislature a man who wanted his vote for another place walked to the polls with him and ostentatiously voted for him, hoping to receive his vote in return. Lincohi voted against him, and the act was much admired by those who saw it.

One noticeable fact is observed in relation to the politicians of the day — their c^ireers were generally brief. Superannuation came early. In the latter part of the last century and the first half of this, men were called old whom we should regard as in the prime of life. When the friends of Washington were first pressing the Presidency upon him in 1788, he urged his " advanced age^ as an imperative reason for declining it : he was fifty-six yeai's old. When Ninian Edwards was a candidate for Gov- ernor of Illinois in 1826, he was only fifty-one, and yet he considered it necessary in his published ad- dresses to refer to the charge that he was too old for the place, and, while admitting the fact that he was no longer young, to urge in extenuation that there are some old things, — like old whisky, old bacon, and old friends, — which are not without their merits. Even so late as 1848, we find a remarkable letter from Mr. Lincoln, who was then in Congress, bearing upon the same point. His partner, William H. Hemdon, had written him a letter, complaining that the old men in Sangamon

68 ABRAHAM LINGOLN

CHAP. III. County were unwilling to let the young ones have any opportunity to distinguish thetnselves. To this Lincoln answered in his usual tone of grave kindness : " The subject of your letter is exceed- ingly painful to me ; and I cannot but think there is some mistake in your impression of the motives of the old men. I suppose I am now one of the old men, and I declare on my veracity, which I think is good with you, that nothing could afford me more satisfaction than to learn that you and others of my young friends at home were doing battle in the contest and endearing themselves to the people and taking a stand far above any I have ever been able to reach in their admiration. I cannot conceive that other old men feel differently. Of course, I cannot demonstrate what I say ; but I was young once, and I am sure I was never un- generously thrust back.^

The man who thus counseled petulant youth with the experienced calmness of age was thirty-nine years old. A state of society where one could at that age call himself or be called by others an old man, is proved by that fact alone to be one of wearing hardships and early decay of the vital powers. The survivors of the pioneers stoutly in- sist upon the contrary view. " It was a glorious lif e,^ says one old patriarch ; " men would fight for the love of it, and then shake hands and be friends ; there is nothing like it now.^ Another says, "I never enjoy my breakfast now as I used to, when I got up and ran down a deer before I could have anything to eat.'' But they see the past through a rosy mist of memory, transfigured by the eternal magic of youth. The sober fact is that the life

ILLINOIS IN 1880 69

was a hard one, with few rational pleasures, few chap. hi. wholesome appliances. The strong ones lived, and some even attained great length of years ; but to the many age came early and was full of infirmity and pain. If we could go back to what our fore- fathers endured in clearing the Western wilderness, we could then better appreciate our obligations to them. It is detracting from the honor which is their due to say that their lives had much of happi- ness or comfort, or were in any respect preferable to our own.

r

CHAPTEE IV

NEW SALEM

CHAP. IV. X^UEING the latter part of " the winter of the -L/ deep snow,^ Lincoln became acquainted with one Denton Offutt, an adventurous and dis- cursive sort of merchant, with more irons in the fire than he could well manage. He wanted to take a flat-boat and cargo to New Orleans, and having heard that Hanks and Lincoln had some experience of the river, he insisted on their joining him. John Johnston was afterwards added to the party, prob- ably at the request ot his foster-brother, to share in the golden profits of the enterprise; for fifty cents a day, and a contingent dividend of twenty dollars apiece, seemed like a promise of immediate opulence to the boys. Li the spring, when the rivers broke up and the melting snows began to pour in torrents down every ravine and gully, the three young men paddled down the Sangamon in a canoe to the point where Jamestown now stands ; whence they walked five miles to Springfield, where Oflfutt had given them rendezvous. They met him at Elliott^s tavern and far from happy. Amid the multiplicity of his engagements he had failed to procure a flat-boat, and the first work his new hands must do was to build one. They cut

70

>

NEW SALEM 71

the timber, with frontier innocence, from "Con- chap.iv. gress land," and soon had a serviceable craft afloat, with which they descended the current of the Sangamon to New Salem, a little village which seems to have been bom for the occasion, as it came into existence just before the arrival of Lincohi, flourished for seven years while he remained one of its citizens, and died soon after he went away. His introduction to his fellow- citizens was effected in a peculiar and somewhat striking manner. Offutt's boat had come to serious embarrassment on Eutledgtfs mill-dam, and the un- wonted incident brought the entire population to the water's edge. They spent a good part of the day watching the hapless flat-boat, resting midships on the dam, the forward end in the air and the stem taking in the turbid Sangamon water. Nobody knew what to do with the disaster except " the bow-oar," who is described as a gigantic youth "with his trousers rolled up some five feet," who was wading about the boat and rigging up some undescribed contrivance by which the cargo was unloaded, the boat tilted and the water let out by boring a hole through the bottom, and everything brought safely to moorings below the dam. This exploit gained for young Lincoln the enthusiastic admiration of his employer, and turned his own mind in the direction of an invention which he afterwards patented " for lifting vessels over shoals." The model on which he obtained this patent — a little boat whittled by his own hand in 1849, after he had become promi- nent as a lawyer and politician — is still shown to visitors at the Department of the Interior. We have never learned that it has served any other purpose.

ABBAHAM UNCOLH

They made a quick trip down the Sangamon, the Illinois, and the Missis- sippi rivers. Although it was but a repetition in great part of the trip young Lincoln had made with Gentry, it evidently created a far deeper im- pression on his mind than the former one. The sim- ple and honest words of John Hanks leave no doubt of this. At New Orleans, he said, they saw for the first time "negroes chained, mal- treated, whipped, and scourged. Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was silent, looked bad. I can gay, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion of slavery. It run its iron in hJTn then and there, May,

1831. I have heard him say so often." The sight of men in chains was intolerable to him. Ten years after this he made another journey by water with his friend Joshua Speed, of Kentucky. "Writing to Speed about it after the lapse of four- teen yearfl, he says : " In 1841 you and I had to- gether a tedious low-water trip on a steamboat from

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74 ABEAHAM LINGOLN

Chap. IV. Louisville to St. Louis. Tou may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me, and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave border. It is not fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable.^

There have been several ingenious attempts to show the origin and occasion of Mr. Lincoln's antislavery convictions. They seem to us an idle waste of labor. These sentiments came with the first awakening of his mind and conscience, and were roused into active life and energy by the sight of fellow-creatures in chains on an Ohio Eiver steamboat, and on the wharf at New Orleans.

The party went up the river in the early summer and separated in St. Louis. Abraham walked in company with John Johnston from St. Louis to Coles County, and spent a few weeks there with his father, who had made another migration the year before. His final move was to Goose Nest Prairie, where he died in 1851,^ at the age of seventy- three years, after a life which, though not success- ful in any material or worldly point of view, was probably far happier than that of his illustrious son, being unvexed by enterprise or ambition. Abraham never lost sight of his parents. He con- tinued to aid and befriend them in every way, even

1 His grave, a mile and a half propriate monument erected by west of the town of Farmington, his grandson, the Hon. Robert T. niinois, is surmounted by an ap- Lincoln.

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NEW SALEM 75

when he could ill afford it, and when his benefac- chap. iv. tions were imprudently used. He not only com- forted their declining years with every aid his affection could suggest, but he did everything in his power to assist his stepbrother Johnston — a hopeless task enough. The following rigidly truth- ful and yet kindly letters will show how mentor- like and masterful, as well as generous, were the relations that Mr. Lincoln held to these friends and companions of his childhood :

Dear Johnston : Your request for eighty dollars I do not think it best to comply with now. At the various times when I have helped you a little, you have said to me, " We can get along very well now," but in a very short time I find you in the same difleulty again. Now this can only happen by some defect in your conduct. What that defect is I think I know. You are not Tazy, and stiU you are an idler. I doubt whether, since I saw you, you have done a good whole day^s work in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work, and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting time is the whole diflculty, and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your chil- dren, that you should break the habit. It is more impor- tant to them because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it easier than they can get out after they are in.

You are now in need of some money ; and what I pro- pose is that you shall go to work "tooth and nail'' for somebody who will give you money for it. Let father and your boys take charge of things at home, prepare for a crop, and make the crop ; and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get ; and to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you that for every dollar you will, between this and the first of next May, get for your own labor, either in money or as discharging your own indebted- ness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if you

76 ABRAHAM LINGOLN

Chap. iy. hire yourself at ten dollars a month, from me yon will get ten more, making twenty dollars a month for yonr work. In this I do not mean you should go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines in Cali- fornia ; but I mean for you to go at it for the best wages you can get elose to home, in Coles County. Now, if you will do this you will soon be out of debt, and, what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again. But if I should now dear you out of debt, next year you would be just as deep in as ever. You say you would almost give your plaee in heaven for seventy or eighty dollars. Then you value your place in heaven very cheap, for I am sure you can with the offer I make get the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months' work. You say if I will furnish you the money you will deed me the land, and if you don't pay the money back you will deliver possession. Nonsense. If you can't now live with the land, how will you then live without it t You have always been kind to me, and I do not mean to be unkind to you. On the contrary, if you will but follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eighty times eighty dollars to you.

Here is a later epistle, still more graphic and terse in statement, which has the unusual merit of painting both confessor and penitent to the life :

Shelbyvtlle, Nov. 4, 1851. Dear Brother: When I came into Charleston, day before yesterday, I learned that you were anxious to sell the land where you live and move to Missouri. I have been thinking of this ever since, and cannot but think such a notion is utterly foolish. What can you do in Missouri better than here t Is the land any richer t Can you there, any more than here, raise com and wheat and oats without work t Will anybody there, any more than here, do your work for you t If you intend to go to work, there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not intend to go to work, you cannot get along anywhere. Squirming and crawling about from place to place can do no good. You have raised no crop this year, and what you really want is to sell the land^

NEW SALEM 77

get the money, and spend it. Part with the land you chap. iv. have, andy my life upon it, you will never after own a spot big enough to bury you in. Half you will get for the land you will spend in moving to Missouri, and the other half you will eat and drink and wear out, and no foot of land will be bought. Now, I feel it is my duty to have no hand in such a piece of foolery. I feel that it is so even on your own account, and particularly on mother's account. The eastern forty acres I intend to keep for mother while she lives ; if you will not cultivate it, it will rent for enough to support her; at least, it will rent for something. Her dower in the other two forties she can let you have, and no thanks to me. Now do not misunderstand this letter. I do not write it in any unkindness. I write it in order, if possible, to get you to face the truth, which truth is, you are destitute because you have idled away all your time. Your thou- sand pretenses deceive nobody but yourself. Gro to work is the only cure for your case.

A volume of disquisition could not put more clearly before the reader the difference between Abraham Lincoln and the common run of Southern and Western rural laborers. He had the same dis- advantages that they had. He grew up in the midst of poverty and ignorance ; he was poisoned with the enervating malaria of the Western woods, as all his fellows were, and the consequences of it were seen in his character and conduct to the close of his life. But he had, what very few of them possessed any glimmering notion of, a fixed and inflexible will to succeed. He did not love work, probably, any better than John Johnston ; but he had an innate self-respect, and a consciousness that his self was worthy of respect, that kept him from idleness as it kept him from all other vices, and made him a better man every year that he lived.

We have anticipated a score of years in speaking

/

78 ABRAHAM UNGOLN

CHAP. IV. of Mr. Lincoln's relations to his family. It was in August of the year 1831 that he finally left his father's roof, and swung out for himself into the current of the world to make his fortime in his own way. He went down to New Salem again to assist Offutt in the business that lively specula- tor thought of establishing there. He was more punctual than either his employer or the merchan- dise, and met with the usual reward of punctuality in being forced to waste his time in waiting for the tardy ones. He seemed to the New Salem people to be " loafing" ; several of them have given that description of him. He did one day's work acting as clerk of a local election, a lettered loafer being pretty sure of employment on such an occasion.^ He also piloted a boat down the San- gamon for one Dr. Nelson, who had had enough of New Salem and wanted to go to Texas. This was probably a task not requiring much pilot-craft, as the river was much swollen, and navigators had in most places two or three miles of channel to count upon. But Offutt and his goods arrived at last, and Lincoln and he got them immediately into position, and opened their doors to what commerce could be found in New Salem. There was clearly not enough to satisfy the volatile mind of Mr. Offutt, for he soon bought Cameron's mill at the historic dam, and made Abraham superintendent also of that branch of the business.

iMrs. Lizzie H. Bell writes of come. They were looking around

this incident: ** My father, Men- for a man to fill his place when

ton Graham, was on that diay, as my father noticed Mr. Lincoln

nsnal, appointed to be a clerk, and asked if he could write. He

and Bfr. McNamee, who was to be answered that ' he could make a

the other, was sick and failed to few rabbit tracks.' "

NEW SALEM 79

It is to be surmised that Offutt never inspired chap.iv. his neighbors and customers with any deep regard for his soUdity of character. One of them says of him with injurious pleonasm, that he ^^ talked too much with his mouth.^ A natural consequence of his excessive fluency was soon to be made dis- agreeably evident to his clerk. He admired Abra- ham beyond measure, and praised him beyond prudence. He said that Abe knew more than any man in the United States; and he was certainly not warranted in making such an assertion, as his own knowledge of the actual state of science in America could not have been exhaustive. He also said that Abe could beat any man in the county running, jumping, or " wrastling.'' This proposi- tion, being less abstract in its nature, was more readily grasped by the local mind, and was not likely to pass unchallenged.

Public opinion at New Salem was formed by a crowd of ruffianly young fellows who were called the " Clary^s Grove Boys.^ Once or twice a week they descended upon the village and passed the day in drinking, fighting, and brutal horse-play. If a stranger appeared in the place, he was likely to suffer a rude initiation into the social life of New Salem at the hands of these jovial savages. Sometimes he was nailed up in a hogshead and rolled down hill ; sometimes he was insulted into a fight and then maiiled black and blue ; for despite their pretentions to chivalry they had no scruples about fair play or any such superstitions of civil- ization. At first they did not seem inclined to molest young Lincoln. His appearance did not invite insolence; his reputation for strength and

ABHAHAU LDTOOLM

activity was a greater pro- tection to him than his in- offensive good-natiire. But the loud admiration of Offutt gave them umbrage. It led to dispute, contradic- tions, and finally to a formal banter to a wrestling-match, Lincoln was greatly averse to all this " wool- ing and pullii^," as he called it. But Offutt's indis- cretiou had made it necessary for him to show his mettle. Jack Arm- strong, the leading bully of the gang, was selected to throw him, and expected an easy victory. But he soon found him- self in different hands from any he bad heretofore engaged with. See- ing he could not manage the tall stranger, his friends swarmed in, and by kicking and tripping nearly succeeded in getting Lincoln down. At this, as has been said of another hero, " the spirit of Odin entered into him," and putting forth his whole strength, be held the

NEW SALEM 81

pride of Clary's Grove in his arms like a child, and chap. iv. almost choked the exuberant life out of him. For a moment a general fight seemed inevitable ; but Lincoln, standing undismayed with his back to the wall, looked so formidable in his defiance that an honest admiration took the place of momentary fury, and his initiation was over. As to Armstrong, he was Lincoln's friend and sworn brother as soon as he recovered the use of his larynx, and the bond thus strangely created lasted through life. Lincoln had no further occasion to fight his own battles while Armstrong was there to act as his champion. The two friends, although so widely diflferent, were helpful to each other afterwards in many ways, and Lincoln made ample amends for the liberty his hands had taken with Jack's throat, by saving, in a memorable trial, his son's neck from the halter.

This incident, trivial and vulgar as it may seem, was of great importance in Lincoln's life. His behavior in this ignoble scuflle did the work of years for him, in giving him the position he required in the community where his lot was cast. He became from that moment, in a certain sense, a personage, with a name and standing of his own. The verdict of Clary's Grove was unanimous that he was " the cleverest fellow that had ever broke into the settlement." He did not have to be con- stantly scuflfling to guard his self-respect, and at the same time he gained the good- will of the better sort by his evident peaceableness and integrity.

He made on the whole a satisfactory clerk for Mr. Offutt, though his downright honesty must have seemed occasionally as eccentric in that posi- tion as afterwards it did to his associates at the Vol. I.— 6

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NEW SALEM 83

bar. Dr. Holland has preserved one or two inci- chap.iv. dents of this kind, which have their value. Once, after he had sold a woman a little bill of goods and received the money, he found on looking over the account again that she had given him six and a quarter cents too much. The money burned in his hands until he locked the shop and started on a walk of several milee in the night to make restitu- tion before he slept. On another occasion, after weighing and delivering a pound of tea, he found a small weight on the scales. He immediately weighed out the quantity of tea of which he had innocently defrauded his customer and went in search of her, his sensitive conscience not permit- ting any delay. To show that the young merchant was not too good for this world, the same writer gives an incident of his shop-keeping experience of a different character. A rural bully having made himself especially offensive one day, when women were present, by loud profanity, Lincoln requested him to be silent. This was of course a cause of war, and the young clerk was forced to follow the incensed ruffian into the street, where the combat was of short duration. Lincoln threw him at once to the ground, and gathering a handful of the dog- fennel with which the roadside was plentifully bor- dered, he rubbed the ruffian's face and eyes with it until he howled for mercy. He did not howl in vain, for the placable giant, when his discipline was finished, brought water to bathe the culprit's smarting face, and doubtless improved the occasion with quaint admonition.

A few passages at arms of this sort gave Abra- ham a redoubtable reputation in the neighborhood.

84 ABRAHAM LINGOLN

coAP. IV. But the principal use he made of his strength and his prestige was in the capacity of peacemaker, an office which soon devolved upon him by general consent. Whenever old feuds blossomed into fights by Offutt's door, or the chivalry of Clary's Grove attempted in its energetic way to take the conceit out of some stranger, or a canine duel spread con- tagion of battle among the masters of the beasts, Lincoln usually appeared upon the scene, and with a judicious mixture of force and reason and invinci- ble good-nature restored peace.

While working with Oflfutt his mind was turned in the direction of English grammar. From what he had heard of it he thought it a matter within his grasp, if he could once fall in with the requisite machinery. Consulting with Menton^ Graham, the schoolmaster, in regard to it, and learning the whereabouts of a vagrant " Kirkham's Grammar,'' he set off at once and soon returned from a walk of a dozen miles with the coveted prize. He devoted himself to the new study with that pecu- liar intensity of application which always remained his most valuable faculty, and soon knew all that can be known about it from rules. He seemed sur- prised, as others have been, at the meager dimen- sions of the science he had acquired and the ease with which it yielded all there was of it to the student. But it seemed no slight achievement to the New Salemites, and contributed not a little to the prevalent impression of his learning.

His name is prominently connected with an event which just at this time caused an excitement

^This name has always been daughter, Mrs. Bell, says that written in Blinois ** Minter,'' but her father's name is as given in a letter from Mr. Graham's the text.

NEW SALEM 85

and interest in Salem and the neighboring towns chap.iv. entirely out of proportion to its importance. It was one of the articles of faith of most of the settlers on the banks of the Sangamon River that it was a navigable stream, and the local politicians found that they could in no way more easily hit the fancy of their hearers than by discussing this assumed fact, and the logical corollary derived from it, that it was the duty of the State or the nation to clear out the snags and give free course to the commerce which was waiting for an opportunity to pour along this natural highway. At last one Captain Vincent Bogue, of Springfield, determined to show that the thing could be done by doing it. The first promise of the great enterprise appears in the " Sangamo Journal " of January 26, 1832, in a letter from the Captain, at Cincinnati, saying he would ascend the Sangamon by steam on the breaking up of the ice. He asked that he might be met at the mouth of the river by ten or twelve men, having axes with long handles, to cut away the overhanging branches of the trees on the banks. From this moment there was great excite- ment,— public meetings, appointment of commit- tees, appeals for subscriptions, and a scattering fire of advertisements of goods and freight to be bargained for, — which sustained the prevailing interest. It was a day of hope and promise when the advertisement reached Springfield from Cin- cinnati that "the splendid upper-cabin steamer Talisman^ would positively start for the Sangamon on a given day. As the paper containing this joy- ous intelligence also complained that no mail had reached Springfield from the east for three weeks.

86 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

CHAP. IV. it is easy to understand the desire for more rapid and regular communications. From week to week the progress of the Talisman^ impeded by bad weather and floating ice, was faithfully recorded, until at last the party with long-handled axes went down to Beardstown to welcome her. It is needless to state that Lincoln was one of the party. His standing as a scientific citizen of New Salem would have been enough to insure his selection even if he had not been known as a bold navigator. He piloted the Talisman safely through the wind- ings of the Sangamon, and Springfield gave itself up to extravagant gayety on the event that proved she " could no longer be considered an inland town.^ Captain Bogue announced "fresh and seasonable goods just received per steamboat Talismafij^ and the local poets illuminated the columns of the " Journal " with odes on her advent. The joy was short-lived. The Talisman met the natural fate of steamboats a few months later, being burned at the St. Louis wharf. Neither State nor nation has ever removed the snags from the Sangamon, and no subsequent navigator of its waters has been found to eclipse the fame of the earliest one.

CHAPTEE V

LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAR

ANEW period in the life of Lincoln begins chap. v. with the summer of 1832. He then obtained i®2. his first public recognition, and entered upon the course of life which was to lead him to a position of prominence and great usefulness.

The business of OflEutt had gone to pieces, and his clerk was out of employment, when Governor Reynolds issued his call for volunteers to move the tribe of Black Hawk across the Mississippi. For several years the raids of the old Sac chieftain upon that portion of his patrimony which he had ceded to the United States had kept the settlers in the neigh- borhood of Eock Island in terror, and menaced the peace of the frontier. In the spring of 1831 he came over to the east side of the river with a con- siderable band of warriors, having been encouraged by secret promises of cooperation from several other tribes. These failed him, however, when the time of trial arrived, and an improvised force of State volunteers, assisted by General E. P. Gaines and his detachment, had little diflSculty in compelling the Indians to recross the Mississippi, and to enter into a solemn treaty on the 30th of June by which the former treaties were ratified and Black Hawk

87

88 ABBAHAM LINCOLN

CHAP. V. and his leading warriors bound themselves never again to set foot on the east side of the river, with- out express permission from the President or the (Governor of Ulinoig.

But Black Hawk was too old a savage to learn respect for treaties or resignation under fancied wrongs. He was already approaching the allotted term of life. He had been a chief of his nation for more than forty years. He had scalped his first enemy when scarcely more than a child, having painted on his blanket the blood-red hand which marked his nobility at fifteen years of age. Peace under any circumstances would doubtless have been irksome to him, but a peace which forbade him free access to his own hunting-grounds and to the graves of his fathers was more than he could now school himself to endure. He had come to believe that he had been foully wronged by the treaty which was his own act ; he had even convinced him- self that "land cannot be sold," a proposition in polit-

" ilfe*anrf ical ecouomy which our modem socialists would be p. 325! puzzled to accept or confute. Besides this, the ten- derest feelings of his heart were outraged by this exclusion from his former domain. He had never passed a year since the death of his daughter with- out making a pilgrimage to her grave at Oquawka and spending hours in mystic ceremonies and con- Poj^^ templation. He was himself prophet as well as war-

nitaSi^"**' rior, and had doubtless his share of mania, which is ^* "^' the strength of prophets. The promptings of his own broken heart readily seemed to him the whisper- ings of attendant spirits ; and day by day these un- seen incitements increased around him, until they could not be resisted even if death stood in the way.

LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAB 89

He made his combinations during the winter, and ch^. v. had it not been for the loyal attitude of Keokuk, he could have brought the entire nation of the Sacs and Foxes to the war-path. As it was, the flower of the young men came with him when, with the opening spring, he crossed the river once more. He came this time, he said, " to plant com," but as a preliminary to this peaceful occupation of the land he marched up the Rock River, expecting to be joined by the Winnebagoes and Pottawatomies. But the time was passed for honorable alliances among the Indians. His oath-bound confederates gave him little assistance, and soon cast in their lot with the stronger party.

This movement excited general alarm in the State. General Henry Atkinson, commanding the United States troops, sent a formal summons to Black Hawk to return; but the old chief was already well on his way to the lodge of his friend, the prophet Wabokishick, at Prophetstown, and treated the sum- mons with contemptuous defiance. The Governor immediately called for volunteers, and was him- self astonished at the alacrity with which the call was answered. Among those who enlisted at the first tap of the drum was Abraham Lincoln, and equally to his surprise and delight he was elected captain of his company. The volunteer organiza- tions of those days were conducted on purely democratic principles. The company assembled on the green, an election was suggested, and three- fourths of the men walked over to where Lincoln was standing ; most of the small remainder joined themselves to one Kirkpatrick, a man of some sub- stance and standing from Spring Creek. We have

90 ABRAHAM LINOOLN

CHAP. V. the word of Mr. Lincoln for it, that no subsequent success ever gave him such unmixed pleasure as this earliest distinction. It was a sincere, unsought tribute of his equals to those physical and moral quaUties which made him the best man of his hun- dred, and as such was accepted and prized.

At the Beardstown rendezvous, Captain Lincoln's company was attached to Colonel Samuel Thomp- son's regiment, the Fourth Illinois, which was organ- ized at Eichland, Sangamon County, on the 21st of April, and moved on the 27th, with the rest of the command under General Samuel Whitesides, for Yellow Banks, where the boats with provisions had been ordered to meet them. It was arduous march- ing. There were no roads and no bridges, and the day's task included a great deal of labor. The third day out they came to the Henderson River, a stream some fifty yards wide, swift and swoUen with the spring thaws, with high and steep banks. To most armies this would have seemed a serious obstacle, but these backwoodsmen swarmed to the

ReynoidB. work like beavers, and in less than three hours the

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horses and wagons. When they came to Yellow Banks, on the Mississippi, the provision-boats had not arrived, and for three days they waited there literally without food ; very uncomfortable days for Governor Reynolds, who accompanied the ex- pedition, and was forced to hear the outspoken comments of two thousand hungry men on his supposed inefficiency. But on the 6th of May the William Wallace arrived, and " this sight," says the Governor with characteristic sincerity, " was, I presume, the most interesting I ever beheld."

LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAB 91

From there they inarched to the mouth of Bock chap. v. River, and thence General Whitesides proceeded with his volunteers up the river some ninety miles to Dixon, where they halted to await the arrival of General Atkinson with the regular troops and pro- visions. There they found two battalions of fresh horsemen under Majors Stillman and Bailey, who had as yet seen no service and were eager for the fray. Whitesides's men were tired with their forced march, and besides, in their ardor to get forward, they had thrown away a good part of their pro- visions and left their baggage behind. It pleased the Governor, therefore, to listen to the prayers of Stillman's braves, and he gave them orders to proceed to the head of Old Man's Creek, where it was supposed there were some hostile Indians, and coerce them into submission. "I thought,'* says the Governor in his memoirs, " they might discover the enemy."

The supposition was certainly well founded. They rode merrily away, came to Old Man's Creek, thereafter to be called Stillman's Run, and en- camped for the night. By the failing light a small party of Indians was discovered on the summit of a hill a mile away, and a few courageous gentle- men huiTiedly saddled their horses, and, without orders, rode after them. The Indians retreated, but were soon overtaken, and two or three of them killed. The volunteers were now strung along a half mile of hill and valley, with no more order or care than if they had been chasing rabbits. Black Hawk, who had been at supper when the running fight began, hastily gathered a handful of warriors and attacked the scattered whites. The onset of

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LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAE 93

the savages acted like an icy bath on the red-hot chap. v. valor of the volunteers ; they turned and ran for their lives, stampeding the camp as they fled. There was very little resistance — so little that Black Hawk, fearing a ruse, tried to recall his warriors from the pursuit, but in the darkness and confusion could not enforce his orders. The Indians killed all they caught up with; but the volunteers had the fleeter horses, and only eleven were overtaken. The rest reached Dixon by twos and threes, rested all night, and took courage. General Whitesides marched out to the scene of the disaster the next morning, but the Indians were gone. They had broken up into small parties, and for several days they reaped the bloody fruit of their victory in the massacre of peaceful settle- ments in the adjacent districts.

The time of enlistment of the volunteers had now come to an end, and the men, seeing no pros- pect of glory or proflt, and weary of the work and the hunger which were the only certain incidents of the campaign, refused in great part to continue in service. But it is hardly necessary to say that Captain Lincoln was not one of these homesick soldiers. Not even the trammels of rank, which are usually so strong among the trailers of the saber, could restrain him from what he considered his simple duty. As soon as he was mustered out of his captaincy, he reenlisted on the same day. May 27, as a private soldier. Several other officers did the same, among them General Whitesides and Major John T. Stuart. Lincoln became a member of Captain Elijah Iles's company of mounted volun- teers, sometimes called the " Independent Spy Bat-

94 ABRAHAM LINGOLK^

CHAP. V. talion,'' an organization unique of its kind, if we may judge from the account given by one of its troopers. It was not, says Mr. George M. Harrison, " under the control of any regiment or brigade, but received orders directly from the Commander-in- Chief, and always, when with the army, camped within the lines, and had many other privileges, such as having no camp duties to perform and drawing rations as much and as often as we pleased,^ which would seem to liken this battalion as nearly as possible to the fabled " regiment of brigadiers.'^ With this ^ite corps Lincoln served through his second enlistment, though it was not his fortune to take part in either of the two engagements in which General James D. Henry, at the Wisconsin BluflEs and the Bad Axe, broke and destroyed forever the power of Black Hawk and the British band of Sacs and Foxes.

After Lincoln was relieved of the weight of dignity involved in his captaincy, the war became a sort of holiday, and the tall private from New Salem enjoyed it as much as any one. He entered with great zest into the athletic sports with which soldiers love to beguile the tedium of camp. He was admitted to be the strongest man in the army, and, with one exception, the best wrestler. Indeed, his friends never admitted the exception, and severely blamed Lincoln for confess- ing himself defeated on the occasion when he met the redoubtable Thompson, and the two fell together on the turf. His popularity increased from the beginning to the end of the campaign, and those of his comrades who still survive always speak with hearty and affectionate praise of his

LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAE 95

character and conduct in those rough yet pleasantly chap. v. remembered days.

The Spy Battalion formed no part of General Henry's forces when, by a disobedience of orders as prudent as it was audacious, he started with his slender force on the fresh trail which he was sure would lead him to Black Hawk's camp. He found and struck the enemy at bay on the bluffs of the Wisconsin River on the 21st of July, and inflicted upon them a signal defeat. The broken remnant of Black Hawk's power then fled for the Missis- sippi River, the whole army following in close pur- suit— General Atkinson in front and General Henry bringing up the rear. Fortune favored the latter once more, for while Black Hawk with a handful of men was engaging and drawing away the force under Atkinson, General Henry struck the main trail, and brought on the battle of the Bad Axe, if that could be called a battle which was an easy slaughter of the weary and discouraged savages, fighting without heart or hope, an army in front and the great river behind. Black Hawk escaped the fate of his followers, to be captured a few days later through the treachery of his allies. He was carried in triumph to Washington and pre- sented to President Jackson, to whom he made this stem and defiant speech, showing how little age or disaster could do to tame his indomitable spirit : " I am a man and you are another. I did not expect to conquer the white people. I took up the hatchet to avenge injuries which could no longer be borne.^ Had I borne them longer my

litis a noteworthy coincidence calls for troops "to redress that President Lincoln's procla- wrongs already long enough en- mation at the opening of the war dured."

96 ABKAHAM LINCOLN

CHAP. V. people would have said : ' Black Hawk is a squaw ;

he is too old to be a chief; he is no Sac.' This

caused me to raise the war-whoop. I say no more

of it ; all is known to yon." He returned to Iowa,

and died on the 3d of October, 1838, at his camp

on the river Des Moines. He was buried in gala

dress, with cocked hat and sword, and the medals

presented him by two governments. He was not

allowed to rest even in his grave. His bones were

Bi8.ietten cxhumcd by some greedy wretch and sold from

Thomas hand to hand till they came at last to the Burling-

cSKiS" ton Museum, where they were destroyed by fire.

It was on the 16th of June, a month before the slaughter of the Bad Axe, that the battalion to which Lincoln belonged was at last mustered out, at Whitewater, Wisconsin. His final release from the service was signed by a young lieutenant of artillery, Robert Anderson, who, twenty-nine years later, in one of the most awful crises in our annals, was to sustain to Lincoln relations of prodigious importance, on a scene iUuminated by the flash of the opening guns of the civil war.^ The men

^A story to the effect that gamonCoiinty,IUinoi8y April 21 , Lincoln was mustered into sery- 1832. The muster-in roll is not ice by Jefferson Davis has for a on file, but the records show that long time been current, but the the company was mustered out strictest search in the records at the mouth of Fox River, May fails to confirm it. We are 27^ 1832, by Nathaniel Buck- indebted to General R. C. Drum, master, Brigade-Major to General Adjutant-General of the Army, Samuel Whitesides's Illinois Vol- for an interesting letter giving unteers. On the muster-roll of all the known facts in relation to Captain Elijah Iles^s company, this story. General Drum says : Illinois Mounted Volunteers, A. "The company of the Fourth Lincoln (Sangamon County) Regiment Illinois Mounted Vol- appears as a private from May unteers, commanded by Mr. 27, 1832, to June 16, 1832, Lincoln, was, with others, called when the company was mustered out by Governor Reynolds, and out of service by Lieutenant was organized at Richland, San- Robert Anderson, Third United

r^v

LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAE 97

started home the next day in high spirits, like chap. v. school-boys for their hoUdays. Lincohi had need, like Horatio, of his good spirits, for they were his only outfit for the long journey to New Salem, he and his mess-mate Harrison^ having had their horses stolen the day before by some patriot over- anxious to reach home. But, as Harrison says, ** I laughed at our fate, and he joked at it, and we all started oflE merrily. The generous men of our com- pany walked and rode by turns with us, and we fared about equal with the rest. But for this gen- erosity our legs would have had to do the better work ; for in that day this dreary route furnished no horses to buy or to steal ; and, whether on horse

States Artillery and Colonel tion, to rendezvous at Ottawa, (Assistant Inspector -General) June 12-15, 1832. Illinois Volunteers. Brigadier- '* There can be no doubt that General Henry Atkinson, in his Captain nes's company, men- report of May 30, 1832, stated tioned above, was one of the idx that the Illinois Volunteers were which served until June 16, called out by the Governor of 1832, while the fact is fully that State, but in haste and for established that the company of no definite period of service. On which Mr. Lincoln was a member their arrival at Ottawa they was mustered out by Lieutenant became clamorous for their dis- Robert Anderson, who, in April, charge, which the Governor 1861, was in command of Fort granted, retaining — of those who Sumter. There is no evidence to were discharged and volunteered show that it was mustered in by for a further period of twenty Lieutenant Jefferson Davis. Mr. days — a sufficient number of men Davis's company (B, First United to form six companies, which States Infantry) was stationed at General Atkinson found at Ottawa Fort Crawford, Wisconsin, during on his arrival there from Rock the months of January and Feb- River. General Atkinson further ruary, 1832, and he is borne on reports that these companies and the rolls as * absent on detached some three himdred regular service at the Dubuque mines by troops, remaining in position at order of Colonel Morgan.' From Rock River, were all the force March 26 to August 18, 1832, left him to keep the enemy in the muster-rolls of his company re- check until the assemblage of the port him as absent on furlough." three thousand additional niinois ^ George M. Harrison, who militia called out by the Governor gives an account of his personal upon his (General A.'s) requisi- experiences in Lamon, p. 116.

Vol. I. —7

98 ABBAHAM LINGOLN

Chap. V. or af oot, we always had company, for many of the horses' backs were too sore for riding.^ It is not hard to imagine with what quips and quirks of native fancy Lincohi and his friends beguiled the way through forest and prairie. With youth, good health, and a clear conscience, and even then the dawn of a young and undeflled ambition in his heart, nothing was wanting to give zest and spice to this long, sociable walk of a hundred leagues. One joke is preserved, and this one is at the expense of Lincoln. One chDly morning he com- plained of being cold. "No wonder," said some facetious cavalier, " there is so much of you on the ground." ^ We hope Lincoln's contributions to the fun were better than this, but of course the pros- perity of these jests lay rather in the liberal ears that heard them than in the good-natured tongues that uttered them.

Lincoln and Harrison could not have been alto- gether pennUess, for at Peoria they bought a canoe and paddled down to Pekin. Here the ingenious Lincoln employed his hereditary talent for car- pentry by making an oar for the frail vessel while Harrison was providing the commissary stores. The latter goes on to say: "The river, being very low, was without current, so that we had to pull hard to make half the speed of legs on land; in fact, we let her float all night, and on the next morning always foimd the objects stOl visible that were beside us the previous evening. The water was remarkably clear for this river of plants, and the fish appeared to be sporting with us as we

1^ Dr. Holland gives this homely later, when Lincoln had perma- joke (Life of Lincoln, p. 71), but nently assumed shoes and had a transfers it to a time four years horse of his own.

LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAE 99

moved over or near them. On the next day after chap. v. we left Pekin we overhauled a raft of saw-logs, with two men afloat on it to urge it on with poles and to guide it in the channel. We immediately pulled up to them and went on the raft, where we were made welcome by various demonstrations, especially by an invitation to a feast on fish, corn- bread, eggs, butter, and coflEee, just prepared for our benefit. Of these good things we ate almost immoderately, for it was the only warm meal we had made for several days. While preparing it, and after dinner, Lincoln entertained them, and they entertained us for a couple of hours very amusingly.'' Kindly human companionship was a luxury in that green wilderness, and was readily appreciated and paid for.

The returning warriors dropped down the river to the village of Havana — from Pekin to Havana in a canoe ! The country is full of these geograph- ical nightmares, the necessary result of freedom of nomenclature bestowed by circumstances upon minds equally destitute of taste or education. There they sold their boat, — no difficult task, for a canoe was a staple article in any river-town, — and again set out " the old way, over the sand-ridges, for Petersburg. As we drew near home, the im- pulse became stronger and urged us on amazingly. The long strides of Lincoln, often slipping back in the loose sand six inches every step, were just right for me ; and he was greatly diverted when he noticed me behind him stepping along in his tracks to keep from slipping.'' Thus the two comrades came back from their soldierings to their humble homes, from which Lincoln was soon to start on

100 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

CHAP. V. the way marked out for him by Providence, with strides which no comrade, with whatever good- will, might hope to follow.

He never took his campaigning seriously. The politician's habit of glorifying the petty incidents of a candidate's life always seemed absurd to him, and in his speech, made in 1848, ridiculing the effort on the part of General Cass's friends to draw some political advantage from that gentleman's respectable but obscure services on the frontier in the war with Great Britain, he estopped any future eulogist from painting his own military achievements in too lively colors. "Did you know, Mr. Speaker," he said, "I am a military herot In the days of the Black Hawk war I fought, bled, and came away. I was not at StDl- man's defeat, but I was about as near it as General Cass was to Hull's surrender ; and, like him, I saw the place very soon afterwards. It is quite certain I did not break my sword, for I had none to break, but I bent my musket pretty badly on one occasion. If General Cass went in advance of me picking whortleberries, I guess I surpassed him in charges on the wild onions. If he saw any live fighting In- dians, it was more than I did, but I had a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes ; and although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry. If ever I should conclude to doff whatever our Democratic friends may sup- pose there is of black-cockade Federalism about me, and thereupon they shall take me up as their can- didate for the Presidency, I protest that they shall not make fun of me, as they have of General Cass, by attempting to write me into a military hero."

k

CHAPTER VI

SURVEYOR AND REPRESENTATIVE

THE discharged volunteer arrived in New chap.vi. Salem only ten days before the August elec- 1882. tiou, in which he had a deep personal interest. Before starting for the wars he had announced himself, according to the custom of the time, by a handbill circular, as a candidate for the Legislature from Sangamon County.^ He had done this in accordance with his own natural bent for public life and desire for usefulness and distinction, and not without strong encouragement from friends whose opinion he valued. He had even then con- siderable experience in speaking and thinking on his feet. He had begun his practice in that direction before leaving Indiana, and continued it everywhere he had gone. Mr. William Butler tells us that on one occasion, when Lincoln was a farm- hand at Island Grove, the famous circuit-rider, Peter Cartwiight, came by, electioneering for the Legislature, and Lincoln at once engaged in a discussion with him in the cornfield, in which the

We are aware that all former oircnlaris dated March 9, 1832,

biographers have stated that and the '^SaDgazno Journal''

Lincoln's candidacy for the Leg- mentions his name among the

islature was subsequent to his candidates in July, and apologizes

return from the war, and a con- for having accidentally omitted

sequence of his service. But his it in May.

101

102 ABRAHAM LINCOLN

•* .•

• «

* • « . • •

Chap- VI. j^e9.t Methodist WAS* cqtuflh^ at the close

/• \4je^xinijlg ai;iU*'£Ke*unc8irtn fi^re of Mr. Brown's extraordinary hired man. At another time, after one Posey, a politician in search of office, had made a speech in Macon, John Hanks, whose admiration of his cousin's oratory was unbounded, said that " Abe could beat it.'' He turned a keg on end, and the tall boy mounted it and made his speech. " The subject was the navigation of the Sangamon, and Abe beat him to death," says the loyal Hanks. So it was not with the tremor of a complete novice that the youner man took the stump during the few days left him between his return and the election.

He ran as a Whig. As this has been denied on authority which is generally trustworthy, it is well enough to insist upon the fact. We have a memorandum in Mr. Lincohi's own handwriting in which he says he ran as ^^ an avowed Clay man." In one of the few speeches of his, which, made at this time, have been remembered and reported, he said : " I am in favor of a national bank ; I am in favor of the internal improvement system, and of a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles." Nothing could be more unqualified or outspoken than this announcement of his adhesion to what was then and for years afterwards called "the American System" of Henry Clay. Other testimony is not wanting to the same effect. Both Major Stuart and Judge Logan ^ say that Lincoln ran in 1832 as a Whig, and that his speeches were unevasively in defense of

1 The Democrats of New Salem was the general understanding worked for Lincoln ont of their of the matter here at the time, personal regard for him. That In this he made no concession of

SUKVEYOE AND BEPRESENTATIVE 103

the principles of that party. Without discussing chap.vt. the merits of the party or its purposes, we may insist that his adopting them thus openly at the outset of his career was an extremely characteristic act, and marks thus early the scrupulous con- scientiousness which shaped every action of his life. The State of Illinois was by a large majority - Democratic, hopelessly attached to the person and policy of Jackson. Nowhere had that despotic leader more violent and unscrupulous partisans than there. They were proud of their very servility, and preferred the name of "whole-hog Jackson men ^ to that of Democrats. The Whigs embraced in their scanty ranks the leading men of the State, those who have since been most distinguished in its history, such as S. T. Logan, Stuart, Browning, Dubois, Hardin, Breese, and many others. But they were utterly unable to do anything except by dividing the Jackson men, whose very numbers made their party unwieldy, and by throwing their votes with the more decent and conservative portion of them. In this way, in the late election, they had secured the success of Governor Reynolds — the Old Ranger — against Governor Kinney, who represented the vehement and prescriptive spirit which Jackson had just breathed into the party. He had visited the General in Washington, and had come back giving out threatenings and slaughter against the Whigs in the true Tennessee style, declaring that "all Whigs should be whipped out of office like dogs

principle wliatevcr. He was as popular — because he was Lin- stiff as a man could be in his coin.

Whig doctrines. They did this Stephen T. Log an.

for him simply because he was July 6, 1875.

104 ABBAHAM LINCOLN

Chap. VI. out of a meat-house " ; the force of south-western simile could no further go. But the great popularity of Reynolds and the adroit manage- ment of the Whigs carried him through success- fully. A single fact will show on which side the people who could read were enlisted. The " whole- hog'* party had one newspaper, the opposition five. Of course it would have been impossible for Reynolds to poll a respectable vote if his loyalty Reynolds, to Jacksou had been seriously doubted. As it was, Ttow!^ he lost many votes through a report that he had P-^- been guilty of saying that "he was as strong for Jackson as any reasonable man should be.** The Governor himself, in his naive account of the canvass, acknowledges the damaging nature of this accusation, and comforts himself with quoting an indiscretion of Kinney's, who opposed a projected canal on the ground that "it would flood the country with Yankees.^

It showed some moral com'age, and certainly an absence of the shuffling politician's fair-weather policy, that Lincoln, in his obscure and penniless youth, at the very beginning of his career, when he was not embarrassed by antecedents or family connections, and when, in fact, what little social influence he knew would have led him the other way, chose to oppose a furiously intolerant majority, and to take his stand with the party which was doomed to long-continued defeat in Illinois. The motives which led him to take this decisive course are not difficult to imagine. The better sort of people in Sangamon County were Whigs, though the majority were Democrats, and he preferred through life the better sort to the

8UEVEY0E AND KEPRESENTATIVE 105

majority. The papers he read were the Louisville chap. vi. "Journal^ and the "Sangamo Journal," both Whig. Reading the speeches and debates of the day, he sided with Webster against Calhoun, and with Clay against anybody. Though his notions of politics, like those of any ill-educated young man of twenty-two, must have been rather crude, and not at all sufficient to live and to die by, he had adopted them honestly and sincerely, with no selfish regard to his own interests ; and though he ardently desired success, he never abated one jot or tittle of his convictions for any possible personal gain, then or thereafter.

In the circular in which he announced his candi- dacy he made no reference to national politics, but confined himself mainly to a discussion of the practicability of improving the navigation of the Sangamon, the favorite hobby of the place and time. He had no monopoly of this *4ssue.'' It formed the burden of nearly every candidate's appeal to the people in that year. The excitement occasioned by the trip of the Talisman had not yet died away, although the little steamer was now dust and ashes, and her bold commander had left the State to avoid an awkward meeting with the shei-iff. The hope of seeing Springfield an emporium of commerce was still lively among the citizens of Sangamon County, and in no one of the handbills of the political aspirants of the season was that hope more judiciously encouraged than in the one signed by Abraham Lincoln. It was a well- written circular, remarkable for its soberness and reserve when we consider the age and the limited advantages of the writer. It concluded in these

106 ABBAHAM UNGOLN

Chap. VI. words: "Upon the subjectsofwhich I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them ; but holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous I shall be ready to renounce them. . . . Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed. I am young, and unknown to many of you. I was bom and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or powerful relations or friends to recom- mend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of the county; and, if elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me, for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the good people in their wis- dom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined."

This is almost precisely the style of his later years. The errors of grammar and construction which spring invariably from an effort to avoid redundancy of expression remained with him through life. He seemed to grudge the space required for necessary parts of speech. But his language was at twenty-two, as it was thirty years later, the simple and manly attire of his thought, with little attempt at ornament and none at dis- guise. There was an intermediate time when he

SUKVEYOE AND REPEESENTATIVE 107

sinned in the direction of fine writing; but this chap.vi. ebullition soon passed away, and left that marvel- ously strong and transparent style in which his two inaugurals were written.

Of course, in the ten days left him after his return from the field, a canvass of the county, which was then — before its division — several thousand square miles in extent, was out of the question. He made a few speeches in the neigh- borhood of New Salem, and at least one in Spring- field. He was wholly unknown there except by his few comrades in arms. We find him mentioned in the county paper only once during the summer, in an editorial note adding the name of Captain Lincoln to those candidates for the Legislature who were periling their lives on the frontier and had left their reputations in charge of their gener- ous fellow-citizens at home. On the occasion of his speaking at Springfield, most of the candidates had come together to address a meeting there to give their electors some idea of their quality. These were severe ordeals for the rash aspirants for popular favor. Besides those citizens who came to listen and judge, there were many whose only object was the free whisky provided for the occasion, and who, after potations pottle-deep, became not only highly unparliamentary but even dangerous to life and limb. This wild chivalry of Lick Creek was, however, less redoubtable to Lin- coln than it might be to an urban statesman unac- quainted with the frolic brutality of Clary's Grove. Their gambols never caused him to lose his self- possession. It is related that once, while he was speaking, he saw a ruffian attack a friend of his in

108 ABBAHAM LINCOLN

Chap. VI. the cro wd, and the rencontre not resulting according to the orator's sympathies, he descended from the stand, seized the objectionable fighting man by the neck, "threw him so^le ten feet,^ then calmly mounted to his place and finished his speech, the course of his logic undisturbed by this athletic parenthesis. Judge Logan saw Lincoln for the first time on the day when he came up to Springfield on his canvass this summer. He thus speaks of his future partner : " He was a very tall, gawky, and rough-looking fellow then ; his panta- loons did n't meet his shoes by six inches. But after he began speaking 1 became very much inter- ested in him. He made a very sensible speech. His manner was very much the same as in after life; that is, the same peculiar characteristics were apparent then, though of course in after years he evinced more knowledge and experience. But he had then the same novelty and the same peculiarity in presenting his ideas. He had the same indi- viduality that he kept through all his life.''

There were two or three men at the meeting whose good opinion was worth more than all the votes of Lick Creek to one beginning life : Stephen T. Logan, a young lawyer who had recently come from Kentucky with the best equipment for a nisi prius practitioner ever brought into the State; Major Stuart, whom we have met in the Black Hawk war, once commanding a battalion and then marching as a private ; and William Butler, after- wards prominent in State politics, at that time a young man of the purest Western breed in body and character, clear-headed and courageous, and ready for any emergency where a friend was to be

8UBVEY0B AND REPBE8ENTATIVE 109

defended or an enemy punished. We do not know chap.vi. whether Lincohi gained any votes that day, but he gained what was far more valuable, the active friendship of these able and honorable men, all Whigs and all Kentuckians like himself.

The acquaintances he made in his canvass, the practice he gained in speaking, and the added confidence which this experience of measuring his abilities with those of others gave, were all the advantages which Lincoln derived from this attempt. He was defeated, for the only time in his life, in a contest before the people. The for- tunate candidates were E. D. Taylor, J. T. Stuart, Achilles Morris, and Peter Cartwright, the first of whom received 1127 votes and the last 815. Lin- coln's position among the eight defeated candidates was a very respectable one. He had 657 votes, and there were five who fared worse, among them his old adversary Kirkpatrick. What must have been especially gratifying to him was the fact that he received the almost unanimous vote of his own neighborhood, the precinct of New Salem, 277 votes against 3, a result which showed more strongly than any words could do the extent of "Sangamo the attachment and the confidence which his genial August u, and upright character had inspired among those ^^* who knew him best.

Having been, even in so slight a degree, a soldier and a politician, he was unfitted for a day laborer; but being entirely without means of subsistence, he was forced to look about for some suitable occupa- tion. We know he thought seriously at this time of learning the trade of a blacksmith, and using in that honest way the sinew and brawn which nature

r\

110 ABRAHAM LIKOOLN

Chap. yi. had given him. But an opening for another kind of business occurred, which prevented his entering upon any merely mechanical occupation. Two of his most intimate friends were the brothers Hern- don, called, according to the fashion of the time, which held it unfriendly to give a man his proper name, and arrogant for him to claim it, "Eow^ and " Jim.^ They kept one of those grocery stores in which everything salable on the frontier was sold, and which seem to have changed their occupants as rapidly as sentry-boxes. " Jim ^ sold his share to an idle and dissolute man named Berry, and "Row^ soon transferred his interest to Lincoln. It was easy enough to buy, as nothing was ever given in payment but a promissory not^. A short time afterwards, one Eeuben Radford, who kept another shop of the same kind, happened one even- ing to attract the dangerous attention of the Clary's Grove boys, who, with their usual prompt and practical facetiousness, without a touch of malice in it, broke his windows and wrecked his store. The next morning, while Eadford was ruefully contemplating the ruin, and doubtless concluding that he had had enough of a country where the local idea of neighborly humor found such eccen- tric expression, he hailed a passer-by named Greene, and challenged him to buy his establish- ment for four hundred dollars. This sort of trade was always irresistible to these Western specu- lators, and Greene at once gave his note for the amount. It next occurred to him to try to find out what the property was worth, and doubting his own skill, he engaged Lincoln to make an invoice of it. The young merchant, whose appetite for

8UBVEY0B AND BEPBE8ENTATIVE 111

speculation had just been whetted by his own chaf.vi. investment, undertook the task, and, finding the stock of goods rather tempting, offered Greene $250 for his bargain, which was at once accepted. Not a cent of money changed hands in all these transactions. By virtue of half a dozen signatures, BeiTy and Lincoln became proprietors of the only mercantile establishment in the village, and the apparent wealth of the community was increased by a liberal distribution of their notes among the Herndons, Radford, Greene, and a Mr. Eutledge, whose business they had also bought.

Fortunately for Lincoln and for the world, the enterprise was not successful. It was entered into without sufficient reflection, and from the very nature of things was destined to fail. To Berry the business was merely the refuge of idleness. He spent his time in gossip and drank up his share of the profits, and it is probable that Lincoln was far more interested in politics and general reading than in the petty traffic of his shop. In the spring of the next year, finding that their merchandise was gaining them little or nothing, they concluded to keep a tavern in addition to their other business, and the records of the County Court of Sangamon County show that Berry took out a license for that purpose on the 6th of March, 1833.^ But it was even then too late for any expedients to save the moribund partnership. The tavern was never opened, for about this time Lincoln and Berry

I The following is an extract tinue twelve months from this

from the court record: ^* March date, and that they pay one

6f 1833. Ordered that William dollar in addition to six dollars

F. Berry, in the name of Berry, heretofore prepaid as per Treas-

and Lincoln, have license to keep nrer^s receipt, and that they be

a tavern in New Salem, to con- allowed the following rates, viz. :

112

cmMT.rs. were ^tfaalleiiged to 9dl oat to a psir of vaicrant brotherg named Trent, wfao^ aa die^ had no idea of ipB!j\Tk1i^^ were willing to give th^ notes t4> any amount, Thej soon ran away^ and B«ry «^spired. extmgmahed in mm. Lincoln was thus ]git loaded with defoti^ and with no aaaetg except worthless notes of Beny and the Treats. It is greatly to his eredit that he never thon^it of doing by otiu^rs as others had <fc«ie by him. The monJity of the frontier was def^rabiy loose in siieh matters* and most of these people woiild hare eonelnded that the faihire of the business ^Eponged its Babilitie& Bat lim^An made no effort eren to compromise the elaims against him. He promised to pay when he eonld, and it took the labor of years to do it ; but he paid at last every farthing of the debt, which seemed to him and his friends so large that it was ealWl among them ^ the national debt."

He had abeady begnn to read elementary books of law^ borrowed from Major Stnart and other kindly acquaintances. Indeed, it is qnite possible that Berry and Lincoln might have succeeded better in business if the jxmior member of the firm ha^l not spent so much of his time reading Black- st^>ne and Chitty in the shade of a great oak just out«irle the door, while the senior quietly fuddled himw?lf within. Eye-witnesses still speak of the grrit^iWjuo youth, habited in homespun tow, lying r>n hiH ba^^k with his feet on the trunk of the tree, and poring over his book by the hour, '* grinding

Kn-nch brandy, por pint, 25 ; 12^ ; Horse for night. 25 ;

Vpm-U, ^ti%'f Apple, 12; Hoi- Single feed, 12i.;; Breakfast,

land ^in, 1 H?;^ ; Domestic, 12^; dinner, or supper, for stage

Wliifi, 25 ; Hum, 1 H^ ; Whisky, passengers, 37^.

12'«; Dreakfftfit, dinner, or "Who gave bond as required

Muppnr, 25 ; Lodging for night, by law.''

r\

112 ABRAHAM UNOOLN

CHAP.vi. were challenged to sell out to a pair of vagrant brothers named Trent, who, as they had no idea of paying, were wiUing to give their notes to any amount. They soon ran away, and Berry expired,