I Am Abraham (5 page)

Justice Green and the schoolmaster, Mentor Graham, begged me not to wander. New Salem couldn’t afford to shed another citizen. So I mucked about, doing odd jobs. I mended pickets after a storm, built coffins for the next plague year, swabbed the sores on the town’s workhorse, and shoveled shit. And when I had to shut the store, I removed to Rutledge’s tavern. It was the centerpiece of New Salem, even if it sat in the dust like every other building, and didn’t have a reliable roof. It did have a window, covered with grime and a trail of dead beetles, and its speckled light fell with a pernicious randomness that had nothing to do with the time of day. The tavern’s rear wall swirled like a gigantic kaleidoscope, with its own feast of colors that suddenly went black—we lived with a lot of candles at Rutledge’s. It’s where the luminaries of the village would congregate over a dram of whiskey and talk of their own prospects. Unless there was a river-run between New Salem and Springfield, the village would peter out, like Offutt’s store. That’s why New Salem had been built on a bluff over the Sangamon—to encourage river traffic, but the river was as unreliable as their roofs. It could overflow one season, become a puddle the next. And since I was a flatboatman who had come pitching out of the Sangamon’s waters, I was looked upon as the pilot who would initiate the Springfield–New Salem run. But the Legislature at Vandalia wouldn’t risk such an enterprise—it was filled with drunken louts who didn’t care a whit about New Salem. And that’s why the luminaries wanted
their
vagabond, Abe Lincoln, to battle for a seat in the lower house. They’d heard me pontificate around the cracker barrel at Offutt’s before it was defunct. They nodded and shut their eyes when I said that women ought to have the right to vote.

“They’re not cattle, are they? A woman can sign her name and ponder over a deed as well as a man.”

They kept nodding, because they wanted their own man in Vandalia who would plead for the village’s navigation rights. Meantime they surveyed Rutledge’s daughter like pig-eyed men begging for a glimpse of her breasts. That’s how secretive and salacious they were. They’d follow her right into the bathhouse if Rutledge gave them half a chance. I heard them talk about her berry bush when Rutledge wasn’t around. But they were the luminaries of New Salem, and I was their candidate, who couldn’t even defend the most voluptuous gal in the county.

Ann Rutledge had red hair and a face that was a marvel, with sultry silver-blue eyes, full lips, and nostrils that were shaped like perfect little bells. It stopped you in your tracks to watch her breathe in and out. She was deliciously plump. Annie attended to the tavern, but she’d been a pupil in Mentor Graham’s class when I first drifted into New Salem as Mr. Offutt’s prospective clerk. Now Ann was nineteen, as nubile as a fine young she-cat, who hoped to continue her education one day at the female academy in Jacksonville.

Every bachelor in New Salem who didn’t have one foot in the grave—and even those who did—courted Ann. Her bodice heaved while she stood still, and her flesh seemed to shiver like some kind of forbidden fruit. But she was no temptress. Ann had made her pick. She decided on one of the luminaries—John McNeil. He owned a farm with grazing land and was a partner in New Salem’s most successful store, McNeil & Hill. Sam Hill was another of her suitors, but Hill didn’t have his lithe look. McNeil was a heart smasher, with whiskers that were barbered every day, shoes that a porter at the tavern blacked and polished with his own spit, and shirts ordered from St. Louis. He was older than the village vagabond by eight or nine years, and I couldn’t have encroached upon his territories.

I wasn’t wounded by his wealth, his silk shirts, or his proximity to Ann. His grammar hurt me most, and his diction. McNeil hailed from New York. And he had that pith of speech I envied in a man. I bathed in my own bile when I imagined the letters he must have written to Ann while he was on some sojourn to Springfield or St. Louis, wearing ruffled shirts and the finest cologne. He also corrected my first campaign address after I decided to run for the Legislature, though he never put on airs or tried to show off his learning at my expense.

“Lincoln, a speech should be like the crack of a whip, but tinged with honey. You have to trap every vote like a hunter. And what kind of speech will lure the voter in?”

“One that’s short and sweet.”

“But not too sweet.” And he cut into my paragraphs with a heartless precision. I didn’t even have to deliver my own address. It was printed up as a handbill with McNeil’s help and distributed to the people of Sangamon County. There was some of McNeil’s pith in it, but the modesty of the music was mine.

I mentioned how river navigation was much more practical than a railroad that would never be built, though the Sangamon was an ornery river that could flood an entire plateau, fling trout above the shoreline like a plague of locusts, or dry up in August and leave cracks in a riverbed as wide as a pregnant sow. I talked about the significance of education for every single man, how a lack of it would doom us and make us deaf to our own history, so that we would run around like blind beggars who couldn’t even tell where we were from. I talked of my own peculiar ambition, how I wanted the esteem of my fellow men. I had no wealthy relations to recommend me, having been born in the most humble circumstances, with a Pa who was half blind.

The first reaction I had to my handbill was from Ann Rutledge. Her lip was palpitating, and there was consternation in her silver eyes.

“Why, Mr. Lincoln, you’re mighty fine about education for men, but not for women. I couldn’t find one word in your writ about the right of women to vote. Does that mean you think women should not read at all?”

I was the worst sort of scoundrel, ruled by political whim. I believed that women ought to vote. But it was Ann’s fiancé who discouraged me from mentioning women’s rights in my first address. Men would rather die than share the vote with women, he said. So I heeded Mack, as we called McNeil.

“Mistress, it’s my maiden voyage. A man has to be careful of the shoals.”

She pulled down her bonnet over one eye and said, “Would that you were a little less careful, Mr. Lincoln, and a little more candid.”

I walked out the tavern with my tail tucked between my legs. And when I navigated the wooden planks that were laid across the sodden road, there was Hannah Armstrong in her own best bonnet. I was delighted to see her, even if she had the most wizened face I’d ever encountered on a twenty-year-old. She clutched my handbill, and it seemed like a malignant sign.

“You have the poetry, Abraham,” she declared in her shouter’s voice. “But you’re feckless. You didn’t mention womenfolk once in your handbill. Ain’t we half the populace?”

“More than half, I’d imagine. But you’ve caught me at a disadvantage. I have to appeal to voters.”

“Lincoln,” she said, growing formal, “would my husband or his Boys ever vote without consulting me? Women vote in ways that were never assigned to us. And men ain’t clever enough to grasp it by the handle. But I expected more from you.”

Hannah confessed that she hadn’t been able to decipher my handbill on her own. It was her preacher who had read the handbill aloud. And then Hannah had chanted it like a hymn.

I escorted her to McNeil & Hill, seized her hand once when she couldn’t navigate a plank. It was the unschooled, like Hannah and me, who had such a hunger for words. We were like pariahs with a strange music inside our heads, a music we only half understood.

I meant to play checkers with Justice Green, but I wasn’t in the mood.

A sudden excitement had come to New Salem. The luminaries raced round, looking for the swords and muskets they had buried somewhere before I was ever born, when they were captains of their own militia, involved in some blood feud they no longer remembered. Now the panic was everywhere. Women wouldn’t even venture into their own gardens. Children couldn’t play near the road. In fact, I couldn’t find one child. The goats were tethered; cows moved right into the cabins. I heard whispers of an Indian uprising. Not a word had come down from the governor, but there were rumors that a farmer’s wife in the next county had been ravaged and left to wander with nary a stitch of clothes. We kept hearing her screams, even without the governor’s writ, and wondered when she would show up in New Salem, with mud under her eyes and marked with a savage’s white paint across her back.

3.

The Black Hawk War

C
OVERED
IN
COW
dung, Black Hawk had decided to declare war on Illinois. The chief of the Sauk and Fox tribes left his roost in Iowa, a patch of territory he’d never wanted, and crossed into northern Illinois with his warriors, his women, and his children in April of ’32, ten months after I had landed in New Salem. He wanted to fight soldiers, not farmers and old men, but he’d had to kill the half-crazed farmers who shot at him. And he knew the soldiers would murder his children, so he traveled in his own war cloud, where only the wisest tracker would ever see him. Black Hawk was looking for his old hunting grounds near Rock Island, and was willing to destroy soldiers and land agents who had lied to him. He scalped the agents and nailed their carcasses to pickets the agents had built to wall him in, and smeared himself in their blood. He’d promised to remain west of the Mississippi, but there was nothing in Iowa for Black Hawk—Iowa was a pigpen.

The land agents had huckstered him, the generals and the governor of Illinois had sold him a bill of goods. Black Hawk was sixty-seven years old, and before he died he wanted to see and
feel
the ancestral lands where he had picked gooseberries and plums as a child and fished along the rapids. Iowa had no gooseberries and no plums; he wanted Rock Island back. It was now the site of Fort Armstrong, with a garrison of soldiers that wasn’t grand enough or sufficient to subdue an army of the Sauk and Fox that could still move by stealth and hide in the shadows like apparitions in war paint.

I understood the attachment Black Hawk had to his native village, but my pity for him and his own lost nation was mingled with the remembrance that he was an Injun like any Injun, no matter how grandiose he happened to be. Yet I couldn’t help admiring him, even in his cloak of excrement.

The governor of Illinois hoped to raise up a militia fifteen hundred strong to put down the insurrection and was offering a reward for every Indian hide. He promised Sangamon County its own contingent of a hundred men. I knew it was a killing party, but I had no choice. I would have been drummed out of New Salem and tossed back into the river. So I joined our little company and was elected its captain. I was given a sword and free grub that kept body and soul together. But I didn’t relish chasing after a war cloud of women and children.

I had no trouble finding recruits. The whole of Clary’s Grove joined the company, and I made Jack Armstrong my trusted first sergeant. He kept the other ruffians in line, poking at them with the digits of his gambler’s glove. He near blinded one or two, but I couldn’t get him to relinquish that damn glove. Few of my men could read or write, and they weren’t much used to marching in formation. They stumbled into one another with each order I gave, and several recruits shouted in my ear, “Fuck Black Hawk, sir.”

We passed through a shrunken forest, crossed a stream that smelled of piss, and marched to Beardstown in a reasonable time—it was fat with gamblers and whores who hoped to pounce on raw recruits. But the gamblers had a hard time of it, and the harlots left after one day. We were locked inside a horse corral that had become a temporary camp for sixteen hundred men, crowded together like hogs. We barely had enough room for a shithouse—none of the officers slept inside the corral. The regular soldiers despised us. They pretended we were insects, outside their own concern.

It seemed an imbecilic way to fight a war, but I was only a captain, with a contract for a month. The Clary’s Grove Boys couldn’t abide a
prison
camp. They prowled that corral like marauders, broke into the supply sergeant’s tent, and swiped five buckets of whiskey and wine. I could hear bodies sway and shout, and I was convinced that Black Hawk and his braves had come to camp in my sleep. At dawn, as the companies moved out of camp, Jack serenaded me with one eye shut, while his Boys shat in the middle of the road and marched into trees.

The Provost Marshal rode up to us in a great fury, his eyes goggling out of his head. I had to return to the Provost’s tent while my company wandered across the plains without marching orders. I went before a military board of captains and colonels—told ’em how I had my sights on becoming a lawyer. One of the colonels frowned and said that lawyers were the biggest wastrels and liars in the land. I was sentenced to wearing a wooden sword.

I had to strap it on in front of the Provost Marshal. I returned to our company like some mediocre player strutting around in a soldier’s suit. The boys did their best not to laugh. We’d lost contact with our own regiment while I was under arrest. And we had to strike out into the wilderness on our own. Lincoln’s company of louts.

We marched through woods and swamp that twisted under us like a hundred snakes until our ankles were caught in the muck; the first of us who broke free had to pull at the others, and we didn’t arrive at the mouth of the Rock River until the ninth of May. We still hadn’t seen one sign of Black Hawk and his men, not even the women and children he could hide in the wind. The U.S. Army regulars chased this phantom on his phantom river. They paddled upstream in their barques while we militiamen slogged around in the muck of the riverbank. Horses vanished into the mud; wagons kept sinking. Soldiers disappeared without a trace, and then we’d find a boot with a feather in it, and we wondered who would be Black Hawk’s next victim. We slept standing on our feet and arrived in Prophetstown like a little band of petrified stragglers. Order and discipline had broken down. Some of the other companies fled back to their own farms.