Lincoln (9 page)

Consoling as that expression of neighborly support was, it did little to solve his acute financial problems. As he noted in an autobiographical statement: “He was now without means and out of business, but was anxious to remain with his friends who had treated him with so much generosity, especially as he had nothing elsewhere to go to.” He began looking about for a job, and
for a future. He considered becoming a blacksmith, but he wanted to avoid a life of physical labor. He thought of studying law. The profession had interested him even as a boy in Indiana, when, according to much later recollections, he attended sessions of local courts at Rockport and Boonville and supposedly read the copy of the
Revised Laws of Indiana
owned by the local constable, David Turnham. But on reflection he concluded that he needed a better education to succeed.

Opportunity came his way when James and J. Rowan Herndon decided to sell the general store they owned in New Salem. William F. Berry, who had been a corporal in Lincoln’s company during the Black Hawk War, arranged to buy James Herndon’s interest in the store, and J. Rowan Herndon offered the other half interest to Lincoln, who was boarding with him. No money passed hands; Lincoln signed a note for his share. “I believed he was thoroughly honest,” Rowan Herndon explained, “and that impression was so strong in me I accepted his note in payment of the whole.”

Lincoln and Berry now owned one of the three stores in New Salem, competing with the well-managed establishment of Samuel Hill and John McNeil and a newer business owned by Reuben Radford. In January 1833, Radford managed to offend the Clary’s Grove boys, who retaliated by trashing his store—knocking out the windows, breaking the crockery, and turning the goods topsy-turvy. In despair, he decided to sell out. Canny young William Greene, Jr., bought his store and his damaged stock of goods for $400 and immediately sold both to Lincoln and Berry, making a profit of $250. Once again, the partners signed notes to cover most of their new purchase.

Moving their meager stock into Radford’s building, Lincoln and Berry were ready for business. Like most other country stores, they supplied customers with tea and coffee, sugar and salt, and a few other commodities that could not be produced in the village. In addition, the store carried blue calico, brown muslin, men and women’s hats, and a small selection of shoes.

There was rarely enough business to keep the partners occupied, and Lincoln was able to spend much of his time reading. Indeed, during his New Salem years he probably read more than at any other time in his life. Fiction did not interest him. He made one unsuccessful attempt at
Ivanhoe,
but he had no other acquaintance with the great British and American novelists. He did not care much for most history and biography, which he thought untrustworthy. Some poetry deeply moved him, and he memorized long passages from Shakespeare’s plays. Jack Kelso probably introduced him to Robert Burns, whose “generous heart, and transcendent genius” he praised many years later, while President, and he was soon able to recite “Tam o’Shanter,” “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” and other long poems. He developed a liking for the melancholy, sentimental verse that was so popular during the era, and he thought Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Last Leaf”
“inexpressibly touching.” When Dr. Jason Duncan showed him a poem called “Mortality,” he was moved by its mournful message:

Lincoln memorized all fifty-six lines, each more doleful than the last, and recited it so often that people began to think he was the author. Not until many years later did he learn that the poem was the work of William Knox, a Scotsman, who was a contemporary of Sir Walter Scott.

Lincoln’s real interest was in the structure and use of language, and he decided that he needed to learn grammar. Samuel Kirkham’s
English Grammar
was considered the best guide, and when Lincoln learned that a farmer named John C. Vance had a copy, he willingly walked six miles into the country to get it. He set himself systematically to master this detailed text, committing large segments to memory. Then he asked his friends to test his mastery, and when challenged to provide a definition of a verb, could recite, “A VERB is a word which signifies to BE, to DO, or to SUFFER; as I
am;
I
rule;
I
am ruled.”
Some of those who participated in this drill—like Mentor Graham, the semiliterate schoolmaster, who did not himself own a grammar—later came to consider themselves Lincoln’s instructors, but in fact he was, in grammar as in other subjects, essentially self-taught. He took pride in his mastery of Kirkham, and he thought it sufficiently important to mention in his 1860 autobiographical sketch that he had “studied English grammar, imperfectly of course, but so as to speak and write as well as he now does.”

Lincoln’s autobiography did not mention another kind of reading. Though New Salem had no churches, it was an intensely religious community. Baptists held services in the schoolhouse, and other denominations met regularly in private homes. In the summer the circuit-riding evangelist Peter Cartwright often conducted a revival meeting. There were no Catholic or Jewish residents, but Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians were constantly engaged in hairsplitting doctrinal controversies. A young Yale Divinity School graduate who came to teach in this central Illinois region found that he “was plunged without warning and preparation into a sea of sectarian rivalries, which was kept in constant agitation.” Inevitably these religious wars attracted Lincoln’s attention, though, like his father, he was reluctant to accept any creed. His parents’ Baptist belief in predestination was deeply ingrained in his mind, though he felt more comfortable in thinking that events were foreordained by immutable natural laws than by a personal deity. To his cool, analytical mind the ideas of the evangelists were less persuasive than those of the few local freethinkers, who gathered about the
store cracker barrel and, when there were no customers in sight, engaged in speculation about the literal accuracy of the Bible, the Virgin Birth, the divinity of Christ, and the possibility of miracles.

These conversations introduced Lincoln to Thomas Paine’s
Age of Reason,
that classic rationalist attack on revealed religion, and he probably also read some of Constantin de Volney’s
Ruins of Civilizations,
which argued that morality was the only essential, demonstrable part of religion. Discussion of such issues was heresy in this rigidly orthodox frontier community, and inevitably reports of Lincoln’s participation in these conversations leaked out. So damaging was the allegation that he was “an open scoffer at Christianity” that in his race for Congress in 1846 he was obliged to issue a formal denial: “That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” He went on to explain with characteristic clarity his religious views: “It is true that in early life I was inclined to believe in what I understand is called the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’—that is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control; and I have sometimes (with one, two or three, but never publicly) tried to maintain this opinion in argument.”

There was time for endless abstract discussions in the Lincoln and Berry store, because it was clear from almost the beginning the enterprise was not going to be a success. It would be easy to blame the partners. Berry may well have been a heavy drinker, as tradition reports, and even the usually charitable Lincoln agreed that he was “a thriftless soul.” Doubtless Lincoln was more interested in reading or in telling anecdotes than he was in selling his wares. But the basic reason for the failure was that by 1833 New Salem had ceased to grow. Forced to maintain what was essentially a barter economy because the Sangamon River was not adequate to carry their surplus produce to the market and there were no roads or railroads, its residents had no money to pay for even the meager goods offered by Lincoln and Berry.

The only branch of the business that showed any profit was the sale of whiskey, which Illinois law permitted the partners to sell, without license, in quantities of one quart or more for hard liquor or two gallons for beer and cider. On January 4, 1833, as business was clearly slipping, Berry first applied for a license to sell liquor by the drink—whiskey at 12½ cents, rum at 18¾ cents, and so on. The license was issued in the name of Berry & Lincoln, but Lincoln’s signature was not in his own handwriting. Berry may have acted against his partner’s will in converting the store, now nearly empty of other goods, into a “grocery.” In later years memories would sharply differ over whether Lincoln himself ever sold liquor by the dram. Stephen A. Douglas called him “a flourishing grocery keeper in the town of New Salem,” but the preponderance of the evidence supports Lincoln’s own
statement that he “never kept a grocery any where in the world.” At any rate, the tavern license failed to save the Berry & Lincoln store, which, as Lincoln said, shortly afterward “winked out.”

With the failure of the store, Lincoln was out of a job, and he had no money. Once more he did day labor, like splitting rails, and he said he worked the latter part of the winter “in a little still house at the head of a hollow.” He picked up a few dollars serving on juries, clerking at elections, and carrying poll sheets to Springfield. But it grew obvious that without regular employment he would soon have to leave New Salem. Fortunately he had good friends, who wanted to make it possible for him to stay. Several of them rallied to procure for him the appointment as village postmaster. The incumbent, Samuel Hill, the storekeeper, apparently did not want the job very badly, because he neglected women standing in line for mail in favor of men desiring to purchase liquor. With a little pressure he was persuaded to resign, and on May 7 Lincoln received the place.

It was a very modest appointment—so modest that the Jackson administration overlooked his strong support of Henry Clay, considering, as Lincoln speculated, the office “too insignificant to make his politics an objection.” But he was overjoyed by it. I “never saw a man better pleased,” Dr. John Allen reported. As postmaster, he would “have access to all the News papers—never yet being able to get the half that he wanted before.”

The duties of his new job were not onerous. Carried on horseback, the mails were supposed to arrive twice a week—when they were not delayed by snow, rain, floods, and other accidents. The recipient of a letter, rather than the sender, usually paid the postage, and it was the postmaster’s job not merely to deliver the mail but to collect the fee. The charge varied with the weight of the letter and the distance it had traveled; for instance, it cost 6¢ to receive a letter consisting of a single sheet that had traveled thirty miles, and double that amount for a two-page letter. Newspapers paid a lower rate. The postmaster received a percentage of all receipts, but in New Salem the amount was small. In 1834–1835, the only full year of Lincoln’s tenure for which records have been preserved, he received $55.70. The best estimate is that his compensation for the three years he served as postmaster was between $150 and $175.

Lincoln seems to have had the unusual notion that a public servant’s first duty is to help people, rather than to follow bureaucratic regulations. If residents did not pick up their mail at the post office in Samuel Hill’s store, he would often put the letters in his hat and deliver them in person, sometimes walking several miles to do so. He liberally interpreted the Post Office Department’s rule that he could send and receive personal mail without charge but would be subject to a fine if he franked anyone else’s letters. In a letter dated September 17, 1835, Mathew S. Marsh described the way Lincoln conducted the post office: “The Post Master (Mr. Lincoln) is very careless about leaving his office open and unlocked during the day—half the time I go in and get my papers, etc., without anyone being there as
was the case yesterday. The letter was only marked twenty-five [cents] and even if he had been there and known it was double, he would not have charged me any more—luckily he is a clever fellow and a particular friend of mine. If he is there when I carry this to the office—I will get him to ‘Frank’ it.” Risking a $10 fine, Lincoln wrote on the back: “Free, A. Lincoln,
P.M
., New Salem, 111, Sept. 22.”

At the same time, he was scrupulous in keeping financial records, and he fiercely resented any imputation of irregularity. When George C. Spears requested a receipt for the postage he had paid on his newspaper, Lincoln responded sharply: “I am some what surprised at your request. I will however comply with it. The law requires News paper postage to be paid in advance and now that I have waited a full year you choose to wound my feelings by insinuating that unless you get a receipt I will probably make you pay it again.” More than a year after the New Salem office had been discontinued and after he moved to Springfield, he turned over to the Post Office Department the precise balance of his receipts, $248.63.

Though appointment as postmaster gave Lincoln a position in the community, an occasion to talk and visit with the residents of the town, and an opportunity to read all newspapers that came into the office, it did not provide a livelihood, and his friends looked for ways for him to supplement his income. One of them learned that John Calhoun, recently appointed county surveyor, was looking for an assistant and strongly recommended Lincoln. Before accepting, Lincoln hesitated because Calhoun was a very active Democratic politician, but he was assured that he would not be expected to compromise his principles. Knowing nothing of surveying, he secured copies of Abel Flint’s
System of Geometry and Trigonometry with a Treatise on Surveying
and Robert Gibson’s
Treatise on Practical Surveying,
scraped together enough money to procure a compass and chain, and, as he said, “went at it.” Setting himself to learn the principles of trigonometry and their practical application to surveying, he studied very hard, and he was soon able to take to the field.