The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (5 page)

The Indiana years passed slowly as the boy grew into manhood. His sister married and died in giving birth to her first child, leaving Lincoln alone among his foster-family. In the spring of 1828, he went on a flatboat voyage down the Mississippi to New Orleans, which was the first city he saw and the only one he was to see for many years.

Gradually the land became more settled, but Thomas Lincoln did not prosper as the community grew larger. Finally, in February, 1830, dominated by the restless urge that carried America across a continent, he decided to move on again into new territory. All the household goods were once more loaded into a wagon; the Lincolns and their relatives set out for Illinois, where there were prairies instead of forests and rich black soil to be had for the asking instead of the stubborn wooded acres of southern Indiana that could be subdued only by back-breaking toil.

They traveled on into new country, crossing ice-laden streams where there were no bridges and where even the fords were uncertain and treacherous. Early in March, they reached a spot on a bluff above the Sangamon River, not far from Decatur, Illinois. Here a new cabin was built; fifteen acres of soil were put into cultivation; and everyone hoped that this was to be the place where the family would at last be able to make a good living. This was Lincoln’s first sight of the Sangamon River. It was to become an integral part of
his life; its lazy winding course runs through the years to come like a muddy brown thread, tying up all the events that were to lead him to fame and glory.

The first winter the settlers spent in their new location was a terrible one—one of the worst in the annals of Illinois. Snow fell until it lay four feet deep on the level prairies; it drifted into piles fifteen feet high along the hill rises and filled up the wooded ravines. All the land was covered under a thick blanket that brought starvation and death to animals and men.

Again the Lincoln clan must have slept through most of the winter, buried away and completely isolated under the white snow. Food was reduced to the slenderest rations. Only sleep could make the miserable people in the cabin keep down the hunger that could not be satisfied. Again they managed somehow to survive. Spring came, causing great floods to rise from the melting snow. Brooks and rivers ran high, sweeping over the land, tearing out trees and bushes, washing off the topsoil into the watercourses to be carried away to the sea.

The experience that Lincoln and his cousin, John Hanks, had gained on their flatboat journey three years before obtained them employment now. An enterprising promoter, Denton Offut, hired them to pilot a boat to New Orleans. They went down the Sangamon in a canoe, taking with them one of Sarah Bush’s boys. They landed near the newly established town of Springfield, and walked there to find Offut. This was Lincoln’s first entry into the place he was so long to be associated with. It was then only a small town, built among the great trees of a grove on the prairie. It was four miles from the river, far from any central point of communication, and there was no reason then to believe that it would ever amount to more than any one of a hundred other prairie villages that were springing up all over the state.

Offut had not been able to purchase a boat. His crew had
to build one for the journey, felling trees by the riverbank, sawing them out and pinning them together to make a craft eighty feet long, sturdy enough to stand the voyage through hundreds of miles of inland waterways. In six weeks they finished it and were ready to start on their journey. They loaded Denton Offut’s merchandise on board and pushed off down the Sangamon. About twenty miles from Springfield, where the river bends around in a curve below a hill, a new grist- and sawmill had just been built. Above it, on the hill, was a recently settled village which had hopefully been named New Salem. The flatboat’s progress was stopped by the milldam that spanned the river here.

Lincoln’s ingenuity was brought into play. He had the merchandise removed; bored a hole in the bottom of the boat; let the water run in; then the back of the boat was lifted; the water ran to the front, weighting it down and thus permitting the boat to be pushed over the dam. This feat served Lincoln as a favorable introduction to the village in which he was to spend his next few years. For the time being, however, he proceeded down the river with the flatboat which made its way toward the Mississippi and eventually to New Orleans.

These two visits to New Orleans were Lincoln’s only first-hand contacts with slavery. He had been a child when he was in the slave state of Kentucky; Indiana and Illinois were free states. In New Orleans he saw one of the most important slave markets in the country. John Hanks said that the sight of a young mulatto girl on the auction block horrified Lincoln and made him resolve that if he could he would “hit slavery and hit it hard.”

The little party returned to St. Louis by steamer; Lincoln walked across country from there to rejoin his family at Decatur, but he returned only to bid his folks farewell. He was twenty-two now and he had a job. Denton Offut had
promised to hire him to help run a store that he was going to start in New Salem.

In July, 1831, Lincoln arrived on the crescent-shaped hill above the river where the fifteen straggling cabins that made up New Salem stood. Life there was almost as primitive as it had been in Indiana, but it was the sort of life to which Lincoln was accustomed. He had never known any other. He fitted into the village immediately, making himself known by his stories and his cheerful willingness to do favors for people. Offut was late in arriving, but by the time he came, his employee had made friends with everyone in the place. The two men built a log shelter on the hilltop just above the mill. They stocked it with general merchandise and opened it for business, but conversation and human contacts were their chief profit from the venture. Lincoln learned a great deal about people but very little about business. Through his great physical strength and courage he endeared himself even to the roughest element in the section. His wrestling match with Jack Armstrong, the leader of the Clary’s Grove boys, has become classic. He met all kinds of people and he was able to hold his own among them, either by his physical prowess or by his growing intellectual ability.

Even while he was a boy in Indiana, Lincoln had been attracted to the law as a profession. In New Salem he had plenty of time on his hands. He began his study of the law, and in addition read everything else he could get. In Indiana he had read the Bible, Aesop’s
Fables, Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim’s Progress
, and Weems’
Life of George Washington.
Now he read Shakespeare and Burns and studied English grammar. Mentor Graham, the local teacher, took him in charge and gave him private lessons.

Business at Offut’s store went from bad to worse. There was very little trade to be had in the tiny community, and the store soon went under. Offut moved on to try his hand at other enterprises; Lincoln was left without a job. Instead of
trying to find manual work—the only kind for which he had been trained—he was seized by a new ambition; he determined to run for the State Legislature.

He was only twenty-three at this time (1832) and he had never done anything that would indicate to the public his fitness for the office he sought. But he was exceedingly popular in his community, and no one could object to the platform he announced for himself. He came out for internal improvements, for better roads, canals, navigable streams and even a railroad—although he admitted that it was difficult to see how one could be financed. He stood for education, too, and better laws. Everything was carefully calculated to please everybody and antagonize no one. Everything was expressed in general terms with no hard and fast promises that might be difficult to keep. Lincoln showed his political ability early.

His lack of training for public office at this period of his life seems startling to us in an age in which education is taken for granted. He knew nothing about history or politics except what he had picked up himself in his own reading; his knowledge of law was very sketchy; economics, finance and business were unknown subjects to him; except for the few days he had spent in New Orleans, he had never seen a city or a factory or, in all probability, even one of the railroads about which he spoke so glibly in his platform speech. Yet his ignorance was no greater than that of most of the men around him, and unlike them he was willing to learn. Men were elected to public office in those days because they had many friends who could support their ticket, or because they could wield some power through organizations they controlled. Their ability to rule or administer was not questioned.

The boy candidate started his campaign for election to the State Legislature. He canvassed the people, spoke to them in person wherever he could and hopefully awaited the results of the election.

Before it could be held, war broke out—a miniature war as
history records it, but it loomed large in the minds of the people in Illinois in those pioneer days. An Indian chief, Black Hawk, led his warriors back into the state to recover land that had been taken from his tribe some thirty years before. Lincoln immediately enlisted in a militia troop. He was made captain of his company for thirty days, and he kept chasing Indians for three months, never coming into actual conflict with any of them, and not even seeing a live one, except once, when an old drunken warrior stumbled into camp and had to be saved by Lincoln from molestation.

In July, the young candidate was mustered out of service.
¹
He went on quietly with his political campaign but he lost the election. The people of New Salem voted for him in an almost solid block, but he was still too new and unknown in Sangamon County to have made enough friends to elect him. He often proudly said that this was the only public office he ever failed to win by a direct vote of the people.

Having been unsuccessful at politics, Lincoln tried his hand at trade again. He had an opportunity to acquire an interest in a general store in New Salem without putting up any cash. In partnership with one William Berry he started out hopefully in his own business. Berry promptly drank himself to death, leaving Lincoln saddled with an $1100 debt that took fifteen years to liquidate. Economically this was the lowest point in his life. He worked in the fields, split rails, did anything to earn his keep. His friends—who were always loyal—pulled wires to get him the postmastership of New Salem, and on May 7, 1833, he assumed his first position as an employee of the United States Government. At this time he taught himself surveying, and in six weeks mastered the rudiments of the science well enough to make actual surveys.

He succeeded in getting himself appointed deputy surveyor. In addition to this he continued his general reading, going through Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and Rollins’
Ancient History
; he also kept up his study of law, reading Blackstone’s
Commentaries
and the
Revised Laws of Illinois.
Since there was no attorney available in New Salem he was permitted to plead minor cases before the local justice of the peace, Bowling Green, who was one of his best friends.

Although Lincoln’s earliest political inclinations were toward the Whig party—he always idolized Henry Clay—his first chance for political advancement came from the Democrats. He was invited by them to run again for the Legislature as joint candidate. He consulted with his Whig friends, was advised to accept the offer, and was elected on August 4, 1834, as Representative to the General Assembly of the State of Illinois.

Through all this New Salem period there runs a note of freshness, of aspiring youth. This was the springtime of Lincoln’s career, and despite the financial setbacks and the political disappointments, it was the one period of real happiness that his troubled life was to have. The idyllic forest groves and rolling hills of the New Salem country formed a fitting background to it. The village itself was very new and crude, but everyone in it felt sure that it would become an important place. There was hope and vitality in the air, potential wealth in the soil and beauty in the wide horizon of fields and trees. It was in New Salem that Lincoln first experienced the love of woman. Here he met and wooed Ann Rutledge, the now almost legendary girl who has become the center of so much dispute and acrimony. Nearly everything we know about her has come to us through William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer. Herndon first announced the Lincoln-Rutledge love affair to the world in a lecture in 1866. The story, as Herndon gives it, is a very simple
one, a tale that could have been told about many young couples in pioneer settlements.

Ann Rutledge was the daughter of James Rutledge, New Salem innkeeper, and owner of the local grist- and sawmill. All those who told Herndon about her testified that she was pretty and sweet-tempered, with blue eyes and light hair. She died before photography was invented; no wandering artist ever came to New Salem to sketch her portrait. Like the half-mythical Nancy Hanks she has faded into the mists of tradition, and although her name is familiar to every American, the facts about her life are few.

She was one of nine children, and she was four years younger than Lincoln. She had been engaged to a John McNamar, a New York farm boy who had come to Illinois to make a living. His real name was McNeil; he took the name of McNamar so his family could not trace him until he had made his fortune. He settled in New Salem, prospered there, and then, in 1832, he left to return east to get his parents. On the way he was delayed by sickness; Ann did not hear from him for months; when she did, his letters were infrequent and finally they stopped altogether. Ann fell in love with Lincoln and he with her. The courtship progressed slowly. In August, 1835, she sickened of “brain-fever”—probably typhoid—and after a short illness she died. That is all we know about Ann Rutledge and her relationship to Lincoln. Even this much has been brought into question as something thought up by Herndon, made public by him because, his critics say, he hated Mrs. Lincoln and wanted to hurt her.