A Man for the Ages Part 39

For days thereafter the people of New Salem were sorely troubled. Abe Lincoln, the ready helper in time of need, the wise counselor, the friend of all--"old and young, dogs and horses," as Samson was wont to say--the pride and hope of the little cabin village, was breaking down under his grief. He seemed to care no more for work or study or friends.h.i.+p. He wandered out in the woods and upon the prairies alone. Many feared that he would lose his reason.

There was a wise and merry-hearted man who lived a mile or so from the village. His name was Bowlin Green. Every one on Salem Hill and in the country round about it laid claim to the friends.h.i.+p of this remarkable man. Those days when one of middle age had established himself in the affections of a community, its members had a way of adopting him. So Mr. Green had been adopted into many families from Beardstown to Springfield. He was everybody's "Uncle Bowlin." He had a most unusual circ.u.mference and the strength to carry it. He was indeed a man of extended boundaries, embracing n.o.ble gifts, the best of which was good nature. His jests, his loud laughter and his quaking circ.u.mference were the three outstanding factors in his popularity. The loss of either would have been a misfortune to himself and neighbors. His ruddy cheeks and curling locks and kindly dark eyes and large head were details of importance. Under all were a heart with the love of men, a mind of unusual understanding and a hand skilled in all the arts of the Kentucky pioneer. He could grill a venison steak and roast a grouse and broil a chicken in a way which had filled the countryside with fond recollections of his hospitality; he could kindle a fire with a bow and string, a pine stick and some shavings; he could make anything from a splint broom to a rocking horse with his jack-knife. Abe Lincoln was one of the many men who knew and loved him.

On a warm, bright afternoon early in September, Bowlin Green was going around the pasture to put his fence in repair, when he came upon young Mr. Lincoln. The latter sat in the shade of a tree on the hillside. He looked "terribly peaked," as Uncle Bowlin, has said in a letter.

"Why, Abe, where have you been?" he asked. "The whole village is scared.

Samson Traylor was here last night lookin' for ye."

"I'm like a deer that's been hurt," said the young man. "I took to the woods. Wanted to be alone. You see, I had a lot of thinking to do--the kind of thinking that every man must do for himself. I've got the brush cleared away, at last, so I can see through. I had made up my mind to go down to your house for the night and was trying to decide whether I have energy enough to do it."

"Come on; it's only a short step," urged the big-hearted Bowlin. "The wife and babies are over to Beardstown. We'll have the whole place to ourselves. The feather beds are ladder high. I've got a haunch of venison buried in the hide and some prairie chickens that I killed yesterday, and, besides, I'm lonesome."

"What I feel the need of, just now, is a week or two of sleep," said Mr.

Lincoln, as he rose and started down the long hill with his friend.

Some time later Bowlin Green gave Samson this brief account of what happened in and about the cabin:

"He wouldn't eat anything. He wanted to go down to the river for a dip, and I went with him. When we got back, I induced him to take off his clothes and get into bed. He was fast asleep in ten minutes. When night came I went up the ladder to bed. He was still asleep when I came down in the morning. I went out and did my ch.o.r.es. Then I cut two venison steaks, each about the size o' my hand, and a half moon of bacon. I pounded the venison to pulp with a little salt and bacon mixed in. I put it on the broiler and over a bed o' hickory coals. I got the coffee into the pot and up next to the fire and some potatoes in the ashes. I basted a bird with bacon strips and put it into the roaster and set it back o' the broiling bed. Then I made some biscuits and put 'em into the oven. I tell you, in a little while the smell o' that fireplace would have 'woke the dead--honest! Abe began to stir. In a minute I heard him call:

"'Say, Uncle Bowlin, I'm goin' to get up an' eat you out o' house and home. I'm hungry and I feel like a new man. What time is it?'

"'It'll be nine o'clock by the time you're washed and dressed,' I says.

"'Well, I declare,' says he, 'I've had about sixteen hours o' solid sleep. The world looks better to me this morning.'

"He hurried into his clothes and we sat down at the table with the steak and the chicken and some wild grape jelly and baked potatoes, with new b.u.t.ter and toffee and cream and hot biscuit and clover honey, and say, we both et till we was ashamed of it.

"At the table I told him a story and got a little laugh out of him. He stayed with me three weeks, choring around the place and taking it easy.

He read all the books I had, until you and Doc Allen came with the law books. Then he pitched into them. I think he has changed a good deal since Ann died. He talks a lot about G.o.d and the hereafter."

In October young Mr. Lincoln returned to his surveying, and in the last month of the year to Vandalia for an extra session of the Legislature, where he took a stand against the convention system of nominating candidates for public office. Samson went to Vandalia for a visit with him and to see the place before the session ended. The next year, in a letter to his brother, he says:

"Vandalia is a small, crude village. It has a strong flavor of whisky, profanity and tobacco. The night after I got there I went to a banquet with Abe Lincoln. Heard a lot about the dam n.i.g.g.e.r-loving Yankees who were trying to ruin the state and country with abolition. There were some stories like those we used to hear in the lumber camp, and no end of powerful talk, in which the names of G.o.d and the Savior were roughly handled. A few of the statesmen got drunk, and after the dinner was over two of them jumped on the table and danced down the whole length of it, shattering plates and cups and saucers and gla.s.ses. n.o.body seemed to be able to stop them. I hear that they had to pay several hundred dollars for the damage done. You will be apt to think that there is too much liberty here in the West, and perhaps that is so, but the fact is these men are not half so bad as they seem to be. Lincoln tells me that they are honest almost to a man and sincerely devoted to the public good as they see it. I asked Abe Lincoln, who all his life has a.s.sociated with rough tongued, drinking men, how he had managed to hold his own course and keep his talk and habits so clean.

"'Why, the fact is,' said he, 'I have a.s.sociated with the people who lived around me only part of the time, but I have never stopped a.s.sociating with myself and with Was.h.i.+ngton and Clay and Webster and Shakespeare and Burns and DeFoe and Scott and Blackstone and Parsons. On the whole, I've been in pretty good company.'

"He has not yet accomplished much in the Legislature. I don't think that he will until some big issue comes along. 'I'm not much of a hand at hunting squirrels,' he said to me the other day. 'Wait till I see a bear.' The people of Vandalia and Springfield have never seen him yet.

They don't know him as I do. But they all respect him--just for his good fellows.h.i.+p, honesty and decency. I guess that every fellow with a foul mouth hates himself for it and envies the man who isn't like him. They begin to see his skill as a politician, which has shown itself in the pa.s.sage of a bill removing the capitol to Springfield. Abe Lincoln was the man who put it through. But he has not yet uncovered his best talents. Mark my word, some day Lincoln will be a big man.

"The death of his sweetheart has aged and sobered him. When we are together he often sits looking down with a sad face. For a while not a word out of him. Suddenly he will begin saying things, the effect of which will go with me to my grave, although I can not call back the words and place them as he did. He is what I would call a great Captain of words. Seems as if I heard the band playing while they march by me as well dressed and stepping as proud and regular as The Boston Guards. In some great battle between Right and Wrong you will hear from him. I hope it may be the battle between Slavery and Freedom, although at present he thinks they must avoid coming to a clinch. In my opinion, it can not be done. I expect to live to see the fight and to take part in it."

Late in the session of 1836-1837 the prophetic truth of these words began to reveal itself. A bill was being put through the Legislature denouncing the growth of abolition sentiment and its activity in organized societies and upholding the right of property in slaves.

Suddenly Lincoln had come to a fork in the road. Popularity, the urge of many friends, the counsel of Wealth and Power, and Public Opinion, the call of good politics pointed in one direction and the crowd went that way. It was a stampede. Lincoln stood alone at the corner. The crowd beckoned, but in vain. One man came back and joined him. It was Dan Stone, who was not a candidate for re-election. His political career was ended. There were three words on the sign-board pointing toward the perilous and lonely road that Lincoln proposed to follow. They were the words Justice and Human Rights. Lincoln and Dan Stone took that road in a protest, declaring that they "believed the inst.i.tution of slavery was founded upon injustice and bad policy." Lincoln had followed his conscience, instead of the crowd. At twenty-eight years of age he had safely pa.s.sed the great danger point in his career. The declaration at Decatur, the speeches against Douglas, the miracle of turning 4,000,000 beasts into 4,000,000 men, the sublime utterance at Gettysburg, the wise parables, the second inaugural, the innumerable acts of mercy, all of which lifted him into undying fame, were now possible. Henceforth he was to go forward with the growing approval of his own spirit and the favor of G.o.d.

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER XVII

WHEREIN YOUNG MR. LINCOLN BETRAYS IGNORANCE OF TWO HIGHLY IMPORTANT SUBJECTS, IN CONSEQUENCE OF WHICH HE BEGINS TO SUFFER SERIOUS EMBARRa.s.sMENT.

There were two subjects of which Mr. Lincoln had little understanding.

They were women and finance. Up to this time his tall, awkward, ill clad figure had been a source of amus.e.m.e.nt to those unacquainted with his admirable spirit. Until they had rightly appraised the value of his friends.h.i.+p, women had been wont to regard him with a riant curiosity. He had been aware of this, and for years had avoided women, save those of old acquaintance. When he lived at the tavern in the village often he had gone without a meal rather than expose himself to the eyes of strange women. The reason for this was well understood by those who knew him. The young man was an exceedingly sensitive human being. No doubt he had suffered more than any one knew from ill concealed ridicule, but he had been able to bear it with composure in his callow youth. Later nothing roused his anger like an attempt to ridicule him. No man who came in his way in after life was so quickly and completely floored as one George Forquer, who, in a moment of folly, had attempted to make light of him.

Two women he had regarded with great tenderness--his foster mother, the second wife of Thomas Lincoln, and Ann Rutledge. Others had been to him, mostly, delightful but inscrutable beings. The company of women and of dollars had been equally unfamiliar to him. He had said more than once in his young manhood that he felt embarra.s.sed in the presence of either, and knew not quite how to behave himself--an exaggeration in which there was no small amount of truth.

In 1836 the middle frontier had entered upon a singular phase of its development. Emigrants from the East and South and from overseas had been pouring into it. The summer before the lake and river steamers had been crowded with them, and their wagons had come in long processions out of the East Chicago had begun its phenomenal growth. A frenzied speculation in town lots had been under way in that community since the autumn of '35. It was spreading through the state. Imaginary cities were laid out or the lonely prairies and all the corner lots sold to eager buyers and paid for with promises. Fortunes of imaginary wealth were created by sales of future greatness. Millions of conversational, promissory dollars, based upon the gold at the foot of the rainbow, were changing hands day by day. The Legislature, with an empty treasury behind it, voted twelve millions for river improvements and imaginary railroads and ca.n.a.ls, for which neither surveys nor estimates had been made, to serve the dream-built cities of the speculator. If Mr. Lincoln had had more experience in the getting and use of dollars and more acquaintance with the shrinking timidity of large sums, he would have tried to dissipate these illusions of grandeur. But he went with the crowd, every member of which had a like inexperience.

In the midst of the session Samson Traylor arrived in Vandalia on his visit to Mr. Lincoln.

"I have sold my farm," said Samson to his old friend the evening of his arrival.

"Did you get a good price?" Mr. Lincoln asked.

"All that my conscience would allow me to take," said Samson. "The man offered me three dollars an acre in cash and ten dollars in notes. We compromised on seven dollars, all cash."

"It's a mistake to sell now. The river is going to be deepened and improved for navigation."

"I've made up my mind that it can't be done, unless you can invent a way to run a steamboat on moist ground," said Samson. "You might as well try to make a great man out of 'Colonel Lukins.' It hasn't the water-shed.

To dig a deep channel for the Sangamon would be like sending 'Colonel Lukins' to Harvard. We're going too fast. We have little to sell yet but land. The people are coming to us in great numbers, but most of them are poor. We must give them time to settle down and create something and increase the wealth of the state. Then we shall have a solid base to build upon; then we shall have the confidence of the capital we require for improvements. Now I fear that we are building on the sands."

"Don't you think that our bonds would sell in the East?"

"No; because we have only used our lungs in all these plans of ours. No one has carefully considered the cost. For all we know, it may cost more than the entire wealth of the state to put through the improvements already planned. The eastern capitalists will want to know about costs and security. Undoubtedly Illinois is sure to be a great state. But we're all looking at the day of greatness through a telescope. It seems to be very near. It isn't. It's at least ten years in the future."

Young Mr. Lincoln looked very grave for a moment. Then he laughed and said: "I don't know but we're all a lot of fools. I begin to suspect myself. The subject of finance is new to me. I don't know much about it, but I'm sure if I were to say what you have said, in the House of Representatives, they would throw me out-of-doors."

"Just at present the House is a kind of insane asylum," said Samson.

"You'll have to stick to the procession now. The road is so crowded that n.o.body can turn around. The folly of the state is so unanimous no one will be more to blame than another when the crash comes. You have meant well, anyhow."

"You make me feel young and inexperienced."

"You are generally wise, Abe, but there's one thing you don't know--that's the use of capital. For two years Sarah and I have been studying the subject of finance."

"I've seen too little of you in the last year or so," said the young statesman. "What are you going to do now that you have sold out?"

"I was thinking of going up to Tazewell County."

"Why don't you go to the growing and prosperous town of Springfield," Mr.

Lincoln asked. "The capitol will be there, and so will I. It is going to be a big city. Men who are to make history will live in Springfield.

You must come and help. The state will need a man of your good sense. It would be a great comfort to me to have you and Sarah and Harry and the children near me. I shall need your friends.h.i.+p, your wisdom and your sympathy. I shall want to sit often by your fireside. You'll find a good school there for the children. If you'll think of it seriously, I'll try to get you into the public service."