Abraham Lincoln: a History Volume I Part 2

They had their own amus.e.m.e.nts, of course; no form of society is without them, from the anthropoid 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 panegyrist: "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, 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 beginnings became decent and serious citizens. Indeed, Mr. Herndon insists than even in their hot youth they showed the promise of goodness and piety. "They attended church, heard the sermon, wept and prayed, shouted, got up and fought an hour, and then went back to prayer, just as the spirit moved them." The camp-meeting may be said, with no irreverent intention, to have been their princ.i.p.al means of intellectual excitement. The circuit preachers were for a long time the only circulating medium of thought and emotion that kept the isolated settlements from utter spiritual stagnation. They were men of great physical and moral endurance, absolutely devoted to their work, which they pursued in the face of every hards.h.i.+p and discouragement. Their circuits were frequently so great in extent that they were forced to be constantly 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 more from their congregations, paid for the most part in necessaries of life. Their oratory was suited to their longitude, and was princ.i.p.ally addressed to the emotions of their hearers. It was often very effective, producing shouts and groans and genuflections among the audience at large, and terrible convulsions among the more nervous and excitable. We hear sometimes of a whole congregation prostrated as by a hurricane, flinging their limbs about in furious contortions, with wild outcries. To this day some of the survivors of that period 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 delirium 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 cla.s.s of men, they did a great deal of good, and are ent.i.tled 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 gathering 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 claims of consanguinity 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 firesides. Instead of taking the rosy daughter of a neighbor, the enterprising bachelor would often go back to Kentucky, and pa.s.s through as many adventures in bringing his wife home as a returning crusader would meet between Beirut and Vienna. If she was a young woman who respected herself, the household gear she would insist on bringing would entail an Iliad of embarra.s.sments. An old farmer of Sangamon County still talks of a featherbed 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 authority 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 conscientious 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 conventional 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 formula of courts.h.i.+p. He always promised the ladies whose hearts he was besieging that "they should 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 corn, stuck in the prairie mud for two weeks near a frequented road. When he returned he found some of his corn 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 generally obliged to remove.

[Sidenote: N.W. Edwards, "Life and Times of Ninian Edwards," p. 163.]

There were still, even so late as the time to which we are referring, two alien elements in the population 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 domestic 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 little short of monstrous to the ferocious exclusiveness of the Anglo-Saxon. [Footnote: Michelet notices this exclusiveness of the English, and inveighs against it in his most lyric style. "Crime contre la nature! Crime contre l'humanite! Il sera expie par la sterilite de l'esprit."] 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 ma.s.sacre. A few years earlier, indeed, the relations of the two races had been more strained, as may be inferred from an act pa.s.sed by the territorial Legislature in 1814, offering a reward of fifty dollars to any citizen or ranger who should kill 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 of relative noxiousness. But ten years later a handful only of the Kickapoos remained in Sangamon 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 G.o.dsend. When Vannoy murdered his wife in Springfield, whole families put on their best clothes and drove fifty miles through bottomless mud and swollen rivers to see him hanged.

[Sidenote: Power, "Early Settlers of Sangamon County," p. 88.]

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 of a green-bordered rivulet, where the deer pa.s.sed by in hundreds, going in the morning from the shady banks of the Sangamon to feed on the rich green gra.s.s of the prairie, and returning in the twilight. He was so delighted with this hunters' paradise that he sent for his brothers to join him. They came and brought their friends, so it happened that in this immense county, several thousand square miles in extent, the settlement of John Kelly at Spring Creek was the only place where there was shelter for the commissioners; 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 t.i.tle, when the distinctive and musical name of Sangamon was ready to their hands. The same day they agreed with John Kelly to build them a court-house, for which they paid him forty-two dollars 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 appointed, and all the machinery of government prepared for the population which was hourly expected. It was taken for granted that malefactors would come and the constables have employment; 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 county, the resources of the Spring Creek men were equal to the emergency. When the commissioners came to decide on the relative 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 would seek no further, and Springfield 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.

[Sidenote: "History Of Sangamon County," p. 83.]

[Sidenote: "Old Times in McLean County," p. 235.]

[Sidenote: Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 53.]

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 Attorney describes his first circuit as a tour of s.h.i.+fts and privations not unlike the wanderings of a mendicant friar. In his first county he received a fee of five dollars for prosecuting the parties to a sanguinary affray. In the next he was equally successful, but barely escaped drowning in Spoon River. In the third there were but two families at 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 dollars. 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 n.o.blemen, from Ma.s.sachusetts," 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 Bloomington and made an extravagant speech, and having gained his case received a fee of five dollars. In such a state of things it was not to be wondered at that the technicalities of law were held in somewhat less veneration than what the pioneer regarded as the essential claims of justice. The infirmities of the jury system gave them less annoyance than they give us. Governor 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 preparations to hang him to the rafters of the jury room. The judges were less hampered by the limitations 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 commitment 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 understand this case as well as you or I. They will do justice between the parties." One famous judge, who was afterwards governor, when sentencing a murderer, impressed it upon his mind, and wished him to inform 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 cla.s.s. 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 surpa.s.sed for learning and ability.

[Sidenote: Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 31.]

[Sidenote: Ford, p. 81.]

In a community where the princ.i.p.al men were lawyers, where there was as yet little commerce, and industrial enterprise was unknown, it was natural that one of the chief interests of life 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 compelled the respect and esteem of the citizens. The 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 defeated 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 political 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 b.u.t.tons, 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 n.o.bility 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. Real 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 statutes of Illinois that they are far better drawn up, and better edited, than those of a later period, when illiterate tricksters, conscious of the party strength behind them, insisted on shaping legislation 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 cla.s.s in Illinois tradition was a member from the South who could neither read nor write, and whose apparently 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 hazelnuts 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 fas.h.i.+onably cut-of voting against every measure which was proposed. If it failed, the responsibility was broadly shared; if it pa.s.sed and was popular, no one would care who voted against it; if it pa.s.sed 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 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 beneficial, as unequaled in their destructive 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 bulls 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 politician 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 Legislature, but would not declare himself until just before the election, and a.s.signed 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 Legislature elected a State treasurer after an exciting contest, and before the members had left the house the unsuccessful aspirant came in and soundly thrashed, one after the other, four of the representatives who had voted against him. Such energy 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 circ.u.mstance 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. Lincoln 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 careers 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 years old. When Ninian Edwards was a candidate for Governor of Illinois in 1826, he was only fifty-one, and yet he considered it necessary in his published addresses 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. Herndon, had written him a letter, complaining that the old men in Sangamon County were unwilling to let the young ones have any opportunity to distinguish themselves. To this Lincoln answered in his usual tone of grave kindness: "The subject of your letter is exceedingly 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 ungenerously 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 hards.h.i.+ps and early decay of the vital powers. The survivors of the pioneers stoutly insist upon the contrary view. "It was a glorious life," 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 was a hard one, with few rational pleasures, few 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 happiness or comfort, or were in any respect preferable to our own.

CHAPTER IV

NEW SALEM

During the latter part of "the winter of the deep snow," Lincoln became acquainted with one Denton Offutt, an adventurous and discursive 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, probably at the request of 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. In 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 Offutt 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 the timber, with frontier innocence, from "Congress 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 born for the occasion, as it came into existence just before the arrival of Lincoln, nourished 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 embarra.s.sment on Rutledge's mill-dam, and the unwonted incident brought the entire population to the water's edge. They spent a good part of the day watching the hapless flat-boat, resting mids.h.i.+ps on the dam, the forward end in the air and the stern taking in the turbid Sangamon water. n.o.body 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 prominent 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MODEL OF LINCOLN'S INVENTION, IN THE PATENT OFFICE, WAs.h.i.+NGTON.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF DRAWINGS IN THE PATENT OFFICE.]

[Sidenote: Lamon, p. 83.]

They made a quick trip down the Sangamon, the Illinois, and the Mississippi rivers. Although it was but a repet.i.tion in great part of the trip young Lincoln had made with Gentry, it evidently created a far deeper impression on his mind than the former one. The simple and honest words of John Hanks leave no doubt of this. At New Orleans, he said, they saw for the first time "negroes chained, maltreated, whipped, and scourged. Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was silent, looked bad. I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion of slavery. It run its iron in him 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 fourteen years, he says: "In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip on a steamboat from Louisville to St. Louis. You 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 a.s.sume 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 River 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, [Footnote: His grave, a mile and a half west of the town of Farmington, Illinois, is surmounted by an appropriate monument erected by his grandson, the Hon. Robert T. Lincoln.] at the age of seventy-three years, after a life which, though not successful in any material or worldly point of view, was probably far happier than that of his ill.u.s.trious son, being unvexed by enterprise or ambition. Abraham never lost sight of his parents. He continued to aid and befriend them in every way, even when he could ill afford it, and when his benefactions were imprudently used. He not only comforted their declining years with every aid his affection could suggest, but he did everything in his power to a.s.sist his stepbrother Johnston-a hopeless task enough. The following rigidly truthful 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 difficulty again. Now this can only happen by some defect in your conduct.

What that defect is I think I know. You are not lazy, and still 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 difficulty, and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children, that you should break the habit. It is more important 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 propose 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 indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if you hire yourself at ten dollars a month, from me you will get ten more, making twenty dollars a month for your work. In this I do not mean you should go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines in California; but I mean for you to go at it for the best wages you can get close 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 clear you out of debt, next year you would be just as deep in as ever. You say you would almost give your place 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? 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:

SHELBYVILLE, 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? Is the land any richer? Can you there, any more than here, raise corn and wheat and oats without work? Will anybody there, any more than here, do your work for you? 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, get the money, and spend it. Part with the land you have, and, 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 dest.i.tute because you have idled away all your time. Your thousand pretenses deceive n.o.body but yourself. Go 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 disadvantages 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 antic.i.p.ated a score of years in speaking 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 fortune in his own way. He went down to New Salem again to a.s.sist Offutt in the business that lively speculator thought of establis.h.i.+ng there. He was more punctual than either his employer or the merchandise, 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. [Footnote: Mrs. Lizzie H. Bell writes of this incident: "My father, Menton Graham, was on that day, as usual, appointed to be a clerk, and Mr. McNamee, who was to be the other, was sick and failed to come. They were looking around for a man to fill his place when my father noticed Mr. Lincoln and asked if he could write. He answered that 'he could make a few rabbit tracks.'"] He also piloted a boat down the Sangamon 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.

It is to be surmised that Offutt never inspired his neighbors and customers with any deep regard for his solidity 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 disagreeably evident to his clerk. He admired Abraham 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 a.s.sertion, 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 proposition, being less abstract in its nature, was more readily grasped by the local mind, and was not likely to pa.s.s unchallenged.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAP OF NEW SALEM AND VICINITY]

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 pa.s.sed 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 mauled black and blue; for despite their pretensions to chivalry they had no scruples about fair play or any such superst.i.tions of civilization. At first they did not seem inclined to molest young Lincoln. His appearance did not invite insolence; his reputation for strength and activity was a greater protection to him than his inoffensive good-nature. But the loud admiration of Offutt gave them umbrage. It led to dispute, contradictions, and finally to a formal banter to a wrestling-match. Lincoln was greatly averse to all this "wooling and pulling," as he called it. But Offutt's indiscretion had made it necessary for him to show his mettle. Jack Armstrong, the leading bully of the gang, was selected to throw him, and expected an easy victory. But he soon found himself in different hands from any he had heretofore engaged with. Seeing 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, he held the pride of Clary's Grove in his arms like a child, and 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 different, 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 ign.o.ble scuffle 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 constantly scuffling 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LEAF FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S EXERCISE BOOK. The page here shown in reduced fac-simile is from the Exercise Book presented by William H. Herndon to the Keyes-Lincoln Memorial Collection. When the book was written Lincoln was about seventeen.]

He made on the whole a satisfactory clerk for Mr. Offutt, though his downright honesty must have seemed occasionally as eccentric in that position as afterwards it did to his a.s.sociates at the bar. Dr. Holland has preserved one or two incidents 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 miles in the night to make rest.i.tution 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 quant.i.ty of tea of which he had innocently defrauded his customer and went in search of her, his sensitive conscience not permitting 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 bordered, 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 pa.s.sages at arms of this sort gave Abraham a redoubtable reputation in the neighborhood. But the princ.i.p.al 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 contagion of battle among the masters of the beasts, Lincoln usually appeared upon the scene, and with a judicious mixture of force and reason and invincible good- nature restored peace.

While working with Offutt 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 [Footnote: This name has always been written in Illinois "Minter," but a letter from Mr. Graham's daughter, Mrs. Bell, says that her father's name is as given in the text.] 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 peculiar intensity of application which always remained his most valuable faculty, and soon knew all that can be known about it from rules. He seemed surprised, as others have been, at the meager dimensions 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 and interest in Salem and the neighboring towns 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 a.s.sumed 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 "Sangsmo 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 excitement,- public meetings, appointment of committees, appeals for subscriptions, and a scattering fire of advertis.e.m.e.nts of goods and freight to be bargained for,-which sustained the prevailing interest. It was a day of hope and promise when the advertis.e.m.e.nt reached Springfield from Cincinnati that "the splendid upper-cabin steamer Talisman" would positively start for the Sangamon on a given day. As the paper containing this joyous intelligence also complained that no mail had reached Springfield from the east for three weeks, 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 windings 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 Talisman," 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.

CHAPTER V

LINCOLN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAR

[Sidenote: 1832.]

A new period in the life of Lincoln begins with the summer of 1832. He then obtained 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 Offutt 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 neighborhood of Rock 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 considerable 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, a.s.sisted by General E. P. Gaines and his detachment, had little difficulty in compelling the Indians to re- cross the Mississippi, and to enter into a solemn treaty on the 30th of June by which the former treaties were ratified and Black Hawk and his leading warriors bound themselves never again to set foot on the east side of the river, without express permission from the President or the Governor of Illinois.

[Sidenote: Reynolds, "Life and Times," p. 325.]

[Sidenote: Ford, "History of Illinois," p. 110.]

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 n.o.bility at fifteen years of age. Peace under any circ.u.mstances 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 himself that "land cannot be sold," a proposition in political economy which our modern socialists would be puzzled to accept or confute. Besides this, the tenderest feelings of his heart were outraged by this exclusion from his former domain. He had never pa.s.sed a year since the death of his daughter without making a pilgrimage to her grave at Oquawka and spending hours in mystic ceremonies and contemplation. He was himself prophet as well as warrior, 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 whisperings of attendant spirits; and day by day these unseen incitements increased around him, until they could not be resisted even if death stood in the way.