The Lincoln Story Book Part 3

"Gentlemen, you may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me a trifle; but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the two silver half-dollars. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day--that by honest work, I had earned a dollar!" (Lincoln's flatboatman wage was $10 a month.)

(Related by Frank B. Carpenter, the portrait-painter, as given out by President Lincoln to a party of friends in the White House executive chamber, Secretary Seward, notably, being among them.)

CONVICTION THROUGH A THRAs.h.i.+NG.

In 1831, Abraham Lincoln, returning from a voyage to New Orleans, paid the usual filial visit to his father, living in Coles County. A famous wrestler, one Needham, hearing of the newcomer's prowess in wrestling, more general than pugilism on the border, called to try their strength. As the professional was in practise, and as the other, from his amiable disposition and his forbidding appearance was not so, the latter declined the honor of a hug and the forced repose of lying on the back. Nevertheless, taunted into the trial, he met the champion and defeated him in two goes. The beaten one was chagrined, and vented his vexation in this defiance:

"You have thrown me twice, Lincoln, but you cannot _whip_ me!"

"I do not want to, and I don't want to get whipped myself," was the simple reply.

"Well, I 'stump' you to lick me!" went on Needham, thinking he was gaining ground. "Throwing a man is one thing and licking him another!"

"Look here, Needham," said the badgered man, at last, "if you are not satisfied that I can throw you every time, and want to be convinced through a thras.h.i.+ng, I will do that, too, for your sake!"

The man "backed out." But he was ever afterward one of the champion's warmest friends.

BOATING ON GROUND "A LEETLE DAMP."

In a letter of August, 1862, the President alludes to the amphibious minor navy, which made their tracks "wherever the ground was a little damp." This is hardly an exaggeration of Western shallow-water navigation. Lincoln, as pilot on the Sangamon River in 1831, was engaged to run a steamboat called the _Talisman_, after Sir Walter Scott's popular romance. It was to test the point whether the Sangamon River was navigable or not, an important local problem on which Lincoln, later, got into the legislature. As he had "tried" the river a good deal with the flatboats, he answered, he would try and do the best he could. A large crowd flocked in from all sides to witness the experiment. Lincoln guided the bark well up to the New Salem dam.

Here a gap had been cut to let the vessel slip through. But at a place called Bogue's Mill, the water was rapidly lowering, and they had to wheel about and get back, or be shoaled and be held there until the spring freshets. The return trip was slow, as, though the stream was in his favor, the high prairie wind delayed the boat. The falling water had made the broken hole in the dam impracticable. But Lincoln backed the _Talisman_ off as soon as she stranded and stuck; and, by casting an anchor so as to act as a gigantic grapnel, to tear away some more of the dam, the opening sufficed for the boat to "coast" on the stones and get over into deep water. "I think," says an old boatman--J. R. ("Row") Herndon--"that the captain gave Lincoln forty dollars to keep on to Beardstown. I am sure I got that!"

THE INITIATOR INSTALLED.

As a fruit of incessant study Abraham Lincoln fitted himself to accept the post of clerk at Offutt's store, in New Salem, in 1831. It was a responsible position, requiring strict honesty, intelligence, glib talk, attention, and courtesy to the few dames in the population of twenty households, "with the back settlement to hear from." In fact, Lincoln's gifts and cultivated acquirements made him such a favorite that the list of customers from out of town was extensive. This promotion of a newcomer nettled the bad element of the region. They were located from congeniality in a suburb termed Clary's Grove. Like the tail which undertakes to wag the dog, this tag const.i.tuted itself the criterion and proposed "initiating" any accession to the inhabitants. To take the conceit out of the upstart who had leaped from the flatboat deck to behind the counter at the store--the acme of a b.u.mpkin's ambition--they selected their bully. This Jack Armstrong was held so high by Bill Clary, "father" of the Grove boys, that he bet with Offutt, over-loud in praise of his help, that Jack could beat Abe, "and your Abe has got to be initiated, anyway!"

Abraham refused under provocation to have anything to do with "rough-and-tumble" fighting--as also known as "scuffle and tussle,"

and "wooling and pulling"--in short, these agreeable features promise to include all brutalities save gouging, which was unfas.h.i.+onable so far to the North. But a man could not live quietly on the frontier without showing to such ruffians that his hands could s.h.i.+eld his head.

For the honor of the store, the clerk had to stand up to the opponent.

The bout came off. In the first attack, Lincoln lifted the foe, though heavier, clean off his feet, but he was unable to lay him down in the orthodox manner, consisting in placing him flat on his back, with both shoulder-blades denting the earth. The semi-victor amicably said: "Let's quit, Jack! You see I cannot give you the fall--and you cannot give it me."

The gang shouted for a resumption of the "sport," thinking this was weakness of the compet.i.tor. They joined again, but Armstrong, having his doubts, resorted to foul play--kicking or "legging," as the localism stands. Indignantly, Lincoln drew him up again and shook him in mid-air as a terrier does a rat. The rowdies, seeing their champion bested, shouted for him to make a _fight_ of it, and probably they would have "mixed in" and made a "fight for all" in another minute. But Jack had his doubts set at rest as to the prospect of overcoming a man who could hold him out and off at arm's length; and, begging to be set down, grasped his antagonist's hand in friends.h.i.+p and proclaimed him the best man "who had ever broke into" that section. The two became friends, and the gang gradually dwindled by this recession from their ranks of their Goliath.

THE HORRORS FOR THE THIRD TIME!

When Abraham Lincoln was a poor young lawyer from Springfield, attending the perambulatory court down at Lewiston, Illinois, he found the place crowded by a Methodist meeting as well as the court having an attractive case to try. He was obliged--because of exclusion from the inn--to put up at the sheriff's house. Mrs. Davidson herself could only offer him shares with Mr. Stephen A. Douglas, also a rising man, and Peter Cartwright, the noted preacher--on the floor, but on a feather bed. At that period the wild goose flew low. It may be supposed that the student of Shakespeare might quote "When shall we three meet again?" on rising between the famous border worthies in the dawn. The hospitality was so refres.h.i.+ng that the trio spent the next night there. They sat up by the large fireside, capping stories.

The enmity of lawyers, and even of politicians, is but skin-deep, and Steve and Abe clashed not at all to meet the minister's reproof.

Lincoln rocked while story-telling in a cane-bottomed chair, taken from the steamboat celebrated in Spoon River annals as its first navigator. Lincoln was the more interested, as he had been boatman and pilot on his river, the Sangamon. In the 1820's, this toy boat, the _Utility_, struggled into the high water of Spoon River. It is a tributary of the Illinois. Now, though the county is named Fulton, none of the inhabitants knew anything about the inventor of steam navigation, and doubted that a steamboat existed near them. Hence the snorting, puffing, and clangor of the vessel as she surged against the freshet, alarmed all the population in hearing when she ascended the virgin Spoon.

One Sam Jenkins had been on a spree for a week, and even he was roused by the tremendous sound. As he rushed from his cabin, by the terrific blaze from the high smoke-stack and the furnace burning pitch-pine, he sank onto his shaking knees and yelled:

"Boys, I have got 'em for the third time! It is all up with me!"

THE WHISTLE THAT STOPPED THE BOAT.

Lincoln was pitted, as a lawyer, against a brother of the toga who was of fat and plethoric habit, and who puffed and blowed when most he wished to get on with his speech. The wag said:

"The gentleman reminds me of a little steamboat I knew about on the Spoon River. She had been equipped with a whistle disproportionate to her capacity of steam-power, and every time she blew off it stopped the boat!"

IT IS THE DEED, NOT THE DOER.

By one of those unaccountable contradictions which disturb one's calculations upon women's conduct, the fair s.e.x "took to" him with extraordinary kindness, though he always remained shy in their presence. This favor on their part was fortified by his striking honesty in little points which the close-seeing feminine eye never misses. To cap the climax he defended the purity of social order with a rarity in those quarters sufficient to single him out. Not that the roughest Westerner was not excessively gallant, but his restrictions in the ladies' presence did not always curb his p.r.o.neness to "tall talk."

Once in the way, a loafer hanging about in the store, and having paid only attention to the dram counter, the necessary concomitant of the village center, became garrulous, but unfortunately more than seasoned the flow with a profanity tolerably rich in variety if not distinguished for refinement; he was of the Clary's Grove _genus_. As there was a crowd at the "ladies' department," that is, the dry-goods and finery, where it happened Lincoln was commonly besieged, the language was resented by woman's weapons--tosses of the head, affected deafness, glances into the future, and so on, but the clerk resented it in another way. He bade him be silent.

Now, the fellow thought, with his kind, that he was ent.i.tled to exhale the breath which was strengthened by the strong waters vended here, and expressed himself more foully than before.

He had a resentment against the clod rising to be a flower of courtesy, and here was his opportunity to satisfy the grudge, and before an audience timid and not apt to intervene.

Singularly, the men who most despise women are the ones who seek to have her applause. He wished to see the man who would stop him from uttering his sentiments. He was answered that his business would be attended to, as soon as the offended ladies had withdrawn.

The undesired witnesses took the hint and quitted the store. Thereupon the long-limbed clerk verified the taunt of "counter-jumper" by clearing it at a bound. "Will you engage not to repeat that rowdy (blackguard) talk in the store while I am the master, and leave instanter?"

The bully protested in a torrent of unrepeatable words.

"I see," said the champion of decency, "you want a whipping, and _I_ may as well give it you as any other man."

And he forthwith administered the correction; not only did he drag him outdoors, but laid him out so senseless that nothing less than the border finish of a knock-down and drag-out encounter--the rubbing the conquered man's eyes with smart-weed--revived him to beg for mercy, and a drink. The victor allowed him to rise, converted his appeal into mockery by offering plain water, which the brute applied solely to his doubly inflamed eyes, and sent him away in tears. But the shock had a reparative effect; he became a good neighbor, and a convert to temperance.

(This or a similar lesson to the village bully is testified to by an eye-witness of Sangamon, but resident of Viroqua, Wisconsin; his name is John White. He worked at chopping rails with the rail-splitter on more than one job.)