Abraham’s stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, remembered that when Abraham came across a passage that particularly struck him, “he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there till he did get paper—then he would re-write it—look at it repeat it.” She reported that her stepson “had a copy book—a kind of scrap book in which he put down all things and thus preserved them.”
Abraham’s copy book served several purposes. He used it as an aid in his memorization of poetry and prose. He also wrote his own verse. The copy book that he started in 1826, at age seventeen, began:
Abraham Lincoln is my nam
And with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote in both hast and speed
And left it here for fools to read.
Although other young people used copy books in their schooling, Lincoln’s copy book also became a forerunner of the reflections he wrote out on odd pieces of paper as an adult.
The books young Lincoln read tell us he was drawn to morality tales of the triumph of good over evil. Above all, what tied his books together was the possibility that ordinary people could do extraordinary things.
AT SOME POINT IN INDIANA, Abraham realized that he was different from the other boys he knew. He delighted in listening in to adult conversations, often turning the ideas he heard over and over in his mind as he fell asleep. Although thoroughly taking part in the young masculine world of wrestling, running, and jumping, he was also carving out an interior world of intellectual curiosity, reading and memorization, and imagination. What could be better than traveling with Shakespeare and Bunyan to England, with Robert Burns to Scotland, and Lord Byron to Italy?
“He was different from those around him,” Nathaniel Grigsby remembered. “His mind soared above us.” Grigsby, who knew Lincoln well in Indiana, summed up the feelings of Abraham’s young friends: “He naturally assumed the leadership of the boys.”
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IN THESE INDIANA YEARS, Lincoln read books laden with moral fruit—fruit he readily picked and consumed. One evening when Lincoln was a little older, he and his friend David Turnham were returning home from Gentryville. “We saw something laying near or in a mud hole,” recalled Turnham, “and Saw that it was a man: we rolled him over and over—waked up the man—he was dead drunk—night was cold—nearly frozen.” Who we are can be defined by our ethical actions when there is no time to think. Turnham did not give himself high marks in describing what happened next. “We took him up—rather Abe did—Carried him to Dennis Hanks—built up a fire and got him warm.—I left—Abe staid all night—we had been threshing wheat—had passed Lincoln’s house—Lincoln stopt & took Care of the poor fellow.” Turnham never forgot the Good Samaritan encounter. It was the kind of moral action Lincoln had learned from his early reading.
“A DEVOUT CHRISTIAN of the baptist order”—so Thomas Lincoln was regarded by Nathaniel Grigsby. In 1821, the Little Pigeon Baptist Church asked Thomas Lincoln to oversee the building of their new meetinghouse. His selection spoke both of his standing within the church and the community as well as of an appreciation for his skills in construction and woodworking. Thomas also built the pulpit and did the cabinet work inside the meetinghouse. Abraham, now twelve, worked alongside his father.
Thomas and Sarah Bush Lincoln became members of the Little Pigeon Baptist Church on June 7, 1823. Since Thomas had been a member of the Little Mount Baptist Church in Kentucky, why did he not join a Baptist church when he first settled in Indiana? In the nineteenth century, with stricter standards for membership, it was not at all unusual for people to attend a church regularly but not become members. Perhaps Thomas Lincoln had waited because he had been part of a Separate Baptist congregation in Kentucky, whereas the Little Pigeon Baptist Church was Regular Baptist. A unity movement among Baptists had spread to Indiana just as Thomas enrolled in the Little Pigeon Baptist Church. He became a member by letter of transfer from Little Mount Baptist, indicating he was a member in good standing in another congregation. Sarah evidently had not been a member of a church before; she was enrolled “by Experience.” Abraham’s sister, Sarah, joined the Little Pigeon Baptist Church on April 8, 1826, by “Experience of grace.”
Abraham, however, did not become a member of the Little Pigeon Baptist Church. He never said why he did not join. In a family-oriented society, the fact that he did not join would have struck others in the community as unusual. According to his stepmother, “He sometimes attended Church.” Young Abraham, with his early attraction to words, did become fascinated by the language of the preachers. Lincoln’s stepmother recalled, “He would hear sermons preached—come home—take the children out—get on a stump or log and almost repeat it word for word.” Lincoln’s stepsister Matilda also remembered how Abe would “call the children and friends around him” and “get up on a stump and repeat almost word for word the sermon he had heard the Sunday before.” She recalled that Thomas Lincoln did not approve of Abraham’s preaching and “would come and make him quit—send him to work.”
WHEN ABRAHAM WAS thirteen or fourteen, he began to work for other farmers. It was the custom that money earned by youths be given to the father for family expenses, but a small amount be returned to the youthful laborer. Hiring himself out to harvest corn or split rails brought him into contact for the first time with a wider circle of people than his immediate family and neighbors. In working for neighboring men, Abraham encountered the personalities and habits of other fathers, especially in relation to their sons.
As the pioneers moved west and cultivated the land, the need for fences grew. Fences protected settlers from attack, preserved gardens and food supplies, and acted as lines of demarcation between neighbors. They became higher as dangers from attack grew on the frontier, and as boundary lines became disputed because of inadequate titles to land. The pioneers had a rule that a rail fence should be horse high, bull strong, and pig tight—high enough that a horse could not jump over it, strong enough that a bull could not ram through it, and tight enough so a pig could not press through it.
At age sixteen, as Abraham Lincoln was approaching his full physical maturity, his skill with an ax opened up limitless possibilities for work. Rail splitters were in steady demand. The best woods for rails came from ash, hickory, oak, poplar, and walnut trees. Typically the rails would be ten feet long and four inches wide.
J. L. G. Ferris painted Lincoln the Rail Splitter in 1909, the year of the Lincoln Centennial. The artist, depicting the young Lincoln with an ax, wished to portray both his strength and his humanity.
Abraham often would work from sunup to sundown. A skilled woodsman could regularly make as many as four hundred rails in a day. The flat rate was twenty-five cents a day, although sometimes the pay was calibrated to piecework. The rail splitter often erected the fence as well.
In August 1826, while splitting rails for various farms, Abraham, Dennis Hanks, and Lincoln’s stepbrother-in-law Squire Hall hatched the idea that they might make more money splitting cordwood for the steamboats not far from where the Anderson River joined the Ohio. They received some of their pay in goods. Abraham accepted nine yards of white domestic cloth, which allowed him to have sewn the first white shirt he had ever possessed.
Around this time, Abraham, so handy with his hands, built a scow, a small flat-bottomed boat. One day two men approached him and asked if he would row them and their luggage out to a passenger steamer on the Ohio. Lincoln sculled them out to the boat and loaded their heavy trunks on board. Just as he was about to leave, the two men thanked Lincoln, each tossing a silver half-dollar into his scow. He could scarcely believe his eyes.
Many years later, Lincoln related this story to his secretary of state, William H. Seward, and some other government officials. “Gentlemen, you may think it was a very little thing … but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day.” He declared, “The world seemed wider and fairer before me.”
Lin
coln’s good fortune did not last long. After helping a few more passengers, Lincoln found himself in big legal trouble. John and Lin Dill, Kentucky ferrymen, believed they had the exclusive ferry rights across the Ohio. They charged Lincoln with encroachment. Lincoln was hauled before Squire Samuel Pate, justice of the peace, in Lewisport, Kentucky, and charged with operating a ferryboat without a license. In Lincoln’s first law case he was the defendant: The Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln pleaded innocence and said that he had not violated any law—he was only responding to requests from passengers on the Indiana side. Squire Pate got down the Kentucky statute book and consulted the relevant law, discovering that it prohibited unlicensed persons transiting persons over or across the river but not to passing steamers in the river. Squire Pate immediately dismissed the charges. As Lincoln sculled back across the Ohio River to Indiana he arrived impressed with the majesty of the law in the hands of a skilled justice of the peace.
LINCOLN REMAINED CLOSE to his sister, Sarah, throughout their childhood. When he was seventeen, Sarah married Aaron Grigsby on August 2, 1826. The new couple moved into a cabin two miles south of the Lincoln cabin. A year and a half after her wedding, Sarah prepared to give birth to the couple’s first child. As she struggled through the pains of delivery, she called for her father. Thomas Lincoln set off to fetch a doctor. But it was too late. The child was stillborn. Shortly after, Sarah, age twenty-one, died on January 20, 1828.
By the age of eighteen, Abraham Lincoln had lost both his mother and his sister.
IN THE FALL OF 1828, when Abraham was nineteen, an invitation opened a new horizon. James Gentry, owner of Gentry’s store, and one of the wealthiest men in the area, wanted a trustworthy young man to accompany his son, Allen, in taking a cargo flatboat to New Orleans to trade goods. He asked Lincoln.
Lincoln and Gentry left Rockport, Indiana, in late December for the 1,222-mile journey. Lincoln served as the bow hand. When the slow-moving Ohio joined the swifter Mississippi, each boy had to be constantly engaged with navigation. Farther south, the boys began exchanging their cargo for sugar, tobacco, and cotton as they passed by Natchez and entered the lower Mississippi with its moss-festooned oak trees.
Just below Baton Rouge the boys tied their boat up for the night near a plantation where they had been trading. Lincoln would never forget their next experience. As he told reporter John Locke Scripps many years later, “One night they were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them.” The seven had not counted on the strength and courage of the two young men. Lincoln and Gentry fought off their attackers. “They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat.”
A few days later, arriving in New Orleans, they were amazed to see hundreds of ships of all kinds—brigs, schooners, sloops, flatboats, and steamboats—sailing to or from New York and Philadelphia, as well as to Havana and Veracruz. They tied up their boat and walked over the tops of scores of other boats on their way into the city. The bustling waterfront became Lincoln’s first glimpse of a city at work. As he walked the cobblestone streets, he saw bales of cotton and large casks of sugar. He observed dried tobacco leaves stripped from their stalks and tied in a bunch called a “hand,” and then tightly packed in four-hundred-pound hogsheads. He saw and tasted many of the products of a new market economy.
Young Lincoln visited a city swaggering and dancing as a cosmopolitan center. The two men probably stayed in an area called “the swamp,” the boatmen’s rendezvous. From its early days, New Orleans’s reputation rested in its medley of cultures—French, Creole, Spanish, African, and English. By 1828, the Southern city was filled with slaves. Men, women, and children were bought and sold daily as products in the slave market. Lincoln left no report about his experiences in the city itself, but in light of his later denunciations of slavery, we are left to wonder how his experiences in New Orleans, at the impressionable age of nineteen, influenced his future views.
Lincoln made eight dollars a month for his labor. He earned far more than that in life experience. After a few dizzying days in New Orleans, he and Gentry returned home to Indiana on a steamboat.
IN THE WINTER OF 1830, Thomas Lincoln decided to move on again. John Hanks, Abraham’s mother’s cousin, had settled in Illinois in 1829 and sent back a report of good soil and an invitation to pull up stakes and come farther west. Thomas Lincoln had moved four times since his first marriage, and now decided to bet his future on the prairies of Illinois.
Abraham pondered what he wanted to do with his life and where he wanted to live. He resisted the desire to leave his family and strike out on his own. Rather, he decided to help his father move. On March 1, after loading their belongings into big ox-drawn wagons, the Indiana Lincolns sold their hogs and corn and said good-bye to their neighbors at Pigeon Creek. Abraham drove one of the wagons west for the 225-mile journey.
The Lincoln caravan probably traveled north to join the Troy– Vincennes Trace, an old ridge route. They no doubt stopped in Vin-cennes at the end of the first fifty miles of their trek. After four or five days, they crossed the Wabash River, which was swollen by spring rains. As the Lincolns continued west, they left behind the immense forests and tangled underbrush of Indiana to find vast prairies of tall grasses and flowers. When Lincoln crossed the Wabash River from Indiana into Illinois he was twenty-one years old and now legally a man. He differed from the norms of the masculine culture in which he was raised by turning away from alcohol, tobacco, and guns, yet he was exceedingly well liked by the young men in Indiana. Both in ideas and actions, he was learning to listen to his own internal voice.
But many questions remained for Lincoln. Where would he live? What would he do? How could he continue his self-education?
On the evening of March 14, 1830, the Lincoln family camped in the village square in Decatur, Illinois. Decatur, awarded a post office a week before their arrival, was a new town with only a dozen log houses situated in an oak grove.
The next day, the families moved to the north bank of the Sangamon River, where forest and prairie land came together, about seven miles west and two miles south of Decatur. On this site, Abraham and his father built a log cabin and then a smokehouse and a barn. Abraham split rails to fence in their land. No longer obligated to work for his father, he continued to do so during the summer and fall of 1830, but also hired out as a farmhand and rail splitter to his new neighbors.
In the summer of 1830, Lincoln made his first political speech in front of Renshaw’s store on Decatur’s town square. William Ewing and John F. Posey, candidates for the legislature in Macon County, had gathered a crowd by denouncing “Old Line Whigs” as out of touch with modern issues. When the speakers finished, Lincoln stepped forward to offer a reply. Wearing tow-linen pants, a hickory shirt, and a straw hat, Lincoln surprised and delighted the crowd by refuting the charges, all the time punctuating his remarks with humor. He did not aim his words at the previous speakers, but rather at the crowd. As Lincoln spoke of contemporary issues facing the small community, especially the prospects of navigation on the Sangamon River, he was speaking of his own future in Illinois, with a new life stretching out before him.
CHAPTER 4
Rendering Myself Worthy of Their Esteem 1831–34
EVERY MAN IS SAID TO HAVE HIS PECULIAR AMBITION. WHETHER IT BE TRUE OR NOT, I CAN SAY FOR ONE THAT I HAVE NO OTHER SO GREAT AS THAT OF BEING TRULY ESTEEMED OF MY FELLOW MEN, BY RENDERING MYSELF WORTHY OF THEIR ESTEEM.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Springfield’s Sangamo Journal, March 15, 1832
N A BLUSTERY SPRING DAY IN APRIL 1831, THE RESIDENTS OF THE recently established village of New Salem, Illinois, clustered on a bluff to watch three young men struggle furiously with a long flatboat that had become stranded on the mill dam on the Sangamon River just below. The crew was attempting to steer the boat, loaded with barrels of pork, corn, and snorting live hogs, over the dam. With its square end, the boat had become jammed, wit
h the stern in the water and the bow in the air. More and more of the cargo was slowly but surely shifting toward that stern.
The boat’s pilot, a gangling fellow in blue-jean trousers, with black hair tucked under a buckeye-chip hat, was eye catching because of his tall, angular stature. As he directed his crew’s efforts, they borrowed a smaller boat in order to transfer some of the goods to lighten the load. Shortly the stranger strode ashore and walked to the cooper shop, owned by Henry Onstot, to borrow an auger. Returning to the water, the boatman bored a hole in the end of the flatboat in order to let some of the water run out. He quickly plugged the hole, and with the boat thus lightened, they were able to pass over the mill dam.
Before departing, the crew poled the flatboat over to the bank and came ashore amid the appreciative comments of the admiring crowd. Thus Abraham Lincoln and the community of New Salem first met each other.
LINCOLN DEPARTED NEW SALEM to pilot the flatboat to New Orleans. He had been engaged by Denton Offutt, an enterprising if sometimes impractical businessman, to head up the voyage down the Mississippi River. Lincoln recruited John D. Johnston, his stepbrother, and John Hanks, his cousin, to join him on the trip.
Lincoln’s journey to New Orleans in 1831, unlike his voyage from Indiana three years before, took place without major incident. Once in New Orleans, Lincoln sold the cargo as well as the boat. He then sailed up the Mississippi by steamboat to St. Louis. From St. Louis, he walked to Coles County in southern Illinois to visit his father and stepmother, who had moved there from their first home near Decatur. From there Lincoln walked nearly 180 miles to New Salem, arriving in July, about to break with the past and enter a decisive new chapter in his life. Offutt, taken with the resourceful spirit of the young Lincoln, had offered him a job in a grocery store he intended to start up.
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