In the spring they were joined by two young men, relatives of Nancy Hanks. A new and more sturdily built cabin was begun with their help. Work on it progressed slowly, so slowly that it was not quite finished when winter was upon them again. Nancy Hanks’ aunt and uncle, Betsy and Thomas Sparrow, came to join them. The newcomers took over the half-faced cabin, while the Lincoln family moved into their unfinished dwelling to spend another winter in hardship and cold.
During the autumn of the next year (1818) a terrifying epidemic swept through the woods. “Milk sickness,” the pioneer people called it, although most of them had no milk or any way to get it. It carried off Betsy and Thomas Sparrow. They were buried on a little hill not far from the cabin. Thomas Lincoln made their coffins, cutting out boards from a tree with a whipsaw and putting them together with wooden pegs. He had hardly finished burying these two when his own wife fell sick. She lingered for seven days, and then, early in October, just as the woods were turning into the autumnal colors that heralded the approach of another winter, she died. Another coffin was cut from the living wood of the forest. The nine-year-old boy and his sister followed the sledge carrying their mother’s body to the hill that had become a wilderness graveyard. It was months before an itinerant preacher came to conduct a funeral service over the lonely graves. The living had another winter to face, and again they managed somehow to survive it.
During that winter the son and the daughter of Nancy Hanks went to a schoolhouse which had been opened in the neighborhood. People were settling in the new country, and schools and churches were beginning to arise in the woodland. Life at the Lincoln home, however, became even more haphazard than it had been before. There was no woman in the house to keep order, to prepare food and take charge of the growing children. Thomas Lincoln endured this for a year; then, in November, 1819, he went back to the Kentucky hills to find himself a wife. Before he had married Nancy Hanks, he had courted—and been rejected by—a good-natured Elizabethtown woman named Sarah Bush. She had married meanwhile, but her husband had died. Thomas went to see the widow to try his luck again. This time she listened more favorably to his story, moved perhaps by the plight of his children, for she had three of her own. She promptly consented to become his wife; they were married the next day, December 2, 1819.
Thomas Lincoln returned to Indiana with his second bride, her children and a wagonload of household goods. His new wife probably received a rude shock when she saw the cabin and its squalid surroundings, but she was inclined to make the best of everything, and she quickly brought order and management to Thomas Lincoln’s home. His children were fortunate in their father’s choice of a wife, for she was a kind and sensible person who took the two motherless children to her heart and raised them as her own. Abraham became her favorite. He was bright—far brighter than her own children—and he turned to her for the affection that he had not had since his own mother’s death.
The household things Sarah Bush had brought from Kentucky added some comfort to the sparsely furnished home. The men in the family were persuaded to finish building and flooring the cabin. The children were taken in hand, cleaned, dressed and disciplined. Existence in that Indiana wilderness was never to become easy for the Lincolns, but Sarah Bush Lincoln raised their standards of living and made things easier for them. She did her best, tried to make the men work, tried to cope with odds that would have been overwhelming to anyone not possessed of her calm good nature and indefatigable energy. Lincoln never forgot his substitute mother. He watched out for her interests when he became a lawyer. When he was elected President, one of his last acts in Illinois was to travel across the state by train and carriage to pay a visit to the woman who had raised him as if he had been her own son.
The Indiana years were the years of Lincoln’s growth to adolescence and manhood. In Indiana he acquired an elementary knowledge of reading, writing and ciphering. This was all that schools ever taught him; his entire contact with formal education lasted for less than a year. Yet there was in him a passion for knowledge that was never to cease throughout his life. There are many accounts of his attempts to learn, of his borrowing books to read, of his efforts to work out problems on the back of a wooden shovel which he then shaved clean so he could use it again. And the young Lincoln had not only to learn about words and figures, he also had to prepare himself for the lot in life that a son of Thomas Lincoln must expect. He became expert with the ax. He worked in the fields and took farm products to the mill. His father hired him out to work for others. Manual labor was all that he could look forward to, for his father was incapable of imagining any other career for him. The son, however, did not take to the kind of life he had inherited. He worked hard with his hands but he never liked such labor; he was more interested in words and ideas.
During this period of his life, Lincoln seems to have been a simple, good-humored farm boy, noted for his kindness, his readiness to oblige others and his love for talking and listening to talk. He lacked the hardness that is so often characteristic of youths raised in such an environment and he sought to better himself and to learn—otherwise there was not much to set him off from thousands of other lads in the new country beyond the Alleghanies. No one seems to have noticed in him at this time any of the moodiness that was to mark his later years. One thing happened to him during this period, though, that may have had some influence upon his development. It was an absurd incident, almost farcical in its occurrence, yet it may have had far-reaching physical and mental effects.
He had to take his father’s grain to the local mill to be ground, riding there on the family’s mare with the grain tied in bags to the saddle. The mare was then hitched to a long pole and driven around in a circle to turn the mill that slowly ground out flour or meal. On one occasion the boy drove the animal too fast; she rebelled and lashed out with her hoofs, striking him on the forehead and knocking him senseless. The head injury may have been more serious than was suspected at the time. At any rate, the youth who had hitherto been so cheerful and casual grew up to be a man whose major characteristic was melancholy—a melancholy far greater than even the harsh and disappointing circumstances of his early life warranted.
The Indiana years passed slowly as the boy grew into manhood. His sister married and died in giving birth to her first child, leaving Lincoln alone among his foster-family. In the spring of 1828, he went on a flatboat voyage down the Mississippi to New Orleans, which was the first city he saw and the only one he was to see for many years.
THE LINCOLN FAMILY MOVES TO ILLINOIS
Gradually the land became more settled, but Thomas Lincoln did not prosper as the community grew larger. Finally, in February, 1830, dominated by the restless urge that carried America across a continent, he decided to move on again into new territory. All the household goods were once more loaded into a wagon; the Lincolns and their relatives set out for Illinois, where there were prairies instead of forests and rich black soil to be had for the asking instead of the stubborn wooded acres of southern Indiana that could be subdued only by back-breaking toil.
They traveled on into new country, crossing ice-laden streams where there were no bridges and where even the fords were uncertain and treacherous. Early in March, they reached a spot on a bluff above the Sangamon River, not far from Decatur, Illinois. Here a new cabin was built; fifteen acres of soil were put into cultivation; and everyone hoped that this was to be the place where the family would at last be able to make a good living. This was Lincoln’s first sight of the Sangamon River. It was to become an integral part of his life; its lazy winding course runs through the years to come like a muddy brown thread, tying up all the events that were to lead him to fame and glory.
The first winter the settlers spent in their new location was a terrible one—one of the worst in the annals of Illinois. Snow fell until it lay four feet deep on the level prairies; it drifted into piles fifteen feet high along the hill rises and filled up the wooded ravines. All the land was covered under a thick blanket that
brought starvation and death to animals and men.
Again the Lincoln clan must have slept through most of the winter, buried away and completely isolated under the white snow. Food was reduced to the slenderest rations. Only sleep could make the miserable people in the cabin keep down the hunger that could not be satisfied. Again they managed somehow to survive. Spring came, causing great floods to rise from the melting snow. Brooks and rivers ran high, sweeping over the land, tearing out trees and bushes, washing off the topsoil into the watercourses to be carried away to the sea.
The experience that Lincoln and his cousin, John Hanks, had gained on their flatboat journey three years before obtained them employment now. An enterprising promoter, Denton Offut, hired them to pilot a boat to New Orleans. They went down the Sangamon in a canoe, taking with them one of Sarah Bush’s boys. They landed near the newly established town of Springfield, and walked there to find Offut. This was Lincoln’s first entry into the place he was so long to be associated with. It was then only a small town, built among the great trees of a grove on the prairie. It was four miles from the river, far from any central point of communication, and there was no reason then to believe that it would ever amount to more than any one of a hundred other prairie villages that were springing up all over the state.
Offut had not been able to purchase a boat. His crew had to build one for the journey, felling trees by the riverbank, sawing them out and pinning them together to make a craft eighty feet long, sturdy enough to stand the voyage through hundreds of miles of inland waterways. In six weeks they finished it and were ready to start on their journey. They loaded Denton Offut’s merchandise on board and pushed off down the Sangamon. About twenty miles from Springfield, where the river bends around in a curve below a hill, a new grist- and sawmill had just been built. Above it, on the hill, was a recently settled village which had hopefully been named New Salem. The flatboat’s progress was stopped by the milldam that spanned the river here.
Lincoln’s ingenuity was brought into play. He had the merchandise removed; bored a hole in the bottom of the boat; let the water run in; then the back of the boat was lifted; the water ran to the front, weighting it down and thus permitting the boat to be pushed over the dam. This feat served Lincoln as a favorable introduction to the village in which he was to spend his next few years. For the time being, however, he proceeded down the river with the flatboat which made its way toward the Mississippi and eventually to New Orleans.
These two visits to New Orleans were Lincoln’s only first-hand contacts with slavery. He had been a child when he was in the slave state of Kentucky; Indiana and Illinois were free states. In New Orleans he saw one of the most important slave markets in the country. John Hanks said that the sight of a young mulatto girl on the auction block horrified Lincoln and made him resolve that if he could he would “hit slavery and hit it hard.”
The little party returned to St. Louis by steamer; Lincoln walked across country from there to rejoin his family at Decatur, but he returned only to bid his folks farewell. He was twenty-two now and he had a job. Denton Offut had promised to hire him to help run a store that he was going to start in New Salem.
In July, 1831, Lincoln arrived on the crescent-shaped hill above the river where the fifteen straggling cabins that made up New Salem stood. Life there was almost as primitive as it had been in Indiana, but it was the sort of life to which Lincoln was accustomed. He had never known any other. He fitted into the village immediately, making himself known by his stories and his cheerful willingness to do favors for people. Offut was late in arriving, but by the time he came, his employee had made friends with everyone in the place. The two men built a log shelter on the hilltop just above the mill. They stocked it with general merchandise and opened it for business, but conversation and human contacts were their chief profit from the venture. Lincoln learned a great deal about people but very little about business. Through his great physical strength and courage he endeared himself even to the roughest element in the section. His wrestling match with Jack Armstrong, the leader of the Clary’s Grove boys, has become classic. He met all kinds of people and he was able to hold his own among them, either by his physical prowess or by his growing intellectual ability.
Even while he was a boy in Indiana, Lincoln had been attracted to the law as a profession. In New Salem he had plenty of time on his hands. He began his study of the law, and in addition read everything else he could get. In Indiana he had read the Bible, Aesop’s Fables, Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and Weems’ Life of George Washington. Now he read Shakespeare and Burns and studied English grammar. Mentor Graham, the local teacher, took him in charge and gave him private lessons.
Business at Offut’s store went from bad to worse. There was very little trade to be had in the tiny community, and the store soon went under. Offut moved on to try his hand at other enterprises; Lincoln was left without a job. Instead of trying to find manual work—the only kind for which he had been trained—he was seized by a new ambition; he determined to run for the State Legislature.
He was only twenty-three at this time (1832) and he had never done anything that would indicate to the public his fitness for the office he sought. But he was exceedingly popular in his community, and no one could object to the platform he announced for himself. He came out for internal improvements, for better roads, canals, navigable streams and even a railroad—although he admitted that it was difficult to see how one could be financed. He stood for education, too, and better laws. Everything was carefully calculated to please everybody and antagonize no one. Everything was expressed in general terms with no hard and fast promises that might be difficult to keep. Lincoln showed his political ability early.
His lack of training for public office at this period of his life seems startling to us in an age in which education is taken for granted. He knew nothing about history or politics except what he had picked up himself in his own reading; his knowledge of law was very sketchy; economics, finance and business were unknown subjects to him; except for the few days he had spent in New Orleans, he had never seen a city or a factory or, in all probability, even one of the railroads about which he spoke so glibly in his platform speech. Yet his ignorance was no greater than that of most of the men around him, and unlike them he was willing to learn. Men were elected to public office in those days because they had many friends who could support their ticket, or because they could wield some power through organizations they controlled. Their ability to rule or administer was not questioned.
The boy candidate started his campaign for election to the State Legislature. He canvassed the people, spoke to them in person wherever he could and hopefully awaited the results of the election.
Before it could be held, war broke out—a miniature war as history records it, but it loomed large in the minds of the people in Illinois in those pioneer days. An Indian chief, Black Hawk, led his warriors back into the state to recover land that had been taken from his tribe some thirty years before. Lincoln immediately enlisted in a militia troop. He was made captain of his company for thirty days, and he kept chasing Indians for three months, never coming into actual conflict with any of them, and not even seeing a live one, except once, when an old drunken warrior stumbled into camp and had to be saved by Lincoln from molestation.
In July, the young candidate was mustered out of service.1 He went on quietly with his political campaign but he lost the election. The people of New Salem voted for him in an almost solid block, but he was still too new and unknown in Sangamon County to have made enough friends to elect him. He often proudly said that this was the only public office he ever failed to win by a direct vote of the people.
Having been unsuccessful at politics, Lincoln tried his hand at trade again. He had an opportunity to acquire an interest in a general store in New Salem without putting up any cash. In partnership with one William Berry he started out hopefully in his own business. Berry promptly drank himself to death, leaving Lincoln s
addled with an $1100 debt that took fifteen years to liquidate. Economically this was the lowest point in his life. He worked in the fields, split rails, did anything to earn his keep. His friends—who were always loyal—pulled wires to get him the postmastership of New Salem, and on May 7, 1833, he assumed his first position as an employee of the United States Government. At this time he taught himself surveying, and in six weeks mastered the rudiments of the science well enough to make actual surveys.
He succeeded in getting himself appointed deputy surveyor. In addition to this he continued his general reading, going through Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Rollins’ Ancient History; he also kept up his study of law, reading Blackstone’s Commentaries and the Revised Laws of Illinois. Since there was no attorney available in New Salem he was permitted to plead minor cases before the local justice of the peace, Bowling Green, who was one of his best friends.
Although Lincoln’s earliest political inclinations were toward the Whig party—he always idolized Henry Clay—his first chance for political advancement came from the Democrats. He was invited by them to run again for the Legislature as joint candidate. He consulted with his Whig friends, was advised to accept the offer, and was elected on August 4, 1834, as Representative to the General Assembly of the State of Illinois.
Through all this New Salem period there runs a note of freshness, of aspiring youth. This was the springtime of Lincoln’s career, and despite the financial setbacks and the political disappointments, it was the one period of real happiness that his troubled life was to have. The idyllic forest groves and rolling hills of the New Salem country formed a fitting background to it. The village itself was very new and crude, but everyone in it felt sure that it would become an important place. There was hope and vitality in the air, potential wealth in the soil and beauty in the wide horizon of fields and trees. It was in New Salem that Lincoln first experienced the love of woman. Here he met and wooed Ann Rutledge, the now almost legendary girl who has become the center of so much dispute and acrimony. Nearly everything we know about her has come to us through William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer. Herndon first announced the Lincoln-Rutledge love affair to the world in a lecture in 1866. The story, as Herndon gives it, is a very simple one, a tale that could have been told about many young couples in pioneer settlements.
The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln Page 4