A storm in the night was the means of getting Abe his first book. Josiah Crawford, a new settler, had a small library; while Abe worked for him, helping to build a house and to dig a well, he allowed Abe to borrow books. The evening Abe took home Ramsay’s Life of Washington he read late, and then sleepily tucked the book into a chink between the logs by his bed. A rain blew up and soaked the book; Abe was dismayed when he saw its condition in the morning. Crawford would be furious—and rightly so. Abe took it to his employer immediately. The pages could be dried for reading, but the beauty of the volume was gone.
“Don’t bring such a book to me!” Crawford shouted angrily. “You pull fodder in my cornfield for two days and keep the thing. I never want to see it again.”
Abe pulled Crawford’s fodder, and he was glad to own a book—but it was a long, long time before he had any pleasure in that one.
This reading, the friends he made, and the talk he heard gradually developed Abe Lincoln into a friendly youth who enjoyed new people, mastered good books, and could think on his feet. The years of his teens went by with nothing dramatic to mark them—yet he was growing steadily, as a tree grows season after season. Then in 1825 a new job was offered him, a job that brought him to the Ohio River.
Abe Lincoln was sixteen when James Taylor hired him to work on a farm by Posey’s Landing. Taylor had a farm and a “Bank Store” on the riverbank where Anderson’s Creek joined the Ohio River. Farmers and rivermen were his customers. When the job at Taylor’s ended, Abe worked for other farmers, and then helped Taylor on his flatboat. They poled up and down the river collecting produce to sell. Abe liked this work; the steamboats, flatboats, and rafts filled with travelers fascinated him, and he earned six dollars a month.
In the summer of 1827, Abe built a scow for himself and did errands along the Indiana side of the Ohio. Sometimes he ferried travelers across Anderson’s Creek when the water was high at the ford. He did not go across the Ohio because the Dill brothers, on the Kentucky side, had a ferry license for that work. His scow brought him many new experiences and the pleasure of meeting travelers.
One morning a stranger yelled at Abe when he was poling near the landing.
“Hi, you! See that steamboat comin’? Take me out to ketch ’er!” The man had stepped out on a great log and was waving his bandanna at the boat coming around the bend.
Abe saw that the Dills’ ferry was tied up on the Kentucky bank; the steamboat was coming fast; and the captain signaled that he would stop in midstream, but would not turn to shore. “What ye waitin’ fer?” the traveler complained. “I’ll pay ye!”
Abe poled near. The man and his companion tossed bags aboard, and Abe put them on the steamboat.
“Here’s yer pay!” As the paddles began to turn, the travelers tossed Abe two silver half-dollars.
Abe fingered the coins incredulously. A dollar! Three days of hog butchering would not earn that sum! After that he hung around the landing and made more money this way.
Alas! Unknown to Abe, the Dill brothers plotted to end his good fortune. They met Abe in mid river and pretended to be in trouble.
“Follow me, will ye, Abe?” John Dill begged. “I hain’t sure I kin make it home.” Abe followed them across; but the minute he was on land, John’s brother leaped on him and accused him of stealing their trade. Abe made a quick thrust that knocked the man off and made the brothers change their minds about fighting him.
“We don’t aim to fight,” John said hastily. “In Kentuck’ we go by the law. You come with us to Squire Pate, and he’ll fix you.”
Abe was willing; he didn’t like a fight even when he won. They went to the squire’s cabin nearby and the Dills swore out a warrant for Abe’s arrest.
“Ready for the case, boys?” the squire asked. “Hain’t much use waitin’.”
They were ready. John Dill testified that he and his brother had the ferry license, but Abe Lincoln took passengers to board steamboats.
“The Kentucky line is ‘low water’ by the Indiana shore,” Dill added.
The squire nodded. “Now state yer case,” he told Abe. “They tell the truth,” Abe granted. “But James Taylor says their license is to carry folks across. I only went to the middle of the river. I don’t think I broke a law. Anyway, Squire, captains won’t wait till a boat comes across to pick ’em up, and travelers hate to miss a boat.”
“We’ll see what the law says.” Squire Pate took a book from his shelf, and as he turned pages the Dills observed that he was impressed with Abe’s argument. “The law is plain,” the squire announced. “You Dills have the right ‘to set a person across,’ but the law does not keep an unlicensed boatman from rowing passengers to midstream. The defendant is acquitted.”
After the disappointed Dills left, Abe Lincoln lingered to talk with Squire Pate. “It’s a wonder to me that you kin tell so quick what’s right,” he said.
“No wonder about it,” the squire replied. “That book is The Statutes of Kentucky. Every man ought to know the statutes of his own state—’twould save him trouble. You come agin, son. You’ll pick up a lot of law here. Might come handy some day fer you to know the law of the land.”
Abe thanked the squire and went to his boat. As he crossed over to Taylor’s those words, “the law of the land,” echoed in his mind. They had a familiar sound. He thought of his mammy and their comfortable cabin in Kentucky; it was nearly eleven years since they had crossed this river, nearly nine, since she had died.
“Mammy al’ays wanted me to git eddicated,” he remembered, and a plan shaped in his mind.
The next time he went to Turnham’s he borrowed The Revised Laws of Indiana—a book he had seen on the office shelf. When he had mastered that, he borrowed a law book from Attorney Pitcher at Rockport. And whenever he could, he crossed the river to attend Squire Pate’s monthly court.
But Abe said nothing at all of this at home. His father might not approve of his interest in Squire Pate and the law.
• CHAPTER SIX •
ABE’S HORIZON WIDENS
The law books and histories stirred Abe Lincoln’s interest in his country’s past and made him wonder what was happening now. Attorney Pitcher took the Louisville Journal, and William Jones—the storekeeper from Vincennes—subscribed for his home-town paper, the Western Sun. Abe read these newspapers and names in the news—Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Hayne, Webster—came alive to him and were not just words on a page.
Daniel Webster.
Most of his neighbors had been so busy with their own affairs that they rarely thought of the world beyond Pigeon Creek. But after they were settled, that gradually changed— though unfortunately few men could read enough to enjoy a newspaper. Men got into the habit of lingering at Jones’s store, where Abe Lincoln sold goods and then read the Sun aloud. Jones’s crossroads store was only one of hundreds of places where people were getting news in the late 1820s. Journeymen printers set up presses in towns in the Middle West. They printed bits of local news and long speeches brought to them by postrider or by boat. Discussions on subjects formerly argued only in Congress were carried on in a thousand corner stores.
During this same time, while he was still “hiring out,” Abe Lincoln walked hundreds of miles—to Gentry’s, to Jones’s, sixteen miles southeast to Taylor’s, eighteen miles southwest to Rockport, and to farms in between. His father seldom let him use a horse unless he was returning the same day. Somewhere Abe had picked up a sick dog—left, perhaps, by a family traveling west—and after he had nursed the mongrel back to health, the dog followed him devotedly. Otherwise Abe usually walked alone. But he found that walking went well with reading; it gave him time to think. Speeches needed “thinking over,” if a youth was to understand them. As he mulled over each one, Abe Lincoln discovered that four or five subjects were the most discussed—orators called these subjects “issues”; but really they were questions that American people were trying to decide.
Abe listened as men in the store had long discussi
ons about a national bank. Some thought it was better for each state to print its own money. They quarreled about the tariff—a tax on merchandise brought into the country. Some thought it was a good thing and some were against it.
But Abe’s neighbors did not argue about improving roads and building canals, because they knew that Indiana needed both. They didn’t care much who paid for the work just so it was done soon. They didn’t care, either, whether families moving west had to pay for land or could get it free; as for slavery, Indiana was a nonslave state. But Abe found many speeches on those matters, and knew people somewhere were thinking about each one.
In the summer of 1828 southern Indianans got excited about politics and the national election. Villages held rallies; speakers toured on horseback and talked to large groups. Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks were for Andrew Jackson. His war record, his humble Carolina birth, and his many fine qualities inspired followers. Pitcher and others Abe admired were for John Quincy Adams, the man Clay was working for. They called themselves “Whigs”—a word borrowed from England years earlier.
“Who you fer?” Abe was often asked. He grinned—and said nothing. He couldn’t vote yet, and he worked for many of the Jackson men—what good would it do to take sides?
Toward the end of the campaign Abe was offered work that would take him far from home. Mr. Gentry planned to sell his autumn produce in New Orleans and needed a helper for his son Allen, who was to take the trip.
“Get Abe Lincoln to go with me,” Allen begged his father. “He is strong and handy and we work well together.”
So Gentry offered Abe the work and he accepted. Allen and Abe were to build the flatboat at Gentry’s Landing below the bluff at Rockport, load the produce, and take it to New Orleans. Gentry agreed to pay eight dollars a month and his return passage by steamboat; so Thomas Lincoln was willing for Abe to go. The trip would be an adventure; it would be hard work and dangerous at times, too, for pirates often raided a well-stocked boat, snags and rapids made navigation hard, and thieves might sneak aboard at night. Abe knew that there was much more to a river trip than merely floating downstream!
A few weeks after Andrew Jackson was elected president in November, the boat was finished and loaded with corn, flour, potatoes, bacon, and hams. Townspeople came to the landing to wish the boys luck, and Allen’s wife (the Ann Roby of Abe’s spelling-match days) waved from the top of the bluff as their boat swung out into the current.
Traveling was lonesome, for there were few boats at this season; but the weather was good, and solitude had advantages. The pirates’ hideout at Cave-in-Rock seemed deserted when they passed it.
The last night of the voyage they tied up at a dock to get some sleep. The treacherous current of that day’s course had exhausted them. The night was dark, the place quiet, and they slept heavily.
A rough hand on his shoulder awakened Abe. His training through years of sleeping in the forest had taught him to waken instantly.
“Allen!” he yelled. “Allen! Watch out!” As he shouted, Abe twisted free and flung the intruder head over heels into the river. His long arms flailed around in the darkness; he caught two more thieves and tossed them into the water. By then, Allen was up and fighting. They grabbed clubs, which they kept handy, and chased four men to shore.
“We’ve got to push off,” Abe whispered, as he and Allen climbed back into the boat.
“In the dark?” Allen objected. “You know how the current is, Abe.”
“I know they’re likely to fetch a gang back with ’em,” Abe retorted, “and next time they wouldn’t count on us being asleep. They didn’t relish gittin’ licked—you saw that.”
Abe cast off and took the place at the wide sweep. Only then he noticed that he had a deep cut above his right ear. He bound it up the best he could, but he carried the scar all his life.
The next day they came to New Orleans, and Abe was free to explore the city while Allen traded the flatboat and its cargo for cotton, tobacco, and sugar which would be shipped to Rockport by steamboat. The city seemed to Abe like a place in The Arabian Nights. He stood before the cathedral with its tall spires, strolled on sidewalks above the mud, stared at gaily tinted houses and the balconies with their lacy wrought-iron grillwork. He smelled new fruits and the horrid stench of the slave market; heard a dozen new tongues—French, Spanish, Italian—and the songs of sailors on ships at the wharves. New Orleans was overwhelming; he was almost glad when it was time to leave. On the journey home he saw still more sights from the steamboat’s high deck—sights they had missed when the low flatboat floated south.
When at last he arrived home, Abe found that his father was disturbed and restless. John Hanks, the son of that carpenter, Joseph Hanks, who had taught Thomas his trade, had visited the Lincolns while Abe was away. John Hanks now lived in Illinois and had excited his host by tales of that state.
“John says they’s acres of land without trees in Illinois,” Thomas Lincoln told Abe. “He says a man needn’t chop down a forest to grow his bit of corn. Jest break the prairie grass an’ plant.” He looked at Abe wondering how the youth would take this news.
“I heard talk about prairie land on the steamboat,” Abe told his father.
“Maybe John’s tales were true!” Lincoln exclaimed incredulously.
“I’m glad you’re home, Abe,” Mrs. Lincoln said. “Your pappy is restless and talks of moving.”
“I’m sick of trees and no water handy,” Lincoln complained. But he did nothing about a move. Abe continued to work for hire through the summer of 1829.
In the autumn travelers brought rumors of “milk sickness.” All who remembered the epidemic of 1818 were frightened.
“That settles it,” Thomas Lincoln decided. “We’ll git out.” He called the family together and told them they were moving to Illinois.
His family was very different now from that of ten years before when the three Johnston and two Lincoln children had crowded their cabin. Death and marriages had altered the group. Elizabeth Johnston and Dennis’s Hanks had married and now had three children. Young Sarah Lincoln had married a neighbor and had died two years later. Matilda Johnston had married Levi Hall, a relative of Dennis’s and they had two children. John Johnston was a lad of fifteen, and Abe Lincoln a tall youth nearing twenty-one.
“Me an’ Elizabeth’ll go with ye,” Dennis said quickly. “It’ll give our children a better chanct.”
“Me an’ Tilly’ll go,” Levi Hall agreed. The young people had talked it over many an evening and had decided. Abe’s opinion wasn’t asked. He had to go with his father the same as a fourteen-year-old.
Thomas Lincoln sold his land to James Gentry and traded his stock for four oxen. Working together the men built two wagons big enough to carry all their household goods. The cabins were buzzing with activity all winter; Thomas Lincoln was like a new man, excited about starting over in a new place. Word was sent to John Hanks to select land with plenty of water.
Preparations were going well when on a January morning Abe went to Jones’s store to get some nails. He found that a copy of the Sun had come, and he read a speech Senator Hayne of South Carolina had made about the tariff and state’s rights. South Carolina planters were having a poor market for their cotton, and Hayne said that the tariff hurt their business. A state should have the right, he said, to manage its own affairs. South Carolina had threatened to leave the Union.
A few days later Abe read Daniel Webster’s brilliant reply to Hayne. Webster said that the power of the federal government was given to it by the states and all should support the Constitution. If any change was needed it should be done by law, not by threats of seceding that might lead to a civil war. Webster pleaded for unity and patience.
“You read that agin, Abe,” Jones said; so Abe reread the final paragraph:
While the Union lasts we have high prospects spread out before us, for us and for our children—liberty first and Union afterward (says Hayne)—I speak another sentiment dear to ev
ery American heart—Liberty AND Union, now and forever.
Men in the store approved those sentiments, and Abe walked home through the snow with the stirring words echoing in his head.
Soon after this, about the first of March, 1830, the Lincoln clan left Pigeon Creek for Illinois. The wagons were piled high with spinning wheels, chests, looms, blankets, chairs, frying pans, and scores of household things. Children and women rode; men walked ahead and took turns guiding the oxen. Abe’s dog trotted alongside him, and over his shoulder Abe carried a sack filled with needles, pins, and buttons which he hoped to sell along the way. (He had got these things from Jones in payment for doing chores.) When a cabin was sighted, Abe would run ahead and with his persuasive manner he usually sold something. He made a good profit on this first business venture.
Before they crossed the Wabash River at Vincennes, Abe saw the press that printed the Sun. He was entranced with the noise and rhythmic movement of the machine. It seemed like a miracle!
A few miles after Vincennes, floating ice in a creek jammed the wagon wheels; the boys had to wade in and heave to get them moving. When the wagon reached the bank, Abe turned to take his boots from Tilly and spied his dog whining on the far side.
“I told ye to keep my dog up top when we crossed,” he called to the children. “We have to go back, Pappy, an’ git my dog.”
“Go back? Not me!” Lincoln retorted. “What’s a dog? You come on!” The wagons continued west.
Abe looked despairingly at his dog. The water was ice-cold; his feet were numb. Yet that dog had such confidence Abe couldn’t disappoint him.
“Jest give me time, Old Fellow,” he said quietly. “I’m comin’!”
He dropped his boots, waded across, picked up the dog, and splashed back through the ice. The dog licked his face gratefully, and Abe grinned at him.
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