The Sandburg Treasury

by Carl Sandburg

  In the morning we marched to Yauco and on to Ponce, finding those towns surrendered. We camped in a wooded ravine two nights. After the first two or three hours of mosquito bites, sleeping in our underwear and barefoot, we put on our pants, wool shirts, and socks, for all of the moist heat. They were large, ravenous, pitiless mosquitoes. “They came with bugles sounding mess call,” said one man with a swollen face. I had one eye closed by the swellings around it. Some fellows had both eyes closed. On the second night I followed others in wrapping my rubber poncho around my head. After an hour I would wake with an aching head from foul air breathed over too many times. I would throw the poncho off, beat away the mosquitoes, wrap the poncho around my head again, then sleep till awakening with a headache—and repeat.

  On roads and streets as we marched were barefooted men and women smiling and calling to us “Puerto Rico Americano.” For four hundred years this island had been run by a Spanish government at Madrid. Now it was to be American and it was plain that the island common people liked the idea and had more hope of it. More than once we saw on the roadside a barefoot man wearing only pants, shirt, and hat, eating away at an ear of parched corn. We saw knee-high children wearing only a ragged shirt, and their little swollen bellies told of not enough food and not the right kind.

  We camped at Ponce a few days and then began a march up mountain roads. The August tropic heat was on. We carried cartridge belt, rifle, bayonet, blanket roll, half a canvas pup tent, haversack with rations, a coat. We still wore the heavy blue-wool pants of the ’65 Army of the Potomac and thick canvas leggings laced from ankles to knees. On one halt after another there were men tearing their blankets in two so as to lessen weight to carry. I tore a third of mine away. Some let the whole blanket go. Men fell out, worn-out, and there were sunstroke cases. It was an eight-mile march upgrade. We halted for the night on a slope above the road. We were sleeping and all was quiet about midnight. Suddenly came a shriek. Then a series of yells and shrieks and several companies of men were rushing headlong down the slope to the road. Men sleeping or just awakened were trampled and bruised. It was found that one of the bullocks hauling carts loaded with supplies and ammunition had got loose and hunting for grass had tramped on a sleeper who gave the first piercing shriek that was taken up by others. We went up the slope and back to our sleep calling it the “First Battle of Bull Run.”

  We camped on a slope on the edge of Adjuntas, where we saw the American flag run up. Cook Metcalf over a long afternoon had boiled a tinned beef we named “Red Horse.” For all the boiling it was stringy and tasteless. We set up our pup tents, laid our ponchos and blankets on the ground, and went to sleep in a slow drizzle of rain. About three o’clock in the morning there was a heavy downpour that kept up, and the downhill water soaked our blankets. We got out of our tents, wrung our blankets as dry as we could and threw them with ponchos over our shoulders. Then a thousand men stood around waiting for daylight and hoping the rain would let up. When daylight came Metcalf managed some hot pork and beans with coffee. Midmorning the sun came out and we dried and marched on to Utuado.

  There at Utuado came news, “The protocol has been signed and peace is declared and we are ordered back to Ponce.” Marching down the mountain roads we had climbed came easy along with rumors that we would take transports home from Ponce. We were lighthearted and cried, “Hurrah for the protocol!” It was a new funny word we liked. We slept a night in a building used for drying coffee. Each man fitted nicely into a dry bin enclosure rich with a coffee smell.

  At Ponce many of us weighed to see what we had sweated and groaned out. All but a half-dozen men had lost weight. The scales said my one hundred and fifty-two pounds in April had gone down to one hundred and thirty pounds in August. Many were gaunt and thin, with a slightly yellow tint on the skin. Uniforms were fading, here and there ragged and torn. Hats had holes in them.

  Our transport with the whole Sixth Illinois sailed for New York. We were divided into messes of eight men for rations. A tin of “Red Horse” would be handed to one man who opened it. He would put it to his nose, smell of it, wrinkle up his face, and take a spit. The next man would do the same, and the next till the eight men of the mess had smelled, grimaced, and spit. Then that tin of “Red Horse” was thrown overboard for many of the fishes of the Atlantic Ocean who might like it. Somehow we got along on cold canned beans, occasional salmon, and the reliable hardtack. What we called “Red Horse” soon had all the country scandalized with its new name of “Embalmed Beef.”

  On the transport we went through a ceremonial we had gone through many times before. A circle of men might be sitting on deck talking and jollying when one would call out “Shirts off! Time for inspection!” Then each man would run his eyes over all parts of the shirt, especially the seams, pick off the gray backs and crush them. Underwear and pants were more of a problem. In camp we boiled them occasionally when there was time and a big kettle of water.

  When Richard Harding Davis wrote that for the troops under General Miles “Porto Rico was a picnic” he was remembering he had lived with the high commanding officers. When he wrote, “In comparison to the Santiago nightmare, the Porto Rican expedition was a fête des fleurs,” he was writing sober and awful historical fact. But only by comparison with that nightmare of blood, fever, and blunders was our campaign a feast of flowers. Mud and mosquitoes are not roses and poinsettias. Nor is sleeping in rain and marching in a baking sun carrying fifty pounds a feast. Few are the picnics where they eat from baskets holding canned beans, hardtack, and “Red Horse” and then take off their shirts and pluck out “seam squirrels.” The war, though a small one, was the first in which the United States sent troops on ocean transports to fight on foreign soil and acquire island possessions. It was a small war edging toward immense consequences.

  We sailed into the port of New York at night, docked at Weehawken, and in the morning saw a small crowd waving at us. On the dock I bought a loaf of white bread for a nickel and a quart of milk for another nickel. As I ate that bread and milk I felt that I had been an animal and was now a human being—it was so clean, tasty, delicious. We were in the newspapers, and as we roamed around New York City, men and women stopped us to ask where we had been, some to ask if we had news of regiments their boys were in, others to ask what we might want in the way of food or drink. People saw we looked lean, somewhat faded and ragged, tanned by sun and sea, hard-bitten by circumstance and insects. There was hospitality that made us feel good about the country. They acted like we were heroes. We had our doubts about that but we did know we could use more fresh victuals and boiling hot water with strong soap. At moments you just had to reach in to scratch at an armpit.

  Again in a train of coaches with wicker seats we rode and slept, reached Springfield, Illinois, and camped there while our muster-out papers were arranged. When our train pulled into the Burlington station at Galesburg on September twenty-first we had been gone only five months but we looked like we had been somewhere. The station platform swarmed with a crowd that overran Seminary Street for a block to the north, and from there on to Main Street the sidewalks were thick with people. I caught my mother’s face and others of the family laughing and waving their hands high. We made a company formation and marched to the Company C drill hall.

  I went that evening with Mary to a farmhouse near Dahinda where she was teaching a country school. They put me in a room with a four-poster feather bed, and I sank into the feathers for a sleep. I tossed around a half-hour, then got out of the bed and in thirty seconds went to sleep on the rag carpet on the floor.

  The next day I went home. Mart said, “Well, you didn’t get killed, did you?” “No, they didn’t give me a chance.” “What did you learn?” Mart went on. “I learnt more than I can use.” “Well,” said Mart, “last year you were a hobo and this year a soldier. What’s next with you?” “Maybe I’ll go to college.” “College! That’ll be something!”

  My father gave me a rich smile and handshake that wilted me.
He said he stayed on the job the day before and when shopmen asked why he didn’t take the day off, he said. “I will see my boy at home and he will tell me everything.” Mother said it had been a big summer for him, with the shopmen and neighbors often asking, “How’s the boy, Gus?” or, “Company C is getting a long ways from home, Gus. We hope your boy comes through all right.” Mart told me such talk hit our Old Man deep and it seemed that now he was sure he was an Americanized citizen. I gave him fifty dollars of my muster-out money, which came to one hundred and three dollars and seventy-three cents in all.

  We were in the newspapers that week. The Army and Navy League gave us a banquet at the Universalist Church and the Ladies’ Society of the First Presbyterian Church another big dinner. The biggest affair was an oyster supper in the basement of the First Methodist Church where ex-Mayor Forrest F. Cooke, Congressman George W. Prince, and the Reverend W. H. Geistweit spoke. President Finley of Knox read a poem about our exploits—a freegoing poem with nice touches of humor, and a printed copy of it in a little book with red covers was presented to each member of Company C.

  In nearly every life come sudden little events not expected that change its course. Two such events came for me. Private George R. Longbrake of Company C, whose back yard on Brooks Street touched our back yard on Berrien, had spoken to me on the transport about my going to Lombard, now a university, where he had been a student for a year. He asked whether I would enter if, as he believed, they would give me free tuition for a year. I said yes. So after all the cheering and the church banquets were over, he came to me to say the arrangement had been cheerfully made at Lombard. Private Lewis W. Kay, one of the two Lombard students in Company C, had died of fever about the time of our muster-out.

  Then came Wiz Brown saying there was a fire-department job vacant. The department had two “call men” who slept at the fire house at night and reported by telephone in the daytime if the fire whistle blew. If it was a big fire they bicycled to it as fast as their pedals would take them. A call man was paid ten dollars a month. “That’s nice money, Cully, and I’m sure if I speak to Mayor Carney he’ll appoint you,” said Wiz. He appointed me. I bought a bicycle and a blue shirt with two rows of pearl buttons of silver-dollar size and a big collar that buttoned far down the chest. I began sleeping on the second floor of the Prairie Street fire house. We were sixteen men sleeping in one room. Alongside each iron frame bed was a pair of rubber boots with pants and when the alarm bell rang we stepped out of bed, pulled up the pants, ran to slide down a brass pole and hop on the chemical wagon or the hose cart. Chief Jim O’Brien gave me a glad hand and said, “Considering where you’ve been, Charlie, I think you’ll make a good fireman.”

  I enrolled at Lombard for classes in Latin, English, inorganic chemistry, elocution, drama, and public speaking. They had an “elective system,” and that was what I elected. In a few days I would report at eight o’clock in the morning for a class in Latin under Professor Jon W. Grubb. Years back I had seen him milk a cow and drive her to pasture. I thought it would be interesting to study Caesar’s Commentaries with a professor who could wear overalls and milk a cow. I would have to leave class when the fire whistle blew but that wasn’t often enough to bother either the class or the professor.

  I was going to get an education. I remembered Lottie Goldquist saying you could never get enough of it.

  Abe Lincoln Grows Up

  Chapter I

  IN THE YEAR 1776, when the thirteen American colonies of England gave to the world that famous piece of paper known as the Declaration of Independence, there was a captain of Virginia militia living in Rockingham County, named Abraham Lincoln.

  He was a farmer with a 210-acre farm deeded to him by his father, John Lincoln, one of the many English, Scotch, Irish, German, Dutch settlers who were taking the green hills and slopes of the Shenandoah Valley and putting their plows to ground never touched with farming tools by the red men, the Indians, who had held it for thousands of years.

  The work of driving out the red men so that the white men could farm in peace was not yet finished. In the summer of that same year of 1776, Captain Abraham Lincoln’s company took a hand in marches and fights against the Cherokee tribes.

  It was a time of much fighting. To the south and west were the red men. To the north and east were white men, the regiments of British soldiers, and Virginia was sending young men and corn and pork to the colonial soldiers under General George Washington. Amos Lincoln, a kinsman of Abraham, up in Massachusetts, was one of the white men who, the story ran, rigged out as Indians, went on board a British ship and dumped a cargo of tea overboard to show their disobedience, contempt, and defiance of British laws and government; later Amos was a captain of artillery in the colonial army.

  There was a Hananiah Lincoln who fought at Brandywine under Washington and became a captain in the Twelfth Pennsylvania regiment; and Hananiah was a first cousin of Abraham. Jacob Lincoln, a brother of Abraham, was at Yorktown, a captain under Washington at the finish of the Revolutionary War. These Lincolns in Virginia came from Berks County in Pennsylvania.

  Though they were fighting men, there was a strain of Quaker blood running in them; they came in part from people who wore black clothes only, used the word “thee” instead of “you,” kept silence or spoke “as the spirit of the heart moved,” and held war to be a curse from hell; they were a serene, peaceable, obstinate people.

  Now Abraham Lincoln had taken for a wife a woman named Bathsheba Herring. And she bore him three sons there amid the green hills and slopes of the Shenandoah Valley, and they were named Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas. And she bore two daughters, named Mary and Nancy.

  This family of a wife and five children Abraham Lincoln took on horses in the year 1782 and moved to Kentucky. For years his friend, Daniel Boone, had been coming back from trips to Kentucky, sometimes robbed of all his deerskins and bearskins and furs of fox and mink, sometimes alone and without the lusty young bucks who had started with him for Kentucky. And listening to Boone’s telling of how the valleys were rich with long slopes of black land and blue grass, how there were game and fish, and tall timber and clear running waters—and seeing the road near his farm so often filled with parties of men and families headed for the wilderness beyond the mountains—he began thinking about taking up land for himself over there. It was his for forty cents an acre. He wanted to be where he could look from his cabin to the horizons on all sides—and the land all his own—was that it? He didn’t know. It called to him, that country Boone was talking about.

  Boone and his friends had worn a trail following an old buffalo path down the Shenandoah Valley to Lexington and around to Cumberland Gap in Tennessee, then northwest into Kentucky. It had become more than a trail, and was called the Wilderness Road. It was the safest way to Kentucky because the British and the Indians still had a hold on the Ohio River water route, the only other way to reach Kentucky.

  Moving to Kentucky had been in Abraham Lincoln’s thoughts for some time, but he didn’t finally decide to go until the state of Virginia started a land office and made new laws to help straighten out tangled land-titles in Kentucky.

  While Bathsheba was still carrying in her arms the baby, Thomas, it happened that Abraham Lincoln sold his farm, and in accordance with the laws of Virginia she signed papers giving up her rights to her husband’s land, declaring in writing on the 24th day of September, 1781, that “she freely and voluntarily relinquished the same without the Force threats or compulsion of her husband.” Then they packed their belongings, especially the rifle, the ax, and the plow, and joined a party which headed down the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap and up north and west into Kentucky.

  Abraham and Bathsheba (or Batsab) Lincoln sign their names to a deed in the courthouse of Rockingham County, Virginia

  Tall mountains loomed about them with long blue shadows at sunup and sundown as they traveled, camped, broke camp, and traveled again. And as they watched the mountains they slanted their kee
nest eyes on any moving patch of shrub or tree—the red men who ambushed enemies might be there.

  There had been papers signed, and the land by law belonged to the white men, but the red men couldn’t understand or didn’t wish to understand how the land was gone from them to the white men. Besides, the red men had been fighting among themselves for favorite hunting grounds and fishing waters; there had been hundreds of years of fighting; now they were fighting white men by the same weapons, ways, and ambushes as they fought red men. And so, though the scenery was good to look at, the white men traveling the Wilderness Road kept a keen eye on the underbrush and had scouts ahead at the turn of the road and scouts behind.

  Some towns and villages then were paying a dollar to two dollars a piece for Indian scalps.

  Coming through safe to Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln located on the Green River, where he filed claims for more than two thousand acres. He had been there three or four years when, one day as he was working in a field, the rifle shot of an Indian killed him. His children and his children’s children scattered across Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and Illinois.

  Tom Lincoln, the child of Abraham and Bathsheba, while growing up, lived in different places in Kentucky, sometimes with his kith and kin, sometimes hiring out to farmers, mostly in Washington County, and somehow betweenwhiles managing to learn the carpenter’s trade and cabinet-making. He bought a horse—and paid taxes on it. He put in a year on the farm of his uncle, Isaac Lincoln, on the Wautauga River in East Tennessee. He moved to Hardin County in Kentucky while still a young bachelor, and bought a farm on Mill Creek, paid taxes on the farm, kept out of debt, and once bought a pair of silk suspenders for a dollar and a half at a time when most men were using homemade hickory-bark galluses.