Lincoln Unbound

by Rich Lowry

  During the trip, Offutt grew quite enamored with Lincoln, who cleverly saved the boat when it got hung up on the mill dam at New Salem, Illinois, on the Sangamon River. He enthused that “Lincoln can do any thing. I really believe he could take the flat-­boat back again up the river.” As Lincoln remembered it, Offutt “conceved a liking for A. and believing he could turn him to account, he contracted him to act as a clerk for him.” Lincoln worked in the store Offutt opened in the promising village of New Salem.

  ­People moved into Illinois starting in the south, and at the time of its establishment two years prior to Lincoln’s arrival, New Salem didn’t have many appreciable settlements to its north. Perched on a bluff above the Sangamon, it began with the typical nucleus of a pioneer village—­a mill, a store, and a saloon—­and catered to the commercial needs of farmers in the vicinity. It had a tiny population consisting of a ­couple of dozen families, including a large contingent who were, like Lincoln, originally from Kentucky. Its structures were mostly one-­story high, one-­ or two-­room log houses. After social gatherings at night, hosts and guests might all bed down to sleep on the floor together.

  A major urban center compared to his former homes, New Salem constituted a perfect launching pad for Lincoln. “Like Westerners in general,” historian Benjamin Thomas writes, “the ­people of New Salem were young, enthusiastic, self-­reliant, willing to take a chance. Equality of opportunity was in large degree a fact, and courage, endurance, and ingenuity were the requisites of success.” Conscientious and courteous, Lincoln impressed ­people and won friends at Offutt’s (short-­lived) store. He had two qualities that served him well in this coarse, male-­dominated world. Big, strong, and athletic, he had the physical prowess on which labor and manly prestige depended. And he could make men laugh.

  He had always been an unusual physical specimen. His father had said, as only a carpenter could, that he “looked as if he’d been chopped out with an axe an’ needed a jack-­plane tuk to him.” At six feet four, 180 pounds as a grown man, Lincoln excelled in the competitions that were a running strongman contest on the frontier. He could outrun, outjump, and outlift his peers, or as Stephen Douglas put it in his first debate with Lincoln in 1858, “he could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper.”

  Lincoln brought an irresistible sense of humor to gatherings of men. He had a limitless supply of stories, some so ribald—­or “on the vulger order,” as an old listener put it—­that friends hesitated to repeat them for posterity’s sake after he had achieved greatness. He could be an inspired practical joker. When he was the local postmaster, Lincoln was irked by an illiterate man named Johnson Elmore who repeatedly asked if he had any letters. Knowing that the man would take it to friends to read for him, Lincoln finally wrote a fake letter to Elmore from a black woman in Kentucky in a familiar tone that concluded, “Johns—­Come & see me and old master won’t Kick you out of the Kitchen any more.”

  Lincoln’s trustworthiness made him a natural umpire in the competitions that enlivened the community. He refereed the horse races, and a witness attests it was his disinterestedness in judging these contests that first earned him the sobriquet “Honest Abe.” According to one story, Lincoln was the judge of a cockfight involving a rooster of one Babb McNabb. When it came time for the match, McNabb’s rooster ran off and perched itself on a fence, where it displayed itself proudly. McNabb upbraided the bird: “Yes, you little cuss, you’re great on dress parade, but not worth a damn in a fight.” During the war, Lincoln compared the impressive-­looking but battle-­shy General McClellan to Babb McNabb’s rooster.

  “Lincoln had nothing only plenty of friends,” someone who knew him in New Salem recalled. Historian William Miller notes that once Lincoln set out on his own, “it is striking how rapidly his life opens out and heads upward. How easily the doors open for him. How few barriers there appear to be. How readily he finds sponsors, and supporters—­including persons in the upper ranks.” Lincoln himself wrote of New Salem, “Here he rapidly made acquaintances and friends.”

  Some of them convinced him to run for the state legislature in 1832. During this, his first race, he was just twenty-­three and had been away from home for a year. To go from rootless flatboat operator and store clerk to elected official—­even in the decidedly non-­august Illinois legislature—­represented a giant leap. Not everyone may have taken it seriously. One friend said of Lincoln’s promoters, “He was so uncouth and awkward, and so illy dressed, that his candidacy afforded a pleasant diversion for them, but it was not expected that it would go any further.”

  But Lincoln knew the Sangamon River, the artery on which the future of the town depended. Could it become a viable throughway, putting New Salem on the commercial map and providing easier access to textiles and farm implements from the east? Whether the river could be improved was as important, in mid-­nineteenth-­century terms, as whether an interstate highway would be built near­by with an exit at the town. As it stood, the Sangamon was a sorry and sinuous river fit only for flatboats. It had to be improved and become navigable for light-­draft steamboats if New Salem were to realize its potential. The Sangamon ­reputedly took 150 miles of river to cover forty-­five miles as the crow flies. Lincoln joked that he once headed downriver and ended up camped at exactly the same spot three straight nights.

  As an aspiring representative of the village’s interests, candidate Lincoln opposed a railroad project that would bypass the burg. He instead pumped for straightening and deepening the Sangamon. Early in 1832, he joined the men wielding long-­handled axes who helped chop the river clear for a steamboat to make its way up it past New Salem, to much fanfare. But then the river fell. Lincoln assisted on the boat during its desultory retreat. It struggled to make its way back downriver, its cabin raked by low-­hanging trees. The ballyhooed voyage, which had held out the prospect of freight arriving from St. Louis at a much diminished cost, ended in a fizzle.

  In a notice of his candidacy in the Sangamo Journal, Lincoln declared his support for education and “internal improvements” (or, in modern parlance, infrastructure). In other words, he wanted ­people better educated for a world beyond subsistence agriculture, and he wanted to aid the development of the connective tissue of transport and communication to hasten that world’s emergence. These are themes that would carry through Lincoln’s politics throughout the decades.

  “For my part,” he wrote, “I desire to see the time when ­education, and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry, shall become much more general than at present.” On improvements, he argued, “With respect to the county of Sangamo, some more easy means of communication than we now possess, for the purpose of facilitating the task of exporting the surplus products of its fertile soil, and importing necessary articles from abroad, are indispensably necessary.” And if he weren’t elected, well, “I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.”

  Even in this first campaign, we can see in rough outline what would become the trademark Lincoln formula: a high-­minded program of uplift and improvement (both personal and collective), presented with a winsome political touch.

  The emphasis on “more easy means of communication” was latent with revolutionary economic potential. The extension of modern transportation networks would take a sledgehammer to the subsistence economy of Lincoln’s youth. It would make it obsolete, impossible even. “Members of inland communities found it hard to resist the high-­quality manufactures that good roads, canals, and railroads made available at unprecedented low prices,” historian Bruce Levine writes. “But the extra money needed to buy such items compelled them to sell still more goods and increasingly to focus their efforts on raising crops that would command the highest price in distant markets.” In its remorseless logic, newly open markets drove specialization. They meant it no longer made sense for farmers even to grow all their own food, le
t alone make their own agricultural implements. The enmeshment of farmers “with commerce grew into a dependence upon the market and subordination to its rhythms.”

  Whatever the merits of his vision, Lincoln didn’t have much time to campaign. As Offutt’s store died (it was the kind of venture that might have benefited if New Salem had been better connected to St. Louis via the Sangamon), Lincoln joined the militia for the Black Hawk War. When his ser­vice ended uneventfully, he made his way back to New Salem by hook and crook after someone stole his horse the night before his departure. Out on the hustings, he cut quite the figure, as usual. “I well remember,” a prospective constituent said later, “how he was dressed he wore flax & tow linnen pantaloons—­I thought about 5 inches too short in the legs and frequently he had but one Suspender—­no vest or Coat he Wore a Calico Shert Such as he had in the black Hawk War he wore coarse Brogans Tan Couler Blue Yarn Socks & straw Hat—­old style and without a band.”

  He didn’t win, place, or show, or even finish seventh. He polled eighth out of thirteen candidates. The top four finishers won seats in the legislature. He didn’t do so well in the broader county, where he wasn’t well-­known and didn’t get enough of a chance to introduce himself. But he nearly swept the votes of New Salem.

  Lincoln opened his own store with a friend, before it, too, “winked out,” in Lincoln’s words. The business failure saddled him—­together with some minor speculative ventures that went nowhere—­with a lawsuit-­spawning mess of liabilities. He called it his “national debt” and it dogged him for years. Herndon maintained that even as a congressman Lincoln still worked to pay it off, although he was probably free of it by then.

  He won appointment as the local postmaster for a time, a minor post, but one that supplied a trickle of income and—­gratifyingly—­access to newspapers. Based in Samuel Hill’s store, Lincoln ran his operation informally if conscientiously. He kept receipts in an old blue sock. There were not yet any envelopes or stamps, and his first year on the job, a post rider still brought the mail to town. Lincoln was known to tuck letters into his hat and deliver them on foot to ­people who didn’t come to get them.

  He also became a deputy to the county surveyor, a job, as he put it later, that “procured bread, and kept body and soul together.” In another act of self-­education, he boned up on plane geometry and trigonometry, studying such texts as Abel Flint’s A System of Geometry and Trigonometry with a Treatise on Surveying, and Robert Gibson’s Treatise on Practical Surveying. He bought a fifty-­dollar horse on credit and, wearing an old straw hat, dove into the brush with surveyor’s compass and chain. One farmer sold him two buckskins, which a friend’s wife used to “fox” his pants to protect them from getting shredded in the brambles.

  A talented and scrupulous surveyor, Lincoln found himself a sought-­after umpire of land disputes in a growing area in need of constant surveying. This was Lincoln’s granular experience with the property rights to which he would become so firmly committed. As he worked throughout the area, he was a kind of walking billboard for himself. “Not only did his wit, kindliness, and knowledge attract ­people,” said his friend Coleman Smoot, “but his strange clothes and uncouth awkwardness advertised him, the shortness of his trousers causing particular remark and amusement. Soon the name ‘Abe Lincoln’ was a household word.”

  He ran again for the legislature, introducing himself far and wide. When one group of men harvesting grain vowed not to vote for anyone who couldn’t work, Lincoln took up and adeptly wielded a cradled scythe in the field: “Boys if that is all i am shure of your votes,” a witness recalled him saying. He gave out candy and nuts to kids. William Butler said he made such a good candidate because he was “genial, kind, sympathetic, open-­hearted,” and when he gave an answer to a question “it was always characteristic, brief, pointed, à propos, out of the common way and manner, and yet exactly suited to the time place and thing.”

  This time, he finished second among all candidates, and within fifteen votes of first. He was headed to the state capital of Vandalia, and a four-­dollar-­a-­day salary, the most he had ever earned in his life. He was still just twenty-­five years old, and before he reached thirty, would be his party’s nominee to become Speaker of the Illinois House. He borrowed two hundred dollars from the well-off Coleman Smoot (paid back as promised) and plowed sixty dollars into his first suit of clothes, remembered by one witness as “a very respectable looking suit of jeans.”

  The legislature exposed Lincoln to a level of attainments he had never before encountered. Lincoln nonetheless returned to New Salem nearly as desperate as he had left it. William Butler, who boarded Lincoln for a time, remembered noticing his unease on the way home. “All the rest of you have something to look forward to,” Lincoln explained, “and all are glad to get home, and will have something to do when you get there. But it isn’t so with me. I am going home, Butler, without a thing in the world.” His partner in the failed store had died, and he committed to paying off this other half of the debt as well. A judge attached Lincoln’s surveying equipment, cutting off that source of income. It was put up to auction and one of Lincoln’s boosters bought it for $120 and returned it to him.

  Around this time, Lincoln resolved to study the law. He had arrived in New Salem with his commitment to reading intact. It filled his spare moments. New Salemite Robert B. Rutledge recalled: “While clerking for Offatt [Offutt] as Post Master or in the pursuit of any avocation, An opportunity would offer, he would apply himself to his studies, if it was but five minutes time, would open his book, which he always kept at hand, & study, close it recite to himself, then entertain company or wait on a Customer in the Store or post office apparently without any interruption. When passing from business to boarding house for meals, he could usually be seen with his book under his arm, or open in his hand reading as he walked.” Another resident remembered that the first time he saw Lincoln “he was lying on a trundle bed rocking a cradle with his foot—­was almost covered with papers and books.”

  A friend reported that “History and poetry & the newspapers constituted the most of his reading.” But Lincoln also undertook a concerted self-­directed program of the study of grammar. He walked some six miles, so the story goes, to procure a copy of Samuel Kirkham’s English Grammar from a farmer. The text wasn’t exactly inviting. At the beginning, it explained, “Grammar is divided into four parts; 1. Orthography, 2. Etymology, 3. Syntax, 4. Prosody.” Lincoln asked a local schoolteacher for help when something stumped him, and had friends drill him. By one account, he mastered it in a matter of weeks and told a friend, “if that is what they call a science I’ll subdue another.”

  When one of his old friends who had quizzed him, William Greene, visited him in Washington during the war, Lincoln introduced him to Secretary of State William Seward as the man who taught him grammar. Embarrassed, the friend objected to Lincoln afterward that all he had done was hold the book to see if Lincoln could give the right answers, and “that was not teaching you grammar.” Lincoln replied, “Well, that was all the teaching of grammar I ever had.”

  All of this was only a warm-­up for his most momentous program of self-­education, as a lawyer. Legal contention had been part of his upbringing. His father was drawn into lawsuits over land titles back in Kentucky. And Lincoln sought out courtroom experiences. On the frontier, court day provided the ­occasion, as an observer put it, for “bustle, business, energy, hilarity, novelty, irony, sarcasm, excitement, and eloquence.” Dennis Hanks said of Lincoln back in Indiana, “He attended trials—­went to Court—­read the Rev. Statutes of Indiana dated 1824—­Heard law Speeches & listened to law trials &c &c.”

  However much Lincoln enjoyed the verbal pyrotechnics, the law must have represented to him the definitive step into a world above and beyond farming and related labor. “The law was the only profession within his reach,” Brian Dirck writes in his book on Lincoln as a lawyer, “where reading and talk
ing were not the mark of laziness, but of merit—­that, and politics.” Of course, the two were intertwined. Years later, in notes for a lecture on the law, Lincoln wrote of the “extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the ­people.” Herndon maintained Lincoln always thought of the law “as a stepping stone to a political life.”

  At first he hesitated, doubting whether he had the education to make a go of it as a lawyer. He said he thought about becoming a blacksmith instead. But mentors encouraged him. One of them was the colorfully named local justice of the peace, Bowling Green, a “reading man” whose girth earned him the nickname “Pot.” He allowed Lincoln to argue minor matters in his court, partly for the amusement value. Lincoln could always be counted on to make him laugh, so “as to produce,” one witness to the proceedings remembered, “a spasmatic shaking of the very fat sides of the old law functionary.” Still, he had the highest regard for the abilities of the young man some twenty years his junior, for whom he was a ­mentor and “almost Second Farther,” according to a friend.

  A friend of Lincoln from the Black Hawk War and the state legislature, the polished and accomplished Springfield lawyer John Stuart, urged him to take up the law. Lincoln borrowed Stuart’s law books, and then bought at auction a copy of Sir ­William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (the legend maintains that he found the copy at the bottom of a pile of junk he bought to help out a hard-­pressed traveler). At the time, there were no law schools in the state of Illinois. Studying on his own, as Lincoln put it, he “went at it in good earnest.” He may have mastered forty pages of Blackstone on the first day, and read it through twice.

  The book was read by almost every aspiring American lawyer of the time. An effort to make the law something “to be cultivated, methodized, and explained,” it must have appealed to the orderliness of Lincoln’s mind. This is a man, after all, who went on to study geometry in his free time, and by his account, “nearly mastered the six books of Euclid.”