Left without a job, Lincoln was saved by the outbreak of the Black Hawk War. The Sauk and Fox Indians, who had been tricked into moving west of the Mississippi River, ceding their vast tribal lands in northwestern Illinois, repudiated their treaty with the federal government, and in May one of their leaders, Black Hawk, returned to Illinois with about 450 warriors and 1,500 women and children, to reclaim their tribal homeland. Immediately the frontier was ablaze with alarm. When Governor John Reynolds called for volunteers to assist the federal troops in repelling the invasion, men rushed to offer their services, some out of patriotism, some out of long-cherished animosity toward Indians, and some who knew that military service would aid their political careers. In Lincoln’s case all these motives were at work—with the added inducement that the pay of a militiaman would be very welcome to a man with no other means of support.
On April 21 he and other volunteers from the New Salem neighborhood met near Richland and were sworn in to service. As was customary, the men of the company elected their own officers. William Kirkpatrick, the owner of a sawmill, announced his candidacy, but some of the Clary’s Grove boys proposed Lincoln. Both candidates stepped out in front, on the village green, and the men formed a line behind their favorite. To Lincoln’s delight, two-thirds of the groups fell in line behind him, and most of the others presently deserted Kirkpatrick and joined them. The election was one of the proudest moments of his life. Many years later, after he had served four terms in the state legislature, had been elected to Congress, and had twice been nominated for the United States Senate, Lincoln said this election as militia captain was “a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since.”
Lincoln tried with moderate success to secure some discipline in his company, and his task was made easier because Jack Armstrong was his first sergeant. He learned a little about close-order drill, but not enough to master the more complicated commands. Once when he found his company marching directly into a fence, he could not remember how to order them to pass through the narrow gate. With considerable presence of mind he called a halt, dismissed the company for two minutes, and ordered them to re-form on the other side of the fence. He did not hesitate to use physical strength to preserve order. When an old Indian, bearing a certificate of good character from American authorities, stumbled into camp, Lincoln’s men talked of killing him, saying, “The Indian is a damned spy” and “We have come out to fight the Indian and by God we intend to do so.” Drawing himself up to his full height, Lincoln stepped in front of the shivering Indian and offered to fight anyone who wanted to hurt the old man. Grumbling, the soldiers let the Indian slip away.
His service in the Black Hawk War was neither particularly dangerous nor heroic. Later, for political reasons, he used to poke fun at his military record. In 1848, when the Democrats nominated Lewis Cass, of Michigan, for President, emphasizing his alleged military record in the War of 1812, Lincoln reminded listeners that he, too, was a military hero. “Yes sir,” he declared; “in the days of the Black Hawk war, I fought, bled, and came away.” He invited comparison of his martial efforts with those of the Michigan governor. If Cass, as alleged, broke his sword in anger after Detroit was needlessly surrendered to the British, Lincoln joked, “It is quite certain I did not break my sword, for I had none to break; but I bent a musket pretty badly on one occasion.” “If he saw any live, fighting indians, it was more than I did,” Lincoln conceded; “but I had a good many bloody struggles with the musquetoes; and, although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry.”
At the time, however, Lincoln was proud of his military service, and he enjoyed the hearty comradeship of men-at-arms. When his first month’s enlistment expired, he, along with several other members of his company, signed up for another twenty days, this time serving as a private, and at the end of that period he reenlisted for another month. “I was out of work... and there being no danger of more fighting, I could do nothing better than enlist again,” he explained afterward. He served until July 10, when he was honorably discharged.
His service in the Black Hawk War gave him some acquaintance with military life and his first experience as a leader of men. Meeting volunteers from different parts of the state was useful to him politically, for it extended his reputation. While he was in the army, he came into contact with a number of the rising young political leaders of the state, like Orville Hickman Browning, a cautious, conservative Quincy lawyer, who would become one of his most influential and critical friends. More important was his acquaintance with John Todd Stuart, a Springfield lawyer, who served as major in the same battalion as Lincoln. Handsome, polished, and well educated, Stuart was apparently the opposite of Lincoln in every way, but he saw great promise in his New Salem friend.
The most immediate benefit Lincoln derived from his brief military service was his compensation of about $110, plus the $14 bounty he received for enlisting. This was the total extent of his resources as he returned to New Salem, in time for a brief campaign before the election for the state legislature on August 6. The canvass was an informal one, and Lincoln, like the other twelve candidates, traveled about Sangamon County, introducing himself and soliciting votes. He was an odd-looking figure, his swarthy complexion now deeply sunburned, so that, as he told his listeners, he was “almost as red as those men I have been chasing through the prairies and forests on the Rivers of Illinois.” On the campaign trail, as one observer remembered, “he wore a mixed jeans coat, clawhammer style, short in the sleeves and bob-tail—in fact it was so short in the tail he could not sit on it; flax and towlinen pantaloons, and a straw hat.”
When he attended political rallies, members of the Clary’s Grove gang, who had recently been his companions in arms, often accompanied him. At his maiden speech, in Pappsville, a village eleven miles west of Springfield, a fight broke out in the crowd, and Lincoln saw one of his supporters attacked. Quitting the platform, he strode into the audience, seized the assailant by the neck and the seat of his trousers, and, as one witness recalled, threw him twelve feet away. As usual, memory is elastic, but there is no doubt that Lincoln, who now stood six feet and four inches tall, was strong enough to intimidate any rival.
In his speeches the candidate made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was, as he said, “a stanch anti-Jackson, or Clay, man.” But for the most part he discussed local issues, like the need to improve the Sangamon River, and avoided larger questions by announcing, “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance.”
When the votes were counted, Lincoln ran eighth in a field of thirteen candidates, the top four of whom were elected. He was, of course, disappointed, and years later he made a point of noting that this election was the only time he “was ever beaten on a direct vote of the people.” He could take comfort, however, from the returns from his own New Salem precinct, where he received 277 of 300 votes cast.
III
Consoling as that expression of neighborly support was, it did little to solve his acute financial problems. As he noted in an autobiographical statement: “He was now without means and out of business, but was anxious to remain with his friends who had treated him with so much generosity, especially as he had nothing elsewhere to go to.” He began looking about for a job, and for a future. He considered becoming a blacksmith, but he wanted to avoid a life of physical labor. He thought of studying law. The profession had interested him even as a boy in Indiana, when, according to much later recollections, he attended sessions of local courts at Rockport and Boonville and supposedly read the copy of the Revised Laws of Indiana owned by the local constable, David Turnham. But on reflection he concluded that he needed a better education to succeed.
Opportunity came his way when James and J. Rowan Herndon decided to sell the general store they owned in New Salem. William F. Berry, who had been a corporal in Lincoln’s company during the Black Hawk War, arranged to buy James Herndon’s interest in the store, and J. Rowan Herndon offere
d the other half interest to Lincoln, who was boarding with him. No money passed hands; Lincoln signed a note for his share. “I believed he was thoroughly honest,” Rowan Herndon explained, “and that impression was so strong in me I accepted his note in payment of the whole.”
Lincoln and Berry now owned one of the three stores in New Salem, competing with the well-managed establishment of Samuel Hill and John McNeil and a newer business owned by Reuben Radford. In January 1833, Radford managed to offend the Clary’s Grove boys, who retaliated by trashing his store—knocking out the windows, breaking the crockery, and turning the goods topsy-turvy. In despair, he decided to sell out. Canny young William Greene, Jr., bought his store and his damaged stock of goods for $400 and immediately sold both to Lincoln and Berry, making a profit of $250. Once again, the partners signed notes to cover most of their new purchase.
Moving their meager stock into Radford’s building, Lincoln and Berry were ready for business. Like most other country stores, they supplied customers with tea and coffee, sugar and salt, and a few other commodities that could not be produced in the village. In addition, the store carried blue calico, brown muslin, men and women’s hats, and a small selection of shoes.
There was rarely enough business to keep the partners occupied, and Lincoln was able to spend much of his time reading. Indeed, during his New Salem years he probably read more than at any other time in his life. Fiction did not interest him. He made one unsuccessful attempt at Ivanhoe, but he had no other acquaintance with the great British and American novelists. He did not care much for most history and biography, which he thought untrustworthy. Some poetry deeply moved him, and he memorized long passages from Shakespeare’s plays. Jack Kelso probably introduced him to Robert Burns, whose “generous heart, and transcendent genius” he praised many years later, while President, and he was soon able to recite “Tam o’Shanter,” “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” and other long poems. He developed a liking for the melancholy, sentimental verse that was so popular during the era, and he thought Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Last Leaf” “inexpressibly touching.” When Dr. Jason Duncan showed him a poem called “Mortality,” he was moved by its mournful message:
Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.
Lincoln memorized all fifty-six lines, each more doleful than the last, and recited it so often that people began to think he was the author. Not until many years later did he learn that the poem was the work of William Knox, a Scotsman, who was a contemporary of Sir Walter Scott.
Lincoln’s real interest was in the structure and use of language, and he decided that he needed to learn grammar. Samuel Kirkham’s English Grammar was considered the best guide, and when Lincoln learned that a farmer named John C. Vance had a copy, he willingly walked six miles into the country to get it. He set himself systematically to master this detailed text, committing large segments to memory. Then he asked his friends to test his mastery, and when challenged to provide a definition of a verb, could recite, “A VERB is a word which signifies to BE, to DO, or to SUFFER; as I am; I rule; I am ruled.” Some of those who participated in this drill—like Mentor Graham, the semiliterate schoolmaster, who did not himself own a grammar—later came to consider themselves Lincoln’s instructors, but in fact he was, in grammar as in other subjects, essentially self-taught. He took pride in his mastery of Kirkham, and he thought it sufficiently important to mention in his 1860 autobiographical sketch that he had “studied English grammar, imperfectly of course, but so as to speak and write as well as he now does.”
Lincoln’s autobiography did not mention another kind of reading. Though New Salem had no churches, it was an intensely religious community. Baptists held services in the schoolhouse, and other denominations met regularly in private homes. In the summer the circuit-riding evangelist Peter Cartwright often conducted a revival meeting. There were no Catholic or Jewish residents, but Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians were constantly engaged in hairsplitting doctrinal controversies. A young Yale Divinity School graduate who came to teach in this central Illinois region found that he “was plunged without warning and preparation into a sea of sectarian rivalries, which was kept in constant agitation.” Inevitably these religious wars attracted Lincoln’s attention, though, like his father, he was reluctant to accept any creed. His parents’ Baptist belief in predestination was deeply ingrained in his mind, though he felt more comfortable in thinking that events were foreordained by immutable natural laws than by a personal deity. To his cool, analytical mind the ideas of the evangelists were less persuasive than those of the few local freethinkers, who gathered about the store cracker barrel and, when there were no customers in sight, engaged in speculation about the literal accuracy of the Bible, the Virgin Birth, the divinity of Christ, and the possibility of miracles.
These conversations introduced Lincoln to Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, that classic rationalist attack on revealed religion, and he probably also read some of Constantin de Volney’s Ruins of Civilizations, which argued that morality was the only essential, demonstrable part of religion. Discussion of such issues was heresy in this rigidly orthodox frontier community, and inevitably reports of Lincoln’s participation in these conversations leaked out. So damaging was the allegation that he was “an open scoffer at Christianity” that in his race for Congress in 1846 he was obliged to issue a formal denial: “That I am not a member of any Christian Church, is true; but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” He went on to explain with characteristic clarity his religious views: “It is true that in early life I was inclined to believe in what I understand is called the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’—that is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control; and I have sometimes (with one, two or three, but never publicly) tried to maintain this opinion in argument.”
There was time for endless abstract discussions in the Lincoln and Berry store, because it was clear from almost the beginning the enterprise was not going to be a success. It would be easy to blame the partners. Berry may well have been a heavy drinker, as tradition reports, and even the usually charitable Lincoln agreed that he was “a thriftless soul.” Doubtless Lincoln was more interested in reading or in telling anecdotes than he was in selling his wares. But the basic reason for the failure was that by 1833 New Salem had ceased to grow. Forced to maintain what was essentially a barter economy because the Sangamon River was not adequate to carry their surplus produce to the market and there were no roads or railroads, its residents had no money to pay for even the meager goods offered by Lincoln and Berry.
The only branch of the business that showed any profit was the sale of whiskey, which Illinois law permitted the partners to sell, without license, in quantities of one quart or more for hard liquor or two gallons for beer and cider. On January 4, 1833, as business was clearly slipping, Berry first applied for a license to sell liquor by the drink—whiskey at 12½ cents, rum at 18¾ cents, and so on. The license was issued in the name of Berry & Lincoln, but Lincoln’s signature was not in his own handwriting. Berry may have acted against his partner’s will in converting the store, now nearly empty of other goods, into a “grocery.” In later years memories would sharply differ over whether Lincoln himself ever sold liquor by the dram. Stephen A. Douglas called him “a flourishing grocery keeper in the town of New Salem,” but the preponderance of the evidence supports Lincoln’s own statement that he “never kept a grocery any where in the world.” At any rate, the tavern license failed to save the Berry & Lincoln store, which, as Lincoln said, shortly afterward “winked out.”
With the failure of the store, Lincoln was out of a job, and he had no money. On
ce more he did day labor, like splitting rails, and he said he worked the latter part of the winter “in a little still house at the head of a hollow.” He picked up a few dollars serving on juries, clerking at elections, and carrying poll sheets to Springfield. But it grew obvious that without regular employment he would soon have to leave New Salem. Fortunately he had good friends, who wanted to make it possible for him to stay. Several of them rallied to procure for him the appointment as village postmaster. The incumbent, Samuel Hill, the storekeeper, apparently did not want the job very badly, because he neglected women standing in line for mail in favor of men desiring to purchase liquor. With a little pressure he was persuaded to resign, and on May 7 Lincoln received the place.
It was a very modest appointment—so modest that the Jackson administration overlooked his strong support of Henry Clay, considering, as Lincoln speculated, the office “too insignificant to make his politics an objection.” But he was overjoyed by it. I “never saw a man better pleased,” Dr. John Allen reported. As postmaster, he would “have access to all the News papers—never yet being able to get the half that he wanted before.”
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