He Knew Lincoln, and Other Billy Brown Stories

Part 1

Chapter 14,203 wordsPublic domain

HE KNEW LINCOLN AND OTHER BILLY BROWN STORIES

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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HE KNEW LINCOLN AND OTHER BILLY BROWN STORIES

BY IDA M. TARBELL

AUTHOR OF “LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN”

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 _All rights reserved_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY NEW YORK CITY

TO MY SISTER

INTRODUCTION

More than one clue must be unravelled to reach an understanding of Abraham Lincoln. Among them there surely must be reckoned his capacity for companionship. None more catholic in his selections ever lived. All men were his fellows. He went unerringly and unconsciously for the most part, to the meeting place that awaited him in each man’s nature. There might be a wall, often there was; but he knew, no one better, that there is always a secret door in human walls. Sooner or later he discovered it, put his finger on its spring, passed through and settled into the place behind that was his.

His life was rich in companionships with unlikely people, often people who began by contempt or semi-contempt of him. There was the town bully of his youth, whom he soundly thrashed for trying a foul in a wrestling match, and who rose from the dust to proclaim Lincoln the best man who ever broke into camp; thirty years later there was his own Secretary of State, with his self-complacent assumption of the President’s unfitness for leadership and of his own call to direct the nation, put gently but firmly in his place and soon frankly and nobly declaring, “He’s the best of us all.”

He had many pass-keys--wrath, magnanimity, shrewdness, patience, clarity of judgment, humor, resolve; and in the end, one or the other or all together opened every closed door, and he sat down at home with men of the most divergent view and experience: the bully, the scholarly, the cunning, the pious, the ambitious, the selfish, the great, the weak, the boy, the man.

Particularly was Lincoln at home with men like the Billy Brown of these pages, men whose native grain had not been obscured by polish and oil. There were many of them in his time in Illinois, plying their trades or professions more or less busily, but never allowing industry to interfere with opportunities for companionship. They were men of shrewdness, humor, usually modest, not over-weighted with ambition. Their appetite for talk, for politics, for reports on human exhibits of all sorts, never dulled. Their love of companionship outstripped even their naturally intolerant partisanship.

These men, unconsciously for the most part, resisted the social veneering that, beginning in Illinois in Lincoln’s day, rapidly overlaid the state. In his first contact with Springfield in the ’30’s he remarked the “flourishing about in carriages,” the separation of people into groups according to money, antecedents, social etiquette. He never allowed convention, address, ceremony, however foreign to him, to interfere with his human relations--he went over or around them. But, natural man that he was, he found a special freedom with those in whom the essence of human nature remained unmixed and uncorked.

The original of Billy Brown was such a man. He was still keeping his drug store in Springfield in the ’90’s when the writer made studies there for a “Life of Lincoln.” She passed many an hour in Lincoln’s chair, while Billy, tipped back in something less precious, talked. There were Billy Browns in other towns--Bloomington, Princeton, Quincy, Chicago. Their memory of Mr. Lincoln was among the most precious and satisfying things in their lives. When business was dull or the day rainy and consequently there were few or no interruptions, the talk you started by questions soon became a soliloquy. Head against the wall, feet on desk, eyes far away, voice softened, they re-lived the old friendship. Their memories were tender, reverent but singularly devoid of the thing that we call hero-worship. Mr. Lincoln remained too real to them, too interesting and companionable.

The sense of intimacy with him which they treasured, their conviction that he recognized them as his friends, had little or no trace of familiarity. He was always “Mr. Lincoln” to them, never “Abe,” nor would they tolerate the use of that word. I never saw my Springfield Billy Brown so angrily indignant as in talking of a townsman who affected the name. True, he and Billy were rivals in reminiscence, but that was not the basis of his resentment. “He never called Mr. Lincoln that to his face” was Billy’s complaint. That is, the use of the name gave a false color to the recollections and only truth was tolerable where Mr. Lincoln was concerned.

If Mr. Lincoln’s fellowship with the Billy Browns of Illinois was based on his love of sheer human nature, he found in them, too, something very precious to him, and that was a humor that answered his own. The spring from which his humor flowed was strong with native salts and so was theirs. It was naked but clean, devoid of evil insinuation. It was always out-with-it--strong, pungent words; strong, pungent facts. The humor was not in words or facts, it was in what they pointed--the illumination they gave of life and men. Lincoln’s humor was part of his passion for reality, truthfulness, freedom. The Billy Browns answered him and gave him more of a particular kind of salt he craved, in a life in many ways starved, starved for love and hope and gaiety, for all of which he had great natural capacity.

The youthfulness of their spirit endeared them to him. They were usually some fifteen or twenty years his junior; but in feeling the difference was greater. Lincoln early looked on himself and spoke of himself as an old man. It was not years--it was burdens, defeats, the failure to find a satisfying purpose in life. He was old, and he craved youth. These men had it. They were perennial children. Youth seemed to warm him, and he sought it wherever it was to be found--in children, boys, young men. They in turn instinctively came to him. A succession of youth in all its forms follows him through his goings and comings in the streets of Springfield, along the route of the old Eighth Circuit of Illinois, through the streets of Washington, into the White House.

His own children stirred the deepest passion his unsatisfied heart ever knew. Tad, whose stuttering tongue and restless, valiant spirit brought out all Mr. Lincoln’s tenderness, sat beside him every free evening, going over the pictures and text of the shoals of books which publishers send to a President; he helping the boy’s stumbling tongue to frame his comments--a perfection of fellowship between them. When the nights were not free--and that was often, for there were long conferences running into the small hours, the lad slept beside him on the floor of the conference room. And when it was over, he gathered him up in his arms and himself put him to bed, consoled in the harrowing muddle of affairs by the perfect love between them.

One can never be too thankful that he had John Hay, then a youth in his early twenties--and such a youth! The joy and fun and understanding between them as it crops out in Hay’s letters is a streak of pure sunshine across the almost soddenly tragic life of the White House in the Civil War.

This capacity for companionship which so linked men of all types to Lincoln in his lifetime and so held them to him in death is one clue to his final success in bringing out of the struggle over slavery in this country certain solid and definite results--results that have enlarged the boundaries of human freedom and given a convincing demonstration of the need and the preciousness of more and more unionism if we are to secure our final better world. He could not have done what he did had he been less understanding of men and their limitations as well as of their powers, less experienced in passing behind human walls, finding what there was there and using it, not asking of a man what he could not give, not forcing on him what he could not receive.

Who can estimate what it was to the nation to have as a leader through the Civil War a man “born with a pass-key to hearts.”

IDA M. TARBELL.

CONTENTS

PAGE He Knew Lincoln 3 Back in ’58 43 Father Abraham 87 In Lincoln’s Chair 127

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

_Facing page_

“_Come and set by the stove by the hour and tell stories and talk and argue_” 4

“_Horace Greeley, he came in here to buy quinine_” 16

“_Aunt Sally, you couldn’t a done nuthin’ which would have pleased me better_” 18

“_He just talked to us that time out of his heart_” 24

“_You’re actin’ like a lot of cowards. You’ve helped make this war, and you’ve got to help fight it_” 26

“_We went out on the back stoop and sat down and talked and talked_” 30

HE KNEW LINCOLN

“He has the pass-key to hearts, to him the response of the prying of hands on the knobs.”

--_Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Answerer.”_

“Did I know Lincoln? Well, I should say. See that chair there? Take it, set down. That’s right. Comfortable, ain’t it? Well, sir, Abraham Lincoln has set in that chair hours, him and Little ‘Doug,’ and Logan and Judge Davis, all of ’em, all the big men in this State, set in that chair. See them marks? Whittlin’. Judge Logan did it, all-firedest man to whittle. Always cuttin’ away at something. I just got that chair new, paid six dollars for it, and I be blamed if I didn’t come in this store and find him slashin’ right into that arm. I picked up a stick and said: ‘Here, Judge, s’posin’ you cut this.’ He just looked at me and then flounced out, mad as a wet hen. Mr. Lincoln was here, and you ought to heard him tee-hee. He was always here. Come and set by the stove by the hour and tell stories and talk and argue. I’d ruther heard the debates them men had around this old stove than heard Webster and Clay and Calhoun and the whole United States Senate. There wa’n’t never a United States Senate that could beat just what I’ve heard right here in this room with Lincoln settin’ in that very chair where you are this minute.

“He traded here. I’ve got his accounts now. See here, ‘quinine, quinine, quinine.’ Greatest hand to buy quinine you ever see. Give it to his constituents. Oh, he knew how to be popular, Mr. Lincoln did. Cutest man in politics. I wa’n’t a Whig. I was then and I am now a Democrat, a real old-fashioned Jackson Democrat, and my blood just would rise up sometimes hearin’ him discuss. He was a dangerous man--a durned dangerous man to have agin you. He’d make you think a thing when you knew it wa’n’t so, and cute! Why, he’d just slide in when you wa’n’t expectin’ it and do some unexpected thing that u’d make you laugh, and then he’d get your vote. You’d vote for him because you liked him--just because you liked him and because he was so all-fired smart, and do it when you knew he was wrong and it was agin the interest of the country.

“Tell stories? Nobody ever could beat him at that, and how he’d enjoy ’em, just slap his hands on his knees and jump up and turn around and then set down, laughin’ to kill. Greatest man to git new yarns that ever lived, always askin’, ‘Heard any new stories, Billy?’ And if I had I’d trot ’em out, and how he’d laugh. Often and often when I’ve told him something new and he’d kin’ a forgit how it went, he’d come in and say, ‘Billy, how about that story you’se tellin’ me?’ and then I’d tell it all over.

“He was away a lot, you know, ridin’ the circuit along with some right smart lawyers. They had great doin’s. Nuthin’ to do evenings but to set around the tavern stove tellin’ stories. That was enough when Lincoln was there. They was all lost without him. Old Judge Davis was boss of that lot, and he never would settle down till Lincoln got around. I’ve heard ’em laugh lots of times how the Judge would fuss around and keep askin’, ‘Where’s Mr. Lincoln, why don’t Mr. Lincoln come? Somebody go and find Lincoln,’ and when Lincoln came he would just settle back and get him started to yarning, and there they’d set half the night.

“When he got home he’d come right in here first time he was downtown and tell me every blamed yarn he’d heard. Whole crowd would get in here sometimes and talk over the trip, and I tell you it was something to hear ’em laugh. You could tell how Lincoln kept things stirred up. He was so blamed quick. Ever hear Judge Weldon tell that story about what Lincoln said one day up to Bloomington when they was takin’ up a subscription to buy Jim Wheeler a new pair of pants? No? Well, perhaps I oughten to tell it to you, ma says it ain’t nice. It makes me mad to hear people objectin’ to Mr. Lincoln’s stories. Mebbe he did say words you wouldn’t expect to hear at a church supper, but he never put no meanin’ into ’em that wouldn’t ’a’ been fit for the minister to put into a sermon, and that’s a blamed sight more’n you can say of a lot of stories I’ve heard some of the people tell who stick up their noses at Mr. Lincoln’s yarns.

“Yes, sir, he used to keep things purty well stirred up on that circuit. That time I was a speakin’ of he made Judge Davis real mad; it happened right in court and everybody got to gigglin’ fit to kill. The Judge knew ’twas something Lincoln had said and he began to sputter.

“‘I am not going to stand this any longer, Mr. Lincoln, you’re always disturbin’ this court with your tomfoolery. I’m goin’ to fine you. The clerk will fine Mr. Lincoln five dollars for disorderly conduct.’ The boys said Lincoln never said a word; he just set lookin’ down with his hand over his mouth, tryin’ not to laugh. About a minute later the Judge, who was always on pins and needles till he knew all the fun that was goin’ on, called up Weldon and whispered to him, ‘What was that Lincoln said?’ Weldon told him, and I’ll be blamed if the Judge didn’t giggle right out loud there in court. The joke was on him then, and he knew it, and soon as he got his face straight he said, dignified like, ‘The clerk may remit Mr. Lincoln’s fine.’

“Yes, he was a mighty cute story-teller, but he knew what he was about tellin’ ’em. I tell you he got more arguments out of stories than he did out of law books, and the queer part was you couldn’t answer ’em--they just made you see it and you couldn’t get around it. I’m a Democrat, but I’ll be blamed if I didn’t have to vote for Mr. Lincoln as President, couldn’t help it, and it was all on account of that snake story of his’n illustratin’ the takin’ of slavery into Kansas and Nebraska. Remember it? I heard him tell it in a speech once.

“‘If I saw a pizen snake crawlin’ in the road,’ he says, ‘I’d kill it with the first thing I could grab; but if I found it in bed with my children, I’d be mighty careful how I touched it fear I’d make it bite the children. If I found it in bed with somebody else’s children I’d let them take care of it; but if I found somebody puttin’ a whole batch of young snakes into an empty bed where mine or anybody’s children was going to sleep pretty soon, I’d stop him from doin’ it if I had to fight him.’ Perhaps he didn’t say ‘fight him,’ but somehow I always tell that story that way because I know I would and so would he or you or anybody. That was what it was all about when you come down to it. They was tryin’ to put a batch of snakes into an empty bed that folks was goin’ to sleep in.

“Before I heard that story I’d heard Lincoln say a hundred times, settin’ right there in that chair, where you are, ‘Boys, we’ve got to stop slavery or it’s goin’ to spread all over this country,’ but, somehow, I didn’t see it before. Them snakes finished me. Then I knew he’d got it right and I’d got to vote for him. Pretty tough, though, for me to go back on Little ‘Doug.’ You see he was our great man, so we thought. Been to the United States Senate and knew all the big bugs all over the country. Sort o’ looked and talked great. Wan’t no comparison between him and Lincoln in looks and talk. Of course, we all knew he wa’n’t honest, like Lincoln, but blamed if I didn’t think in them days Lincoln was too all-fired honest--kind of innocent honest. He couldn’t stand it nohow to have things said that wan’t so. He just felt plumb bad about lies. I remember once bein’ in court over to Decatur when Mr. Lincoln was tryin’ a case. There was a fellow agin him that didn’t have no prejudices against lyin’ in a lawsuit, and he was tellin’ how Lincoln had said this an’ that, tryin’ to mix up the jury. It was snowin’ bad outside, and Mr. Lincoln had wet his feet and he was tryin’ to dry ’em at the stove. He had pulled off one shoe and was settin’ there holdin’ up his great big foot, his forehead all puckered up, listenin’ to that ornery lawyer’s lies. All at onct he jumped up and hopped right out into the middle of the court-room.

“‘Now, Judge,’ he says, ‘that ain’t fair. I didn’t say no sich thing, and he knows I didn’t. I ain’t goin’ to have this jury all fuddled up.’

“You never see anything so funny in a court-room as that big fellow standin’ there in one stockin’ foot, a shoe in his hand, talking so earnest. No, sir, he couldn’t stand a lie.

“‘Think he was a big man, then?’ Nope--never did. Just as I said, we all thought Douglas was _our_ big man. You know I felt kind of sorry for Lincoln when they began to talk about him for President. It seemed almost as if somebody was makin’ fun of him. He didn’t look like a president. I never had seen one, but we had pictures of ’em, all of ’em from George Washington down, and they looked somehow as if they were different kind of timber from us. Leastwise that’s always the way it struck me. Now Mr. Lincoln he was just like your own folks--no trouble to talk to him, no siree. Somehow you just settled down comfortable to visitin’ the minute he come in. I couldn’t imagine George Washington or Thomas Jefferson settin’ here in that chair you’re in tee-heein’ over some blamed yarn of mine. None of us around town took much stock in his bein’ elected at first--that is, none of the men, the women was different. They always believed in him, and used to say, ‘You mark my word, Mr. Lincoln will be president. He’s just made for it, he’s good, he’s the best man ever lived and he ought to be president.’ I didn’t see no logic in that then, but I dunno but there was some after all.

“It seems all right now though. I reckon I learned somethin’ watchin’ him be President--learned a lot--not that it made any difference in _him_. Funniest thing to see him goin’ around in this town--not a mite changed--and the whole United States a watchin’ him and the biggest men in the country runnin’ after him and reporters hangin’ around to talk to him and fellers makin’ his pictures in ile and every other way. That didn’t make no difference to him--only he didn’t like bein’ so busy he couldn’t come in here much. He had a room over there in the Court House--room on that corner there. I never looked up that it wa’n’t chuck full of people wantin’ him. This old town was full of people all the time--delegations and committees and politicians and newspaper men. Only time I ever see Horace Greeley, he came in here to buy quinine. Mr. Lincoln sent him. Think of that, Horace Greeley buyin’ quinine of _me_.

“No end of other great men around. He saw ’em all. Sometimes I used to step over and watch him--didn’t bother him a mite to see a big man--not a mite. He’d jest shake hands and talk as easy and natural as if ’twas me--and he didn’t do no struttin’ either. Some of the fellers who come to see him looked as if _they_ was goin’ to be president, but Mr. Lincoln didn’t put on any airs. No, sir, and he didn’t cut any of his old friends either. Tickled to death to see ’em every time, and they all come--blamed if every old man and woman in Sangamon County didn’t trot up here to see him. They’d all knowed him when he was keepin’ store down to New Salem and swingin’ a chain--surveyed lots of their towns for ’em--he had--and then he’d electioneered all over that county, too, so they just come in droves to bid him good-by. I was over there one day when old Aunt Sally Lowdy came in the door. Aunt Sally lived down near New Salem, and I expect she’d mended Mr. Lincoln’s pants many a time; for all them old women down there just doted on him and took care of him as if he was their own boy. Well, Aunt Sally stood lookin’ kind a scared seein’ so many strangers and not knowin’ precisely what to do, when Mr. Lincoln spied her. Quick as a wink he said, ‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ and he just rushed over to that old woman and shook hands with both of his’n and says, ‘Now, Aunt Sally, this is real kind of you to come and see me. How are you and how’s Jake?’ (Jake was her boy.) ‘Come right over here,’ and he led her over, as if she was the biggest lady in Illinois, and says, ‘Gentlemen, this is a good old friend of mine. She can make the best flapjacks you ever tasted, and she’s baked ’em for me many a time.’ Aunt Sally was jest as pink as a rosy, she was so tickled. And she says, ‘Abe’--all the old folks in Sangamon called him Abe. They knowed him as a boy, but don’t you believe anybody ever did up here. No, sir, we said Mr. Lincoln. He was like one of us, but he wa’n’t no man to be over familiar with. ‘Abe,’ says Aunt Sally, ‘I had to come and say good-by. They say down our way they’re goin’ to kill you if they get you down to Washington, but I don’t believe it. I just tell ’em you’re too smart to let ’em git ahead of you that way. I thought I’d come and bring you a present, knit ’em myself,’ and I’ll be blamed if that old lady didn’t pull out a great big pair of yarn socks and hand ’em to Mr. Lincoln.

“Well, sir, it was the funniest thing to see Mr. Lincoln’s face pucker up and his eyes twinkle and twinkle. He took them socks and held ’em up by the toes, one in each hand. They was the longest socks I ever see. ‘The lady got my latitude and longitude ’bout right, didn’t she, gentlemen?’ he says, and then he laid ’em down and he took Aunt Sally’s hand and he says tender-like, ‘Aunt Sally, you couldn’t a done nothin’ which would have pleased me better. I’ll take ’em to Washington and wear ’em, and think of you when I do it.’ And I declare he said it so first thing I knew I was almost blubberin’, and I wan’t the only one nuther, and I bet he did wear ’em in Washington. I can jest see him pullin’ off his shoe and showin’ them socks to Sumner or Seward or some other big bug that was botherin’ him when he wanted to switch off on another subject and tellin’ ’em the story about Aunt Sally and her flapjacks.