Part 2

The tall young woodchopper had just passed his twenty-first birthday, and it was he, in buckskin breeches and coonskin cap, who goaded on the oxen hitched to the clumsy wagon that creaked and lurched through the March mud and partly frozen streams on that terrible two weeks’ journey into the Sangamon country of Illinois.

He said good-bye to the old log-cabin. It was rude and mean, but, after all, it was his home. He shook hands with his friends in Gentryville. He took a last look at the unmarked grave of his mother. His boyhood was over.

Before setting out for his new home, Lincoln spent all his money, more than thirty dollars, in buying petty merchandise, knives, forks, needles, pins, buttons, thread and other things that might appeal to housewives. And on the voyage to Illinois the future President of the United States peddled his little wares so successfully that he doubled his money. Thus Abraham Lincoln entered the State which saw him rise to greatness--woodchopper, ox-driver, peddler, pioneer.

Even in that rough, heroic pilgrimage, the tender heart of the man showed itself again and again. One loves to remember Lincoln as Mr. Herndon, his law-partner, has described him, pulling off his shoes and stockings and wading a stream through broken ice to save a pet dog left whining on the other side.

“I could not bear to abandon even a dog,” he explained.

Presently the emigrants settled on a bluff overlooking the Sangamon River, five miles from Decatur, in Macon County. All promptly set to work. A clearing was made, trees felled, and a cabin built. Abraham and his cousin, John Hanks, ploughed fifteen acres of sod and split rails enough to fence the space in.

Some of the rails split by Lincoln at that time were thirty years later carried into the convention which nominated him for President.

Having reached his majority and seen his father and family safely housed, Lincoln started out to shift for himself. Among other things, he split three thousand rails for a Major Warnick, walking three miles a day to his work.

Then came the winter of “the deep snow,” a season so terrible that John Hay has thus described its effects:

“Geese and chickens were caught by the feet and wings and frozen to the wet ground. A drove of a thousand hogs, which were being driven to St. Louis, rushed together for warmth, and became piled in a great heap. Those inside smothered and those outside froze, and the ghastly pyramid remained there on the prairie for weeks; the drovers barely escaped with their lives. Men killed their horses, disemboweled them, and crept into the cavities of their bodies to escape the murderous wind.”

Lincoln left his father’s house empty-handed, save for his axe, and he had to face that blizzard winter as best he could. No man or woman ever heard him complain. In all his after years he looked back upon the struggles of his early career without a word of self-pity. Those were iron days, but they were not without romance, and life was honest and strengthening.

It is doubtful, after all, whether Lincoln’s son, who became rich, dined with kings and queens, and came to be president of the hundred-million-dollar Pullman Company, ever in his comfortable and successful career once felt half the sense of life in its deepest, grandest moods that thrilled his gaunt father facing that fearful winter.

Let the discouraged American, whose heart grows faint in the presence of “bad luck,” think of that rude frontiersman, to whom hardship brought only strength and renewed courage. In spite of everything, the sources of a man’s success are within him, and none can stay him but himself. Lincoln knew famine, and cold, and wandering. But he did not pity himself. Axe in hand, he confronted his fate in that smitten country with as great a soul as when he faced the armed Confederacy and saw his country riven and bleeding.

In the spring of 1831 Denton Offut hired Lincoln to go with him on a boat, with a load of stock and provisions, to New Orleans, and, after many adventures, in which his strength and ingenuity saved boat and cargo several times, he again found himself at the mouth of the Mississippi.

Here he first saw the hideous side of slavery. His law-partner thus refers to one of the scenes he witnessed:

“A vigorous and comely mulatto girl was being sold. She underwent a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they pinched her flesh and made her trot up and down the room like a horse.... Bidding his companions follow him, he said, ‘By God, boys, let’s get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing I’ll hit it hard.’”

The grandest and bloodiest page of modern history is a record of how Lincoln fulfilled that promise.

That very summer he went to the village of New Salem, on the Sangamon River--a village that has long since vanished--and became clerk in a log-house general store opened by Offut, who was a restless commercial adventurer. Lincoln and an assistant slept in the store.

Here the tall clerk became famous for his stories and homely wit. His immense stature, his strength, his humor and his penetrating logic attracted attention at once. He talked in quaint, waggish parables, but he never failed to reach the heart or brain.

Offut’s store grew to be the common meeting place of the frontiersmen, and long-legged, droll, kindly Lincoln developed his natural genius for story-telling and argument.

But Offut bragged of his clerk’s strength. That angered the rough, rollicking youths of a nearby settlement known as Clary’s Grove, who picked out Jack Armstrong, their leader and a veritable giant, to “throw” Lincoln. At first Lincoln declined the challenge on the ground that he did not like “wooling and pulling.” But, although his inheritance of Quaker blood inclined him to avoid violence, he was finally taunted into the struggle. In the presence of all New Salem and Clary’s Grove he partly stripped his two hundred and fourteen pounds of muscle-ribbed body and conquered the bully of Sangamon County.

After that exhibition of strength and pluck, Lincoln was the hero of the community. Braggarts became silent in his presence. A ruffian swore one day in the store before a woman. Lincoln bade him stop, but he continued his abuse. “Well, if you must be whipped,” said the clerk, “I suppose I might as well whip you as any man.” And he did it. That was Lincoln.

His honesty became a proverb. It is said that, having overcharged a customer six cents, he walked three miles in the dark, after the store was closed, to give back the money. By mistake he sold four ounces of tea for a half-pound, and the next day trudged to the customer’s cabin with the rest of the tea.

Just when Lincoln became a conscious politician no man can say. His endless anecdotes and jokes, his winning honesty and good nature, his readiness to accept or stop a fight, his willingness to do a good turn for man, woman or child, and his open scorn for meanness, cruelty or deceit, were the simple overflowings of his natural character. He was coarse in his speech and manners. But behind the joking and buffoonery, the primitive man in him was true, gentle, chivalrous. His tender-heartedness was real. His kindliness was not merely the result of a desire to catch friends.

He once illustrated himself by quoting an old man at an Indiana church meeting: “When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion.”

But in New Salem it soon became evident that Lincoln was not satisfied to remain a clerk in a general store, and that the strivings of leadership were in him. He borrowed books. He asked Menton Graham, the schoolmaster, for advice. He read, read, read. He walked many miles at night to speak in debating clubs. He trudged twelve miles to get Kirkham’s Grammar, and often asked his assistant in the store to keep watch with the book while he said the lesson. It was a common thing to find him stretched out on the counter, head on a roll of calicos, grammar in hand. His desire to master language became a passion. The whole village “took notice.” Even the cooper would keep a fire of shavings going at night that Lincoln might read.

The young frontiersman of six-feet-four, who could outlift, outwrestle and outrun any man in Sagamon County, rising from an almost hopeless abyss of ignorance and poverty, was, by his own resolute efforts, acquiring the power that made him the hero of civilization and the savior of a race.

How many of the almost seventeen million children who receive free education in the public schools in the United States, and who assemble once a year to repeat the imperishable sayings of Lincoln, realize how he had to strain and struggle for the knowledge which is offered daily to them as a gift?

No wonder that Lincoln became popular in New Salem, and that when the little Black Hawk Indian war broke out he was elected captain of the company which marched forth from the village in April, 1831, in buckskin breeches and coon caps, with rifles, powder horns and blankets.

It was in that picturesque campaign that Lincoln, coming with his company to a fence gate and not remembering the military word of command necessary to get his company in order through such a narrow space, instantly showed his ingenuity by shouting, “This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate.”

A poor, old half-starved Indian crept into Lincoln’s camp for shelter. The excited soldiers insisted on killing him. But Lincoln stood between them and the frightened fugitive. At the risk of his own life he saved the Indian. The soul of chivalry was in him.

He had no chance to fight, and he was compelled to wear a wooden sword for two weeks because his company got drunk--he who afterwards commanded Grant, Sherman and Sheridan--yet he returned to his village a hero without having shed blood, for the world honors courage and patience even in those who fail to reach the firing line.

V

After the war of 1812, which was fought while Lincoln was in his rude Kentucky cradle, the continental spirit of the American people gradually rose to a high pitch, which was intensified in 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine was born and the Holy Alliance--not to say all Europe--was warned against armed interference with even the humblest republic of the Western Hemisphere.

A new sense of power inspired swaggering, bragging American politics. So the Greeks bragged when Alexander overthrew Persia; so Christendom bragged when Charles Martel smashed the Saracens and made possible the Empire of Charlemagne; so the British bragged after Trafalgar and Waterloo; so the Puritans bragged when Cromwell struck off the head of King Charles.

The boastful spirit of America was encouraged by spread-eagle statesmen in blue coats, brass buttons and buff waistcoats, who spoke as though history began at Bunker Hill. Andrew Jackson, whose frontiersmen had thrashed the trained British regiments at New Orleans, had succeeded John Quincy Adams, the polished Harvard professor, in the White House. It was a time of grand talk. The People--with a capital P--puffed out their unterrified bosoms and made faces at the miserable rulers of Europe. It was brave and honest, this strutting, defiant democracy, but it took Charles Dickens some years later to show us the ridiculous side of it, even though he went too far.

“Do you suppose I am such a d--d fool as to think myself fit for President of the United States? No, sir!” was Jackson’s estimate of himself in 1823. Yet there was the rough old hero in Washington’s chair at last.

Hayne had talked in the United States Senate of nullifying the nation’s laws in South Carolina, and Webster had thundered back his majestic defence of the indivisible Union. Then South Carolina had attempted nullification and threatened secession, to be promptly answered by President Jackson with an effective promise of cold steel and powder, and a gruff hint of the hangman’s noose.

Beyond the Allegheny Mountains were the new Western States, with unpaved towns, frantic land booms, tall talk, and hero-hearted men in coonskin caps pushing out with axes and rifles into the unsettled national territories.

In the midst of this half-organized civilization Abraham Lincoln listened to the slowly swelling voices of conflict that came to him in his Illinois village from the Eastern and Southern States.

The great scattered West longed for means of transportation. Railroads, canals, steamboats! They meant wealth and power to the pioneers and the shrieking speculators. The Whigs under Henry Clay promised to raise such a national revenue through a high protective tariff that a mighty surplus of money could be divided among the States to carry on internal improvements.

Lincoln was a Whig. He was for a high tariff and internal improvements. Had he not personally piloted a steamboat from Cincinnati between the crooked and overgrown banks of the Sangamon River, and had not the imagination of that country taken fire as the vessel reached Springfield? Railroads, canals, steamboats! And no recognition yet of the issue of disunion that was to shake the continent and drench it with blood.

After the return from the Black Hawk war Lincoln offered himself as a candidate for the Legislature. His handbill, addressed to the voters, dealt mainly with river navigation, railroads and usury.

“I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life,” he wrote. “I have no wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me.”

Lincoln knew that public. He made his first speech in “a mixed jeans coat, claw-hammer style, short in the sleeves and bob-tail; flax and tow-linen pantaloons, and a straw hat.” First, he jumped from the platform, caught a fighting rowdy by the neck and trousers, hurled him twelve feet away, remounted the platform, threw down his hat, and made his historic entrance into American politics in these words:

“Fellow citizens: I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same.”

There is the Lincoln we love--simple, genuine, direct! He seemed to feel to the day of his death that the public was not some distant abstraction, to be approached fearfully and crawlingly; but men like himself, with the same feelings and aspirations. It was because Lincoln hated shams and sneaks, and had the root of kindly honor in his nature, and because he saw, at the very bottom, all men more or less the same, that he reached the average American heart as no one has reached it before or since. He was humble enough--and humility is an inevitable result of moral and spiritual intelligence--to believe that the honesty he felt in himself stirred an equal honesty in others about him.

He was defeated in the election, but that was the only time the people rejected him.

Failure did not sour Lincoln. He took odd jobs about the village--Offutt’s had “petered out”--and for a time he considered the blacksmith’s trade. But presently he became a partner in a general store with an idle fellow named Berry, giving his note in payment of his share. He and his partner bought out still another unsuccessful store, paying for it with their notes. The end of it all was that their business failed and Lincoln had to shoulder a debt that made him stagger for many years.

He was not a good merchant. His fondness for study made him neglect his store. Having secured copies of Blackstone and Chitty he spent his days and nights studying law. He would go to the great oak just outside of the door, lie on his back with his feet against the tree, and lose himself in Blackstone for hours.

The store was a failure, and Lincoln went back to rail splitting and farm work. But his law books were always with him. No hardship, no disappointment, could persuade him to give up his pursuit of knowledge.

In 1833 he became postmaster of New Salem, often carrying the scanty mail about in his hat and reading the newspapers before he delivered them.

Meanwhile John Calhoun, the Surveyor of Sangamon County, wanted an assistant, and he appointed the tall, story-telling, likeable postmaster to the place. Lincoln knew nothing of surveying, but in six weeks he got enough out of books to fit him for the work. His survey maps are still models of accuracy and intelligence.

Once more he was a candidate for the Legislature, in 1834. This time he was elected. He had to borrow money to buy clothes in which to make his legislative appearance.

VI

And now came the first great romance of Lincoln’s life. He fell in love with pretty, auburn-haired Anne Rutledge, daughter of the owner of the tavern in which he lived. His passion seemed hopeless, for the slender maid of seventeen was pledged to a young man from New York. Yet Lincoln loved and waited and hoped. His studies had worn him to emaciation. His ill-fitting clothes hung loose on his ungainly figure. His face was thin and his eyes sunken. He was poor, and a mere clodhopper. Still he loved sweet little Anne Rutledge, even though all the village knew she was another’s, and that love burned in him always.

When her lover went away, promising to return, Lincoln was her watchful knight, serving and hoping. But the New Yorker did not come back. Anne Rutledge grew pale with waiting. It was evident that she was deserted. All New Salem knew it.

Then Lincoln offered her his heart and she consented, asking only time enough to write to her lost lover. No answer to the letter came. Week after week passed. And then Lincoln was accepted. But, alas, the strain had been too great, and the abandoned young beauty grew mortally ill. On her deathbed she called for Lincoln continually, and when he came they left him alone with her for farewell. Afterwards he went to her grave and wept like a child. “My heart lies buried there,” he said.

Poor, honest, ugly Lincoln! That tragedy saddened his life, and years afterwards he could not refer to Anne Rutledge without tears. So terrible was the effect of her death upon him that for a time his friends feared for his reason. He would wander in the woods a victim to despair. To a companion who urged him to forget his loss he groaned, “I cannot; the thought of the snow and rain on her grave fills me with indescribable grief.” Finally, he was taken to a friend’s house and there watched and comforted through days of deep torment, bordering on madness, till he could bear to go out again among men.

Lincoln went to the Legislature at Vandalia in a coarse suit of jeans, but most of the Illinois lawmakers wore jeans and coonskin caps. It cannot be honestly said that he was a brilliant or important lawmaker, although his great height, immense strength, quaint, sharp wit and never-failing stories made him a popular figure at the State capital.

His mind was too much occupied with the study of the law. He had resumed an acquaintance, formed during the Black Hawk war, with Major John T. Stuart, who encouraged him to become a lawyer, and loaned him books. Curiously enough he seemed to desire no teacher, but followed his course of studies alone. Self-reliance was his strongest trait, self-reliance and endless work.

Those who attempt to account for Lincoln’s remarkable rise in life are apt to overlook the terrific mental grind to which he subjected himself for so many years; and, as we value most that which we get through stress and sacrifice and pain, so the things which Lincoln dug out of his books were never forgotten.

Perhaps, in these easy days, when education is pressed upon all, there is a lesson to be found in the story of this man who laid firm foundations for his after life of greatness by taking upon himself the whole responsibility for searching after sound knowledge and principles.

Lincoln became Major Stuart’s law-partner, and for many years he alternated between petty lawsuits and his more profitable work as a surveyor. His sincerity, shrewd humor, fairness and hearty hand-shaking qualities drew friends to him wherever he went. His long, almost ludicrous figure, with its trousers short of the shoetops by several inches; his stooping shoulders and shriveled, sunken, melancholy face, were not associated with the distinction, romance and tragic dignity which history has given to all that belongs to him. But his very spraddling awkwardness, the picturesque vernacular in which he told his countryside parables, coarse and satirical though they sometimes were; the humble spirit in which the lawyer-surveyor-politician would do odd jobs or chores to help a neighbor or earn a dollar, gave him added political strength with a frontier people who loved plain men.

He does not understand Lincoln who thinks of him as a guileless, innocent frontiersman, raised by accident from a log-cabin to direct a mighty war and shape the policy of a nation. He was a sagacious, observant, natural politician, ambitious but honest. His law-partner, Mr. Herndon, has made that plain. Horace White, who knew Lincoln in his days of political campaigning, has written of him:

“He was as ambitious of earthly honors as any man of his time. Furthermore, he was an adept at log-rolling or any political game that did not involve falsity.... Nobody knew better how to turn things to advantage politically, and nobody was readier to take such advantage, provided it did not involve dishonorable means. He could not cheat the people out of their votes any more than out of their money. The Abraham Lincoln that some people have pictured to themselves, sitting in his dingy law office, working over his cases till the voice of duty roused him, never existed. If this had been his type he never would have been called at all.”

It helps one to realize the man who afterwards roused the soul of the Republic to resist the degradation of slavery and the shock of war to read what he wrote from Washington to Mr. Herndon in 1848:

“Now, as to the young men, you must not wait to be brought forward by the older men. For instance, do you suppose that I should ever have got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by older men? You young men get together and form a Rough and Ready club, and have regular meetings and speeches. Take in everybody that you can get.... As you go along, gather up the shrewd, wild boys about town, whether just of age or just a little under. Let every one play the part he can play best--some speak, some sing, and all halloo.”

And in 1836 we catch sight of Lincoln, again a candidate for the Legislature, leaping forward, with flashing eyes to answer a taunt of a Mr. Forquer, who had a lightning rod on his new house, and had just left the Whig party for a place in the Land Office: “I desire to live, and I desire place and distinction; but I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, live to see the day that I would change my politics for an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then feel compelled to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God.”

Yes, Lincoln was a politician who could seize your attention by the very witchery of his grotesque personality, twist his opponent into helplessness by the stinging shrewdness of a humorous story, make you laugh or cry alternately, reach down into your humanity by some frank confession of his poverty and rough beginnings, and then suddenly stir the highest instincts of your nature by a sublime moral appeal.