Abraham Lincoln Read online

  Later, in the White House, he would say of this incident, “Gentlemen, you may think it a very little thing . . . but it was the most important incident of my life . . . the world seemed wider and fairer before me.”

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  WHEN SPRING CAME in 1828, James Gentry, the storekeeper who gave his name to Gentryville, planned to send a flatboat loaded with grain, meat, sugar, and tobacco down to New Orleans. Gentry’s son Allen, a friend of Abraham’s, was the captain of the vessel, and Lincoln himself signed on as the bow hand. They departed from Rockport on the Ohio, the river that served as the Indiana-Kentucky border. They poled their way down the Ohio and into the Mississippi, whose current carried them into the different world of Spanish moss and institutional slavery. While they were tied up at a plantation near Baton Rouge, where they were trading some of their cargo, their raft was attacked at night by a group of seven slaves armed with knives. Abe and the Gentry boy, roused from their sleep, grabbed clubs and in the end drove the men off. Many would speculate later on what would have befallen America if the ultimate Great Emancipator had been killed on the Mississippi in 1828 by those he would later free.

  New Orleans was the biggest town Abraham had ever seen, where seven thousand flatboats like the one he traveled on sat ready to sell their cargoes, and where the architectural elegance of the French Quarter and the squalor of the slave pens stated the contradictory nature of the South. Since their flatboat, once they had sold its cargo, was disposable, on part of their trip home they caught a steamer. Arriving back, Abraham had twenty-five dollars’ cash money to give his father.

  Thus, that summer young Lincoln had acquired some leisure to hang around the courts in Rockport and Boonville and to acquire a copy of the popular Revised Statutes of Indiana. For the first time he read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, for he noticed how frequently lawyers in court called upon them.

  There was a great deal of information in Indiana about new land opportunities in Illinois, beyond the Wabash River. Dennis Hanks, who had married one of Abe’s stepsisters, lost a lot of stock in the winter of 1829 to the milk sick, and so did Thomas Lincoln. He sold his land to James Gentry, and his grain and stock to another Indiana settler, and in early 1830 headed west in a wagon drawn by two yokes of oxen. Illinois had already voted to be a nonslave state, but it would be wrong to believe that in moving to southern Illinois, Tom was making a statement of fraternity with the enslaved black man. Like most new-comers to Illinois, he saw the black man both as the property of Southern aristocrats, whom he resented, and as a potential source of competition for labor, keeping down wages—such as they were—in kind or cash. Whatever the comprehensive motives for this shift, one of them was, perhaps, that a Hanks relative was already settled in Macon County, Illinois, and had sent promising reports.

  The large party of Lincolns, thirteen in all, including Dennis and his wife, made their way over the swollen streams and un-thawed tracks into Illinois. Their wagon was nearly swept away in crossing the swollen Kaskaskia. They settled to the west of Decatur, “on the North Side of the Sangamon River, at the junction of the timber-land and prairie.”

  Here Abe, just turned twenty-one, helped his father cut the timbers for and build another cabin, clear ten acres, and plant corn. By this time, father and son, working together, were strangers. Books like Abe’s copy of The Revised Statutes of Indiana had increased the distance between them.

  Abraham began to go to political meetings in the summer. At one meeting outside a store in Decatur—when he heard a local politician speak unimpressively on the issue of dredging the Sangamon, so that local traders could avail themselves of a current to take them down to New Orleans—Lincoln made his first passionate speech on the issue. As one who heard him said later, in its advocacy for public works, for what we now call infrastructure, it was typical of speeches he would make for the next twenty years.

  That autumn everybody in the Lincoln family came down with what they called “the ague”—a form of malarial fever. Surviving, they then faced a memorable winter—the “winter of the deep snow,” as it would be called—in which cattle and horses wallowed in powder and died of exhaustion. After his brief display of rhetoric in Decatur, rural fever and snow had put Lincoln back in his place.

  But the Sangamon flowed into the Mississippi via the Illinois and thus offered Abraham yet another potential road. With his stepbrother, John Johnston, and John Hanks, a cousin on his mother’s side, Abraham was planning to take another flatboat of cargo to New Orleans. A speculator-storekeeper named Denton Offut would supply the cargo. The young men set to work on the flatboat on the banks of the Sangamon. Eighteen feet wide and eighty feet long, according to John Hanks, it was loaded with barrel pork and corn, and would pick up live hogs farther downriver. Just abreast of the village of New Salem, this huge, laden raft got stuck on the milldam wall. Onlooking locals were impressed to see the way the tallest boatman took control, ordering the unloading of a large part of the cargo and then boring a hole in the bow to let just enough water through to tip the whole great raft forward and over the weir. Offut was also very taken with this exploit of Abe’s, and formed the intention to offer this competent young man a job.

  The flatboat rushed through Beardstown, pushed along by a sail constructed of planks. (“The people came out and laughed at them,” said one contemporary.) They entered the Mississippi where it made a great bend above St. Louis. Where the Ohio joined the Mississippi, they passed Cairo, a southern Illinois river port that would have prodigious importance in an as yet unenvisaged war, and they stopped at Memphis, Vicksburg, and Natchez to trade. John Hanks remembered the impact of revisiting New Orleans on Abraham. “There it was when we saw Negroes chained, maltreated, whipped, and scourged. Lincoln saw it; his heart bled, said nothing much. . . . I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinions of slavery. It ran its irons in him then and there, May 1831.”

  Offut, having traveled south more comfortably on a river steamer, met Abe, John Hanks, and the Johnston boy in New Orleans to oversee the sale of his cargo, and then returned with them to St. Louis by steamer, from which he veered off to attend some business. The three flatboatmen walked from there into the interior of Illinois, a hike of a mere hundred miles or so.

  In Abe’s absence Tom Lincoln had moved his family to his last farm in Coles County. But Denton Offut, while in New Salem, had purchased the mill and decided to open a general store, and asked Abe to clerk for him. New Salem was a small place on the bluffs above the river, but it was a definite and discrete town, with its politics, its gangs, its street life. So the twenty-two-year-old took the job and left his father’s influence more or less for good.

  When Lincoln first arrived in town in his rough homespun pants that were several inches too short, one townsperson considered him “as ruff a specimen of humanity as could be found.” Another remembered, “His appearance was very odd.” The local doctor, Dr. Jason Duncan, “found something about the young man very attractive, evincing intelligence, far beyond the generality of youth. . . .” People remembered that in Offut’s store Lincoln read purposefully between customers, even for just five minutes at a time. One later friend’s first sighting was in a local house, Lincoln lying on a trundle bed rocking a cradle with his foot while reading. Another villager remembered him atop a wood heap, reading a statute book. He also had a book in hand as he walked from group to group along the street.

  He was popular because of his whimsical sense of humor. Despite his poor clothing, his blue jeans, “a coarse pare of Stoga shoes,” and a “low crowned broad-brimmed hat,” he was a good and obliging clerk. He swapped jokes with farmers in the store, and competed in sprints and wood-chopping events. He went fishing with a dropout schoolteacher named Jack Kelso, a passionate admirer of Shakespeare, and, by fishing holes along the riverbank, argued the merits of the Bard’s plays and soliloquies. He joined a local debating society that met in an old storehouse, and dared express there some of
the skepticism about the Bible that he had picked up from reading Tom Paine. He told one friend that the history of the New Testament showed Christ to be a bastard, and his mother a base woman. Lincoln did not belong to any church but seemed to subscribe to the tradition of deism, the concept of something like a grand overriding cosmic intelligence, a divine architect. He still fought with the concept of predestination, the tenet of the preaching houses of the hinterland.

  Early in his stay in New Salem he became the butt of a group called the Clary Grove Boys and their leader, Jack Armstrong. These were the hardfisted mockers of all oddity in the place. But though Abraham may have been odd, he was big. A wrestling match was organized, with Offut and Bill Clary, another storekeeper, acting as promoters. Bets were made; a date was chosen. It seems that Jack Armstrong applied an illegal hold to Lincoln, who stood back and reproached him. Lincoln’s enormous strength became apparent to everyone when he put Armstrong on his back. According to a number of versions, the Clary Grove Boys did not seem to like this, but Armstrong called them off a defiant Lincoln and became his friend and admirer for life.

  The wrestling match gave Abraham great social credit in New Salem. But then, so did one of his jokes about a preacher who got a possum caught in his pants. Encouraged by reading Tom Paine, the poetry of Robbie Burns, and Constantine Volney’s religion-deflating Ruins, he wrote in 1834 his own “Little Book on Infidelity” attacking the divinity of Christ, the veracity of the Bible, and the logicality of predestination. He wanted to send it to newspapers for publication. A storekeeper’s wife, a friend of Lincoln’s, Parthena Hill, remembered her wise husband, Sam, snatching it from its author’s hands and burning it in the fire. It was a great favor, for the tract would have had the capacity to destroy the young man politically.

  At the age of twenty-three, in early 1832, he announced himself a candidate for the state legislature. His political platform, his first published piece of writing, was printed in the March 15, 1832, issue of Springfield’s Sangamo Journal. He declared himself a supporter of “improvements.” This was a more heretical idea to some than it would seem now. Improvements required the existence of financing banks, and Democrats abominated banks as an Old World perversion from which the Jeffersonian farmer should be saved. Lincoln’s political prophet, Henry Clay of Kentucky, had devised a model he named the “American System”: subsidies for internal improvements (such as widening the Sangamon, a beloved project of the young Abraham, the digging of canals, and the laying of railroads) and a national bank to create a uniform system of national investment and currency. The party Clay had turned into a modern machine went by the name Whigs, a title borrowed from the British liberal progressives, and Abraham was a Whig, standing for a different world from the one Tom Lincoln occupied.

  After laying out the Clay vision in his platform as published in the local paper, the young Abraham said eloquently, “I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent voters of the county. . . .” It was not yet remarkable prose in itself, but it was remarkable prose for Tom Lincoln’s son, and a long way from the adolescent exercises of his copybook:

  Abraham Lincoln is my nam[e]

  And with my pen I wrote the same

  I wrote in both hast and speed

  and left it here for fools to read

  As for his oratory, a campaign speech ran, “My politics is short and sweet, like an old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank, a high and protective tariff, and the internal improvement system. If elected, I will be thankful. If beaten, I can do as I have been doing, work for a living.” Here at the start is Lincoln’s western pithiness and lack of pretense. He spoke in an idiom to which the novels of Mark Twain would give an international currency.

  Offut’s store was failing for want of river traffic, and so a river-boat, the Talisman, was attracted up from the Illinois to save the place from its own shallows. Offut persuaded Captain Bogue Vincent to use Abraham Lincoln as his Sangamon River pilot, for Lincoln knew all its shoals. If the Talisman could become a regular visitor, it would restore river commerce to New Salem and give fresh value to the land Offut owned there. But not even Abraham, standing in the bow and cutting overhanging branches as the steamer progressed, could get the Talisman to New Salem. As the craft abandoned the attempt and steamed off again to St. Louis, Offut’s store crashed and Lincoln became unemployed.

  Lincoln’s political campaign had just begun, and his employment by Offut had come to an end, when a military diversion was thrust on him. An elderly leader of the Fox and the Sauk Indians, Black Hawk, had as a young man been driven with his people into Iowa, as a result of an unsatisfactory treaty with the United States in 1804. The Fox and the Sauk had sided with the British in 1812, in the hope that they might vanquish the Americans and arrest their settlement of Illinois. But when the British were defeated, these indigenous peoples were deprived even of the Iowa land they previously held and were allocated a less favorable stretch of earth. Hungry, and pressed from the north by other tribes including the Dakota, in the spring of 1842 they were led back by Black Hawk to their homeland across the Mississippi, the Rock River region of northern Illinois. Black Hawk announced with some dignity that he intended to plant corn on his traditional ground, but in trying to do so, he and his warriors violated both the earlier and the more recent treaties.

  A boy raised with the tale of his grandfather’s slaughter at the hands of Indian marauders in Kentucky, Lincoln never seemed to think it a national sin that Indians were forced off their land to make way for settlers—the way he did when black men and women were kept in bondage to enhance the wealth of Southern property owners. Though his enlistment in the militia for the summer might have had a certain political expedience to it, and he intended to return to New Salem in time for the election in late August, he went off to campaign on a borrowed horse because he believed devoutly that the settlers of the Rock River Valley should be free from Indian molestation. When the Coles County Company of which he was a member rendezvoused at a place called Rushville, Lincoln was elected its captain. In total, four regiments and a spy battalion formed in the country between Beardstown and Rushville, and they marched toward the mouth of Rock River.

  Abraham Lincoln relished his command—later, he would say that no other success in his life had given him as much satisfaction as being elected captain. One acquaintance remembered that Lincoln “had the wildest company in the world,” but he drilled them in the important maneuver of shifting from column into line. And in the process of chasing Black Hawk and his band of five hundred across northern Illinois, Lincoln made some important friends. One was a brigade major of militia named John Todd Stuart, a Springfield lawyer and a powerful figure among the Whigs of Illinois; another was Orville Hick-man Browning, who would one day escort President-elect Lincoln from Springfield to his inauguration in Washington. Stuart’s first impressions of Abraham were of his strength and skill in wrestling and athletic sports, and that he was “a great lover of jokes and teller of stories.” The only disapproval he attracted had been early in the campaign, when his men, who included many of the Clary Grove Boys, broke into the wagon that held the officers’ whiskey supply. The senior command punished Lincoln by making him bear a wooden sword for two days.

  Unlike politicians who seek to make all they can of their military service, Lincoln later self-mockingly described his as involving many bloody encounters with mosquitoes and many dashing and hungry assaults on wild onion patches and stray pigs. For in the muddy, swampy pursuit up the Rock River, in company with Capt. Zachary Taylor’s regulars, Lincoln’s company got very low on food. Many of his men considered their duty done once Black Hawk and his warriors passed into Wisconsin. But Lincoln signed up for a further month—he had no store to go back to—and then for a further month, even when he had to serve as a private.

  During his militia service he had an enc
ounter with a prostitute in Beardstown and, according to another source, one in Galena. Herndon later said Lincoln had told him he had suffered from syphilis, and whether that was true or not, fear of passing the disease on would make Lincoln anxious about marrying.

  Later in his service, he and his comrades came across five whites recently killed by Black Hawk’s party. “[E]very man had a round, red spot on top of his head.” They had been scalped. Such experience would no doubt influence the fierce behavior of the regulars when ultimately they caught up with Black Hawk’s group in Wisconsin.

  By then, his third month of soldiering over, Lincoln returned to New Salem for more electioneering. The respect of fellow soldiers and officers had given him fresh confidence. In the election he came in eighth in a field of thirteen. At the New Salem polling station itself, however, more than three-quarters of his fellow citizens gave him their vote. For that reason he wondered whether he could afford to leave New Salem, his political base. A contradictory temptation, however, was to study law, as Major Stuart had urged him, and to enter a wider world.