The Story of
Young Abraham Lincoln

By

WAYNE WHIPPLE

CONTENTS

[9]

INTRODUCTION

Lincoln From New and Unusual Sources

The boy or girl who reads to-day may know
more about the real Lincoln than his own children
knew. The greatest President’s son, Robert
Lincoln, discussing a certain incident in their
life in the White House, remarked to the writer,
with a smile full of meaning:

“I believe you know more about our family
matters than I do!”

This is because “all the world loves a lover”—and
Abraham Lincoln loved everybody. With
all his brain and brawn, his real greatness was
in his heart. He has been called “the Great-Heart
of the White House,” and there is little
doubt that more people have heard about him
than there are who have read of the original
“Great-Heart” in “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

Indeed, it is safe to say that more millions in
the modern world are acquainted with the story
of the rise of Abraham Lincoln from a poorly[10]
built log cabin to the highest place among “the
seats of the mighty,” than are familiar with the
Bible story of Joseph who arose and stood next
to the throne of the Pharaohs.

Nearly every year, especially since the Lincoln
Centennial, 1909, something new has been
added to the universal knowledge of one of the
greatest, if not the greatest man who ever lived
his life in the world. Not only those who “knew
Lincoln,” but many who only “saw him once” or
shook hands with him, have been called upon to
tell what they saw him do or heard him say. So
hearty was his kindness toward everybody that
the most casual remark of his seems to be
charged with deep human affection—”the touch
of Nature” which has made “the whole world
kin” to him.

He knew just how to sympathize with every
one. The people felt this, without knowing why,
and recognized it in every deed or word or touch,
so that those who have once felt the grasp of his
great warm hand seem to have been drawn into
the strong circuit of “Lincoln fellowship,” and
were enabled, as if by “the laying on of hands,”
to speak of him ever after with a deep and tender
feeling.[11]

There are many such people who did not rush
into print with their observations and experiences.
Their Lincoln memories seemed too sacred
to scatter far and wide. Some of them have
yielded, with real reluctance, in relating all for
publication in The Story of Young Abraham
Lincoln only because they wished their recollections
to benefit the rising generation.

Several of these modest folk have shed true
light on important phases and events in Lincoln’s
life history. For instance, there has been
much discussion concerning Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address—where was it written, and did he
deliver it from notes?

Now, fifty years after that great occasion,
comes a distinguished college professor who unconsciously
settles the whole dispute, whether
Lincoln held his notes in his right hand or his
left—if he used them at all!—while making his
immortal “little speech.” To a group of veterans
of the Grand Army of the Republic he related,
casually, what he saw while a college student
at Gettysburg, after working his way
through the crowd of fifteen thousand people to
the front of the platform on that memorable
day. From this point of vantage he saw and[12]
heard everything, and there is no gainsaying the
vivid memories of his first impressions—how the
President held the little pages in both hands
straight down before him, swinging his tall form
to right, to left and to the front again as he emphasized
the now familiar closing words, “of the
people—by the people—for the people—shall not
perish from the earth.”

Such data have been gathered from various
sources and are here given for the first time in a
connected life-story. Several corrections of
stories giving rise to popular misconceptions
have been supplied by Robert, Lincoln’s only living
son. One of these is the true version of
“Bob’s” losing the only copy of his father’s first
inaugural address. Others were furnished by
two aged Illinois friends who were acquainted
with “Abe” before he became famous. One of
these explained, without knowing it, a question
which has puzzled several biographers—how a
young man of Lincoln’s shrewd intelligence
could have been guilty of such a misdemeanor,
as captain in the Black Hawk War, as to make it
necessary for his superior officer to deprive him
of his sword for a single day.

A new story is told by a dear old lady, who did[13]
not wish her name given, about herself when she
was a little girl, when a “drove of lawyers riding
the old Eighth Judicial District of Illinois,”
came to drink from a famous cold spring on her
father’s premises. She described the uncouth
dress of a tall young man, asking her father who
he was, and he replied with a laugh, “Oh, that’s
Abe Lincoln.”

One day in their rounds, as the lawyers came
through the front gate, a certain judge, whose
name the narrator refused to divulge, knocked
down with his cane her pet doll, which was leaning
against the fence. The little girl cried over
this contemptuous treatment of her “child.”

Young Lawyer Lincoln, seeing it all, sprang in
and quickly picked up the fallen doll. Brushing
off the dust with his great awkward hand he
said, soothingly, to the wounded little mother-heart:

“There now, little Black Eyes, don’t cry.
Your baby’s alive. See, she isn’t hurt a bit!”

That tall young man never looked uncouth to
her after that. It was this same old lady who
told the writer that Lawyer Lincoln wore a new
suit of clothes for the first time on the very day
that he performed the oft-described feat of rescuing[14]
a helpless hog from a great deep hole in
the road, and plastered his new clothes with mud
to the great merriment of his legal friends. This
well-known incident occurred not far from her
father’s place near Paris, Illinois.

These and many other new and corrected incidents
are now collected for The Story Of
Young Abraham Lincoln, in addition to the
best of everything suitable that was known before—as
the highest patriotic service which the
writer can render to the young people of the
United States of America.

[15]

THE STORY OF
YOUNG ABRAHAM LINCOLN

CHAPTER I

Abraham Lincoln’s Forefathers

Lincoln’s grandfather, for whom he was
named Abraham, was a distant cousin to Daniel
Boone. The Boones and the Lincolns had intermarried
for generations. The Lincolns were of
good old English stock. When he was President,
Abraham Lincoln, who had never given
much attention to the family pedigree, said that
the history of his family was well described by
a single line in Gray’s “Elegy”:

“The short and simple annals of the poor.”

Yet Grandfather Abraham was wealthy for
his day. He accompanied Boone from Virginia
to Kentucky and lost his life there. He had sacrificed
part of his property to the pioneer spirit
within him, and, with the killing of their father,
his family lost the rest. They were “land poor”[16]
in the wilderness of the “Dark-and-Bloody-Ground”—the
meaning of the Indian name,
“Ken-tuc-kee.”

Grandfather Lincoln had built a solid log
cabin and cleared a field or two around it, near
the Falls of the Ohio, about where Louisville
now stands. But, in the Summer of 1784, the
tragic day dawned upon the Lincolns which has
come to many a pioneer family in Kentucky and
elsewhere. His son Thomas told this story to his
children:

“My father—your grandfather, Abraham
Lincoln—come over the mountains from Virginia
with his cousin, Dan’l Boone. He was
rich for them times, as he had property worth
seventeen thousand dollars; but Mr. Boone he
told Father he could make a good deal more
by trappin’ and tradin’ with the Injuns for valuable
pelts, or fur skins.

“You know, Dan’l Boone he had lived among
the Injuns. He was a sure shot with the rifle
so’s he could beat the redskins at their own game.
They took him a prisoner oncet, and instead of
killin’ him, they was about ready to make him[17]
chief—he pretended all the while as how he’d
like that—when he got away from ’em. He was
such a good fellow that them Injuns admired
his shrewdness, and they let him do about what
he pleased. So he thought they’d let Father
alone.

“Well, your grandfather was a Quaker, you
see, and believed in treatin’ them red devils well—like
William Penn done, you know. He was a
man for peace and quiet, and everything was
goin’ smooth with the tribes of what we called
the Beargrass Country, till one day, when he
and my brothers, Mordecai—’Mord’ was a big
fellow for his age—and Josiah, a few years
younger—was out in the clearin’ with the oxen,
haulin’ logs down to the crick. I went along too,
but I didn’t help much—for I was only six.

“Young as I was, I remember what happened
that day like it was only yesterday. It come like
a bolt out of the blue. We see Father drop like
he was shot—for he was shot! Then I heard the
crack of a rifle and I saw a puff of smoke floatin’
out o’ the bushes.

“Injuns!” gasps Mord, and starts on the run
for the house—to get his gun. Josiah, he starts
right off in the opposite direction to the Beargrass[18]
fort—we called it a fort, but it was nothin’
but a stockade. The way we boys scattered was
like a brood o’ young turkeys, or pa’tridges,
strikin’ for cover when the old one is shot. I
knowed I’d ought to run too, but I didn’t want
to leave my father layin’ there on the ground.
Seemed like I’d ought to woke him up so he
could run too. Yet I didn’t feel like touchin’
him. I think I must ‘a’ knowed he was dead.

“While I was standin’ still, starin’ like the
oxen, not knowin’ what to do, a big Injun come
out o’ the brush, with a big knife in his hand.
I knowed what he was goin’ to do—skelp my
father! I braced up to ‘im to keep ‘im away,
an’ he jist laffed at me. I never think what the
devil looks like without seein’ that red demon
with his snaky black eyes, grinnin’ at me!

“He picked me up like I was a baby an set
me on the sawlog, an’ was turnin’ back to skelp
Father, when—biff!—another gun-crack—and
Mr. Big Indian he drops jist like your grandfather
did, only he wriggles and squirms around,
bitin’ the dust—like a big snake for all the
world![19]

“I was standin’ there, kind o’ dazed, watchin’
another puff o’ white smoke, comin’ out between
two logs in the side of our house. Then
I knowed ‘Mord’ had shot my Injun. He had
run in, got the gun down off’n the wall, an’
peekin’ out through a crack, he sees that Injun
takin’ hold o’ me. Waitin’ till the ol’ demon
turns away, so’s not to hit me, ‘Mord’ he aims
at a silver dangler on Mr. Injun’s breast and
makes him drop in his tracks like I said. Your
Uncle ‘Mord’ he was a sure shot—like Cousin
Dan’l Boone.

“Then I hears the most blood-curdlin’ yells,
and a lot o’ red devils jump out o’ the bushes
an’ come for me brandishin’ their tomahawks
an’ skelpin’ knives. It was like hell broke
loose. They had been watchin’ an’, of course,
’twas all right to kill Father, but when ‘Mord’
killed one o’ their bucks, that made a big difference.
I had sense enough left to run for the
house with them Injuns after me. Seemed like
I couldn’t run half as fast as usual, but I must
‘a’ made purty good time, from what ‘Mord’ an’
Mother said afterward.

“He said one was ahead o’ the rest an’ had
his tomahawk raised to brain me with it when—bing!—an’[20]
‘Mord’ fetches him down like he
did the fellow that was goin’ to skelp Father.
That made the others mad an’ they took after
me, but ‘Mord’ he drops the head one jist when
he’s goin’ to hit me. But all I knowed at the
time was that them red devils was a-chasin’ me,
and I’d got to ‘leg it’ for dear life!

“When I gits near enough to the house, I
hears Mother and ‘Mord’ hollerin’ to make me
run faster and go to the door, for Mother had it
open jist wide enough to reach out an’ snatch
me in—when the third Injun was stoopin’ to
grab me, but ‘Mord’ makes him bite the dust
like the others.

“My, but wasn’t them Injuns mad! Some
of ’em sneaked around behind the house—they
had to give ‘Mord’s’ gun a wide berth to git
there!—but he could only protect the front—and
was a-settin’ fire to our cabin to smoke us out
or roast us alive, jist when the soldiers come
with Josiah from the fort and saved our lives.
Then the Injuns made ’emselves scurce—but
they druv off the oxen and all our other stock.

“That was the breaking up of our family.[21]
None of us boys was old enough to take Father’s
place, an’ Mother she was afraid to live there
alone. Accordin’ to the laws o’ Virginia—Kentucky
belonged to Virginia then—the oldest son
got all the proputty, so ‘Mord’ he gets it all. He
was welcome to it too, for he was the only one
of us that could take care of it. ‘Mord’ he
wasn’t satisfied with killin’ a few Injuns that
day to revenge Father’s death. He made a business
of shootin’ ’em on sight—a reg’lar Injun
stalker! He couldn’t see that he was jist as
savage as the worst Injun, to murder ’em without
waitin’ to see whether Mr. Injun was a
friend or a foe.

“Oncet when I told ‘im there was good an’
bad red men like they wuz good an’ bad white
men, he said I might jist as well say ‘good devil‘
as ‘good Injun!’ He says ‘the only good Injun’s
the dead Injun!’

“Well, the settlers must ‘a’ ‘greed with
‘Mord,’ for they made him sheriff o’ the county—he
was sech a good shot, too—an’ they
‘lected him to the Legislatur’ after Kentucky
come in as a State. He stood high in the county.
Folks didn’t mind his shootin’ an’ Injun or two,
more or less, when he got the chancet. They[22]
all looked on redskins like they was catamounts
an’ other pesky varmints.

“Your grandmother Lincoln an’ Josiah an’
me moved over into Washington County, but
she had hard scrabblin’ to git a livin’. Josiah
he stayed with her, an’ between him an’ ‘Mord,’
they helped her along, but I had to git out and
scratch for a livin’. From the time I was ten
I was hired out to work for my ‘keep,’ an’ anything
else I could git. I knocked aroun’ the
country, doin’ this, that an’ t’other thing till I
picked up carpenterin’ o’ Joseph Hanks, a
cousin o’ mine, an’ there I met his sister Nancy,
an’ that’s how she come to be your mother—an’
’bout how I come to be your father, too!”

Little is known today of Mordecai Lincoln,
and there would be less interest in poor Thomas
if he had not become the father of Abraham
Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United
States. Mordecai Lincoln was a joker and humorist.
One who knew him well said of him:

“He was a man of great drollery, and it would
almost make you laugh to look at him. I never
saw but one other man whose quiet, droll look
excited in me the disposition to laugh, and that
was ‘Artemus Ward.’[23]

“Mordecai was quite a story-teller, and in
this Abe resembled his ‘Uncle Mord,’ as we
called him. He was an honest man, as tender-hearted
as a woman, and to the last degree charitable
and benevolent.

“Abe Lincoln had a very high opinion of his
uncle, and on one occasion remarked, ‘I have
often said that Uncle Mord had run off with all
the talents of the family.'”

In a letter about his family history, just before
he was nominated for the presidency, Abraham
Lincoln wrote:

“My parents were both born in Virginia, of
undistinguished families—second families, perhaps
I should say. My mother was of a family
of the name of Hanks. My paternal grandfather,
Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham
County, Virginia, to Kentucky about
1781 or 2, where, a year or two later, he was
killed by Indians—not in battle, but by stealth,
when he was laboring to open a farm in the
forest. His ancestors, who were Quakers, went
to Virginia from Berks County, Pennsylvania.
An effort to identify them with the New England
family of the same name ended in nothing
more definite than a similarity of Christian[24]
names in both families, such as Enoch, Levi,
Mordecai, Solomon, Abraham, and the like.

“My father, at the death of his father, was but
six years of age; and he grew up, literally without
education.”

CHAPTER II

Abraham Lincoln’s Father and Mother

While Thomas Lincoln was living with a
farmer and doing odd jobs of carpentering, he
met Nancy Hanks, a tall, slender woman, with
dark skin, dark brown hair and small, deep-set
gray eyes. She had a full forehead, a sharp,
angular face and a sad expression. Yet her disposition
was generally cheerful. For her backwoods
advantages she was considered well educated.
She read well and could write, too. It is
stated that Nancy Hanks taught Thomas Lincoln
to write his own name. Thomas was twenty-eight
and Nancy twenty-three when their wedding
day came. Christopher Columbus Graham,
when almost one hundred years old, gave the[25]
following description of the marriage feast of
the Lincoln bride and groom:

“I am one of the two living men who can
prove that Abraham Lincoln, or Linkhorn, as
the family was miscalled, was born in lawful
wedlock, for I saw Thomas Lincoln marry
Nancy Hanks on the 12th day of June, 1806. I
was hunting roots for my medicine and just went
to the wedding to get a good supper and got it.

“Tom Lincoln was a carpenter, and a good
one for those days, when a cabin was built
mainly with the ax, and not a nail or a bolt or
hinge in it, only leathers and pins to the doors,
and no glass, except in watches and spectacles
and bottles. Tom had the best set of tools in
what was then and is now Washington County.

“Jesse Head, the good Methodist minister
that married them, was also a carpenter or cabinet
maker by trade, and as he was then a neighbor,
they were good friends.

“While you pin me down to facts, I will say
that I saw Nancy Hanks Lincoln at her wedding,
a fresh-looking girl, I should say over twenty.
Tom was a respectable mechanic and could
choose, and she was treated with respect.

“I was at the infare, too, given by John H.[26]
Parrott, her guardian, and only girls with
money had guardians appointed by the court.
We had bear meat; venison; wild turkey and
ducks’ eggs, wild and tame—so common that
you could buy them at two bits a bushel; maple
sugar, swung on a string, to bite off for coffee;
syrup in big gourds, peach and honey; a sheep
that the two families barbecued whole over coals
of wood burned in a pit, and covered with green
boughs to keep the juices in. Our table was of
the puncheons cut from solid logs, and the next
day they were the floor of the new cabin.”

Thomas Lincoln took his bride to live in a
little log cabin in a Kentucky settlement—not a
village or hardly a hamlet—called Elizabethtown.
He evidently thought this place would be
less lonesome for his wife, while he was away
hunting and carpentering, than the lonely farm
he had purchased in Hardin County, about fourteen
miles away. There was so little carpentering
or cabinet making to do that he could make
a better living by farming or hunting. Thomas
was very fond of shooting and as he was a fine
marksman he could provide game for the table,
and other things which are considered luxuries
to-day, such as furs and skins needed for the[27]
primitive wearing apparel of the pioneers. A
daughter was born to the young couple at Elizabethtown,
whom they named Sarah.

Dennis Hanks, a cousin of Nancy, lived near
the Lincolns in the early days of their married
life, and gave Mrs. Eleanor Atkinson this description
of their early life together:

“Looks didn’t count them days, nohow. It
was stren’th an’ work an’ daredevil. A lazy
man or a coward was jist pizen, an’ a spindlin’
feller had to stay in the settlemints. The
clearin’s hadn’t no use fur him. Tom was
strong, an’ he wasn’t lazy nor afeer’d o’ nothin’,
but he was kind o’ shif’less—couldn’t git nothin’
ahead, an’ didn’t keer putickalar. Lots o’ them
kind o’ fellers in ‘arly days, ‘druther hunt and
fish, an’ I reckon they had their use. They
killed off the varmints an’ made it safe fur other
fellers to go into the woods with an ax.

“When Nancy married Tom he was workin’
in a carpenter shop. It wasn’t Tom’s fault he
couldn’t make a livin’ by his trade. Thar was
sca’cely any money in that kentry. Every man
had to do his own tinkerin’, an’ keep everlastin’ly
at work to git enough to eat. So Tom tuk
up some land. It was mighty ornery land, but it[28]
was the best Tom could git, when he hadn’t
much to trade fur it.

“Pore? We was all pore, them days, but the
Lincolns was porer than anybody. Choppin’
trees an’ grubbin’ roots an’ splittin’ rails an’
huntin’ an’ trappin’ didn’t leave Tom no time.
It was all he could do to git his fambly enough
to eat and to kiver ’em. Nancy was turrible
ashamed o’ the way they lived, but she knowed
Tom was doin’ his best, an’ she wa’n’t the pesterin’
kind. She was purty as a pictur’ an’ smart
as you’d find ’em anywhere. She could read an’
write. The Hankses was some smarter’n the
Lincolns. Tom thought a heap o’ Nancy, an’ he
was as good to her as he knowed how. He didn’t
drink or swear or play cyards or fight, an’ them
was drinkin’, cussin’, quarrelsome days. Tom
was popylar, an’ he could lick a bully if he had
to. He jist couldn’t git ahead, somehow.”

Evidently Elizabethtown failed to furnish
Thomas Lincoln a living wage from carpentering,
for he moved with his young wife and his
baby girl to a farm on Nolen Creek, fourteen
miles away. The chief attraction of the so-called[29]
farm was a fine spring of water bubbling up in
the shade of a small grove. From this spring
the place came to be known as “Rock Spring
Farm.” It was a barren spot and the cabin on
it was a rude and primitive sort of home for a
carpenter and joiner to occupy. It contained
but a single room, with only one window and
one door. There was a wide fireplace in the big
chimney which was built outside. But that rude
hut became the home of “the greatest American.”

Abraham Lincoln was born to poverty and
privation, but he was never a pauper. His hardships
were those of many other pioneers, the
wealthiest of whom suffered greater privations
than the poorest laboring man has to endure to-day.

After his nomination to the presidency, Mr.
Lincoln gave to Mr. Hicks, a portrait painter,
this memorandum of his birth:

The exact spot was identified after his death,
and the house was found standing many years
later. The logs were removed to Chicago, for
the World’s Columbian Exposition, in 1893, and
the cabin was reconstructed and exhibited there
and elsewhere in the United States. The materials
were taken back to their original site,
and a fine marble structure now encloses the
precious relics of the birthplace of “the first
American,” as Lowell calls Lincoln in his great
“Commemoration Ode.”

Cousin Dennis Hanks gives the following
quaint description of “Nancy’s boy baby,” as
reported by Mrs. Eleanor Atkinson in her little
book on “Lincoln’s Boyhood.”

“Tom an’ Nancy lived on a farm about two
miles from us, when Abe was born. I ricollect
Tom comin’ over to our house one cold mornin’
in Feb’uary an’ sayin’ kind o’ slow, ‘Nancy’s
got a boy baby.’

“Mother got flustered an’ hurried up ‘er work[31]
to go over to look after the little feller, but I
didn’t have nothin’ to wait fur, so I cut an’ run
the hull two mile to see my new cousin.

“You bet I was tickled to death. Babies
wasn’t as common as blackberries in the woods
o’ Kaintucky. Mother come over an’ washed him
an’ put a yaller flannel petticoat on him, an’
cooked some dried berries with wild honey fur
Nancy, an’ slicked things up an’ went home.
An’ that’s all the nuss’n either of ’em got.

“I rolled up in a b’ar skin an’ slep’ by the fireplace
that night, so’s I could see the little feller
when he cried an’ Tom had to get up an’ tend
to him. Nancy let me hold him purty soon.
Folks often ask me if Abe was a good lookin’
baby. Well, now, he looked just like any other
baby, at fust—like red cherry pulp squeezed dry.
An’ he didn’t improve none as he growed older.
Abe never was much fur looks. I ricollect how
Tom joked about Abe’s long legs when he was
toddlin’ round the cabin. He growed out o’ his
clothes faster’n Nancy could make ’em.

“But he was mighty good comp’ny, solemn as
a papoose, but interested in everything. An’ he
always did have fits o’ cuttin’ up. I’ve seen him
when he was a little feller, settin’ on a stool,[32]
starin’ at a visitor. All of a sudden he’d bu’st
out laughin’ fit to kill. If he told us what he
was laughin’ at, half the time we couldn’t see no
joke.

“Abe never give Nancy no trouble after he
could walk excep’ to keep him in clothes. Most
o’ the time he went bar’foot. Ever wear a wet
buckskin glove? Them moccasins wasn’t no
putection ag’inst the wet. Birch bark with hickory
bark soles, strapped on over yarn socks,
beat buckskin all holler, fur snow. Abe’n me
got purty handy contrivin’ things that way. An’
Abe was right out in the woods about as soon’s
he was weaned, fishin’ in the creek, settin’ traps
fur rabbits an’ muskrats, goin’ on coon-hunts
with Tom an’ me an’ the dogs, follerin’ up bees
to find bee-trees, an’ drappin’ corn fur his
pappy. Mighty interestin’ life fur a boy, but
thar was a good many chances he wouldn’t live
to grow up.”

When little Abe was four years old his father
and mother moved from Rock Spring Farm to
a better place on Knob Creek, a few miles to
the northeast of the farm where he was born.[33]

CHAPTER III

The Boy Lincoln’s Best Teacher

At Knob Creek the boy began to go to an
“A B C” school. His first teacher was Zachariah
Riney. Of course, there were no regular
schools in the backwoods then. When a man
who “knew enough” happened to come along,
especially if he had nothing else to do, he tried
to teach the children of the pioneers in a poor
log schoolhouse. It is not likely that little Abe
went to school more than a few weeks at this
time, for he never had a year’s schooling in his
life. There was another teacher afterward at
Knob Creek—a man named Caleb Hazel. Little
is known of either of these teachers except that
he taught little Abe Lincoln. If their pupil had
not become famous the men and their schools
would never have been mentioned in history.

An old man, named Austin Gollaher, used to
like to tell of the days when he and little Abe
went to school together. He said:

“Abe was an unusually bright boy at school,[34]
and made splendid progress in his studies. Indeed,
he learned faster than any of his schoolmates.
Though so young, he studied very
hard.”

Although Nancy Lincoln insisted on sending
the children to school, when there was any, she
had a large share in Abe’s early education, just
as she had taught his father to write his own
name. She told them Bible stories and such
others as she had picked up in her barren, backwoods
life. She and her husband were too religious
to believe in telling their children fairy
tales.

The best thing of all was the reading of “The
Pilgrim’s Progress” during the long Winter
evenings, after the wood was brought in and
Father Tom had set his traps and done his other
work for the night. Nancy’s voice was low, with
soft, southern tones and accents. Tom and the
children enjoyed the story of Christian’s pilgrimage
from the City of Destruction to the Celestial
City the more because of her love for the
story she was reading to them, as they lay on
bearskin rugs before the blazing fire.

Abe was only six, but he was a thoughtful
boy. He tried to think of some way to show his[35]
gratitude to his mother for giving them so much
pleasure. While out gathering sticks and cutting
wood for the big fireplace, a happy thought
came to him—he would cut off some spicewood
branches, hack them up on a log, and secrete
them behind the cabin. Then, when the mother
was ready to read again, and Sarah and the
father were sitting and lying before the fire, he
brought in the hidden branches and threw them
on, a few twigs at a time, to the surprise of the
others. It worked like a charm; the spicewood
boughs not only added to the brightness of the
scene but filled the whole house with the “sweet
smelling savour” of a little boy’s love and gratitude.

No one can fathom the pleasure of that precious
memory throughout those four lives, as the
story of Great Heart and Christiana followed
Christian along the path that “shineth more and
more unto the perfect day.” While the father
and sister were delighted with the crackle, sparkle
and pleasant aroma of the bits of spicewood,
as Abe tossed them upon the fire, no one could
appreciate the thoughtful act of the boy so much
as his mother. It would be strange if her eyes
did not fill, as she read to her fascinated family,[36]
but that was not the sort of thing the fondest
mother could speak of.

Little did Nancy dream that, in reading to her
son of the devotion of Great Heart to his
charges, she was fostering a spirit in her little
son that would help him make the noble pilgrimage
from their hovel to the highest home in
the land, where another President of the United
States would refer to him as “the Great Heart
of the White House.” If any one could have
looked ahead fifty years to see all this, and could
have told Nancy Hanks Lincoln, she would not
have believed it. After her own life of toil and
hardship it would have seemed to her “too good
to be true.” But in the centuries following the
humble yet beautiful career of “the Backwoods
Boy” from the hut to the White House, history
keeps the whole world saying with bated breath,
“the half was never told!”

Austin Gollaher, grown to manhood, still
living in his old log cabin near the Lincoln
house in Knob Creek nearly twenty years[37]
after Lincoln’s assassination, and gave the following
account of an adventure he had with the
little Lincoln boy:

“I once saved Lincoln’s life. We had been
going to school together one year; but the next
year we had no school, because there were so few
scholars to attend, there being only about twenty
in the school the year before.

“Consequently Abe and I had not much to do;
but, as we did not go to school and our mothers
were strict with us, we did not get to see each
other very often. One Sunday morning my
mother waked me up early, saying she was going
to see Mrs. Lincoln, and that I could go along.
Glad of the chance, I was soon dressed and ready
to go. After my mother and I got there, Abe and
I played all through the day.

“While we were wandering up and down the
little stream called Knob Creek, Abe said: ‘Right
up there’—pointing to the east—’we saw a covey
of partridges yesterday. Let’s go over.’ The
stream was too wide for us to jump across.
Finally we saw a foot-log, and decided to try it.
It was narrow, but Abe said, ‘Let’s coon it.’

“I went first and reached the other side all
right. Abe went about half way across, when[38]
he got scared and began trembling. I hollered
to him, ‘Don’t look down nor up nor sideways,
but look right at me and hold on tight!’ But he
fell off into the creek, and, as the water was about
seven or eight feet deep (I could not swim, and
neither could Abe), I knew it would do no good
for me to go in after him.

“So I got a stick—a long water sprout—and
held it out to him. He came up, grabbing with
both hands, and I put the stick into his hands.
He clung to it, and I pulled him out on the bank,
almost dead. I got him by the arms and shook
him well, and then I rolled him on the ground,
when the water poured out of his mouth.

“He was all right very soon. We promised
each other that we would never tell anybody
about it, and never did for years. I never told
any one of it till after Lincoln was killed.”

Abraham Lincoln’s parents were religious in
their simple way. The boy was brought up to
believe in the care of the Father in Heaven over
the affairs of this life. The family attended
camp meetings and preaching services, which
were great events, because few and far between,
in those primitive days. Abe used afterward to
get his playmates together and preach to them[39]
in a way that sometimes frightened them and
made them cry.

No doubt young Lincoln learned more that was
useful to him in after life from the wandering
preachers of his day than he did of his teachers
during the few months that he was permitted to
go to school. But his best teacher was his
mother. She would have been proud to have her
boy grow up to be a traveling minister or exhorter,
like Peter Cartwright, “the backwoods
preacher.”

Nancy Hanks Lincoln “builded better than
she knew.” She would have been satisfied with
a cabin life for her son. She little knew that by
her own life and teaching she was raising up the
greatest man of his age, and one of the grandest
men in all history, to become the ruler of the
greatest nation that the world has ever seen. She
did her duty by her little boy and he honored her
always during her life and afterward. No wonder
he once exclaimed when he thought of her:

“All I am or hope to be I owe to my sainted
mother.”

And out of her poor, humble life, that devoted
woman

“Gave us Lincoln and never knew!”[40]

CHAPTER IV

Learning to Work

The little Lincoln boy learned to help his
father and mother as soon as he could, picking
berries, dropping seeds and carrying water for
the men to drink. The farm at Knob Creek
seems to have been a little more fertile than the
other two places on which his father had chosen
to live.

Once while living in the White House, President
Lincoln was asked if he could remember his
“old Kentucky home.” He replied with considerable
feeling:

“I remember that old home very well. Our
farm was composed of three fields. It lay in the
valley, surrounded by high hills and deep gorges.
Sometimes, when there came a big rain in the
hills, the water would come down through the
gorges and spread all over the farm. The last
thing I remember of doing there was one Saturday
afternoon; the other boys planted the corn
in what we called the big field—it contained[41]
seven acres—and I dropped the pumpkin seed.
I dropped two seeds in every other row and every
other hill. The next Sunday morning there
came a big rain in the hills—it did not rain a
drop in the valley, but the water, coming through
the gorges, washed the ground, corn, pumpkin
seeds and all, clear off the field!”

Although this was the last thing Lincoln could
remember doing on that farm, it is not at all
likely that it was the last thing he did there, for
Thomas Lincoln was not the man to plant corn
in a field he was about to leave. (The Lincolns
moved away in the fall.)

Another baby boy was born at Knob Creek
farm; a puny, pathetic little stranger. When
this baby was about three years old, the father
had to use his skill as a cabinet maker in making
a tiny coffin, and the Lincoln family wept over a
lonely little grave in the wilderness.

About this time Abe began to learn lessons in
practical patriotism. Once when Mr. Lincoln
was asked what he could remember of the War
of 1812, he replied:

“Nothing but this: I had been fishing one day
and caught a little fish which I was taking home.
I met a soldier on the road, and, having been told[42]
at home that we must be good to the soldiers, I
gave him my fish.”

An old man, Major Alexander Sympson, who
lived not far from the Lincolns at this period,
left this description of “a mere spindle of a
boy,” in one of his earliest attempts to defend
himself against odds, while waiting at the neighboring
mill while a grist was being ground.

“He was the shyest, most reticent, most uncouth
and awkward-appearing, homeliest and
worst-dressed of any in the crowd. So superlatively
wretched a butt could not hope to look on
long unmolested. He was attacked one day as he
stood near a tree by a larger boy with others at
his back. But the crowd was greatly astonished
when little Lincoln soundly thrashed the first,
the second, and third boy in succession; and then,
placing his back against the tree, he defied the
whole crowd, and told them they were a lot of
cowards.”

Evidently Father Tom, who enjoyed quite a
reputation as a wrestler, had give the small boy
a few lessons in “the manly art of self-defense.”

Meanwhile the little brother and sister were
learning still better things at their mother’s
knee, alternately hearing and reading stories[43]
from the Bible, “The Pilgrim’s Progress,”
“Æsop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and
other books, common now, but rare enough in the
backwoods in those days.

There were hard times, even in the wilderness
of Kentucky, after the War of 1812. Slavery
was spreading, and Thomas and Nancy Lincoln
heartily hated that “relic of barbarism.” To
avoid witnessing its wrongs which made it
harder for self-respecting white men to rise
above the class referred to with contempt in the
South as “poor white trash,” Tom Lincoln determined
to move farther north and west—and
deeper into the wilds.

It is sometimes stated that Abraham Lincoln
belonged to the indolent class known as “poor
whites,” but this is not true. Shiftless and improvident
though his father was, he had no use
for that class of white slaves, who seemed to fall
even lower than the blacks.

There was trouble, too, about the title to much
of the land in Kentucky, while Indiana offered
special inducements to settlers in that new territory.

In his carpenter work, Thomas Lincoln had
learned how to build a flatboat, and had made at[44]
least one trip to New Orleans on a craft which
he himself had put together. So, when he finally
decided in the fall of 1816 to emigrate to Indiana,
he at once began to build another boat, which he
launched on the Rolling Fork, at the mouth of
Knob Creek, about half a mile from his own
cabin. He traded his farm for what movable
property he could get, and loaded his raft with
that and his carpenter tools. Waving good-bye
to his wife and two children, he floated down the
Rolling Fork, Salt River, and out into the Ohio
River, which proved too rough for his shaky
craft, and it soon went to pieces.

After fishing up the carpenter tools and most
of his other effects, he put together a crazy raft
which held till he landed at Thompson’s Ferry,
Perry County, in Southern Indiana. Here he
unloaded his raft, left his valuables in the care of
a settler named Posey and journeyed on foot
through the woods to find a good location. After
trudging about sixteen miles, blazing a trail, he
found a situation which suited him well enough,
he thought. Then he walked all the way back to
the Kentucky home they were about to leave.

He found his wife, with Sarah, aged nine, and
Abraham, aged seven, ready to migrate with him[45]
to a newer wilderness. The last thing Nancy
Lincoln had done before leaving their old home
was to take the brother and sister for a farewell
visit to the grave of “the little boy that died.”

The place the father had selected for their
home was a beautiful spot. They could build
their cabin on a little hill, sloping gently down
on all sides. The soil was excellent, but there
was one serious drawback—there was no water
fit to drink within a mile! Thomas Lincoln had
neglected to observe this most important point
while he was prospecting. His wife, or even little
Abe, would have had more common sense. That
was one reason why Thomas Lincoln, though a
good man, who tried hard enough at times, was
always poor and looked down upon by his thrifty
neighbors.

Instead of taking his wife and children down
the three streams by boat, as he had gone, the
father borrowed two horses of a neighbor and
“packed through to Posey’s,” where he had left
his carpenter tools and the other property he
had saved from the wreck of his raft. Abe and
Sarah must have enjoyed the journey, especially[46]
camping out every night on the way. The
father’s skill as a marksman furnished them
with tempting suppers and breakfasts of wild
game.

On the horses they packed their bedding and
the cooking utensils they needed while on the
journey, and for use after their arrival at the
new home. This stock was not large, for it consisted
only of “one oven and lid, one skillet and
lid, and some tinware.”

After they came to Posey’s, Thomas Lincoln
hired a wagon and loaded it with the effects he
had left there, as well as the bedding and the
cooking things they had brought with them on
the two horses. It was a rough wagon ride, jolting
over stumps, logs, and roots of trees. An
earlier settler had cut out a path for a few miles,
but the rest of the way required many days, for
the father had to cut down trees to make a rough
road wide enough for the wagon to pass. It is
not likely that Abe and Sarah minded the delays,
for children generally enjoy new experiences of
that sort. As for their mother, she was accustomed
to all such hardships; she had learned to
take life as it came and make the best of it.

Nancy Lincoln needed all her Christian fortitude[47]
in that Indiana home—if such a place could
be called a home. At last they reached the
chosen place, in the “fork” made by Little
Pigeon Creek emptying into Big Pigeon Creek,
about a mile and a half from a settlement which
was afterward called Gentryville.

As it was late in the fall, Thomas Lincoln decided
not to wait to cut down big trees and hew
logs for a cabin, so he built a “half-faced camp,”
or shed enclosed on three sides, for his family to
live in that winter. As this shed was made of
saplings and poles, he put an ax in Abe’s hands,
and the seven-year-old boy helped his father
build their first “home” in Indiana. It was
Abe’s first experience in the work that afterward
made him famous as “the rail splitter.” It was
with the ax, as it were, that he hewed his way to
the White House and became President of the
United States.

Of course, little Abe Lincoln had no idea of the
White House then. He may never have heard of
“the President’s Palace,” as it used to be called—for
the White House was then a gruesome,
blackened ruin, burned by the British in the War
of 1812. President Madison was living in a
rented house nearby, while the Executive Mansion[48]
was being restored. The blackened stone
walls, left standing after the fire, were painted
white, and on that account the President’s mansion
came to be known as “the White House.”

Little Abe, without a thought of his great future,
was getting ready for it by hacking away
at poles and little trees and helping his father in
the very best way he knew. It was not long, then,
before the “half-faced camp” was ready for his
mother and sister to move into.

Then there was the water question. Dennis
Hanks afterward said: “Tom Lincoln riddled his
land like a honeycomb” trying to find good
water. In the fall and winter they caught rainwater
or melted snow and strained it, but that
was not very healthful at best. So Abe and Sarah
had to go a mile to a spring and carry all the
water they needed to drink, and, when there had
been no rain for a long time, all the water they
used for cooking and washing had to be brought
from there, too.

When warmer weather came, after their “long
and dreary winter” of shivering in that poor
shed, the “camp” did not seem so bad. Thomas
Lincoln soon set about building a warmer and
more substantial cabin. Abe was now eight[49]
years old, and had had some practice in the use
of the ax, so he was able to help his father still
more by cutting and hewing larger logs for the
new cabin. They got it ready for the family to
move into before cold weather set in again.

They had to make their own furniture also.
The table and chairs were made of “puncheon,”
or slabs of wood, with holes bored under each
corner to stick the legs in. Their bedsteads were
poles fitted into holes bored in logs in the walls
of the cabin, and the protruding ends supported
by poles or stakes driven into the ground, for
Tom Lincoln had not yet laid the puncheon floor
of their cabin. Abe’s bed was a pile of dry
leaves laid in one corner of the loft to which he
climbed by means of a ladder of pegs driven into
the wall, instead of stairs.

Their surroundings were such as to delight
the heart of a couple of care-free children. The
forest was filled with oaks, beeches, walnuts and
sugar-maple trees, growing close together and
free from underbrush. Now and then there was
an open glade called a prairie or “lick,” where
the wild animals came to drink and disport
themselves. Game was plentiful—deer, bears,
pheasants, wild turkeys, ducks and birds of all[50]
kinds. This, with Tom Lincoln’s passion for
hunting, promised good things for the family to
eat, as well as bearskin rugs for the bare earth
floor, and deerskin curtains for the still open
door and window. There were fish in the
streams and wild fruits and nuts of many kinds
to be found in the woods during the summer and
fall. For a long time the corn for the “corndodgers”
which they baked in the ashes, had to
be ground by pounding, or in primitive hand-mills.
Potatoes were about the only vegetable
raised in large quantities, and pioneer families
often made the whole meal of roasted potatoes.
Once when his father had “asked the blessing”
over an ashy heap of this staple, Abe remarked
that they were “mighty poor blessings!”

But there were few complaints. They were
all accustomed to that way of living, and they
enjoyed the free and easy life of the forest.
Their only reason for complaint was because
they had been compelled to live in an open shed
all winter, and because there was no floor to
cover the damp ground in their new cabin—no
oiled paper for their one window, and no door
swinging in the single doorway—yet the father
was carpenter and cabinet maker! There is no[51]
record that Nancy Lincoln, weak and ailing
though she was, demurred even at such needless
privations.

About the only reference to this period of
their life that has been preserved for us was in
an odd little sketch in which Mr. Lincoln wrote
of himself as “he.”

“A few days before the completion of his
eighth year, in the absence of his father, a flock
of wild turkeys approached the new log cabin,
and Abraham, with a rifle gun, standing inside,
shot through a crack and killed one of them. He
has never since pulled a trigger on any larger
game.”

Though shooting was the principal sport of
the youth and their fathers in Lincoln’s younger
days, Abe was too kind to inflict needless suffering
upon any of God’s creatures. He had real
religion in his loving heart. Even as a boy he
seemed to know that

[52]

CHAPTER V

Losing his Mother

In the fall of 1817, when the Lincoln family
had moved from the shed into the rough log
cabin, Thomas and Betsy Sparrow came and occupied
the “darned little half-faced camp,” as
Dennis Hanks called it. Betsy Sparrow was
the aunt who had brought up Nancy Hanks, and
she was now a foster-mother to Dennis, her
nephew. Dennis became the constant companion
of the two Lincoln children. He has told
most of the stories that are known of this sad
time in the Lincoln boy’s life.

The two families had lived there for nearly a
year when Thomas and Betsy Sparrow were
both seized with a terrible disease known to the
settlers as the “milk-sick” because it attacked
the cattle. The stricken uncle and aunt died,
early in October, within a few days of each
other. While his wife was ill with the same dread
disease, Thomas Lincoln was at work, cutting
down trees and ripping boards out of the logs[53]
with a long whipsaw with a handle at each end,
which little Abe had to help him use. It was a
sorrowful task for the young lad, for Abe must
have known that he would soon be helping his
father make his mother’s coffin. They buried the
Sparrows under the trees “without benefit of
clergy,” for ministers came seldom to that remote
region.

Nancy Lincoln did not long survive the devoted
aunt and uncle. She had suffered too
much from exposure and privation to recover
her strength when she was seized by the strange
malady. One who was near her during her last
illness wrote, long afterward:

“She struggled on, day by day, like the patient
Christian woman she was. Abe and his
sister Sarah waited on their mother, and did the
little jobs and errands required of them. There
was no physician nearer than thirty-five miles.

“The mother knew that she was going to die,
and called the children to her bedside. She was
very weak and the boy and girl leaned over her
while she gave them her dying message. Placing
her feeble hand on little Abe’s head, she told
him to be kind and good to his father and sister.

“‘Be good to one another,’ she said to them[54]
both. While expressing her hope that they
might live, as she had taught them to live, in the
love of their kindred and the service of God,
Nancy Hanks Lincoln passed from the miserable
surroundings of her poor life on earth to
the brightness of the Beyond, on the seventh day
after she was taken sick.”

To the motherless boy the thought of his
blessed mother being buried without any religious
service whatever added a keen pang to
the bitterness of his lot. Dennis Hanks once
told how eagerly Abe learned to write:

“Sometimes he would write with a piece of
charcoal, or the p’int of a burnt stick, on the
fence or floor. We got a little paper at the
country town, and I made ink out of blackberry
juice, briar root and a little copperas in it. It
was black, but the copperas would eat the paper
after a while. I made his first pen out of a turkey-buzzard
feather. We hadn’t no geese them
days—to make good pens of goose quills.”

As soon as he was able Abe Lincoln wrote his
first letter. It was addressed to Parson Elkin,
the Baptist preacher, who had sometimes stayed
over night with the family when they lived in
Kentucky, to ask that elder to come and preach[55]
a sermon over his mother’s grave. It had been
a long struggle to learn to write “good enough
for a preacher”—especially for a small boy who
is asking such a favor of a man as “high and
mighty” as a minister of the Gospel seemed to
him.

It was a heartbroken plea, but the lad did not
realize it. It was a short, straightforward note,
but the good preacher’s eyes filled with tears as
he read it.

The great undertaking was not finished when
the letter was written. The postage was a large
matter for a little boy. It cost sixpence (equal
to twelve-and-a-half cents today) to send a letter
a short distance—up to thirty miles. Some
letters required twenty-five cents—equal to fifty
in modern money. Sometimes, when the sender
could not advance the postage, the receiver had
to pay it before the letter could be opened and
read. On this account letters were almost as
rare and as expensive as telegrams are today.
When the person getting a letter could not pay
the postage, it was returned to the writer, who
had to pay double to get it back.

In those days one person could annoy another
and put him to expense by writing him and forcing[56]
him to pay the postage—then when the letter
was opened, it was found to be full of abuse, thus
making a man pay for insults to himself!

There was a great general who had suffered
in this way, so he made a rule that he would
receive no letters unless the postage was prepaid.
One day there came to his address a long
envelope containing what seemed to be an important
document. But it was not stamped, and
the servant had been instructed not to receive
that kind of mail. So it was returned to the
sender. When it came back it was discovered
that it had been mailed by mistake without a
stamp. That letter announced to General Zachary
Taylor that he had been nominated by a
great convention as candidate for President of
the United States!

All this seems very strange now that a letter
can be sent around the world for a few cents.
Besides, the mails did not go often and were carried
on horseback. For a long time one half-sick
old man carried the mail on a good-for-nothing
horse, once a week, between New York and
Philadelphia, though they were the largest cities
in the country.

So it was many months before Abe received an[57]
answer to his letter. Elder Elkin may have been
away from home on one of the long circuits covered
by pioneer preachers. As the days and
weeks went by without the lad’s receiving any
reply he was filled with misgivings lest he had
imposed upon the good man’s former friendship.

At last the answer came and poor Abe’s anxiety
was turned to joy. The kind elder not only
said he would come, but he also named the Sunday
when it would be, so that the Lincoln family
could invite all their friends from far and near
to the postponed service—for it often happened
in this new country that the funeral could not
take place for months after the burial.

It was late in the following Summer, nearly
a year after Nancy’s death, that the devoted
minister came. The word had gone out to all
the region round about. It was the religious
event of the season. Hundreds of people of all
ages came from twenty miles around on horseback—a father,
mother and two children on one
horse—also in oxcarts, and on foot. They sat in
groups in the wagons, and on the green grass, as
at the feeding of the multitudes in the time of
the Christ. But these people brought their own
refreshments as if it were a picnic.[58]

They talked together in low, solemn tones
while waiting for the poor little funeral procession
to march out from the Lincoln cabin to
the grass-covered grave. Pioneer etiquette required
the formalities of a funeral. Elder Elkin
was followed by the widowed husband, with
Abraham and Sarah and poor Cousin Dennis,
also bereaved of his foster-parents, and now a
member of the Lincoln family.

There were tender hearts behind those hardened
faces, and tears glistened on the tanned
cheeks of many in that motley assemblage of
eager listeners, while the good elder was paying
the last tribute of earth to the sweet and patient
memory of his departed friend of other days.

The words of the man of God, telling that assembled
multitude what a lovely and devoted
girl and woman his mother had been, gave sweet
and solemn joy to the soul of the little Lincoln
boy. It was all for her dear sake, and she was,
of all women, worthy of this sacred respect. As
he gazed around on the weeping people, he
thought of the hopes and fears of the months
that had passed since he wrote his first letter
to bring this about.

“God bless my angel mother!” burst from his[59]
lonely lips—”how glad I am I’ve learned to
write!”

All that a young girl of twelve could do, assisted
by a willing brother of ten, was done by
Sarah and Abraham Lincoln to make that desolate
cabin a home for their lonesome father, and
for cousin Dennis Hanks, whose young life had
been twice darkened by a double bereavement.
But “what is home without a mother?”
Thomas Lincoln, missing the balance and inspiration
of a patient wife, became more and
more restless, and, after a year, wandered back
again to his former homes and haunts in Kentucky.

While visiting Elizabethtown he saw a former
sweetheart, the Sally Bush of younger days,
now Mrs. Daniel Johnston, widow of the county
jailer who had recently died, leaving three children
and considerable property, for that time
and place. Thomas renewed his suit and won
the pitying heart of Sarah Johnston, and according
to the story of the county clerk:

“The next morning, December 2, 1819, I issued
the license, and the same day they were[60]
married, bundled up, and started for home.”

Imagine the glad surprise of the three children
who had been left at home for weeks, when
they saw a smart, covered wagon, drawn by four
horses, driven up before the cabin door one
bright winter day, and their father, active and
alert, spring out and assist a pleasant-looking
woman and three children to alight! Then
they were told that this woman was to be their
mother and they had two more sisters and another
brother!

To the poor forlorn Lincoln children and their
still more desolate cousin, it seemed too good to
be true. They quickly learned the names of
their new brother and sisters. The Johnston
children were called John, Sarah and Matilda,
so Sarah Lincoln’s name was promptly changed
to Nancy for her dead mother, as there were two
Sarahs already in the combined family.

Mrs. Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln lost no
time in taking poor Abe and Nancy Lincoln to
her great motherly heart, as if they were her
own. They were dirty, for they had been
neglected, ill-used and deserted. She washed
their wasted bodies clean and dressed them in
nice warm clothing provided for her own children,[61]
till she, as she expressed it, “made them
look more human.”

Dennis Hanks told afterward of the great
difference the stepmother made in their young
lives:

“In fact, in a few weeks all had changed; and
where everything had been wanting, all was
snug and comfortable. She was a woman of
great energy, of remarkable good sense, very industrious
and saving, also very neat and tidy in
her person and manners. She took an especial
liking for young Abe. Her love for him was
warmly returned, and continued to the day of
his death. But few children love their parents
as he loved his stepmother. She dressed him up
in entire new clothes, and from that time on he
appeared to lead a new life. He was encouraged
by her to study, and a wish on his part was
gratified when it could be done. The two sets of
children got along finely together, as if they all
had been the children of the same parents.”

Dennis also referred to the “large supply of
household goods” the new mother brought with
her:

“One fine bureau (worth $40), one table, one
set of chairs, one large clothes chest, cooking[62]
utensils, knives, forks, bedding and other
articles.”

It must have been a glorious day when such a
splendid array of household furniture was carried
into the rude cabin of Thomas Lincoln.
But best of all, the new wife had sufficient tact
and force of will to induce her good-hearted but
shiftless husband to lay a floor, put in a window,
and hang a door to protect his doubled family
from the cold. It was about Christmas time,
and the Lincoln children, as they nestled in
warm beds for the first time in their lives, must
have thanked their second mother from the bottoms
of their grateful hearts.

CHAPTER VI

School Days Now and Then

Lincoln once wrote, in a letter to a friend,
about his early teachers in Indiana:

“He (father) removed from Kentucky to what
is now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth
year. We reached our new home about the time[63]
the State came into the Union. It was a wild
region with many bears and other wild animals
still in the woods. There I grew up. There
were some schools, so-called; but no qualification
was ever required of a teacher beside
readin’, writin’, and cipherin’ to the Rule of
Three (simple proportion). If a straggler supposed
to understand Latin happened to sojourn
in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a
wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite
ambition for education.”

Abe’s first teacher in Indiana, however, was
Hazel Dorsey. The school house was built of
rough, round logs. The chimney was made of
poles well covered with clay. The windows were
spaces cut in the logs, and covered with greased
paper. But Abe was determined to learn. He
and his sister thought nothing of walking four
miles a day through snow, rain and mud. “Nat”
Grigsby, who afterward married the sister,
spoke in glowing terms of Abe’s few school
days:

“He was always at school early, and attended
to his studies. He lost no time at home, and
when not at work was at his books. He kept up
his studies on Sunday, and carried his books[64]
with him to work, so that he might read when
he rested from labor.”

Thomas Lincoln had no use for “eddication,”
as he called it. “It will spile the boy,” he kept
saying. He—the father—had got along better
without going to school, and why should Abe
have a better education than his father? He
thought Abe’s studious habits were due to “pure
laziness, jest to git shet o’ workin’.” So, whenever
there was the slightest excuse, he took Abe
out of school and set him to work at home or for
one of the neighbors, while he himself went
hunting or loafed about the house.

This must have been very trying to a boy as
hungry to learn as Abe Lincoln was. His new
mother saw and sympathized with him, and in
her quiet way, managed to get the boy started
to school, for a few weeks at most. For some
reason Hazel Dorsey stopped “keeping” the
school, and there was a long “vacation” for all
the children. But a new man, Andrew Crawford,
came and settled near Gentryville. Having
nothing better to do at first, he was urged to
reopen the school.

One evening Abe came in from his work and
his stepmother greeted him with:[65]

“Another chance for you to go to school.”

“Where?”

“That man Crawford that moved in a while
ago is to begin school next week, and two miles
and back every day will be just about enough
for you to walk to keep your legs limber.”

The tactful wife accomplished it somehow and
Abe started off to school with Nancy, and a light
heart. A neighbor described him as he appeared
in Crawford’s school, as “long, wiry and
strong, while his big feet and hands, and the
length of his legs and arms, were out of all
proportion to his small trunk and head. His complexion
was swarthy, and his skin shriveled and
yellow even then. He wore low shoes, buckskin
breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, and a coonskin
cap. The breeches hung close to his legs, but
were far from meeting the tops of his shoes,
exposing ‘twelve inches of shinbone, sharp, blue
and narrow.'”

“Yet,” said Nat Grigsby, “he was always in
good health, never sick, and had an excellent constitution.”

Andrew Crawford must have been an unusual[66]
man, for he tried to teach “manners” in his
backwoods school! Spelling was considered a
great accomplishment. Abe shone as a speller
in school and at the spelling-matches. One day,
evidently during a period when young Lincoln
was kept from school to do some outside work
for his father, he appeared at the window when
the class in spelling was on the floor. The word
“defied” was given out and several pupils had
misspelled it. Kate Roby, the pretty girl of the
village, was stammering over it. “D-e-f,” said
Kate, then she hesitated over the next letter.
Abe pointed to his eye and winked significantly.
The girl took the hint and went on glibly
“i-e-d,” and “went up head.”

There was a buck’s head nailed over the
school house door. It proved a temptation to
young Lincoln, who was tall enough to reach it
easily. One day the schoolmaster discovered
that one horn was broken and he demanded to
know who had done the damage. There was
silence and a general denial till Abe spoke up
sturdily:

“I did it. I did not mean to do it, but I hung[67]
on it—and it broke!” The other boys thought
Abe was foolish to “own up” till he had to—but
that was his way.

It is doubtful if Abe Lincoln owned an
arithmetic. He had a copybook, made by himself, in
which he entered tables of weights and
measures and “sums” he had to do. Among these
was a specimen of schoolboy doggerel:

In another place he wrote some solemn
reflections on the value of time:

As he grew older his handwriting improved
and he was often asked to “set copies” for other[68]
boys to follow. In the book of a boy named
Richardson, he wrote this prophetic couplet:

Dennis Hanks related of his young companion:
“As far as food and clothing were concerned,
the boy had plenty—such as it was—’corndodgers,’
bacon and game, some fish and
wild fruits. We had very little wheat flour.
The nearest mill was eighteen miles. A hoss
mill it was, with a plug (old horse) pullin’ a
beam around; and Abe used to say his dog could
stand and eat the flour as fast as it was made,
and then be ready for supper!

“For clothing he had jeans. He was grown
before he wore all-wool pants. It was a new
country, and he was a raw boy, rather a bright
and likely lad; but the big world seemed far
ahead of him. We were all slow-goin’ folks.
But he had the stuff of greatness in him. He
got his rare sense and sterling principles from
both parents. But Abe’s kindliness, humor,
love of humanity, hatred of slavery, all came[69]
from his mother. I am free to say Abe was a
‘mother’s boy.'”

Dennis used to like to tell of Abe’s earliest
ventures in the fields of literature: “His first
readin’ book was Webster’s speller. Then he
got hold of a book—I can’t rickilect the name.
It told about a feller, a nigger or suthin’, that
sailed a flatboat up to a rock, and the rock was
magnetized and drawed the nails out of his boat,
an’ he got a duckin’, or drownded, or suthin’, I
forget now. (This book, of course, was ‘The
Arabian Nights.’) Abe would lay on the floor
with a chair under his head, and laugh over
them stories by the hour. I told him they was
likely lies from end to end; but he learned to
read right well in them.”

His stock of books was small, but they were
the right kind—the Bible, “The Pilgrim’s Progress,”
Æsop’s Fables, “Robinson Crusoe,” a
history of the United States, and the Statutes
of Indiana. This last was a strange book for a
boy to read, but Abe pored over it as eagerly as
a lad to-day might read “The Three Guardsmen,”
or “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
He made notes of what he read with his turkey-buzzard
pen and brier-root ink. If he did not[70]
have these handy, he would write with a piece of
charcoal or the charred end of a stick, on a
board, or on the under side of a chair or bench.
He used the wooden fire shovel for a slate, shaving
it off clean when both sides were full of figures.
When he got hold of paper enough to
make a copy-book he would go about transferring
his notes from boards, beams, under sides
of the chairs and the table, and from all the
queer places he had put them down, on the spur
of the moment.

Besides the books he had at hand, he borrowed
all he could get, often walking many miles for
a book, until, as he once told a friend, he “read
through every book he had ever heard of in that
country, for a circuit of fifty miles”—quite a
circulating library!

“The thoughts of youth are long, long
thoughts.” It must have been about this time
that the lad had the following experience, which
he himself related to a legal friend, with his
chair tilted back and his knees “cocked
up” in the manner described by Cousin John
Hanks:[71]

“Did you ever write out a story in your mind?
I did when I was little codger. One day a wagon
with a lady and two girls and a man broke down
near us, and while they were fixing up, they
cooked in our kitchen. The woman had books
and read us stories, and they were the first of
the kind I ever heard. I took a great fancy to
one of the girls; and when they were gone I
thought of her a good deal, and one day, when
I was sitting out in the sun by the house, I wrote
out a story in my mind.

“I thought I took my father’s horse and followed
the wagon, and finally I found it, and
they were surprised to see me.

“I talked with the girl and persuaded her to
elope with me; and that night I put her on my
horse and we started off across the prairie.
After several hours we came to a camp; and
when we rode up we found it was one we had
left a few hours before and went in.

“The next night we tried again, and the same
thing happened—the horse came back to the
same place; and then we concluded we ought not
to elope. I stayed until I had persuaded her
father that he ought to give her to me.

“I always meant to write that story out and[72]
publish it, and I began once; but I concluded it
was not much of a story.

“But I think that was the beginning of love
with me.”

Abe’s chief delight, if permitted to do so, was
to lie in the shade of some inviting tree and
read. He liked to lie on his stomach before the
fire at night, and often read as long as this flickering
light lasted. He sometimes took a book
to bed to read as soon as the morning light began
to come through the chinks between the logs beside
his bed. He once placed a book between
the logs to have it handy in the morning, and a
storm came up and soaked it with dirty water
from the “mud-daubed” mortar, plastered between
the logs of the cabin.

The book happened to be Weems’s “Life of
Washington.” Abe was in a sad dilemma.
What could he say to the owner of the book,
which he had borrowed from the meanest man
in the neighborhood, Josiah Crawford, who was
so unpopular that he went by the nickname of
“Old Blue Nose”?[73]

The only course was to show the angry owner
his precious volume, warped and stained as it
was, and offer to do anything he could to repay
him.

“Abe,” said “Old Blue Nose,” with bloodcurdling
friendliness, “bein’ as it’s you, Abe, I
won’t be hard on you. You jest come over and
pull fodder for me, and the book is yours.”

“All right,” said Abe, his deep-set eyes twinkling
in spite of himself at the thought of owning
the story of the life of the greatest of heroes,
“how much fodder?”

“Wal,” said old Josiah, “that book’s worth
seventy-five cents, at least. You kin earn twenty-five
cents a day—that will make three days.
You come and pull all you can in three days and
you may have the book.”

That was an exorbitant price, even if the book
were new, but Abe was at the old man’s mercy.
He realized this, and made the best of a bad bargain.
He cheerfully did the work for a man who
was mean enough to take advantage of his misfortune.
He comforted himself with the
thought that he would be the owner of the
precious “Life of Washington.” Long afterward,
in a speech before the New Jersey Legislature,[74]
on his way to Washington to be inaugurated,
like Washington, as President of the
United States, he referred to this strange book.

One morning, on his way to work, with an ax
on his shoulder, his stepsister, Matilda Johnston,
though forbidden by her mother to follow
Abe, crept after him, and with a cat-like spring
landed between his shoulders and pressed her
sharp knees into the small of his back.

Taken unawares, Abe staggered backward
and ax and girl fell to the ground together. The
sharp implement cut her ankle badly, and mischievous
Matilda shrieked with fright and pain
when she saw the blood gushing from the wound.
Young Lincoln tore a sleeve from his shirt to
bandage the gash and bound up the ankle as
well as he could. Then he tried to teach the still
sobbing girl a lesson.

“‘Tilda,” he said gently, “I’m surprised.
Why did you disobey mother?”

Matilda only wept silently, and the lad went
on, “What are you going to tell mother about
it?”[75]

“Tell her I did it with the ax,” sobbed the
young girl. “That will be the truth, too.”

“Yes,” said Abe severely, “that’s the truth,
but not all the truth. You just tell the whole
truth, ‘Tilda, and trust mother for the rest.”

Matilda went limping home and told her
mother the whole story, and the good woman was
so sorry for her that, as the girl told Abe that
evening, “she didn’t even scold me.”

Abe sometimes heard things in the simple
conversation of friends that disturbed him because
they seemed beyond his comprehension.
He said of this:

“I remember how, when a child, I used to get
irritated when any one talked to me in a way I
couldn’t understand.

“I do not think I ever got angry with anything
else in my life; but that always disturbed
my temper—and has ever since.

“I can remember going to my little bedroom,
after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening
with my father, and spending no small part of
the night walking up and down, trying to make[76]
out what was the exact meaning of some of
their, to me, dark sayings.

“I could not sleep, although I tried to, when
I got on such a hunt for an idea; and when I
thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I
had repeated it over and over, and had put in
language plain enough, as I thought, for any
boy I knew to comprehend.

“This was a kind of a passion with me, and
it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now
when I am bounding a thought, till I have
bounded it east, and bounded it west, and
bounded it north, and bounded it south.”

Not long before her death, Mr. Herndon, Lincoln’s
law partner, called upon Mrs. Sarah Lincoln
to collect material for a “Life of Lincoln”
he was preparing to write. This was the best of
all the things she related of her illustrious stepson:

“I can say what scarcely one mother in a
thousand can say, Abe never gave me a cross
word or look, and never refused, in fact or appearance,
to do anything I asked him. His
mind and mine seemed to run together.[77]

“I had a son, John, who was raised with Abe.
Both were good boys, but I must say, both now
being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw
or expect to see.”

“Charity begins at home”—and so do truth
and honesty. Abraham Lincoln could not have
become so popular all over the world on account
of his honest kindheartedness if he had not been
loyal, obedient and loving toward those at home.
Popularity, also, “begins at home.” A mean,
disagreeable, dishonest boy may become a king,
because he was “to the manner born.” But only
a good, kind, honest man, considerate of others,
can be elected President of the United States.

CHAPTER VII

Abe and the Neighbors

Nat Grigsby stated once that writing compositions
was not required by Schoolmaster Crawford,
but “Abe took it up on his own account,”[78]
and his first essay was against cruelty to animals.

The boys of the neighborhood made a practice
of catching terrapins and laying live coals on
their backs. Abe caught a group of them at this
cruel sport one day, and rushed to the relief of
the helpless turtle. Snatching the shingle that
one of the boys was using to handle the coals, he
brushed them off the turtle’s shell, and with
angry tears in his eyes, proceeded to use it on
one of the offenders, while he called the rest a
lot of cowards.

One day his stepbrother, John Johnston, according
to his sister Matilda, “caught a terrapin,
brought it to the place where Abe was
‘preaching,’ threw it against a tree and crushed
its shell.” Abe then preached against cruelty to
animals, contending that “an ant’s life is as
sweet to it as ours is to us.”

Abe was compelled to leave school on the
slightest pretext to work for the neighbors. He
was so big and strong—attaining his full height
at seventeen—that his services were more in demand
than those of his stepbrother, John Johnston,[79]
or of Cousin Dennis. Abe was called lazy
because the neighbors shared the idea of
Thomas Lincoln, that his reading and studying
were only a pretext for shirking. Yet he was
never so idle as either Dennis Hanks or John
Johnston, who were permitted to go hunting or
fishing with Tom Lincoln, while Abe stayed out
of school to do the work that one of the three
older men should have done.

Abe’s father was kinder in many ways to his
stepchildren than he was to his own son. This
may have been due to the fact that he did not
wish to be thought “partial” to his own child.
No doubt Abe was “forward.” He liked to
take part in any discussion, and sometimes he
broke into the conversation when his opinion
had not been asked. Besides, he got into arguments
with his fellow-laborers, and wasted the
time belonging to his employer.

One day, according to Dennis, they were all
working together in the field, when a man rode
up on horseback and asked a question. Abe was
the first to mount the fence to answer the
stranger and engage him in conversation. To
teach his son better “manners” in the presence
of his “superiors,” Thomas Lincoln struck Abe[80]
a heavy blow which knocked him backward off
the fence, and silenced him for a time.

Of course, every one present laughed at Abe’s
discomfiture, and the neighbors approved of
Thomas Lincoln’s rude act as a matter of discipline.
In their opinion Abe Lincoln was getting
altogether too smart. While they enjoyed
his homely wit and good nature, they did not
like to admit that he was in any way their superior.
A visitor to Springfield, Ill., will
even now find some of Lincoln’s old neighbors
eager to say “there were a dozen smarter men
in this city than Lincoln” when he “happened
to get nominated for the presidency!”

Abe was “hail fellow, well met” everywhere.
The women comprehended his true greatness
before the men did so. There was a rough gallantry
about him, which, though lacking in
“polish,” was true, “heart-of-oak” politeness.
He wished every one well. His whole life passed
with “malice toward none, with charity for
all.”

When he “went out evenings” Abe Lincoln
took the greatest pains to make everybody comfortable[81]
and happy. He was sure to bring in the
biggest backlog and make the brightest fire. He
read “the funniest fortunes” for the young
people from the sparks as they flew up the chimney.
He was the best helper in paring the
apples, shelling the corn and cracking the nuts
for the evening’s refreshments.

When he went to spelling school, after the first
few times, he was not allowed to take part in the
spelling match because everybody knew that the
side that “chose first” would get Abe Lincoln
and he always “spelled down.” But he went
just the same and had a good time himself if he
could add to the enjoyment of the rest.

He went swimming, warm evenings, with the
boys, and ran races, jumped and wrestled at
noon-times, which was supposed to be given up
to eating and resting. He was “the life” of the
husking-bee and barn raising, and was always
present, often as a judge because of his humor,
fairness and tact, at horse races. He engaged
heartily in every kind of “manly sport” which
did not entail unnecessary suffering upon helpless
animals.

Coon hunting, however, was an exception.
The coon was a pest and a plague to the farmer,[82]
so it should be got rid of. He once told the following
story:

“My father had a little yellow house dog
which invariably gave the alarm if we boys undertook
to slip away unobserved after night had
set in—as we sometimes did—to go coon hunting.
One night my brother, John Johnston, and
I, with the usual complement of boys required
for a successful coon hunt, took the insignificant
little cur with us.

“We located the coveted coon, killed him, and
then in a sporting vein, sewed the coon skin on
the little dog.

“It struggled vigorously during the operation
of sewing on, and when released made a bee-line
for home. Some larger dogs on the way, scenting coon,
tracked the little animal home and apparently
mistaking him for a real coon, speedily
demolished him. The next morning, father
found, lying in his yard, the lifeless remains of
yellow ‘Joe,’ with strong circumstantial evidence,
in the form of fragments of coon skin,
against us.

“Father was much incensed at his death, but[83]
as John and I, scantily protected from the morning
wind, stood shivering in the doorway, we
felt assured that little yellow Joe would never
again be able to sound the alarm of another
coon hunt.”

While he was President, Mr. Lincoln told
Henry J. Raymond, the founder of the New
York Times, the following story of an experience
he had about this time, while working with
his stepbrother in a cornfield:

“Raymond,” said he, “you were brought up
on a farm, were you not? Then you know what
a ‘chin fly’ is. My brother and I were plowing
corn once, I driving the horse and he holding
the plow. The horse was lazy, but on one occasion
he rushed across the field so that I, with my
long legs, could scarcely keep pace with him.
On reaching the end of the furrow I found an
enormous chin fly fastened upon the horse and
I knocked it off. My brother asked me what I
did that for. I told him I didn’t want the old
horse bitten in that way.

“‘Why,’ said my brother,’that’s all that
made him go.'”[84]

“Now if Mr. Chase (the Secretary of the
Treasury) has a presidential ‘chin fly’ biting
him, I’m not going to knock it off, if it will only
make his department go.”

It seemed to be the “irony of fate” that Abe
should have to work for “Old Blue Nose” as a
farm hand. But the lad liked Mrs. Crawford,
and Lincoln’s sister Nancy lived there, at the
same time, as maid-of-all-work. Another attraction,
the Crawford family was rich, in Abe’s
eyes, in possessing several books, which he was
glad of the chance to read.

Mrs. Crawford told many things about young
Lincoln that might otherwise have been lost.
She said “Abe was very polite, in his awkward
way, taking off his hat to me and bowing. He
was a sensitive lad, never coming where he was
not wanted. He was tender and kind—like his
sister.

“He liked to hang around and gossip and joke
with the women. After he had wasted too much
time this way, he would exclaim:

“‘Well, this won’t buy the child a coat,’
and the long-legged hired boy would stride[85]
away and catch up with the others.”

One day when he was asked to kill a hog, Abe
answered promptly that he had never done that,
“but if you’ll risk the hog, I’ll risk myself!”

Mrs. Crawford told also about “going to meeting”
in those primitive days:

“At that time we thought it nothing to go
eight or ten miles. The ladies did not stop for
the want of a shawl or riding dress, or horses.
In the winter time they would put on their husbands’
old overcoats, wrap up their little ones,
and take two or three of them on their beasts,
while their husbands would walk.

“In winter time they would hold church in
some of the neighbors’ houses. At such times
they were always treated with the utmost kindness;
a basket of apples, or turnips—apples
were scarce in those days—was set out. Sometimes
potatoes were used for a ‘treat.’ In old
Mr. Linkhorn’s (Lincoln’s) house a plate of potatoes,
washed and pared nicely, was handed
around.”

Meanwhile the boy was growing to tall manhood,
both in body and in mind. The neighbors,[86]
who failed to mark his mental growth, were
greatly impressed with his physical strength.
The Richardson family, with whom Abe seemed
to have lived as hired man, used to tell marvelous
tales of his prowess, some of which may
have grown somewhat in the telling. Mr. Richardson
declared that the young man could carry
as heavy a load as “three ordinary men.” He
saw Abe pick up and walk away with “a chicken
house, made up of poles pinned together, and
covered, that weighed at least six hundred if not
much more.”

When the Richardsons were building their
corn-crib, Abe saw three or four men getting
ready to carry several huge posts or timbers on
“sticks” between them. Watching his chance,
he coolly stepped in, shouldered all the timbers
at once and walked off alone with them, carrying
them to the place desired. He performed
these feats off-hand, smiling down in undisguised
pleasure as the men around him expressed
their amazement. It seemed to appeal
to his sense of humor as well as his desire to help
others out of their difficulties.

Another neighbor, “old Mr. Wood,” said of
Abe: “He could strike, with a maul, a heavier[87]
blow than any other man. He could sink an ax
deeper into wood than any man I ever saw.”

Dennis Hanks used to tell that if you heard
Abe working in the woods alone, felling trees,
you would think three men, at least, were at
work there—the trees came crashing down so
fast.

On one occasion after he had been threshing
wheat for Mr. Turnham, the farmer-constable
whose “Revised Statutes of Indiana” Abe had
devoured, Lincoln was walking back, late at
night from Gentryville, where he and a number
of cronies had spent the evening. As the youths
were picking their way along the frozen road,
they saw a dark object on the ground by the
roadside. They found it to be an old sot they
knew too well lying there, dead drunk. Lincoln
stopped, and the rest, knowing the tenderness of
his heart, exclaimed:

“Aw, let him alone, Abe. ‘Twon’t do him no
good. He’s made his bed, let him lay in it!”

The rest laughed—for the “bed” was freezing
mud. But Abe could see no humor in the situation.
The man might be run over, or freeze to
death. To abandon any human being in such a
plight seemed too monstrous to him. The other[88]
young men hurried on in the cold, shrugging
their shoulders and shaking their heads—”Poor
Abe!—he’s a hopeless case,” and left Lincoln
to do the work of a Good Samaritan alone. He
had no beast on which to carry the dead weight
of the drunken man, whom he vainly tried,
again and again, to arouse to a sense of the
predicament he was in. At last the young man
took up the apparently lifeless body of the mud-covered
man in his strong arms, and carried him
a quarter of a mile to a deserted cabin, where
he made up a fire and warmed and nursed the
old drunkard the rest of that night. Then Abe
gave him “a good talking to,” and the unfortunate
man is said to have been so deeply impressed
by the young man’s kindness that he
heeded the temperance lecture and never again
risked his life as he had done that night. When
the old man told John Hanks of Abe’s Herculean
effort to save him, he added:

“It was mighty clever in Abe Lincoln to tote
me to a warm fire that cold night.”

While Abe was working for the farmers round
about his father’s farm he spent many of his[89]
evenings in Jones’ grocery “talking politics”
and other things with the men, who also gathered
there. Mr. Jones took a Louisville paper,
which young Lincoln read eagerly. Slavery was
a live political topic then, and Abe soon acquired
quite a reputation as a stump orator.

As he read the “Indiana Statutes” he was
supposed to “know more law than the constable.”
In fact, his taste for the law was so
pronounced at that early age that he went,
sometimes, fifteen miles to Boonville, as a spectator
in the county court. Once he heard a lawyer of
ability, named Breckinridge, defend an accused
murderer there. It was a great plea; the tall
country boy knew it and, pushing through the
crowd, reached out his long, coatless arm to
congratulate the lawyer, who looked at the
awkward youth in amazement and passed on without
acknowledging Abe’s compliment. The two
men met again in Washington, more than thirty
years later, under very different circumstances.

But there were things other than politics
discussed at the country store, and Abe Lincoln
often raised a laugh at the expense of some
braggart or bully. There was “Uncle Jimmy”
Larkins, who posed as the hero of his own[90]
stories. In acknowledgment of Abe’s authority
as a judge of horse flesh, “Uncle Jimmy” was
boasting of his horse’s superiority in a recent
fox chase. But young Lincoln seemed to pay
no heed. Larkins repeated:

“Abe, I’ve got the best horse in the world;
he won the race and never drew a long breath.”

Young Lincoln still appeared not to be paying
attention. “Uncle Jimmy” persisted. He
was bound to make Abe hear. He reiterated:

“I say, Abe, I have got the best horse in the
world; after all that running he never drew a
long breath.”

“Well, Larkins,” drawled young Lincoln,
“why don’t you tell us how many short breaths
he drew.” The laugh was on the boastful and
discomfited Larkins.

Abe’s efforts were not always so well received,
for he was sometimes misunderstood. The
neighbors used to think the Lincoln boy was secretly
in love with Kate Roby, the pretty girl he
had helped out of a dilemma in the spelling class.
Several years after that episode, Abe and Kate
were sitting on a log, about sunset, talking:[91]

“Abe,” said Kate, “the sun’s goin’ down.”

“Reckon not,” Abe answered, “we’re coming
up, that’s all.”

“Don’t you s’pose I got eyes?”

“Yes, I know you have; but it’s the earth that
goes round. The sun stands as still as a tree.
When we’re swung round so we can’t see it any
more, the light’s cut off and we call it night.”

“What a fool you are, Abe Lincoln!” exclaimed
Kate, who was not to blame for her ignorance,
for astronomy had never been taught in
Crawford’s school.

While brother and sister were working for
“Old Blue Nose,” Aaron Grigsby, “Nat’s”
brother, was “paying attention” to Nancy Lincoln.
They were soon married. Nancy was only
eighteen. When she was nineteen Mrs. Aaron
Grigsby died. Her love for Abe had almost
amounted to idolatry. In some ways she resembled
him. He, in turn, was deeply devoted
to his only sister.

The family did not stay long at Pigeon Creek
after the loss of Nancy, who was buried, not beside
her mother, but with the Grigsbys in the[92]
churchyard of the old Pigeon Creek meeting-house.

Much as Abraham Lincoln had “worked out”
as a hired man, his father kept the money, as he
had a legal right to do, not giving the boy any of
the results of his hard labor, for, strong as he
was, his pay was only twenty-five or thirty cents
a day. Abe accepted this as right and proper.
He never complained of it.

After he became President, Lincoln told his
Secretary of State the following story of the
first dollar he ever had for his own:

“Seward,” he said, “did you ever hear how I
earned my first dollar?” “No,” replied Seward.
“Well,” said he, “I was about eighteen years of
age . . . and had constructed a flatboat. . . .
A steamer was going down the river. We have,
you know, no wharves on the western streams,
and the custom was, if passengers were at any
of the landings they had to go out in a boat, the
steamer stopping and taking them on board. I
was contemplating my new boat, and wondering
whether I could make it stronger or improve it
in any part, when two men with trunks came[93]
down to the shore in carriages, and looking at
the different boats, singled out mine, and asked:

“‘Who owns this?’

“I answered modestly, ‘I do.’

“‘Will you,’ said one of them, ‘take us and
our trunks out to the steamer?’

“‘Certainly,’ said I. I was very glad to have
a chance of earning something, and supposed
that they would give me a couple of ‘bits.’ The
trunks were put in my boat, the passengers
seated themselves on them, and I sculled them
out to the steamer. They got on board, and I
lifted the trunks and put them on deck. The
steamer was moving away when I called out:

“‘You have forgotten to pay me.’

“Each of them took from his pocket a silver
half-dollar and threw it on the bottom of my
boat. I could scarcely believe my eyes as I
picked up the money. You may think it was a
very little thing, and in these days it seems to
me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident
in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a
poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day—that
by honest work I had earned a dollar. I
was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from
that time.”[94]

CHAPTER VIII

Moving to Illinois

Thomas Lincoln had become restless again.
Fourteen years was a long time for him to live
in one place. Abe was seven years old when
they came over from Kentucky, and he was now
nearly twenty-one. During that time Thomas
had lost his wife, Nancy, and his only daughter,
who bore her mother’s name. While the land he
had chosen was fertile enough, the want of water
had always been a sad drawback. The desire to
try his fortunes in a newer country had taken
possession of him.

John Hanks had gone to Illinois, and had
written back that everything was more favorable
there for making a living. Thomas Lincoln
had not been successful in Indiana. His
children’s prospects seemed to be against them.
After working as a hired hand on the surrounding
farms, Abe had served for a time as a ferryman,
and, working by the river, had learned to[95]
build the boat with which he had earned his first
dollar.

As George Washington longed to go to sea,
Abraham Lincoln seems to have yearned to
“follow the river.” He tried to hire out as
deck hand, but his age was against him. He
soon had a chance to go “down river” to New
Orleans, with his friend, Allen Gentry, the son
of the man for whom Gentryville was named.
Allen afterward married Kate Roby. A flatboat
belonging to Allen’s father was loaded with
bacon and other farm merchandise for the
southern market. Allen went in charge of the
expedition, and young Lincoln was engaged as
“bow hand.” They started in April, 1828.
There was nothing to do but steer the unwieldy
craft with the current. The flatboat was made
to float down stream only. It was to be broken
up at New Orleans and sold for lumber.

The two young men from Indiana made the
trip without incident until they came to the
plantation of Madame Duchesne, six miles from
Baton Rouge, where they moored their raft for
the night. There they heard the stealthy footsteps
of midnight marauders on board.

Young Gentry was first aroused. He sprang[96]
up and found a gang of lawless negroes on deck,
evidently looking for plunder, and thinking so
many of them could easily cow or handle the two
white men.

“Bring the guns, Abe!” shouted Allen.
“Shoot them!” Abraham Lincoln was among
them, brandishing a club—they had no guns.
The negroes were frightened not only by the
fierce, commanding form of their tall adversary,
but also by his giant strength. The two white
men routed the whole black crew, but Abraham
Lincoln received a wound in the encounter, and
bore the scar of it to his dying day.

The trip required about three months, going
and returning, and the two adventurers from
Gentryville came back in June, with good
stories of their experiences to tell in Jones’
store.

Not long after this Thomas Lincoln, in response
to an urgent invitation from John
Hanks, decided to move to Illinois. It took a
long time, after gathering in the fall crops, for
Thomas Lincoln to have a “vandoo” and sell his
corn and hogs. As for selling his farm, it had
never really belonged to him. He simply turned
it over to Mr. Gentry, who held a mortgage on it.[97]
It was February, 1830, before the pioneer wagon
got under way. The emigrant family consisted
of Thomas Lincoln and Sarah, his wife, Abraham,
and John Johnston; Sarah and Matilda
Johnston were both married, and, with their
husbands, a young man named Hall and Dennis
Hanks, formed the rest of the party. The
women rode with their household goods in a
great covered cart drawn by two yoke of oxen.

Merchant Jones, for whom Abe had worked
that fall and winter, after his return from New
Orleans, sold the young man a pack of “notions”
to peddle along the road to Illinois. “A
set of knives and forks,” related Mr. Jones’
son afterward, “was the largest item on the bill.
The other items were needles, pins, thread, buttons,
and other little domestic necessities. When
the Lincolns reached their new home, Abraham
wrote back to my father stating that he had
doubled his money on his purchases by selling
them along the road. Unfortunately we did not
keep that letter, not thinking how highly we
would prize it afterward.”

In the early days of his presidency, an international[98]
problem came before the cabinet which
reminded Mr. Lincoln of an experience he had
on this journey, so he told the several secretaries
this story:

“The situation just now reminds me of a fix
I got into some thirty years ago when I was
peddling ‘notions’ on the way from Indiana to
Illinois. I didn’t have a large stock, but I
charged large prices and I made money. Perhaps
you don’t see what I am driving at.

“Just before we left Indiana and were crossing
into Illinois we came across a small farmhouse
full of children. These ranged in age
from seventeen years to seventeen months, and
were all in tears. The mother of the family was
red-headed and red-faced, and the whip she held
in her right hand led to the inference that she
had been chastising her brood. The father of
the family, a meek-looking, mild-mannered, tow-headed
chap, was standing at the front door—to
all appearances waiting his turn!

“I thought there wasn’t much use in asking
the head of that house if she wanted any ‘notions.’
She was too busy. It was evident that
an insurrection had been in progress, but it was
pretty well quelled when I got there. She saw[99]
me when I came up, and from her look I thought
she surmised that I intended to interfere. Advancing
to the doorway—roughly pushing her
husband aside—she demanded my business.

“‘Nothing, ma’am,’ I answered as gently as
possible. ‘I merely dropped in, as I came along,
to see how things were going.’

“‘Well, you needn’t wait,’ she said in an irritated
way; ‘there’s trouble here, and lots of it,
too, but I kin manage my own affairs without
the help of outsiders. This is jest a family row,
but I’ll teach these brats their places if I hev to
lick the hide off every one of them. I don’t do
much talking, but I run this house, an’ I don’t
want no one sneakin’ round tryin’ to find out
how I do it either.’

“That’s the case here with us. We must let
the other nations know that we propose to settle
our family row in our own way, an’ teach these
brats (the seceding States) their places, and,
like the old woman, we don’t want any ‘sneakin’
round’ by other countries, that would like to find
out how we are going to do it either.”

Abe strode along in the mud, driving the four[100]
oxen much of the time, for the houses he could
visit with his peddler’s pack were few and far
between. A dog belonging to one of the family—an
insignificant little cur—fell behind. After
the oxen had floundered through the mud, snow
and ice of a prairie stream, they discovered that
the animal was missing. The other men of the
party thought they could now get rid of the
little nuisance, and even the women were
anxious, as the hour was late, to go on and find a
place to camp for the night. To turn back with
the clumsy ox-team and lumbering emigrant
wagon was out of the question.

Abraham gave the whip to one of the other
men and turned back to see if he could discern
the dog anywhere. He discovered it running up
and down on the other bank of the river, in
great distress, for the swift current was filled
with floating ice and the poor little creature was
afraid to make the attempt to swim across.
After whistling in vain to encourage the dog to
try if it would, the tender-hearted youth went
to its rescue. Referring to the incident himself
afterward, he said:

“I could not endure the idea of abandoning
even a dog. Pulling off shoes and socks, I waded[101]
across the stream and triumphantly returned
with the shivering animal under my arm. His
frantic leaps of joy and other evidences of a
dog’s gratitude amply repaid me for all the exposure
I had undergone.”

After two weary weeks of floundering through
muddy prairies and jolting over rough forest
roads, now and then fording swollen and dangerous
streams, the Lincolns were met near Decatur,
Illinois, by Cousin John Hanks, and
given a hearty welcome. John had chosen a
spot not far from his own home, and had the
logs all ready to build a cabin for the newcomers.
Besides young Abe, with the strength
of three, there were five men in the party, so
they were able to erect their first home in Illinois
without asking the help of the neighbors, as was
customary for a “raising” of that kind.

Nicolay and Hay, President Lincoln’s private
secretaries, in their great life of their chief, gave
the following account of the splitting of the rails
which afterward became the talk of the civilized
world:

“Without the assistance of John Hanks he[102]
plowed fifteen acres, and split, from the tall
walnut trees of the primeval forest, enough rails
to surround them with a fence. Little did
either dream, while engaged in this work, that
the day would come when the appearance of
John Hanks in a public meeting with two of
these rails on his shoulder, would electrify a
State convention, and kindle throughout the
country a contagious and passionate enthusiasm
whose results would reach to endless generations.”

CHAPTER IX

Starting Out for Himself

According to his own account, Abe had made
about thirty dollars as a peddler, besides bearing
the brunt of the labor of the journey, though
there were four grown men in the combined
family. As he had passed his twenty-first birthday
on the road, he really had the right to claim
these profits as his own. His father, who had,
for ten years, exacted Abraham’s meager, hard-earned[103]
wages, should at least have given the boy
a part of that thirty dollars for a “freedom suit”
of clothes, as was the custom then.

But neither Thomas Lincoln nor his son seems
to have thought of such a thing. Instead of entertaining
resentment, Abraham stayed by, doing
all he could to make his father and stepmother
comfortable before he left them altogether.
Mrs. Lincoln had two daughters and
sons-in-law, besides John Johnston, so Abe
might easily have excused himself from looking
after the welfare of his parents. Though his
father had seemed to favor his stepchildren in
preference to his own son, Mrs. Lincoln had
been “like an own mother to him,” and he never
ceased to show his gratitude by being “like an
own son to her.”

The first work Abe did in that neighborhood
was to split a thousand rails for a pair of trousers,
at the rate of four hundred rails per yard
of “brown jeans dyed with walnut bark.” The
young man’s breeches cost him about four hundred
rails more than they would if he had been
a man of ordinary height.

But Abraham hovered about, helping clear a
little farm, and making the cabin comfortable[104]
while he was earning his own “freedom suit.”
He saw the spring planting done and that a
garden was made for his stepmother before he
went out of ready reach of the old people.

One special reason Thomas Lincoln had for
leaving Indiana was to get away from “the
milksick.” But the fall of 1830 was a very bad
season in Illinois for chills and fever. The
father and, in fact, nearly the whole family left
at home suffered so much from malaria that they
were thoroughly discouraged. The interior of
their little cabin was a sorry sight—Thomas and
his wife were both afflicted at once, and one married
daughter was almost as ill. They were all so
sick that Thomas Lincoln registered a shaky but
vehement resolve that as soon as they could
travel they would “git out o’ thar!” He had
been so determined to move to Illinois that no
persuasion could induce him to give up the project,
therefore his disappointment was the more
keen and bitter.

The first winter the Lincolns spent in Illinois
was memorable for its severity. It is still
spoken of in that region as “the winter of the
big snow.” Cattle and sheep froze to death or
died of exposure and starvation.[105]

Early in the spring after “the big snow,”
John Hanks, Lincoln and John Johnston met
Denton Offutt, a man who was to wield an influence
on the life of young Lincoln. Offutt engaged
the three to take a load of produce and
other merchandise to New Orleans to sell. John
Hanks, the most reliable member of the Hanks
family, gave the following account of the way
he managed to bring Abe and his stepbrother
into the transaction: “He wanted me to go badly
but I waited before answering. I hunted up
Abe, and I introduced him and John Johnston,
his stepbrother, to Offutt. After some talk we
at last made an engagement with Offutt at fifty
cents a day and sixty dollars to make the trip to
New Orleans. Abe and I came down the Sangamon
River in a canoe in March, 1831, and landed
at what is now called Jamestown, five miles east
of Springfield.”

Denton Offutt spent so much time drinking
in a tavern at the village of Springfield that the
flatboat was not ready when the trio arrived to
take it and its cargo down the river. Their employer
met them on their arrival with profuse
apologies, and the three men were engaged to[106]
build the boat and load it up for the journey.

During the four weeks required to build the
raft, the men of that neighborhood became acquainted
with young Lincoln. A man named
John Roll has given this description of Abe’s
appearance at that time:

“He was a tall, gaunt young man, dressed in
a suit of blue homespun, consisting of a roundabout
jacket, waistcoat, and breeches which
came to within about three inches of his feet.
The latter were encased in rawhide boots, into
the tops of which, most of the time, his pantaloons
were stuffed. He wore a soft felt hat
which had once been black, but now, as its owner
dryly remarked, ‘was sunburned until it was a
combine of colors.'”

There was a sawmill in Sangamontown, and
it was the custom for the “men folks” of the
neighborhood to assemble near it at noon and in
the evening, and sit on a peeled log which had
been rolled out for the purpose. Young Lincoln
soon joined this group and at once became
a great favorite because of his stories and jokes.
His stories were so funny that “whenever he’d
end ’em up in his unexpected way the boys on
the log would whoop and roll off.” In this way[107]
the log was polished smooth as glass, and came
to be known in the neighborhood as “Abe’s
log.”

A traveling juggler came one day while the
boat was building and gave an exhibition in the
house of one of the neighbors. This magician
asked for Abe’s hat to cook eggs in. Lincoln
hesitated, but gave this explanation for his delay:
“It was out of respect for the eggs—not
care for my hat!”

While they were at work on the flatboat the
humorous young stranger from Indiana became
the hero of a thrilling adventure, described as
follows by John Roll, who was an eye witness
to the whole scene:

“It was the spring following ‘the winter of
the deep snow.’ Walter Carman, John Seamon,
myself, and at times others of the Carman boys,
had helped Abe in building the boat, and when
we had finished we went to work to make a dug-out,
or canoe, to be used as a small boat with the
flat. We found a suitable log about an eighth
of a mile up the river, and with our axes went to
work under Lincoln’s direction. The river was[108]
very high, fairly ‘booming.’ After the dug-out
was ready to launch we took it to the edge of the
water, and made ready to ‘let her go,’ when
Walter Carman and John Seamon jumped in as
the boat struck the water, each one anxious to
be the first to get a ride. As they shot out from
the shore they found they were unable to make
any headway against the strong current. Carman
had the paddle, and Seamon was in the
stern of the boat. Lincoln shouted to them to
head up-stream and ‘work back to shore,’ but
they found themselves powerless against the
stream. At last they began to pull for the wreck
of an old flatboat, the first ever built on the Sangamon,
which had sunk and gone to pieces, leaving
one of the stanchions sticking above the
water. Just as they reached it Seamon made a
grab, and caught hold of the stanchion, when the
canoe capsized, leaving Seamon clinging to the
old timber and throwing Carman into the
stream. It carried him down with the speed of
a mill-race. Lincoln raised his voice above the
roar of the flood, and yelled to Carman to swim
for an elm tree which stood almost in the channel,
which the action of the water had changed.

“Carman, being a good swimmer, succeeded[109]
in catching a branch, and pulled himself up out
of the water, which was very cold, and had almost
chilled him to death; and there he sat, shivering
and chattering in the tree.

“Lincoln, seeing Carman safe, called out to
Seamon to let go the stanchion and swim for the
tree. With some hesitation he obeyed, and
struck out, while Lincoln cheered and directed
him from the bank. As Seamon neared the tree
he made one grab for a branch, and, missing it,
went under the water. Another desperate lunge
was successful, and he climbed up beside Carman.

“Things were pretty exciting now, for there
were two men in the tree, and the boat gone. It
was a cold, raw April day, and there was great
danger of the men becoming benumbed and falling
back into the water. Lincoln called out to
them to keep their spirits up and he would save
them.

“The village had been alarmed by this time,
and many people had come down to the bank.
Lincoln procured a rope and tied it to a log. He
called all hands to come and help roll the log into
the water, and, after this had been done, he, with
the assistance of several others, towed it some[110]
distance up the stream. A daring young fellow
by the name of ‘Jim’ Dorell then took his seat on
the end of the log, and it was pushed out into the
current, with the expectation that it would be
carried down stream against the tree where Seamon
and Carman were.

“The log was well directed, and went straight
to the tree; but Jim, in his impatience to help
his friends, fell a victim to his good intentions.
Making a frantic grab at a branch, he raised
himself off the log, which was swept from under
him by the raging waters and he soon joined the
other victims upon their forlorn perch.

“The excitement on the shore increased, and
almost the whole population of the village gathered
on the river bank. Lincoln had the log
pulled up the stream, and, securing another
piece of rope, called to the men in the tree to
catch it if they could when he should reach the
tree. He then straddled the log himself, and
gave the word to push out into the stream.
When he dashed into the tree he threw the rope
over the stump of a broken limb, and let it play
until he broke the speed of the log, and gradually
drew it back to the tree, holding it there
until the three now nearly frozen men had[111]
climbed down and seated themselves astride.
He then gave orders to the people on shore to
hold fast to the end of the rope which was tied
to the log, and leaving his rope in the tree he
turned the log adrift. The force of the current,
acting against the taut rope, swung the log
around against the bank and all ‘on board’ were
saved.

“The excited people who had watched the
dangerous expedition with alternate hope and
fear, now broke into cheers for Abe Lincoln,
and praises for his brave act. This adventure
made quite a hero of him along the Sangamon,
and the people never tired of telling of the exploit.”

The launching of that flatboat was made a
feast-day in the neighborhood. Denton Offutt,
its proprietor, was invited to break away from
the “Buckhorn” tavern at Springfield to witness
the ceremonies, which, of course, took a political
turn. There was much speech-making,
but Andrew Jackson and the Whig leaders were
equally praised.

The boat had been loaded with pork in barrels,
corn, and hogs, and it slid into the Sangamon[112]
River, then overflowing with the spring “fresh,”
with a big splash.

The three sturdy navigators, accompanied by
Offutt himself, floated away in triumph from
the waving crowd on the bank.

The first incident in the voyage occurred the
19th of April, at Rutledge’s mill dam at New
Salem, where the boat stranded and “hung”
there a day and a night.

New Salem was destined to fill an important
place in the life of Abraham Lincoln. One who
became well acquainted with him described him
as the New Salemites first saw him, “wading
round on Rutledge’s dam with his trousers
rolled up nine feet, more or less.”

One of the crew gave this account of their
mode of operations to get the stranded raft over
the dam:

“We unloaded the boat—that is, we transferred
the goods from our boat to a borrowed
one. We then rolled the barrels forward; Lincoln
bored a hole in the end (projecting) over
the dam; the water which had leaked in ran out
then and we slid over.”[113]

Offutt’s enthusiasm over Abe’s simple method
of surmounting this great obstacle was boundless.
A crowd had gathered on a hillside to
watch Lincoln’s operations.

For the novelty of the thing, John Hanks
claimed to have taken young Lincoln to a
“voodoo” negress. She is said to have become
excited in reading the future of the tall, thin
young man, saying to him, “You will be President,
and all the negroes will be free.” This
story probably originated long afterward, when
the strange prophecy had already come true—though
fortune tellers often inform young men
who come to them that they will be Presidents
some day. That such a woman could read the
Emancipation Proclamation in that young
man’s future is not at all likely.

Another story is told of Abraham Lincoln’s
second visit to New Orleans that is more probable,
but even this is not certain to have happened
exactly as related. The young northerner
doubtless saw negroes in chains, and his spirit,
like that of his father and mother, rebelled
against this inhumanity. There is little doubt[114]
that in such sights, as one of his companions related,
“Slavery ran the iron into him then and there.”

But the story goes that the three young fellows—Hanks,
Johnston and Lincoln—went wandering
about the city, and passed a slave market,
where a comely young mulatto girl was offered to
the highest bidder. They saw prospective purchasers
examine the weeping girl’s teeth, pinch
her flesh and pull her about as they would a cow
or a horse. The whole scene was so revolting that
Lincoln recoiled from it with horror and hatred,
saying to his two companions, “Boys, let’s get
away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that
thing”—meaning slavery—”I’ll hit it hard!“

In June the four men took passage up the river
on a steamboat for the return trip. At St. Louis,
Offutt got off to purchase stock for a store he
proposed to open in New Salem, where he
planned to place young Lincoln in charge.

The other three started on foot to reach their
several homes in Illinois. Abe improved the opportunity
to visit his father’s family in Coles[115]
County, where Thomas Lincoln had removed as
soon as he was able to leave their first Illinois
home near Decatur.

Abe’s reputation as a wrestler had preceded
him and the Coles County Champion, Daniel
Needham, came and challenged the tall visitor
to a friendly contest. Young Lincoln laughingly
accepted and threw Needham twice. The
crestfallen wrestler’s pride was deeply hurt, and
he found it hard to give up beaten.

“Lincoln,” said he, “you have thrown me
twice, but you can’t whip me.”

Abe laughed again and replied:

“Needham, are you satisfied that I can throw
you? If you are not, and must be convinced
through a thrashing, I will do that, too—for
your sake!“

CHAPTER X

Clerking and Working

It was in August, 1831, that Abraham Lincoln
appeared in the village of New Salem, Illinois.[116]
Neither Denton Offutt nor his merchandise
had arrived as promised. While paying
the penalty of the punctual man—by waiting for
the tardy one—he seemed to the villagers to be
loafing. But Abraham Lincoln was no loafer.
He always found something useful and helpful
to do. This time there was a local election, and
one of the clerks had not appeared to perform
his duties. A New Salem woman wrote of Lincoln’s
first act in the village:

“My father, Mentor Graham, was on that day,
as usual, appointed to be a clerk, and Mr. McNamee,
who was to be the other, was sick and
failed to come. They were looking around for
a man to fill his place when my father noticed
Mr. Lincoln and asked if he could write. He
answered that he could ‘make a few rabbit
tracks.'”

A few days after the election the young
stranger, who had become known by this time
as the hero of the flatboat on Rutledge’s dam
four months before, found employment as a
pilot. A citizen, Dr. Nelson, was about to emigrate
to Texas. The easiest and best mode of[117]
travel in those days was by flatboat down the
river. He had loaded all his household goods
and movable property on his “private conveyance”
and was looking about for a “driver.”
Young Lincoln, still waiting, unemployed, offered
his services and took the Nelson family
down the Sangamon River—a more difficult
task in August than in April, when the water
was high on account of the spring rains. But
the young pilot proceeded cautiously down the
shallow stream, and reached Beardstown, on the
Illinois River, where he was “discharged” and
walked back over the hills to New Salem.

Denton Offutt and his stock for the store arrived
at last, and Lincoln soon had a little store
opened for business. A country store seemed
too small for a clerk of such astounding abilities,
so the too enthusiastic employer bought Cameron’s
mill with the dam on which Lincoln had
already distinguished himself, and made the
clerk manager of the whole business.

This was not enough. Offutt sounded the
praises of the new clerk to all comers. He
claimed that Abraham Lincoln “knew more than[118]
any man in the United States.” As Mr. Offutt
had never shown that he knew enough himself
to prove this statement, the neighbors began to
resent such rash claims. In addition, Offutt
boasted that Abe could “beat the county” running,
jumping and wrestling. Here was something
the new clerk could prove, if true, so his
employer’s statement was promptly challenged.

When a strange man came to the village to
live, even though no one boasted of his prowess,
he was likely to suffer at the hands of the
rougher element of the place. It was a sort of
rude initiation into their society. These ceremonies
were conducted with a savage sense of
humor by a gang of rowdies known as the
“Clary’s Grove Boys,” of whom the “best
fighter” was Jack Armstrong.

Sometimes “the Boys” nailed up a stranger
in a hogshead and it was rolled down hill. Sometimes
he was ingeniously insulted, or made to
fight in self-defense, and beaten black and blue
by the whole gang. They seemed not to be
hampered by delicate notions of fair play in
their actions toward a stranger. They “picked
on him,” as chickens, dogs and wolves do upon a
newcomer among them.[119]

So when young Lincoln heard his employer
bragging about his brain and brawn he was sufficiently
acquainted with backwoods nature to
know that it boded no good to him. Even then
“he knew how to bide his time,” and turned it to
good account, for he had a good chance, shortly
to show the metal that was in him.

“The Boys” called and began to banter with
the long-legged clerk in the new store. This led
to a challenge and comparison of strength and
prowess between young Lincoln and Jack Armstrong.
Abe accepted the gauntlet with an alacrity
that pleased the crowd, especially the chief
of the bully “Boys,” who expected an easy victory.
But Jack was surprised to find that the
stranger was his match—yes, more than his
match. Others of “the Boys” saw this, also, and
began to interfere by tripping Abe and trying to
help their champion by unfair means.

This made young Lincoln angry. Putting
forth all his strength, he seized Armstrong by
the throat and “nearly choked the exuberant
life out of him.” When “the Boys” saw the
stranger shaking their “best fighter” as if he
were a mere child, their enmity gave place to
admiration; and when Abe had thrown Jack[120]
Armstrong upon the ground, in his wrath, as a
lion would throw a dog that had been set upon
him, and while the strong stranger stood there,
with his back to the wall, challenging the whole
gang, with deep-set eyes blazing with indignation,
they acknowledged him as their conqueror,
and declared that “Abe Lincoln is the cleverest
fellow that ever broke into the settlement.”

The initiation was over, and young Lincoln’s
triumph complete. From that day “the Clary’s
Grove Boys” were his staunch supporters and
defenders, and his employer was allowed to go
on bragging about his wonderful clerk without
hindrance.

A bumptious stranger came into the store one
day and tried to pick a quarrel with the tall
clerk. To this end he used language offensive to
several women who were there trading. Lincoln
quietly asked the fellow to desist as there
were “ladies present.” The bully considered
this an admission that the clerk was afraid of
him, so he began to swear and use more offensive
language than before. As this was too much for
Abraham’s patience, he whispered to the fellow[121]
that if he would keep quiet till the ladies went
out, he (Lincoln) would go and “have it out.”

After the women went, the man became violently
abusive. Young Lincoln calmly went outside
with him, saying: “I see you must be
whipped and I suppose I will have to do it.”
With this he seized the insolent fellow and made
short work of him. Throwing the man on the
ground, Lincoln sat on him, and, with his long
arms, gathered a handful of “smartweed” which
grew around them. He then rubbed it into the
bully’s eyes until he roared with pain. An observer
of this incident said afterward:

“Lincoln did all this without a particle of
anger, and when the job was finished he went
immediately for water, washed his victim’s face
and did everything he could to alleviate the
man’s distress. The upshot of the matter was
that the fellow became his life-long friend, and
was a better man from that day.”

Lincoln’s morals were unusually good for that
time and place. Smoking, chewing, drinking,
swearing and gambling were almost universal[122]
among his associates. Offutt hired a young
man, William G. Greene, after the purchase of
the mill. This assistant first told many of the
stories, now so well known, concerning Abe at
this period of his career:

Young Greene was, like most of the young
men in New Salem, addicted to petty gambling.
He once related how Lincoln induced him to quit
the habit. Abe said to him one day:

“Billy, you ought to stop gambling with
Estep.” Billy made a lame excuse:

“I’m ninety cents behind, and I can’t quit
until I win it back.”

“I’ll help you get that back,” urged Lincoln,
“if you’ll promise me you won’t gamble any
more.”

The youth reflected a moment and made the
required promise. Lincoln continued:

“Here are some good hats, and you need a
new one. Now, when Estep comes again, you
draw him on by degrees, and finally bet him one
of these hats that I can lift a forty-gallon barrel
of whisky and take a drink out of the bunghole.”

Billy agreed, and the two clerks chuckled as
they fixed the barrel so that the bunghole would[123]
come in the right place to win the bet, though
the thing seemed impossible to Greene himself.
Estep appeared in due time, and after long parleying
and bantering the wager was laid. Lincoln
then squatted before the barrel, lifted one
end up on one knee, then raised the other end
on to the other knee, bent over, and by a Herculean
effort, actually succeeded in taking a drink
from the bunghole—though he spat it out immediately.
“That was the only time,” said Greene
long afterward, “that I ever saw Abraham Lincoln
take a drink of liquor of any kind.” This
was the more remarkable, as whisky was served
on all occasions—even passed around with refreshments
at religious meetings, according to
Mrs. Josiah Crawford, the woman for whom Abe
and Nancy had worked as hired help. Much as
Abe disapproved of drinking, he considered that
“the end justified the means” employed to break
his fellow clerk of the gambling habit.

Abe Lincoln could not endure the thought of
cheating any one, even though it had been done
unintentionally. One day a woman bought a
bill of goods in Offutt’s store amounting to something[124]
over two dollars. She paid Abe the money
and went away satisfied. That night, on going
over the sales of the day, Abe found that he had
charged the woman six and one-fourth cents too
much. After closing the store, though it was
late, he could not go home to supper or to bed
till he had restored that sixpence to its proper
owner. She lived more than two miles away, but
that did not matter to Abe Lincoln. When he
had returned the money to the astonished woman
he walked back to the village with a long
step and a light heart, content with doing his
duty.

Another evening, as he was closing the store, a
woman came in for a half-pound of tea. He
weighed it out for her and took the pay. But
early next morning, when he came to “open up,”
he found the four-ounce weight instead of the
eight-ounce on the scales, and inferred that he
had given that woman only half as much tea as
he had taken the money for. Of course, the
woman would never know the difference, and it
meant walking several miles and back, but the
honest clerk weighed out another quarter pound
of tea, locked the store and took that long walk
before breakfast. As a “constitutional” it must[125]
have been a benefit to his health, for it satisfied
his sensitive conscience and soothed his tender
heart to “make good” in that way.

Drink and misdirected enthusiasm interfered
with Denton Offutt’s success. After about a
year in New Salem he “busted up,” as the neighbors
expressed it, and left his creditors in the
lurch. Among them was the clerk he had
boasted so much about. For a short time Abe
Lincoln needed a home, and found a hearty welcome
with Jack Armstrong, the best fighter of
Clary’s Grove!

J. G. Holland wrote, in his “Life of Abraham
Lincoln,” of the young man’s progress during
his first year in New Salem:

“The year that Lincoln was in Denton Offutt’s
store was one of great advance. He had made
new and valuable acquaintances, read many
books, won multitudes of friends, and become
ready for a step further in advance. Those who
could appreciate brains respected him, and those
whose ideas of a man related to his muscles were
devoted to him. It was while he was performing
the work of the store that he acquired the nickname,
‘Honest Abe’—a characterization that he
never dishonored, an abbreviation that he never[126]
outgrew. He was everybody’s friend, the best-natured,
the most sensible, the best-informed, the
most modest and unassuming, the kindest,
gentlest, roughest, strongest, best fellow in all
New Salem and the region round about.”

CHAPTER XI

Politics, War, Storekeeping and Studying
Law

By “a step still further in advance” Dr. Holland
must have meant the young clerk’s going
into politics. He had made many friends in New
Salem, and they reflected back his good-will by
urging him to run for the State Legislature.
Before doing this he consulted Mentor Graham,
the village schoolmaster, with whom he had
worked as election clerk when he first came to
the place. Abe could read, write and cipher,
but he felt that if he should succeed in politics,
he would disgrace his office and himself[127]
by not speaking and writing English correctly.

The schoolmaster advised: “If you expect to
go before the public in any capacity, I think the
best thing you can do is to study English grammar.”

“If I had a grammar I would commence now,”
sighed Abe.

Mr. Graham thought one could be found at
Vaner’s, only six miles away. So Abe got up
and started for it as fast as he could stride. In
an incredibly short time he returned with a copy
of Kirkham’s Grammar, and set to work upon it
at once. Sometimes he would steal away into
the woods, where he could study “out loud” if he
desired. He kept up his old habit of sitting up
nights to read, and as lights were expensive, the
village cooper allowed him to stay in his shop,
where he burned the shavings and studied by the
blaze as he had done in Indiana, after every one
else had gone to bed. So it was not long before
young Lincoln, with the aid of Schoolmaster
Graham, had mastered the principles of English
grammar, and felt himself better equipped to
enter politics and public life. Some of his rivals,
however, did not trouble themselves about speaking
and writing correctly.[128]

James Rutledge, a “substantial” citizen, and
the former owner of Rutledge’s mill and dam,
was the president of the New Salem debating
club. Young Lincoln joined this society, and
when he first rose to speak, everybody began to
smile in anticipation of a funny story, but Abe
proceeded to discuss the question before the
house in very good form. He was awkward in his
movements and gestures at first, and amused
those present by thrusting his unwieldy hands
deep into his pockets, but his arguments were so
well-put and forcible that all who heard him were
astonished.

Mr. Rutledge, that night after Abe’s maiden
effort at the lyceum, told his wife:

“There is more in Abe Lincoln’s head than
mere wit and fun. He is already a fine speaker.
All he needs is culture to fit him for a high position
in public life.”

But there were occasions enough where something
besides culture was required. A man
who was present and heard Lincoln’s first real
stump speech describes his appearance and actions
in the following picturesque language:

“He wore a mixed jean coat, clawhammer[129]
style, short in the sleeves and bob-tail—in fact,
it was so short in the tail that he could not sit
upon it—flax and tow linen pantaloons, and a
straw hat. I think he wore a vest, but do not remember
how it looked. He wore pot metal (top)
boots.

“His maiden effort on the stump was a speech
on the occasion of a public sale at Pappyville, a
village eleven miles from Springfield. After the
sale was over and speechmaking had begun, a
fight—a ‘general fight’ as one of the bystanders
relates—ensued, and Lincoln, noticing one
of his friends about to succumb to the attack of
an infuriated ruffian, interposed to prevent it.
He did so most effectually. Hastily descending
from the rude platform, he edged his way
through the crowd, and seizing the bully by the
neck and the seat of his trousers, threw him by
means of his great strength and long arms, as
one witness stoutly insists, ‘twelve feet away.’
Returning to the stand, and throwing aside his
hat, he inaugurated his campaign with the following
brief and juicy declaration:

“‘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[130]
candidate for the Legislature. My politics are
“short and sweet” like the old woman’s dance.
I am in favor of 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.'”

The only requirement for a candidate for the
Illinois Legislature in 1832 was that he should
announce his “sentiments.” This Lincoln did,
according to custom, in a circular of about two
thousand words, rehearsing his experiences on
the Sangamon River and in the community of
New Salem. For a youth who had just turned
twenty-three, who had never been to school a
year in his life, who had no political training,
and had never made a political speech, it was a
bold and dignified document, closing as follows:

“Considering the great degree of modesty
which should always attend youth, it is probable
I have already been presuming more than becomes
me. However, upon the subjects of which
I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought.
I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them,
but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better
only sometimes to be right than at all times to be[131]
wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be
erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.

“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition.
Whether this is true or not, I can say for
one, that I have no other so great as that of being
truly esteemed of my fellow-men by rendering
myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall
succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be
developed. I am young and unknown to many
of you. I was born, and have ever remained in
the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy
or popular relations or friends to recommend
me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent
voters of the country; and, if elected,
they will have conferred a favor on me for which
I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate.
But if the good people in their wisdom
shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have
been too familiar with disappointments to be
very much chagrined.”

Lincoln had hardly launched in his first political
venture when, in April, 1832, a messenger
arrived in New Salem with the announcement
from Governor Reynolds, of Illinois, that the[132]
Sacs and other hostile tribes, led by Black Hawk,
had invaded the northern part of the State,
spreading terror among the white settlers in that
region. The governor called upon those who
were willing to help in driving back the Indians
to report at Beardstown, on the Illinois River,
within a week.

Lincoln and other Sangamon County men
went at once to Richmond where a company was
formed. The principal candidate for captain
was a man named Kirkpatrick, who had treated
Lincoln shabbily when Abe, in one of the odd
jobs he had done in that region, worked in Kirkpatrick’s
sawmill. The employer had agreed to
buy his hired man a cant-hook for handling the
heavy logs. As there was a delay in doing this,
Lincoln told him he would handle the logs without
the cant-hook if Kirkpatrick would pay him
the two dollars that implement would cost. The
employer promised to do this, but never gave him
the money.

So when Lincoln saw that Kirkpatrick was a
candidate for the captaincy, he said to Greene,
who had worked with him in Offutt’s store:

“Bill, I believe I can make Kirkpatrick pay
me that two dollars he owes me on the cant-hook[133]
now. I guess I’ll run against him for captain.”

Therefore Abe Lincoln announced himself as
a candidate. The vote was taken in an odd way.
It was announced that when the men heard the
command to march, each should go and stand by
the man he wished to have for captain. The command
was given. At the word, “March,” three-fourths
of the company rallied round Abe Lincoln.
More than twenty-five years afterward,
when Lincoln was a candidate for the presidency
of the United States, he referred to himself in
the third person in describing this incident, saying
that he was elected “to his own surprise,”
and “he says he has not since had any success in
life which gave him so much satisfaction.”

But Lincoln was a “raw hand” at military
tactics. He used to enjoy telling of his ignorance
and the expedients adopted in giving his
commands to the company. Once when he was
marching, twenty men abreast, across a field it
became necessary to pass through a narrow gateway
into the next field. He said:

“I could not, for the life of me, remember the
word for getting the company endwise so that it[134]
could go through the gate; so, as we came near
the gate, I shouted, ‘This company is dismissed
for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the
other side of the fence.'”

Captain Lincoln had his sword taken from
him for shooting within limits. Many have wondered
that a man of Lincoln’s intelligence should
have been guilty of this stupid infraction of ordinary
army regulations. Biographers of Lincoln
puzzled over this until the secret was explained
by William Turley Baker, of Bolivia, Ill., at the
Lincoln Centenary in Springfield. All unconscious
of solving a historic mystery, “Uncle
Billy” Baker related the following story which
explains that the shooting was purely accidental:

“My father was roadmaster general in the
Black Hawk War. Lincoln used to come often
to our house and talk it all over with father,
when I was a boy, and I’ve heard them laugh
over their experiences in that war. The best
joke of all was this: Father received orders one
day to throw log bridges over a certain stream
the army had to cross. He felled some tall, slim[135]
black walnuts—the only ones he could find there—and
the logs were so smooth and round that
they were hard to walk on any time. This day it
rained and made them very slippery. Half of
the soldiers fell into the stream and got a good
ducking. Captain Lincoln was one of those that
tumbled in. He just laughed and scrambled out
as quick as he could. He always made the best
of everything like that.

“Well, that evening when the company came
to camp, some of them had dog tents—just a big
canvas sheet—and the boys laughed to see Lincoln
crawl under one of them little tents. He was
so long that his head and hands and feet stuck
out on all sides. The boys said he looked just
like a big terrapin. After he had got himself
stowed away for the night, he remembered that
he hadn’t cleaned his pistol, after he fell into
the creek.

“So he backed out from under his canvas
shell and started to clean it out. It was what
was called a bulldog pistol, because it had a
blunt, short muzzle. Abe’s forefinger was long
enough to use as a ramrod for it. But before he
began operations he snapped the trigger and, to
his astonishment, the thing went off![136]

“Pretty soon an orderly came along in great
haste, yellin’, ‘Who did that?—Who fired that
shot?’ Some of the men tried to send the orderly
along about his business, making believe
the report was heard further on, but Lincoln he
wouldn’t stand for no such deception, spoken
or unspoken. ‘I did it,’ says he, beginning to
explain how it happened.

“You see, his legs was so blamed long, and
he must have landed on his feet, in the creek, and
got out of the water without his pistol getting
wet, ‘way up there in his weskit!

“But he had to pay the penalty just the same,
for they took his sword away from him for several
days. You see, he was a captain and ought
to ‘a’ set a good example in military discipline.”

One day an old “friendly Indian” came into
camp with a “talking paper” or pass from the
“big white war chief.” The men, with the
pioneer idea that “the only good Indian is a
dead Indian,” were for stringing him up. The
poor old red man protested and held the general’s
letter before their eyes.

“Me good Injun,” he kept saying, “white war[137]
chief say me good Injun. Look—talking paper—see!”

“Get out! It’s a forgery! Shoot him! String
him up!” shouted the soldiers angrily.

This noise brought Captain Lincoln out of his
tent. At a glance he saw what they were about
to do. He jumped in among them, shouting indignantly:

“Stand back, all of you! For shame! I’ll
fight you all, one after the other, just as you
come. Take it out on me if you can, but you
shan’t hurt this poor old Indian. When a man
comes to me for help, he’s going to get it, if I
have to lick all Sangamon County to give it to
him.”

The three months for which the men were enlisted
soon expired, and Lincoln’s captaincy also
ended. But he re-enlisted as a private, and remained
in the ranks until the end of the war,
which found him in Wisconsin, hundreds of
miles from New Salem. He and a few companions
walked home, as there were not many
horses to be had. Lincoln enlivened the long
tramp with his fund of stories and jokes.

It is sometimes asserted that Abraham Lincoln
and Jefferson Davis met at this early day,[138]
as officers in the Black Hawk War, but this
statement is not founded on fact, for young
Lieutenant Davis was absent on a furlough and
could not have encountered the tall captain from
the Sangamon then, as many would like to believe.

Lincoln always referred to the Black Hawk
War as a humorous adventure. He made a
funny speech in Congress describing some of his
experiences in this campaign in which he did
not take part in a battle, nor did he even catch
sight of a hostile Indian.

Abe was still out of work. Just before he enlisted
he piloted the Talisman, a steamboat
which had come up the Sangamon on a trial
trip, in which the speed of the boat averaged
four miles an hour. At that time the wildest excitement
prevailed. The coming of the Talisman
up their little river was hailed with grand
demonstrations and much speech-making.
Every one expected the Government to spend
millions of dollars to make the Sangamon navigable,
and even New Salem (which is not now to
be found on the map) was to become a flourishing[139]
city, in the hopeful imaginings of its few
inhabitants. Lincoln, being a candidate, naturally
“took the fever,” and shared the delirium
that prevailed. He could hardly have done
otherwise, even if he had been so disposed. This
was before the days of railroads, and the commerce
and prosperity of the country depended
on making the smaller streams navigable. Lincoln
received forty dollars, however, for his services
as pilot. The Talisman, instead of establishing
a river connection with the Mississippi
River cities, never came back. She was burned
at the wharf in St. Louis, and the navigation of
the poor little Sangamon, which was only a shallow
creek, was soon forgotten.

When Abe returned from the war he had no
steady employment. On this account, especially,
he must have been deeply disappointed to
be defeated in the election which took place
within two weeks after his arrival. His patriotism
had been stronger than his political sagacity.
If he had stayed at home to help himself to
the Legislature he might have been elected,
though he was then a comparative stranger in[140]
the county. One of the four representatives
chosen was Peter Cartwright, the backwoods
preacher.

Lincoln afterward mentioned that this was
the only time he was ever defeated by a direct
vote of the people.

CHAPTER XII

Buying and Keeping a Store

After making what he considered a bad beginning
politically, young Lincoln was on the
lookout for a “business chance.” One came to
him in a peculiar way. A man named Radford
had opened a store in New Salem. Possessing
neither the strength nor the sagacity and tact of
Abe Lincoln, he was driven out of business by
the Clary’s Grove Boys, who broke his store fixtures
and drank his liquors. In his fright
Radford was willing to sell out at almost any
price and take most of his pay in promissory
notes. He was quickly accommodated. Through
William G. Greene a transfer was made at once[141]
from Reuben Radford to William Berry and
Abraham Lincoln. Berry had $250 in cash and
made the first payment. In a few hours after a
violent visit from those ruffians from Clary’s
Grove Berry and Lincoln had formed a partnership
and were the nominal owners of a country
store.

The new firm soon absorbed the stock and
business of another firm, James and Rowan
Herndon, who had previously acquired the stock
and debts of the predecessors in their business,
and all these obligations were passed on with the
goods of both the Radford and Herndon stores
to “Honest Abe.”

The senior partner of the firm of Berry &
Lincoln was devoted to the whisky which was
found in the inventory of the Radford stock,
and the junior partner was given over to the
study of a set of “Blackstone’s Commentaries,”
text-books which all lawyers have to study, that
came into his possession in a peculiar way, as
Candidate Lincoln told an artist who was painting
his portrait in 1860:

“One day a man who was migrating to the
West drove up in front of my store with a
wagon which contained his family and household[142]
plunder. He asked me if I would buy an
old barrel for which he had no room in his
wagon, and which contained nothing of special
value. I did not want it, but to oblige him I
bought it, and paid him, I think, half a dollar
for it. Without further examination I put it
away in the store and forgot all about it.

“Some time after, in overhauling things, I
came upon the barrel, and emptying it on the
floor to see what it contained, I found at the bottom
of the rubbish a complete set of ‘Blackstone’s
Commentaries.’ I began to read those
famous works. I had plenty of time; for during
the long summer days, when the farmers were
busy with their crops, my customers were few
and far between. The more I read the more intensely
interested I became. Never in my whole
life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed. I
read until I devoured them.”

With one partner drinking whisky and the
other devouring “Blackstone,” it was not surprising
that the business “winked out,” as Lincoln
whimsically expressed it, leaving the conscientious
junior partner saddled with the obligations
of the former owners of two country
stores, and owing an amount so large that Lincoln[143]
often referred to it as “the national debt.”
William Berry, the senior partner, who was
equally responsible, “drank himself to death,”
leaving Lincoln alone to pay all the debts.

According to the custom and conscience of the
time, the insolvent young merchant was under
no obligation whatever to pay liabilities contracted
by the other men, but Lincoln could
never be induced even to compromise any of the
accounts the others had gone off and left him to
settle. “Honest Abe” paid the last cent of his
“national debt” nearly twenty years later, after
much toil, self-denial and hardship.

Again out of employment, Abe was forced to
accept the hospitality of his friends of whom he
now had a large number. While in business
with Berry he received the appointment as postmaster.
The pay of the New Salem post office
was not large, but Lincoln, always longing for
news and knowledge, had the privilege of reading
the newspapers which passed through his
hands. He took so much pains in delivering the
letters and papers that came into his charge as[144]
postmaster that he anticipated the “special delivery”
and “rural free delivery” features of
the postal service of the present day.

Later John Calhoun, the county surveyor,
sent word to Lincoln that he would appoint him
deputy surveyor of the county if he would accept
the position. The young man, greatly astonished,
went to Springfield to call on Calhoun
and see if the story could be true. Calhoun knew
that Lincoln was utterly ignorant of surveying,
but told him he might take time to study up. As
soon as Lincoln was assured that the
appointment did not involve any political obligation—for
Calhoun was a Jackson Democrat, and
Lincoln was already a staunch Whig—he procured
a copy of Flint and Gibson’s “Surveying” and
went to work with a will. With the aid of
Mentor Graham, and studying day and night, he
mastered the subject and reported to Calhoun in
six weeks. The county surveyor was astounded,
but when Lincoln gave ample proofs of his ability
to do field work, the chief surveyor appointed
him a deputy and assigned him to the northern
part of Sangamon County.[145]

Deputy Surveyor Lincoln had to run deeper
in debt for a horse and surveying instruments in
order to do this new work. Although he made
three dollars a day at it—a large salary for that
time—and board and expenses were cheap, he
was unable to make money fast enough to satisfy
one creditor who was pushing him to pay one of
the old debts left by the failure of Berry & Lincoln.
This man sued Lincoln and, getting judgment,
seized the deputy’s horse and instruments.
This was like “killing the goose that laid the
golden egg.” Lincoln was in despair. But a
friend, as a surprise, bought in the horse and
instruments for one hundred and twenty dollars
and presented them to the struggling surveyor.

President Lincoln, many years afterward,
generously repaid this man, “Uncle Jimmy”
Short, for his friendly act in that hour of need.

Lincoln’s reputation as a story teller and
wrestler had spread so that when it became
known that he was to survey a tract in a certain
district the whole neighborhood turned out and
held a sort of picnic. Men and boys stood ready
to “carry chain,” drive stakes, blaze trees, or
work for the popular deputy in any capacity—just
to hear his funny stories and odd jokes.[146]
They had foot races, wrestling matches and other
athletic sports, in which the surveyor sometimes
took part.

But Lincoln’s honesty was as manifest in
“running his lines” as in his weights and measures
while he was a clerk and storekeeper. In
whatever he attempted he did his best. He had
that true genius, which is defined as “the ability
to take pains.” With all his jokes and fun Abraham
Lincoln was deeply in earnest. Careless
work in making surveys involved the landholders
of that part of the country in endless disputes
and going to law about boundaries. But
Lincoln’s surveys were recognized as correct always,
so that, although he had mastered the science
in six weeks, lawyers and courts had such
confidence in his skill, as well as his honesty,
that his record as to a certain corner or line was
accepted as the true verdict and that ended the
dispute.

Hampered though he was by unjust debts and
unreasonable creditors, Postmaster and Surveyor
Lincoln gained an honorable reputation
throughout the county, so that when he ran for[147]
the State Legislature, in 1834, he was elected by
a creditable majority.

CHAPTER XIII

The Young Legislator in Love

Paying his debts had kept Lincoln so poor
that, though he had been elected to the Legislature,
he was not properly clothed or equipped
to make himself presentable as the people’s representative
at the State capital, then located at
Vandalia. One day he went with a friend to
call on an older acquaintance, named Smoot,
who was almost as dry a joker as himself, but
Smoot had more of this world’s goods than the
young legislator-elect. Lincoln began at once to
chaff his friend.

“Smoot,” said he, “did you vote for me?”

“I did that very thing,” answered Smoot.

“Well,” said Lincoln with a wink, “that
makes you responsible. You must lend me the[148]
money to buy suitable clothing, for I want to
make a decent appearance in the Legislature.”

“How much do you want?” asked Smoot.

“About two hundred dollars, I reckon.”

For friendship’s sake and for the honor of
Sangamon County the young representative received
the money at once.

Abe Lincoln’s new suit of clothes made him
look still more handsome in the eyes of Ann, the
daughter of the proprietor of Rutledge’s Tavern,
where Abe was boarding at that time. She
was a beautiful girl who had been betrothed to
a young man named McNamar, who was said to
have returned to New York State to care for his
dying father and look after the family estate.
It began to leak out that this young man was
going about under an assumed name and certain
suspicious circumstances came to light. But
Ann, though she loved the young legislator, still
clung to her promise and the man who had
proved false to her. As time went on, though
she was supposed to be betrothed to Mr. Lincoln,
the treatment she had received from the recreant
lover preyed upon her mind so that she fell[149]
into a decline in the summer of 1835, about a
year after her true lover’s election to the Legislature.

William O. Stoddard, one of the President’s
private secretaries, has best told the story of the
young lover’s despair over the loss of his first
love:

“It is not known precisely when Ann Rutledge
told her suitor that her heart was his, but
early in 1835 it was publicly known that they
were solemnly betrothed. Even then the scrupulous
maiden waited for the return of the absent
McNamar, that she might be formally released
from the obligation to him which he had so recklessly
forfeited. Her friends argued with her
that she was carrying her scruples too far, and
at last, as neither man nor letter came, she permitted
it to be understood that she would marry
Abraham Lincoln as soon as his legal studies
should be completed.

“That was a glorious summer for him; the
brightest, sweetest, most hopeful he yet had
known. It was also the fairest time he was ever
to see; for even now, as the golden days came
and went, they brought an increasing shadow on
their wings. It was a shadow that was not to[150]
pass away. Little by little came indications that
the health of Ann Rutledge had suffered under
the prolonged strain to which she had been subjected.
Her sensitive nature had been strung
to too high a tension and the chords of her life
were beginning to give way.

“There were those of her friends who said
that she died of a broken heart, but the doctors
called it ‘brain fever.’

“On the 25th of August, 1835, just before the
summer died, she passed away from earth. But
she never faded from the heart of Abraham Lincoln. . . .
In her early grave was buried the
best hope he ever knew, and the shadow of that
great darkness was never entirely lifted from
him.

“A few days before Ann’s death a message
from her brought her betrothed to her bedside,
and they were left alone. No one ever knew
what passed between them in the endless moments
of that last sad farewell; but Lincoln left
the house with inexpressible agony written upon
his face. He had been to that hour a man of
marvelous poise and self-control, but the pain he
now struggled with grew deeper and more deep,
until, when they came and told him she was[151]
dead, his heart and will, and even his brain itself
gave way. He was utterly without help or the
knowledge of possible help in this world or
beyond it. He was frantic for a time, seeming
even to lose the sense of his own identity, and all
New Salem said that he was insane. He piteously
moaned and raved:

“‘I never can be reconciled to have the snow,
rain, and storms beat upon her grave.’

“His best friends seemed to have lost their
influence over him, . . . all but one; for
Bowling Green . . . managed to entice the
poor fellow to his own home, a short distance
from the village, there to keep watch and ward
over him until the fury of his sorrow should
wear away. There were well-grounded fears
lest he might do himself some injury, and the
watch was vigilantly kept.

“In a few weeks reason again obtained the
mastery, and it was safe to let him return to his
studies and his work. He could indeed work
again, and he could once more study law, for
there was a kind of relief in steady occupation
and absorbing toil, but he was not, could not ever
be the same man. . . .

“Lincoln had been fond of poetry from boyhood,[152]
and had gradually made himself familiar
with large parts of Shakespeare’s plays and the
works of other great writers. He now discovered,
in a strange collection of verses, the one
poem which seemed best to express the morbid,
troubled, sore condition of his mind, . . . the
lines by William Knox, beginning:

Two years was the term for which Lincoln was
elected to the Legislature. The year following
the death of Ann Rutledge he threw himself into
a vigorous campaign for re-election. He had
found much to do at Vandalia. The greatest
thing was the proposed removal of the State
capital to Springfield. In this enterprise he had
the co-operation of a group of tall men, known[153]
as “the Long Nine,” of whom he was the tallest
and came to be the leader.

Lincoln announced his second candidacy in
this brief, informal letter in the county paper:

The earliest railroads in the United States
had been built during the five years just preceding
this announcement, the first one of all, only
thirteen miles long, near Baltimore, in 1831. It
is interesting to observe the enthusiasm with
which the young frontier politician caught the
progressive idea, and how quickly the minds of
the people turned from impossible river “improvements”
to the grand possibilities of railway
transportation.

Many are the stories of the remarkable Sangamon
campaign in 1836. Rowan Herndon,
Abe’s fellow pilot and storekeeper, told the following:[155]

“Abraham came to my house, near Island
Grove, during harvest. There were some thirty
men in the field. He got his dinner and went out
into the field, where the men were at work. I
gave him an introduction, and the boys said that
they could not vote for a man unless he could
take a hand.

“‘Well, boys,’ said he, ‘if that is all, I am sure
of your votes’ He took the ‘cradle’ and led all
the way round with perfect ease. The boys were
satisfied, and I don’t think he lost a vote in the
crowd.

“The next day there was speaking at Berlin.
He went from my house with Dr. Barnett, who
had asked me who this man Lincoln was. I told
him that he was a candidate for the Legislature.
He laughed and said:

“‘Can’t the party raise any better material
than that?’

“I said, ‘Go to-morrow and hear him before
you pronounce judgment.’

“When he came back I said, ‘Doctor, what do
you say now?’

“‘Why, sir,’ said he, ‘he is a perfect “take-in.”[156]
He knows more than all of them put together.'”

Young Lincoln happened to call to speak to a
leading farmer in the district, and found his
rival, a Democratic candidate, there on the same
errand. The farmer was away from home, so
each of the candidates did his best to gain the
good-will of the farmer’s “better half,” who was
on her way to milk the cow. The Democrat
seized the pail and insisted on doing the work
for her. Lincoln did not make the slightest objection,
but improved the opportunity thus given
to chat with their hostess. This he did so successfully
that when his rival had finished the
unpleasant task, the only acknowledgment he
received was a profusion of thanks from the
woman for the opportunity he had given her of
having “such a pleasant talk with Mr. Lincoln!“

Abe distinguished himself in his first political
speech at Springfield, the county seat. A leading
citizen there, George Forquer, was accused[157]
of changing his political opinions to secure a certain
government position; he also had his fine
residence protected by the first lightning-rod
ever seen in that part of the country.

The contest was close and exciting. There
were seven Democratic and seven Whig candidates
for the lower branch of the Legislature.
Forquer, though not a candidate, asked to be
heard in reply to young Lincoln, whom he proceeded
to attack in a sneering overbearing way,
ridiculing the young man’s appearance, dress,
manners and so on. Turning to Lincoln who
then stood within a few feet of him, Forquer announced
his intention in these words: “This
young man must be taken down, and I am truly
sorry that the task devolves upon me.”

The “Clary’s Grove Boys,” who attended the
meeting in a body—or a gang!—could hardly be
restrained from arising in their might and smiting
the pompous Forquer, hip and thigh.

But their hero, with pale face and flashing
eyes, smiled as he shook his head at them, and
calmly answered the insulting speech of his opponent.
Among other things he said:

“The gentleman commenced his speech by saying
‘this young man,’ alluding to me, ‘must be[158]
taken down.’ I am not so young in years as I
am in the tricks and trades of a politician, but”—pointing
at Forquer—”live long or die young,
I would rather die now than, like the gentleman,
change my politics, and with the change receive
an office worth three thousand dollars a year,
and then feel obliged to erect a lightning-rod
over my house to protect a guilty conscience
from an offended God!”

This stroke blasted Forquer’s political prospects
forever, and satisfied the Clary’s Grove
Boys that it was even better than all the things
they would have done to him.

On another occasion Lincoln’s wit suddenly
turned the tables on an abusive opponent. One
of the Democratic orators was Colonel Dick
Taylor, a dapper, but bombastic little man, who
rode in his carriage, and dressed richly. But,
politically, he boasted of belonging to the Democrats,
“the bone and sinew, the hard-fisted yeomanry
of the land,” and sneered at those “rag
barons,” those Whig aristocrats, the “silk stocking
gentry!” As Abe Lincoln, the leading Whig
present, was dressed in Kentucky jeans, coarse[159]
boots, a checkered shirt without a collar or necktie,
and an old slouch hat, Colonel Taylor’s attack
on the “bloated Whig aristocracy” sounded
rather absurd.

Once the colonel made a gesture so violent that
it tore his vest open and exposed his elegant shirt
ruffles, his gold watch-fob, his seals and other
ornaments to the view of all. Before Taylor, in
his embarrassment, could adjust his waistcoat,
Lincoln stepped to the front exclaiming:

“Behold the hard-fisted Democrat! Look at
this specimen of ‘bone and sinew’—and here,
gentlemen,” laying his big work-bronzed hand
on his heart and bowing obsequiously—”here, at
your service, is your ‘aristocrat!’ Here is one
of your ‘silk stocking gentry!'” Then spreading
out his great bony hands he continued, “Here is
your ‘rag baron’ with his lily-white hands. Yes,
I suppose I am, according to my friend Taylor,
a ‘bloated aristocrat!'”

The contrast was so ludicrous, and Abe had
quoted the speaker’s stock phrases with such a
marvelous mimicry that the crowd burst into a
roar, and Colonel Dick Taylor’s usefulness as a
campaign speaker was at an end.

Small wonder, then, that young Lincoln’s wit,[160]
wisdom and power of ridicule made him known
in that campaign as one of the greatest orators
in the State, or that he was elected by such an
astonishing plurality that the county, which had
always been strongly Democratic, elected Whig
representatives that year.

After Herculean labors “the Long Nine” succeeded
in having the State capital removed from
Vandalia to Springfield. This move added
greatly to the influence and renown of its “prime
mover,” Abraham Lincoln, who was feasted and
“toasted” by the people of Springfield and by
politicians all over the State. After reading
“Blackstone” during his political campaigns,
young Lincoln fell in again with Major John T.
Stuart, whom he had met in the Black Hawk
War, and who gave him helpful advice and lent
him other books that he might “read law.”

Although he had no idea of it at the time,
Abraham Lincoln took part in a grander movement
than the removal of a State capital. Resolutions
were adopted in the Legislature in favor
of slavery and denouncing the hated “abolitionists”—or
people who spoke and wrote for the[161]
abolition of slavery. It required true heroism
for a young man thus to stand out against the
legislators of his State, but Abe Lincoln seems
to have thought little of that. The hatred of the
people for any one who opposed slavery was very
bitter. Lincoln found one man, named Stone,
who was willing to sign a protest against the
resolutions favoring slavery, which read as follows:

[162]

CHAPTER XIV

Moving to Springfield

New Salem could no longer give young Lincoln
scope for his growing power and influence.
Within a few weeks after the Lincoln-Stone protest,
late in March, 1837, after living six years in
the little village which held so much of life and
sorrow for him, Abe sold his surveying compass,
marking-pins, chain and pole, packed all his effects
into his saddle-bags, borrowed a horse of
his good friend “Squire” Bowling Green, and
reluctantly said good-bye to his friends there. It
is a strange fact that New Salem ceased to exist
within a year from the day “Honest Abe” left
it. Even its little post office was discontinued by
the Government.

Henry C. Whitney, who was associated with
Lincoln in those early days, describes Abe’s modest
entry into the future State capital, with all
his possessions in a pair of saddle-bags, and calling
at the store of Joshua F. Speed, overlooking
“the square,” in the following dialogue:[163]

Speed—”Hello, Abe, just from Salem?”

Lincoln—”Howdy, Speed! Yes, this is my
first show-up.”

Speed—”So you are to be one of us?”

Lincoln—”I reckon so, if you will let me take
pot luck with you.”

Speed—”All right, Abe; it’s better than
Salem.”

Lincoln—”I’ve been to Gorman’s and got a
single bedstead; now you figure out what it will
cost for a tick, blankets and so forth.”

Speed (after figuring)—”Say, seventeen dollars
or so.”

Lincoln (countenance paling)—”I had no idea
it would cost half that, and I—I can’t pay it; but
if you can wait on me till Christmas, and I make
anything, I’ll pay; if I don’t, I can’t.”

Speed—”I can do better than that; upstairs I
sleep in a bed big enough for two, and you just
come and sleep with me till you can do better.”

Lincoln (brightening)—”Good, where is it?”

Speed—”Upstairs behind that pile of barrels—turn
to the right when you go up.”

Lincoln (returning joyously)—”Well, Speed,
I’ve moved!”[164]

Major Stuart had grown so thoroughly interested
in Lincoln, approving the diligence with
which the young law student applied himself to
the books which he had lent him, that, after his
signal success in bringing about the removal of
the State capital to Springfield, the older man
invited the younger to go into partnership with
him.

Abe had been admitted to the bar the year before,
and had practiced law in a small way before
Squire Bowling Green in New Salem.
Greatly flattered by the offer of such a man, Abe
gladly accepted, and soon after his arrival in
Springfield this sign, which thrilled the junior
partner’s whole being, appeared in front of an
office near the square:

After a while Lincoln left Speed’s friendly
loft and slept on a lounge in the law office, keeping[165]
his few effects in the little old-fashioned
trunk pushed out of sight under his couch.

One day an agent of the Post Office Department
came in and asked if Abraham Lincoln
could be found there. Abe arose and, reaching
out his hand, said that was his name. The agent
then stated his business; he had come to collect
a balance due the Post Office Department since
the closing of the post office at New Salem.

The young ex-postmaster looked puzzled for
a moment, and a friend, who happened to be
present, hastened to his rescue with, “Lincoln,
if you are in need of money, let us help you.”

Abe made no reply, but, pulling out his little
old trunk, he asked the agent how much he owed.
The man stated the amount, and he, opening the
trunk, took out an old cotton cloth containing
coins, which he handed to the official without
counting, and it proved to be the exact sum required,
over seventeen dollars, evidently the
very pieces of money Abe had received while
acting as postmaster years before!

After the department agent had receipted for
the money and had gone out, Mr. Lincoln quietly
remarked:

“I never use anyone’s money but my own.”[166]

Stuart & Lincoln’s office was, for a time, over
a court room, which was used evenings as a hall.
There was a square opening in the ceiling of the
court room, covered by a trap door in the room
overhead where Lincoln slept. One night there
was a promiscuous crowd in the hall, and
Lincoln’s friend, E. D. Baker, was delivering
a political harangue. Becoming somewhat
excited Baker made an accusation against
a well-known newspaper in Springfield, and
the remark was resented by several in the audience.

“Pull him down!” yelled one of them as they
came up to the platform threatening Baker with
personal violence. There was considerable confusion
which might become a riot.

Just at this juncture the spectators were
astonished to see a pair of long legs dangling
from the ceiling and Abraham Lincoln dropped
upon the platform. Seizing the water pitcher
he took his stand beside the speaker, and
brandished it, his face ablaze with indignation.

“Gentlemen,” he said, when the confusion
had subsided, “let us not disgrace the age and[167]
the country in which we live. This is a land
where freedom of speech is guaranteed. Mr.
Baker has a right to speak, and ought to be permitted
to do so. I am here to protect him and no
man shall take him from this stand if I can prevent
it.” Lincoln had opened the trap door in
his room and silently watched the proceedings
until he saw that his presence was needed below.
Then he dropped right into the midst of the fray,
and defended his friend and the right of free
speech at the same time.

A widow came to Mr. Lincoln and told him
how an attorney had charged her an exorbitant
fee for collecting her pension. Such cases filled
him with righteous wrath. He cared nothing for
“professional etiquette,” if it permitted the
swindling of a poor woman. Going directly to
the greedy lawyer, he forced him to refund to
the widow all that he had charged in excess of a
fair fee for his services, or he would start proceedings
at once to prevent the extortionate attorney
from practicing law any longer at the
Springfield bar.[168]

If a negro had been wronged in any way, Lawyer
Lincoln was the only attorney in Springfield
who dared to appear in his behalf, for he
always did so at great risk to his political standing.
Sometimes he appeared in defense of fugitive
slaves, or negroes who had been freed or had
run away from southern or “slave” States
where slavery prevailed to gain liberty in “free”
States in which slavery was not allowed. Lawyer
Lincoln did all this at the risk of making
himself very unpopular with his fellow-attorneys
and among the people at large, the greater
part of whom were then in favor of permitting
those who wished to own, buy and sell negroes as
slaves.

Lincoln always sympathized with the poor
and down-trodden. He could not bear to charge
what his fellow-lawyers considered a fair price
for the amount of work and time spent on a
case. He often advised those who came to him
to settle their disputes without going to law.
Once he told a man he would charge him a large
fee if he had to try the case, but if the parties in
the dispute settled their difficulty without going
into court he would furnish them all the legal
advice they needed free of charge. Here is some[169]
excellent counsel Lawyer Lincoln gave, in later
life, in an address to a class of young attorneys:

“Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors
to compromise whenever you can. Point
out to them how the nominal winner is often the
real loser—in fees, expenses and waste of time.
As a peacemaker a lawyer has a superior opportunity
of becoming a good man. There will always
be enough business. Never stir up litigation.
A worse man can scarcely be found than
one who does this. Who can be more nearly a
fiend than he who habitually overhauls the
register of deeds in search of defects in titles
whereon to stir up strife and put money in his
pocket. A moral tone ought to be infused into
the profession which should drive such men out
of it.”

A wagonmaker in Mechanicsville, near
Springfield, was sued on account of a disputed
bill. The other side had engaged the best lawyer
in the place. The cartwright saw that his own
attorney would be unable to defend the case well.[170]
So, when the day of the trial arrived he sent his
son-in-law to Springfield to bring Mr. Lincoln
to save the day for him if possible. He said to
the messenger:

“Son, you’ve just got time. Take this letter
to my young friend, Abe Lincoln, and bring him
back in the buggy to appear in the case. Guess
he’ll come if he can.”

The young man from Mechanicsville found the
lawyer in the street playing “knucks” with a
troop of children and laughing heartily at the
fun they were all having. When the note was
handed to him, Lincoln said:

“All right, wait a minute,” and the game soon
ended amid peals of laughter. Then the young
lawyer jumped into the buggy. On the way
back Mr. Lincoln told his companion such funny
stories that the young man, convulsed with
laughter, was unable to drive. The horse, badly
broken, upset them into a ditch, smashing the
vehicle.

“You stay behind and look after the buggy,”
said the lawyer. “I’ll walk on.”

He came, with long strides, into the court
room just in time for the trial and won the case
for the wagonmaker.[171]

“What am I to pay you?” asked the client delighted.

“I hope you won’t think ten or fifteen dollars
too much,” said the young attorney, “and I’ll
pay half the hire of the buggy and half the cost
of repairing it.”

About the time Mr. Lincoln was admitted to
the bar, Miss Mary Owens, a bright and beautiful
young woman from Kentucky, came to visit
her married sister near New Salem. The sister
had boasted that she was going to “make a
match” between her sister and Lawyer Lincoln.
The newly admitted attorney smiled indulgently
at all this banter until he began to consider himself
under obligations to marry Miss Owens if
that young lady proved willing.

After he went to live in Springfield, with no
home but his office, he wrote the young lady a
long, discouraging letter, of which this is a part:

For a love letter this was nearly as cold and
formal as a legal document. Miss Owens could[173]
see well enough that Lawyer Lincoln was not
much in love with her, and she let him know, as
kindly as she could, that she was not disposed to
cast her lot for life with an enforced lover, as he
had proved himself to be. She afterward confided
to a friend that “Mr. Lincoln was deficient
in those little links which make up the chain of
a woman’s happiness.”

Soon after Mr. Lincoln came to Springfield he
met Stephen A. Douglas, a brilliant little man
from Vermont. The two seemed naturally to
take opposing sides of every question. They
were opposite in every way. Lincoln was tall,
angular and awkward. Douglas was small,
round and graceful—he came to be known as
“the Little Giant.” Douglas was a Democrat
and favored slavery. Lincoln was a Whig, and
strongly opposed that dark institution. Even in
petty discussions in Speed’s store, the two men
seemed to gravitate to opposite sides. A little
later they were rivals for the hand of the same
young woman.

One night, in a convivial company, Mr. Douglas’s[174]
attention was directed to the fact that Mr.
Lincoln neither smoked nor drank. Considering
this a reflection upon his own habits, the little
man sneered:

“What, Mr. Lincoln, are you a temperance
man?”

“No,” replied Lincoln with a smile full of
meaning, “I’m not exactly a temperance man,
but I am temperate in this, to wit:—I don’t
drink!“

In spite of this remark, Mr. Lincoln was an
ardent temperance man. One Washington’s
birthday he delivered a temperance address before
the Washingtonian Society of Springfield,
on “Charity in Temperance Reform,” in
which he made a strong comparison between the
drink habit and black slavery.

In 1841 the partnership between Stuart and
Lincoln was dissolved and the younger man became
a member of the firm of Logan & Lincoln.
This was considered a long step in advance for
the young lawyer, as Judge Stephen T. Logan
was known as one of the leading lawyers in the[175]
State. From this senior partner he learned to
make the thorough study of his cases that
characterized his work throughout his later
career.

While in partnership with Logan, Mr. Lincoln
was helping a young fellow named “Billy”
Herndon, a clerk in his friend Speed’s store, advising
him in his law studies and promising to
give the youth a place in his own office as soon as
young Herndon should be fitted to fill it.

During the interim between two partnerships,
after he had left Major Stuart, and before he
went into the office with Logan, Mr. Lincoln conducted
a case alone. He worked very hard and
made a brilliant success of it, winning the verdict
and a five hundred dollar fee. When an old lawyer
friend called on him, Lincoln had the money
spread out on the table counting it over.

“Look here, judge,” said the young lawyer.
“See what a heap of money I’ve got from that
case. Did you ever see anything like it? Why,
I never in my life had so much money all at
once!”[176]

Then his manner changed, and crossing his
long arms on the table he said:

“I have got just five hundred dollars; if it
were only seven hundred and fifty I would go
and buy a quarter section (160 acres) of land
and give it to my old stepmother.”

The friend offered to lend him the two hundred
and fifty dollars needed. While drawing up
the necessary papers, the old judge gave the
young lawyer this advice:

“Lincoln, I wouldn’t do it quite that way.
Your stepmother is getting old, and, in all probability,
will not live many years. I would settle
the property upon her for use during her lifetime,
to revert to you upon her death.”

“I shall do no such thing,” Lincoln replied
with deep feeling. “It is a poor return, at best,
for all the good woman’s devotion to me, and
there is not going to be any half-way business
about it.”

The dutiful stepson did as he planned. Some
years later he was obliged to write to John
Johnston, his stepmother’s son, appealing to
him not to try to induce his mother to sell the
land lest the old woman should lose the support
he had provided for her in her declining years.[177]

Lincoln’s popularity in Sangamon County, always
increasing, was greatly strengthened by
the part he had taken in the removal of the capital
to Springfield, which was the county seat as
well as the State capital. So he was returned to
the Legislature, now held in Springfield, time
after time, without further effort on his part.
He was looked upon as a young man with a great
future. While he was in the office with Major
Stuart that gentleman’s cousin, Miss Mary
Todd, a witty, accomplished young lady from
Lexington, Kentucky, came to Springfield to
visit her sister, wife of Ninian W. Edwards, one
of the “Long Nine” in the State Assembly.

Miss Todd was brilliant and gay, a society girl—in
every way the opposite of Mr. Lincoln—and
he was charmed with everything she said
and did. Judge Douglas was one of her numerous
admirers, and it is said that the Louisville
belle was so flattered by his attentions that she
was in doubt, for a time, which suitor to accept.
She was an ambitious young woman, having
boasted from girlhood that she would one day be
mistress of the White House.

To all appearances Douglas was the more[178]
likely to fulfill Miss Todd’s high ambition. He
was a society man, witty in conversation, popular
with women as well as with men, and had
been to Congress, so he had a national reputation,
while Lincoln’s was only local, or at most
confined to Sangamon County and the Eighth
Judicial Circuit of Illinois.

But Mr. Douglas was already addicted to
drink, and Miss Todd saw doubtless that he
could not go on long at the rapid pace he was
keeping up. It is often said that she was in
favor of slavery, as some of her relatives who
owned slaves, years later, entered the Confederate
ranks to fight against the Union. But the
remarkable fact that she finally chose Lincoln
shows that her sympathies were against slavery,
and she thus cut herself off from several members
of her own family. With a woman’s intuition
she saw the true worth of Abraham Lincoln,
and before long they were understood to be engaged.

But the young lawyer, after his recent experience
with Mary Owens, distrusted his ability to
make any woman happy—much less the belle
from Louisville, so brilliant, vivacious, well educated
and exacting. He seemed to grow morbidly[179]
conscious of his shortcomings, and she was
high-strung. A misunderstanding arose, and,
between such exceptional natures, “the course of
true love never did run smooth.”

Their engagement, if they were actually betrothed,
was broken, and the lawyer-lover was
plunged in deep melancholy. He wrote long,
morbid letters to his friend Speed, who had returned
to Kentucky, and had recently married
there. Lincoln even went to Louisville to visit
the Speeds, hoping that the change of scene and
friendly sympathies and counsel would revive
his health and spirits.

In one of his letters Lincoln bemoaned his sad
fate and referred to “the fatal 1st of January,”
probably the date when his engagement or “the
understanding” with Mary Todd was broken.
From this expression, one of Lincoln’s biographers
elaborated a damaging fiction, stating that
Lincoln and his affianced were to have been married
that day, that the wedding supper was
ready, that the bride was all dressed for the ceremony,
the guests assembled—but the melancholy
bridegroom failed to come to his own wedding!

If such a thing had happened in a little town[180]
like Springfield in those days, the guests would
have told of it, and everybody would have gossiped
about it. It would have been a nine days’
wonder, and such a great joker as Lincoln would
“never have heard the last of it.”

After Lincoln’s return from visiting the
Speeds in Louisville, he threw himself into politics
again, not, however, in his own behalf. He
declined to be a candidate again for the State
Legislature, in which he had served four consecutive
terms, covering a period of eight years.
He engaged enthusiastically in the “Log Cabin”
campaign of 1840, when the country went for
“Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,” which means that
General William Henry Harrison, the hero of
the battle of Tippecanoe, and John Tyler were
elected President and Vice-President of the
United States.

In 1842 the young lawyer had so far recovered
from bodily illness and mental unhappiness as
to write more cheerful letters to his friend
Speed of which two short extracts follow:

“It seems to me that I should have been entirely[181]
happy but for the never-absent idea that
there is one (Miss Todd) still unhappy whom I
have contributed to make so. That still kills my
soul. I cannot but reproach myself for even
wishing to be happy while she is otherwise. She
accompanied a large party on the railroad cars
to Jacksonville last Monday, and at her return
spoke, so I heard of it, of having ‘enjoyed the
trip exceedingly.’ God be praised for that.”

“You will see by the last Sangamon Journal
that I made a temperance speech on the 22d of
February, which I claim that Fanny and you
shall read as an act of charity toward me; for I
cannot learn that anybody has read it or is likely
to. Fortunately it is not long, and I shall deem
it a sufficient compliance with my request if one
of you listens while the other reads it.”

Early the following summer Lincoln wrote for
the Sangamon Journal a humorous criticism of
State Auditor Shields, a vain and “touchy”
little man. This was in the form of a story and
signed by “Rebecca of the Lost Townships.”
The article created considerable amusement and
might have passed unnoticed by the conceited
little auditor if it had not been followed by another,[182]
less humorous, but more personal and
satirical, signed in the same way, but the second
communication was written by two mischievous
(if not malicious) girls—Mary Todd and her
friend, Julia Jayne. This stinging attack made
Shields wild with rage, and he demanded the
name of the writer of it. Lincoln told the editor
to give Shields his name as if he had written both
contributions and thus protect the two young
ladies. The auditor then challenged the lawyer
to fight a duel. Lincoln, averse to dueling, chose
absurd weapons, imposed ridiculous conditions
and tried to treat the whole affair as a huge joke.
When the two came face to face, explanations
became possible and the ludicrous duel was
avoided. Lincoln’s conduct throughout this humiliating
affair plainly showed that, while
Shields would gladly have killed him, he had no
intention of injuring the man who had challenged
him.

Mary Todd’s heart seems to have softened
toward the young man who was willing to risk
his life for her sake, and the pair, after a long
and miserable misunderstanding on both sides,
were happily married on the 4th of November,
1842. Their wedding ceremony was the first ever[183]
performed in Springfield by the use of the Episcopal
ritual.

When one of the guests, bluff old Judge Tom
Brown, saw the bridegroom placing the ring on
Miss Todd’s finger, and repeating after the minister,
“With this ring”—”I thee wed”—”and
with all”—”my worldly goods”—”I thee endow”—he
exclaimed, in a stage whisper:

“Grace to Goshen, Lincoln, the statute fixes
all that!”

In a letter to Speed, not long after this event,
the happy bridegroom wrote:

“We are not keeping house but boarding at
the Globe Tavern, which is very well kept now
by a widow lady of the name of Beck. Our rooms
are the same Dr. Wallace occupied there, and
boarding only costs four dollars a week (for the
two). I most heartily wish you and your family
will not fail to come. Just let us know the time,
a week in advance, and we will have a room prepared
for you and we’ll all be merry together for
a while.”[184]

CHAPTER XV

Lincoln & Herndon

Lincoln remained in the office with Judge
Logan about four years, dissolving partnership
in 1845. Meanwhile he was interesting himself
in behalf of young William H. Herndon, who,
after Speed’s removal to Kentucky, had gone to
college at Jacksonville, Ill. The young man
seemed to be made of the right kind of metal, was
industrious, and agreeable, and Mr. Lincoln
looked forward to the time when he could have
“Billy” with him in a business of his own.

Mrs. Lincoln, with that marvelous instinct
which women often possess, opposed her husband’s
taking Bill Herndon into partnership.
While the young man was honest and capable
enough, he was neither brilliant nor steady. He
contracted the habit of drinking, the bane of Lincoln’s
business career. As Mr. Lincoln had not
yet paid off “the national debt” largely due to[185]
his first business partner’s drunkenness, it seems
rather strange that he did not listen to his wife’s
admonitions. But young Herndon seems always
to have exercised a strange fascination over his
older friend and partner.

While yet in partnership with Judge Logan,
Mr. Lincoln went into the national campaign of
1844, making speeches in Illinois and Indiana
for Henry Clay, to whom he was thoroughly devoted.

Before this campaign Lincoln had written to
Mr. Speed:

“We had a meeting of the Whigs of the
county here last Monday to appoint delegates to
a district convention; and Baker beat me, and
got the delegation instructed to go for him. The
meeting, in spite of my attempts to decline it,
appointed me one of the delegates, so that in getting
Baker the nomination I shall be fixed like a
fellow who is made a groomsman to a fellow
that has cut him out, and is marrying his own
dear ‘gal.'”

Mr. Lincoln, about this time, was offered the
nomination for Governor of Illinois, and declined
the honor. Mrs. Lincoln, who had supreme
confidence in her husband’s ability, tried[186]
to make him more self-seeking in his political efforts.
He visited his old home in Indiana, making
several speeches in that part of the State. It
was fourteen years after he and all the family
had removed to Illinois. One of his speeches was
delivered from the door of a harness shop near
Gentryville, and one he made in the “Old Carter
Schoolhouse.” After this address he drove
home with Mr. Josiah Crawford—”Old Blue
Nose” for whom he had “pulled fodder” to pay
an exorbitant price for Weems’s “Life of Washington,”
and in whose house his sister and he
had lived as hired girl and hired man. He delighted
the old friends by asking about everybody,
and being interested in the “old swimming-hole,”
Jones’s grocery where he had often
argued and “held forth,” the saw-pit, the old
mill, the blacksmith shop, whose owner, Mr.
Baldwin, had told him some of his best stories,
and where he once started in to learn the blacksmith’s
trade. He went around and called on all
his former acquaintances who were still living in
the neighborhood. His memories were so vivid
and his emotions so keen that he wrote a long
poem about this, from which the following are
three stanzas:[187]

As Mr. Lincoln spent so much of his time
away from Springfield he felt that he needed a
younger assistant to “keep office” and look after
his cases in the different courts. He should not
have made “Billy” Herndon an equal partner,
but he did so, though the young man had neither
the ability nor experience to earn anything like
half the income of the office. If Herndon had
kept sober and done his best he might have made
some return for all that Mr. Lincoln, who
treated him like a foster-father, was trying to
do for him. But “Billy” did nothing of the[188]
sort. He took advantage of his senior partner’s
absences by going on sprees with several dissipated
young men about town.

A Springfield gentleman relates the following
story which shows Lawyer Lincoln’s business
methods, his unwillingness to charge much for
his legal services; and his great longing to save
his young partner from the clutches of drink:

“My father,” said the neighbor, “was in business,
facing the square, not far from the Court
House. He had an account with a man who
seemed to be doing a good, straight business for
years, but the fellow disappeared one night,
owing father about $1000. Time went on and
father got no trace of the vanished debtor. He
considered the account as good as lost.

“But one day, in connection with other business,
he told Mr. Lincoln he would give him half
of what he could recover of that bad debt. The
tall attorney’s deep gray eyes twinkled as he
said, ‘One-half of nought is nothing. I’m
neither a shark nor a shyster, Mr. Man. If I
should collect it, I would accept only my regular
percentage.’[189]

“‘But I mean it,’ father said earnestly. ‘I
should consider it as good as finding money in
the street.’

“‘And “the finder will be liberally rewarded,”
eh?’ said Mr. Lincoln with a laugh.

“‘Yes,’ my father replied, ‘that’s about the
size of it; and I’m glad if you understand it.
The members of the bar here grumble because
you charge too little for your professional services,
and I’m willing to do my share toward educating
you in the right direction.’

“‘Well, seein’ as it’s you,’ said Mr. Lincoln
with a whimsical smile, ‘considering that you’re
such an intimate friend, I’d do it for twice as
much as I’d charge a total stranger! Is that
satisfactory?’

“‘I should not be satisfied with giving you
less than half the gross amount collected—in
this case,’ my father insisted. ‘I don’t see why
you are so loath to take what is your due, Mr.
Lincoln. You have a family to support and will
have to provide for the future of several boys.
They need money and are as worthy of it as any
other man’s wife and sons.’

“Mr. Lincoln put out his big bony hand as if
to ward off a blow, exclaiming in a pained tone:[190]

“‘That isn’t it, Mr. Man. That isn’t it. I
yield to no man in love to my wife and babies,
and I provide enough for them. Most of those
who bring their cases to me need the money more
than I do. Other lawyers rob them. They act
like a pack of wolves. They have no mercy. So
when a needy fellow comes to me in his trouble—sometimes
it’s a poor widow—I can’t take
much from them. I’m not much of a Shylock.
I always try to get them to settle it without going
into court. I tell them if they will make it
up among themselves I won’t charge them anything.’

“‘Well, Mr. Lincoln,’ said father with a
laugh, ‘if they were all like you there would be
no need of lawyers.’

“‘Well,’ exclaimed Lawyer Lincoln with a
quizzical inflection which meant much. ‘Look
out for the millennium, Mr. Man—still, as a
great favor, I’ll charge you a fat fee if I ever
find that fellow and can get anything out of him.
But that’s like promising to give you half of the
first dollar I find floating up the Sangamon on a
grindstone, isn’t it? I’ll take a big slice, though,
out of the grindstone itself, if you say so,’ and
the tall attorney went out with the peculiar[191]
laugh that afterward became world-famous.

“Not long afterward, while in Bloomington,
out on the circuit, Mr. Lincoln ran across the
man who had disappeared from Springfield ‘between
two days,’ carrying on an apparently
prosperous business under an assumed name.
Following the man to his office and managing to
talk with him alone, the lawyer, by means of
threats, made the man go right to the bank and
draw out the whole thousand then. It meant
payment in full or the penitentiary. The man
understood it and went white as a sheet. In all
his sympathy for the poor and needy, Mr. Lincoln
had no pity on the flourishing criminal.
Money could not purchase the favor of Lincoln.

“Well, I hardly know which half of that thousand
dollars father was gladder to get, but I
honestly believe he was more pleased on Mr.
Lincoln’s account than on his own.

“‘Let me give you your five hundred dollars
before I change my mind,’ he said to the attorney.

“‘One hundred dollars is all I’ll take out of
that,’ Mr. Lincoln replied emphatically. ‘It was
no trouble, and—and I haven’t earned even that
much.’[192]

“‘But Mr. Lincoln,’ my father demurred,
‘you promised to take half.’

“‘Yes, but you got my word under false pretenses,
as it were. Neither of us had the least
idea I would collect the bill even if I ever found
the fellow.’

“As he would not accept more than one hundred
dollars that day, father wouldn’t give him
any of the money due, for fear the too scrupulous
attorney would give him a receipt in full for
collecting. Finally, Mr. Lincoln went away
after yielding enough to say he might accept two
hundred and fifty dollars sometime in a pinch
of some sort.

“The occasion was not long delayed—but it
was not because of illness or any special necessity
in his own family. His young partner,
‘Billy’ Herndon, had been carousing with several
of his cronies in a saloon around on Fourth
Street, and the gang had broken mirrors, decanters
and other things in their drunken spree.
The proprietor, tired of such work, had had
them all arrested.

“Mr. Lincoln, always alarmed when Billy
failed to appear at the usual hour in the morning,
went in search of him, and found him and[193]
his partners in distress, locked up in the calaboose.
The others were helpless, unable to pay
or to promise to pay for any of the damages, so
it devolved on Mr. Lincoln to raise the whole
two hundred and fifty dollars the angry saloon
keeper demanded.

“He came into our office out of breath and
said sheepishly:

“‘I reckon I can use that two-fifty now.’

“‘Check or currency?’ asked father.

“‘Currency, if you’ve got it handy.’

“‘Give Mr. Lincoln two hundred and fifty
dollars,’ father called to a clerk in the office.

“There was a moment’s pause, during which
my father refrained from asking any questions,
and Mr. Lincoln was in no mood to give information.
As soon as the money was brought, the tall
attorney seized the bills and stalked out without
counting it or saying anything but ‘Thankee,
Mr. Man,’ and hurried diagonally across the
square toward the Court House, clutching the
precious banknotes in his bony talons.

“Father saw him cross the street so fast that
the tails of his long coat stood out straight behind;
then go up the Court House steps, two at
a time, and disappear.[194]

“We learned afterward what he did with the
money. Of course, Bill Herndon was penitent
and promised to mend his ways, and, of course,
Mr. Lincoln believed him. He took the money
very much against his will, even against his
principles—thinking it might save his junior
partner from the drunkard’s grave. But the
heart of Abraham Lincoln was hoping against
hope.”

CHAPTER XVI

His Kindness of Heart

Mr. Lincoln’s tender-heartedness was the
subject of much amusement among his fellow
attorneys. One day, while out riding with several
friends, they missed Lincoln. One of them,
having heard the distressed cries of two young
birds that had fallen from the nest, surmised
that this had something to do with Mr. Lincoln’s
disappearance. The man was right. Lincoln
had hitched his horse and climbed the fence into
the thicket where the fledglings were fluttering[195]
on the ground in great fright. He caught the
young birds and tenderly carried them about
until he found their nest. Climbing the tree he
put the birdlings back where they belonged.
After an hour Mr. Lincoln caught up with his
companions, who laughed at him for what they
called his “childishness.” He answered them
earnestly:

“Gentlemen, you may laugh, but I could not
have slept tonight if I had not saved those little
birds. The mother’s cries and theirs would have
rung in my ears.”

Lawyer Lincoln rode from one county-seat
to another, on the Eighth Judicial Circuit of
Illinois, either on the back of a raw-boned horse,
or in a rickety buggy drawn by the same old
“crowbait,” as his legal friends called the animal.
The judge and lawyers of the several
courts traveled together and whiled away the
time chatting and joking. Of course, Abraham
Lincoln was in great demand because of his unfailing
humor.[196]

One day he appeared in a new suit of clothes.
This was such a rare occurrence that the friends
made remarks about it. The garments did not
fit him very well, and the others felt in duty
bound to “say things” which were anything but
complimentary.

As they rode along through the mud they were
making Lincoln the butt of their gibes. He was
not like most jokers, for he could take as well
as give, while he could “give as good as he got.”

In the course of their “chaffing” they came to
a spot about four miles from Paris, Illinois,
where they saw a pig stuck in the mud and
squealing lustily. The men all laughed at the
poor animal and its absurd plight.

“Poor piggy!” exclaimed Mr. Lincoln impulsively.
“Let’s get him out of that.”

The others jeered at the idea. “You’d better
do it. You’re dressed for the job!” exclaimed
one.

“Return to your wallow!” laughed another,
pointing in great glee to the wallowing hog and
the mudhole.

Lincoln looked at the pig, at the deep mud,
then down at his new clothes. Ruefully he rode
on with them for some time. But the cries of the[197]
helpless animal rang in his ears. He could endure
it no longer. Lagging behind the rest, he
waited until they had passed a bend in the road.
Then he turned and rode back as fast as his poor
old horse could carry him through the mud.
Dismounting, he surveyed the ground. The pig
had struggled until it was almost buried in the
mire, and was now too exhausted to move. After
studying the case as if it were a problem in civil
engineering, he took some rails off the fence beside
the road. Building a platform of rails
around the now exhausted hog, then taking one
rail for a lever and another for a fulcrum, he
began gently to pry the fat, helpless creature out
of the sticky mud. In doing this he plastered
his new suit from head to foot, but he did not
care, as long as he could save that pig!

“Now, piggy-wig,” he said. “It’s you and
me for it. You do your part and I’ll get you out.
Now—’one-two-three—up-a-daisy!‘”

He smiled grimly as he thought of the jeers
and sneers that would be hurled at him if his
friends had stayed to watch him at this work.

After long and patient labor he succeeded in
loosening the hog and coaxing it to make the
attempt to get free. At last, the animal was[198]
made to see that it could get out. Making one
violent effort it wallowed away and started for
the nearest farmhouse, grunting and flopping its
ears as it went.

Lawyer Lincoln looked ruefully down at his
clothes, then placed all the rails back on the
fence as he had found them.

He had to ride the rest of the day alone, for
he did not wish to appear before his comrades
until the mud on his suit had dried so that it
could be brushed off. That night, when they
saw him at the tavern, they asked him what he
had been doing all day, eying his clothes with
suspicious leers and grins. He had to admit that
he could not bear to leave that hog to die, and
tried to excuse his tender-heartedness to them
by adding: “Farmer Jones’s children might
have had to go barefoot all Winter if he had lost
a valuable hog like that!”

In 1846 Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress,
defeating the Rev. Peter Cartwright, the[199]
famous backwoods preacher, who was elected to
the State Legislature fourteen years before, the
first time Lincoln was a candidate and the only
time he was ever defeated by popular vote.
Cartwright had made a vigorous canvass, telling
the people that Lincoln was “an aristocrat and
an atheist.” But, though they had a great respect
for Peter Cartwright and his preaching,
the people did not believe all that he said against
Lincoln, and they elected him. Shortly after
this he wrote again to Speed:

In the same letter he imparted to his friend
some information which seems to have been
much more interesting to him than being elected
to Congress:[200]

The new baby mentioned in this letter was
Edward, who died in 1850, before his fourth
birthday. “Bob,” or Robert, the eldest of the
Lincoln’s four children, was born in 1843. William,
born in 1850, died in the White House. The
youngest was born in 1853, after the death of
Thomas Lincoln, so he was named for his grandfather,
but he was known only by his nickname,
“Tad.” “Little Tad” was his father’s constant[201]
companion during the terrible years of the Civil
War, especially after Willie’s death, in 1862.
“Tad” became “the child of the nation.” He
died in Chicago, July 10, 1871, at the age of
eighteen, after returning from Europe with his
widowed mother and his brother Robert. Robert
has served his country as Secretary of War
and Ambassador to the English court, and is
recognized as a leader in national affairs.

When Lincoln was sent to the national House
of Representatives, Douglas was elected to the
Senate for the first time. Lincoln was the only
Whig from Illinois. This shows his great personal
popularity. Daniel Webster was then living
in the national capital, and Congressman
Lincoln stopped once at Ashland, Ky., on his
way to Washington to visit the idol of the
Whigs, Henry Clay.

As soon as Lincoln was elected, an editor
wrote to ask him for a biographical sketch of
himself for the “Congressional Directory.”
This is all Mr. Lincoln wrote—in a blank form
sent for the purpose:

“Born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County,
Kentucky.

“Education defective.[202]

“Profession, lawyer.

“Military service, captain of volunteers in
Black Hawk War.

“Offices held: Postmaster at a very small
office; four times a member of the Illinois Legislature,
and elected to the lower House of the
next Congress.”

Mr. Lincoln was in Congress while the Mexican
War was in progress, and there was much
discussion over President Polk’s action in declaring
that war.

As Mrs. Lincoln was obliged to stay in Springfield
to care for her two little boys, Congressman
Lincoln lived in a Washington boarding-house.
He soon gained the reputation of telling
the best stories at the capital. He made a humorous
speech on General Cass, comparing the
general’s army experiences with his own in the
Black Hawk War. He also drafted a bill to
abolish slavery in the District of Columbia,
which was never brought to a vote. Most of his
care seems to have been for Billy Herndon, who
wrote complaining letters to him about the “old
men” in Springfield who were always trying to
“keep the young men down.” Here are two of
Mr. Lincoln’s replies:[203]

Mr. Lincoln did not allow his name to be used
as a candidate for re-election, as there were
other men in the congressional district who deserved
the honor of going to Washington as
much as he. On his way home from Washington,
after the last session of the Thirtieth Congress,[205]
he visited New England, where he made a
few speeches, and stopped at Niagara Falls,
which impressed him so strongly that he wrote a
lecture on the subject.

After returning home he made a flying visit to
Washington to enter his patent steamboat,
equipped so that it would navigate shallow western
rivers. This boat, he told a friend, “would
go where the ground is a little damp.” The
model of Lincoln’s steamboat is one of the sights
of the Patent Office to this day.

After Mr. Lincoln had settled down to his law
business, permanently, as he hoped, his former
fellow-clerk, William G. Greene, having business
in Coles County, went to “Goosenest Prairie”
to call on Abe’s father and stepmother, who
still lived in a log cabin. Thomas Lincoln received
his son’s friend very hospitably. During
the young man’s visit, the father reverted to the
old subject, his disapproval of his son’s wasting
his time in study. He said:

“I s’pose Abe’s still a-foolin’ hisself with
eddication. I tried to stop it, but he’s got that
fool idee in his head an’ it can’t be got out. Now
I haint got no eddication, but I git along better
than if I had.”[206]

Not long after this, in 1851, Abraham learned
that his father was very ill. As he could not
leave Springfield then, he wrote to his stepbrother
(for Thomas Lincoln could not read)
the following comforting letter to be read to his
father:

“I sincerely hope father may recover his
health; but at all events, tell him to remember to
call upon and confide in our great and merciful
Maker, who will not turn away from him in any
extremity. He notes the fall of the sparrow, and
numbers the hairs of our heads, and He will not
forget the dying man who puts his trust in Him.
Say to him that, if we could meet now, it is
doubtful whether it would be more painful than
pleasant, but if it is his lot to go now, he will
soon have a joyful meeting with the loved ones
gone before, and where the rest of us, through
the mercy of God, hope ere long to join them.”

Thomas Lincoln died that year, at the age of
seventy-three.

After his father’s death Abraham Lincoln
had, on several occasions, to protect his stepmother[207]
against the schemes of her own lazy,
good-for-nothing son. Here is one of the letters
written, at this time, to his stepbrother, John
Johnston:

“Dear Brother: I hear that you were anxious
to sell the land where you live, and move to
Missouri. What can you do in Missouri better
than here? Is the land any richer? Can you
there, any more than here, raise corn and wheat
and oats without work? Will anybody there,
any more than here, do your work for you? If
you intend to go to work, there is no better place
than right where you are; if you do not intend
to go to work, you cannot get along anywhere.
Squirming and crawling about from place to
place can do no good. You have raised no crop
this year, and what you really want is to sell the
land, get the money and spend it. Part with the
land you have and, my life upon it, you will
never own a spot big enough to bury you in.
Half you will get for the land you will spend in
moving to Missouri, and the other half you will
eat and drink and wear out, and no foot of land
will be bought.

“Now, I feel that it is my duty to have no hand
in such a piece of foolery. I feel it is so even on[208]
your own account, and particularly on mother’s
account.

“Now do not misunderstand this letter. I do
not write it in any unkindness. I write it in
order, if possible, to get you to face the truth,
which truth is, you are destitute because you
have idled away your time. Your thousand pretenses
deceive nobody but yourself. Go to work
is the only cure for your case.”

CHAPTER XVII

What Made the Difference Between Abraham
Lincoln and His Stepbrother

These letters show the wide difference between
the real lives of two boys brought up in
the same surroundings, and under similar conditions.
The advantages were in John Johnston’s
favor. He and Dennis Hanks never rose
above the lower level of poverty and ignorance.
John was looked down upon by the
poor illiterates around him as a lazy, good-for-nothing
fellow, and Dennis Hanks was[209]
known to be careless about telling the truth.

In speaking of the early life of Abe’s father
and mother, Dennis threw in the remark that
“the Hankses was some smarter than the Lincolns.”
It was not “smartness” that made Abe
Lincoln grow to be a greater man than Dennis
Hanks. There are men in Springfield to-day
who say, “There were a dozen smarter men in
this town than Mr. Lincoln when he happened
to be nominated, and peculiar conditions prevailing
at that time brought about his election
to the presidency!”

True greatness is made of goodness rather
than smartness. Abraham Lincoln was honest
with himself while a boy and a man, and it was
“Honest Abe” who became President of the
United States. The people loved him for his big
heart—because he loved them more than he loved
himself and they knew it. In his second inaugural
address as President he used this expression:
“With malice toward none, with charity
for all.” This was not a new thought, but it
was full of meaning to the country because little
Abe Lincoln had lived that idea all his life, with
his own family, his friends, acquaintances, and
employers. He became the most beloved man in[210]
the world, in his own or any other time, because
he himself loved everybody.

Mrs. Crawford, the wife of “Old Blue Nose,”
used to laugh at the very idea of Abe Lincoln
ever becoming President. Lincoln often said to
her: “I’ll get ready and the time will come.”
He got ready in his father’s log hut and when
the door of opportunity opened he walked right
into the White House. He “made himself at
home” there, because he had only to go on in
the same way after he became the “servant of
the people” that he had followed when he was
“Old Blue Nose’s” hired boy and man.

Then there was William H. Herndon, known
to the world only because he happened to be
“Lincoln’s law partner.” His advantages were
superior to Lincoln’s. And far more than that,
he had his great partner’s help to push him forward
and upward. But “poor Billy” had an
unfortunate appetite. He could not deny himself,
though it always made him ashamed and
miserable. It dragged him down, down from
“the President’s partner” to the gutter. That[211]
was not all. When he asked his old partner to
give him a government appointment which he
had, for years, been making himself wholly unworthy
to fill, President Lincoln, much as he had
loved Billy all along, could not give it to him.
It grieved Mr. Lincoln’s great heart to refuse
Billy anything. But Herndon did not blame
himself for all that. He spent the rest of his
wretched life in bitterness and spite—avenging
himself on his noble benefactor by putting untruths
into the “Life of Lincoln” he was able to
write because Abraham Lincoln, against the advice
of his wife and friends, had insisted on
keeping him close to his heart. It is a terrible
thing—that spirit of spite! Among many good
and true things he had to say about his fatherly
law partner, he poisoned the good name of Abraham
Lincoln in the minds of millions, by writing
stealthy slander about Lincoln’s mother and
wife, and made many people believe that the
most religious of men at heart was an infidel
(because he himself was one!), that Mr. Lincoln
sometimes acted from unworthy and unpatriotic
motives, and that he failed to come to his own
wedding. If these things had been true it would
have been wrong to publish them to the prejudice[212]
of a great man’s good name—then how
much more wicked to invent and spread broadcast
falsehoods which hurt the heart and injure
the mind of the whole world—just to spite the
memory of the best friend a man ever had!

The fate of the firm of Lincoln & Herndon
shows in a striking way how the world looks
upon the heart that hates and the heart that
loves, for the hateful junior partner died miserably
in an almshouse, but the senior was crowned
with immortal martyrdom in the White House.

Stephen A. Douglas, “the Little Giant,” who
had been a rival for the hand of the fascinating
Mary Todd, was also Lincoln’s chief opponent in
politics. Douglas was small and brilliant; used
to society ways, he seemed always to keep ahead
of his tall, uncouth, plodding competitor. After
going to Congress, Mr. Lincoln was encouraged
to aspire even higher, so, ten years later, he became
a candidate for the Senate. Slavery was
then the burning question, and Douglas seemed
naturally to fall upon the opposite side, favoring
and justifying it in every way he could.

Douglas was then a member of the Senate,[213]
but the opposing party nominated Lincoln to
succeed him, while “the Little Giant” had been
renominated to succeed himself. Douglas
sneered at his tall opponent, trying to “damn
him with faint praise” by referring to him as “a
kind, amiable and intelligent gentleman.” Mr.
Lincoln challenged the Senator to discuss the
issues of the hour in a series of debates.

Douglas was forced, very much against his
will, to accept, and the debates took place in
seven towns scattered over the State of Illinois,
from August 21st to October 15th, 1858. Lincoln
had announced his belief that “a house divided
against itself cannot stand;” therefore the
United States could not long exist “half slave
and half free.”

“The Little Giant” drove from place to place
in great style, traveling with an escort of influential
friends. These discussions, known in
history as the “Lincoln-Douglas Debates,” rose
to national importance while they were in progress,
by attracting the attention, in the newspapers,
of voters all over the country. They
were attended, on an average, by ten thousand
persons each, both men being accompanied by
bands and people carrying banners and what[214]
Mr. Lincoln called “fizzlegigs and fireworks.”

Some of the banners were humorous.

At the first debate Lincoln took off his linen
duster and, handing it to a bystander, said:

“Hold my coat while I stone Stephen!”

In the course of these debates Lincoln propounded
questions for Mr. Douglas to answer.
Brilliant as “the Little Giant” was, he was not
shrewd enough to defend himself from the
shafts of his opponent’s wit and logic. So he
fell into Lincoln’s trap.

“If he does that,” said Lincoln, “he may be
Senator, but he can never be President. I am
after larger game. The battle of 1860 is worth
a hundred of this.”

This prophecy proved true.[215]

CHAPTER XVIII

How Emancipation Came to Pass

When Abraham Lincoln was a small boy he
began to show the keenest sympathy for the
helpless and oppressed. The only time he betrayed
anger as a child was, as you already have
learned, when he saw the other boys hurting a
mud-turtle. In his first school “composition,”
on “Cruelty to Animals,” his stepsister remembers
this sentence: “An ant’s life is as sweet to
it as ours is to us.”

As you have read on an earlier page, when
Abe grew to be a big, strong boy he saved a
drunken man from freezing in the mud, by
carrying him to a cabin, building a fire, and
spent the rest of the night warming and sobering
him up. Instead of leaving the drunkard to
the fate the other fellows thought he deserved,
Abe Lincoln, through pity for the helpless, rescued
a fellow-being not only from mud and cold
but also from a drunkard’s grave. For that tall
lad’s love and mercy revealed to the poor creature
the terrible slavery of which he was the[216]
victim. Thus Abe helped him throw off the
shackles of drink and made a man of him.

As he grew older, Abe Lincoln saw that the
drink habit was a sort of human slavery. He
delivered an address before the Washingtonian
(Temperance) Society in which he compared
white slavery with black, in which he said:

“And when the victory shall be complete—when
there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard
on the earth—how proud the title of that
land which may truly claim to be the birthplace
and the cradle of both those revolutions that
have ended in that victory.”

This address was delivered on Washington’s
Birthday, 1842. The closing words throb with
young Lawyer Lincoln’s fervent patriotism:

“This is the one hundred and tenth anniversary
of the birth of Washington; we are met to
celebrate this day. Washington is the mightiest
name of earth, long since the mightiest in the
cause of civil liberty, still mightiest in moral
reformation. On that name no eulogy is expected.
It cannot be. To add to the brightness
of the sun or glory to the name of Washington[217]
is alike impossible. Let none attempt it. In
solemn awe we pronounce the name and, in its
naked, deathless splendor, leave it shining on.”

It was young Lincoln’s patriotic love for
George Washington which did so much to bring
about, in time, a double emancipation from
white slavery and black.

Once, as President, he said to a boy who had
just signed the temperance pledge:

“Now, Sonny, keep that pledge and it will be
the best act of your life.”

President Lincoln was true and consistent in
his temperance principles. In March, 1864, he
went by steamboat with his wife and “Little
Tad,” to visit General Grant at his headquarters
at City Point, Virginia.

When asked how he was, during the reception
which followed his arrival there, the President
said, as related by General Horace Porter:

“‘I am not feeling very well. I got pretty
badly shaken up on the bay coming down, and
am not altogether over it yet.’

“‘Let me send for a bottle of champagne for
you, Mr. President,’ said a staff-officer, ‘that’s
the best remedy I know of for sea-sickness.’

“‘No, no, my young friend,’ replied the[218]
President, ‘I’ve seen many a man in my time
seasick ashore from drinking that very article.’

“That was the last time any one screwed up
sufficient courage to offer him wine.”

Some people are kinder to dumb animals—is
it because they are dumb?—than to their relatives.
Many are the stories of Lincoln’s tenderness
to beasts and birds. But his kindness
did not stop there, nor with his brothers and sisters
in white. He recognized his close relationship
with the black man, and the bitterest name
his enemies called him—worse in their minds
than “fool,” “clown,” “imbecile” or “gorilla”—was
a “Black Republican.” That terrible
phobia against the negro only enlisted Abraham
Lincoln’s sympathies the more. He appeared in
court in behalf of colored people, time and again.
The more bitter the hatred and oppression of
others, the more they needed his sympathetic
help, the more certain they were to receive it.

“My sympathies are with the under dog,”
said Mr. Lincoln, one day, “though it is often
that dog that starts the fuss.”

The fact that the poor fellow may have[219]
brought the trouble upon himself did not make
him forfeit Abraham Lincoln’s sympathy. That
was only a good lesson to him to “Look out and
do better next time!”

After he went to Washington, President Lincoln
was between two fires. One side wanted the
slaves freed whether the Union was broken up
or not. They could not see that declaring them
free would have but little effect, if the government
could not “back up” such a declaration.

The other party did not wish the matter tampered
with, as cheap labor was necessary for
raising cotton, sugar and other products on
which the living of millions of people depended.

The extreme Abolitionists, who wished slavery
abolished, whether or no, sent men to tell the
President that if he did not free the slaves he
was a coward and a turncoat, and they would
withhold their support from the Government
and the Army.

Delegations of Abolitionists from all over the
North arrived almost daily from different cities
to urge, coax and threaten the President. They
did not know that he was trying to keep the Border[220]
States of Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri
from seceding. If Maryland alone had gone out
of the Union, Washington, the national capital,
would have been surrounded and forced to surrender.

Besides, at this time, the armies of the North
were losing nearly all the battles.

To declare all the slaves down South freed,
when the Government could not enforce such a
statement and could not even win a battle,
would be absurd. To one committee the President
said: “If I issued a proclamation of emancipation
now it would be like the Pope’s bull
(or decree) against the comet!”

A delegation of Chicago ministers came to beg
Mr. Lincoln to free the slaves. He patiently explained
to them that his declaring them free
would not make them free. These men seemed
to see the point and were retiring, disappointed,
when one of them returned to him and whispered
solemnly:

“What you have said to us, Mr. President,
compels me to say to you in reply that it is a
message from our divine Master, through me,
commanding you, sir, to open the doors of bondage
that the slave may go free!”[221]

“Now, isn’t that strange?” the President replied
instantly. “Here I am, studying this
question, day and night, and God has placed it
upon me, too. Don’t you think it’s rather odd
that He should send such a message by way of
that awful wicked city of Chicago?”

The ministers were shocked at such an answer
from the President of the United States.
They could not know, for Mr. Lincoln dared not
tell them, that he had the Emancipation Proclamation
in his pocket waiting for a Federal
victory before he could issue it!

Then, came the news of Antietam, a terrible
battle, but gained by the Northern arms. At
last the time had come to announce the freeing
of the slaves that they might help in winning
their liberties. The President had not held a
meeting of his Cabinet for some time. He
thought of the occasion when, as a young man
he went on a flatboat trip to New Orleans and
saw, for the first, the horrors of negro slavery,
and said to his companions:

“If ever I get a chance to hit that thing I’ll
hit it hard!”[222]

Now the “chance to hit that thing”—the inhuman
monster of human slavery—had come,
and he was going to “hit it hard.”

He called the Cabinet together. Edwin M.
Stanton, the Secretary of War, has described
the scene:

“On the 22nd of September, 1862, I had a sudden
and peremptory call to a Cabinet meeting
at the White House. I went immediately and
found the historic War Cabinet of Abraham
Lincoln assembled, every member being present.
The President hardly noticed me as I came
in. He was reading a book of some kind which
seemed to amuse him. It was a little book. He
finally turned to us and said:

“‘Gentlemen, did you ever read anything
from “Artemus Ward?” Let me read you a
chapter that is very funny.’

“Not a member of the Cabinet smiled; as for
myself, I was angry, and looked to see what the
President meant. It seemed to me like buffoonery.
He, however, concluded to read us a
chapter from ‘Artemus Ward,’ which he did
with great deliberation. Having finished, he
laughed heartily, without a member of the Cabinet
joining in the laughter.[223]

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s have another chapter.’

“I was considering whether I should rise and
leave the meeting abruptly, when he threw the
book down, heaved a long sigh, and said:

“‘Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh? With
the fearful strain that is upon me night and day,
if I did not laugh I should die, and you need
this medicine as much as I do.’

“He then put his hand in his tall hat that sat
upon the table, and pulled out a little paper.
Turning to the members of the Cabinet, he said:

“‘Gentlemen, I have called you here upon
very important business. I have prepared a little
paper of much significance. I have made up
my mind that this paper is to issue; that the
time is come when it should issue; that the people
are ready for it to issue.

“‘It is due to my Cabinet that you should be
the first to hear and know of it, and if any of
you have any suggestions to make as to the form
of this paper or its composition, I shall be glad
to hear them. But the paper is to issue.’

“And, to my astonishment, he read the Emancipation
Proclamation of that date, which was
to take effect the first of January following.”

Secretary Stanton continued: “I have always[224]
tried to be calm, but I think I lost my calmness
for a moment, and with great enthusiasm I
arose, approached the President, extended my
hand and said:

“‘Mr. President, if the reading of chapters
of “Artemus Ward” is a prelude to such a deed
as this, the book should be filed among the archives
of the nation, and the author should be
canonized. Henceforth I see the light and the
country is saved.’

“And all said ‘Amen!’

“And Lincoln said to me in a droll way, just
as I was leaving, ‘Stanton, it would have been
too early last Spring.’

“And as I look back upon it, I think the President
was right.”

It was a fitting fulfillment of the Declaration
of Independence, which proclaimed that:

“All men are created equal; that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights; that among these are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.”

That Declaration young Abe Lincoln first
read in the Gentryville constable’s copy of the
“Statutes of Indiana.”

At noon on the first of January, 1863, William[225]
H. Seward, Secretary of State, with his son
Frederick, called at the White House with the
Emancipation document to be signed by the
President. It was just after the regular New
Year’s Day reception.

Mr. Lincoln seated himself at his table, took
up the pen, dipped it in the ink, held the pen a
moment, then laid it down. After waiting a
while he went through the same movements as
before. Turning to his Secretary of State, he
said, to explain his hesitation:

“I have been shaking hands since nine o’clock
this morning, and my arm is almost paralyzed.
If my name ever goes into history, it will be for
this act, and my whole soul is in it. If my hand
trembles when I sign the Proclamation, all who
examine the document hereafter will say:

“‘He hesitated.'”

Turning back to the table, he took the pen
again and wrote, deliberately and firmly, the
“Abraham Lincoln” with which the world is
now familiar. Looking up at the Sewards,
father and son, he smiled and said, with a sigh
of relief:

“That will do!“[226]

CHAPTER XIX

The Glory of Gettysburg

The Battle of Gettysburg, which raged
through July 1st, 2nd and 3d, 1863, was called
the “high water mark” of the Civil War, and
one of the “fifteen decisive battles” of history.
It was decisive because General Robert E. Lee,
with his brave army, was driven back from Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania. If Lee had been victorious
there, he might have destroyed Philadelphia
and New York. By such a brilliant stroke
he could have surrounded and captured Baltimore
and Washington. This would have
changed the grand result of the war.

In point of numbers, bravery and genius, the
battle of Gettysburg was the greatest that had
ever been fought up to that time. Glorious as
this was, the greatest glory of Gettysburg lay
in the experiences and utterances of one man,
Abraham Lincoln, President of the United
States of America.[227]

It came at a terrible time in the progress of
the war, when everything seemed to be going
against the Union. There had been four disastrous
defeats—twice at Bull Run, followed by
Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Even the
battle of Antietam, accounted victory enough
for the President to issue his Emancipation
Proclamation, proved to be a drawn battle, with
terrific losses on both sides. Lee was driven
back from Maryland then, it is true, but he soon
won the great battles of Fredericksburg and
Chancellorsville, and had made his way north
into Pennsylvania.

The night after the battle of Chancellorsville
(fought May 2nd and 3d, 1863), was the darkest
in the history of the Civil War. President Lincoln
walked the floor the whole night long, crying
out in his anguish, “O what will the country
say!”

To fill the decimated ranks of the army, the
Government had resorted to the draft, which
roused great opposition in the North and provoked
foolish, unreasoning riots in New York
City.

After winning the battle of Gettysburg, which
the President hoped would end the war, General[228]
Meade, instead of announcing that he had captured
the Confederate army, stated that he had
“driven the invaders from our soil.” Mr. Lincoln
fell on his knees and, covering his face with
his great, strong hands, cried out in tones of
agony:

“‘Driven the invaders from our soil!’ My
God, is that all?”

But Lincoln’s spirits were bound to rise. Believing
he was “on God’s side,” he felt that the
cause of Right could not lose, for the Lord would
save His own.

The next day, July 4th, 1863, came the surrender
of Vicksburg, the stronghold of the great
West. Chastened joy began to cover his gaunt
and pallid features, and the light of hope shone
again in his deep, gray eyes.

Calling on General Sickles, in a Washington
hospital—for the general had lost a leg on the
second day of the battle of Gettysburg—the
President was asked why he believed that victory
would be given the Federal forces at Gettysburg.

“I will tell you how it was. In the pinch of
your campaign up there, when everybody seemed
panic-stricken, and nobody could tell what was[229]
going to happen, I went to my room one day and
locked the door, and got down on my knees before
Almighty God, and prayed to him mightily
for victory at Gettysburg. I told Him this was
His war, and our cause His cause, but that
we couldn’t stand another Fredericksburg or
Chancellorsville. And I then and there made a
solemn vow to Almighty God that if He would
stand by our boys at Gettysburg, I would stand
by Him. And He did, and I will!“

The President’s call on General Sickles was
on the Sunday after the three-days’ battle of
Gettysburg, before the arrival of the gunboat at
Cairo, Illinois, with the glad tidings from Vicksburg,
which added new luster to the patriotic
joy of Independence Day. The telegraph wires
had been so generally cut on all sides of Vicksburg
that the news was sent to Cairo and telegraphed
to Washington. In proof that his faith
even included the Mississippi blockade he went
on:

“Besides, I have been praying over Vicksburg
also, and believe our Heavenly Father is going
to give us victory there, too, because we need it,
in order to bisect the Confederacy, and let ‘the
Father of Waters flow unvexed to the sea.'”[230]

Not long after the conflict at Gettysburg a
movement was on foot to devote a large part of
that battle-ground to a national cemetery.

The Hon. Edward Everett, prominent in national
and educational affairs, and the greatest
living orator, was invited to deliver the grand
oration. The President was asked, if he could,
to come and make a few dedicatory remarks, but
Mr. Everett was to be the chief speaker of the
occasion.

The Sunday before the 19th of November,
1863, the date of the dedication, the President
went with his friend Noah Brooks to Gardner’s
gallery, in Washington, where he had promised
to sit for his photograph. While there he
showed Mr. Brooks a proof of Everett’s oration
which had been sent to him. As this printed
address covered two newspaper pages, Mr. Lincoln
struck an attitude and quoted from a
speech by Daniel Webster:

“Solid men of Boston, make no long orations!”
and burst out laughing. When Mr.
Brooks asked about his speech for that occasion,
Mr. Lincoln replied: “I’ve got it written, but[231]
not licked into shape yet. It’s short, short,
short!”

During the forenoon of the 18th, Secretary
John Hay was anxious lest the President be late
for the special Presidential train, which was to
leave at noon for Gettysburg.

“Don’t worry, John,” said Mr. Lincoln. “I’m
like the man who was going to be hung, and saw
the crowds pushing and hurrying past the cart in
which he was being taken to the place of execution.
He called out to them: ‘Don’t hurry,
boys. There won’t be anything going on till I
get there!'”

When the train stopped, on the way to Gettysburg,
a little girl on the platform held up a
bouquet to Mr. Lincoln, lisping: “Flowerth for
the Prethident.”

He reached out, took her up and kissed her,
saying:

“You’re a sweet little rosebud yourself. I
hope your life will open into perpetual beauty
and goodness.”

About noon on the 19th of November, the distinguished
party arrived in a procession and
took seats on the platform erected for the exercises.
The President was seated in a rocking-chair[232]
placed there for him. There were fifteen
thousand people waiting, some of whom had
been standing in the sun for hours. It was a
warm day and a Quaker woman near the platform
fainted. An alarm was given and the unconscious
woman was in danger of being crushed.

The President sprang to the edge of the staging
and called out:

“Here, let me get hold of that lady.”

With a firm, strong grasp he extricated her
from the crush and seated her in his rocking-chair.
When that modest woman “came to,”
she saw fifteen thousand pairs of eyes watching
her while the President of the United States
was fanning her tenderly.

This was too much for her. She gasped:

“I feel—better—now. I want to go—back to—my
husband!”

“Now, my dear lady,” said Mr. Lincoln.
“You are all right here. I had an awful time
pulling you up out of there, and I couldn’t stick
you back again!”

A youth who stood near the platform in front
of the President says that, while Mr. Everett
was orating, Mr. Lincoln took his “little
speech,” as he called it, out of his pocket, and[233]
conned it over like a schoolboy with a half-learned
lesson. The President had put the finishing
touches on it that morning. As it was
expected that the President would make a few
offhand remarks, no one seems to have noticed
its simple grandeur until it was printed in the
newspapers.

Yet Mr. Lincoln was interrupted four or five
times during the two minutes by applause. The
fact that the President was speaking was sufficient,
no matter what he said. The people
would have applauded Abraham Lincoln if he
had merely recited the multiplication table!
When he finished, they gave “three times three
cheers” for the President of the United States,
and three cheers for each of the State Governors
present.

That afternoon there was a patriotic service
in one of the churches which the President decided
to attend. Taking Secretary Seward with
him, he called on an old cobbler named John
Burns, of whose courage in the battle of Gettysburg
Mr. Lincoln had just heard. Those who
planned the dedication did not think the poor
cobbler was of much account. The old hero, now
known through Bret Harte’s poem, “John[234]
Burns of Gettysburg,” had the pride and joy of
having all the village and visitors see him march
to the church between President Lincoln and
Secretary Seward. This simple act was “just
like Lincoln!” He honored Gettysburg in thus
honoring one of its humblest citizens. It was
Abraham Lincoln’s tribute to the patriotism of
the dear “common people” whom he said “God
must love.”

CHAPTER XX

“No End of a Boy“

“The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln”
would be incomplete without some insight into
the perfect boyishness of the President of the
United States. When the cares of State and the
horrors of war had made his homely yet beautiful
face pallid and seamed, till it became a sensitive
map of the Civil War, it was said that the
only times the President was ever happy were
when he was playing with little Tad.

He used to carry the boy on his shoulder or
“pick-a-back,” cantering through the spacious[235]
rooms of the Executive Mansion, both yelling
like Comanches. The little boy was lonely after
Willie died, and the father’s heart yearned over
the only boy left at home, for Robert was at Harvard
until near the close of the war, when he went
to the front as an aide to General Grant. So
little Tad was his father’s most constant companion
and the President became the boy’s only
playfellow. Mr. Lincoln, with a heart as full of
faith as a little child’s, had always lived in
deep sympathy with the children, and this
feeling was intensified toward his own offspring.

When Abe Lincoln was living in New Salem
he distinguished himself by caring for the little
children—a thing beneath the dignity of the
other young men of the settlement.

Hannah Armstrong, wife of the Clary’s Grove
bully, whom Abe had to “lick” to a finish in
order to establish himself on a solid basis in
New Salem society, told how friendly their relations
became after the thrashing he gave her
husband:

“Abe would come to our house, drink milk,
eat mush, cornbread and butter, bring the children
candy and rock the cradle.” (This seemed[236]
a strange thing to her.) “He would nurse babies—do
anything to accommodate anybody.”

The Armstrong baby, Willie, grew to be a
youth of wrong habits, and was nicknamed
“Duff.” He was drawn, one afternoon, into a
bad quarrel with another rough young man,
named Metzker, who was brutally beaten. In
the evening a vicious young man, named Morris,
joined the row and the lad was struck on the
head and died without telling who had dealt the
fatal blow. The blame was thrown upon “Duff”
Armstrong, who was arrested. Illinois law preventing
him from testifying in his own behalf.

When Lawyer Lincoln heard of the case, he
wrote as follows:

The feeling in the neighborhood where the
crime was committed was so intense that it was
decided that it must be taken over to the next
county to secure a fair trial. Lawyer Lincoln
was on hand to defend the son of his old friend.

Besides those who testified to the bad character
of the young prisoner, one witness, named
Allen, testified that he saw “Duff” Armstrong
strike the blow which killed Metzker.

“Couldn’t you be mistaken about this?” asked
Mr. Lincoln. “What time did you see it?”

“Between nine and ten o’clock that night.”

“Are you certain that you saw the prisoner[238]
strike the blow?—Be careful—remember—you
are under oath!”

“I am sure. There is no doubt about it.”

“But wasn’t it dark at that hour?”

“No, the moon was shining bright.”

“Then you say there was a moon and it was
not dark.”

“Yes, it was light enough for me to see him
hit Metzker on the head.”

“Now I want you to be very careful. I understand
you to say the murder was committed
about half past nine o’clock, and there was a
bright moon at the time?”

“Yes, sir,” said the witness positively.

“Very well. That is all.”

Then Lawyer Lincoln produced an almanac
showing that there was no moon that night till
the early hours of the morning.

“This witness has perjured himself,” he said,
“and his whole story is a lie.”

“Duff” Armstrong was promptly acquitted.
The tears of that widowed mother and the
gratitude of the boy he had rocked were the best[239]
sort of pay to Lawyer Lincoln for an act of kindness
and life-saving.

A Springfield neighbor used to say that it was
almost a habit with Mr. Lincoln to carry his
children about on his shoulders. Indeed, the
man said he seldom saw the tall lawyer go by
without one or both boys perched on high or tugging
at the tails of his long coat. This neighbor
relates that he was attracted to the door of his
own house one day by a great noise of crying
children, and saw Mr. Lincoln passing with the
two boys in their usual position, and both were
howling lustily.

“Why, Mr. Lincoln, what’s the matter?” he
asked in astonishment.

“Just what’s the matter with the whole
world,” the lawyer replied coolly. “I’ve got
three walnuts, and each wants two.”

Several years later Judge Treat, of Springfield
was playing chess with Mr. Lincoln in his[240]
law office when Tad came in to call his father to
supper. The boy, impatient at the delay of the
slow and silent game, tried to break it up by a
flank movement against the chess board, but the
attacks were warded off, each time, by his
father’s long arms.

The child disappeared, and when the two
players had begun to believe they were to be permitted
to end the game in peace, the table suddenly
“bucked” and the board and chessmen
were sent flying all over the floor.

Judge Treat was much vexed, and expressed
impatience, not hesitating to tell Mr. Lincoln
that the boy ought to be punished severely.

Mr. Lincoln replied, as he gently took down
his hat to go home to supper:

“Considering the position of your pieces,
judge, at the time of the upheaval, I think you
have no reason to complain.”

Yet, indulgent as he was, there were some
things Mr. Lincoln would not allow even his
youngest child to do. An observer who saw the
President-elect and his family in their train on
the way to Washington to take the helm of State,[241]
relates that little Tad amused himself by raising
the car window an inch or two and trying, by
shutting it down suddenly, to catch the fingers
of the curious boys outside who were holding
themselves up by their hands on the window sill
of the car to catch sight of the new President
and his family.

The President-elect, who had to go out to the
platform to make a little speech to a crowd at
nearly every stop, noticed Tad’s attempts to
pinch the boys’ fingers. He spoke sharply to his
son and commanded him to stop that. Tad
obeyed for a time, but his father, catching him
at the same trick again, leaned over, and taking
the little fellow across his knee, gave him a good,
sound spanking, exclaiming as he did so:

“Why do you want to mash those boys’ fingers?”

Mr. Lincoln was always lenient when the offense
was against himself. The Hon. Robert
Todd Lincoln, the only living son of the great
President, tells how the satchel containing his
father’s inaugural address was lost for a time.[242]
Some writers have related the story of this loss,
stating that it all happened at Harrisburg, and
telling how the President-elect discovered a bag
like his own, and on opening it found only a
pack of greasy cards, a bottle of whisky and a
soiled paper collar. Also that Mr. Lincoln was
“reminded” of a cheap, ill-fitting story—but
none of these things really took place.

Here is the true story, as related to the writer
by Robert Lincoln himself:

“My father had confided to me the care of the
satchel containing his inaugural address. It was
lost for a little while during the stay of our party
at the old Bates House in Indianapolis. When
we entered the hotel I set the bag down with the
other luggage, which was all removed to a room
back of the clerk’s desk.

“As soon as I missed the valise I went right
to father, in great distress of mind. He ordered
a search made. We were naturally much
alarmed, for it was the only copy he had of his
inaugural address, which he had carefully written
before leaving Springfield. Of course, he
added certain parts after reaching Washington.
The missing bag was soon found in a safe place.

“Instead of taking out the precious manuscript[243]
and stuffing it into his own pocket, father
handed it right back to me, saying:

“‘There, Bob, see if you can’t take better care
of it this time’—and you may be sure I was true
to the trust he placed in me. Why, I hardly let
that precious gripsack get out of my sight during
my waking hours all the rest of the long
roundabout journey to Washington.”

The death of Willie, who was nearly three
years older than Tad, early in 1862, during their
first year in the White House, nearly broke his
father’s heart. It was said that Mr. Lincoln
never recovered from that bereavement. It
made him yearn the more tenderly over his
youngest son who sadly missed the brother who
had been his constant companion.

It was natural for a lad who was so much indulged
to take advantage of his freedom. Tad
had a slight impediment in his speech which
made the street urchins laugh at him, and even
cabinet members, because they could not understand
him, considered him a little nuisance. So
Tad, though known as “the child of the nation,”
and greatly beloved and petted by those who[244]
knew him for a lovable affectionate child, found
himself alone in a class by himself, and against
all classes of people.

He illustrated this spirit one day by getting
hold of the hose and turning it on some dignified
State officials, several army officers, and finally
on a soldier on guard who was ordered to charge
and take possession of that water battery. Although
that little escapade appealed to the President’s
sense of humor, for he himself liked
nothing better than to take generals and pompous
officials down “a peg or two,” Tad got well
spanked for the havoc he wrought that day.

The members of the President’s cabinet had
reason to be annoyed by the boy’s frequent interruptions.
He seemed to have the right of
way wherever his father happened to be. No
matter if Senator Sumner or Secretary Stanton
was discussing some weighty matter of State or
war, if Tad came in, his father turned from the
men of high estate to minister to the wants of his
little boy. He did it to get rid of him, for of[245]
course he knew Tad would raise such a racket
that no one could talk or think till his wants
were disposed of.

A story is told of the boy’s interruption of a
council of war. This habit of Tad’s enraged
Secretary Stanton, whose horror of the boy was
similar to that of an elephant for a mouse. The
President was giving his opinion on a certain
piece of strategy which he thought the general
in question might carry out—when a great noise
was heard out in the hall, followed by a number
of sharp raps on the door of the cabinet room.

Strategy, war, everything was, for the moment
forgotten by the President, whose wan face
assumed an expression of unusual pleasure,
while he gathered up his great, weary length
from different parts of the room as he had half
lain, sprawling about, across and around his
chair and the great table.

“That’s Tad,” he exclaimed, “I wonder what
that boy wants now.” On his way to open the
door, Mr. Lincoln explained that those knocks
had just been adopted by the boy and himself, as[246]
part of the telegraph system, and that he was
obliged to let the lad in—”for it wouldn’t do to
go back on the code now,” he added, half in
apology for permitting such a sudden break in
their deliberations.

When the door was opened, Tad, with flushed
face and sparkling eyes, sprang in and threw his
arms around his father’s neck. The President
straightened up and embraced the boy with an
expression of happiness never seen on his face
except while playing with his little son.

Mr. Lincoln turned, with the boy still in his
arms, to explain that he and Tad had agreed
upon this telegraphic code to prevent the lad
from bursting in upon them without warning.
The members of the cabinet looked puzzled or
disgusted, as though they failed to see that several
startling raps could be any better than having
Tad break in with a whoop or a wail, as had
been the boy’s custom.

The boy raised a question of right. He had
besieged Peter, the colored steward, demanding
that a dinner be served to several urchins he had
picked up outside—two of whom were sons of[247]
soldiers. Peter had protested that he “had
other fish to fry” just then.

The President recognized at once that this was
a case for diplomacy. Turning to various members
of the cabinet, he called on each to contribute
from his store of wisdom, what would be
best to do in a case of such vast importance.
Tad looked on in wonder as his father set the
great machinery of government in motion to
make out a commissary order on black Peter,
which would force that astonished servant to deliver
certain pieces of pie and other desired eatables
to Tad, for himself and his boy friends.

At last an “order” was prepared by the Chief
Executive of the United States directing “The
Commissary Department of the Presidential
Residence to issue rations to Lieutenant Tad
Lincoln and his five associates, two of whom are
the sons of soldiers in the Army of the Potomac.”

With an expression of deep gravity and a solemn
flourish, the President tendered this Commissary
Order to the lieutenant, his son, saying
as he presented the document:

“I reckon Peter will have to come to time
now.”[248]

CHAPTER XXI

Lieutenant Tad Lincoln, Patriot

There was no more sturdy little patriot in the
whole country than Lieutenant Tad Lincoln,
“the child of the nation,” nor had the President
of the United States a more devoted admirer
and follower than his own small son. A word
from his father would melt the lad to tears and
submission, or bring him out of a nervous tantrum
with his small round face wreathed with
smiles, and a chuckling in his throat of “Papa-day,
my papa-day!” No one knew exactly what
the boy meant by papa-day. It was his pet name
for the dearest man on earth, and it was his only
way of expressing the greatest pleasure his boyish
heart was able to hold. It was the “sweetest
word ever heard” by the war-burdened, crushed
and sorrowing soul of the broken-hearted President
of the United States.

Mr. Lincoln took his youngest son with him
everywhere—on his great mission to Fortress
Monroe, and they—”the long and the short of
it,” the soldiers said—marched hand in hand[249]
through the streets of fallen Richmond. The
understanding between the man and the boy was
so complete and sacred, that some acts which
seemed to outsiders absurd and ill-fitting, became
perfectly right and proper when certain
unknown facts were taken into account.

For instance, one night, during an enthusiastic
serenade at the White House, after a great
victory of the northern armies, when the President
had been out and made a happy speech in
response to the congratulations he had received,
everybody was horrified to see the Confederate
“Stars and Bars” waving frantically from an
upper window with shouts followed by shrieks
as old Edward, the faithful colored servant,
pulled in the flag and the boy who was guilty of
the mischief.

“That was little Tad!” exclaimed some one in
the crowd. Many laughed, but some spectators
thought the boy ought to be punished for such a
treasonable outbreak on the part of a President’s
boy in a soldier’s uniform.

“If he don’t know any better than that,” said[250]
one man, “he should be taught better. It’s an
insult to the North and the President ought to
stop it and apologize, too.”

But little Tad understood his father’s spirit
better than the crowd did. He knew that the
President’s love was not confined to “the Boys
in Blue,” but that his heart went out also to “the
Boys in Gray.” The soldiers were all “boys” to
him. They knew he loved them. They said
among themselves: “He cares for us. He takes
our part. We will fight for him; yes, we will die
for him.”

And a large part of the common soldier’s patriotism
was this heart-response of “the boys”
to the great “boy” in the White House. That
was the meaning of their song as they trooped to
the front at his call:

Little Tad saw plenty of evidences of his
father’s love for the younger soldiers—the real
boys of the army. Going always with the President,
he had heard his “Papa-day” say of several[251]
youths condemned to be shot for sleeping at
their post or some like offense:

“That boy is worth more above ground than
under;” or, “A live boy can serve his country
better than a dead one.”

“Give the boys a chance,” was Abraham Lincoln’s
motto. He hadn’t had much of a chance
himself and he wanted all other boys to have a
fair show. His own father had been too hard
with him, and he was going to make it up to all
the other boys he could reach. This passion for
doing good to others began in the log cabin when
he had no idea he could ever be exercising his
loving kindness in the Executive Mansion—the
Home of the Nation. “With malice toward
none, with charity for all,” was the rule of his
life in the backwoods as well as in the National
Capital.

And “the Boys in Gray” were his “boys,” too,
but they didn’t understand, so they had wandered
away—they were a little wayward, but he
would win them back. The great chivalrous
South has learned, since those bitter, ruinous
days, that Abraham Lincoln was the best friend
the South then had in the North. Tad had seen
his father show great tenderness to all the[252]
“boys” he met in the gray uniform, but the
President had few opportunities to show his
tenderness to the South—though there was a secret
pigeonhole in his desk stuffed full of threats
of assassination. He was not afraid of death—indeed,
he was glad to die if it would do his
“boys” and the country any good. But it hurt
him deep in his heart to know that some of his
beloved children misunderstood him so that they
were willing to kill him!

It was no one’s bullet which made Abraham
Lincoln a martyr. All his life he had shown the
spirit of love which was willing to give his very
life if it could save or help others.

All these things little Tad could not have explained,
but they were inbred into the deep understanding
of the big father and the small son
who were living in the White House as boys together.

A few days after the war ended at Appomattox,
a great crowd came to the White House to
serenade the President. It was Tuesday evening,
April 11, 1865. Mr. Lincoln had written a
short address for the occasion. The times were[253]
so out of joint and every word was so important
that the President could not trust himself to
speak off-hand.

A friend stepped out on the northern portico
with him to hold the candle by which Mr. Lincoln
was to read his speech. Little Tad was with
his father, as usual, and when the President had
finished reading a page of his manuscript he let
it flutter down, like a leaf, or a big white butterfly,
for Tad to catch. When the pages came too
slowly the boy pulled his father’s coat-tail, piping
up in a muffled, excited tone:

“Give me ‘nother paper, Papa-day.”

To the few in the front of the crowd who witnessed
this little by-play it seemed ridiculous
that the President of the United States should
allow any child to behave like that and hamper
him while delivering a great address which
would wield a national, if not world-wide influence.
But little Tad did not trouble his father
in the least. It was a part of the little game they
were constantly playing together.

The address opened with these words:

Then he went on outlining a policy of peace
and friendship toward the South—showing a
spirit far higher and more advanced than that of
the listening crowd. On concluding his address
and bidding the assembled multitude good night,
he turned to the serenading band and shouted
joyously:

“Give us ‘Dixie,’ boys; play ‘Dixie.’ We have
a right to that tune now.”

There was a moment of silence. Some of the
people gasped, as they had done when they saw
Tad waving the Confederate flag at the window.
But the band, loyal even to a mere whim (as they
then thought it) of “Father Abraham,” started
the long-forbidden tune, and the President, bowing,[255]
retired, with little Tad, within the White
House. Those words, “Give us ‘Dixie,’ boys,”
were President Lincoln’s last public utterance.

As Mr. Lincoln came in through the door after
speaking to the crowd, Mrs. Lincoln—who had
been, with a group of friends, looking on from
within—exclaimed to him:

“You must not be so careless. Some one could
easily have shot you while you were speaking
there—and you know they are threatening your
life!”

The President smiled at his wife, through a
look of inexpressible pain and sadness, and
shrugged his great shoulders, but “still he answered
not a word.”

At a late hour Good Friday night, that same
week, little Tad came in alone at a basement door
of the White House from the National Theater,
where he knew the manager, and some of the
company, had made a great pet of him. He had
often gone there alone or with his tutor. How
he had heard the terrible news from Ford’s
Theater is not known, but he came up the lower
stairway with heartrending cries like a wounded[256]
animal. Seeing Thomas Pendel, the faithful
doorkeeper, he wailed from his breaking heart:

“Tom Pen, Tom Pen, they have killed Papa-day!
They have killed my Papa-day!”

After the funeral the little fellow was more
lonely than ever. It was hard to have his pony
burned up in the stable. It was harder still to
lose Brother Willie, his constant companion,
and now his mother was desperately ill, and his
father had been killed. Tad, of course, could not
comprehend why any one could be so cruel and
wicked as to wish to murder his darling Papa-day,
who loved every one so!

He wandered through the empty rooms,
aching with loneliness, murmuring softly to himself:

“Papa-day, where’s my Papa-day. I’m tired—tired
of playing alone. I want to play together.
Please, Papa-day, come back and play
with your little Tad.”

Young though he was he could not sleep long
at night. His sense of loneliness penetrated his
dreams. Sometimes he would chuckle and
gurgle in an ecstacy, as he had done when riding
on his father’s back, romping through the stately[257]
rooms. He would throw his arm about the neck
of the doorkeeper or lifeguard who had lain
down beside him to console the boy and try to get
him to sleep. When the man spoke to comfort
him, Tad would find out his terrible mistake,
that his father was not with him.

Then he would wail again in the bitterness of
his disappointment:

“Papa-day, where’s my Papa-day?”

“Your papa’s gone ‘way off”—said his companion,
his voice breaking with emotion—”gone
to heaven.”

Tad opened his eyes wide with wonder. “Is
Papa-day happy in heaven?” he asked eagerly.

“Yes, yes, I’m sure he’s happy there, Taddie
dear; now go to sleep.”

“Papa-day’s happy. I’m glad—so glad!”—sighed
the little boy—”for Papa-day never was
happy here.”

Then he fell into his first sweet sleep since that
terrible night.

The fond-hearted little fellow went abroad
with his mother a few years after the tragedy[258]
that broke both their lives. By a surgical operation,
and by struggling manfully, he had corrected
the imperfection in his speech. But the
heart of little Tad had been broken. While still
a lad he joined his fond father in the Beyond.

“Give the boys a chance,” had amounted to a
passion with Abraham Lincoln, yet through
great wickedness and sad misunderstandings his
own little son was robbed of this great boon.
Little Tad had been denied the one chance he
sorely needed for his very existence. For this,
as for all the inequities the great heart of the
White House was prepared. His spirit had
shone through his whole life as if in letters of
living fire:

“With malice toward none; with charity for
all.”

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The heroines of these stories are four girls, who with enthusiasm
for outdoor life, transformed a dilapidated canal
boat into a pretty floating summer home. They christened
the craft “The Merry Maid” and launched it on the shore of
Chesapeake Bay. The stories are full of fun and adventure,
with not a dull moment anywhere.

THE MEADOW-BROOK GIRLS SERIES

By JANET ALDRIDGE

Four clever girls go hiking around
the country and meet with many thrilling
and provoking adventures. These
stories pulsate with the atmosphere of
outdoor life.

THE AUTOMOBILE GIRLS SERIES

By LAURA DENT CRANE

Girls as well as boys love wholesome adventure, a wealth
of which is found in many forms and in many scenes in the
volumes of this series.

THE HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS SERIES

By JESSIE GRAHAM FLOWER, A. M.

The scenes, episodes, and adventures
through which Grace Harlowe and her
intimate chums pass in the course of
these stories are pictured with a vivacity
that at once takes the young feminine
captive.

THE COLLEGE GIRLS SERIES

By JESSIE GRAHAM FLOWER, A. M.

Every school and college girl will recognize that the account
of Grace Harlowe’s experiences at Overton College is
true to life.

THE GRACE HARLOWE OVERSEAS
SERIES

By JESSIE GRAHAM FLOWER, A. M.

Grace Harlowe went with the Overton
College Red Cross Unit to France,
there to serve her country by aiding
the American fighting forces.

THE GRACE HARLOWE OVERLAND
RIDERS SERIES

By JESSIE GRAHAM FLOWER, A. M.

Grace Harlowe and her friends seek adventure on the
mountain trails and in the wilder sections of their homeland,
after their return from service in France.

ALTEMUS’ NEW ILLUSTRATED
YOUNG PEOPLE’S LIBRARY

A series of choice literature for children,
selected from the best and most popular
works. Printed on fine paper from large type,
with numerous illustrations in color and black
and white, by the most famous artists, making
the most attractive series of juvenile classics
before the public.

THE ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE. 70 illustrations.

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. 42 illustrations.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE. 50 illustrations.

BUNYAN’S PILGRIM’S PROGRESS. 46 illustrations.

A CHILD’S STORY OF THE BIBLE. 72 illustrations.

A CHILD’S LIFE OF CHRIST. 49 illustrations.

ÆSOP’S FABLES. 62 illustrations.

SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON. 50 illustrations.

THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY. By Edward Everett Hale. Illustrated.

GULLIVER’S TRAVELS. 50 illustrations.

MOTHER GOOSE RHYMES, JINGLES, AND FAIRY TALES. 234 illustrations.

WOOD’S NATURAL HISTORY. 80 illustrations.

BLACK BEAUTY. By Anna Sewell. 50 illustrations.

ARABIAN NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENTS. 130 illustrations.

WEE BOOKS FOR WEE FOLKS

For little hands to fondle and for mother to read aloud.
Every ounce of them will give a ton of joy.

WEE BOOKS FOR WEE FOLKS SERIES

MOTHER GOOSE NURSERY TALES.

MOTHER GOOSE NURSERY RHYMES.

A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES. Robert Louis Stevenson.

THE FOOLISH FOX.

THREE LITTLE PIGS.

THE ROBBER KITTEN.

LITTLE BLACK SAMBO.

THE LITTLE SMALL RED HEN.

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS.

THE LITTLE WISE CHICKEN THAT KNEW IT ALL.

THE FOUR LITTLE PIGS THAT DIDN’T HAVE ANY MOTHER.

THE LITTLE PUPPY THAT WANTED TO KNOW TOO MUCH.

THE COCK, THE MOUSE AND THE LITTLE RED HEN.

GRUNTY GRUNTS AND SMILEY SMILE—INDOORS.

GRUNTY GRUNTS AND SMILEY SMILE—OUTDOORS.

I DON’T WANT TO WEAR COATS AND THINGS.

I DON’T WANT TO GO TO BED.

LITTLE SALLIE MANDY.

JIMMY SLIDERLEGS.

SLOVENLY BETSY.

LITTLE BLACK SAMBO AND THE BABY ELEPHANT.

WEE FOLKS BIBLE STORIES SERIES

WEE FOLKS STORIES FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT. In Words
of One Syllable.

WEE FOLKS STORIES FROM THE NEW TESTAMENT. In Words
of One Syllable.

WEE FOLKS LIFE OF CHRIST.

WEE FOLKS BIBLE A B C BOOK.

LITTLE PRAYERS FOR LITTLE LIPS.

THE WISH FAIRY SERIES

THE WISH FAIRY OF THE SUNSHINE AND SHADOW FOREST.

THE WISH FAIRY AND DEWY DEAR.

WEE FOLKS PETER RABBIT SERIES

WEE FOLKS CINDERELLA SERIES

LITTLE BUNNIE BUNNIEKIN SERIES