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Why We Love Lincoln

<h2 class="nobreak" id="IV">IV</h2> Two years later the milk-sickness which had robbed Lincoln of his mother again visited the Pigeon Creek settlers, and his father decided to move to Illinois, where rich lands were to be had cheap. Dennis Hanks and Levi Hall accompanied the Lincoln family. The tall young woodchopper had just passed his twenty-first birthday, and it was he, in buckskin breeches and coonskin cap, who goaded on the oxen hitched to the clumsy wagon that creaked and lurched through the March mud and partly frozen streams on that terrible two weeks’ journey into the Sangamon country of Illinois. He said good-bye to the old log-cabin. It was rude and mean, but, after all, it was his home. He shook hands with his friends in28 Gentryville. He took a last look at the unmarked grave of his mother. His boyhood was over. Before setting out for his new home, Lincoln spent all his money, more than thirty dollars, in buying petty merchandise, knives, forks, needles, pins, buttons, thread and other things that might appeal to housewives. And on the voyage to Illinois the future President of the United States peddled his little wares so successfully that he doubled his money. Thus Abraham Lincoln entered the State which saw him rise to greatness—woodchopper, ox-driver, peddler, pioneer. Even in that rough, heroic pilgrimage, the tender heart of the man showed itself again and again. One loves to remember Lincoln as Mr. Herndon, his law-partner, has described him, pulling off his shoes and stockings and wading a stream through broken ice to save a pet dog left whining on the other side. 29 “I could not bear to abandon even a dog,” he explained. Presently the emigrants settled on a bluff overlooking the Sangamon River, five miles from Decatur, in Macon County. All promptly set to work. A clearing was made, trees felled, and a cabin built. Abraham and his cousin, John Hanks, ploughed fifteen acres of sod and split rails enough to fence the space in. Some of the rails split by Lincoln at that time were thirty years later carried into the convention which nominated him for President. Having reached his majority and seen his father and family safely housed, Lincoln started out to shift for himself. Among other things, he split three thousand rails for a Major Warnick, walking three miles a day to his work. Then came the winter of “the deep snow,” a season so terrible that John Hay has thus described its effects: 30 “Geese and chickens were caught by the feet and wings and frozen to the wet ground. A drove of a thousand hogs, which were being driven to St. Louis, rushed together for warmth, and became piled in a great heap. Those inside smothered and those outside froze, and the ghastly pyramid remained there on the prairie for weeks; the drovers barely escaped with their lives. Men killed their horses, disemboweled them, and crept into the cavities of their bodies to escape the murderous wind.” Lincoln left his father’s house empty-handed, save for his axe, and he had to face that blizzard winter as best he could. No man or woman ever heard him complain. In all his after years he looked back upon the struggles of his early career without a word of self-pity. Those were iron days, but they were not without romance, and life was honest and strengthening. It is doubtful, after all, whether Lincoln’s son, who became rich, dined with kings and31 queens, and came to be president of the hundred-million-dollar Pullman Company, ever in his comfortable and successful career once felt half the sense of life in its deepest, grandest moods that thrilled his gaunt father facing that fearful winter. Let the discouraged American, whose heart grows faint in the presence of “bad luck,” think of that rude frontiersman, to whom hardship brought only strength and renewed courage. In spite of everything, the sources of a man’s success are within him, and none can stay him but himself. Lincoln knew famine, and cold, and wandering. But he did not pity himself. Axe in hand, he confronted his fate in that smitten country with as great a soul as when he faced the armed Confederacy and saw his country riven and bleeding. In the spring of 1831 Denton Offut hired Lincoln to go with him on a boat, with a load of stock and provisions, to New Orleans, and, after many adventures, in which32 his strength and ingenuity saved boat and cargo several times, he again found himself at the mouth of the Mississippi. Here he first saw the hideous side of slavery. His law-partner thus refers to one of the scenes he witnessed: “A vigorous and comely mulatto girl was being sold. She underwent a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they pinched her flesh and made her trot up and down the room like a horse.... Bidding his companions follow him, he said, ‘By God, boys, let’s get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing I’ll hit it hard.’” The grandest and bloodiest page of modern history is a record of how Lincoln fulfilled that promise. That very summer he went to the village of New Salem, on the Sangamon River—a village that has long since vanished—and became clerk in a log-house general store opened by Offut, who was a restless commercial33 adventurer. Lincoln and an assistant slept in the store. Here the tall clerk became famous for his stories and homely wit. His immense stature, his strength, his humor and his penetrating logic attracted attention at once. He talked in quaint, waggish parables, but he never failed to reach the heart or brain. Offut’s store grew to be the common meeting place of the frontiersmen, and long-legged, droll, kindly Lincoln developed his natural genius for story-telling and argument. But Offut bragged of his clerk’s strength. That angered the rough, rollicking youths of a nearby settlement known as Clary’s Grove, who picked out Jack Armstrong, their leader and a veritable giant, to “throw” Lincoln. At first Lincoln declined the challenge on the ground that he did not like “wooling and pulling.” But, although his inheritance of Quaker blood inclined him to avoid violence, he was finally taunted into the struggle. In34 the presence of all New Salem and Clary’s Grove he partly stripped his two hundred and fourteen pounds of muscle-ribbed body and conquered the bully of Sangamon County. After that exhibition of strength and pluck, Lincoln was the hero of the community. Braggarts became silent in his presence. A ruffian swore one day in the store before a woman. Lincoln bade him stop, but he continued his abuse. “Well, if you must be whipped,” said the clerk, “I suppose I might as well whip you as any man.” And he did it. That was Lincoln. His honesty became a proverb. It is said that, having overcharged a customer six cents, he walked three miles in the dark, after the store was closed, to give back the money. By mistake he sold four ounces of tea for a half-pound, and the next day trudged to the customer’s cabin with the rest of the tea. Just when Lincoln became a conscious35 politician no man can say. His endless anecdotes and jokes, his winning honesty and good nature, his readiness to accept or stop a fight, his willingness to do a good turn for man, woman or child, and his open scorn for meanness, cruelty or deceit, were the simple overflowings of his natural character. He was coarse in his speech and manners. But behind the joking and buffoonery, the primitive man in him was true, gentle, chivalrous. His tender-heartedness was real. His kindliness was not merely the result of a desire to catch friends. He once illustrated himself by quoting an old man at an Indiana church meeting: “When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion.” But in New Salem it soon became evident that Lincoln was not satisfied to remain a clerk in a general store, and that the strivings of leadership were in him. He borrowed books. He asked Menton Graham, the schoolmaster, for advice. He36 read, read, read. He walked many miles at night to speak in debating clubs. He trudged twelve miles to get Kirkham’s Grammar, and often asked his assistant in the store to keep watch with the book while he said the lesson. It was a common thing to find him stretched out on the counter, head on a roll of calicos, grammar in hand. His desire to master language became a passion. The whole village “took notice.” Even the cooper would keep a fire of shavings going at night that Lincoln might read. The young frontiersman of six-feet-four, who could outlift, outwrestle and outrun any man in Sagamon County, rising from an almost hopeless abyss of ignorance and poverty, was, by his own resolute efforts, acquiring the power that made him the hero of civilization and the savior of a race. <div id="if_i_036" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 35em;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_036.jpg" width-obs="1840" height-obs="1291" alt="" /> <div class="caption"> From “Abraham Lincoln.” Copyright, 1892, D. Appleton & Co. The Globe Tavern, Springfield, where Lincoln lived </div> </div> How many of the almost seventeen million children who receive free education in the public schools in the United States, and who assemble once a year to repeat the37 imperishable sayings of Lincoln, realize how he had to strain and struggle for the knowledge which is offered daily to them as a gift? No wonder that Lincoln became popular in New Salem, and that when the little Black Hawk Indian war broke out he was elected captain of the company which marched forth from the village in April, 1831, in buckskin breeches and coon caps, with rifles, powder horns and blankets. It was in that picturesque campaign that Lincoln, coming with his company to a fence gate and not remembering the military word of command necessary to get his company in order through such a narrow space, instantly showed his ingenuity by shouting, “This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate.” A poor, old half-starved Indian crept into Lincoln’s camp for shelter. The excited soldiers insisted on killing him. But Lincoln stood between them and the frightened38 fugitive. At the risk of his own life he saved the Indian. The soul of chivalry was in him. He had no chance to fight, and he was compelled to wear a wooden sword for two weeks because his company got drunk—he who afterwards commanded Grant, Sherman and Sheridan—yet he returned to his village a hero without having shed blood, for the world honors courage and patience even in those who fail to reach the firing line. <hr /> 39 <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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