III. TESTS OF CHARACTER ON THE LAWLESS FRONTIER
There were gangs of good-natured rowdies, and there were roughhouse communities in pioneer days.
Such a community and such a gang was in the neighborhood of New Salem, known as Clary’s Grove and the Clary Grove Boys. They delighted in being rough and coarse, though, it is said, to their credit, that they were generous and most faithful friends.
Denton Offutt for some reason liked to boast to them of his hired man. He seemed to believe that it shed glory on himself as an employer. He told the Clary Boys that his man could lift more, throw farther, run faster, jump higher and wrestle better than any man in Sangamon County. This hurt the Clary boys’ sense of superiority. They decided to test it out. Accordingly, they appointed Jack Armstrong as their best man to prove their right to the championship.
Lincoln objected to the “tussle and scuffle” ideas of the time, he disbelieved in the honors won by “wooling and pulling,” but the age of “fist-and-skull” duels was not yet at an end, and the question of best man had to be tried out.
Clary’s Grove came one day to back their man as representative of themselves, and New Salem turned out to back the other. It was to be “catch-as-catch-can and the best man wins.”
The task to represent New Salem against the neighboring rowdydom was not an easy one. But such is human nature that who can say what effect it would have had on Lincoln’s future if he had been beaten and bullied over in that fight. Perhaps it shows how needful it is to do well everything at hand to be done, because we do not know how it may be part of our way to the unknowable future.
The champions came together according to the “fair play” of the time. They clinched and swayed, those two strong men, but neither could be moved from his feet. Each side was yelling itself hoarse, as the one who was to be the greatest of Americans strove with the one who would long ago be as forgotten as his dust, except for the struggle he made and for the conquest.
Feeling himself being defeated, one of them did not play the game fair. It was not Lincoln. The champion of the Clary gang played a trick, and Lincoln caught him by the throat, holding him out at arm’s length, where he could only kick, and squirm and beat the air, but could do nothing against that long, strong right arm. The Clary gang rushed to the rescue, and it looked as if he would have to fight them all when Armstrong declared that he had enough, and that Lincoln was the “best fellow that ever broke into camp.”
Not long after this the Clary gang elected Lincoln as Captain of their sports and henceforth were among his most faithful friends. The fact that Lincoln could hold the political support and good-will of both the best and the worst shows that there was a reliability in his character to which they could together safely give allegiance.
The friendship of Jack Armstrong and his family, after the fight, never swerved, and the time came when Lincoln repaid their kindness and their simple loyalty in a great way. Years afterward, when Lincoln had become a renowned lawyer, Jack Armstrong’s son was accused of murder. They went for Lincoln and Lincoln came. He studied the case and became convinced that the son of his old friend was innocent.
There had been a quarrel among some young men one night near an out-of-door camp meeting, and one had been stabbed to death.
Young Armstrong was arrested on the testimony of one who claimed to have seen the blow struck by the light of the moon.
Lincoln made the witness repeat his testimony about the moon and then began his address to the jury. He told of his relations to the prisoner’s father, of the kindness of the mother, and how he had played with the boy as a child. Then he said that he was not there as paid attorney but as a friend of the family. With that explanation, he reviewed the testimony showing that all the evidence depended on what the witness had seen by the light of the moon. At this point he produced an almanac showing that there was no moon on the night of the murder. The jury took only a very short consultation to bring in a verdict of “Not Guilty.”
This story has often been told in which the almanac is represented as having been an old one, thus winning the case by a trick of falsehood, but investigation has proven this to be untrue, accordingly supporting the statement that Lincoln never used such tactics to win a case.
We have learned that no character in history can be understood except in relation to its surroundings. Otherwise, Lincoln’s fight with the backwoods’ ruffians might now seem vulgar and lawless, but it was in truth a powerful factor in building his life for its supreme service. It not only helped to establish his own conscious integrity, but it was planting respect for him among his neighbors, which was as necessary for his growth of reputation as anything at any time in his career. The time when a boy can afford not “to care what people think” depends very much not only upon the boy and the people, but also upon what is meant by the “care” and the “think.”