ABRAHAM BECOMES A LABORER.

Abraham was ten years old when his new mother came from Kentucky, and he was already an important member of the family. He was remarkably strong for his years, and the work he could do in a day was a decided advantage to Thomas Lincoln. The axe which had been put into his hand to help in making the first clearing, he had never been allowed to drop; indeed, as he says himself, “from that till within his twenty-third year he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument.” Besides, he drove the team, cut the elm and linn brush with which the stock was often fed, learned to handle the old shovel-plough, to wield the sickle, to thresh the wheat with a flail, to fan and clean it with a sheet, to go to mill and turn the hard-earned grist into flour. In short, he learned all the trades the settler’s boy must know, and so well that when his father did not need him he could hire him to the neighbors. Thomas Lincoln also taught him the rudiments of carpentry and cabinet-making, and kept him busy much of the time as his assistant in his trade. There are houses still standing, in and near Gentryville, on which it is said he worked. The families of Lamar, Jones, Crawford, Gentry, Turnham, and Richardson, all claim the honor of having employed him upon their cabins.

A MISSISSIPPI “BROAD-HORN.”
From a model in the exhibit of the United States National Museum at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895. The flatboat which Abraham Lincoln piloted to New Orleans was not, probably, as well built a boat as the above model represents; but it was built on the same general plan. The hold was enclosed to protect the produce, and on the deck was a cabin in which the boatmen lived. In going down the river, rough sails were sometimes rigged up on these broad-horns, though they floated usually, directed by huge paddles. If the boat was brought back, it was warped and poled by hand up the river. More often, however, the boatmen sold both boat and cargo at New Orleans, and came back by the steamers as deck passengers. Boats like the two models on this page are still seen in great numbers on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

A RIVER PRODUCE BOAT.
From a model in the exhibit of the United States National Museum at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895. The photograph of this model, and of the one above, we owe to the courtesy of the director of the Museum, Mr. G. Brown Goode.

As he grew older he became one of the strongest and most popular “hands” in the vicinity, and much of his time was spent as a “hired boy” on some neighbor’s farm. For twenty-five cents a day—paid to his father—he was hostler, ploughman, wood-chopper, and carpenter, besides helping the women with the “chores.” For them he was ready to carry water, make the fire, even tend the baby. No wonder that a laborer who never refused to do anything asked of him, who could “strike with a mall heavier blows” and “sink an axe deeper into the wood” than anybody else in the community, and who at the same time was general help for the women, never lacked a job in Gentryville.

JOSEPH GENTRY.
One of the few companions of Lincoln’s youth in Indiana, now living, is Joseph Gentry. He resides on a farm one-fourth mile west from the Lincoln farm, where he has lived about sixty years. When a boy he lived in Gentryville—a town founded by the Gentrys. He was present at the funeral of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and remembers hearing the minister say it was through the efforts of the little son of the dead woman that his services had been secured.

Of all the tasks his rude life brought him, none seems to have suited him better than going to the mill. It was, perhaps, as much the leisure enforced by this trip as anything else that attracted him. The machinery was primitive, and each man waited his turn, which sometimes was long in coming. A story is told by one of the pioneers of Illinois of going many miles with a grist, and waiting so long for his turn that, when it came, he and his horse had eaten all the corn, and he had none to grind. This waiting with other men and boys on like errands gave an opportunity for talk, story-telling, and games, which were Lincoln’s delight.

In 1826 he spent several months as a ferryman at the mouth of Anderson Creek, where it joins the Ohio. This experience suggested new possibilities to him. It was a custom among the farmers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois at this date to collect a quantity of produce, and float down to New Orleans on a raft, to sell it. Young Lincoln saw this, and wanted to try his fortune as a produce merchant. An incident of his projected trip he related once to Mr. Seward:

“Seward,” he said, “did you ever hear how I earned my first dollar?”

“No,” said Mr. Seward.

Carbon enlargement, made by Sherman & McHugh of New York City.
LINCOLN IN 1858.
From a photograph loaned by W. J. Franklin of Macomb, Illinois, and taken in 1866 from an ambrotype made in 1858 in Macomb. This portrait figures in the collection in the Lincoln Home at Springfield, Illinois, and on the back of the photograph is the following inscription: “This likeness of Abraham Lincoln is a faithful copy of an original ambrotype, now in possession of James K. Magie. It was taken August 25, 1858, by Mr. T. P. Pierson, at Macomb, in this State, and is believed to be of anterior date to any other likeness of Mr. Lincoln ever brought before the public. Mr. Magie happened to remain over night at Macomb, at the same hotel with Mr. Lincoln, and the next morning took a walk about town, and upon Mr. Magie’s invitation they stepped into Mr. Pierson’s establishment, and the ambrotype of which this is a copy was the result. Mr. Lincoln, upon entering, looked at the camera as though he was unfamiliar with such an instrument, and then remarked: ‘Well, do you want to take a shot at me with that thing?’ He was shown to a glass, where he was told to ‘fix up,’ but declined, saying it would not be much of a likeness if he fixed up any. The old neighbors and acquaintances of Mr. Lincoln in Illinois, upon seeing this picture, are apt to exclaim: ‘There! that’s the best likeness of Mr. Lincoln that I ever saw!’ The dress he wore in this picture is the same in which he made his famous canvass with Senator Douglas.” This inscription was written by J. C. Power, now dead, but for many years custodian of the Lincoln monument in Springfield.

“Well,” replied he, “I was about eighteen years of age, and belonged, as you know, to what they call down South the ‘scrubs;’ people who do not own land and slaves are nobody there; but we had succeeded in raising, chiefly by my labor, sufficient produce, as I thought, to justify me in taking it down the river to sell. After much persuasion I had got the consent of my mother to go, and had constructed a flatboat large enough to take the few barrels of things we had gathered to New Orleans. 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 were 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 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 the chance of earning something, and supposed that each of them 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 the deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, 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, the 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.”

SAMUEL CRAWFORD.
Only living son of Josiah Crawford, who lent Lincoln the Weems’s “Life of Washington.” To our representative in Indiana, who secured this picture of Mr. Crawford, he said, when asked if he remembered the Lincolns: “Oh, yes; I remember them, although I was not Abraham’s age. He was twelve years older than I. One day I ran in, calling out, ‘Mother! mother! Aaron Grigsby is sparking Sally Lincoln; I saw him kiss her!’ Mother scolded me, and told me I must stop watching Sally, or I wouldn’t get to the wedding. [It will be remembered that Sally Lincoln was ‘help’ in the Crawford family, and that she afterwards married Aaron Grigsby.] Neighbors thought lots more of each other then than now, and it seems like everybody liked the Lincolns. We were well acquainted, for Mr. Thomas Lincoln was a good carpenter, and made the cupboard, mantels, doors, and sashes in our old home that was burned down.”

Soon after this, while he was working for Mr. Gentry, the leading citizen of Gentryville, his employer decided to send a load of produce to New Orleans, and chose young Lincoln to go as “bow-hand,” “to work the front oars.” For this trip he received eight dollars a month and his passage back.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
After a photograph in the collection of Mr. J. C. Browne of Philadelphia.

MISSISSIPPI RIVER FLATBOAT.

CHAPTER IV.
EARLY EDUCATION.—BOOKS ABRAHAM READ.—THE JONES GROCERY STORE.—LIFE ON THE RIVER.

With all his hard living and hard work, Lincoln was getting, in this period, a desultory kind of education. Not that he received much schooling. He went to school “by littles,” he says; “in all it did not amount to more than a year.” And, if we accept his own description of the teachers, it was, perhaps, just as well that it was only “by littles.” “No qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond ‘readin’, writin’, and cipherin’ to the rule of three.’ If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard.” But more or less of the schoolroom is a matter of small importance if a boy has learned to read, and to think of what he reads. And that, this boy had learned. His stock of books was small, but he knew them thoroughly, and they were good books to know: the Bible, “Æsop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a “History of the United States,” Weems’s “Life of Washington,” and the “Statutes of Indiana.” These are the chief ones we know about. He did not own them all, but sometimes had to borrow them from the neighbors: a practice which resulted in at least one casualty, for Weems’s “Life of Washington” he allowed to get wet, and to make good the loss he had to pull fodder three days. No matter. The book became his then, and he could read it as he would. Fortunately he took this curious work in profound seriousness, which a wide-awake boy would hardly be expected to do to-day. Washington became an exalted figure in his imagination; and he always contended later, when the question of the real character of the first President was brought up, that it was wiser to regard him as a godlike being, heroic in nature and deeds, as Weems did, than to contend that he was only a man who, if wise and good, still made mistakes and indulged in follies, like other men.

In 1861, addressing the Senate of the State of New Jersey, he said:

“May I be pardoned if, upon this occasion, I mention that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen—Weems’s ‘Life of Washington.’ I remember all the accounts there given of the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single Revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that these men struggled for.”

Besides these books he borrowed many. He once told a friend that he “read through every book he had ever heard of in that country, for a circuit of fifty miles.” From everything he read he made long extracts, using a turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. When he had no paper he would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copy-book. The wooden fire-shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he ciphered with a charred stick, shaving it off when covered. The logs and boards in his vicinity he filled with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in his loft, to have it at hand at peep of day. When acting as ferryman, in his nineteenth year, anxious, no doubt, to get through the books of the house where he boarded, before he left the place, he read every night “till midnight.”[[7]]

Copyright, 1894 by D. Appleton & Co., publishers of Herndon’s “Life of Lincoln,” and reproduced by special permission.
JOHN HANKS.
The son of Joseph Hanks, with whom Thomas Lincoln learned the carpenter’s trade, and a cousin of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. John Hanks lived with Thomas Lincoln in Indiana, from about 1823 to 1827, then returned to Kentucky, and from there emigrated to Illinois. It was largely through his influence that Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks went to the Sangamon country in 1830. When Mr. Lincoln first left home he and John Hanks worked together. In 1831 they made a trip to New Orleans on a flatboat. It was John Hanks who, in 1860, accompanied Governor Oglesby to the old Lincoln farm in Macon County, to select the rails Lincoln had split, and it was he who carried them into the convention of the Republican party of Illinois, which nominated Lincoln as its candidate. John Hanks was an illiterate man, being able neither to read nor write; but he was honest and kindly, and his reminiscences of Mr. Lincoln’s early life, gathered by Mr. Herndon and others, are regarded by all who knew him as trustworthy. After Mr. Lincoln’s election to the Presidency, he desired an Indian agency; but his lack of even a rudimentary education made it impossible to give it to him.

Every lull in his daily labor he used for reading, rarely going to his work without a book. When ploughing or cultivating the rough fields of Spencer County, he found frequently a half hour for reading. At the end of every long row the horse was allowed to rest, and Lincoln had his book out, and was perched on stump or fence, almost as soon as the plough had come to a standstill. One of the few people still left in Gentryville who remembers Lincoln, Captain John Lamar, tells to this day of riding to mill with his father, and seeing, as they drove along, a boy sitting on the top rail of an old-fashioned stake-and-rider worm fence, reading so intently that he did not notice their approach. His father, turning to him, said: “John, look at that boy yonder, and mark my words, he will make a smart man out of himself. I may not see it, but you’ll see if my words don’t come true.” “That boy was Abraham Lincoln,” adds Mr. Lamar, impressively.

Copyright, 1894, by D Appleton & Co., publishers of Herndon’s “Life of Lincoln,” and reproduced by special permission.
JUDGE JOHN PITCHER.
A lawyer of Rockport, Indiana, at the time the Lincolns lived near Gentryville. An essay of Mr. Lincoln’s, composed when he was about nineteen, was submitted to Mr. Pitcher, who declared the “world couldn’t beat it;” and he seems to have taken a kindly interest in the author from that time forward, lending him books freely from his law office. Mr. Pitcher was still living in 1889, in Mt. Vernon, Indiana, having reached the age of ninety-three years. His reminiscences of the boyhood of Lincoln are embodied in Herndon’s “Life.”

In his habits of reading and study the boy had little encouragement from his father, but his step-mother did all she could for him. Indeed, between the two there soon grew up a relation of touching gentleness and confidence. In one of the interviews a biographer of Mr. Lincoln sought with her before her death, Mrs. Lincoln said:

“I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home, as well as at school. At first he was not easily reconciled to it, but finally he too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent. Abe was a dutiful son to me always, and we took particular care when he was reading not to disturb him—would let him read on and on till he quit of his own accord.”

This consideration of his step-mother won the boy’s confidence, and he rarely copied anything that he did not take it to her to read, asking her opinion of it; and often, when she did not understand it, explaining the meaning in his plain and simple language.

No newspaper ever escaped him. One man in Gentryville, Mr. Jones, the storekeeper, took a Louisville paper, and here Lincoln went regularly to read and discuss its contents. All the men and boys of the neighborhood gathered there, and everything which the paper related was subjected to their keen, shrewd common-sense. It was not long before young Lincoln became the favorite member of the group, the one listened to most respectfully. Politics were warmly discussed by these Gentryville citizens, and it may be that sitting on the counter of Jones’s grocery Lincoln even argued on slavery. It certainly was one of the live questions in Indiana at that date.

CORN-HUSK COLLAR.
Drawn from the original, in the United States National Museum, at Washington, D.C. These collars were used in Indiana and Illinois in Lincoln’s day.

For several years after the organization of the Territory, and in spite of the Ordinance of 1787, a system of thinly disguised slavery had existed; and it took a sharp struggle to bring the State in without some form of the institution. So uncertain was the result that, when decided, the word passed from mouth to mouth all over Hoosierdom, “She has come in free, she has come in free!” Even in 1820, four years after the admission to Statehood, the census showed one hundred and ninety slaves, nearly all of them in the southwest corner, where the Lincolns lived, and it was not, in reality, until 1821 that the State Supreme Court put an end to the question. In Illinois in 1822–1824 there was carried on one of the most violent contests between the friends and opponents of slavery which occurred before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The effort to secure slave labor was nearly successful. In the campaign, pamphlets pro and con literally inundated the State; the pulpits took it up; and “almost every stump in every county had its bellowing, indignant orator.” So violent a commotion so near their borders could hardly have failed to reach Gentryville.

PUNCHED SHEET-IRON LANTERN.
Drawn from the original, in the United States National Museum, at Washington, D.C. Oiled paper was sometimes used in the lanterns.

JOHN W. LAMAR.
Mr. Lamar was a young boy in Spencer County when Lincoln left Indiana, but was old enough to have seen much of him and to have known his characteristics and his reputation in the county. He is still living near his old home.

There had been other anti-slavery agitation going on within hearing for several years. In 1804 a number of Baptist ministers of Kentucky started a crusade against the institution, which resulted in a hot contest in the denomination, and the organization of the “Baptist Licking-Locust Association Friends of Humanity.” The Rev. Jesse Head, the minister who married Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, talked freely and boldly against slavery; and one of their old friends, Christopher Columbus Graham, the man who was present at their wedding, says: “Tom and Nancy Lincoln and Sally Bush were just steeped full of Jesse Head’s notions about the wrong of slavery and the rights of man as explained by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.” In 1806 Charles Osborn began to preach “immediate emancipation” in Tennessee. Ten years later he started a paper in Ohio, devoted to the same idea, and in 1819 he transferred his crusade to Indiana. In 1821 Benjamin Lundy started, in Tennessee, the famous “Genius,” devoted to the same doctrine; and in 1822, at Shelbyville, only about one hundred miles from Gentryville, was started a paper similar in its views, the “Abolition Intelligencer.”

At that time there were in Kentucky five or six abolition societies, and in Illinois was an organization called the “Friends of Humanity.” Probably young Lincoln heard but vaguely of these movements; but of some of them he must have heard, and he must have connected them with the “Speech of Mr. Pitt on the Slave Trade;” with Merry’s elegy, “The Slaves;” and with the discussion given in his “Kentucky Preceptor,” “Which has the Most to complain of, the Indian or the Negro?” all of which tradition declares he was fond of repeating. It is not impossible that, as Frederick Douglas first realized his own condition in reading a school-speaker, the “Columbian Orator,” so Abraham Lincoln first felt the wrong of slavery in reading his “American Preceptor.”

REV. ALLEN BROONER.
An Indiana acquaintance of Lincoln, still living near Gentryville. “Mr. Brooner’s mother was a friend of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. In the fall of 1818 Mrs. Brooner was very sick, and Mrs. Lincoln called to see her. The sick woman was very despondent, and said: ‘Mrs. Lincoln, I am going to die. You will not see me again while living.’ ‘Tut te tut. You must not say that. Why, you will live longer than I. So cheer up,’ answered Mrs. Lincoln. Then, after a few parting words, Mrs. Lincoln went home. The next day she was very ill and in a few days she died. A few days later Mrs. Brooner died. When the tombstone was placed at Mrs. Lincoln’s grave, no one could state positively which was Mrs. Brooner’s and which Mrs. Lincoln’s grave. Mr. Allen Brooner gave his opinion, and the stone was placed; but the iron fence encloses both graves, which lie in a half-acre tract of land owned by the United States Government. Mr. Allen Brooner, after his mother’s death, became a minister of the United Brethren Church, and moved to Illinois. Like all of the old settlers of Gentryville, he remembers the departure of the Lincolns for Illinois. ‘When the Lincolns were getting ready to leave,’ says Mr. Brooner, ‘Abraham and his step-brother, John Johnston, came over to our house to swap a horse for a yoke of oxen. John did all the talking. If any one had been asked that day which would make the greatest success in life, I think the answer would have been John Johnston.’”[[8]]

Lincoln was not only winning in these days in the Jones grocery store a reputation as a talker and story-teller; he was becoming known as a kind of backwoods orator. He could repeat with effect all the poems and speeches in his various school-readers, he could imitate to perfection the wandering preachers who came to Gentryville, and he could make a political speech so stirring that he drew a crowd about him every time he mounted a stump. The applause he won was sweet; and frequently he indulged his gifts when he ought to have been at work—so thought his employers and Thomas his father. It was trying, no doubt, to the hard-pushed farmers, to see the men who ought to have been cutting grass or chopping wood throw down their sickles or axes and group around a boy, whenever he mounted a stump to develop a pet theory or repeat with variations yesterday’s sermon. In his fondness for speech-making he attended all the trials of the neighborhood, and frequently walked fifteen miles to Boonville to attend court.

LINES FROM LINCOLN’S COPY-BOOK.
These lines were written on a leaf of a copy-book in which Lincoln wrote out the tables of weights and measures, and the sums in connection with them. His step-mother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, gave the leaf, with a few others from the book, to Mr. Herndon. It is now owned by Jesse W. Weik.

He wrote as well as spoke, and some of his productions were even printed, through the influence of his admiring neighbors. Thus a local Baptist preacher was so struck with one of Abraham’s essays on temperance that he sent it to Ohio, where it appeared in some paper. Another article, on “National Politics,” so pleased a lawyer of the vicinity that he declared the “world couldn’t beat it.”