FROM INDIANA TO ILLINOIS.
The company which emigrated to Illinois included the family of Thomas Lincoln and those of Dennis Hanks and Levi Hall, married to Lincoln’s step-sisters—thirteen persons in all. They sold land, cattle, and grain, and much of their household goods, and were ready in March of 1830 for their journey. All the possessions which the three families had to take with them were packed into a big wagon—the first one Thomas Lincoln had ever owned, it is said—to which four oxen were attached, and the caravan was ready. The weather was still cold, the streams were swollen, and the roads were muddy; but the party started out bravely. Inured to hardships, alive to all the new sights on their route, every day brought them amusement and adventures, and especially to young Lincoln the journey must have been of keen interest.
He drove the oxen on this trip, he tells us, and, according to a story current in Gentryville, he succeeded in doing a fair peddler’s business on the route. Captain William Jones, in whose father’s store Lincoln had spent so many hours in discussion and in story-telling, and for whom he had worked the last winter he was in Indiana, says that before leaving the State Abraham invested all his money, some thirty-odd dollars, in notions. Though the country through which they expected to pass was but sparsely settled, he believed he could dispose of them. “A set of knives and forks was the largest item entered on the bill,” says Captain Jones; “the other items were needles, pins, thread, buttons, and other little domestic necessities. When the Lincolns reached their new home, near Decatur, Illinois, 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 have prized it years afterwards.”
The pioneers were a fortnight on their journey. All we know of the route they took is from a few chance remarks of Lincoln’s to his friends to the effect that they passed through Vincennes, where they saw a printing-press for the first time, and through Palestine, where they saw a juggler performing sleight-of-hand tricks. They reached Macon County, their new home, from the south. Mr. H. C. Whitney says that once in Decatur he and Lincoln passed the court-house together. “Lincoln walked out a few feet in front, and, after shifting his position two or three times, said, as he looked up at the building, partly to himself and partly to me: ‘Here is the exact spot where I stood by our wagon when we moved from Indiana, twenty-six years ago; this isn’t six feet from the exact spot.’ ... I asked him if he, at that time, had expected to be a lawyer and practise law in that court-house; to which he replied: ‘No; I didn’t know I had sense enough to be a lawyer then.’ He then told me he had frequently thereafter tried to locate the route by which they had come, and that he had decided that it was near the main line of the Illinois Central Railroad.”
MODEL OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S DEVICE FOR LIFTING VESSELS OVER SHOALS.
The inscription above this model, which is shown to all visitors to the Model Hall of the Patent Office, reads: “6469, Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois. Improvement in method of lifting vessels over shoals. Patented May 22, 1849.” The apparatus consists of a bellows placed in each side of the hull of the craft, just below the water-line, and worked by an odd but simple system of ropes and pulleys. When the keel of the vessel grates against the sand or obstruction, the bellows is filled with air; and, thus buoyed up, the vessel is expected to float over the shoal. The model is about eighteen or twenty inches long, and looks as if it had been whittled with a knife out of a shingle and a cigar box. There is no elaboration in the apparatus beyond that necessary to show the operation of buoying the vessel over the obstructions.
The party settled some ten miles west of Decatur, in Macon County. Here John Hanks had the logs already cut for their new home, and Lincoln, Dennis Hanks, and Hall soon had a cabin erected. Mr. Lincoln says in his short autobiography of 1860, which he wrote in the third person: “Here they built a log cabin, into which they removed, and made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year. These are, or are supposed to be, the rails about which so much is being said just now, though these are far from being the first or only rails ever made by Abraham.”
If they were far from being his “first and only rails,” they certainly were the most famous ones he or anybody else ever split. This was the last work he did for his father, for in the summer of that year (1830) he exercised the right of majority and started out to shift for himself. When he left his home, he went empty-handed. He was already some months over twenty-one years of age, but he had nothing in the world, not even a suit of respectable clothes; and one of the first pieces of work he did was “to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white-walnut bark that would be necessary to make him a pair of trousers.” He had no trade, no profession, no spot of land, no patron, no influence. Two things recommended him to his neighbors—he was strong, and he was a good fellow.
His strength made him a valuable laborer. Not that he was fond of hard labor. Mrs. Crawford says: “Abe was no hand to pitch into work like killing snakes;” but when he did work, it was with an ease and effectiveness which compensated his employer for the time he spent in practical jokes and extemporaneous speeches. He would lift as much as three ordinary men, and “My, how he would chop!” says Dennis Hanks. “His axe would flash and bite into a sugar-tree or sycamore, and down it would come. If you heard him fellin’ trees in a clearin’, you would say there was three men at work by the way the trees fell.”
Standing six feet four, he could out-lift, out-work, and out-wrestle any man he came in contact with. Friends and employers were proud of his prowess, and boasted of it, never failing to pit him against any hero whose strength they heard vaunted. He himself was proud of it, and throughout his life was fond of comparing himself with tall and strong men. When the committee called on him in Springfield, in 1860, to notify him of his nomination as President, Governor Morgan of New York was of the number, a man of great height and brawn. “Pray, Governor, how tall may you be?” was Mr. Lincoln’s first question. There is a story told of a poor man seeking a favor from him once at the White House. He was overpowered by the idea that he was in the presence of the President, and, his errand done, was edging shyly out, when Mr. Lincoln stopped him, insisting that he measure with him. The man was the taller, as Mr. Lincoln had thought; and he went away evidently as much abashed that he dared be taller than the President of the United States as that he had dared to venture into his presence.
Governor Hoyt tells an excellent story illustrating this interest of Lincoln’s in manly strength, and his involuntary comparison of himself with whoever showed it. It was in 1859, after Lincoln had delivered a speech at the Wisconsin State Agricultural Fair in Milwaukee. Governor Hoyt had asked him to make the rounds of the exhibits, and they went into a tent to see a “strong man” perform. He went through the ordinary exercises with huge iron balls, tossing them in the air and catching them, and rolling them on his arms and back; and Mr. Lincoln, who evidently had never before seen such a combination of agility and strength, watched him with intense interest, ejaculating under his breath now and then, “By George! By George!” When the performance was over, Governor Hoyt, seeing Mr. Lincoln’s interest, asked him to go up and be introduced to the athlete. He did so; and, as he stood looking down musingly on the man, who was very short, and evidently wondering that one so much smaller than he could be so much stronger, he suddenly broke out with one of his quaint speeches. “Why,” he said, “why, I could lick salt off the top of your hat.”
His strength won him popularity, but his good-nature, his wit, his skill in debate, his stories, were still more efficient in gaining him good-will. People liked to have him around, and voted him a good fellow to work with. Yet such were the conditions of his life at this time that, in spite of his popularity, nothing was open to him but hard manual labor. To take the first job which he happened upon—rail-splitting, ploughing, lumbering, boating, store-keeping—and make the most of it, thankful if thereby he earned his bed and board and yearly suit of jeans, was apparently all there was before Abraham Lincoln in 1830, when he started out for himself.
LINCOLN, OFFUTT, AND GREEN ON THE FLATBOAT AT NEW SALEM.
From a painting in the State Capitol, Springfield, Illinois. This picture is crude and inaccurate. The flatboat built by Lincoln, and by him piloted to New Orleans, was larger than the one here portrayed, and the structure over the dam belittles the real mill. There was not only a grist-mill, but also a saw-mill. The mill was built in 1829. March 5, 1830, we find John Overstreet averring before the County Commissioners “that John Cameron and James Rutledge have erected a mill-dam on the Sangamon River which obstructs the navigation of said river;” and Cameron and Rutledge are ordered to alter the dam so as to restore “safe navigation.” James M. Rutledge of Petersburg, a nephew of the mill-owner, helped build the mill, and says: “The mill was a frame structure, and was solidly built. They used to grind corn mostly, though some flour was made. At times they would run day and night. The saw-mill had an old-fashioned upright saw, and stood on the bank.” For a time this mill was operated by Denton Offutt, under the supervision of Lincoln. A few stakes, a part of the old dam, still show at low water.
CHAPTER VIII.
FIRST INDEPENDENT WORK.—FIRST APPEARANCE IN SANGAMON COUNTY.—VISIT TO NEW ORLEANS IN 1831.
Through the summer and fall of 1830 and the early winter of 1831, Mr. Lincoln worked in the vicinity of his father’s new home, usually as a farm-hand and rail-splitter. Most of his work was done in company with John Hanks. Before the end of the winter he secured employment of which he has given an account himself, though in the third person:
“During that winter Abraham, together with his step-mother’s son, John D. Johnston, and John Hanks, yet residing in Macon County, hired themselves to Denton Offutt to take a flatboat from Beardstown, Illinois, to New Orleans, and for that purpose were to join him (Offutt) at Springfield, Illinois, so soon as the snow should go off. When it did go off, which was about March 1, 1831, the country was so flooded as to make travelling by land impracticable; to obviate which difficulty they purchased a large canoe and came down the Sangamon River in it from where they were all living (near Decatur). This is the time and manner of Abraham’s first entrance into Sangamon County. They found Offutt at Springfield, but learned from him that he had failed in getting a boat at Beardstown. This led to their hiring themselves to him for twelve dollars per month each, and getting the timber out of the trees, and building a boat at old Sangamon town, on the Sangamon River, seven miles northwest of Springfield, which boat they took to New Orleans, substantially on the old contract.”
Sangamon town, where Mr. Lincoln built the flatboat, has, since his day, completely disappeared from the earth; but then it was one of the flourishing settlements on the river of that name. Lincoln and his friends, on arriving there in March, immediately began work. There is still living in Springfield, Illinois, a man who helped Lincoln at the raft-building—Mr. John Roll, a well-known citizen, and one who has been prominent in the material advancement of the city. Mr. Roll remembers distinctly Lincoln’s first appearance in Sangamon town. “He was a tall, gaunt young man,” he says, “dressed in a suit of blue homespun jeans, consisting of a roundabout jacket, waistcoat, and breeches which came to within about four 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 at one time been black, but now, as its owner dryly remarked, ‘was sunburned until it was a combine of colors.’”
Mr. Roll’s relation to the new-comer soon became something more than that of a critical observer; he hired out to him, and says with pride, “I made every pin which went into that boat.”