"NICE CLOTHES MAY MAKE A HANDSOME MAN--EVEN OF YOU!"
In 1832, Lincoln, elected to the Illinois legislative chamber, found himself in one of those anguishing embarrassments besetting him in all the early stages of his unflagging ascent from the social slough of despond. Unlike eels, he never got used to skinning. For the new station, however well provided mentally, he had no means to procure dress fit for the august halls of debate.
He was yet standing behind the counter in Offutt's general shop at New Salem, when an utter stranger strolled in, asked his name, though his exceptional stature and unrivaled mien revealed his identity, and announced his own name. Each had heard of the other. The newcomer was not an Adonis, perhaps, but he was one compared with the awkward, leaning Tower of Pisa "cornstalk," who carried the jack-knife as "the homeliest man in the section." Lincoln was doubly the plainest speaker there and thereabouts.
"Mr. Smoot," began the clerk, "I am disappointed in you, sir! I expected to see a scaly specimen of humanity!"
"Mr. Lincoln, I am sorely disappointed in you, in whom I expected to see a good-looking man!"
After this jocular exchange of greeting, the joke cemented friendship between them. The proof of the friendship is in the usefulness of it. Lincoln turned to this acquaintance in his dilemma.
This future President may have divined the saying of the similarly martyred McKinley--about "the cheap clothes making a cheap man." He summed up his situation:
"I must certainly have decent clothes to go there among the celebrities."
No doubt, the State capital had other fashions than those prevailing at Sangamon town, where even the shopkeeper's present attire, in which he had solicited suffrages, was scoffed at as below the mark. It was composed of "flax and tow-linen pantaloons (one Ellis, storekeeper, describes from eye-witnessing), I thought, about five inches too short in the legs, exposing blue-yarn socks (the original of the Farmers' Sox of our mailorder magazines); no vest or coat; and but one suspender. He wore a calico shirt, as he had in the Black Hawk War; coarse brogans, tan color."
"As you voted for me," went on the ambitious man about to exchange the counter for the rostrum, "you must want me to make a decent appearance in the state-house?"
"Certainly," was the reply, as anticipated, Lincoln was so sure of his wheedling ways by this time.
And the friend in need supplied him with two hundred dollars currency, which, according to the budding legislator's promise, he returned out of his first pay as representative.