[i-35] Dennis Hanks, in Atkinson, 50.
[i-36] Leonard Swett, in Rice, 465-66.
[i-37] At about the time Abraham Lincoln thus spoke to his creditors in Illinois, a young man in far-away Maine named Hannibal Hamlin, destined to share his electoral honors, used somewhat similar language under corresponding circumstances. He had gone on the bond of a certain deputy sheriff for four thousand dollars. That officer became a defaulter, and the people who had claims against him looked to his bondsmen. Hamlin, having called the creditors together, said: “My friends, I have lived among you only a few years, but I think you know that I keep my word. I am poor, young, and struggling for an honest support for myself. This struggle will continue right among you, my neighbors. I am unable now to meet this just debt; but if you will give me time, and God will give me strength, I will pay off every dollar I owe you, even if it takes me a lifetime to do it.”
He redeemed his promise to the last cent; but at what cost may be inferred from his exclamation, many years later, in telling the story: “Heavens! how long it kept my nose on the grindstone.”
A fuller narrative of the incident may be found in Hamlin, 46. For another somewhat similar episode, in the early life of Andrew Jackson, the reader is referred to Brady, 56-57.
[i-38] A patron of Samuel Hill’s store, Harvey Ross who carried the mails, once told how he, as well as others, was impressed by Lincoln’s straightforward methods. His narrative which belongs perhaps to this period may be found in Onstot, 76-77.
“Mr. Lincoln,” said Ross, “was very attentive to business; was kind and obliging to the customers, and they had so much confidence in his honesty that they preferred to trade with him rather than Hill. This was true of the ladies who said he was honest and would tell the truth about the goods. I went into the store one day to buy a pair of buckskin gloves, and asked him if he had a pair that would fit me. He threw down a pair on the counter: ‘There is a pair of dogskin gloves that I think will fit you, and you can have them for seventy-five cents.’ When he called them dogskin I was surprised, as I had never heard of such a thing before. At that time no factory gloves had been brought into the county. All the gloves and mittens then worn were made by hand, and by the women of the neighborhood from tanned deerskins, and the Indians did the tanning. A large buckskin could be bought for fifty to seventy-five cents. So I said to Lincoln: ‘How do you know they are dogskin?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you how I know they are dogskin. Jack Clary’s dog killed Tom Watkins’s sheep, and Tom Watkins’s boy killed the dog, old John Mounts tanned the dogskin, and Sally Spears made the gloves, and that is the way I know they are dogskin gloves.’ So I asked no more, but paid six bits, took the gloves, and can truly say that I have worn buckskin and dogskin gloves for sixty years and never found a pair that did me such service as the pair I got from Lincoln.”
[i-39] Lincoln to George Spears, Works, i, 11. A facsimile of the letter is reproduced from the Menard-Salem-Lincoln Souvenir Album, in Tarbell, i, 97.
[i-40] Tarbell’s Early Life, 190, note.
[i-41] This kind act is attributed to James Short and one of the Greenes,—whether Bowling or William G. appears to be in doubt. See Lamon, 138-39, 149-50; Arnold, 41-42; Herndon, i, 114-15; Leland, 43-44; Barrett (New), i, 40; Morse, i, 42; Curtis’s Lincoln, 33-34; Stoddard, 88-89; Irelan, xvi, 109; Tarbell, i, 105-06; Tarbell’s Early Life, 188-90.