Till population had grown a good deal, pioneer families were largely occupied in producing for themselves with their own hands what, in their hardy if not always frugal view, were the necessities and comforts of life. They had no Eastern market for their produce, for railways did not begin to be made till 1840, and it was many years before they crossed the Eastern mountains. An occasional cargo was taken on a flat-bottomed boat down the nearest creek, as a stream is called in America, into the Ohio and so by the innumerable windings of the Mississippi to New Orleans; but no return cargo could be brought up stream. Knives and axes were the most precious objects to be gained by trade; woollen fabrics were rare in the West, when Lincoln was born, and the white man and woman, like the red whom they had displaced, were chiefly dressed in deer skins. The woods abounded in game, and in the early stages of the development of the West a man could largely support himself by his gun. The cold of every winter is there great, and an occasional winter made itself long remembered, like the "winter of the deep snow" in Illinois, by the havoc of its sudden onset and the suffering of its long duration. The settling of a forest country was accompanied here as elsewhere by the occasional ravages of strange and destructive pestilences and the constant presence of malaria. Population was soon thick enough for occasional gatherings, convivial or religious, and in either case apt to be wild, but for long it was not thick enough for the life of most settlers to be other than lonely as well as hard.
Abraham Lincoln in his teens grew very fast, and by nineteen he was nearly six foot four. His weight was never quite proportionate to this. His ungainly figure, with long arms and large hands and relatively small development of chest, and the strange deep-cut lineaments of his face were perhaps the evidence of unfit (sometimes insufficient) food in these years of growth. But his muscular strength was great, and startling statistical tales are told of the weight he could lift and the force of his blows with a mallet or an axe. To a gentle and thoughtful boy with secret ambition in him such strength is a great gift, and in such surroundings most obviously so. Lincoln as a lad was a valuable workman at the varied tasks that came his way, without needing that intense application to manual pursuits which the bent of his mind made irksome to him. And he was a person of high consideration among the lads of his age and company. The manners of the people then settling in Indiana and Illinois had not the extreme ferocity for which Kentucky had earlier been famous, and which crops up here and there in frontier life elsewhere. All the same, as might naturally be supposed, they shared Plato's opinion that youths and men in the prime of life should settle their differences with their fists. Young Lincoln's few serious combats were satisfactorily decisive, and neither they nor his friendly wrestling bouts ended in the quarrels which were too common among his neighbours. Thus, for all his originality and oddity, he early grew accustomed to mix in the sort of company he was likely to meet, without either inward shrinking or the need of conscious self-assertion.
In one thing he stood aloof from the sports of his fellows. Most backwoodsmen were bred to the gun; he has told us that he shot a turkey when he was eight and never afterwards shot at all. There is an early tale of his protests against an aimless slaughter of mud turtles; and it may be guessed that the dislike of all killing, which gave him sore trouble later, began when he was young. Tales survive of his kindness to helpless men and animals. It marks the real hardness of his surroundings, and their hardening effect on many, that his exertions in saving a drunken man from death in the snow are related with apparent surprise. Some tales of his helping a pig stuck in a bog or a dog on an ice floe and the like seem to indicate a curious and lasting trait. These things seem not to have been done spontaneously, but on mature reflection after he had passed unheeding by. He grew to be a man of prompt action in circumstances of certain kinds; but generally his impulse was slow and not very sure. Taste and the minor sensibilities were a little deficient in him. As a lady once candidly explained to him, he was not ready with little gracious acts. But rare occasions, such as can arouse a passionate sense of justice, would kindle his slow, kind nature with a sudden fire.
The total amount of his schooling, at the several brief periods for which there happened to have been a school accessible and facility to get to it, was afterwards computed by himself at something under twelve months. With this slight help distributed over the years from his eighth to his fifteenth birthday he taught himself to read, write, and do sums. The stories of the effort and painful shifts, by which great men accomplish this initial labour almost unhelped, have in all cases the same pathos, and have a certain sameness in detail. Having learnt to read he had the following books within his reach: the Bible, "Aesop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," the "Pilgrim's Progress," a "History of the United States," and Weems' "Life of Washington." Later on the fancy took him to learn the laws of his State, and he obtained the "Laws of Indiana." These books he did read, and read again, and pondered, not with any dreamy or purely intellectual interest, but like one who desires the weapon of learning for practical ends, and desires also to have patterns of what life should be. As already said, his service as a labourer could be considerable, and when something stirred his ambition to do a task quickly his energy could be prodigious. But "bone idle is what I called him," was the verdict long after of one, perhaps too critical, employer. "I found him," he said, "cocked up on a haystack with a book. 'What are you reading?' I said. 'I'm not reading, I'm studying,' says he. 'What are you studying?' says I. 'Law,' says he, as proud as Cicero. 'Great God Almighty!' said I." The boy's correction, "studying" for "reading," was impertinent, but probably sound. To be equally sound, we must reckon among his educational facilities the abundant stories which came his way in a community which, however unlettered, was certainly not dull-spirited; the occasional newspaper; the rare lectures or political meetings; the much more frequent religious meetings, with preachers who taught a grim doctrine, but who preached with vigour and sometimes with the deepest sincerity; the hymns often of great emotional power over a simple congregation—Cowper's "There is a fountain filled with blood," is one recorded favourite among them; the songs, far other than hymns, which Dennis Hanks and his other mates would pick up or compose; and the practice in rhetoric and the art of exposition, which he unblushingly afforded himself before audiences of fellow labourers who welcomed the jest and the excuse for stopping work. The achievement of the self-taught man remains wonderful, but, if he surmounts his difficulties at all, some of his limitations may turn to sheer advantage. There is some advantage merely in being driven to make the most of few books; great advantage in having one's choice restricted by circumstances to good books; great advantage too in the consciousness of untrained faculty which leaves a man capable in mature life of deliberately undertaking mental discipline.
Along with the legends and authentic records of his self-training, signs of an ambition which showed itself early and which was from the first a clean and a high ambition, there are also other legends showing Lincoln as a naughty boy among naughty boys. The selection here made from these lacks refinement, and the reader must note that this was literally a big, naughty boy, not a man who had grown stiff in coarseness and ill-nature. First it must be recalled that Abraham bore a grudge against the Grigsbys, an honourable grudge in its origin and perhaps the only grudge he ever bore. There had arisen from this a combat, of which the details might displease the fastidious, but which was noble in so far that Abraham rescued a weaker combatant who was over-matched. But there ensued something more displeasing, a series of lampoons by Abraham, in prose and a kind of verse. These were gross and silly enough, though probably to the taste of the public which he then addressed, but it is the sequel that matters. In a work called "The First Chronicles of Reuben," it is related how Reuben and Josiah, the sons of Reuben Grigsby the elder, took to themselves wives on the same day. By local custom the bridal feast took place and the two young couples began their married careers under the roof of the bridegrooms' father. Moreover, it was the custom that, at a certain stage in the celebrations, the brides should be escorted to their chambers by hired attendants who shortly after conducted the bridegrooms thither. On this occasion some sense of mischief afoot disturbed the heart of Mrs. Reuben Grigsby the elder, and, hastening upstairs, just after the attendants had returned, she cried out in a loud voice and to the great consternation of all concerned, "Why, Reuben, you're in bed with the wrong wife!" The historian who, to the manifest annoyance of Lincoln's other biographers, has preserved this and much other priceless information, infers that Abraham, who was not invited to the feast, had plotted this domestic catastrophe and won over the attendants to his evil purpose. This is not a certain inference, nor is it absolutely beyond doubt that the event recorded in "The First Chronicles of Reuben" ever happened at all. What is certain is that these Chronicles themselves, composed in what purports to be the style of Scripture, were circulated for the joint edification of the proud race of Grigsby and of their envious neighbours in the handwriting of Abraham Lincoln, then between seventeen and eighteen. Not without reason does an earlier manuscript of the same author conclude, after several correct exercises in compound subtraction, with the distich:—
"Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen,
He will be good, but God knows when."
Not to be too solemn about a tale which has here been told for the whimsical fancy of its unseemliness and because it is probably the worst that there is to tell, we may here look forward and face the well-known fact that the unseemliness in talk of rough, rustic boys flavoured the great President's conversation through life. It is well to be plain about this. Lincoln was quite without any elegant and sentimental dissoluteness, such as can be attractively portrayed. His life was austere and seems to have been so from the start. He had that shy reverence for womanhood which is sometimes acquired as easily in rough as in polished surroundings and often quite as steadily maintained. The testimony of his early companions, along with some fragments of the boy's feeble but sincere attempts at verse, shows that he acquired it young. But a large part of the stories and pithy sayings for which he was famous wherever he went, but of which when their setting is lost it is impossible to recover the enjoyment, were undeniably coarse, and naturally enough this fact was jarring to some of those in America who most revered him. It should not really be hard, in any comprehensive view of his character and the circumstances in which it unfolded itself, to trace in this bent of his humour something not discordant with the widening sympathy and deepening tenderness of his nature. The words of his political associate in Illinois, Mr. Leonard Swett, afterwards Attorney-General of the United States, may suffice. He writes: "Almost any man, who will tell a very vulgar story, has, in a degree, a vulgar mind. But it was not so with him; with all his purity of character and exalted morality and sensibility, which no man can doubt, when hunting for wit he had no ability to discriminate between the vulgar and refined substances from which he extracted it. It was the wit he was after, the pure jewel, and he would pick it up out of the mud or dirt just as readily as from a parlour table." In any case his best remembered utterances of this order, when least fit for print, were both wise and incomparably witty, and in any case they did not prevent grave gentlemen, who marvelled at them rather uncomfortably, from receiving the deep impression of what they called his pure-mindedness.
One last recollection of Lincoln's boyhood has appealed, beyond any other, to some of his friends as prophetic of things to come. Mention has already been made of his two long trips down the Mississippi. With the novel responsibilities which they threw on him, and the novel sights and company which he met all the way to the strange, distant city of New Orleans, they must have been great experiences. Only two incidents of them are recorded. In the first voyage he and his mates had been disturbed at night by a band of negro marauders and had had a sharp fight in repelling them, but in the second voyage he met with the negro in a way that to him was more memorable. He and the young fellows with him saw, among the sights of New Orleans, negroes chained, maltreated, whipped and scourged; they came in their rambles upon a slave auction where a fine mulatto girl was being pinched and prodded and trotted up and down the room like a horse to show how she moved, that "bidders might satisfy themselves," as the auctioneer said, of the soundness of the article to be sold. John Johnston and John Hanks and Abraham Lincoln saw these sights with the unsophisticated eyes of honest country lads from a free State. In their home circle it seems that slavery was always spoken of with horror. One of them had a tenacious memory and a tenacious will. "Lincoln saw it," John Hanks said long after, and other men's recollections of Lincoln's talk confirmed him—"Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was silent. I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion of slavery. It ran its iron into him then and there, May, 1831. I have heard him say so often." Perhaps in other talks old John Hanks dramatised his early remembrances a little; he related how at the slave auction Lincoln said, "By God, boys, let's get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard."
The youth, who probably did not express his indignation in these prophetic words, was in fact chosen to deal "that thing" a blow from which it seems unlikely to recover as a permitted institution among civilised men, and it is certain that from this early time the thought of slavery never ceased to be hateful to him. Yet it is not in the light of a crusader against this special evil that we are to regard him. When he came back from this voyage to his new home in Illinois he was simply a youth ambitious of an honourable part in the life of the young country of which he was proud. We may regard, and he himself regarded, the liberation of the slaves, which will always be associated with his name, as a part of a larger work, the restoration of his country to its earliest and noblest tradition, which alone gave permanence or worth to its existence as a nation.