On the same authority we are told that Lincoln gallantly interfered to save the life of a poor old Indian who had thrown himself on the mercy of the soldiers, and whom, notwithstanding that he had a pass, they were proceeding to slay. The anecdote wears a somewhat melodramatic aspect; but there is no doubt of Lincoln's humanity, or of his readiness to protest against oppression and cruelty when they actually fell under his notice. It was also in keeping with his character to insist firmly on the right of his militiamen to the same rations and pay as the regulars, and to draw the legal line sharply and clearly when the regular officers exceeded their authority in the exercise of command.
Returning to New Salem, Lincoln, having served his apprenticeship as a clerk, commenced storekeeping on his own account. An opening was made for him by the departure of Mr. Radford, the keeper of a grocery, who, having offended the Clary's Grove boys, they "selected a convenient night for breaking in his windows and gutting his establishment." From his ruins rose the firm of Lincoln & Berry. Doubt rests on the great historic question whether Lincoln sold liquor in his store, and on that question still more agonizing to a sensitive morality—whether he sold it by the dram. The points remain, we are told, and will forever remain undetermined. The only fact in which history can repose with certainty is that some liquor must have been given away, since nobody in the neighbourhood of Clary's Grove could keep store without offering the customary dram to the patrons of the place. When taxed on the platform by his rival, Douglas, with having sold liquor, Mr. Lincoln replied that if he figured on one side of the counter, Douglas figured on the other. "As a storekeeper," says Mr. Ellis, "Mr. Lincoln wore flax and tow linen pantaloons—I thought about five inches too short in the legs—and frequently he had but one suspender, no vest or coat. He had a calico shirt such as he had in the Black Hawk War; coarse brogues, tan-colour; blue yarn socks, a straw hat, old style, and without a band." It is recorded that he preferred dealing with men and boys, and disliked to wait on the ladies. Possibly, if his attire has been rightly described, the ladies, even the Clary's Grove ladies, may have reciprocated the feeling.
In storekeeping, however, Mr. Lincoln did not prosper; neither storekeeping nor any other regular business or occupation was congenial to his character. He was born to be a politician. Accordingly he began to read law, with which he combined surveying, at which we are assured he made himself "expert" by a six weeks' course of study. They mix trades a little in the West. We expected on turning the page to find that Mr. Lincoln had also taken up surgery and performed the Caesarean operation. The few law books needed for Western practice were supplied to him by a kind friend at Springfield, and according to a witness who has evidently an accurate memory for details, "he went to read law in 1832 or 1833 barefooted, seated in the shade of a tree and would grind around with the shade, just opposite Berry's grocery store, a few feet south of the door, occasionally lying flat on his back and putting his feet up the tree." Evidently, whatever he read, especially of a practical kind, he made thoroughly his own. It is needless to say that he did not become a master of scientific jurisprudence, but it seems that he did become an effective Western advocate. What is more, there is conclusive testimony to the fact that he was—what has been scandalously alleged to be rare, even in the United States—an honest lawyer. "Love of justice and fair play," says one of his brothers of the bar, "was his predominant trait. I have often listened to him when I thought he would state his case out of Court. It was not in his nature to assume or attempt to bolster up a false position. He would abandon his case first. He did so in the case of Buckmaster for the use of Durham v. Beener & Arthur, in our Supreme Court, in which I happened to be opposed to him. Another gentleman, less fastidious, took Mr. Lincoln's place and gained the case." His power as an advocate seems to have depended on his conviction that the right was on his side. "Tell Harris it's no use to waste money on me; in that case, he'll get beat." In a larceny case he took those who were counsel with him for the defence aside and said, "If you can say anything for the man do it. I can't. If I attempt it, the jury will see that I think he is guilty and convict him of course." In another case he proved an account for his client, who, though he did not know it, was a rogue. The counsel on the other side proved a receipt. By the time he had done Lincoln was missing; and on the Court sending for him, he replied, "Tell the judge I can't come; my hands are dirty, and I came over to clean them." Mr. Herndon, who visited Lincoln's office on business, gives the following reminiscence: —"Mr. Lincoln was seated at his table, listening very attentively to a man who was talking earnestly in a low tone. After the would-be client had stated the facts of the case, Mr. Lincoln replied, 'yes, there is no reasonable doubt but that I can gain your case for you. I can set a whole neighbourhood at logger heads; I can distress a widowed mother and her six fatherless children, and thereby get for you six hundred dollars, which rightly belongs, it appears to me, as much to the woman and her children as it does to you. You must remember that some things that are legally right are not morally right. I shall not take your case but will give you a bit of advice, for which I will charge you nothing. You seem to be a sprightly, energetic man. I would advise you to try your hand at making six hundred dollars in some other way.'" On one occasion, however, Lincoln, we believe it must be admitted, resorted to sharp practice. William Armstrong, the son of Jack Armstrong, of Clary's Grove, inheriting, as it seems, the "abundant animal spirits" of his father, committed, as was universally believed, a very brutal murder at a camp meeting, and being brought to trial was in imminent peril of the halter. Lincoln volunteered to defend him. The witness whose testimony bore hardest on the prisoner swore that he saw the murder committed by the light of the moon. Lincoln put in an almanac, which, on reference being made to it showed that at the time stated by the witness there was no moon. This broke down the witness and the prisoner was acquitted. It was not observed at the moment that the almanac was one of the year previous to the murder; and therefore morally a fabrication. Herculean efforts are made to prove that two almanacs were produced and that Mr. Lincoln was innocent of any deception. But the best plea, we conceive, is, that Mr. Lincoln had rocked William Armstrong in the cradle.
There is one part of Lincoln's early life which, though scandal may batten on it, we shall pass over lightly, we mean that part which relates to his love affairs and his marriage. Criticism, and even biography, should respect as far as possible the sanctuary of affection. That a man has dedicated his life to the service of the public is no reason why the public should be licensed to amuse itself by playing with his heart-strings. Not only as a storekeeper, but in every capacity, Mr. Lincoln was far more happy in his relations with men than with women. He however loved, and loved deeply, Ann Rutledge, who appears to have been entirely worthy of his attachment, and whose death at the moment when she would have felt herself at liberty to marry him threw him into a transport of grief, which threatened his reason and excited the gravest apprehensions of his friends. In stormy weather especially he would rave piteously, crying that "he could never be reconciled to have the snow, rains and storms to beat upon her grave." This first love he seems never to have forgotten. He next had an affair, not so creditable to him, with a Miss Owens, of whom, after their rupture, he wrote things which he had better have left unwritten. Finally, he made a match of which the world has heard more than enough, though the Western Boy was too true a gentleman to let it hear anything about the matter from his lips. It is enough to say that this man was not wanting in that not inconsiderable element of worth, even of the worth of statesmen, strong and pure affection.
"If ever," said Abraham Lincoln, "American society and the United States Government are demoralized and overthrown, it will come from the voracious desire of office—this wriggle to live without toil, from which I am not free myself." These words ought to be written up in the largest characters in every schoolroom in the United States. The confession with which they conclude is as true as the rest. Mr. Lincoln, we are told, took no part in the promotion of local enterprises, railroads, schools, churches, asylums. The benefits he proposed for his fellow men were to be accomplished by political means alone "Politics were his world—a world filled with hopeful enchantments. Ordinarily he disliked to discuss any other subject." "In the office," says his partner, Mr. Herndon, "he sat down or spilt himself (sic) on his lounge, read aloud, told stories, talked politics—never science, art, literature, railroad gatherings, colleges, asylums, hospitals, commerce, education, progress—nothing that interested the world generally, except politics." "He seldom," says his present biographer, "took an active part in local or minor elections, or wasted his power to advance a friend. He did nothing out of mere gratitude, and forgot the devotion of his warmest partisans, as soon as the occasion for their services had passed. What they did for him was quietly appropriated as the reward of superior merit, calling for no return in kind." We are told that while he was "wriggling," he was in effect boarded and clothed for some years by his friend, Hon. W. Butler, at Springfield, and that, when in power, he refused to exercise his patronage in favour of his friend. On that occasion, his biographer tells us, that he considered his patronage a solemn trust. We give him credit for a conscientiousness above the ordinary level of his species on this as well as on other subjects. But his sense of the solemn character of his trust, though it prevented him from giving a petty place to the old friend who had helped him in the day of his need, did not prevent him, as President, from sometimes paying for support by a far more questionable use of the highest patronage in his gift.
The fact is not that the man was by nature wanting in gratitude or in any kindly quality, on the contrary, he seems to have abounded in them all. But the excitement of the game was so intense that it swallowed up all other considerations and emotions. In a dead season of politics, his depression was extreme. "He said gloomily, despairingly, sadly, 'How hard, oh! how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived for it. This world is dead to hope, deaf to its own death-struggle.'" Possibly this is the way in which "wriggling" politicians generally put the case to themselves.
Lincoln's fundamental principle was devotion to the popular will. In his address to the people of Sangamon County, he says, "while acting as their representative I shall be governed by their will on all subjects upon which I have the means of knowing what their will is, and upon all others I will do what my own judgment teaches me will advance their interests." "'It is a maxim,' with many politicians, just to keep along even with the humour of the people right or wrong." "This maxim," adds the biographer, "Mr. Lincoln held then, as ever since, in very high estimation." It may occur to some enquiring minds to ask what, upon those principles, is the use of having representation at all, and whether it would not be better to let the people themselves vote directly on all questions without interposing a representative to diminish their sense of responsibility, to say nothing of the sacrifice of the representative's conscience, which, in the cases of the statesmen here described, was probably not very great. With regard to Slavery, however, Mr. Lincoln showed forecast, if not conscientious independence. He stepped forth in advance of the sentiments of his party, and to his political friends appeared rash in the extreme.
Lincoln's first attempt to get elected to the State Legislature was unsuccessful. It however brought him the means of "doing something for his country," and partly averting the "death-struggle of the world," in the shape of the postmastership of New Salem. The business of the office was not on a large scale, for it was carried on in Mr. Lincoln's hat—an integument of which it is recorded, that he refused to give it to a conjurer to play the egg trick in, "not from respect for his own hat, but for the conjurer's eggs." The future President did not fail to signalize his first appearance as an administrator by a sally of the jocularity which was always struggling with melancholy in his mind. A gentleman of the place, whose education had been defective, was in the habit of calling two or three times a day at the post-office, and ostentatiously inquiring for letters. At last he received a letter, which, being unable to read himself, he got the postmaster to read for him before a large circle of friends. It proved to be from a negro lady engaged in domestic service in the South, recalling the memory of a mutual attachment, with a number of incidents more delectable than sublime. It is needless to say that the postmaster, by a slight extension of the sphere of his office, had written the letter as well as delivered it.
In a second candidature the aspirant was more successful, and he became one of nine representatives of Sangamon County, in the State Legislature of Illinois, who, being all more than six feet high, were called "The Long Nine." With his Brobdingnagian colleagues Abraham plunged at once into the "internal improvement system," and distinguished himself above his fellows by the unscrupulous energy and strategy with which he urged through the Legislature a series of bubble schemes and jobs. Railroads and other improvements, especially improvements of river navigation, were voted out of all proportion to the means or credit of the then thinly-peopled State. To set these little matters in motion, a loan of eight millions of dollars was authorized, and to complete the canal from Chicago to Peru, another loan of four millions of dollars was voted at the same session, two hundred thousand dollars being given as a gratuity to those counties which seemed to have no special interest in any of the foregoing projects. Work on all these roads was to commence, not only at the same time, but at both ends of each road and at all the river- crossings. There were as yet no surveys of any route, no estimates, no reports of engineers, or even unprofessional viewers. "Progress was not to wait on trifles; capitalists were supposed to be lying in wait to catch these precious bonds; the money would be raised in a twinkling, and being applied with all the skill of a hundred De Witt Clintons—a class of gentlemen at that time extremely numerous and obtrusive—the loan would build railroads, the railroads would build cities, cities would create farms, foreign capital would rush in to so inviting a field, the lands would be taken up with marvellous celerity, and the land tax going into a sinking fund, that, with some tolls and certain sly speculations to be made by the State, would pay principal and interest of debt without even a cent of taxation upon the people. In short, everybody was to be enriched, while the munificence of the State in selling its credit and spending the proceeds, would make its empty coffers overflow with ready money. It was a dark stroke of statesmanship, a mysterious device in finance, which, whether from being misunderstood or mismanaged, bore from the beginning fruits the very reverse of those it had promised." We seem here to be reading the history of more than one great railway enterprise undertaken by politicians without the red tape preliminaries of surveying or framing estimates, progress not deigning to wait upon trifles. This system of policy gave fine scope for the talents of the "log-roller," here defined as an especially wily and persuasive person, who could depict the merits of his scheme with roseate but delusive eloquence, and who was said to carry a gourd of "possum fat"—wherewith he "greased and swallowed" his prey. One of the largest of these gourds was carried by "honest Abe," who was especially active in "log-rolling" a bill for the removal of the seat of government from Vandalia to Springfield, at a virtual cost to the State of about six millions of dollars, which we were told would have purchased all the real estate in the town three times over. "Thus by log-rolling on the loud measure, by multiplying railroads, by terminating these roads at Alton, that Alton might become a great city in opposition to St. Louis; by distributing money to some of the counties to be wasted by the County Commissioners, and by giving the seat of government to Springfield—was the whole State bought up and bribed to approve the most senseless and disastrous policy which ever crippled the energies of a young country." We are told, and do not doubt, that Mr. Lincoln shared the popular delusion; but we are also told, and are equally sure, that "even if he had been unhappily afflicted with individual scruples of his own he would have deemed it but simple duty to obey the almost unanimous voice of his constituency." In other words, he would have deemed it his duty to pander to the popular madness by taking a part in financial swindling. Yet he and his principal confederates obtained afterwards high places of honour and trust. A historian of Illinois calls them "spared monuments of popular wrath, evincing how safe it is to be a politician, but how disastrous it may be to the country to keep along with the present fervour of the people." It is instructive as well as just to remember that all this time the man was strictly, nay sensitively, honourable in his private dealings, that he was regarded by his fellows as a paragon of probity, that his word was never questioned, that of personal corruption calumny itself, so far as we are aware, never dared to accuse him. Politics, it seems, may be a game apart, with rules of its own which supersede morality.
Considering that, as we said before, this man was destined to preside over the most tremendous operations in the whole history of finance, it is especially instructive to see what was the state of his mind on economical subjects. He actually proposed to pass a usury law, having arrived, it appears, at the sage conviction that while to pay the current rent for the use of a house or the current fee for the services of a lawyer is perfectly proper, to pay the current price for money is to "allow a few individuals to levy a direct tax on the community." But this is an ordinary illusion. Abraham Lincoln's illusions went far beyond it. He actually proposed so to legislate that in cases of extreme necessity there might "always be found means to cheat the law, while in all other cases it would have its intended effect." He proposed in fact absurdity qualified by fraud, the established practice of which would, no doubt, have had a most excellent effect in teaching the citizens to reverence and the Courts to uphold the law. As President, when told that the finances were low, he asked whether the printing machine had given out, and he suggested, as a special temptation to capitalists, the issue of a class of bonds which should be exempt from seizure for debt. It may safely be said that the burden of the United States debt was ultimately increased fifty per cent through sheer ignorance of the simplest principles of economy and finance on the part of those by whom it was contracted.