For several years after the organization of the Territory, and in spite of the Ordinance of 1787, a system of thinly disguised slavery had existed; and it took a sharp struggle to bring the State in without some form of the institution. So uncertain was the result that, when decided, the word passed from mouth to mouth all over Hoosierdom, “She has come in free, she has come in free!” Even in 1820, four years after the admission to Statehood, the census showed one hundred and ninety slaves, nearly all of them in the southwest corner, where the Lincolns lived, and it was not, in reality, until 1821 that the State Supreme Court put an end to the question. In Illinois in 1822–1824 there was carried on one of the most violent contests between the friends and opponents of slavery which occurred before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The effort to secure slave labor was nearly successful. In the campaign, pamphlets pro and con literally inundated the State; the pulpits took it up; and “almost every stump in every county had its bellowing, indignant orator.” So violent a commotion so near their borders could hardly have failed to reach Gentryville.

PUNCHED SHEET-IRON LANTERN.
Drawn from the original, in the United States National Museum, at Washington, D.C. Oiled paper was sometimes used in the lanterns.

JOHN W. LAMAR.
Mr. Lamar was a young boy in Spencer County when Lincoln left Indiana, but was old enough to have seen much of him and to have known his characteristics and his reputation in the county. He is still living near his old home.

There had been other anti-slavery agitation going on within hearing for several years. In 1804 a number of Baptist ministers of Kentucky started a crusade against the institution, which resulted in a hot contest in the denomination, and the organization of the “Baptist Licking-Locust Association Friends of Humanity.” The Rev. Jesse Head, the minister who married Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, talked freely and boldly against slavery; and one of their old friends, Christopher Columbus Graham, the man who was present at their wedding, says: “Tom and Nancy Lincoln and Sally Bush were just steeped full of Jesse Head’s notions about the wrong of slavery and the rights of man as explained by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.” In 1806 Charles Osborn began to preach “immediate emancipation” in Tennessee. Ten years later he started a paper in Ohio, devoted to the same idea, and in 1819 he transferred his crusade to Indiana. In 1821 Benjamin Lundy started, in Tennessee, the famous “Genius,” devoted to the same doctrine; and in 1822, at Shelbyville, only about one hundred miles from Gentryville, was started a paper similar in its views, the “Abolition Intelligencer.”

At that time there were in Kentucky five or six abolition societies, and in Illinois was an organization called the “Friends of Humanity.” Probably young Lincoln heard but vaguely of these movements; but of some of them he must have heard, and he must have connected them with the “Speech of Mr. Pitt on the Slave Trade;” with Merry’s elegy, “The Slaves;” and with the discussion given in his “Kentucky Preceptor,” “Which has the Most to complain of, the Indian or the Negro?” all of which tradition declares he was fond of repeating. It is not impossible that, as Frederick Douglas first realized his own condition in reading a school-speaker, the “Columbian Orator,” so Abraham Lincoln first felt the wrong of slavery in reading his “American Preceptor.”

REV. ALLEN BROONER.
An Indiana acquaintance of Lincoln, still living near Gentryville. “Mr. Brooner’s mother was a friend of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. In the fall of 1818 Mrs. Brooner was very sick, and Mrs. Lincoln called to see her. The sick woman was very despondent, and said: ‘Mrs. Lincoln, I am going to die. You will not see me again while living.’ ‘Tut te tut. You must not say that. Why, you will live longer than I. So cheer up,’ answered Mrs. Lincoln. Then, after a few parting words, Mrs. Lincoln went home. The next day she was very ill and in a few days she died. A few days later Mrs. Brooner died. When the tombstone was placed at Mrs. Lincoln’s grave, no one could state positively which was Mrs. Brooner’s and which Mrs. Lincoln’s grave. Mr. Allen Brooner gave his opinion, and the stone was placed; but the iron fence encloses both graves, which lie in a half-acre tract of land owned by the United States Government. Mr. Allen Brooner, after his mother’s death, became a minister of the United Brethren Church, and moved to Illinois. Like all of the old settlers of Gentryville, he remembers the departure of the Lincolns for Illinois. ‘When the Lincolns were getting ready to leave,’ says Mr. Brooner, ‘Abraham and his step-brother, John Johnston, came over to our house to swap a horse for a yoke of oxen. John did all the talking. If any one had been asked that day which would make the greatest success in life, I think the answer would have been John Johnston.’”[[8]]

Lincoln was not only winning in these days in the Jones grocery store a reputation as a talker and story-teller; he was becoming known as a kind of backwoods orator. He could repeat with effect all the poems and speeches in his various school-readers, he could imitate to perfection the wandering preachers who came to Gentryville, and he could make a political speech so stirring that he drew a crowd about him every time he mounted a stump. The applause he won was sweet; and frequently he indulged his gifts when he ought to have been at work—so thought his employers and Thomas his father. It was trying, no doubt, to the hard-pushed farmers, to see the men who ought to have been cutting grass or chopping wood throw down their sickles or axes and group around a boy, whenever he mounted a stump to develop a pet theory or repeat with variations yesterday’s sermon. In his fondness for speech-making he attended all the trials of the neighborhood, and frequently walked fifteen miles to Boonville to attend court.