LINES FROM LINCOLN’S COPY-BOOK.
These lines were written on a leaf of a copy-book in which Lincoln wrote out the tables of weights and measures, and the sums in connection with them. His step-mother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, gave the leaf, with a few others from the book, to Mr. Herndon. It is now owned by Jesse W. Weik.
He wrote as well as spoke, and some of his productions were even printed, through the influence of his admiring neighbors. Thus a local Baptist preacher was so struck with one of Abraham’s essays on temperance that he sent it to Ohio, where it appeared in some paper. Another article, on “National Politics,” so pleased a lawyer of the vicinity that he declared the “world couldn’t beat it.”
INFLUENCE OF THE RIVER LIFE.
In considering the different opportunities for development which the boy had at this time, his months spent on the Ohio as a ferryman and his trips down the Mississippi should not be forgotten. In fact, all that Abraham Lincoln saw of men and the world outside of Gentryville and its neighborhood, until after he was twenty-one years of age, he saw on these rivers. For many years the Ohio and the Mississippi were the Appian Way, the one route to the world for the Western settlers. To preserve it they had been willing in early times to go to war with Spain or with France, to secede from the Union, even to join Spain or France against the United States if either country would insure their right to their highway. In the long years in which the ownership of the great river was unsettled, every man of them had come to feel with Benjamin Franklin, “a neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street-door.” In fact, this water-way was their “street-door,” and all that many of them ever saw of the world passed here. Up and down the rivers was a continual movement. Odd craft of every kind possible on a river went by: “arks” and “sleds,” with tidy cabins where families lived, and where one could see the washing stretched, the children playing, the mother on pleasant days rocking and sewing; keel-boats, which dodged in and out and turned inquisitive noses up all the creeks and bayous; great fleets from the Alleghanies, made up of a score or more of timber rafts, and manned by forty or fifty rough boatmen; “Orleans boats,” loaded with flour, hogs, produce of all kinds; pirogues, made from great trees; “broad-horns;” curious nondescripts worked by a wheel; and, after 1812, steamboats.
FRAGMENT FROM A LEAF OF LINCOLN’S EXERCISE-BOOK.
SEE APPENDIX.
