LINCOLN IN 1859.
From a photograph in the collection of H. W. Fay, De Kalb, Illinois. The original was made by S. M. Fassett of Chicago; the negative was destroyed in the Chicago fire. This picture was made at the solicitation of D. B. Cook, who says that Mrs. Lincoln pronounced it the best likeness she had ever seen of her husband. Rajon used the Fassett picture as the original of his etching, and Kruell has made a fine engraving of it.
FROM INDIANA TO ILLINOIS.
The company which emigrated to Illinois included the family of Thomas Lincoln and those of Dennis Hanks and Levi Hall, married to Lincoln’s step-sisters—thirteen persons in all. They sold land, cattle, and grain, and much of their household goods, and were ready in March of 1830 for their journey. All the possessions which the three families had to take with them were packed into a big wagon—the first one Thomas Lincoln had ever owned, it is said—to which four oxen were attached, and the caravan was ready. The weather was still cold, the streams were swollen, and the roads were muddy; but the party started out bravely. Inured to hardships, alive to all the new sights on their route, every day brought them amusement and adventures, and especially to young Lincoln the journey must have been of keen interest.
He drove the oxen on this trip, he tells us, and, according to a story current in Gentryville, he succeeded in doing a fair peddler’s business on the route. Captain William Jones, in whose father’s store Lincoln had spent so many hours in discussion and in story-telling, and for whom he had worked the last winter he was in Indiana, says that before leaving the State Abraham invested all his money, some thirty-odd dollars, in notions. Though the country through which they expected to pass was but sparsely settled, he believed he could dispose of them. “A set of knives and forks was the largest item entered on the bill,” says Captain Jones; “the other items were needles, pins, thread, buttons, and other little domestic necessities. When the Lincolns reached their new home, near Decatur, Illinois, Abraham wrote back to my father, stating that he had doubled his money on his purchases by selling them along the road. Unfortunately we did not keep that letter, not thinking how highly we would have prized it years afterwards.”
The pioneers were a fortnight on their journey. All we know of the route they took is from a few chance remarks of Lincoln’s to his friends to the effect that they passed through Vincennes, where they saw a printing-press for the first time, and through Palestine, where they saw a juggler performing sleight-of-hand tricks. They reached Macon County, their new home, from the south. Mr. H. C. Whitney says that once in Decatur he and Lincoln passed the court-house together. “Lincoln walked out a few feet in front, and, after shifting his position two or three times, said, as he looked up at the building, partly to himself and partly to me: ‘Here is the exact spot where I stood by our wagon when we moved from Indiana, twenty-six years ago; this isn’t six feet from the exact spot.’ ... I asked him if he, at that time, had expected to be a lawyer and practise law in that court-house; to which he replied: ‘No; I didn’t know I had sense enough to be a lawyer then.’ He then told me he had frequently thereafter tried to locate the route by which they had come, and that he had decided that it was near the main line of the Illinois Central Railroad.”
MODEL OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S DEVICE FOR LIFTING VESSELS OVER SHOALS.
The inscription above this model, which is shown to all visitors to the Model Hall of the Patent Office, reads: “6469, Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois. Improvement in method of lifting vessels over shoals. Patented May 22, 1849.” The apparatus consists of a bellows placed in each side of the hull of the craft, just below the water-line, and worked by an odd but simple system of ropes and pulleys. When the keel of the vessel grates against the sand or obstruction, the bellows is filled with air; and, thus buoyed up, the vessel is expected to float over the shoal. The model is about eighteen or twenty inches long, and looks as if it had been whittled with a knife out of a shingle and a cigar box. There is no elaboration in the apparatus beyond that necessary to show the operation of buoying the vessel over the obstructions.
The party settled some ten miles west of Decatur, in Macon County. Here John Hanks had the logs already cut for their new home, and Lincoln, Dennis Hanks, and Hall soon had a cabin erected. Mr. Lincoln says in his short autobiography of 1860, which he wrote in the third person: “Here they built a log cabin, into which they removed, and made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year. These are, or are supposed to be, the rails about which so much is being said just now, though these are far from being the first or only rails ever made by Abraham.”
If they were far from being his “first and only rails,” they certainly were the most famous ones he or anybody else ever split. This was the last work he did for his father, for in the summer of that year (1830) he exercised the right of majority and started out to shift for himself. When he left his home, he went empty-handed. He was already some months over twenty-one years of age, but he had nothing in the world, not even a suit of respectable clothes; and one of the first pieces of work he did was “to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white-walnut bark that would be necessary to make him a pair of trousers.” He had no trade, no profession, no spot of land, no patron, no influence. Two things recommended him to his neighbors—he was strong, and he was a good fellow.
His strength made him a valuable laborer. Not that he was fond of hard labor. Mrs. Crawford says: “Abe was no hand to pitch into work like killing snakes;” but when he did work, it was with an ease and effectiveness which compensated his employer for the time he spent in practical jokes and extemporaneous speeches. He would lift as much as three ordinary men, and “My, how he would chop!” says Dennis Hanks. “His axe would flash and bite into a sugar-tree or sycamore, and down it would come. If you heard him fellin’ trees in a clearin’, you would say there was three men at work by the way the trees fell.”