Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

The treasured "Life of Washington" came to grief. One stormy night the rain beat between the logs of the cabin, and flooded the volume as it lay on a board upheld by two pegs. Abraham sadly carried it back to its owner, and worked three days, at twenty-five cents a day, to pay damages, and thus made the book his own.

The few months of schooling had already come to an end, and he was "living out," hoeing, planting, and chopping wood for the farmers, and giving the wages to his parents. In this way, in the daytime he studied human nature, and in the evenings he read "Plutarch's Lives" and the "Life of Benjamin Franklin." He was liked in these humble homes, for he could tend baby, tell stories, make a good impromptu speech, recite poetry, even making rhymes himself, and could wrestle and jump as well as the best.

While drinking intoxicants was the fashion all about him, taught by his first mother not to touch them, he had solemnly carried out her wishes. But his tender heart made him kind to the many who, in this pioneer life, had been ruined through drink. One night, as he was returning from a house-raising, he and two or three friends found a man in the ditch benumbed with the cold, and his patient horse waiting beside him. They lifted the man upon the animal, and held him on till they reached the nearest house, where Abraham cared for him through the night, and thus saved his life.

At eighteen he had found a situation in a small store, but he was not satisfied to stand behind a counter; he had read too much about Washington and Franklin. Fifteen miles from Gentryville, courts were held at certain seasons of the year; and when Abraham could find a spare day he walked over in the morning and back at night, listening to the cases. Meantime he had borrowed a strange book for a poor country-lad,—"The Revised Statutes of Indiana."

One day a man on trial for murder had secured the able lawyer, John A. Breckenridge, to defend him. Abraham listened as he made his appeal to the jury. He had never heard anything so eloquent. When the court adjourned the tall, homely boy, his face beaming with admiration for the great man, pressed forward to grasp his hand; but, with a contemptuous air, the lawyer passed on without speaking. Thirty years later the two met in Washington, when Abraham Lincoln was the President of the United States; and then he thanked Mr. Breckenridge for his great speech in Indiana.

In March, 1828, the long-hoped-for opportunity to see the world outside of Gentryville had come. Abraham was asked by a man who knew his honesty and willingness to work, to take a flat-boat down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. He was paid only two dollars a week and his rations; and as a flat-boat could not come up the river, but must be sold for lumber at the journey's end, he was obliged to walk the whole distance back. The big-hearted, broad-shouldered youth, six feet and four inches tall, had seen in this trip what he would never forget; had seen black men in chains, and men and women sold like sheep in the slave-marts of New Orleans. Here began his horror of human slavery, which years after culminated in the Emancipation Proclamation.

Two years later, when he had become of age, Abraham helped move his father's family to Illinois, driving the four yoke of oxen which drew the household goods over the muddy roads and through the creeks. Then he joined his adopted brothers in building a log house, plowed fifteen acres of prairie land for corn, split rails to fence it in, and then went out into the world to earn for himself, his scanty wages heretofore belonging legally to his father. He did not always receive money for his work, for once, for a Mrs. Miller, he split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans, dyed with white walnut bark, necessary to make a pair of trowsers.

He had no trade, and no money, and must do whatever came to hand. For a year he worked for one farmer and another, and then he and his half-brother were hired by a Mr. Offutt to build and take a flat-boat to New Orleans. So pleased was the owner, that on Abraham's return, he was at once engaged to manage a mill and store at New Salem. Here he went by the name of "Honest Abe," because he was so fair in his dealings. On one occasion, having sold a woman a bill of goods amounting to two dollars and six and a quarter cents, he found that in adding the items, he had taken six and a quarter cents too much. It was night, and locking the store, he walked two or three miles to return the money to his astonished customer. Another time a woman bought a half pound of tea. He discovered afterward that he had used a four-ounce weight on the scales, and at once walked a long way to deliver the four ounces which were her due. No wonder the world, like Diogenes, is always looking for an honest man.

He insisted on politeness before women. One day as he was showing goods, a boorish man came in and began to use profanity. Young Lincoln leaned over the desk, and begged him to desist before ladies. When they had gone, the man became furious. Finding that he really desired to fight, Lincoln said, "Well, if you must be whipped, I suppose I may as well whip you as any other man," and suiting the action to the word, gave him a severe punishing. The man became a better citizen from that day, and Lincoln's life-long friend.

Years afterward, when in the Presidential chair, a man used profanity in his presence, he said, "I thought Senator C. had sent me a gentleman. I was mistaken. There is the door, and I wish you good-night."