During his last years in Indiana he lived fully the life of the people around him. Their ideals seemed his ideals. Athletic superiority was the road to respect and honor, and Lincoln became the foremost man in physical games. He first won renown as a wrestler. Stories of his superior strength were heralded far and wide and his place was unchallenged. He was a leader in the rude crowd where might was the test of standing. Living among men devoted to hunting, he seldom indulged in that common recreation. In this his individuality asserted itself. He would not sanction suffering even in the animal world, and he seldom swerved from his convictions even in the day when the wolf howled at the cabin door.
The maturity of Lincoln's development at the time of his departure from Indiana has not received just consideration. Gaunt and awkward in appearance there was little in him to attract favorable attention. He was without trade or profession. Nothing appeared to distinguish him from the other members of the shiftless Lincoln and Hanks family. A stranger would hardly have chosen him as a future son of fortune, even from that humble crowd of wanderers. Uncouth in dress and manner, he would have found small favor in polite society, and among those who judge by things seen on the surface.
Viewed subjectively there is another Lincoln, a man of promise and inevitable distinction. Those who have dwelt extensively on the objective aspect of Lincoln have squandered sympathy on his want of education. For though poor in material things, he was rich in mental wealth, in the qualities that make manhood, in those virtues that survive the mutations of time, that future generations dwell on with ever increasing fondness. At the threshold of his majority he was already possessed of elemental ability and greatness. He was one of those rare souls that do not lose the golden ideals of youth with passing years. The sneers of selfish men never changed the primal sweetness of his nature.
The fourteen years that Lincoln lived in Indiana were years of splendid fruition. By his peculiar process of self-development his mind had attained a maturity far beyond his age. He mingled freely in the world of men and events. He was close to the human heart, to the sorrows of the humble, to the mute and deep emotions of the lonely dweller on the western farms. He loved the plain people. He had the command of style, the ease and pith of statement that schools rarely give. Ready of speech, he could command the attention of the rough as well as the sober minded. He was already renowned as a dispenser of laughter through the magic of his stories. But above all he was rarely gifted with good sense, with a mind not easily diverted by false lights, by the glitter of objectivity. He went irresistibly to the root of things. A man of fine emotions, wanting in the small social amenities, he seldom went astray in the domain of reality.
It is also essential to mark the practical character of all his learning. His knowledge was all useful and vitalizing. His mind was not cumbered with waste materials. His education was sound to the core, was all genuine, well calculated for a man in the very strife of life. Judged by the standard of schools and universities he was not an educated man, but judged by the broader standard of thought and action he was supremely educated, the best educated man of his time. He served his apprenticeship in the school of experience and only needed opportunity to be of royal service to his fellowmen. Honest, homely and humble, he was in harmony with the average man of his time, and was well fitted to become a representative of the people.
CHAPTER III
THE POLITICAL HERO OF NEW SALEM
The immediate occasion for the departure of Thomas Lincoln from Indiana was the visitation of the mysterious ailment widely known as the "milk sick." The scant progress made by the family in Spencer County strengthened his desire to try his fortune in a new land,—a land that in the distance held forth alluring promises of betterment.