The Soul of Abraham Lincoln

by William E. Barton

Lincoln arrived in New Salem on April 19, 1831, a tall, lank flatboat hand, with his trousers rolled up "about five feet," and he left it on a borrowed horse with all his belongings in a pair of saddlebags, March 15, 1837. So far as worldly wealth was concerned, he was richer when he arrived at the age of twenty-two than when he left at the age of twenty-eight, for he was heavily in debt. It had fared better with him financially had he spent those six years in Illinois College at Jacksonville. He might have entered Springfield at the same time with a college diploma and a smaller debt. A college education was not impossible for him, and he might have had it had he cared for it as much as did the Green brothers or the brother of Ann Rutledge, or, among his later associates, Shelby M. Collum or Newton Bateman. It is a fair question whether an education under such good and great men as Julian M. Sturtevant and Edward Beecher would have been more or less valuable than what he actually got; in any event, it was not an impossibility if he had cared as much for it as did some other boys as poor as he.

But New Salem was his alma mater, as Mrs. Atkinson has aptly termed it, and there he got what had to stand as the equivalent of his academic course.

To have seen him entering New Salem on a flatboat and leaving it on a borrowed horse, one might easily have arrived at very erroneous conclusions as to what the six years had done for him. But the years were not lost.

He came to New Salem a strong pioneer, proud of his great height, and he always remained almost childishly proud of it, and ready to challenge any other tall man to back up to him and discover which was the taller. He was capable of hard work, and disinclined to perform it. Thomas Lincoln had taught him to work, but not to love work; and his employers declared that he loved labor far less than his meals and pay. If he must work, he preferred almost any kind of work rather than that of the farm, and he had welcomed the brief experiences of the river and had serious thoughts of being a blacksmith. He had prized his great strength less for the labor he might perform than for the supremacy which it gave him in physical contests; and it had made him the admired leader of the local wrestlers and the idol of the Clary Grove gang.

He had come to New Salem able to read, and to make what he called "rabbit tracks" as clerk on election day, assisting Mentor Graham, who rewarded him many fold in what he later taught to the young giant. He left New Salem a competent surveyor, a member of the bar, a representative in the Legislature, and, he might have called himself Captain, if he had chosen to do so, or even taken advantage of the frontier's ready system of post-bellum promotions and acquired higher rank as an officer who had seen actual military service. He had the good sense not to do this, and about the only commendable thing in his one important speech in Congress in later years was his mirthful description of his own military performance.

He had learned to think, to compose reasonably good English, to stand on his feet and debate. He had learned to measure his intellectual strength against that of other men, and to come out ahead at least part of the time. He was possessed of almost inordinate ambition, and had no false notion that in his case the office was to seek the man;[17] he was more than ready for any office that would support him, enable him to reduce his "national debt," and advance him toward something higher. He was entering the profession of the law, but law was to him as yet a means to an end, and that end was office. Politics was the vocation and law the avocation in a large percentage of the law offices in Illinois and other new States; and Lincoln was a politician long before he was a lawyer.

His residence in New Salem had tested his moral character and confirmed his personal habits. He did not drink nor swear nor use tobacco.

In a state of society such as then existed, there was almost nothing which such a young man might not have aspired to, and Lincoln had high self-esteem and large aspiration. From this distance we see him leaving New Salem to "wink out" while he rode his borrowed steed far beyond Springfield, to tether him at last where Thomas Jefferson is alleged to have hitched his horse, to the palings of the White House.

But it was no exultant mood which possessed the soul of Lincoln as he turned his back upon his alma mater and went forth to conquer the world. He was a briefless lawyer, and bedless as well as briefless. He had met and mastered men, but had become painfully aware of his own poverty, his lack of education, his utter ignorance of the usages of even such polite society as had been in New Salem, to say nothing of that in Springfield.

He was unsettled in love and unsettled in religion, though he had been on speaking terms with both. He had loved and lost Ann Rutledge, and he did not love Mary Owens and could not lose her. He was about to begin one of the loneliest periods of his very lonely life. For a year only one woman in Springfield spoke to him, and she would rather not have done so. He did not go to church nor mingle in society, but faced the hard and bitter problems that confronted him in earning a living, making some small payments on his debt, settling his relations with Mary Owens, and possibly giving some thought to his soul. But this was not a time of one of his spiritual high water-marks.