Abraham Lincoln

by William Eleroy Curtis

A few months later Lincoln wrote Johnston again in regard to his contemplated move to Missouri:

"What can you do in Missouri better than here? Is the land any richer? Can you there, any more than here, raise corn and wheat and oats without work? Will anybody there, any more than here, do your work for you? If you intend to go to work, there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not intend to go to work, you cannot get along anywhere. Squirming and crawling about from place to place can do you no good. You have raised no crop this year; and what you really want is to sell the land, get the money, and spend it. Part with the land you have, and, my life upon it, you will never after own a spot big enough to bury you in. Half you will get for the land you will spend in moving to Missouri, and the other half you will eat, drink, and wear out, and no foot of land will be bought. Now, I feel it my duty to have no hand in such a piece of foolery."

Shortly after leaving his father's primitive home in the spring of 1831, Lincoln obtained employment with Denton Offutt, a trader and speculator, who, having heard that he had already made a voyage on a flat-boat from Indiana to New Orleans, engaged him for a similar expedition, in company with John D. Johnston, his step-brother, and John Hanks, his cousin, for twelve dollars a month each with their return expenses. It took some time to build the boat, and at the very beginning of the voyage it stuck midway across a dam at the village of New Salem. The bow was high in the air, the stern was low in the water, and shipwreck seemed absolutely certain when Lincoln's ingenuity rescued the craft. Having unloaded the cargo, he bored a hole in the bottom at the end extending over the dam; then he tilted up the boat and let the water run out. That being done, the boat was easily shoved over the dam and reloaded. This novel exhibition of marine engineering so impressed the inhabitants of the neighborhood that Abraham Lincoln's genius was discussed at every fireside for months thereafter, and he gained a reputation at New Salem that proved to be of great value. He was so much interested in what he had done that twenty years later he developed the idea and applied for a patent for a curious contrivance for lifting flat-boats over shoals.

The journey to New Orleans was a valuable experience. Lincoln's first actual contact with the system of slavery made him an abolitionist for life, and the impressions he received were retained throughout his entire career. He returned to St. Louis by steamer, walked across the country to New Salem, and became a clerk in the store of Denton Offutt, measuring calico, weighing out sugar and nails, tending a grist-mill, and making himself useful to his employer and popular with the people.

The following year he engaged in a mercantile adventure on his own account at New Salem which failed disastrously, and found himself loaded with obligations which, in humorous satire upon his own folly, he called "the national debt." His creditors accepted his notes in settlement, and during the next seventeen years he paid them in instalments unto the uttermost farthing, although the terrible responsibility darkened all the days of his life.

"That debt," he once said to a friend, "was the greatest obstacle I have ever met in my life; I had no way of speculating, and could not earn money except by labor, and to earn by labor eleven hundred dollars besides my living seemed the work of a lifetime. There was, however, but one way. I went to the creditors, and told them that if they would let me alone I would give them all I could earn over my living, as fast as I could earn it."

As late as 1849, when a member of Congress, so we are informed by Mr. Herndon, he sent home money saved from his salary to be applied on these obligations. Only a single creditor refused to accept his promises. A man named Van Bergen, who bought one of his notes on speculation, brought suit, obtained judgment against him, and levied upon the horse, saddle, and instruments used by him daily in surveying, and with which, to use his own words, he "kept body and soul together."

James Short, a well-to-do farmer living a few miles north of New Salem, heard of the trouble which had befallen his young friend, and, without advising Lincoln, attended the sale, bought in the horse and surveying instruments for one hundred and twenty dollars, and turned them over to their former owner. After Lincoln left New Salem James Short removed to the far West, and one day thirty years later he received a letter from Washington, containing the surprising but gratifying announcement that he had been commissioned as Indian agent.

It was this honorable discharge of the obligations in which he became involved through the rascality of another man that gave Lincoln the sobriquet of "Honest Old Abe," which one of his biographers has said "proved of greater service to himself and his country than if he had gained the wealth of Crœsus."

It was while he was struggling along, trying to do business with his partner Berry, that he was appointed postmaster at New Salem, which office he continued to hold until it was discontinued in May, 1836. His duties as postmaster, as well as his compensation, were very light, because there were only two or three hundred patrons of the office and their correspondence was limited. He carried their letters around in his hat and read all of their newspapers before he delivered them.