Lincoln also enjoyed telling the story of a camp meeting where, as the tents were being struck, “a little wizened-faced man ascended the log steps of the pulpit, and clasping his small hands, and rolling his weak eyes upward, squealed out, ‘Brethern and sis-tern!’ ” Because he presented “such a striking contrast to the last speaker,” the assembled people paused “to look with wonder upon him.” Encouraged by their attention, he resumed: “I rise to norate on toe you on the subject of the baptismal—yes, the baptismal! Ahem. There was Noah, he had three sons—ahem—namlie, Shadadarack, Meshisck, and Bellteezer! They all went in toe the Dannel’s den, and likewise with them was a lion! Ahem.” Observing that his auditors were inattentive, the fellow adopted a new tack: “Dear perishing friends, ef you will not hear on toe me on this great subject, I will only say this, that Squire Nobbs has recently lost a little bay mare with a flaxy mane and tail amen!”121
Even though Lincoln delighted in mimicking backwoods clergymen, something of what they preached became embedded in his psyche, for he remained a Calvinistic fatalist throughout life. He frequently quoted Hamlet’s lines, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/ Rough-hew them how we will.” He also found religious significance in the poetry of Alexander Pope, whose “Essay on Man,” he said, “contained all the religious instruction which it was necessary for a man to know.”122 He repeatedly said: “What is to be [will be] and no cares (prayers) of ours Can [arrest] the decree.”123 Lincoln also retained a fondness for the frontier ministers’ theatrical style. In 1861 he told the sculptor Leonard Volk, “I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!”124
Relations with the Opposite Sex
Lincoln’s great height and sartorial indifference did not endear him to the opposite sex, nor was his physical and social awkwardness very appealing. He was strikingly tall: He reached 6 feet by age 16, and he kept growing until by 21 he attained his full height of 6 feet 4 inches. He was thin, swarthy, and rawboned. Though he was “very careful of his person” and “tolerably neat and clean,” his clothes were typically rough and suited to the frontier—tow linen pants in warm weather, buckskin pants in cool weather, flax shirts, linsey-woolsey jackets, short socks, low shoes, and caps fashioned from animal skins. But they fit him poorly; his pants often exposed 6 to 12 inches of shin. This did not bother him, for he cared little about fashion.125
Lincoln got along well enough with neighborhood girls, kidding and chatting with them, but they found him “too green and awkward” to care for him romantically.126 One Indiana maiden recalled that “he was so tall and awkward” and that all “the young girls my age made fun of Abe. They’d laugh at him right before his face, but Abe never ’peared to care. He was so good and he’d just laugh with them. Abe tried to go with some of them, but no sir-ee, they’d give him the mitten every time, just because he was … so tall and gawky, and it was mighty awkward I can tell you trying to keep company with a fellow as tall as Abe was.”127 Elizabeth Wood found him “too awkward.”128 Pretty, vain Elizabeth Tuley reported that “he was big and awkward and couldn’t dance much.” Whenever she was seen with Lincoln, her friends “teased her unmercifully” about “his coat sleeves and pantlegs always being too short.”129 Another young woman who thought him “too big, awkward & ugly” further objected that he “just cared too much for books.”130 Lincoln attended parties but refused to dance. Instead, he would gather several boys together and tell stories, which upset the girls, for they would as a result have trouble rounding up partners for dancing.
For his part, Lincoln returned the girls’ indifference. His friend Anna Roby was one of many who noted that Abe “didn’t like girls much” and found them “too frivalous.”131 Lincoln’s cousin, Sophie Hanks, reported that Abe “didn[’]t like the girls company.”132 His stepmother remembered that he “was not very fond of girls.”133 John Hanks said that “I never Could get him in Company with women: he was not a timid man in this particular, but [he] did not seek such company.”134 Some Hoosiers alleged that after Lincoln turned 17 he began to take a romantic interest in the opposite sex, but the evidence tends to support Dennis Hanks, who called Lincoln the “bashfullest boy that ever lived,” and John D. Johnston, who said Lincoln “didn’t take much truck with the girls” because “he was too busy studying.”135
Quasi-Slavery as a Rented Laborer
Lincoln was indeed busy, but not always with a book in hand. He worked hard on his father’s farm and also for neighbors to whom Thomas rented his boy. Around 1825, Thomas Lincoln found himself in greater financial trouble than usual when a friend defaulted on a loan that he had endorsed. To pay off that note, Thomas removed Abe from school and hired him out to neighbors such as Thomas Turnham, Wesley Hall, William Wood, Silas Richardson, Joseph Gentry, John Dutton, John Jones, and Josiah Crawford. For the next few years, Lincoln was virtually a slave, toiling as a butcher, ferry operator, riverman, store clerk, farmhand, wood chopper, distiller, and sawyer, earning anywhere from 10¢ to 31¢ a day. He handed these meager wages over to Thomas, in compliance with the law stipulating that children were the property of their father and that any money they earned belonged to him. Locked in this bondage, Abraham felt as if he were a chattel on a Southern plantation. “I used to be a slave,” he declared in 1856.136 This painful experience led him to identify with the slaves and to denounce human bondage even when it was politically risky to do so.
Among the people for whom young Lincoln slaved was a neighbor named Carter, who paid him 10¢ a day to cut corn. Josiah Crawford gave him 25¢ daily to split rails, build fences, dig wells, cut pork, clear land, daub his cabin, and perform other farm chores. When Lincoln and Joseph Richardson pulled fodder, they each received 25¢ for a full day’s work. In 1827, he spent three months clearing land for John Jones, who compensated the young laborer with corn instead of money. Lincoln received 20¢ a day from James Taylor, who hired him to operate a ferry on Anderson Creek. When not shuttling passengers across that 100-foot-wide expanse of water, Lincoln helped with chores on Taylor’s farm, where he lived for several months.
Lincoln’s most lucrative work, earning him 31¢¢ a day, was butchering hogs for Taylor. It was also his nastiest job, involving “Barrells of hot water— blankets—clubs.”137 A hog had to be clubbed, doused in scalding water, and its bristles removed. Then one man held the warm, moist, greasy carcass, as heavy as 200 pounds, nearly perpendicular with its head down; another man ran a gambrel bar through a slit in the animal’s hock, over a string pole, and then through the other hock. Holding the hog was a challenge. Lincoln termed this regimen at Taylor’s “the roughest work a young man could be made to do.”138 Abe still managed to get in some reading at Taylor’s. He would read until midnight, then rise early, make a fire for Mrs. Taylor, put on the water, and straighten up the place.
While working for Taylor, Lincoln built a small boat. One day two gentlemen in a hurry saw the craft and asked Lincoln to row them and their trunks out to a steamer on the Ohio River. He gladly agreed. While boarding the steamboat, the men dumbfounded Lincoln by pitching two silver half-dollars into his vessel. Recounting this episode, he said: “it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar. The world seemed wider and fairer before me; I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.”139
Rowing passengers out onto the Ohio was lucrative, but it soon provoked a ferry owner on the Kentucky shore to sue Lincoln for operating without a license. The presiding justice of the peace, Samuel Pate, ruled for the defense, pointing out that the statute in question covered ferries plying between the southern and northern banks of the Ohio and not ferrymen who merely rowed passengers partway across the river. This episode may have stirred young Lincoln’s interest in the law; it might have also predisposed him to read Constable Thomas Turnham’s copy of The Statutes of Indiana with unus
ual avidity.
As a ferryman, Lincoln had grown so fond of working on the water that he readily accepted the offer made by a local merchant, James Gentry, to accompany his son Allen on a cargo boat trip to Louisiana. The two young men spent weeks constructing a flatboat for their corn, pork, potatoes, hay, and kraut—all destined for Deep South sugar plantations. In late December 1828, they shoved off from Rockport on a 1,200-mile, seven-week excursion down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, with Lincoln manning the bow oars and Gentry the tiller. The constantly changing scenery and the boats passing by kept the voyage from becoming monotonous. From the riverbanks, villagers would call out, “Where are you from?” “Where are you bound?” “What are you loaded with? ” Gentry and Lincoln slept on the hard deck, which was difficult when storms raged, forcing them to struggle hard to keep their boat from capsizing. On occasion they were pelted by rain for days on end.140
As they floated down the Mississippi, Gentry and Lincoln stopped frequently to peddle their cargo. They traded foodstuffs for cotton, tobacco, and sugar. One night, while tied up at a plantation a few miles below Baton Rouge, they were attacked by seven slaves. The blacks, noting that only two young men were aboard the boat, attempted to rob it. Gentry and Lincoln fended them off in a fierce struggle during which both were badly hurt.
After selling all their wares along the banks of the Mississippi, they proceeded to New Orleans. As they strolled about, Lincoln saw something that would leave an indelible impression on him: a slave auction at which scantily clad young women were exhibited on the block and pinched and ogled by prospective buyers. Revolted, Lincoln said: “Allen, that’s a disgrace.”141 It was the first time, but not the last, that he would be repelled while observing slavery firsthand.
Lincoln and Gentry probably returned to Illinois via steamboat, perhaps one like the ship Frances Trollope described in her reminiscences of the riverboatmen whom she observed on a voyage up the Mississippi: “We had about two hundred of these men on board, but the part of the vessel occupied by them is so distinct from the cabins, that we never saw them, except when we stopped to take in wood; and then they ran, or rather sprung and vaulted over each other’s heads to the shore, whence they all assisted in carrying wood to supply the steam engine; the performance of this duty being a stipulated part of the payment of their passage.”142 When Lincoln reached home, tales of his adventures won him a reputation as a capable boatman and a courageous fighter.
If the trip to New Orleans convinced Lincoln that chattel slavery was disgraceful, it also intensified his desire to escape his own quasi-slavery in Indiana. Soon after his return, Lincoln called on a neighbor, William Wood. When the shy young man found it difficult to get to the point, Wood prompted him: “Abe, what is your Case?”
“Uncle I want you to go to the River—(the Ohio) and give me Some recommendation to some boat.”
Citing the law that made children their father’s property until they attained their majority, Wood said: “Abe—your age is against you—you are not 21 yet.”
“I Know that,” protested Lincoln, “but I want a start.”
Wood refused, counseling Lincoln to stay with his father until 1830. Reluctantly, Lincoln took that advice.143
Lincoln may have been eager to escape his home for some time. An interviewer who spoke with people who knew Lincoln concluded, “Mr. L does not appear to have cared for home after the death of his mother.”144 At 13 he worked away from home for the first time, cutting wood with Dennis Hanks and Squire Hall on the banks of the Ohio. Thereafter he frequently absented himself from the paternal cabin. In 1825, at the age of 16, he stayed several months with the Taylors on Anderson Creek. After his sister Sarah wed Aaron Grigsby in the summer of 1826, Lincoln spent much time at their home. In the spring of 1827, he lived with John Jones’s family at Dale, returning home only on Saturday nights. That same year Lincoln and John D. Johnston journeyed to Louisville, where they found employment on the Louisville and Portland Canal. In the fall of 1828, while helping Allen Gentry construct their flatboat, Lincoln stayed weeks with the family of Daniel Grass in Rockport. He lived with William Jones when he worked on his farm and at his Gentryville store.
Lincoln heartily disliked farm chores. His employers, neighbors, and family all testified that he “was not industrious as a worker on the farm or at any other Kind of Manu[al] Labor.”145 Lincoln admitted that “his father taught him to work but never learned him to love it.”146
On the frontier, “laziness” connoted physical, not mental, indolence. A neighbor of the Lincolns in Illinois recalled that Abe “always did take” to “book-readin’ ” and “on that account we uns uset to think he would n’t amount to much. You see, it war n’t book-readin’ then, it war work, that counted.”147 Another Illinois acquaintance, John Purkapile, declared that “Lincoln was a mighty lazy man. Why, I’ve seen him under a tree with a book in his hand and too mortal lazy to move when the sun came round.”148 As his stepsister Matilda observed, Lincoln was indeed intellectually industrious, if reluctant to perform farm chores: “Abe was not Energetic Except in one thing—he was active & persistant in learning—read Everything he Could—Ciphered on boards—on the walls.”149 Sarah Bush Lincoln told an interviewer that her stepson “was diligent for Knowledge—wished to Know & if pains & Labor would get it he was sure to get it.”150
Longing to escape the toilsome world of subsistence farming and make something of himself, Lincoln prophetically told Elizabeth Crawford, “I don’t always intend to delve, grub, shuck corn, split rails, and the like.”151 She remembered that “Abe was ambitious, sought to outstrip and override others.”152 His friend Joseph Gentry had a similar recollection: “Abe wa[s]n’t fond of work and often told me he never intended to make his living that way—he often said he would get some profession, in fact his whole mind seemed bent on learning and education.”153 Sophie Hanks recalled that her cousin Abe “always had a natural idea that he was going to be something.”154 In 1829, Lincoln wrote this couplet in a friend’s copybook:
“Good boys who to their books apply
Will make great men by & by.”155
When he could, Lincoln lured others into shunning chores with him. He would employ pranks, tricks, stories, and jokes to distract them. One day when he and Dennis Hanks had a job pulling fodder, they procrastinated all morning by playing marbles. At noon, Hanks “reminded Lincoln that they had not pulled any fodder. Lincoln replied that he had rather play marbles any time than pull fodder.”156
Upon his return from New Orleans, after weeks of freedom as a flatboatman, Lincoln grudgingly resumed the uncompensated toil imposed on him by his father. The contrast to his life on the water seemed to curdle Lincoln’s good nature; in 1829 the dark side of his personality emerged as he became testy, belligerent, spiteful, and vindictive. This transformation was especially obvious when he attacked the neighboring Grigsby clan. Although Nathaniel Grigsby was one of his best friends, Abe detested Nathaniel’s older brother, Aaron, who had married his sister Sarah in 1826. Lincoln believed that the prosperous Grigsby family mistreated her and looked down on her because she had been “hired help.”157 Joseph C. Richardson remarked on Lincoln’s anger at Grigsby: “You may think you have forgiven the fellow who married your sister and abused her, but you never do. You go gunning for him in your sleep.”158
A year and a half after her wedding, Sarah died in childbirth. Upon hearing the news, Lincoln “sat down on a log and hid his face in his hands while the tears rolled down through his long bony fingers. Those present turned away in pity and left him to his grief.”159 Repeatedly he asked himself: “What have I to live for?” Henry C. Whitney, who thought that “Abraham’s inner life was a desert of sorrow,” speculated plausibly that Sarah’s passing reawakened painful memories of his mother’s death.160 Lincoln and his father blamed Sarah’s death on the neglectful conduct of the Grigsby clan. The Grigsbys contended that they had taken good care of her but that the only nearby doctor had been too drunk to tend t
o her.
Lincoln had another falling out with the Grigsbys when everyone in the neighborhood except his family was invited to celebrate the double wedding of Reuben and Charles Grigsby to Elizabeth Ray and Matilda Hawkins, respectively. “Miffed” and “insulted,” Abraham vowed revenge for the slight.161 With his highly developed knack for mimicry and sarcasm, Lincoln penned a satire in biblical language titled “The Chronicles of Reuben,” which described grooms inadvertently bedding down the wrong brides. This burlesque, Nathaniel Grigsby recalled, was so “sharp” and “cutting” that “it hurt us.”162 It became famous in the Buck Horn Valley, where the Chronicles of Reuben were remembered “better than the Bible—better than Watts hymns.” Joseph C. Richardson called the Chronicles “the first production that I know of that made us feel that Abe was truly & real[l]y some[one]. This called the attention of the People to Abe intellectually.”163 Lincoln evidently wrote other satirical pieces in Indiana, though none seem to have survived.
Not content with the wounds inflicted on Reuben and Charles, Lincoln wrote a bawdy poem questioning the sexual preference of their brother William:
I will tell you a Joke about [Josiah?] & Mary
Tis neither a joke nor a story
For Reuben & Charles have married 2 Girls
But Billy has married a boy
He tried the girls on Every Side
He had well tried
None could he get to agree
All was in vain
He went home again
And since that he’s married to Natty
so biley and naty agreed very well
and mamas well pleased at the matc[h]
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 9
