the egg it is laid but Natys afraid
the Shell is So Soft that it never will hatc[h]
but betsy She Said you Cursed ball head
my Suiter you never Can be
besids your low Croch proclaimes you a botch
and that never Can anser for me.164
Thirsting for revenge, William Grigsby challenged Lincoln to a fight, but the larger and stronger Lincoln protested that it would hardly be a fair match. So they hit on a compromise: Grigsby would battle Lincoln’s stepbrother, John D. Johnston. As John Gentry recalled it, the fight became a much-anticipated spectacle: “The ring was pitched in Warrick County, a short distance from the old Lincoln homestead. That was for the purpose of evading any investigation by the grand jury. The fight was well advertised.… Every township in the county was represented, I reckon. There was a big crowd present. Abe Lincoln was there, and he was mad because he couldn’t get anybody to fight him.”165 Johnston and Grigsby pummeled each other until Johnston was seriously hurt. At that point, “Abe burst through, caught Grigsby—threw him off some feet—stood up and swore he was the big buck at the lick.” A general melee then broke out.166
This uncharacteristically boastful intervention in a fight that he himself caused suggests that Lincoln at age 20 was not entirely a paragon of virtue, despite his reputation as a sociable, cheerful, good-natured, and gentle fellow. The Bolins of Perry County thought that “the young Lincoln of Pigeon Creek, like all his Indiana cronies, was pretty much of a rowdy, and, certainly, was not of a saintly nature.”167 What Henry Whitney aptly called a “reprehensible trait of character” that Lincoln showed in cruelly satirizing the Grigsbys would mar him for years to come; not until midlife did he cease wounding people with his exceptional knack for ridicule.168
In other ways Lincoln showed his frontier crudeness. “At times, a highly polished cuss word would escape his lips,” his stepmother admitted, and he began to develop a taste for alcohol.169 In 1858, he told a friend that “he had never taken a drink of any alcoholic beverage in the past twenty years,” clearly implying that he stopped drinking in 1838, at the age of 29.170 Nathaniel Grigsby testified that Lincoln was a “temperate drinker,” who drank “his dram as well as all others did, preachers & Christians included.”171 Elizabeth Tuley alleged that at least once Abe “had gotten too much cider of apple-jack … and fell in a branch on his face and almost drowned.” Her strict father never forgave Lincoln for that one lapse.172
In Indiana, Lincoln acquired a lifelong fondness for off-color humor. Dennis Hanks said Lincoln liked to sing “Little Smut[t]y Songs,” but Hanks refused to recite their lyrics, for it “would Not Look well in print.”173 J. Rowan Herndon also declined to tell all he knew of Lincoln’s anecdotes: “there is many … that i could Mention But thay [are] on the vulger order.”174 Lincoln wrote a satire about Charles Harper, who one day encountered Mrs. Noah Gordon as he was riding to the mill with a long bag of wheat. She remarked, “Brother, your bag is too long.”
“No,” he replied, “it is only too long in the summer.”
When Mrs. Gordon told her husband about this ribald remark, he demanded a church trial. Lincoln heard about the proceedings and penned a witty commentary poking fun at the parties involved.175
Young Lincoln could be “a kind of forward boy,” a “little rude,” and “stubborn,” according to Dennis Hanks, who also remarked that Lincoln was “a good listener to his Superiors” but “bad to his inferiors” because “he Couldn’t Endure Jabber.”176 One day while working on Anderson Creek as a ferryman, he taunted Green B. Taylor about a girl in a nearby town whom Taylor disliked. Exasperated, Taylor hurled a large ear of corn at him. Lincoln then “spanked him good and plenty.”177 Lincoln liked to deflate boastful men. One election day, for example, while en route to the polls, he encountered a braggart named James Larkin, who boasted about his mare’s great speed: “Why,” said Larkin, “yesterday I run her five miles in four minutes—and She never drew a long breath’ ” Lincoln replied quietly, “I guess She drew a great many Short ones.” The consequent laughter enraged Larkin, who “declared he would fight Abe if he wasn’t so big. He cussed and jumped around until Abe quietly said, Now Larkin, if you don’t shut up I’ll throw you in that water.”178
The Move to Illinois
In 1830, Thomas Lincoln moved his family to a site near the hamlet of Decatur, in Macon County, Illinois, where John Hanks and some of his relatives had settled two years earlier. Hanks’s letters extolling the virtues of the Prairie State helped induce Thomas to migrate west. His decision was abrupt; in 1829 he and Abraham had been whipsawing logs for a new cabin in Indiana and had already erected the walls.
Dennis Hanks took the lead in migrating west. He removed his wife, Elizabeth (the elder daughter of Sarah Bush Lincoln), and their four children from Indiana because of an outbreak of the milk sickness. Not wanting to be separated from her daughter and grandchildren, Mrs. Lincoln prevailed upon Thomas to join Dennis and Elizabeth in Illinois. Thomas sold his farm, corn, and pigs to Indiana neighbors, disposed of his wife’s lot in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and from his church obtained a letter of dismission, a kind of recommendation to other Baptist congregations. (Little Pigeon Creek Church records show that a month after that letter was issued, “Nancy Grigsby informed the church that she was not satisfied with Bro. and Sister Lincoln.… The church agreed and called back their letter until satisfaction could be attained.… The parties convened at Wm. Hoskins and agreed and settled the difficulty.” The substance of Mrs. Grigsby’s complaint is unknown.)179
On March 1, 1830, with his wife, son, stepson, stepdaughters, and their families—eight adults and five children all told—Thomas Lincoln set out for Illinois in a primitive wagon which Abe and his father had constructed almost entirely of wood, with few iron parts. Many neighbors, including James Grigsby, turned out to see them off. Their departure was slightly delayed by Abraham’s tardiness. When he finally appeared, Grigsby noticed Thomas, ox whip in hand, looking impatiently at his son. “Watch old Tom flail him,” Grigsby said to a friend. But instead of a beating, Thomas gave Abraham the whip and told him to lead the way.180
The 225-mile journey took the family past Lickskillett, Loafers Station, Polk-berry Creek, the Embarrass River, Polk Patch, Dead Man’s Grove, Purgatory Bottom, and Paradise, areas that, judging by their names, no doubt had a story of their own to tell. Problems with the crude wagon wheels—disks of solid wood—forced occasional stops, including one in Vincennes, where Lincoln visited a newspaper office and first beheld a printing press. As they crossed a river coated with a thin layer of ice, they inadvertently left behind Lincoln’s dog, which could be heard in the distance howling in despair. Lincoln removed his shoes, rolled up his pants, and waded through the frigid water to rescue the canine. In recounting this story, he said, “I guess that I felt about as glad as the dog.”181 Although the weather was generally mild, the roads were so wet that for long stretches Abe found himself slogging through mud several inches deep. The Kaskaskia River overflowed its banks, almost washing out the corduroy road. Following some debate, the party decided to press on, and for a few miles Abraham led the team through water so high that it threatened to sweep away wagon, oxen, and all.
After two weeks, they finally reached John Hanks’s spread on the Sangamon River, 4 miles northwest of Decatur, where they received a hearty welcome. According to Henry C. Whitney, Hanks was “home-spun, matter-of-fact, and dull to a superlative degree, but he was the very soul of generosity, truth, and probity.”182
As of February 12, 1830, Lincoln was at last legally free to go his own way, but he did not do so. His sense of duty overruled the desire of his heart, and he postponed his self-emancipation in order to help his family as they settled into a new home. Abraham helped Hanks and Thomas Lincoln build a cabin, fence it in, and clear several acres. Conditions there were primitive; deer and wolves roamed about freely, sometimes coming close enough to homes to be visible from doorways and
windows. When building cabins for his father and others, Lincoln always served as one of the men to true up corners, a task that required a keen eye and expertise with an ax.
Because he often stayed with the families who hired him as a laborer, Lincoln spent little time in this new cabin. For Macon County sheriff William Warnick, Reuben Brown, William Butler, Charles Hanks, and William Miller, among others, he broke prairie, raised crops, and split rails. One cold day, when Miller’s wife (John Hanks’s sister Nancy) noticed that Lincoln’s pants were worn out, she offered to make him new ones. To his protest that he had no money, she replied that he could chop wood for her instead of paying cash. In both Macon and Sangamon counties, Lincoln and John Hanks cut innumerable cords of wood and divided the profits equally. (Lincoln’s later reputation as a rail-splitter was no fanciful invention of political publicists.) Joining them in some of these labors was George Close, who described Lincoln as “the toughest looking man I ever saw,” a “poor boy” dressed in “pants made of flax and tow, cut tight at the ankle—his knees were both out.” Close recalled that they had a “hard time to get work. All a man could do was to keep himself in clothes.” Lincoln trudged “5, 6, and 7 miles to his day’s work.”183 As a farmhand, he was especially adept with a reap hook, which was “hard, hot, thirsty work.”184 At lunch break, he bolted down his food and spent most of the hour reading.
Henry C. Whitney, to whom Lincoln described his year in Macon County, called that period one of the “three eras of unusual hardship and misery” in Lincoln’s “melancholy journey of life.” (The other two unusually painful periods, Whitney asserted, were those following the deaths of Nancy Hanks Lincoln in 1818 and his sweetheart Ann Rutledge in 1835.)185
Lincoln’s introduction to Illinois politics occurred in the summer of 1830 when he was working for William Butler as a plowman at Island Grove, near Springfield. There he heard a speech by Peter Cartwright, a popular Methodist circuit rider campaigning for office. Butler recalled that Lincoln, though “awkward and very shabbily dressed,” challenged the speaker for being too dogmatic. “[M]y first special attention was attracted to Lincoln,” Butler said, “by the way in which he met the great preacher in his arguments, and the extensive acquaintance he showed with the politics of the State—in fact he quite beat him in the argument.”186
Later that season, Lincoln put to work the speaking skills he had been cultivating for years as a mimic. He attended a debate in Decatur between two candidates for the state legislature, William L. D. Ewing and John F. Posey. Posey had violated Illinois custom by failing to offer liquid refreshment to the crowd; people on the hard-drinking frontier expected candidates to treat them to alcoholic beverages. When George Close urged Lincoln to abuse Posey, Lincoln responded that he would do so as long as his friends promised not to laugh at him. Frightened when he began speaking, Lincoln quickly warmed up and delivered a respectable speech. Instead of attacking Posey, he spoke well of both candidates and offered a vision of the future of Illinois. After he finished, Ewing complimented Lincoln, calling him “a bright one.”187 Then Posey took Abe aside and “asked him where he had learned So much.” When Abe described his program of reading, Posey encouraged him “to persevere.”188
Thomas Lincoln did not wish to persevere in Illinois. In the summer of 1830 everyone in and around Decatur was attacked by disease-bearing mosquitoes (“gallinippers” in frontier parlance) whose bite transmitted malaria, a debilitating and discouraging disease then variously known as “Illinois shakes,” “the ague,” or simply “chills and fever.” Thomas and his family were seriously afflicted. He and his wife shivered uncontrollably, and their married daughter who came to nurse them was scarcely better off. Miserable, Thomas vowed “that as soon as he got able to travel he would ‘git out o’ thar.’ ”189
Eventually frost killed off the mosquitoes, but relief was short-lived, for a December blizzard dumped 3 feet of snow on central Illinois. Soon thereafter, a freezing rain encrusted the snow with a layer of ice, followed by more snow. Then temperatures plunged below zero and remained there for a fortnight. This season would become immortalized in the annals of Illinois history as “the winter of the deep snow.” For two miserable months the Lincolns and their neighbors, ill-prepared for such harsh weather, huddled captive in their cabins while livestock froze and starved outside. Abraham, putting aside his aversion to hunting, braved the cold in search of game. The deer were easy prey because they were caught fast when their sharp hooves broke through the ice crust. To a farmer he encountered, Lincoln reported: “We have used up all of our corn, and now have to go to our neighbors for assistance.”190 One day Lincoln’s feet got wet crossing the Sangamon River as he headed for Sheriff Warnick’s and became frostbitten as he trudged 2 more miles to his destination. Mrs. Warnick nursed him back to health.
Discouraged by mosquitoes and snowstorms, Thomas Lincoln retreated toward Indiana in the spring of 1831. En route, he stopped at the Coles County home of his sister-in-law, where she and other relatives, including John Sawyer, a good friend of Thomas from Kentucky, persuaded him to settle in their neighborhood. Thomas and his family built a cabin in nearby Buck Grove, where they stayed until 1834, when they moved to Muddy Point, also in Coles County. Three years later they migrated to yet another location in that county, Goosenest Prairie, near Farmington; there Thomas would remain for the rest of his life. His wife Sarah, unhappy with this nomadic existence, told the neighbors “that they moved so often that it reminded her of the children of Israel trying to find the Promised Land.” When Thomas suggested yet another move, she flatly refused.191
Lincoln did not accompany his family as they headed back to Indiana. In March 1831 his stepmother bundled up his meager possessions, which he slung over his shoulder and he struck out on his own. No longer could Thomas rent him out to neighbors and attach the wages he earned in the abundant sweat of his brow. Though unsure about what he wanted to do, young Lincoln knew for certain that he did not wish to lead the crude life of a subsistence farmer, mired in poverty, superstition, and ignorance. He had had his fill of primitive backwoods agriculture and culture. Later, as a politician, he would not pander to farmers. Despite his enthusiasm for measures promoting economic growth and opportunity, he paid little attention to homestead legislation offering people free farms on government land, which many Republicans considered the best means to end poverty.
In abandoning farm life, Lincoln was hardly unique. Horace Greeley echoed many commentators when he wrote, “[o]ur farmers’ sons escape from their fathers’ calling whenever they can, because it is made a mindless, monotonous drudgery.”192
Fleeing that drudgery and what he called “parental tyranny,” Lincoln strove to distance himself from the world of his father, who for Abe embodied the indolence, ignorance, and backwardness that he so disliked.193 Lincoln’s adult life clearly represented a flight from the frontier. Once he left the paternal home, Lincoln would never invite Thomas to visit him. Never would he give Thomas the satisfaction of knowing that his name would be carried on by a grandson. Never would Thomas see his grandchildren or his daughter-in-law. Never would Lincoln perform Thomas’s work as a farmer and carpenter. Never would he pursue Thomas’s favorite forms of recreation, hunting and fishing. As he stepped from the Macon County cabin, Lincoln was free at last, free at last.
3
“Separated from His Father, He Studied
English Grammar”
New Salem
(1831–1834)
In 1848, the 39-year-old Lincoln offered some sage advice to his law partner, William H. Herndon, who had complained that he and other young Whigs were being discriminated against by older Whigs. In denying the allegation, Lincoln urged him to avoid thinking of himself as a victim: “The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him. Allow me to assure you, that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation. There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a youn
g man down; and they will succeed too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury. Cast about, and see if this feeling has not injured every person you have ever known to fall into it.”1
By his own account, Lincoln began his emancipated life “a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy.”2 After escaping from his paternal home, he spent three years preparing himself for a way of life far different from the hardscrabble existence into which he had been born. As he groped his way toward a new identity, he improved himself every way he could.
Frontier Boatman, Humorist, and Jack-of-All-Trades
To earn some pennies, Lincoln accepted an offer from a Kentucky entrepreneur named Denton Offutt to take a flatboat to New Orleans. Offutt was a stocky, talkative, bibulous merchant and speculator constantly on the lookout for quick money. He was also something of a confidence man, peddling a magical expression that would allegedly tame horses when whispered in their ears. Lincoln’s friends thought Offutt “gassy” and “rattle brained.”3 A sheriff from whose jail Offutt escaped in 1834 said he tried to pass for the gentleman he was not. When Offutt approached Lincoln, he was trying to recoup losses from a failed pork-packing enterprise by buying corn, beef, and pork cheap and selling them in the South. In February 1831, Offutt proposed to John Hanks, a skilled riverman, that he run a flatboat of goods to New Orleans. Hanks took Offutt to meet his cousin Abraham. “I am seeking employment,” Lincoln reportedly said. “I have had some experience in boating and boat building, and if you are in want of hands I think I can give you satisfaction.”4 Hanks, Lincoln, and John D. Johnston struck a deal to make the trip south as soon as the snow melted.
In March, the adventuresome trio paddled a canoe from Decatur to Springfield, where they discovered Offutt in the Buckhorn Tavern, dead drunk at midday. After sobering up, Offutt confessed that he had not yet obtained a flatboat, so the first task confronting the three young men would be to build one. They hiked 5 miles north to the mouth of Spring Creek, felled trees, floated the logs to a sawmill near Sangamo-town, and, with the help of Charles P. Cabanis, a knowledgeable carpenter, managed to construct a serviceable vessel 80 feet long by 18 feet wide.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 10
