Lincoln

N >> Nathaniel Wright Stephenson >> Lincoln


One great experience broke the monotony of the life on Pigeon Creek.
He made a trip to New Orleans as a "hand" on a flatboat. Of this trip
little is known though much may be surmised. To his deeply poetic nature
what an experience it must have been: the majesty of the vast river; the
pageant of its immense travel; the steamers heavily laden; the fleets of
barges; the many towns; the nights of stars over wide sweeps of water;
the stately plantation houses along the banks; the old French city with
its crowds, its bells, the shipping, the strange faces and the foreign
speech; all the bewildering evidence that there were other worlds
besides Pigeon Creek!

What seed of new thinking was sown in his imagination by this Odyssey
we shall never know. The obvious effect in the ten years of his life
in Indiana was produced at Pigeon Creek. The "settlement" was within
fifteen miles of the Ohio. It lay in that southerly fringe of Indiana
which received early in the century many families of much the same
estate, character and origin as the Lincolns,--poor whites of the edges
of the great forest working outward toward the prairies. Located on good
land not far from a great highway, the Ohio, it illustrated in its
rude prosperity a transformation that went on unobserved in many such
settlements, the transformation of the wandering forester of the lower
class into a peasant farmer. Its life was of the earth, earthy; though
it retained the religious traditions of the forest, their significance
was evaporating; mysticism was fading into emotionalism; the
camp-meeting was degenerating into a picnic. The supreme social event,
the wedding, was attended by festivities that filled twenty-four hours:
a race of male guests in the forenoon with a bottle of whisky for a
prize; an Homeric dinner at midday; "an afternoon of rough games and
outrageous practical jokes; a supper and dance at night interrupted
by the successive withdrawals of the bride and groom, attended by
ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian crudeness; and a noisy
dispersal next day."(3) The intensities of the forest survived in hard
drinking, in the fury of the fun-making, and in the hunt. The forest
passion for storytelling had in no way decreased.

In this atmosphere, about eighteen and nineteen, Abraham shot up
suddenly from a slender boy to a huge, raw-honed, ungainly man, six feet
four inches tall, of unusual muscular strength. His strength was one of
the fixed conditions of his development. It delivered him from all fear
of his fellows. He had plenty of peculiarities. He was ugly, awkward;
he lacked the wanton appetites of the average sensual man. And these
peculiarities without his great strength as his warrant might have
brought him into ridicule. As it was, whatever his peculiarities, in
a society like that of Pigeon Creek, the man who could beat all
competitors, wrestling or boxing, was free from molestation. But Lincoln
instinctively had another aim in life than mere freedom to be himself.
Two characteristics that were so significant in his childhood continued
with growing vitality in his young manhood: his placidity and his
intense sense of comradeship. The latter, however, had undergone a
change. It was no longer the comradeship of the wild creatures. That
spurt of physical expansion, the swift rank growth to his tremendous
stature, swept him apparently across a dim dividing line, out of the
world of birds and beasts and into the world of men. He took the new
world with the same unfailing but also unexcitable curiosity with which
he had taken the other, the world of squirrels, flowers, fawns.

Here as there, the difference from his mother, deep though their
similarities may have been, was sharply evident. Had he been wholly at
one with her religiously, the gift of telling speech which he now began
to display might have led him into a course that would have rejoiced
her heart, might have made him a boy preacher, and later, a great
revivalist. His father and elder sister while on Pigeon Creek joined the
local Baptist Church. But Abraham did not follow them. Nor is there a
single anecdote linking him in any way with the fervors of camp meeting.
On the contrary, what little is remembered, is of a cool aloofness.(4)
The inscrutability of the forest was his--what it gave to the stealthy,
cautious men who were too intent on observing, too suspiciously
watchful, to give vent to their feelings. Therefore, in Lincoln
there was always a double life, outer and inner, the outer quietly
companionable, the inner, solitary, mysterious.

It was the outer life that assumed its first definite phase in the years
on Pigeon Creek. During those years, Lincoln discovered his gift of
story-telling. He also discovered humor. In the employment of both
talents, he accepted as a matter of course the tone of the young
ruffians among whom he dwelt. Very soon this powerful fellow, who could
throw any of them in a wrestle, won the central position among them by a
surer title, by the power to delight. And any one who knows how peasant
schools of art arise--for that matter, all schools of art that are
vital--knows how he did it. In this connection, his famous biographers,
Nicolay and Hay, reveal a certain externality by objecting that a story
attributed to him is ancient. All stories are ancient. Not the tale, but
the telling, as the proverb says, is the thing. In later years, Lincoln
wrote down every good story that he heard, and filed it.(5) When it
reappeared it had become his own. Who can doubt that this deliberate
assimilation, the typical artistic process, began on Pigeon Creek?
Lincoln never would have captured as he did his plowboy audience, set
them roaring with laughter in the intervals of labor, had he not given
them back their own tales done over into new forms brilliantly beyond
their powers of conception. That these tales were gross, even ribald,
might have been taken for granted, even had we not positive evidence
of the fact. Otherwise none of that uproarious laughter which we may be
sure sounded often across shimmering harvest fields while stalwart young
pagans, ever ready to pause, leaned, bellowing, on the handles of their
scythes, Abe Lincoln having just then finished a story.

Though the humor of these stories was Falstaffian, to say the least,
though Lincoln was cock of the walk among the plowboys of Pigeon Creek,
a significant fact with regard to him here comes into view. Not an
anecdote survives that in any way suggests personal licentiousness.
Scrupulous men who in after-time were offended by his coarseness of
speech--for more or less of the artist of Pigeon Creek stuck to him
almost to the end; he talked in fables, often in gross fables--these
men, despite their annoyance, felt no impulse to attribute to him
personal habits in harmony with his tales. On the other hand, they
were puzzled by their own impression, never wavering, that he was
"pureminded." The clue which they did not have lay in the nature of his
double life. That part of him which, in our modern jargon, we call his
"reactions" obeyed a curious law. They dwelt in his outer life without
penetrating to the inner; but all his impulses of personal action were
securely seated deep within. Even at nineteen, for any one attuned to
spiritual meaning, he would have struck the note of mystery, faintly,
perhaps, but certainly. To be sure, no hint of this reached the minds
of his rollicking comrades of the harvest field. It was not for such as
they to perceive the problem of his character, to suspect that he was a
genius, or to guess that a time would come when sincere men would form
impressions of him as dissimilar as black and white. And so far as it
went the observation of the plowboys was correct. The man they saw was
indeed a reflection of themselves. But it was a reflection only. Their
influence entered into the real man no more than the image in a mirror
has entered into the glass.




III. A VILLAGE LEADER

Though placid, this early Lincoln was not resigned. He differed from the
boors of Pigeon Creek in wanting some other sort of life. What it was he
wanted, he did not know. His reading had not as yet given him definite
ambitions. It may well be that New Orleans was the clue to such stirring
in him as there was of that discontent which fanciful people have called
divine. Remembering New Orleans, could any imaginative youth be content
with Pigeon Creek?

In the spring of 1830, shortly after he came of age, he agreed for once
with his father whose chronic vagrancy had reasserted itself. The whole
family set out again on their wanderings and made their way in an oxcart
to a new halting place on the Sangamon River in Illinois. There Abraham
helped his father clear another piece of land for another illusive
"start" in life. The following spring he parted with his family and
struck out for himself.(1) His next adventure was a second trip as a
boatman to New Orleans. Can one help suspecting there was vague hope in
his heart that he might be adventuring to the land of hearts' desire?
If there was, the yokels who were his fellow boatmen never suspected
it. One of them long afterward asserted that Lincoln returned from New
Orleans fiercely rebellious against its central institution, slavery,
and determined to "hit that thing" whenever he could.

The legend centers in his witnessing a slave auction and giving voice to
his horror in a style quite unlike any of his authentic utterances. The
authority for all this is doubtful.(2) Furthermore, the Lincoln of 1831
was not yet awakened. That inner life in which such a reaction might
take place was still largely dormant. The outer life, the life of the
harvest clown, was still a thick insulation. Apparently, the waking of
the inner life, the termination of its dormant stage, was reserved for
an incident far more personal that fell upon him in desolating force a
few years later.

Following the New Orleans venture, came a period as storekeeper for
a man named Denton Offut, in perhaps the least desirable town in
Illinois--a dreary little huddle of houses gathered around Rutledge's
Mill on the Sangamon River and called New Salem.(3) Though a few of
its people were of a better sort than any Lincoln had yet known except,
perhaps, the miller's family in the old days in Kentucky--and still a
smaller few were of fine quality, the community for the most part was
hopeless. A fatality for unpromising neighborhoods overhangs like a doom
the early part of this strange life. All accounts of New Salem represent
it as predominantly a congregation of the worthless, flung together by
unaccountable accident at a spot where there was no genuine reason for
a town's existence. A casual town, created by drifters, and void of
settled purpose. Small wonder that ere long it vanished from the map;
that after a few years its drifting congregation dispersed to every
corner of the horizon, and was no more. But during its brief existence
it staged an episode in the development of Lincoln's character. However,
this did not take place at once. And before it happened, came another
turn of his soul's highway scarcely less important. He discovered, or
thought he discovered, what he wanted. His vague ambition took shape. He
decided to try to be a politician. At twenty-three, after living in New
Salem less than a year, this audacious, not to say impertinent, young
man offered himself to the voters of Sangamon County as a candidate for
the Legislature. At this time that humility which was eventually his
characteristic had not appeared. It may be dated as subsequent to New
Salem--a further evidence that the deep spiritual experience which
closed this chapter formed a crisis. Before then, at New Salem as
at Pigeon Creek, he was but a variant, singularly decent, of the
boisterous, frolicking, impertinent type that instinctively sought the
laxer neighborhoods of the frontier. An echo of Pigeon Creek informed
the young storekeeper's first state paper, the announcement of his
candidacy, in the year 1832. His first political speech was in a curious
vein, glib, intimate and fantastic: "Fellow citizens, I presume you all
know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by
many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are
short and sweet like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national
bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high
protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If
elected, I shall be thankful; if not it will be all the same."(4)

However, this bold throw of the dice of fortune was not quite so
impertinent as it seems. During the months when he was in charge of
Offut's grocery store he had made a conquest of New Salem. The village
grocery in those days was the village club. It had its constant
gathering of loafers all of whom were endowed with votes. It was the one
place through which passed the whole population, in and out, one time
or another. To a clever storekeeper it gave a chance to establish a
following. Had he, as Lincoln had, the gift of story-telling, the gift
of humor, he was a made man. Pigeon Creek over again! Lincoln's wealth
of funny stories gave Offut's grocery somewhat the role of a vaudeville
theater and made the storekeeper as popular a man as there was in New
Salem.

In another way he repeated his conquest of Pigeon Creek. New Salem had
its local Alsatia known as Clary's Grove whose insolent young toughs led
by their chief, Jack Armstrong, were the terror of the neighborhood. The
groceries paid them tribute in free drinks. Any luckless storekeeper
who incurred their displeasure found his store some fine morning a total
wreck. Lincoln challenged Jack Armstrong to a duel with fists. It was
formally arranged. A ring was formed; the whole village was audience;
and Lincoln thrashed him to a finish. But this was only a small part
of his triumph. His physical prowess, joined with his humor and his
companionableness; entirely captivated Clary's Grove. Thereafter, it was
storekeeper Lincoln's pocket borough; its ruffians were his body-guard.
Woe to any one who made trouble for their hero.

There were still other causes for his quick rise to the position of
village leader. His unfailing kindness was one; his honesty was another.
Tales were related of his scrupulous dealings, such as walking a
distance of miles in order to correct a trifling error he had made, in
selling a poor woman less than the proper weight of tea. Then, too, by
New Salem standards, he was educated. Long practice on the shovel at
Pigeon Creek had given him a good handwriting, and one of the first
things he did at New Salem was to volunteer to be clerk of elections.
And there was a distinct moral superiority. Little as this would have
signified unbacked by his giant strength since it had that authority
behind it his morality set him apart from his followers, different,
imposing. He seldom, if ever, drank whisky. Sobriety was already the
rule of his life, both outward and inward. At the same time he was
not censorious. He accepted the devotion of Clary's Grove without
the slightest attempt to make over its bravoes in his own image. He
sympathized with its ideas of sport. For all his kindliness to humans of
every sort much of his sensitiveness for animals had passed away. He was
not averse to cock fighting; he enjoyed a horse race.(5) Altogether, in
his outer life, before the catastrophe that revealed him to himself,
he was quite as much in the tone of New Salem as ever in that of Pigeon
Creek. When the election came he got every vote in New Salem except
three.(6)

But the village was a small part of Sangamon County. Though Lincoln
received a respectable number of votes elsewhere, his total was well
down in the running. He remained an inconspicuous minority candidate.

Meanwhile Offut's grocery had failed. In the midst of the legislative
campaign, Offut's farmer storekeeper volunteered for the Indian War
with Black Hawk, but returned to New Salem shortly before the election
without having once smelled powder. Since his peers were not of a
mind to give him immediate occupation in governing, he turned again to
business. He formed a partnership with a man named Berry. They bought on
credit the wreck of a grocery that had been sacked by Lincoln's friends
of Clary's Grove, and started business as "General Merchants," under the
style of Berry & Lincoln. There followed a year of complete unsuccess.
Lincoln demonstrated that he was far more inclined to read any chance
book that came his way than to attend to business, and that he had "no
money sense." The new firm went the way of Offut's grocery, leaving
nothing behind it but debt. The debts did not trouble Berry; Lincoln
assumed them all. They formed a dreadful load which he bore with his
usual patience and little by little discharged. Fifteen years passed
before again he was a free man financially.

A new and powerful influence came into his life during the half idleness
of his unsuccessful storekeeping. It is worth repeating in his own
words, or what seems to be the fairly accurate recollection of his
words: "One day a man who was migrating to the West, drove up in front
of my store with a wagon which contained his family and household
plunder. He asked me if I would buy an old barrel for which he had no
room in his wagon, and which he said contained nothing of special value.
I did not want it but to oblige him I bought it and paid him, I think,
a half a dollar for it. Without further examination I put it away in the
store and forgot all about it Sometime after, in overhauling things,
I came upon the barrel and emptying it upon the floor to see what it
contained, I found at the bottom of the rubbish a complete edition of
Blackstone's Commentaries. I began to read those famous works, and I had
plenty of time; for during the long summer days when the farmers were
busy with their crops, my customers were few and far between. The more I
read, the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was
my mind so thoroughly absorbed. I read until I devoured them."(7)

The majesty of the law at the bottom of a barrel of trash discovered at
a venture and taking instant possession of the discoverer's mind! Like
the genius issuing grandly in the smoke cloud from the vase drawn up out
of the sea by the fisher in the Arabian tale! But this great book was
not the only magic casket discovered by the idle store-keeper, the
broken seals of which released mighty presences. Both Shakespeare and
Burns were revealed to him in this period. Never after did either for a
moment cease to be his companion. These literary treasures were found
at Springfield twenty miles from New Salem, whither Lincoln went on foot
many a time to borrow books.

His subsistence, after the failure of Berry & Lincoln, was derived from
the friendliness of the County Surveyor Calhoun, who was a Democrat,
while Lincoln called himself a Whig. Calhoun offered him the post of
assistant. In accepting, Lincoln again displayed the honesty that was
beginning to be known as his characteristic. He stipulated that he
should be perfectly free to express his opinions, that the office should
not be in any respect, a bribe. This being conceded, he went to work
furiously on a treatise upon surveying, and astonishingly soon, with the
generous help of the schoolmaster of New Salem, was able to take up his
duties. His first fee was "two buckskins which Hannah Armstrong 'fixed'
on his pants so the briers would not wear them out."(8)

Thus time passed until 1834 when he staked his only wealth, his
popularity, in the gamble of an election. This time he was successful.
During the following winter he sat in the Legislature of Illinois; a
huge, uncouth, mainly silent member, making apparently no impression
whatever, very probably striking the educated members as a nonentity in
homespun.(9)

In the spring of 1835, he was back in New Salem, busy again with his
surveying. Kind friends had secured him the office of local postmaster.
The delivery of letters was now combined with going to and fro as a
surveyor. As the mail came but once a week, and as whatever he had to
deliver could generally be carried in his hat, and as payment was in
proportion to business done, his revenues continued small. Nevertheless,
in the view of New Salem, he was getting on.

And then suddenly misfortune overtook him. His great adventure, the
first of those spiritual agonies of which he was destined to endure so
many, approached. Hitherto, since childhood, women had played no part
in his story. All the recollections of his youth are vague in their
references to the feminine. As a boy at Pigeon Creek when old Thomas was
hiring him out, the women of the settlement liked to have him around,
apparently because he was kindly and ever ready to do odd jobs in
addition to his regular work. However, until 1835, his story is that of
a man's man, possibly because there was so much of the feminine in
his own make-up. In 1835 came a change. A girl of New Salem, a pretty
village maiden, the best the poor place could produce, revealed him to
himself. Sweet Ann Rutledge, the daughter of the tavern-keeper, was
his first love. But destiny was against them. A brief engagement was
terminated by her sudden death late in the summer of 1835. Of this
shadowy love-affair very little is known,--though much romantic fancy
has been woven about it. Its significance for after-time is in Lincoln's
"reaction." There had been much sickness in New Salem the summer in
which Ann died. Lincoln had given himself freely as nurse--the depth
of his companionableness thus being proved--and was in an overwrought
condition when his sorrow struck him. A last interview with the dying
girl, at which no one was present, left him quite unmanned. A period of
violent agitation followed. For a time he seemed completely transformed.
The sunny Lincoln, the delight of Clary's Grove, had vanished. In
his place was a desolated soul--a brother to dragons, in the terrible
imagery of Job--a dweller in the dark places of affliction. It was his
mother reborn in him. It was all the shadowiness of his mother's world;
all that frantic reveling in the mysteries of woe to which, hitherto,
her son had been an alien. To the simple minds of the villagers with
their hard-headed, practical way of keeping all things, especially love
and grief, in the outer layer of consciousness, this revelation of an
emotional terror was past understanding. Some of them, true to their
type, pronounced him insane. He was watched with especial vigilance
during storms, fogs, damp gloomy weather, "for fear of an accident."
Surely, it was only a crazy man, in New Salem psychology, who was heard
to say, "I can never be reconciled to have the snow, rains and storms
beat upon her grave."(10)

In this crucial moment when the real base of his character had been
suddenly revealed--all the passionateness of the forest shadow, the
unfathomable gloom laid so deep at the bottom of his soul--he was
carried through his spiritual eclipse by the loving comprehension of two
fine friends. New Salem was not all of the sort of Clary's Grove. Near
by on a farm, in a lovely, restful landscape, lived two people who
deserve to be remembered, Bowlin Green and his wife. They drew Lincoln
into the seclusion of their home, and there in the gleaming days of
autumn, when everywhere in the near woods flickered downward, slowly,
idly, the falling leaves golden and scarlet, Lincoln recovered his
equanimity.(11) But the hero of Pigeon Creek, of Clary's Grove, did not
quite come hack. In the outward life, to be sure, a day came when the
sunny story-teller, the victor of Jack Armstrong, was once more what
Jack would have called his real self. In the inner life where alone
was his reality, the temper which affliction had revealed to him was
established. Ever after, at heart, he was to dwell alone, facing,
silent, those inscrutable things which to the primitive mind are things
of every day. Always, he was to have for his portion in his real self,
the dimness of twilight, or at best, the night with its stars, "never
glad, confident morning again."




IV. REVELATIONS

From this time during many years almost all the men who saw beyond the
surface in Lincoln have indicated, in one way or another, their vision
of a constant quality. The observers of the surface did not see it.
That is to say, Lincoln did not at once cast off any of his previous
characteristics. It is doubtful if he ever did. His experience was
tenaciously cumulative. Everything he once acquired, he retained, both
in the outer life and the inner; and therefore, to those who did not
have the clue to him, he appeared increasingly contradictory, one thing
on the surface, another within. Clary's Grove and the evolutions from
Clary's Grove, continued to think of him as their leader. On the other
hand, men who had parted with the mere humanism of Clary's Grove, who
were a bit analytical, who thought themselves still more analytical,
seeing somewhat beneath the surface, reached conclusions similar to
those of a shrewd Congressman who long afterward said that Lincoln was
not a leader of men but a manager of men.(1) This astute distinction
was not true of the Lincoln the Congressman confronted; nevertheless, it
betrays much both of the observer and of the man he tried to observe. In
the Congressman's day, what he thought he saw was in reality the shadow
of a Lincoln that had passed away, passed so slowly, so imperceptibly
that few people knew it had passed. During many years following 1835,
the distinction in the main applied. So thought the men who, like
Lincoln's latest law partner, William H. Herndon, were not derivatives
of Clary's Grove. The Lincoln of these days was the only one Herndon
knew. How deeply he understood Lincoln is justly a matter of debate;
but this, at least, he understood--that Clary's Grove, in attributing
to Lincoln its own idea of leadership, was definitely wrong. He saw in
Lincoln, in all the larger matters, a tendency to wait on events, to
take the lead indicated by events, to do what shallow people would have
called mere drifting. To explain this, he labeled him a fatalist.(2) The
label was only approximate, as most labels are. But Herndon's effort
to find one is significant. In these years, Lincoln took the
initiative--when he took it at all--in a way that most people did not
recognize. His spirit was ever aloof. It was only the every-day, the
external Lincoln that came into practical contact with his fellows.