LINCOLN - THE UNKNOWN. Dale Carnegie
travel three miles each day to work. Once, while crossing the Sangamon, his canoe was upset, he was thrown into the icy water, and before he could reach the nearest house, Major Warnick’s, his feet froze. For a month he was unable to walk, and so he spent that time lying in front of the fireplace at Major Warnick’s telling stories, and reading a volume of the Statutes of Illinois.
Prior to this, Lincoln had courted the major’s daughter, but the major frowned on the idea. What? A daughter of his, a Warnick, married to this gawky, uneducated rail-splitter? A man without land, without cash, and without prospects? Never!
True, Lincoln didn’t own any land; and that wasn’t all— he didn’t want to own any. He had spent twenty-two years on farms, and he had had enough of pioneer farming. He hated the grinding toil, the lonely monotony of the life. Longing for distinction, as well as for contact with other social beings, he wanted a job where he could meet people and gather a crowd around him and keep them roaring at his stories.
While living back in Indiana Abe had once helped float a flatboat down the river to New Orleans, and what fun he had had! Novelty. Excitement. Adventure. One night while the boat was tied up to the shore at the plantation of Madame Duchesne, a gang of Negroes, armed with knives and clubs, climbed aboard. They meant to kill the crew, throw their bodies into the river, and float the cargo down to the thieves’ headquarters at New Orleans.
Lincoln seized a club, and with his long, powerful arms knocked three of the marauders into the river, then chased the others ashore; but, in the fight, one of the Negroes slashed Lincoln’s forehead with a knife and left over his right eye a scar that he carried to his grave.
No, Tom Lincoln could not hold the boy Abe to a pioneer farm.
Having seen New Orleans once, Abe now got himself another river job. For fifty cents a day and a bonus he and his stepbrother and second cousin cut down trees, hewed logs, floated them to a sawmill, built a flatboat eighty feet long, loaded it with bacon, corn, and hogs, and floated it down the Mississippi.
Lincoln did the cooking for the crew, steered the boat, told stories, played seven-up, and sang in a loud voice:
“The turbaned Turk that scorns the world
And struts about with his whiskers curled
For no other man but himself to see.”
This trip down the river made a profound and lasting impression upon Lincoln. Herndon says:
In New Orleans, for the first time Lincoln beheld the true horrors of human slavery. He saw “negroes in chains —whipped and scourged.” Against this inhumanity his sense of right and justice rebelled, and his mind and conscience were awakened to a realization of what he had often heard and read. No doubt, as one of his companions has said, “Slavery ran the iron into him then and there.” One morning in their rambles over the city the trio passed a slave auction. A vigorous and comely mulatto girl was being sold. She underwent a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they pinched her flesh and made her trot up and down the room like a horse, to show how she moved, and in order, as the auctioneer said, that “bidders might satisfy themselves” whether the article they were offering to buy was sound or not. The whole thing was so revolting that Lincoln moved away from the scene with a deep feeling of “unconquerable hate.” Bidding his companions follow him he said, “By God, boys, let's get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing [meaning slavery], I'll hit it hard.”
Lincoln became very popular with Denton Offut, the man who hired him to go to New Orleans. Offut liked his jokes and stories and honesty. He employed the young man to go back to Illinois, fell trees, and build a log-cabin grocery store in New Salem, a tiny village composed of fifteen or twenty cabins perched on a bluff high above the winding Sangamon. Here Lincoln clerked in the store and also ran a grist and sawmill, and here he lived for six years—years that had a tremendous influence on his future.
The village had a wild, pugnacious, hell-raising gang of ruffians called the Clary’s Grove Boys, a crowd who boasted that they could drink more whisky, swear more profanely, wrestle better, and hit harder than any other group in all Illinois.
At heart they weren’t a bad lot. They were loyal, frank, generous, and sympathetic, but they loved to show off. So when the loud-mouthed Denton Offut came to town and proclaimed the physical prowess of his grocery clerk, Abe Lincoln, the Clary’s Grove Boys were delighted. They would show this upstart a thing or two.
But the showing was all the other way, for this young giant won their foot-races and jumping contests; and with his extraordinarily long arms he could throw a maul or toss a cannon-ball farther than any of them. Besides, he could tell the kind of funny stories they could understand; and he kept them laughing for hours at his back-woods tales.
He reached the high-water mark of his career in New Salem, as far as the Clary’s Grove Boys were concerned, on the day all the town gathered under the white-oak trees to see him wrestle with their leader, Jack Armstrong. When Lincoln laid Armstrong out, he had arrived, he had achieved the ultimate. From that time on the Clary’s Grove Boys gave him their friendship and crowned him with their allegiance. They appointed him judge of their horse-races and referee of their cock-fights. And when Lincoln was out of work and had no home, they took him into their cabins and fed him.
Lincoln found here in New Salem an opportunity he had been seeking for years, an opportunity to conquer his fears and learn to speak in public. Back in Indiana the only chance that he had had at this sort of thing had been in talking to little groups of laborers in the fields. But here in New Salem there was an organized “literary society” that met every Saturday night in the dining-room of the Rutledge tavern. Lincoln joined it with alacrity and took a leading part on its program, telling stories, reading verses that he had written himself, making extemporaneous talks on such subjects as the navigation of the Sangamon River, and debating the various questions of the day.
This activity was priceless. It widened his mental horizon and awakened his ambition. He discovered that he had an unusual ability to influence other men by his speech. That knowledge developed his courage and self-confidence as nothing else had ever done.
In a few months Offut’s store failed and Lincoln was out of a job. An election was coming on, the State was seething with politics, and so he proposed to cash in on his ability to speak.
With the aid of Mentor Graham, the local school-teacher, he toiled for weeks over his first address to the public, in which he announced that he was a candidate for the State Legislature. He stated that he favored “internal improvements . . . the navigation of the Sangamon . . . better education . . . justice,” and so on.
In closing he said:
“I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me.” And he concluded with this pathetic sentence: “But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.”
A few days later a horseman dashed into New Salem with the startling news that the great Sac Indian chief, Black Hawk, was on the war-path with his braves, burning homes, capturing women, massacring settlers, and spreading red terror along Rock River.
In a panic Governor Reynolds was calling for volunteers; and Lincoln, “out of work, penniless, a candidate for office,” joined the forces for thirty days, was elected captain, and tried to drill the Clary’s Grove Boys, who shouted back at his commands, “Go to the devil.”
Herndon says Lincoln always regarded his participation in the Black Hawk War “as a sort of holiday affair and chicken-stealing expedition.” It was just about that.
Later, in the course of a speech in Congress, Lincoln declared that he didn’t attack any redskins, but that he made “charges upon the wild onions.” He said he didn’t see any Indians, but that he had “a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes.”
Returning from the war, “Captain Lincoln” plunged again into his political campaign, going from cabin to cabin, shaking hands,