Lincoln, the Politician. T. Aaron Levy
twice, then a two gallon jug and bucket of water. A warm discussion arose about Indiana accepting the land donated by Congress for the construction of the Wabash and Erie Canals. Dr. Stone was most noisy against accepting. "Friends of the canal chose me," said the teacher, "to reply." "I was 'half seas over' from free and frequent use of the cup. I was puzzled to know what to do. Soon a fence rail was slipped into the worn fence near by and a wash tub turned up and placed upon it. Two or three seized hold of me and placed me on the eminence amid shouts of the friends of the canal. I could scarcely preserve my equilibrium. My lips refused utterance. After a long pause, I smote my breast with my hand, and said, 'I feel too full for utterance.' (I meant whiskey—they, full of indignation at the Dr.'s effrontery of opposition). The ruse worked like a charm. They shouted, 'Let him have it!' I raised my finger and pointed a moment steadily at the Doctor. They shouted, 'Hit him again.' I made my first speech twenty-five minutes. The Dr. talked again thirty minutes. I closed the debate and there was a viva voce vote in favor of the canal."[17]
As the early settler succeeded the hunter, agriculture became the main means of subsistence, but it could not become a source of profit without improved methods of transportation. The movement for internal improvements was to have a profound influence on the course of events in the West. The splendid enthusiasm that lately concerned itself with a hostile environment was now employed in competing for the markets of the East. The Westerner was not accustomed to wander in the realm of dreams, yet he grew romantic in contemplating the resources of his fertile soil, and believed the time would come when nations would pay tribute to his products. The completion of the Erie Canal marked a distinct epoch in this movement. It increased prices in some cases more than two hundred per cent. This advance called for better shipping facilities. As times became better, the people of the West became the missionaries of the internal improvement system.[18]
Nothing so vividly revealed this enthusiasm as the reception afforded Governor Clinton when he visited Ohio in 1825. He was hailed as a hero, as a friend, as a benefactor. A contemporary observer thus described the occasion:
"The grave and the gay, the man of gray hairs and the ruddy-faced youth, matrons and maidens, and even lisping children, joined to tell his worth, and on his virtues dwell, to hail his approach and to welcome his arrival. Every street, where he passed, was thronged with multitudes, and the windows were filled with the beautiful ladies of Ohio, waving their snowy white handkerchiefs, and casting flowers on the pavement where he was to pass on it." The Governor was deeply affected by such an unusual demonstration, and even shed tears in the presence of his worshippers.[19]
A vast system of internal improvements in Indiana was the fruition of a campaign of more than a decade. It was an unfailing argument of those seeking political preferment. The construction of roads and canals was urged as one of the fundamental purposes of human society. This policy was declared to be the highway from poverty to prosperity. It fairly became the political religion of the day. Indiana, in 1836, started with rejoicing on the path that was before long to involve it in disasters that led it close to the chasm of bankruptcy and repudiation.
Spencer County was in the southern part of the State, bordering on the Ohio River. The country was very rough and covered with forests, sparsely inhabited and poorly adapted for prosperous farming. There being no market for the products of the soil, the most primitive methods in agriculture were in operation. Wild turkeys and deer were had at the door of every man's cabin. Bears, wild-cats, even panthers, were still in evidence.
Thomas Lincoln, though he often changed his home, did not modify his character. He remained to the end a shiftless man of roving disposition without effectual ambition. A carpenter by trade, while other men built substantial homes in the wilderness, he was content to live in a primitive log cabin without windows, floor or furniture. It was only the influence of his second wife that secured those urgent improvements. A man of supreme physical strength, slow to anger, yet dangerous when once aroused, he was not without deep affection. Still he did not hesitate to knock his inquisitive son off the fence for answering travelers' questions. He was a master in the telling of stories. It was his chief accomplishment, the main gift that his son owed to him. The nature of his mind is somewhat shown by his rambling religious opinions. In Kentucky he was a Free Will Baptist; in Indiana he espoused the cause of Presbyterianism, and in Illinois he became a Campbellite. A relative quaintly observes that happiness was the end of life with him.[20] John Hanks, the uncle of Lincoln, was the most sturdy of his relatives; yet, this same Hanks was so illiterate that when Lincoln became President, he could not endow him with an Indian Agency.
The somberness of Lincoln's childhood was brightened by the memory of his mother. In intellect, she was far above those with whom she enacted the sad and short drama of her life. Even as a child in Kentucky he felt the spell and potent influence of her words. When she died, young as he was, he lived alone with his grief. The passing years hallowed the early impression of his sorrow, yet during all these years the memory of his mother was a mystic influence in his development; and so when he stood almost at the summit of his career, he declared, "All that I am, all that I hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."[21]
The greatness of Lincoln grows upon us when we contemplate the conditions from which he emerged, and consider the manner of men among whom he lived. Despite the efforts of many biographers to brighten his early surroundings, we have the highest evidence in his conduct and speech that he was nurtured in hopeless adversity; in poverty that was not alone incidental to pioneer conditions, but continued long after it was the common fate. He comprehensively described his environment in the statement that there was absolutely nothing in his associations to excite ambition for education.[22] There was little in his ancestry to quicken his pride. He ever maintained a peculiar reticence about his youthful days and his parentage. He may by constant thinking have exaggerated the distressing state of his childhood, but in the main there can be little addition to, or modification of, his reluctant testimony.[23]
He made his own way in the trail of letters. He pursued plans of educating himself infinitely better than those followed in schools and universities. He has left us priceless testimony of the manner of his intellectual development. "Among my earliest recollections," said Lincoln, "I remember how when a child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I do not think I ever got angry at anything else in my life; but that always disturbed my temper and has ever since. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings. I could not sleep though I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for an idea until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over again; until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north and south and bounded it east and west. But your question reminds me of a bit of education which I am bound in honor to mention. In the course of my law reading I constantly came upon the word demonstrate. I thought at first that I understood its meaning, but soon became satisfied that I did not. I said to myself, 'What do I mean when I demonstrate more than when I reason or prove?' I consulted Webster's Dictionary. That told of certain proof—proof beyond the probability of a doubt, but I could form no sort of idea what proof it was. I thought a great many things were proved beyond the possibility of a doubt, without recourse to any such reasoning as I understood demonstration to be. I consulted all the dictionaries and books of reference I could find, but with no better results. You might as well have defined blue to a blind man. At last I said, 'Lincoln, you can never make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means;' and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father's house, and stayed there until I could give any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight. I then found out what demonstrate meant, and went back to my law studies."[24]
Inadequate as his education may have been objectively, Lincoln was supremely trained in the college of lonely thought. No American of eminence owes less to the public school system. His entire career is a mystery unless full value is given to the statement of Herndon that "Lincoln read less and thought more than any other man of his time."[A]
His love of learning amounted to a passion.