• CHAPTER SIX •

ABE’S HORIZON WIDENS

The law books and histories stirred Abe Lincoln’s interest in his country’s past and made him wonder what was happening now. Attorney Pitcher took the Louisville Journal, and William Jones—the storekeeper from Vincennes—subscribed for his home-town paper, the Western Sun. Abe read these newspapers and names in the news—Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Hayne, Webster—came alive to him and were not just words on a page.

Daniel Webster.

Most of his neighbors had been so busy with their own affairs that they rarely thought of the world beyond Pigeon Creek. But after they were settled, that gradually changed— though unfortunately few men could read enough to enjoy a newspaper. Men got into the habit of lingering at Jones’s store, where Abe Lincoln sold goods and then read the Sun aloud. Jones’s crossroads store was only one of hundreds of places where people were getting news in the late 1820s. Journeymen printers set up presses in towns in the Middle West. They printed bits of local news and long speeches brought to them by postrider or by boat. Discussions on subjects formerly argued only in Congress were carried on in a thousand corner stores.

During this same time, while he was still “hiring out,” Abe Lincoln walked hundreds of miles—to Gentry’s, to Jones’s, sixteen miles southeast to Taylor’s, eighteen miles southwest to Rockport, and to farms in between. His father seldom let him use a horse unless he was returning the same day. Somewhere Abe had picked up a sick dog—left, perhaps, by a family traveling west—and after he had nursed the mongrel back to health, the dog followed him devotedly. Otherwise Abe usually walked alone. But he found that walking went well with reading; it gave him time to think. Speeches needed “thinking over,” if a youth was to understand them. As he mulled over each one, Abe Lincoln discovered that four or five subjects were the most discussed—orators called these subjects “issues”; but really they were questions that American people were trying to decide.

Abe listened as men in the store had long discussions about a national bank. Some thought it was better for each state to print its own money. They quarreled about the tariff—a tax on merchandise brought into the country. Some thought it was a good thing and some were against it.

But Abe’s neighbors did not argue about improving roads and building canals, because they knew that Indiana needed both. They didn’t care much who paid for the work just so it was done soon. They didn’t care, either, whether families moving west had to pay for land or could get it free; as for slavery, Indiana was a nonslave state. But Abe found many speeches on those matters, and knew people somewhere were thinking about each one.

In the summer of 1828 southern Indianans got excited about politics and the national election. Villages held rallies; speakers toured on horseback and talked to large groups. Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks were for Andrew Jackson. His war record, his humble Carolina birth, and his many fine qualities inspired followers. Pitcher and others Abe admired were for John Quincy Adams, the man Clay was working for. They called themselves “Whigs”—a word borrowed from England years earlier.

“Who you fer?” Abe was often asked. He grinned—and said nothing. He couldn’t vote yet, and he worked for many of the Jackson men—what good would it do to take sides?

Toward the end of the campaign Abe was offered work that would take him far from home. Mr. Gentry planned to sell his autumn produce in New Orleans and needed a helper for his son Allen, who was to take the trip.

“Get Abe Lincoln to go with me,” Allen begged his father. “He is strong and handy and we work well together.”

So Gentry offered Abe the work and he accepted. Allen and Abe were to build the flatboat at Gentry’s Landing below the bluff at Rockport, load the produce, and take it to New Orleans. Gentry agreed to pay eight dollars a month and his return passage by steamboat; so Thomas Lincoln was willing for Abe to go. The trip would be an adventure; it would be hard work and dangerous at times, too, for pirates often raided a well-stocked boat, snags and rapids made navigation hard, and thieves might sneak aboard at night. Abe knew that there was much more to a river trip than merely floating downstream!

A few weeks after Andrew Jackson was elected president in November, the boat was finished and loaded with corn, flour, potatoes, bacon, and hams. Townspeople came to the landing to wish the boys luck, and Allen’s wife (the Ann Roby of Abe’s spelling-match days) waved from the top of the bluff as their boat swung out into the current.

Traveling was lonesome, for there were few boats at this season; but the weather was good, and solitude had advantages. The pirates’ hideout at Cave-in-Rock seemed deserted when they passed it.

The last night of the voyage they tied up at a dock to get some sleep. The treacherous current of that day’s course had exhausted them. The night was dark, the place quiet, and they slept heavily.

A rough hand on his shoulder awakened Abe. His training through years of sleeping in the forest had taught him to waken instantly.

“Allen!” he yelled. “Allen! Watch out!” As he shouted, Abe twisted free and flung the intruder head over heels into the river. His long arms flailed around in the darkness; he caught two more thieves and tossed them into the water. By then, Allen was up and fighting. They grabbed clubs, which they kept handy, and chased four men to shore.

“We’ve got to push off,” Abe whispered, as he and Allen climbed back into the boat.

“In the dark?” Allen objected. “You know how the current is, Abe.”

“I know they’re likely to fetch a gang back with ’em,” Abe retorted, “and next time they wouldn’t count on us being asleep. They didn’t relish gittin’ licked—you saw that.”

Abe cast off and took the place at the wide sweep. Only then he noticed that he had a deep cut above his right ear. He bound it up the best he could, but he carried the scar all his life.

The next day they came to New Orleans, and Abe was free to explore the city while Allen traded the flatboat and its cargo for cotton, tobacco, and sugar which would be shipped to Rockport by steamboat. The city seemed to Abe like a place in The Arabian Nights. He stood before the cathedral with its tall spires, strolled on sidewalks above the mud, stared at gaily tinted houses and the balconies with their lacy wrought-iron grillwork. He smelled new fruits and the horrid stench of the slave market; heard a dozen new tongues—French, Spanish, Italian—and the songs of sailors on ships at the wharves. New Orleans was overwhelming; he was almost glad when it was time to leave. On the journey home he saw still more sights from the steamboat’s high deck—sights they had missed when the low flatboat floated south.

When at last he arrived home, Abe found that his father was disturbed and restless. John Hanks, the son of that carpenter, Joseph Hanks, who had taught Thomas his trade, had visited the Lincolns while Abe was away. John Hanks now lived in Illinois and had excited his host by tales of that state.

“John says they’s acres of land without trees in Illinois,” Thomas Lincoln told Abe. “He says a man needn’t chop down a forest to grow his bit of corn. Jest break the prairie grass an’ plant.” He looked at Abe wondering how the youth would take this news.

“I heard talk about prairie land on the steamboat,” Abe told his father.

“Maybe John’s tales were true!” Lincoln exclaimed incredulously.

“I’m glad you’re home, Abe,” Mrs. Lincoln said. “Your pappy is restless and talks of moving.”

“I’m sick of trees and no water handy,” Lincoln complained. But he did nothing about a move. Abe continued to work for hire through the summer of 1829.

In the autumn travelers brought rumors of “milk sickness.” All who remembered the epidemic of 1818 were frightened.

“That settles it,” Thomas Lincoln decided. “We’ll git out.” He called the family together and told them they were moving to Illinois.

His family was very different now from that of ten years before when the three Johnston and two Lincoln children had crowded their cabin. Death and marriages had altered the group. Elizabeth Johnston and Dennis’s Hanks had married and now had three children. Young Sarah Lincoln had married a neighbor and had died two years later. Matilda Johnston had married Levi Hall, a relative of Dennis’s and they had two children. John Johnston was a lad of fifteen, and Abe Lincoln a tall youth nearing twenty-one.

“Me an’ Elizabeth’ll go with ye,” Dennis said quickly. “It’ll give our children a better chanct.”

“Me an’ Tilly’ll go,” Levi Hall agreed. The young people had talked it over many an evening and had decided. Abe’s opinion wasn’t asked. He had to go with his father the same as a fourteen-year-old.

Thomas Lincoln sold his land to James Gentry and traded his stock for four oxen. Working together the men built two wagons big enough to carry all their household goods. The cabins were buzzing with activity all winter; Thomas Lincoln was like a new man, excited about starting over in a new place. Word was sent to John Hanks to select land with plenty of water.

Preparations were going well when on a January morning Abe went to Jones’s store to get some nails. He found that a copy of the Sun had come, and he read a speech Senator Hayne of South Carolina had made about the tariff and state’s rights. South Carolina planters were having a poor market for their cotton, and Hayne said that the tariff hurt their business. A state should have the right, he said, to manage its own affairs. South Carolina had threatened to leave the Union.

A few days later Abe read Daniel Webster’s brilliant reply to Hayne. Webster said that the power of the federal government was given to it by the states and all should support the Constitution. If any change was needed it should be done by law, not by threats of seceding that might lead to a civil war. Webster pleaded for unity and patience.

“You read that agin, Abe,” Jones said; so Abe reread the final paragraph:

While the Union lasts we have high prospects spread out before us, for us and for our children—liberty first and Union afterward (says Hayne)—I speak another sentiment dear to every American heart—Liberty AND Union, now and forever.

Men in the store approved those sentiments, and Abe walked home through the snow with the stirring words echoing in his head.

Soon after this, about the first of March, 1830, the Lincoln clan left Pigeon Creek for Illinois. The wagons were piled high with spinning wheels, chests, looms, blankets, chairs, frying pans, and scores of household things. Children and women rode; men walked ahead and took turns guiding the oxen. Abe’s dog trotted alongside him, and over his shoulder Abe carried a sack filled with needles, pins, and buttons which he hoped to sell along the way. (He had got these things from Jones in payment for doing chores.) When a cabin was sighted, Abe would run ahead and with his persuasive manner he usually sold something. He made a good profit on this first business venture.

Before they crossed the Wabash River at Vincennes, Abe saw the press that printed the Sun. He was entranced with the noise and rhythmic movement of the machine. It seemed like a miracle!

A few miles after Vincennes, floating ice in a creek jammed the wagon wheels; the boys had to wade in and heave to get them moving. When the wagon reached the bank, Abe turned to take his boots from Tilly and spied his dog whining on the far side.

“I told ye to keep my dog up top when we crossed,” he called to the children. “We have to go back, Pappy, an’ git my dog.”

“Go back? Not me!” Lincoln retorted. “What’s a dog? You come on!” The wagons continued west.

Abe looked despairingly at his dog. The water was ice-cold; his feet were numb. Yet that dog had such confidence Abe couldn’t disappoint him.

“Jest give me time, Old Fellow,” he said quietly. “I’m comin’!”

He dropped his boots, waded across, picked up the dog, and splashed back through the ice. The dog licked his face gratefully, and Abe grinned at him.

“You stay on the wagon, next creek we come to,” he advised as he worried his numb feet into wet boots. But his tone was kind; the dog understood.

In this way Abe Lincoln, soon after his twenty-first birthday, came into the prairie state called Illinois.