THE WONDERFUL STORY OF LINCOLN

C. M. STEVENS

“I see him, as he stands,

With gifts of mercy in his outstretched hands;

A kindly light within his gentle eyes,

Sad as the toil in which his heart grew wise;

His lips half parted with the constant smile

That kindled truth but foiled the deepest guile;

His head bent forward, and his willing ear

Divinely patient right and wrong to hear:

Great in his goodness, humble in his state,

Firm in his purpose, yet not passionate,

He led his people with a tender hand,

And won by love a sway beyond command.”

George H. Boker.

Inspiration Series of Patriotic Americans

THE WONDERFUL STORY OF LINCOLN
AND THE MEANING OF HIS LIFE FOR THE YOUTH
AND PATRIOTISM OF AMERICA

By C. M. STEVENS
Author of “The Wonderful Story of Washington”

NEW YORK
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

Copyright, 1917, by
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

Printed in U. S. A.

CONTENTS

LINCOLN AND AMERICAN FREEDOM

[CHAPTER I]
INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS

I. A PERSONAL LIFE AND ITS INTEREST TO AMERICANS

“America First” has probably as many varieties of meaning and use as “Safety First.” It means to every individual very much according to what feelings it inspires in him of selfishness or patriotism. We are inspired as we believe, and, to be an American, it is necessary to appreciate the meaning and mission of America.

American history is composed of the struggle to get clear the meaning of American liberty. Through many years of distress and sacrifice, known as the Revolutionary War, the American people freed themselves from un-American methods and masteries imposed on them from across the sea. Out of that turmoil of minds came forth one typical leader and American, George Washington. But we did not yet have clear the meaning of America, and through yet more years of even worse suffering, involving the Civil War, we freed ourselves from the war-making methods and masteries entrenched within our own government. Out of that political turmoil of minds appeared another American, Abraham Lincoln, whose life represents supremely the most important possibilities in the meaning and ideal of America. To know the mind-making process that developed Washington and Lincoln is to know not only the meaning but also the mission of America.

Every American child and every newcomer to our shores is in great need to understand clearly and indisputably their interest in American freedom, as being human freedom and world freedom, if they are to realize and fulfill their part as Americans.

The American vision of moral freedom and social righteousness can in no way be made clearer than in studying the process of development that individually prepared Washington and Lincoln to be the makers and preservers of a developing democracy for America and for the American mind of the world.

Lincoln’s early life has interest and meaning only for those who are seeking to understand the pioneer political principles, fundamental in character and civilization, out of which could develop a mind and manhood equipped for the greatest and noblest of human tasks. To take his “backwoods” experiences and their comparatively uncouth incidents, as interesting merely because they happened to a man who became famous, is to miss every inspiration, value and meaning so important in building his way as man and statesman. To read the early incidents of Lincoln’s life for the isolated interest of their being the queer, peculiar or pathetic biography of a notable character has little that is either inspiring or informing to a boy in the light of present experiences and methods of living. Indeed, many social episodes of pioneer customs are seemingly so trivial or coarse, in comparison, as to detract in respect from a boy’s ideal of the historical Lincoln.

The Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln—Hodgensville, Ky.

The pioneer frontier was the social infancy of a new meaning for civilization. Its lowly needs of humble equality were the first social interests of Lincoln, and the wonderful story of his life in that place and time, if told as merely historical happenings, incidentally noticeable only because they happened to Lincoln, becomes more and more frivolous and disesteeming in interest to boyhood, and to the general reader, as current social customs develop away beyond those times. This is why such strained efforts have been made to give the incidents of his social infancy a pathetic interest, or some other sympathetic appeal, where everything was so unromantic, industrious, simple, enjoyable and faithful to the earth.

Those lowly years were sacred privacy to him. He knew there was nothing in them for a biographer, and he said so. His experience is valuable only in showing how it developed a man. True enough, the biographically uninteresting trivialities of his early years were not from him but from his environment. This is proven from the fact that two wider contrasting environments are hardly possible than those of Washington and Lincoln, and yet out of them came the same model character and supreme American.

II. THE PROCESS OF LIFE FROM WITHIN

Standard authorities have already fully recorded Lincoln’s biography and its historical environment. There yet remains the far more difficult, delicate and consequential message from generation to generation, so much needed in patriotic appreciation, to interpret his rise from those vanished social origins, in order that there may be a just valuation of his life by American youth.

The schoolboy learns with little addition to his ideals, or to his patriotism, or humanity, when he reads of a person, born in what appears to be the most sordid and pathetic destitution of the wild West, at last becoming a martyr president. The scenes in the making of Lincoln’s life run by too fast in the reading for the strengthening life-interest to be received and appreciated. The human process of Lincoln’s youth, with its supreme lesson of patience and labor and growth, is lost in considering the man solely as a strange figure of American history. If that life can be separated enough from the political turmoil so as to be seen and to be given a worthy interpretation, there is thus a service that may be worth while for the American youth.

Heroes have been made in many a historical crisis and they represent some splendid devotion to a single idea of human worth, but Lincoln’s heroism was the far severer test of a hard struggle through many years. He came near encountering every discouragement and in mastering every difficulty that may befall any American from the worst to the best, and from the lowliest to the most responsible position.

The poet has expressed these valuations arising through the frailties and vicissitudes of his long, tragic struggle in the following lines:

“A blend of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears;

A quaint knight-errant of the pioneers;

A homely hero born of star and sod;

A Peasant Prince; a Masterpiece of God.”

Lincoln’s life has much more for American youth than the adventure-story of a backwoods boy of pioneer days on his unknown way to be a hero of American history. What Lincoln thought he was and what he made out of his relations with those around him are only incidental to the inspiring patience with which he kept the faith of high meaning within him, and the labor with which he strove on until his ideal came clear as one of the supreme visions of humanity.

Every really ambitious American boy asks himself the question, How did he do it? The probably correct answer is that he didn’t do it. He made himself the right man and the right people did it.

We do not now hear so much of Lincoln as the “fireplace” student, because that word no longer carries so pathetic a vision as it did to the American boy. “Lincoln the railsplitter” has almost disappeared from the phrases of patriotic eulogy for this great American, because the task and significance of railsplitting no longer bear the force of meaning that they did to the boys of Civil-War days. This means that, if the American boy is to receive any inspiration from the early life of Lincoln, there must be achieved some new and more significant form of interpretation from the making of his life and character.

Even the strong description of Edwin Markham becomes more figurative than concrete in its illustration more poetic than material, when he says,

“He built the rail-pile as he built the state,

Pouring his splendid strength through every blow,

The conscience of him testing every stroke,

To make his deed the measure of a man.”

III. A LIFE BUILT AS ONE WOULD HAVE THE NATION

Lincoln’s life may be prized as much in what he did for himself as in what he did for his country, because in the course of our interest they mean the same and become the same. He has shown to every American boy that the right desire, no matter what the circumstances and conditions, will invariably lead along the right way to the successful life, because the successful character is a successful career for a successful humanity. Very clearly one thing is sure, he was wonderfully successful in finding the right thing to do and in finding the right way to do it. That is what humanity wants and such a man is the human ideal. Accordingly, Lincoln’s personal moral development, apart from his historical public career, is an introductory story inspiring an interest for the patriotic study of his statesmanship and the fundamental principles of American life.

Any boy or girl can appreciate the events that entered into the making of Lincoln’s mind and character, but only a student of statesmanship and history can read beyond this and appreciate the almost superhuman task which Lincoln carried through to the extinction of slavery and the preservation of the United States of America.

In that view we are not here writing the biography or history of Lincoln the Statesman, nor of Lincoln the War President, for that work has already been exhaustively and nobly done, but to give the inspiring meaning of his experiences from which arose the boy and man representing above all others the meaning and mission of Americans and America.

[CHAPTER II]

I. THE PROBLEM OF A WORTHWHILE LIFE

Many of the early events entering into Lincoln’s life seem too trivial to mention in the light of his great services to America. But the human struggle and the moral achievement of a supreme American ideal cannot be appreciated or understood unless the experiences buffeting the way to it, and their circumstances, are known for what they mean to his life. Trivial experiences have very much to do with forming our lives and without them we can neither appreciate nor understand the great events that we believe have given us our career and our destiny.

After being nominated for the presidency of the United States, Lincoln was asked for material from his early life out of which to make a biography.

“Why,” he replied earnestly, as if this was a sacred privacy in his own profound struggle, “it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed in a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Grey’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”

His early friends all agree that he was lazy and idle, but, when we ask closer, they tell us that he spent his time “reading and writing and arguing.” One of his most admiring friends hired him for a certain period and became greatly disgusted at the young man’s preference for idling his time away reading. Another friend one day found him reading, and, with the intention of severely rebuking him, asked what he was doing. “Reading law,” was the reply, without taking his eye from the page.

“Almighty Gosh!” was all the disgusted friend could say. Reading was bad enough waste of time, but to be reading law was beyond all use of words or censure.

So, it merely proves that no one can be understood by the historical student, except as the conditions of mental soil in which the character grew are understood. And especially is it good to learn why the prophet is without honor in his own country, sometimes not even known in his own age. Home people rarely or never understand the unusual worker, because they cannot measure outside of their own experience, and their opinions rarely give much insight into the great laborer born among them, with the great urge, if not the vision, of work and the way.

Lincoln is probably the last Great American who shall ever have to begin his mind-making as anything less than an “heir of all ages.” In Lincoln’s case it seemed as if all else was banished that a mind might build itself up anew to be a fundamental interpretation of American civilization. Like the great Newton, he built his world of principle out of the particulars of original experience, and found that it was the order of the universe. And yet, it might be said that he was a failure in particulars and minor matters, for he thought in terms of general humanity and swung the world into a new consciousness and vision of the moral law.

As Mr. Herndon says, “His origin was in that unknown and sunless bog in which history never made a footprint.” The social origin and development of Christ were far less obscure, humble and lowly in destitute and helpless environment, before the special task of preserving a meaning in the earth as a home for man.

Julia Ward Howe expresses the seriousness attending the possibilities of every new-born soul, as she says, of Lincoln,

“Through the dim pageant of the years

A wondrous tracery appears:

A cabin of the western wild

Shelters in sleep a new-born child,

Nor nurse, nor parent dear, can know

The way those infant feet must go;

And yet a nation’s help and hope

Are sealed within that horoscope.”

It was certainly impossible for a pioneer of the early frontier to imagine how the rich live now, but it is not so hard for any one now to imagine how people lived then, if he will go into the deep woods with only a few simple tools and try to live. It can be done and it will probably be a healthful experience, but not an experience that any person would be expected to try twice.

It is therefore not needful to the setting of our story about the making of a man, for any extended description to be made of the ignorance and the poverty common to those times.

It is enough for us to say with Maurice Thompson in his lines:

“He was the North, the South, the East, the West;

The thrall, the master, all of us in one.”

Ida Tarbell, after her extensive original researches into the early life of Lincoln, very thoughtfully, says,

“He seems to have had as nearly a universal human sympathy as any one in history. A man could not be so high or so low that Lincoln could not meet him and he could not be so much of a fool, or so many kinds of a fool. He could listen unruffled to cant, to violence, to criticism, just and unjust. Amazingly he absorbed from each man the real thing he had to offer, annexed him by showing him that he understood, and yet gave him somehow a sense of the impossibility of considering him alone, and leaving out the multitudes of other men as convinced and as loyal as he was.”

II. THE LINCOLN BOY OF THE KENTUCKY WOODS

We may well believe that the little Lincoln boy was thrilled with stories of noxious “varmints” and wild “Injuns.” As the fire crackled in the wide earthen fireplace and the sparks flew up the broad dirt chimney, we may well suppose the mystic superstitions of the ignorant times thrilled the young mind with vague fears and often with indescribable dread.

Doubtless he often heard his father tell the story of his own desperate boyhood, how Mordecai, the elder brother, had, just in the nick of time, saved his life from the tomahawk.

Abe’s father when a child went out to their clearing with his two brothers and their father, whose name was Abraham. We may be sure that their watchful eyes looked closely into every pile of brush or clump of bushes that might hide an Indian. But the Indians were trained to hide like snakes or foxes. So that which was ever expected and feared happened. There was a shot from an unseen form in the bushes, and the father of the family fell dead.

Mordecai, the eldest, ran for the cabin, the other boy ran for help, but the younger boy, too bewildered and not comprehending what had happened, remained by the side of his fallen father.

As Mordecai looked out through the chinks of the cabin to see the enemy, which he supposed to be in numbers, he saw a lone Indian come out and seize the boy. With quick aim he fired and the Indian fell dead. The little boy, now understanding, began to scream, when Mordecai ran to him and carried him into the cabin.

It was in the death of this pioneer that the Lincolns became subjected to such poverty. And yet it is doubtful if their poverty was much worse than most of those around them. In this vision of frontier life we can get some idea at what great cost has been achieved the civilization that composes the foundations of this country.

Lives seem insignificant and their experiences trivial, but in them are the making of all that is good and great. In the making of typical lives is to be seen the meaning and the making of the nation. It is said that Lincoln’s first attempts to write his name were made with a stick upon the ground. Those letters have long since vanished and yet that name is written in sentiments and deeds of gold throughout the earth.

Wilbur Nesbit holds up the jewel of Lincoln’s life in the following lines:

“Not as the great who grew more great,

Until they have a mystic fame—

No stroke of pastime or of fate

Gave Lincoln his undying name.

A common man, earth-bred, earth-born,

One of the breed who work and wait,—

His was a soul above all scorn,

His was a heart above all hate.”

III. HOME-SEEKERS IN THE WILD WEST

Thomas Lincoln became a home-seeking wanderer soon after the death of his father. According to the laws of that time, all the property went to the eldest, and it may be supposed that little attention was paid in that rough destitute life to the raising of Thomas. He grew up simply “a wandering, laboring boy,” whose hard circumstances left little ambition or hope in him. But, in the course of all wondrous events and time, he became a carpenter, well respected, and married his cousin, the niece of the man in whose shop he worked. This niece was Nancy Hanks, daughter of Joseph Hanks, who had married Nannie Shipley, a Quaker girl. From all authentic accounts that can be gathered concerning Nancy Hanks, she was one of God’s great women.

This much at least is sufficiently verified that she was a strong, handsome girl, noted for her religious zeal, and was one of the most sought-for singers at the marvellous camp-meetings of those days. That the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks was regarded as an important community event is the testimony of several who were present, for every social enjoyment known to the times was there, and the occasion was celebrated with unusual demonstrations of good will.

The wedding took place June 12, 1806, and the documents of the marriage show that she had enough property left her by her father to require a guardian appointed by the court. The uncle with whom she lived was her guardian, appointed on the death of her parents when she was nine years old.

Documents in existence also show that Thomas Lincoln owned a large tract of land, that he held responsible public position, and was well respected in his community. The stories of shiftlessness and shame so long told as truth must be cast out as among the curiosities of envious gossip, sometimes accepted even by those it injures as true history.

A year after the marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks their first child was born, a girl, which they named Nancy. Twelve years later, after the death of her mother and the marriage of her father to Sarah Bush Johnson, this daughter renamed herself Sarah, by which name she was known until her death at the age of twenty.

Sarah was born at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, but soon after the family moved to a farm, bought several years before by Thomas Lincoln, about fourteen miles away. There on February 12, 1809, was born one of the greatest of all Americans, Abraham Lincoln.

The Lincoln home was so rude that descriptions of it, in comparison with present poverty-stricken homes, sounds like distressful destitution, but it was the home of frontiersmen in pioneer days. All testimony agrees that no one suffered and that the boy grew strong and manly, in the abiding favor of friends, and in the noble aspirations of a superior destiny.

When Abraham Lincoln was seven years old and his sister Sarah was near nine, his father desired to seek a better home, which the pioneer always dreamed of as farther on. He built a flatboat in a creek half a mile from his house, put his household goods upon it, and floated down the Rolling Fork on a voyage of discovery to Salt River, and down Salt River to the Ohio. At Thompson’s Ferry on the Indiana shore he landed, stored his goods, and went back after his family, which he brought through on horseback.

IV. A WONDERFUL FAMILY IN THE DESOLATE WILDERNESS

Lincoln tells us of one thing his mother said to him which he never forgot, though he was not yet nine years old. Her thought for him became his dream of her.

“Mother wants her little boy to be honest, truthful, and kind to everybody, and always to trust in God.”

The words of his “angel mother,” as he named her, were always the guiding star of his life. He always wanted to be what his mother said was her desire for him to be. He often said, “All I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother,” and yet, as a poet has said it, that mother

“Gave us Lincoln and never knew.”

An epidemic carried away Lincoln’s mother in 1818 when he was nine years of age. It was the beginning of that great man’s acquaintance with grief, but the impression she had made on him never forsook him. Her last words to the surrounding friends were, “I pray you to love your kindred and worship God.”

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked Charles Kingsley for the secret of his splendid life, he answered, “I once had a friend.” So it was with Lincoln. He once had a friend, and he always spoke of her as his “angel mother.”

So deeply had she impressed the nine-year-old boy with her religious faith that he could never be satisfied until he induced a preacher to preach a sermon and offer a prayer over her grave.

In that profoundly earnest incident of sympathy is to be seen the love that leavened his life to the making of a man nobler than kings among men.

Of these early years Lincoln spoke but little, and the gossip of old people, who might have told interesting incidents, has not proven altogether reliable. One of these personal incidents told by Lincoln of his childhood may be regarded as typical of his life. It was from a dim memory of what he had been taught concerning soldiers and war.

Lincoln said that he had a memory of only one incident relating to the War of 1812. This happened near the close of the war. He had been fishing and had caught a little fish. On the way home he met a soldier returning from the war. He had been told that he must be kind to soldiers. Thinking of this, he went up to the soldier and gave him the fish.

Even the wilderness has a succession of new scenes and offers an endless variety of revelations for the growing mind. Only the will of disordered interests is able to get bad things into the desires of a child. The Lincoln boy was fortunate in living with good people. There was no one to impress him with false ideas of life.

We may be sure that there was something superior in Thomas Lincoln that he sought out only noble women, and that noble women were willing to trust their happiness and welfare to him.

Thomas Lincoln could not hope to make a living after his wife died and care properly for his household needs, including the two motherless children. His own homeless childhood made him tender toward his little unmothered family, and, presently, he returned to Kentucky and married Sarah Bush Johnson, another of God’s own mother-women.

She came with abundance of household goods and there was soon a comfortable Lincoln home. She loved the little boy she found on her arrival in the Indiana household, and encouraged him in his eager desire to know things.

The ten-year-old Lincoln was eager to learn of the wondrous world beyond the woods and he asked many questions of wayfarers passing that way. One day a very trivial event happened, but in the wondrous revelation of things to the blooming mind it may have been one of the greatest in Lincoln’s life.

An emigrant wagon broke down near their place. The wife and two little daughters staid in Lincoln’s home two or three days, till the wagon was repaired.

“The woman had books,” so Lincoln tells us about it, “and she read us stories.” It was the first books he had ever seen and the first book-stories he had ever heard. In fact, it was also the first educated people he had ever seen. One of the little girls seems to have impressed him deeply, to have awakened in him a spiritual reverence for beautiful girlhood, and to have given him a never-dying vision of possible sympathy and character for a nobler social life.

V. WAY-MARKS OF RIGHT LIFE

Lincoln’s new mother had three children of her own, but under her management they all lived together, in the one-room house, in perfect harmony and friendship.

Of the little Lincoln boy she said, “His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run together.” She said that there had never been a cross word or look between them and that she loved the little fellow as her own child. One thing is sure, to the American people, Sarah Bush Lincoln has forever given a sacred meaning to the name stepmother and hallowed its duties near to the meaning of mother.

In her old age she was visited by a biographer of Lincoln, to whom she said, “I had a son John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys, but I must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw, or expect to see.”

Lincoln’s sister Sarah, or Nancy, as she was also called, was a noble girl and was of inestimable help to Mrs. Lincoln in the labors of a pioneer home. She was quick to learn and she did her share in helping her brother in his desire to learn. There was nothing remarkable about that brother, he was not wondrous, except in one thing, and that was his unceasing zeal to have a greater mind, and for that mind to be a right mind.

His first real school life was to travel a deer path through the deep woods, nine miles each day, to school.

He had no time to waste on useless knowledge. Josh Billings once exclaimed, lamenting, “What’s the use of larnin’ so much that ain’t so.” Lincoln thought there was no use in such foolishness, and he sought to fill his mind only with useful information, valuable toward a greater life.

For instance, he got hold of a small dictionary and he read it through and through with the eagerness that many people give to baseball news or a novel. When the book called the “Statutes of Indiana” fell into his hands he could hardly eat or sleep till he had read it through. When he finally got hold of a grammar, it was no dry reading to him and no task. He literally devoured its information and committed its principles to memory, as a value of the finest wealth. He was indeed remarkable or wondrous in nothing but the divine inspiration to enlarge a useful mind. These are the minds that make life worth living and invariably characterize the builders of the world.

It appears that the first approach of Lincoln to the formation of a life-ideal, his first patriotic vision of American citizenship, was derived from reading a life of Washington. A friendly neighbor loaned him the book. His book-shelf was a chink in the log house. One night it rained into his book-shelf and the next morning he found his borrowed book bucked up into a most unreadable shape. Lincoln’s introduction to Washington was unhappy and significant. Trivial as the incident might seem, it supplies suggestions of character on the way of superior worth to civilization. Events, one by one, build up or tear down together the structure of self or of the public system.

The Lincoln boy could have shielded himself, as to the damaged book, behind personal irresponsibility for an accident, or he could have flatly refused to make good. If so, we may well guess that he would never have been President of the United States, and would never have served America in its dire peril so as to be honored by the whole world. He was not that kind of a character. As we trace the steps of moral integrity, the trivial incident becomes powerfully significant. The Lincoln boy made good. He worked three days for the owner of the damaged book, so that another should not suffer loss through any kindness or good-will to him; also, beyond that, he could have no rest nor peace while any wrong existed between him and another man.

From that time on he had before him the vision of a great American. Washington became his ideal type of character, and that ideal no doubt helped much to make him the patient power he was in the great crisis of his nation’s existence.

The rough and hard never hurt any one if they are healthy interests; the rude and uncultured wrong no taste if they are moral; and poverty injures nobody when it is clean and persevering and safe. So the hard requirements, rude living and destitute means only strengthened the boy more and more for the heroic responsibilities requiring such a type of manhood.

It is said that he memorized and often repeated for self-encouragement the homely old verses of the song, “Try, Try Again.”

“When you strive, it’s no disgrace

Though you fail to win the race;

Bravely, then, in such a case,

Try, try again.

That which other folks can do,

Why, with patience, may not you?

All that’s been done, you may do,

If you will but try.”

In a copy book the following lines, still preserved, were written by Lincoln:

“Abraham Lincoln

his hand and pen.

he will be good but

God knows when.”

This pathetic glimpse of the childhood dream may account for his profound interest in boys and boyhood. When he had reached world-wide fame he said, “The boy is the inventor and owner of the present, and he is our supreme hope for the future. Men and things everywhere minister unto him, and let no one slight his needs.”

Lincoln reading by Firelight.

[CHAPTER III]

I. THE LINCOLN BOY AND HIS SISTER

The wilderness never brought forth a more wonderful being than the child that became one of the greatest names in the history of America. Deep in the wild woods of Kentucky, in the humblest conditions of nature, farthest from the inventions of society, there arose a mind that gave great riches of thought to the making of civilization.

Lincoln and his sister “hired out,” and the position of servant can hardly be servile or menial with such an illustrious American example, unless the master make it so. One woman, whose family had hired them both, testified to their lovable characters. Lincoln slept in the hay-loft during the period of his work, and he was noted for being remarkably considerate in “keeping his place,” and for not coming in “where he was not wanted.” It is said that he would lift his hat and bow when he entered the house, and that he was reliable, tender and kind, “like his sister.” We wonder if his employers had only known of “the angel” they were “entertaining unawares,” what would have been “his place” and where he would have been “wanted.” Every such soul may, somewhere along the immortal way, be “an angel” “unaware” some time in the meaning of the great moral universe.

As showing the making of Lincoln’s mind, one of his first attempts at essay writing was on the subject of “Cruelty to Animals” and another on “Temperance.”

During his earliest acquaintance with the first lawyer he had known, he wrote a paper on “American Government,” and he anxiously asked the lawyer to read it and pass an opinion on its merits. The lawyer did so, declaring that the “world couldn’t beat it,” and expressing the opinion that some day the people would “hear from that boy.”

His repugnance toward acts of cruelty is shown by the first fist fight he ever had.

Some boys had caught a mud-turtle and were having great sport in putting a coal of fire on its back to see it open up its shell and run. Lincoln was then not as large as some of the tormentors of the poor animal, but, coming by and seeing what they were doing, he dashed in among them, knocked the firebrand from the boy’s hand, and fought them all away from the turtle. Then he gave them a fierce scolding for their cruelty. With tears in his eyes he declared that the terrapin’s life was as sweet to it as theirs was to them. His appeal was successful and there was freedom henceforth in that community for the American turtle.

II. HOW THE LINCOLN BOY MADE THE LINCOLN MAN

The American boy, seeing anything of great interest accomplished, wants to know how it was done. That is true all the way from winning some game at play to making a million in some great enterprise. But far more, in fact immeasurably more, is the making of a masterful mind, the development of a nation-making character, and of a world-historical man. Such was Abraham Lincoln, who was built up from what seems to be nothing on to the very highest worth of mankind. How did he do it? “If I only knew how,” said a philosopher-mathematician, “I could turn the world over with a lever.” “If I only knew how,” said a philosopher-farmer, “I could make a three-year-old calf between now and next Christmas.” In other words, the belief has always prevailed that by thought made into will anything can be accomplished, provided thinking perseveres in the right way for the right thing. Successful “might” always promotes the belief that it is right because it is successful, but the “successful” is no more than a temporary expedient toward coming failure, if it is not the righteousness of an immortal social system.

So let us see how Lincoln did it. It is not much of a mystery how he became a masterful man. There must be a beginning place, and, for such a person, it must be a divine beginning place. He had a loving mother and a home. It was the basis of his belief in humanity. The heart of the world he believed to be like the two noble-souled women who mothered his young heart and growing mind. He says himself that he didn’t do it but that they did it. So, the first thing for a boy who wants to be a masterful man is to take the advice of Oliver Wendell Holmes to have the right kind of ancestors. At least, it seems quite necessary for him to choose a loving mother and it will be a lightened task for him to do the rest.

In 1823, while going to the Crawford school, there occurred an incident representing his invariable sense of honor. A buck’s head was nailed to the wall and one day, probably experimenting as all boys do, he pulled too hard on one of the horns and broke it off. No one saw him and when the teacher inquired for the mischief maker Lincoln promptly told how it happened. The teacher believed him and said no more about it.

The first reprehensible thing known of the Lincoln boy was done soon after the death of his sister. She married at nineteen and died the next year. Lincoln believed, as most others believed, that she died of ill-treatment. There was no way to express his fierce resentment but in writing, and he wrote some scurrilous letters to the ones against whom he was so angry. Some biographers, in the supposed cause of history, have published some alleged copies of those letters, but at worst they merely show what a boy could do in the distress occasioned by what he believed to be the murder of his sister, whom we may believe was the one great love of his life after the death of his mother.

Being a good penman, Lincoln was often called on to write a line in copybooks. Among the proud possessors of a copybook so favored was Joe Richardson. In his book Lincoln wrote these commonplace, yet significant lines:

“Good boys who to their books apply

Will all be great men by and by.”

Lincoln was brought up in the midst of superstitions that prevailed in every act of life, but they seem to have made no impression on him. Many of the most estimable people believed the sun went round the earth, from the indisputable fact that in the morning it was on one side of the house and in the afternoon was on the other side. Many also believed the earth to be flat, because any one trying to go so far as to go around it would naturally become lost, travel in a circle, as all lost people do, and come back to the same place, thinking they had gone around the world.

People who argued otherwise were merely “stuck up” and “just proud to show themselves off.” Doubtless, his belief about the sun and earth lost him his first love affair.

He was going to school to Andrew Crawford, who also taught good manners, when he began to exchange special attention with Miss Roby, a fine lass of fifteen. He especially had her gratitude for some help he gave her in a spelling class. When she was about to spell “defied” with a “y,” he pointed to his eye, just in time to save her from disgrace with the teacher, and from losing her place in the class.

But one day as they were walking along the road she made a remark that brought up an unfortunate subject.

“Abe,” said she, “look yonder, the sun is going down.”

“Reckon not,” was the unfortunate reply. “It’s us coming up. That’s all.”

“Don’t you suppose I’ve got eyes,” she answered indignantly.

“Reckon so,” he replied, “but the sun’s as still as a tree. When we’re swung up so’s the shine’s cut off, we call it night.”

“Abe,” said she, “you’re a consarned fool,” and away she went, leaving him to the glory of his “stuck-up larnin’.”

III. SOME SIGNS ALONG THE EARLY WAY

The Lincoln boy impressed all who knew him as being different from other boys, though they did not know just how. We now know that the difference consisted in his having a purpose to have a mind rather than to have a good time. And yet, Lincoln loved joyful sports and he was a favorite in all the social gatherings of the community. But his mind was not composed of sport experience, nor his interest in life inspired by sport success. The world-mind of books contained more value and richer promise than the turmoil of happenings among companions, or than those who were juggling interests in the hope of events.

Lincoln’s books were very limited in number but exceedingly wide in their humanity. Weems’ “Life of Washington” seems to have given him his ideal of American character and statesmanship, while the “Statutes of Indiana” aroused his interest in civil law and the American government.

When addressing the senate of the state of New Jersey, in 1861, Lincoln said, “May I be pardoned if, on this occasion, I mention that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, ‘Weems’ Life of Washington.’ I remember all the accounts there given of the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves in my mind more than any single revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that these men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made.”

Lincoln told one of his friends that he read through every book he had ever heard of in his surroundings for a distance of fifty miles. The industry with which he sought to learn and his unceasing endeavor to build up his mind were marks of the genius that possessed him, the spirit that made him one of the strongest men of a world-wide work.

In the whole country round there was only one newspaper subscriber, and that was in Gentryville, Indiana, for a weekly paper from Louisville. Lincoln walked to town every week to see that paper and discuss the news. By the time he had become a man, in Menard County, Illinois, his neighbors went to him in order to know things, and he was a good custodian of the knowledge he had gained. His opinions coincided with common sense. So, common sense made him President of the United States, saved a United Nation, and gave Lincoln a never-dying place in the love and honor of mankind.

Lincoln walked six miles to borrow a grammar, and he studied it till he mastered the principles of the English language. Many another boy has thought that he had few troubles more unbearable than the study of composition, but many another boy has not been prepared to speak the world-stirring speech, such as was spoken by Lincoln at the dedication of the battlefield of Gettysburg.

IV. ILLUSTRATIONS SHOWING THE MAKING OF A MAN

Lincoln, very early in life, believed that witnesses must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Matilda Johnson, his stepsister, was very fond of him, and she often ran away from the house to be with him where he was at work. Lincoln would rather tell her stories than work, so the mother forbade the child from following him to work. But, one morning, she disobeyed and ran after him. She tried to surprise him by jumping up at his back, and catching him by the shoulders. In doing so the axe was swung around so that it severely cut her ankle. Matilda screamed with pain but Lincoln soon had the bleeding stopped and the wound bound. Then came the problem.

“Tilda,” he exclaimed, “I am astonished at you. How could you disobey your mother? Now, what are you going to tell her?”

“I’ll tell her I did it with the axe,” she said in the midst of her crying. “That will be the truth, won’t it?”

“Yes,” replied the boy, “that’s the truth as far as it goes, but it is not all of the truth. You tell the whole truth and trust your mother for the rest.”

Tilda went home limping and weeping with the whole truth, and the good mother thought she had been punished enough.

The self-possessed way in which Lincoln conducted himself is well illustrated in his experience with the boaster who was telling of his horse-race, and especially endeavoring to impress his story upon the youthful Lincoln.

Uncle Jimmy Larkins, the boastful owner of the fast horse, was much of a hero in the eyes of a small boy who grew up to be Captain John Lamar, the man who tells the story.

Lincoln paid no attention to the boasting. Uncle Jimmy did not like this and the Lamar boy thought it very rude in Lincoln. Finally Uncle Jimmy said, “Abe, I’ve got the best horse in the world: he won that race and never drew a long breath.”

But Abe still paid no attention. Uncle Jimmy didn’t like it some more and the Lamar boy was disgusted that Lincoln did not give due respect for something so important.

“I say, Abe,” repeated Uncle Jimmy emphatically, “I have the best horse in the world; after all that running he never drew a long breath.”

Then Abe had to say something, so he said, “Well, Uncle Jimmy, why don’t you tell us how many short breaths he took.”

“Everybody laughed and Uncle Jimmy got all-fired hot,” says Captain Lamar. “He spoke something about fighting Abe, and Abe said, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll throw you into the pond,’ and Uncle Jimmy shut up.”

Captain Lamar, in concluding his comments, said, “I was very much hurt at the way my hero was treated, but I have lived to change my ideas about heroes.”

V. LINCOLN’S FIRST DOLLAR

Lincoln enjoyed the commonplace interests of ordinary life, and much that we know of him is from conversations with friends over the early lessons of his youth.

One day while he was president, as he was talking with Secretary Seward over weighty affairs of state, he suddenly broke from the subject they were discussing and said, “Seward, do you know how I earned my first dollar?”

The well-to-do and rather aristocratic Secretary of State replied that he did not know.

“It was this way,” Lincoln continued. “I was about eighteen years of age and had succeeded in raising enough produce to justify a trip down the Ohio to the markets at New Orleans. I made a flatboat big enough to hold the barrels containing our things and was soon ready for loading up and starting on our journey.

“There were few landing places for steamers, and, where passengers desired to get on to one of the passing boats, they had to be taken out into the river in order to get aboard.

“While I was looking my boat over to see if anything more could be done to strengthen it, two men came down to the shore in a carriage, with their trunks, for the purpose of boarding a passing steamer. They looked the boats over and came down to me.

“‘Who owns this boat?’ they asked.

“I very proudly answered, ‘I do.’

“‘Will you take us and our trunks out to the steamer?’

“I was glad for a chance to earn something and I soon had them and their trunks loaded into my boat. I soon sculled them out to the steamer. They climbed aboard and I lifted their trunks on deck. I expected them to hand me a couple of bits for my work, but both seemed to have forgotten their dues to me. The steamer was about to start, when I called out to them, ‘You have forgotten to pay me.’

“Each took a silver half-dollar and threw it over into the bottom of my boat. I could scarcely believe my good fortune. That seems like a little thing but it was one of the most important incidents in my life. I could hardly believe that I had been able to earn, by my own work, a dollar in less than a day. I now knew that such things could be done. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.”

Lincoln received eight dollars a month for his trip down the Ohio and Mississippi from Indiana, but he probably got much priceless value out of it in the broader view of life it gave him. He had already prepared himself to think on what he saw, and, from all attainable evidence from every side, to reach reasonable and justified conclusions.

This voyage was comparatively uneventful except that one night, after the little boat crew of three men had sold their goods, they were attacked by seven negroes, who came aboard intending to kill and rob them. But, after a lively fight, the assailants were driven off and the boat was swung out into the river.

One cannot help thinking about what a difference it would have made to the negro race if those negroes had killed the man whom destiny had then started on the way to make their people free.

VI. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF A SUPERIOR MIND

The boy who reads the story of Lincoln, desiring to get real help in building his life, will find no miracle nor any short-cuts to get easily the ambitions of life. Lincoln did not know the office he wanted to hold, but he knew the kind of man he wanted to be and he worked unceasingly to reach that ideal of mind and manhood. In proportion, it is no harder now to know more than others, in order to be correspondingly useful to others, than it was in Lincoln’s time.

Lincoln said that he went to school by “littles” altogether not more than a year, but no one ever thinks of him as anything less than a learned man. All records show that he was intellectually at home in company with any worldly-wise men. It was in the prudent selection of interests nobly directed in honorable ways that gave him world-wisdom from the most limited supply, while now the multiplication of great books has made the diffusion of knowledge almost unlimited for anyone who seeks to be worth while. But it was in his high moral nature where was to be found the secret of his unwavering progress. Numerous characteristic incidents illustrate how little he was disturbed by the ill-nature of others.

That Lincoln was above “holding spite” or “bearing a grudge” is shown in his experience with the noted Kentucky lawyer, John Breckenridge.

There had been a murder at Boonville, Indiana, and Lincoln went to hear the speech made to the jury by the defense. He had never before heard a learned and eloquent man. The powerful plea of the silver-tongued John Breckenridge went through the sensitive soul of Lincoln like heavenly music. Forgetting his backwoodsman appearance, he rushed forward with others at the close of the speech to express his admiration.

Breckenridge was a “gentleman” of the South, not used to being familiarly addressed by anyone having the appearance of being “poor white trash.” He gazed in insulted amazement at the presumptuous youth and strode indignantly away.

This was probably the first knowledge Lincoln had of the artificial social barriers set up by men developing antagonizing classes. Here he first met the great problem of the ages in a land where all are born free and equal before life and law. It was a social partisanship not only contrary to common sense and moral law, but in violation of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the entire meaning of America. This is the great significance of Lincoln, that his life so unmistakably refuted so many un-American ideas of society and civilization.

In 1862 this same Breckenridge, now an humble petitioner for presidential favors, was introduced to President Lincoln, who then completed his expression of admiration for the excellent speech made by Mr. Breckenridge in the Indiana murder case. The able lawyer was indeed dumbfounded and it gave him a new vision of Lincoln, if not of the relationship of men. That equality of mind and opportunity which Lincoln represented was the master meaning of America, disclosing that in its freedom there is opportunity for the poorest to become the greatest through human values the most lasting and worthwhile.

Lincoln could have satisfied a righteous resentment against such haughty treatment toward the poor as was shown by Breckenridge to him at Boonville, and he could have given a deserved rebuke to pride in a land where pride of that kind is unpatriotic as well as immoral, but Lincoln chose the better part. It reminds us of the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Lincoln’s heart was as large as the world, but nowhere had any room for the memory of a wrong.”

[CHAPTER IV]

I. THE WILDERNESS AS THE GARDEN OF POLITICAL LIBERTY

The pioneer and frontiersman of early America are very strange beings when viewed from our present social customs, or as studied from the so-called refinements of modern interests and conveniences, but, no doubt, the problem is now before us, which shall be the makers of America, the pioneer view of freedom and right, or influence from the present methods of material distinctions and individual success. We may be sure that whichever one of these ideas gets first to the heart of the American boy, that is the ideal that will make of him the resulting man. The American boy loves to go to the bottom of things and so the submarine idea of interests is full of fancies. He likes to get to the top of things and the airship carries him away on the wings of adventure. But this all is merely because he likes freedom and conquest. There is a limit to the submarine and the airship, as there is to all machinery ideals, but there was no limit to the frontiersman and the pioneer. The boy wants no limit, and there is the same opening now to be a frontiersman and a pioneer in human values as there ever was, provided they are human values and not individual aggrandizement. The only consideration is that the scenes have changed and the obstacles known as “things in the way” are different.

The pioneer and the frontiersman were laboring to achieve something far more important than clearing away trees, killing wildcats or subduing the wild men of the wilderness. Such dangerous and exciting work was but an incident in the great struggle. They were striving for a safe, free and sufficient living for family and home. But far greater than the economic interest was the ideal interest of freedom from the will of overlords. That sublime goal of human endeavor is probably no nearer the heart’s desire now than it was then. Society is not yet out of the wilderness of wildcat schemers and wild men monopolists.

The American boy has an immeasurably greater opportunity to continue the heroic and patriotic work of the frontiersman and pioneer. The safety, freedom and sufficiency of America is merely well started on its second period. The first great epoch of American humanity became symbolized in the life of Washington and the second in the life of Lincoln. If there is a third great symbolic character, it is yet to come. The American boy must feel the meaning combined in Washington and Lincoln if he is to be a pioneer civilizing, socially and politically, the frontier of America for a nobler world.

II. SMALL BEGINNINGS IN PUBLIC ESTEEM

The wilderness family was humble as its needs. It was as least as good as its neighbors. One thing we should appreciate as significant, in the destitution of the times, the Lincoln family was adventurous and enterprising until it arrived for final settlement in the richest soil-regions of the Mississippi valley, and the freest mind-regions of political America.

In the spring of 1830, on account of ill health in the neighborhood, Lincoln’s father decided to move from the unpromising forests of Indiana to the fertile prairies of Illinois. Friends and relatives had already preceded him, and had sent back glowing accounts of the prairie lands. When the family arrived in Illinois, Lincoln was probably as near destitute as ever in his life, and he entered into a contract “to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark that would make a pair of trousers.”

Lincoln was now past twenty-one, and, it may be said, not until his arrival at New Salem had he found firm ground on which to begin building to some plan of life. Undoubtedly, his vision of the future was one of very vague dreams. That he was adventurous and looked beyond his community for the fulfillment of his fortunes is shown in his effort at commercial enterprise with nothing as his capital. He now arranged to take a second raft of home goods to New Orleans. Such a venture required no small amount of courage and self-reliance.

Wide observation with suitable thinking seems to give one prudence and steadiness of mind in emergencies. In several trying instances this proved to be true in Lincoln’s experience, long before the civilization of America was depending upon his warm heart and clear head. Many such instances seem as trivial as the trimmings of a sapling, but they are the perfecting process that makes possible the great oak.

When his flatboat was finished at New Salem, it was necessary to have a canoe that was to trail along behind the boat. The canoe was made from a dugout log. When it was shoved into the booming Sangamon river, his two friends, John Seamon and Walter Carmon, sprang into it for the first ride, but the stream was too swift for them. The current began to sweep them away down stream.

“Head up stream,” Lincoln shouted, “and work back to shore.”

But they could not beat the rush of water. Nearing the wreck of an old flatboat, they tried to pull the canoe in among the timbers and hold themselves fast. Seamon caught hold of a stanchion as they came by and the canoe was overturned, leaving Seamon clinging to the timber and Carmon being borne down stream, clinging to the slippery log.

Lincoln yelled for Carmon to swim for the branches of an elm tree that swung in the high water near the shore. Carmon did this. Lincoln then called to Seamon to swim for the tree with Carmon and they could be rescued together.

It was a very cold April day and the men were in danger of becoming too benumbed to hold on. By this time the whole village of New Salem was gathered at the bank.

Lincoln procured a rope, which he fastened to a large log. The log was pushed into the water and a venturesome young fellow named Jim Darrell bestrode the log that was to be floated down stream to the rescue.

The log went straight to the tree all right, but the young man was too eager to help his fellows. In the struggles the log was turned and so caught in the current that it was swept away from them and there were now three to be rescued from the tree.

The log was towed back. Lincoln tied another rope to it, and held the end of the rope in his hand. He then mounted the log to take the dangerous ride himself. As the log came into the tree, he threw the rope around a limb and held fast. In another minute all three of the shipwrecked men were safely astride the log. He then told the people to let go the guiding rope. The well-calculated result was that the current against the log, and the pull on the rope fastened to the limb, swung them safely around to the shore.

Strange and foreign as it may seem, numerous clear-headed exploits like this made his neighbors believe in him. Such belief encouraged him to believe in himself, and, trivial as the analogy may seem, and unworthy as the comparison might be, it doubtless had much to do in strengthening his ambition to surpass his surroundings and gain the larger fields of service. It is said that no one ever learned faster in any situation than Lincoln. He never “lost his head” in any whirl of events, and always before the crisis arrived he was facing it as master.

Lincoln's Residence at Springfield, Illinois.

Lincoln’s raft from New Salem arrived in New Orleans in May, 1831. At that time it seemed as if all the adventurers in the world had gathered there, and it was probably the wickedest city on earth. It was the gathering place of pirates, robbers and wild boatmen of the river and gulf.

The city in its wild prosperity and barbarity must have made a strong impression on Lincoln. Worst of all was its hideous slave market. Here men and women were herded together like animals and sold like cattle. Here he saw negro girls, many of them nearly white, treated like beasts. At the auctioning off of a mulatto girl he turned away from the revolting spectacle, saying to his companions, “Boys, let’s get away from this. If I ever get a chance to hit that thing (meaning slavery), I’ll hit it hard.”

And to him was given the chance, through the terrible ordeal of civil war, to drive that shame forever from the land of freedom. Only in the light of twentieth century developments can we look back and see what a desperate condition America would be in if the Southern half of the United States had succeeded in becoming a separate slave-nation. Great evils were involved and great wrongs had to be worked out from among the passions and prejudice of the times, but we can now all believe, no matter how meritorious was state patriotism, or how sincere the faith of the people, or how correct their interpretation of the original Union, that we have a greater America, destined to take a better part in making a nobler civilization for a more progressive world.

III. TESTS OF CHARACTER ON THE LAWLESS FRONTIER

There were gangs of good-natured rowdies, and there were roughhouse communities in pioneer days.

Such a community and such a gang was in the neighborhood of New Salem, known as Clary’s Grove and the Clary Grove Boys. They delighted in being rough and coarse, though, it is said, to their credit, that they were generous and most faithful friends.

Denton Offutt for some reason liked to boast to them of his hired man. He seemed to believe that it shed glory on himself as an employer. He told the Clary Boys that his man could lift more, throw farther, run faster, jump higher and wrestle better than any man in Sangamon County. This hurt the Clary boys’ sense of superiority. They decided to test it out. Accordingly, they appointed Jack Armstrong as their best man to prove their right to the championship.

Lincoln objected to the “tussle and scuffle” ideas of the time, he disbelieved in the honors won by “wooling and pulling,” but the age of “fist-and-skull” duels was not yet at an end, and the question of best man had to be tried out.

Clary’s Grove came one day to back their man as representative of themselves, and New Salem turned out to back the other. It was to be “catch-as-catch-can and the best man wins.”

The task to represent New Salem against the neighboring rowdydom was not an easy one. But such is human nature that who can say what effect it would have had on Lincoln’s future if he had been beaten and bullied over in that fight. Perhaps it shows how needful it is to do well everything at hand to be done, because we do not know how it may be part of our way to the unknowable future.

The champions came together according to the “fair play” of the time. They clinched and swayed, those two strong men, but neither could be moved from his feet. Each side was yelling itself hoarse, as the one who was to be the greatest of Americans strove with the one who would long ago be as forgotten as his dust, except for the struggle he made and for the conquest.

Feeling himself being defeated, one of them did not play the game fair. It was not Lincoln. The champion of the Clary gang played a trick, and Lincoln caught him by the throat, holding him out at arm’s length, where he could only kick, and squirm and beat the air, but could do nothing against that long, strong right arm. The Clary gang rushed to the rescue, and it looked as if he would have to fight them all when Armstrong declared that he had enough, and that Lincoln was the “best fellow that ever broke into camp.”

Not long after this the Clary gang elected Lincoln as Captain of their sports and henceforth were among his most faithful friends. The fact that Lincoln could hold the political support and good-will of both the best and the worst shows that there was a reliability in his character to which they could together safely give allegiance.

The friendship of Jack Armstrong and his family, after the fight, never swerved, and the time came when Lincoln repaid their kindness and their simple loyalty in a great way. Years afterward, when Lincoln had become a renowned lawyer, Jack Armstrong’s son was accused of murder. They went for Lincoln and Lincoln came. He studied the case and became convinced that the son of his old friend was innocent.

There had been a quarrel among some young men one night near an out-of-door camp meeting, and one had been stabbed to death.

Young Armstrong was arrested on the testimony of one who claimed to have seen the blow struck by the light of the moon.

Lincoln made the witness repeat his testimony about the moon and then began his address to the jury. He told of his relations to the prisoner’s father, of the kindness of the mother, and how he had played with the boy as a child. Then he said that he was not there as paid attorney but as a friend of the family. With that explanation, he reviewed the testimony showing that all the evidence depended on what the witness had seen by the light of the moon. At this point he produced an almanac showing that there was no moon on the night of the murder. The jury took only a very short consultation to bring in a verdict of “Not Guilty.”

This story has often been told in which the almanac is represented as having been an old one, thus winning the case by a trick of falsehood, but investigation has proven this to be untrue, accordingly supporting the statement that Lincoln never used such tactics to win a case.

We have learned that no character in history can be understood except in relation to its surroundings. Otherwise, Lincoln’s fight with the backwoods’ ruffians might now seem vulgar and lawless, but it was in truth a powerful factor in building his life for its supreme service. It not only helped to establish his own conscious integrity, but it was planting respect for him among his neighbors, which was as necessary for his growth of reputation as anything at any time in his career. The time when a boy can afford not “to care what people think” depends very much not only upon the boy and the people, but also upon what is meant by the “care” and the “think.”

IV. THE PIONEER MISSIONARY OF HUMANITY

The pioneer West was indeed uncouth, but there were many noteworthy redeeming features in the zeal of the better classes for ideal interests. Doubtless, Lincoln was often inspired by such a fair view of humanity. Many an incident is told of the unselfish devotion among the people with whom Lincoln lived.

The zeal in having a mission in those days was something that is almost unimaginable in these days. It is illustrated by the following incident told by Milburn of the useful men of those days in touch with the Lincoln life.

A young travelling preacher, and the preachers of that period in those regions were really all travelling if they were preachers, for they had no abiding place, was so much beloved by a man who had acquired a large amount of land, that the man made the young preacher the present of a deed to half a section of land. The young man, being destitute, was much rejoiced to receive the gift of three hundred and twenty acres of good prairie soil. He went away with a grateful heart toward his generous benefactor. Three months later he returned, and, as he greeted the generous friend at the door, he handed back the deed, saying, “Here, sir, I want you to take back your title-deed.”

“What’s the matter,” asked the surprised friend. “Anything wrong with it?”

“No,” replied the young man, as if somewhat ashamed to give his reason.

“Isn’t the land good enough?”

“Good as any in the state.”

“Are you afraid it is a sickly place?”