The year that marked the advent of Indiana into national statehood, witnessed the humble and unheralded entrance of Thomas Lincoln and his family into Spencer County. The State was a haven for the pioneer of peaceable disposition. The danger of the Indian no longer haunted the land. Still life was a grim struggle, hewing the way through solid forests to reach the new home, cutting the trees to build the log cabin, patiently raising the first crop of corn. It took time to construct the trail and then the road. Yet with marvelous rapidity, these early settlers soon caused the church to appear, the schoolhouse and the hamlet.[14]

Party politics is largely the product of a settled community. When men are engrossed in establishing a home matters of national significance seem of little moment. The kitchen is more important to the log cabin than the parlor. So the most pressing problems of a pioneer settlement are those of local concern. Conventions and parties were unknown for some time. Any man could proclaim his candidacy for office. Voters were known as "Jones-men" or "Smith-men," after the candidate of their choice. The earliest manifestations of party spirit arose over the slavery question. Even under territorial government, delegates to Congress were called "Slavery" or "Anti-Slavery." During the canvass in which John Quincy Adams was selected as President, the Whig and Democratic parties were little recognized in Indiana. On election day, the workers shouted, "Here are Jackson tickets! Here are Clay!"[15] The defeat of Jackson hastened the growth of partisanship. With the introduction of party politics came resort to trickery in elections.[16]

Politics was a recreation to the early settler. When the newspaper was a luxury, when there were few forms of amusement, it was an indulgence as well as an educational influence to listen to the orator on the questions of the day. Politics was the school of the nation, and in it there were few truants.

The following incident illustrates a primitive political gathering. School was dismissed at the time of the militia election, and so the teacher took part in the festivities. A tin cup of whiskey was passed around 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. The time his companions squandered in recreation he largely employed in mental improvement. His literary education was a painful process and was gained without help. His plan was slow but effective. "He read every book he could lay his hands on; and, when he came across a passage that struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper. Then he would rewrite it, look at it, repeat it. He had a copybook, a kind of scrap book, in which he put down all things, and thus preserved them."[25]

By this method he gradually evolved a style of supreme strength and sincerity. The Bible was the main force in its fruition. For a long time he dabbled in "crude rhymes" and "awkward imitations of scriptural lore." With all the gentleness of his nature, he was a master of satire, and slowly learned to use this dangerous gift with moderation. One of his early compositions was an impulsive effort to condemn cruelty to the helpless toad and turtle. More ambitious products followed. The reading of a newspaper article on temperance induced him to contribute something on that theme. A minister found it a place in a newspaper, to the ecstasy of the writer for the first time tasting the sweetness of publicity. This success led him to indulge in other dissertations. His political environment and his readings in American history germinated. With exultant spirit he proclaimed that "the American Government was the best form of government for an intelligent people; that it ought to be kept sound, and preserved forever; that general education should be fostered and carried all over the country; that the Constitution should be saved, the Union perpetuated, and the laws revered, respected, and enforced."[26] This effort met with instant approbation. A lawyer, to whose criticism it was soberly entrusted, declared, "The world can't beat it."[27]

Three books had a pervasive influence upon his political opinions, "The Revised Statutes of Indiana," Weems' "Life of Washington," and a "History of the United States."[28] Lincoln has left us indisputable evidence of the profound power of Revolutionary History in moulding his patriotic sentiments. For in his memorable speech in the Senate Chamber at Trenton, New Jersey, he said:

"May I be pardoned if, upon 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 on my memory, more than any single Revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any 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—that something even more than national independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come—I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be a humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost most chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle."[29]

The influence of Weems' "Life" is indicated by the fact that Lincoln did not lose his boyish enthusiasm for the character of Washington. He once exclaimed, "Let us believe as in the days of our youth that Washington was spotless; it makes human nature better to believe that one human being was perfect: that human perfection is possible."[30] This devotion is still more significant as Lincoln very rarely indulged in hero worship.

We shall not at all comprehend the political life of Abraham Lincoln unless we fairly understand the momentous subjective influence of these few volumes. One of them, the Revised Statutes of Indiana, contained the Declaration of Independence. He was scarcely more than eighteen years old when he brooded over the significance of that immortal utterance.[31]

His stepsister says, he was an indefatigable preacher. "When father and mother would go to church, Abe would take down the Bible, read a verse, give out a hymn, and we would sing. Abe was about fifteen years of age. He preached, and we would do the crying. Sometimes he would join in the chorus of tears. One day my brother, John Johnston, caught a land terrapin, brought it to the place where Abe was preaching, threw it against the tree and crushed the shell. It suffered much,—quivered all over. Abe then preached against cruelty to animals, contending that an ant's life was just as sweet to it as ours to us."[32]

Often mounting a real tree stump his quaint stories and impressive manner gathered all his fellow laborers. It is related that Lincoln's father and sometimes his employers, angered at the loss of labor, would drag the orator from his eminence. It was about this time that Lincoln said that his father taught him to work but never to love it.[33]

Lincoln's wit was no small part of his forensic eloquence. He was more ready at the beginning of his career than in after years to ridicule censorious conduct. So James Larkin found it, who was a great hand to brag. He stepped up before Abe, who was in the crowd, and boasted of his horse. "I have got the best horse in the country," he shouted to his young listener. "I ran him three miles in exactly three minutes, and he never fetched a long breath."

"I presume," said Abe, rather dryly, "that he fetched a good many short ones though."[34]

Lincoln further found opportunity for exercising his oratorical talent in the speaking exhibitions at Gentryville. Public debates were no minor attraction to the community. Discussions as to whether the Indian or negro had the greater right to find fault with his treatment were frequent and intense. The closing day of school was duly celebrated by declamations, debates and dialogues. Many selections for these occasions came from the Kentucky "Preceptor," rich in such utterance as Pitt's "Speech on the Slave Trade."[35]

Lincoln was present on one occasion at a dramatic murder trial in which John V. Brackenridge appeared for the defendant.[36] Lincoln heard the polished and eloquent advocate as in a dream. After the trial the humble backwood speaker freely praised the eloquence of the mature advocate. Brackenridge glancing at his awkward shabby admirer turned away without a word.

Lincoln learned that ability does not always go hand in hand with sympathy. He crawled into his own world where pride was to have no home, where humble appearances were not to be despised. When Lincoln as President met this same Brackenridge, he simply said, "If I could, as I then thought, have made as good a speech as that, my soul would have been satisfied; for it was up to that time the best speech I had ever heard."[37]

The people of Gentryville were largely of a rough hardy sort. Like other pioneers they were ready to escape the monotony of their life by engaging in exciting games. The rude joke, the vulgar gibe was prized. To laugh loud was somewhat of a luxury to the hard working settler. Refining influence was fairly unknown.

However, social distinctions gradually asserted themselves with the progress of prosperity. Parties of some pretensions came into vogue, and distinctions were made in the guests invited. Lincoln, who had been welcomed at the ruder gatherings, log rollings and similar entertainments, was not in favor with those seeking social prominence. Fond of popular applause, he resented this treatment, and in spite wrote satires and "chronicles," chastising the offenders.[38] These productions were coarse, vulgar and even indecent, spiced with no lack of wit. They appealed to many, though it is said that some were shocked.

On one occasion Lincoln placed certain reflections on the Grigsby family where they could be readily discovered. Being found, they brought on a fight for the family honor. Lincoln had his stepbrother, Johnston, first stand "the brunt" of the contest. A terrible fight ensued, and when Lincoln saw that Grigsby was too much for Johnston, he burst through the ring, caught Grigsby, and threw him off some feet away. Then swinging a bottle of liquor over his head swore that he was "the big buck of the lick." "If any one doubts it," he shouted, "he has only to come on and whet his horns." A general engagement resulted, but soon the field was cleared and the wounded retired amid the exultant shouts of the victors.[39]

From such an origin Lincoln came. Biographers seek to illumine its poverty in vain. He was reared amid a shiftless family. No external inducement guided him in his wearisome journey. He was in the daily presence of vulgarity. He alone of all his companions started in a titanic conflict with an enslaving environment.

The store was the social center of the pioneer town, the place to hear the latest gossip. There the neighbors met to pass judgment on events of general and local interest. The proprietor was often the only possessor of the weekly newspaper. It was not as in later days the abode of loungers mainly. It played a big part in the education of the frontier community. It was the school of many men and the home of wit and wisdom. Politics, religion and other problems were here subjected to the scrutiny of men blest with good sense and judgment.

The store drew the choice spirits in story telling, and its hero was the man who could best kindle laughter. In a community where this art was the highway to the general good will, Lincoln soon became the master among the many contestants for that distinction.

Wherever men congregated Lincoln sought supremacy. Political discussions were frequent. The newcomer soon tried his hand in the art of controversy. He gradually gained headway in the esteem of the soberminded for the clearness of his statements, for the keenness of his vision, and the honesty of his manner. Day by day he gathered strength and wisdom. It is improbable that any other young man so soon won the general good will or was so widely respected by all classes of men. In this, even as a youth, he was unique. He had the splendid tact, the inherent humanity that appealed to the various elements that constituted the transitional frontier when it was evolving into a higher community.

There is very little satisfactory evidence of the political opinions of Abraham Lincoln in Indiana. Lamon states that his family were all Jackson Democrats; that Lincoln's employer, Jones, the grocery keeper of Gentryville, was a Jackson Democrat, and that Lincoln read papers that championed the principles of the Democratic party of that day, and that he was in the beginning a follower of that eminent political sage.[40] There is no corroboration of this testimony that Lincoln was ever avowedly an attendant in the school of Jackson. Lincoln frequently refers to the fact with pride that he was an old time Whig, and it might be inferred from his speeches and statements that he was a devoted follower of Clay from the very first. However, Lincoln was somewhat an admirer of Andrew Jackson. It may be that early in life he passed through the several stages of political development, and was thus aided in becoming a tolerant politician.

From childhood until 1829, Lincoln lived in Gentryville. In that year he made a trip by boat to New Orleans with Allen Gentry. It was on this venture that Lincoln had his first vital meeting with the members of the race in whose destiny he was to be so deeply concerned. While their boat was moored near Baton Rouge and they were fast asleep, they were startled by footsteps on board. They knew "that it was a gang of negroes come to rob, and perhaps to murder them. Allen, thinking to frighten the intruders, cried out, 'Bring the guns, Lincoln; shoot them.' Abe came without a gun, but he fell among the negroes with a huge bludgeon, and belabored them most cruelly," but "received a scar which he carried with him to his grave."[41] It is strange that this incident did not jaundice the youthful Lincoln against the unfortunate people. Though his life was endangered by these wayward sons of Ethiopia, it did not affect his sympathy in any degree for the burdened and oppressed race, nor change his judgment as to the injustice of their treatment.

The origin of Lincoln's anti-slavery sentiments is somewhat of a mystery. That Stephen Douglas, reared in New England, should become the foremost champion of the Southern slavery policy, and that Abraham Lincoln, a son of Kentucky, that of the bondsman, baffles the wisdom of the historian.

Various efforts have been made to account for his views on the slavery issue. The claim that he derived them from his parents in Kentucky has been noted. Ida Tarbell enumerates the various abolition movements in the western domain that may have influenced him. In 1819, Charles Osborn published a paper advocating emancipation. A few years after Benjamin Lundy issued the Genius at Shelbyville. Scarcely one hundred miles from Gentryville the Abolition Intelligencer was started. There were abolition societies in Kentucky and Illinois. The same author states that "it is not impossible that as Frederick Douglas first realized his own condition in reading a school speaker, the 'Columbian Orator,' so Abraham Lincoln first felt the wrong of slavery in reading his 'Kentucky' or 'American Preceptor.'"[42]

Considering the slowness of communication, the casual appearances of even well-known journals, it is doubtful if Lincoln heard of the abolition movement to any serious extent. It is at least significant that Lincoln alone, of his entire family and of his associates, saw the magnitude of the slavery evil. Like his sympathy for the suffering animal world, his anti-slavery sentiments baffle explanation. He hated the infliction of wrong instinctively.

There is a duality to the life of Lincoln that should command more attention. Intellectually, he lived in a world of his own, a world in which he found little companionship. Still he was not altogether the fruition of a subjective life. He shared the common pioneer craving for human society. It may have been rendered even more intense in his case by the loneliness of his mental existence. Neither the forest, prairie nor storm, the sunset or constellation were his friends as men were. He loved his kind more than nature.

During his last years in Indiana he lived fully the life of the people around him. Their ideals seemed his ideals. Athletic superiority was the road to respect and honor, and Lincoln became the foremost man in physical games. He first won renown as a wrestler. Stories of his superior strength were heralded far and wide and his place was unchallenged. He was a leader in the rude crowd where might was the test of standing. Living among men devoted to hunting, he seldom indulged in that common recreation. In this his individuality asserted itself. He would not sanction suffering even in the animal world, and he seldom swerved from his convictions even in the day when the wolf howled at the cabin door.

The maturity of Lincoln's development at the time of his departure from Indiana has not received just consideration. Gaunt and awkward in appearance there was little in him to attract favorable attention. He was without trade or profession. Nothing appeared to distinguish him from the other members of the shiftless Lincoln and Hanks family. A stranger would hardly have chosen him as a future son of fortune, even from that humble crowd of wanderers. Uncouth in dress and manner, he would have found small favor in polite society, and among those who judge by things seen on the surface.

Viewed subjectively there is another Lincoln, a man of promise and inevitable distinction. Those who have dwelt extensively on the objective aspect of Lincoln have squandered sympathy on his want of education. For though poor in material things, he was rich in mental wealth, in the qualities that make manhood, in those virtues that survive the mutations of time, that future generations dwell on with ever increasing fondness. At the threshold of his majority he was already possessed of elemental ability and greatness. He was one of those rare souls that do not lose the golden ideals of youth with passing years. The sneers of selfish men never changed the primal sweetness of his nature.

The fourteen years that Lincoln lived in Indiana were years of splendid fruition. By his peculiar process of self-development his mind had attained a maturity far beyond his age. He mingled freely in the world of men and events. He was close to the human heart, to the sorrows of the humble, to the mute and deep emotions of the lonely dweller on the western farms. He loved the plain people. He had the command of style, the ease and pith of statement that schools rarely give. Ready of speech, he could command the attention of the rough as well as the sober minded. He was already renowned as a dispenser of laughter through the magic of his stories. But above all he was rarely gifted with good sense, with a mind not easily diverted by false lights, by the glitter of objectivity. He went irresistibly to the root of things. A man of fine emotions, wanting in the small social amenities, he seldom went astray in the domain of reality.

It is also essential to mark the practical character of all his learning. His knowledge was all useful and vitalizing. His mind was not cumbered with waste materials. His education was sound to the core, was all genuine, well calculated for a man in the very strife of life. Judged by the standard of schools and universities he was not an educated man, but judged by the broader standard of thought and action he was supremely educated, the best educated man of his time. He served his apprenticeship in the school of experience and only needed opportunity to be of royal service to his fellowmen. Honest, homely and humble, he was in harmony with the average man of his time, and was well fitted to become a representative of the people.