CHAPTER XVI.
BUSINESS REVERSES.—LINCOLN FOR THE SECOND TIME A CANDIDATE FOR THE LEGISLATURE.—IS ELECTED.
Between his duties as deputy surveyor and postmaster, Lincoln had little leisure for the store, and its management passed into the hands of Berry. The stock of groceries was on the wane. The numerous obligations of the firm were maturing, with no money to meet them. Both members of the firm, in the face of such obstacles, lost courage; and when, early in 1834, Alexander and William Trent asked if the store was for sale, an affirmative answer was eagerly given. A price was agreed upon, and the sale was made. Now, neither Alexander Trent nor his brother had any money; but as Berry and Lincoln had bought without money, it seemed only fair that they should be willing to sell on the same terms. Accordingly the notes of the Trent brothers were accepted for the purchase price, and the store was turned over to the new owners. But about the time their notes fell due the Trent brothers disappeared. The few groceries in the store were seized by creditors, and the doors were closed, never to be opened again.
Misfortunes now crowded upon Lincoln. His late partner, Berry, soon reached the end of his wild career, and one morning a farmer from the Rock Creek neighborhood drove into New Salem with the news that he was dead.
The appalling debt which had accumulated was thrown upon Lincoln’s shoulders. It was then too common a fashion among men who became deluged in debt to “clear out,” in the expressive language of the pioneer, as the Trents had done; but this was not Lincoln’s way. He quietly settled down among the men he owed, and promised to pay them. For fifteen years he carried this burden—a load which he cheerfully and manfully bore, but one so heavy that he habitually spoke of it as the “national debt.” Talking once of it to a friend, Lincoln said: “That debt was the greatest obstacle I have ever met in life. I had no way of speculating, and could not earn money except by labor; and to earn by labor eleven hundred dollars, besides my living, seemed the work of a lifetime. There was, however, but one way. I went to the creditors, and told them that if they would let me alone, I would give them all I could earn over my living, as fast as I could earn it.” As late as 1848, so we are informed by Mr. Herndon, Mr. Lincoln, then a member of Congress, sent home money, saved from his salary, to be applied on these obligations. All the notes, with interest at the high rates then prevailing, were at last paid.
FACSIMILE OF A LETTER WRITTEN BY LINCOLN WHILE POSTMASTER AT NEW SALEM.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
From the collection of Mr. C. F. Gunther of Chicago.
With a single exception, Lincoln’s creditors seem to have been lenient. One of the notes given by him came into the hands of a Mr. Van Bergen, who, when it fell due, brought suit. The amount of the judgment was more than Lincoln could pay, and his personal effects were levied upon. These consisted of his horse, saddle and bridle, and surveying instruments. James Short, a well-to-do farmer living on Sand Ridge, a few miles north of New Salem, heard of the trouble which had befallen his young friend. Without advising Lincoln of his plans, he attended the sale, bought in the horse and surveying instruments for one hundred and twenty dollars, and turned them over to their former owner. By this kind act of “Uncle Jimmy,” the young surveyor was enabled to continue his business.
JOHN CALHOUN, UNDER WHOM LINCOLN LEARNED SURVEYING.
From a steel engraving in the possession of R. W. Diller, Springfield, Illinois. John Calhoun was born in Boston, Massachusetts, October 14, 1806. In 1830 he removed to Springfield, Illinois, and after serving in the Black Hawk War was appointed surveyor of Sangamon County. He was a Democratic Representative in 1838; Democratic presidential elector in 1844; candidate for Governor before the Democratic State Convention in 1846; Mayor of Springfield in 1849, 1850, and 1851. In 1854, President Pierce appointed him Surveyor-General of Kansas, and he became conspicuous in Kansas politics. He was president of the Lecompton Convention. He died at St. Joseph, Missouri, October 25, 1859. Mr. Frederick Hawn, who was his boyhood friend, and afterward married a sister of Calhoun’s wife, is now living at Leavenworth, Kansas, at the age of eighty-five years. In an interesting letter to the writer he says: “It has been related that Calhoun induced Lincoln to study surveying in order to become his deputy. Presuming that he was ready to graduate and receive his commission, he called on Calhoun, then living with his father-in-law, Seth R. Cutter, on Upper Lick Creek. After the interview was concluded, Mr. Lincoln, about to depart, remarked: ‘Calhoun, I am entirely unable to repay you for your generosity at present. All that I have you see on me, except a quarter of a dollar in my pocket.’ This is a family tradition. However, my wife, then a miss of sixteen, says, while I am writing this sketch, that she distinctly remembers this interview. After Lincoln was gone she says she and her sister, Mrs. Calhoun, commenced making jocular remarks about his uncanny appearance, in the presence of Calhoun, to which in substance he made this rejoinder: ‘For all that, he is no common man.’ My wife believes these were the exact words.”
Lincoln never forgot a benefactor. He not only repaid the money with interest, but nearly thirty years later remembered the kindness in a most substantial way. After Lincoln left New Salem, financial reverses came to James Short, and he removed to the far West to seek his fortune anew. Early in Lincoln’s presidential term he heard that “Uncle Jimmy” was living in California. One day Mr. Short received a letter from Washington. Tearing it open, he read the gratifying announcement that he had been commissioned an Indian agent.
LINCOLN’S SURVEYING INSTRUMENTS.
Photographed for this work. After Lincoln gave up surveying, he sold his instruments to John B. Gum, afterward county surveyor of Menard County. Mr. Gum kept them until a few years ago, when he presented the instruments to the Lincoln Monument Association, and they are now on exhibition at the monument in Springfield, Illinois.
THE KINDNESS SHOWN LINCOLN IN NEW SALEM.
The kindness of Mr. Short was not exceptional in Lincoln’s New Salem career. When the store had “winked out,” as he put it, and the post-office had been left without headquarters, one of his neighbors, Samuel Hill, invited the homeless postmaster into his store. There was hardly a man or woman in the community who would not have been glad to do as much. It was a simple recognition of Lincoln’s friendliness to them. He was what they called “obliging”—a man who instinctively did the thing which he saw would help another, no matter how trivial or homely it was. In the home of Rowan Herndon, where he had boarded when he first came to the town, he had made himself loved by his care of the children. “He nearly always had one of them around with him,” says Mr. Herndon. In the Rutledge tavern, where he afterwards lived, the landlord told with appreciation how, when his house was full, Lincoln gave up his bed, went to the store, and slept on the counter, his pillow a web of calico. If a traveller “stuck in the mud” in New Salem’s one street, Lincoln was always the first to help pull out the wheel. The widows praised him because he “chopped their wood;” the overworked, because he was always ready to give them a lift. It was the spontaneous, unobtrusive helpfulness of the man’s nature which endeared him to everybody, and which inspired a general desire to do all possible in return. There are many tales told of homely service rendered him, even by the hard-working farmers’ wives around New Salem. There was not one of them who did not gladly “put on a plate” for Abe Lincoln when he appeared, or did not darn or mend for him when she knew he needed it. Hannah Armstrong, the wife of the hero of Clary’s Grove, made him one of her family. “Abe would come out to our house,” she said, “drink milk, eat mush, cornbread and butter, bring the children candy, and rock the cradle while I got him something to eat.... Has stayed at our house two or three weeks at a time.” Lincoln’s pay for his first piece of surveying came in the shape of two buckskins, and it was Hannah who “foxed” them on his trousers.
His relations were equally friendly in the better homes of the community; even at the minister, the Rev. John Cameron’s, he was perfectly at home, and Mrs. Cameron was by him affectionately called “Aunt Polly.” It was not only his kindly service which made Lincoln loved; it was his sympathetic comprehension of the duties and joys and sorrows and interests of the people. Whether it was Jack Armstrong and his wrestling, Hannah and her babies, Kelso and his fishing and poetry, the school-master and his books—with one and all he was at home. He possessed in an extraordinary degree the power of entering into the interests of others, a power found only in reflective, unselfish natures endowed with a humorous sense of human foibles, and with great tenderness of heart. Men and women amused Lincoln, but so long as they were sincere he loved them and sympathized with them. He was human in the best sense of that fine word.
LINCOLN’S ACQUAINTANCE IN SANGAMON COUNTY IS EXTENDED.
Now that the store was closed and his surveying increased, Lincoln had an excellent opportunity to extend his acquaintance, for he was travelling about the country. Everywhere he won friends. The surveyor, naturally, was respected for his calling’s sake; but the new deputy surveyor was admired for his friendly ways, his willingness to lend a hand indoors as well as out, his learning, his ambition, his independence. Throughout the county he began to be regarded as “a right smart young man.” Some of his associates appear even to have comprehended his peculiarly great character, and dimly to have foreseen a splendid future. “Often,” says Daniel Green Burner, Berry and Lincoln’s clerk in the grocery, “I have heard my brother-in-law, Dr. Duncan, say he would not be surprised if some day Abe Lincoln got to be Governor of Illinois. Lincoln,” Mr. Burner adds, “was thought to know a little more than anybody else among the young people. He was a good debater, and liked it. He read much, and seemed never to forget anything.”
LINCOLN IN THE SUMMER OF 1860.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.
From a copy (made by E. A. Bromley of the Minneapolis “Journal” staff) of a photograph owned by Mrs. Cyrus Aldrich, whose husband, now dead, was a Congressman from Minnesota. We owe the photograph to the courtesy of Mr. Daniel Fish of Minneapolis. In the summer of 1860 Mr. M. C. Tuttle, a photographer of St. Paul, wrote to Mr. Lincoln, requesting that he have a negative taken and sent to him for local use in the campaign. The request was granted, but the negative was broken in transit. On learning of the accident, Mr. Lincoln sat again, and with the second negative he sent a jocular note wherein he referred to the fact, disclosed by the picture, that in the interval he had “got a new coat.” A few copies of the picture were made by Mr. Tuttle, and distributed among the Republican editors of the State. It has never before been reproduced. Mrs. Aldrich’s copy was presented to her by William H. Seward when he was entertained at the Aldrich homestead (now the Minneapolis City Hospital) in September, 1860. A fine copy of this same photograph is owned by Mr. Ward Monroe of Jersey City, New Jersey.
LINCOLN’S SADDLE-BAGS.—PHOTOGRAPHED FOR THIS BIOGRAPHY.
These saddle-bags, now in the Lincoln Monument at Springfield, are said to have been used by Lincoln while he was a surveyor.
Lincoln was fully conscious of his popularity, and it seemed to him in 1834 that he could safely venture to try again for the legislature. Accordingly he announced himself as a candidate, spending much of the summer of 1834 in electioneering. It was a repetition of what he had done in 1832, though on the larger scale made possible by wider acquaintance. In company with the other candidates, he rode up and down the county, making speeches at the public sales, in shady groves, now and then in a log schoolhouse. In his speeches he soon distinguished himself by the amazing candor with which he dealt with all questions, and by his curious blending of audacity and humility. Wherever he saw a crowd of men he joined them, and he never failed to adapt himself to their point of view in asking for votes. If the degree of physical strength was their test for a candidate, he was ready to lift a weight, or wrestle with the countryside champion; if the amount of grain a man could cradle would recommend him, he seized the cradle and showed the swath he could cut. The campaign was well conducted, for in August he was elected one of the four assemblymen from Sangamon. The vote at this election stood: Dawson, 1390; Lincoln, 1376; Carpenter, 1170; Stuart, 1164.
VIEW OF THE SANGAMON RIVER NEAR NEW SALEM.
Reproduced, by permission, from “Menard-Salem-Lincoln Souvenir Album,” Petersburg, Illinois, 1893.
With one exception, the biographers of Lincoln have given him the first place on the ticket in 1834. He really stood second in order. Herndon gives the correct vote, although he is in error in saying that the chief authority he quotes, a document owned by Dr. A. W. French of Springfield, Illinois, is an “official return.” It is a statement, made out in Lincoln’s writing, and certified to by the county clerk, of the total number of votes cast in the whole county for each of the several candidates for the legislature. The official returns are on file in the Springfield court-house.