A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 3
Persistent in Learning 1816–30

YOUNG ABE WAS DILIGENT FOR KNOWLEDGE—WISHED TO KNOW & IF PAINS AND LABOR WOULD GET IT HE WAS SURE TO GET IT

SARAH BUSH LINCOLN
Interview with William Herndon, September 8, 1865

YHERE I GREW UP- IS THE UNDERSTATED WAY ABRAHAM LINCOLN described his fourteen years in Indiana in his 1860 campaign autobiographical statement. Arriving with his family in the late fall of 1816 at the age of seven, Lincoln would grow from a boy to a youth to a young man who would prove different from any young man in the world around him.
The formative years from seven to twenty-one are critical for every person, and especially for Lincoln. In Indiana, the young Lincoln would grow physically, so that by the time he was twenty-one he was six feet four inches tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds, his physical strength setting him apart early in the frontier’s masculine culture. Lincoln would also grow intellectually on the small but steady diet of books he mastered. Early on, no matter how bleak and limiting life on his family’s farm became, he learned to rely on his books and his imagination to satisfy his curiosity and intellect. Finally, in Indiana, Lincoln would develop the interior moral compass that enabled him to navigate not simply the forests and streams of the state, but the more difficult terrain of ethical decisions in a young America on the rise.
IN THE FALL OF 1816, Thomas Lincoln began the first of two journeys to move his young family across the Ohio River from Kentucky to Indiana, which was about to become the newest free state. On a flatboat of yellow cedar, Thomas floated down Knob Creek into the Rolling Fork, steered his boat into the Beach Fork, and finally moved west on the broad Ohio River.
Coming ashore in Indiana at a gentle bend in the Ohio, Thomas cut his own trail through sixteen miles of dense wilderness. Only eight months later, in July 1817, Elias Pym Fordham, a young English farmer, would describe Indiana as “a vast forest, larger than England.” In the midst of this huge forest Thomas selected a quarter section, or forty acres. He marked his claim by stacking brush at the corners of his property. Thomas had purchased “Congress land,” which had been surveyed by the government; the title would be indisputable.
After many weeks on his new property, Thomas Lincoln returned to his wife, Nancy, and Sarah and Abraham at their Knob Creek farm in Kentucky. The family enjoyed reports of good land with deep, rich soil. At age seven, Abraham joined in the family preparations to move for the third time in his young life.
Thomas and Nancy had been married for ten years and had accrued a good deal of household possessions. They decided to leave their furniture behind because Thomas, a skilled carpenter, could make furniture for their new home. They packed their wagons with their featherbed, a spinning wheel, cooking utensils, and many tools, including an ax to clear their new land.
In the late fall of 1816, the Lincoln family began their trek to Indiana. Just before departing they walked to the cemetery on the top of a hill to pause at a small field stone marked with the initials T.L., the grave of little Thomas Lincoln, Jr., who had died four years before.
The Lincolns made stops to say their good-byes to friends in Eliza-bethtown and at various farms along the way. As they journeyed, Abraham and Sarah were excited to see who would be the first to catch a view of the mighty Ohio River. The 981-mile winding river had become the major interstate highway carrying settlers to new lands and adventures.
After several days, the Lincolns reached a ferry about two and a half miles west of Troy, Indiana. Fees to cross the river were one dollar for horse and wagon, twelve and a half cents per adult, and free for children under ten years, which included Abraham and Sarah. As they crossed, the children were on the lookout for flatboats and barges. Thomas Lincoln told Abraham and Sarah that they might see a steamboat, maybe the Washington or the Pike, descending the Ohio River on its way to faraway New Orleans.
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AFTER STEPPING ONTO Indiana soil, the family had to “pack through” sixteen miles of almost impenetrable forest and underbrush. Dense fog could darken the forest in the middle of the day. With his ax and hunting knife, Thomas cut his way to the farm, felling oak, hickory, beech, maple, and walnut trees entangled with grapevines. No wonder the early pioneers called these forest thickets the “roughs.”
Arriving in the region near Pigeon Creek, the Lincolns immediately set about to build a “half-faced camp,” a rough log shelter enclosed on three sides with a blazing fire on the fourth. After a few days they began erecting a cabin on a knoll overlooking their land.
Learning to use the ax, Abraham helped his father build the cabin and establish the farming. Thomas constructed a pole bedstead in a corner opposite the fireplace where Abraham could climb up to sleep. Young Abraham learned from his carpenter father to build a three-legged stool, which, though small, rested sturdily because of its precise balance. Photographs from later in the century often pictured old, rundown cabins on the frontier, but the Lincoln cabin was new and smelled of fresh-cut timber.
The memory of clearing the Indiana land with his ax became part of Lincoln’s campaign biography thirty-four years later: “A., though very young, was large of his age, and had an axe put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twenty-third year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument.”
An ax in Lincoln’s day would have been hand forged of bar iron and cast steel, giving it its proper shape in relation to its weight. It took up to two days to make such an ax. The price would have been an enormous three to five dollars. Many woodsmen chose to split and finish their own handles from second-growth hickory. Men in frontier Kentucky and Indiana would ride a hundred miles on horseback to purchase such an ax, or to have their favorite ax resteeled. Pioneers often discussed the proper weight of an ax and the best kind of handle as much as they discussed politics.
Abraham helped his father clear the land, chop wood, and split fence rails. Early on, he developed the muscle coordination necessary for a powerful swing. As he grew in size and coordination, young Abe could fell trees of four to six feet in diameter. Handling an ax with such skill was a sign that a boy was becoming a man.
Wild animals flourished in the forest around Pigeon Creek. Deer, wolves, panthers, wildcats, bears, turkeys, quail, and grouse were all plentiful. During the Lincolns’ first winter in Indiana, before they were able to plant vegetables, the family lived on forest game.
More than two decades later, Lincoln returned to Indiana and wrote a poem describing the scene of his youth:
When first my father settled here,
’twas then the frontier line:
The panther’s scream filled night with fear
And bears preyed on the swine.
THE LINCOLNS’ FIRST YEAR in Indiana, 1817, was lonely. Their nearest neighbors with children near Abraham’s age lived several miles away—through the forest. In winter, the encirclement by the never-ending trees increased the sense of darkness and isolation.
A few months after their arrival, “a few days before the completion of [my] eighth year, in the absence of [my] father,” Abraham asked his mother’s permission to borrow his father’s gun because he had spied a flock of wild turkeys flying overhead. In a frontier household, guns were a regular part of daily life, and their use became a central part of a boy’s rite of passage. In his campaign statement, he described what happened next. “A., standing inside, shot through a crack, and killed one of them.”
Lincoln surprised himself with his response to his accurate marksmanship. Upon examining the beautiful dead bird, he found himself filled not with pride but sorrow. At that moment, young Abraham made an unexpected choice: “[I have] never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.” Even more unexpected, he decided to include this admission in his presidential campaign autobiography.
In the fall of 1817, a break in the loneliness came with the arrival of Nancy’s aunt, Elizabeth Sparrow; her husband, Thomas; and Dennis Hanks, Lincoln’s mother’s cousin. The Sparrows had come from Kentucky, the victims of an “ejectment” suit like the one that had helped persuade Thomas Lincoln to relocate to Indiana the year before. Abraham was especially pleased to welcome Dennis Hanks, who, at eighteen, exuded good fun. Abe came to enjoy him as an older friend.
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IN THE LATE SUMMER of 1818, a ravaging illness spread through southern Indiana, a mysterious disease that infected whole communities. No one could anticipate its coming or fathom its cure. Later, it was discovered that one contracted the disease by drinking milk from a cow who had ingested a poisonous white snakeroot plant while grazing.
In September, the “milk sick” struck the Lincoln family. It claimed first the life of Thomas Sparrow, and shortly thereafter his wife, Elizabeth.
By the end of September, Nancy, Abraham’s mother, began to experience the “trembles,” symptoms of the dreaded disease. She died seven days later, the saddest day in Abraham’s young life. He watched as his father, who had made coffins for others, wielded a whipsaw to construct a green pine coffin for his wife of twelve years. On October 5, 1818, Abraham stood in a densely wooded grove of persimmon trees while his mother, age thirty-four, was buried about one-fourth of a mile from the family log cabin. He was only nine. Abraham never mentioned her in any of his autobiographical writings. That she was a loving, nurturing presence we hear from others. Nathaniel Grigsby, Lincoln’s boyhood Indiana friend, said of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, “Her good humored laugh I can see now—is as fresh in my mind as if it were yesterday.”


The death of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who died of “milk sick” at the age of thirty four on October 5, 1818, left a huge hole in the heart of nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln.

On February 12, 1819, Abraham marked his tenth birthday in a home that had little cause for celebration. With the death of the Sparrows and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the family life of Thomas, Abraham, Sarah, and Dennis Hanks was sliding into disarray. In the fall, thirteen months after his wife’s death, Thomas decided to return to Kentucky to seek a new wife and mother for his children. In Elizabethtown he called upon Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow. Thomas had known Sarah for many years and may have courted her before he married Nancy. Sarah had been married to Daniel Johnson, the town jailer, who had died in 1816. She had to provide for her three children, Elizabeth, John, and Matilda, and was left with the considerable debts of her husband.
Thomas arrived unannounced at Sarah’s door. Whatever romantic feelings they may have experienced, they had urgent practical needs to be met. Each had lost a spouse. Thomas and his children needed a wife and mother. Sarah and her children needed a husband and father. Part of Thomas’s proposal to Sarah was his commitment to pay off her debts. They married in Elizabethtown on December 2, 1819. Thomas was now forty-one and Sarah thirty-one. A second Lincoln procession set out for Indiana three years after the first.
Upon her arrival at Pigeon Creek, Sarah discovered how much work there was to do. She took charge and directed all hands to attack the dirty, disheveled cabin. No more hunting for Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks, she said, until they had constructed a floor, put in a door, and made some proper furniture.
She found Abraham clad only in buckskins. “She Soaped—rubbed and washed the Children so that they look pretty neat—well & clean,” Dennis described. She then dressed Abraham and his sister in some of her own clothing.
The real mending that Sarah brought was the healing of two broken families. Her impact was enormous. She brought order to a household; more important, she brought love and concern for young Abraham. Years later, in his campaign autobiography, he remarked, “She proved a good and kind mother to A.”
Going to the mill was an indispensable part of the pioneer routine. When Abraham was ten, his father let him go to the mill alone, toting a heavy sack of corn and a bag of meal. He rode a mile and a half to Noah Gordon’s mill, then waited his turn as the horses went around a circle supplying the power for grinding the corn. When it was his turn, he hitched his mare to the arm of the mill. With the impatience of youth, Abraham hit the mare with a switch to move her along. The horse responded with a prompt kick that sent young Abe slumping to the ground. He lay unconscious and bleeding until Gordon picked him up. In 1860, he remembered this incident. “In [my] tenth year [I] was kicked by a horse, and apparently killed for a time.”


Sarah Bush Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s stepmother, came into his life when he was ten years old. She loved him and consistently encouraged his education. This photograph was taken much later, when she lived in Illinois.

BY AGE TEN, LINCOLN’S attention and affections would have typically begun to flow from his mother to his father, but the Lincoln family didn’t always follow typical patterns. Even as Sarah Bush Johnston became a binding force in the family, an unbinding was occurring between father and son.
Cousin Dennis Hanks, who continued to live with the Lincolns, later offered contradictory reminiscences on Thomas and Abraham’s relationship. On the one hand, Dennis stated, “I have Seen his father Nock him Down,” but on the other hand he recalled, “the Old Man Loved his Children.” Years later, Dennis doubted whether “Abe Loved his father Very well or Not.” Augustus H. Chapman, son-in-law of Dennis Hanks, added his perspective. “Thos. Lincoln never showed by his actions that he thought much of his son Abraham when a boy.”
Many years later, when Lincoln served in Congress, he responded to a query from Solomon Lincoln of Massachusetts about his family history. “Owing to my father being left an orphan at the age of six years, in poverty, and in a new country, he became a wholly uneducated man; which I supposed is why I know so little of our family history.” How does one interpret Lincoln’s comments? Are his words descriptive—is this simply how he remembered his father? Or prescriptive—is he judging his father? As an adult who made it on his own, Abraham showed little empathy for his father, who as a boy found himself suddenly bereft of a father, and as a young farmer struggled against lawsuits that challenged parts or all of three farms.
At the same time, Abraham’s stepmother’s love and encouragement became critical to his development. Sarah Bush Lincoln believed that what she gave was returned in kind. “I can say what scarcely one woman—a mother—can say in a thousand and it is this—Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused … to do anything I requested him.”
Decades later, when Lincoln was traveling the judicial circuit in Illinois, he told his law partner William Herndon, “God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.” There is some dispute as to whether Lincoln was referring to his birth mother or stepmother, but the larger point is that the praise of his mother only emphasized his silence about his feelings for his father.
IF THE PREVIOUS GENERATIONS of American Lincolns had a hunger for the land, Abraham was developing an insatiable hunger for learning. His stepmother said that young Abe “ didn’t like physical labor—was diligent for Knowledge—wished to Know & if pains & Labor would get it he was sure to get it.” His youngest stepsister, Matilda Johnston, recalled, “Abe was not Energetic Except in one thing—he was active & persistent in learning.” From an early age this yearning to learn directed the way young Abraham spent his free time.
At the age of ten, Lincoln attended school for the first time in Indiana. In the winter of 1818–19, he and his sister attended a school in a cabin of rough-hewn logs on the Noah Gordon farm. The term of the early subscription schools in Spencer County was usually only one to three months, from December into early March, before the boys returned to work in the fields. In remote districts like Pigeon Creek, school was often held only every two years.
Abraham’s first teacher in Indiana was Andrew Crawford. In addition to teaching spelling and grammar, he instructed the children in courtesy and manners, including the art of introducing and receiving guests. A student would leave the schoolhouse, and as he or she reentered another student would introduce the guest to all the children in the room.
Lincoln would look back on his part-time studies in the rustic Indiana schoolhouses with a mixture of affirmation, amusement, and regret. In a brief autobiographical statement written in 1859, Lincoln recalled, “There were some schools, so called; but no qualification was ever required of a teacher, beyond ‘readin, writin, and cipherin’ to the Rule of Three. If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he would be looked upon as a wizard.” His regret about what he missed is caught in his observation “There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.” The “nothing” Lincoln spoke of included the lack of real encouragement from his father. Lincoln’s motivation would have to come from within.
Nathaniel Grigsby and Abraham Lincoln went to school together in Indiana. Grigsby remembered that “Whilst other boys were idling away their time Lincoln was at home studying hard.” Grigsby said that Lincoln liked to “cipher on the boards [calculate numbers].” His persistence struck Grigsby. “Abe woulde set up late reading & rise Early doing the Same.” David Turnham, a neighbor and friend, remembered that “What Lincoln read he read and re-read.”
Lincoln’s hunger for learning could never be satiated by part-time teachers and two-month school terms. Years later, he would say in his autobiographical third-person voice, “What he has in the way of education, he has picked up.” Young Abe begged, borrowed, and then devoured a small library of books. Each book that Lincoln read by the fireplace in Indiana became a log in the foundation of the schoolhouse of his mind.
Dennis Hanks recalled that “Abe was getting hungry for books, reading Evry thing he could lay his hands on.” These books included classics such as Aesop’s Fables, Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, as well as William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution and Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book. Hanks added, “He was a Constant and I may Say Stubborn reader.”


Eastman Johnson’s appealing painting The Boyhood of Lincoln portrays the young Lincoln reading by the light of a fire in his log cabin home. The painting suggests that, regardless of social station, learning is Lincoln’s key to a life of purpose and meaning.

Lincoln read the King James Version of the Bible, which in the early nineteenth century often functioned as a textbook for its readers. Lincoln did not simply read the Bible. In Indiana, he began his lifelong practice of memorizing whole sections. One of his favorite portions to memorize was the Psalms.
When Lincoln read Aesop’s Fables, he was not just reading ancient tales; through the editor’s foreword he learned lessons for American young people. An edition that Lincoln may well have read bemoaned the religious and political teachings put before European children. American editions of Aesop’s Fables featured exhortations at the end of each tale. Young Lincoln may well have been drawn to the moral added to the conclusion of “The Crow and the Pitcher.” Through the ages young people have responded to the story of the thirsty crow who, flying over a farm, sees a pitcher with a small amount of water in it sitting on a picnic table. The crow attempts to drink the water but cannot reach it. At last he collects stones and drops them one by one into the pitcher until he can drink.
The traditional moral of the story is that necessity is the mother of invention. The American editor enhanced the moral by telling his young readers that when meeting “a difficulty,” the person “of sagacity” should be ready to employ “his wit and ingenuity … to avoid or get over an impediment” and “makes no scruple of stepping out of the path of his forefathers.”
Lincoln also likely read the tale of “The Lion and the Four Bulls.” The lion cannot attack the four bulls as long as they stand together in the pasture. But once they separate, they become easy prey. The moral of this fable is “A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand”—words that would go on to have profound meaning in Lincoln’s life.
According to Grigsby and Turnham, Lincoln also enjoyed Starke Dupuy’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs. Dupuy, of French Huguenot background, was the son of a Baptist minister of Woodford County, Kentucky. Published in Louisville in 1818, his hymnbook became popular in Kentucky and Tennessee. In addition to traditional hymns focusing on God, the book’s “Spiritual Songs” focused on the experience of life with God and were sung to popular tunes of the day. Although young Abraham did not have a voice for singing, he enjoyed the practice of reading hymns aloud.
Lincoln also reportedly read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which appealed to both children and adults in a culture where religious questions permeated everyday conversations. If a pioneer family had only a few books in their home, it was likely that two would be the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. The prefaces to American editions of Pilgrim’s Progress in the early nineteenth century encouraged readers to read Bunyan’s stories aloud on “the Lord’s day evening” as well as on weekday evenings. The tales of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Obstinate, Goodwill, and Patience inspired men and women whose daily lives were interspersed regularly with fire and flood, sickness and death; many saw the stories as a map toward a better life.
According to his stepsister Matilda Johnston, Lincoln read William Grimshaw’s History of the United States, published in 1820. Grimshaw, who emigrated from Ireland, where he experienced intolerance, made no excuses for the colonists’ turning a blind eye to slavery. “What a climax of human cupidity and turpitude! The colonists … place the last rivet in the chain.” In the last paragraph of his history, Grimshaw, at the time a resident of Philadelphia, told the reader: “Let us not only declare by words, but demonstrate by our actions, that ‘all men are created equal.’ ”
Abraham’s stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, remembered that when Abraham came across a passage that particularly struck him, “he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there till he did get paper—then he would re-write it—look at it repeat it.” She reported that her stepson “had a copy book—a kind of scrap book in which he put down all things and thus preserved them.”
Abraham’s copy book served several purposes. He used it as an aid in his memorization of poetry and prose. He also wrote his own verse. The copy book that he started in 1826, at age seventeen, began:
Abraham Lincoln is my nam
And with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote in both hast and speed
And left it here for fools to read.
Although other young people used copy books in their schooling, Lincoln’s copy book also became a forerunner of the reflections he wrote out on odd pieces of paper as an adult.
The books young Lincoln read tell us he was drawn to morality tales of the triumph of good over evil. Above all, what tied his books together was the possibility that ordinary people could do extraordinary things.
AT SOME POINT IN INDIANA, Abraham realized that he was different from the other boys he knew. He delighted in listening in to adult conversations, often turning the ideas he heard over and over in his mind as he fell asleep. Although thoroughly taking part in the young masculine world of wrestling, running, and jumping, he was also carving out an interior world of intellectual curiosity, reading and memorization, and imagination. What could be better than traveling with Shakespeare and Bunyan to England, with Robert Burns to Scotland, and Lord Byron to Italy?
“He was different from those around him,” Nathaniel Grigsby remembered. “His mind soared above us.” Grigsby, who knew Lincoln well in Indiana, summed up the feelings of Abraham’s young friends: “He naturally assumed the leadership of the boys.”
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IN THESE INDIANA YEARS, Lincoln read books laden with moral fruit—fruit he readily picked and consumed. One evening when Lincoln was a little older, he and his friend David Turnham were returning home from Gentryville. “We saw something laying near or in a mud hole,” recalled Turnham, “and Saw that it was a man: we rolled him over and over—waked up the man—he was dead drunk—night was cold—nearly frozen.” Who we are can be defined by our ethical actions when there is no time to think. Turnham did not give himself high marks in describing what happened next. “We took him up—rather Abe did—Carried him to Dennis Hanks—built up a fire and got him warm.—I left—Abe staid all night—we had been threshing wheat—had passed Lincoln’s house—Lincoln stopt & took Care of the poor fellow.” Turnham never forgot the Good Samaritan encounter. It was the kind of moral action Lincoln had learned from his early reading.
“A DEVOUT CHRISTIAN of the baptist order”—so Thomas Lincoln was regarded by Nathaniel Grigsby. In 1821, the Little Pigeon Baptist Church asked Thomas Lincoln to oversee the building of their new meetinghouse. His selection spoke both of his standing within the church and the community as well as of an appreciation for his skills in construction and woodworking. Thomas also built the pulpit and did the cabinet work inside the meetinghouse. Abraham, now twelve, worked alongside his father.
Thomas and Sarah Bush Lincoln became members of the Little Pigeon Baptist Church on June 7, 1823. Since Thomas had been a member of the Little Mount Baptist Church in Kentucky, why did he not join a Baptist church when he first settled in Indiana? In the nineteenth century, with stricter standards for membership, it was not at all unusual for people to attend a church regularly but not become members. Perhaps Thomas Lincoln had waited because he had been part of a Separate Baptist congregation in Kentucky, whereas the Little Pigeon Baptist Church was Regular Baptist. A unity movement among Baptists had spread to Indiana just as Thomas enrolled in the Little Pigeon Baptist Church. He became a member by letter of transfer from Little Mount Baptist, indicating he was a member in good standing in another congregation. Sarah evidently had not been a member of a church before; she was enrolled “by Experience.” Abraham’s sister, Sarah, joined the Little Pigeon Baptist Church on April 8, 1826, by “Experience of grace.”
Abraham, however, did not become a member of the Little Pigeon Baptist Church. He never said why he did not join. In a family-oriented society, the fact that he did not join would have struck others in the community as unusual. According to his stepmother, “He sometimes attended Church.” Young Abraham, with his early attraction to words, did become fascinated by the language of the preachers. Lincoln’s stepmother recalled, “He would hear sermons preached—come home—take the children out—get on a stump or log and almost repeat it word for word.” Lincoln’s stepsister Matilda also remembered how Abe would “call the children and friends around him” and “get up on a stump and repeat almost word for word the sermon he had heard the Sunday before.” She recalled that Thomas Lincoln did not approve of Abraham’s preaching and “would come and make him quit—send him to work.”
WHEN ABRAHAM WAS thirteen or fourteen, he began to work for other farmers. It was the custom that money earned by youths be given to the father for family expenses, but a small amount be returned to the youthful laborer. Hiring himself out to harvest corn or split rails brought him into contact for the first time with a wider circle of people than his immediate family and neighbors. In working for neighboring men, Abraham encountered the personalities and habits of other fathers, especially in relation to their sons.
As the pioneers moved west and cultivated the land, the need for fences grew. Fences protected settlers from attack, preserved gardens and food supplies, and acted as lines of demarcation between neighbors. They became higher as dangers from attack grew on the frontier, and as boundary lines became disputed because of inadequate titles to land. The pioneers had a rule that a rail fence should be horse high, bull strong, and pig tight—high enough that a horse could not jump over it, strong enough that a bull could not ram through it, and tight enough so a pig could not press through it.
At age sixteen, as Abraham Lincoln was approaching his full physical maturity, his skill with an ax opened up limitless possibilities for work. Rail splitters were in steady demand. The best woods for rails came from ash, hickory, oak, poplar, and walnut trees. Typically the rails would be ten feet long and four inches wide.


J. L. G. Ferris painted Lincoln the Rail Splitter in 1909, the year of the Lincoln Centennial. The artist, depicting the young Lincoln with an ax, wished to portray both his strength and his humanity.

Abraham often would work from sunup to sundown. A skilled woodsman could regularly make as many as four hundred rails in a day. The flat rate was twenty-five cents a day, although sometimes the pay was calibrated to piecework. The rail splitter often erected the fence as well.
In August 1826, while splitting rails for various farms, Abraham, Dennis Hanks, and Lincoln’s stepbrother-in-law Squire Hall hatched the idea that they might make more money splitting cordwood for the steamboats not far from where the Anderson River joined the Ohio. They received some of their pay in goods. Abraham accepted nine yards of white domestic cloth, which allowed him to have sewn the first white shirt he had ever possessed.
Around this time, Abraham, so handy with his hands, built a scow, a small flat-bottomed boat. One day two men approached him and asked if he would row them and their luggage out to a passenger steamer on the Ohio. Lincoln sculled them out to the boat and loaded their heavy trunks on board. Just as he was about to leave, the two men thanked Lincoln, each tossing a silver half-dollar into his scow. He could scarcely believe his eyes.
Many years later, Lincoln related this story to his secretary of state, William H. Seward, and some other government officials. “Gentlemen, you may think it was a very little thing … but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day.” He declared, “The world seemed wider and fairer before me.”
Lincoln’s good fortune did not last long. After helping a few more passengers, Lincoln found himself in big legal trouble. John and Lin Dill, Kentucky ferrymen, believed they had the exclusive ferry rights across the Ohio. They charged Lincoln with encroachment. Lincoln was hauled before Squire Samuel Pate, justice of the peace, in Lewisport, Kentucky, and charged with operating a ferryboat without a license. In Lincoln’s first law case he was the defendant: The Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln pleaded innocence and said that he had not violated any law—he was only responding to requests from passengers on the Indiana side. Squire Pate got down the Kentucky statute book and consulted the relevant law, discovering that it prohibited unlicensed persons transiting persons over or across the river but not to passing steamers in the river. Squire Pate immediately dismissed the charges. As Lincoln sculled back across the Ohio River to Indiana he arrived impressed with the majesty of the law in the hands of a skilled justice of the peace.
LINCOLN REMAINED CLOSE to his sister, Sarah, throughout their childhood. When he was seventeen, Sarah married Aaron Grigsby on August 2, 1826. The new couple moved into a cabin two miles south of the Lincoln cabin. A year and a half after her wedding, Sarah prepared to give birth to the couple’s first child. As she struggled through the pains of delivery, she called for her father. Thomas Lincoln set off to fetch a doctor. But it was too late. The child was stillborn. Shortly after, Sarah, age twenty-one, died on January 20, 1828.
By the age of eighteen, Abraham Lincoln had lost both his mother and his sister.
IN THE FALL OF 1828, when Abraham was nineteen, an invitation opened a new horizon. James Gentry, owner of Gentry’s store, and one of the wealthiest men in the area, wanted a trustworthy young man to accompany his son, Allen, in taking a cargo flatboat to New Orleans to trade goods. He asked Lincoln.
Lincoln and Gentry left Rockport, Indiana, in late December for the 1,222-mile journey. Lincoln served as the bow hand. When the slow-moving Ohio joined the swifter Mississippi, each boy had to be constantly engaged with navigation. Farther south, the boys began exchanging their cargo for sugar, tobacco, and cotton as they passed by Natchez and entered the lower Mississippi with its moss-festooned oak trees.
Just below Baton Rouge the boys tied their boat up for the night near a plantation where they had been trading. Lincoln would never forget their next experience. As he told reporter John Locke Scripps many years later, “One night they were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them.” The seven had not counted on the strength and courage of the two young men. Lincoln and Gentry fought off their attackers. “They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat.”
A few days later, arriving in New Orleans, they were amazed to see hundreds of ships of all kinds—brigs, schooners, sloops, flatboats, and steamboats—sailing to or from New York and Philadelphia, as well as to Havana and Veracruz. They tied up their boat and walked over the tops of scores of other boats on their way into the city. The bustling waterfront became Lincoln’s first glimpse of a city at work. As he walked the cobblestone streets, he saw bales of cotton and large casks of sugar. He observed dried tobacco leaves stripped from their stalks and tied in a bunch called a “hand,” and then tightly packed in four-hundred-pound hogsheads. He saw and tasted many of the products of a new market economy.
Young Lincoln visited a city swaggering and dancing as a cosmopolitan center. The two men probably stayed in an area called “the swamp,” the boatmen’s rendezvous. From its early days, New Orleans’s reputation rested in its medley of cultures—French, Creole, Spanish, African, and English. By 1828, the Southern city was filled with slaves. Men, women, and children were bought and sold daily as products in the slave market. Lincoln left no report about his experiences in the city itself, but in light of his later denunciations of slavery, we are left to wonder how his experiences in New Orleans, at the impressionable age of nineteen, influenced his future views.
Lincoln made eight dollars a month for his labor. He earned far more than that in life experience. After a few dizzying days in New Orleans, he and Gentry returned home to Indiana on a steamboat.
IN THE WINTER OF 1830, Thomas Lincoln decided to move on again. John Hanks, Abraham’s mother’s cousin, had settled in Illinois in 1829 and sent back a report of good soil and an invitation to pull up stakes and come farther west. Thomas Lincoln had moved four times since his first marriage, and now decided to bet his future on the prairies of Illinois.
Abraham pondered what he wanted to do with his life and where he wanted to live. He resisted the desire to leave his family and strike out on his own. Rather, he decided to help his father move. On March 1, after loading their belongings into big ox-drawn wagons, the Indiana Lincolns sold their hogs and corn and said good-bye to their neighbors at Pigeon Creek. Abraham drove one of the wagons west for the 225-mile journey.
The Lincoln caravan probably traveled north to join the Troy– Vincennes Trace, an old ridge route. They no doubt stopped in Vin-cennes at the end of the first fifty miles of their trek. After four or five days, they crossed the Wabash River, which was swollen by spring rains. As the Lincolns continued west, they left behind the immense forests and tangled underbrush of Indiana to find vast prairies of tall grasses and flowers. When Lincoln crossed the Wabash River from Indiana into Illinois he was twenty-one years old and now legally a man. He differed from the norms of the masculine culture in which he was raised by turning away from alcohol, tobacco, and guns, yet he was exceedingly well liked by the young men in Indiana. Both in ideas and actions, he was learning to listen to his own internal voice.
But many questions remained for Lincoln. Where would he live? What would he do? How could he continue his self-education?
On the evening of March 14, 1830, the Lincoln family camped in the village square in Decatur, Illinois. Decatur, awarded a post office a week before their arrival, was a new town with only a dozen log houses situated in an oak grove.
The next day, the families moved to the north bank of the Sangamon River, where forest and prairie land came together, about seven miles west and two miles south of Decatur. On this site, Abraham and his father built a log cabin and then a smokehouse and a barn. Abraham split rails to fence in their land. No longer obligated to work for his father, he continued to do so during the summer and fall of 1830, but also hired out as a farmhand and rail splitter to his new neighbors.
In the summer of 1830, Lincoln made his first political speech in front of Renshaw’s store on Decatur’s town square. William Ewing and John F. Posey, candidates for the legislature in Macon County, had gathered a crowd by denouncing “Old Line Whigs” as out of touch with modern issues. When the speakers finished, Lincoln stepped forward to offer a reply. Wearing tow-linen pants, a hickory shirt, and a straw hat, Lincoln surprised and delighted the crowd by refuting the charges, all the time punctuating his remarks with humor. He did not aim his words at the previous speakers, but rather at the crowd. As Lincoln spoke of contemporary issues facing the small community, especially the prospects of navigation on the Sangamon River, he was speaking of his own future in Illinois, with a new life stretching out before him.