7k REAL BOOK ahut 
 
 ABRAHAM 
 
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 BEHIND-THE-SCENES INCIDENTS 
 
 AND LIVELY ANECDOTES IN THE STORY OF A GREAT AMERICAN 
 
 % MICHAEL GORHAM / 
 
 SUwMated/lf ELINORE BLAISDELL 
 
Price, $1.25 
 
 THE WMM, W@K ABOUT 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 By Michael Gorham 
 
 Illustrated by Elinore Blaisdell 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was one of our 
 greatest Americans— yet he began as a 
 typical American boy of his time. He 
 knew the rough, vital frontier life of 
 his day; he grew up to be the greatest 
 force in settling the most difficult 
 problem that the young United States 
 had ever faced. 
 
 The Real Book About Abraham 
 Lincoln shows vividly the Lincoln 
 family's life as pioneers in Kentucky, 
 Indiana and Illinois. It shows young 
 Abe growing up as a lively young ath- 
 lete, always ready to pit his strength 
 against another's, yet growing to be a 
 student and a thinker, too. 
 
 Lincoln's adventurous river trips 
 and his horrible, burning impressions 
 of the slave market in New Orleans 
 are here, as well as his success as a 
 frontier lawyer and legislator. 
 
 Lincoln's later years in the White 
 House were those of a man burdened 
 with the problems of a nation, yet 
 there were many moments of humor 
 and relaxation. 
 
 This story is a spirited one— of Lin- 
 coln the human being, the typical 
 American, and Lincoln the President 
 who headed his country in its darkest 
 days and with wisdom and compas- 
 sion preserved our Union. 
 
 (Please see back flo})) 
 
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LINCOLN ROOM 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 LIBRARY 
 
 MEMORIAL 
 
 the Class of 1901 
 
 founded by 
 
 HARLAN HOYT HORNER 
 
 and 
 
 HENRIETTA CALHOUN HORNER 
 
THE f&Mffl, W@@& ABOUT 
 
 ABRAHAM 
 LINCOLN 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2012 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
 http://archive.org/details/realbookaboutabrOOfols 
 
THE ffiMM, 1B@@K ABOUT 
 
 ABRAHAM 
 LINCOLN 
 
 BY 
 MICHAEL GORHAM 
 
 Illustrated by 
 ELINORE BLAISDELL 
 
 REAL Bqt)^ 
 
 [Jfej 
 
 EDITED BY HELEN HOKE 
 
 Garden City Books 
 
 GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK 
 BY ARRANGEMENT WITH FRANKLIN WATTS, INC. 
 
1951 
 GARDEN CITY BOOKS 
 
 Copyright, 1951, by Franklin Watts, Inc. 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 
 AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y. 
 
173.7/^3 
 H4 £i 81 
 
 ■ 
 
 Contents 
 
 
 Chapter I 
 
 ABE IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 7 
 
 
 Chapter II 
 
 LITTLE PIGEON CREEK 
 
 17 
 
 
 Chapter III 
 
 ABE GETS A NEW MOTHER 
 
 23 
 
 
 Chapter IV 
 
 LONGSHANKS FINDS JOBS 
 
 32 
 
 
 Chapter V 
 
 "A LEARNER ALWAYS" 
 
 38 
 
 
 Chapter VI 
 
 ABE MOVES AGAIN 
 
 50 
 
 t 
 
 Chapter VII 
 
 YOUNG MAN ON THE 
 FRONTIER 
 
 56 
 
 1 . 
 
 Chapter VIII 
 
 ABE BECOMES STORE- 
 KEEPER 
 
 67 
 
 
 Chapter IX 
 
 CAPTAIN ABRAHAM 
 LINCOLN 
 
 78 
 
 
 Chapter X 
 
 ABE TRIES POLITICS 
 
 87 
 
 
 Chapter XI 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 
 LEGISLATOR 
 
 96 
 
 
 Chapter XII 
 
 ABE GOES TO CONGRESS 
 
 105 
 
 
 Chapter XIII 
 
 ABE TALKS ABOUT 
 SLAVERY 
 
 114 
 
Chapter XIV ABE GETS READY TO BE 
 
 PRESIDENT 124 
 
 Chapter XV THE LINCOLNS MOVE TO 
 
 THE WHITE HOUSE 1 3 1 
 
 Chapter XVI ABE IN THE WHITE HOUSE 138 
 
 Chapter XVII THE WAR IS WON 149 
 
 Chapter XVIII THE REAL ABRAHAM 
 
 LINCOLN 159 
 
 REAL DATES IN THE LIFE 
 
 OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 165 
 
 THINGS THAT LINCOLN 
 
 REALLY SAID 171 
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 179 
 
 INDEX 183 
 
THE 18MM,B@@IK ABOUT 
 
 ABRAHAM 
 LINCOLN 
 
Chapter I: ABE IN THE WILDERNESS 
 
 Sunday morning, February 12,1 809, Thomas Lin- 
 coln had news to spread. He pushed open the leather- 
 hinged door of his one-room log cabin near Hodgen- 
 ville, Kentucky, and stepped outside. 
 
 Thomas was too "pore" to have a riding horse 
 handy in a barn and ready to saddle, but he'd gladly 
 walk anywhere today. His strong, stocky body usu- 
 ally moved slowly. Today he swung along quickly, 
 two miles up the road to the place where Tom and 
 Betsy Sparrow lived. They were the foster parents of 
 his wife, Nancy, and it was at their cabin he told his 
 news. 
 
 "Nancy's got a boy baby," he said to nine-year-old 
 
 7 
 
Dennis Hanks who met him in the doorway. Dennis 
 was a cousin of Nancy, and the Sparrows had adopted 
 him, too. Full of excitement, Dennis ran off down the 
 road to what he called the "Linkern place" in his 
 backwoods "Kaintucky" drawl. 
 
 There he found two-year-old Sarah Lincoln play- 
 ing on the dirt floor of the cabin. Near by, his dark, 
 slender cousin, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, lay under 
 bearskin covers on a bunk bed made of poles, and with 
 her was a new baby. 
 
 "What are you going to call him?" Dennis asked. 
 
 "Abraham, after his grandfather," gray-eyed 
 Nancy replied. 
 
 When he took a good look at the baby by the light 
 of the one small window in the cabin, Dennis was 
 disappointed. 
 
 "Its skin looks just like red cherry pulp squeezed 
 dry, in wrinkles," he said. 
 
 On further examination he decided little Abe 
 would "never come to much." One thing was certain 
 —it would be a long time before this small baby would 
 be any good as a playmate. Even when Abe began to 
 grow, Dennis was not hopeful. The family all said 
 the new baby was "solemn as a papoose." 
 
 As it turned out, Dennis didn't have to feel disap- 
 pointed for very long. In a few years Abe began to 
 play and get into mischief— and mischief was some- 
 thing Dennis loved dearly. 
 
 8 
 
When Abe was three, his family moved to a barren, 
 almost treeless farm on Knob Creek a few miles away. 
 He lived there for the next four years or so. And more 
 and more as he grew from a baby to a boy, he loved 
 his hard-working mother whom he called "Mammy." 
 
 She sent him off when he was seven on a four-mile 
 walk to the "blab" school. It was called that because 
 the children "blabbed" their lessons. Big boys who 
 were almost men and little fellows like Abe all recited 
 out loud together, repeating the teacher's words in a 
 singsong. The idea seemed to be that sooner or later 
 everybody would remember some of the lessons at 
 least. 
 
 Abe didn't get to the classes very often. Later he 
 said he attended school "by littles." Although he went 
 to several different schools before he was grown, the 
 time he actually spent in classrooms added up to less 
 than a year altogether. Some people think it was only 
 about four months. But when he was there, Abe acted 
 just like the other boys. He got into mischief, and 
 the teacher in his first school switched him with a 
 hazel switch. 
 
 On the days when Abe's mother trudged to the 
 store at Elizabethtown to buy the few things she could 
 afford, she took him along. Abe liked these trips. For 
 one thing, he could watch the clerk as he waited on 
 Mrs. Lincoln, and that was something for Abe's wise 
 gray eyes to wonder at. The clerk was the only man 
 
 9 
 
Abe had ever seen who wore store clothes every 
 single day. All the other men wore buckskins or may- 
 be homespun shirts and pants, except sometimes on 
 Sunday. But there was something even better about 
 the store. The clerk gave Abe maple sugar to eat 
 while Mrs. Lincoln was busy. Abe used to perch on a 
 maple syrup keg or a keg of nails and suck on the 
 precious gift. 
 
 On the way to school and back, or around the farm 
 when there were no chores to do, Abe had a good 
 deal of fun. Sometimes he played with his older sister 
 Sarah, sometimes with a friend. Once he and little 
 Johnny Duncan chased a ground hog. The boys were 
 quick in their motions, but the chubby ground hog 
 was quicker. He slipped away from them into a crev- 
 ice between two rocks. For two hours Abe and 
 Johnny kept trying to get the animal out of his hiding 
 place, but they had no luck. 
 
 Here was a problem Abe wanted to solve, and he 
 was determined he would solve it. Finally he thought 
 of a plan and dashed off a quarter of a mile to a black- 
 smith shop. There he borrowed an iron hook. When 
 he got back to Johnny who was standing guard over 
 the ground hog, Abe fastened the hook to the end of 
 a pole. Then just as he had figured, they were able to 
 hook the animal out of the crevice. 
 
 Even before he was seven, Abe was always plan- 
 ning out things that way, but not all his plans worked 
 
 10 
 
so well. He found that other boys could be smart, too. 
 
 Once he and Austin Gollaher were out in the 
 woods when the papaws were soft and ripe and good 
 for eating. Both boys had taken off their coonskin 
 caps and dropped them on the ground. Then Abe 
 climbed a tree right over the place where the caps lay. 
 As he climbed, an idea came into his head. It would 
 be a good joke if he dropped a soft, juicy, messy 
 papaw into Austin's coonskin cap. But Austin guessed 
 what was coming, and he quietly switched caps while 
 Abe was not looking. The papaw sailed down. Abe's 
 aim was perfect— but the joke was on him. 
 
 One Sunday Austin and his mother came over to 
 the Lincoln cabin for the day, and Abe and Austin 
 played and explored. While they were wandering 
 along Knob Creek, Abe stopped at one spot and 
 pointed^ j 
 
 "Right up there," he said, "we saw a covey of par- 
 tridges yesterday. Let's go over and get some of 
 them." 
 
 The creek was swollen and too wide for them to 
 jump over, but Abe saw a narrow log lying across the 
 water. 
 
 "Let's coon it," he proposed. Austin agreed, and 
 he went across first, crawling on all fours like a rac- 
 coon. Then Abe started. He crept out halfway, but 
 suddenly he got scared and began trembling. 
 
 "Don't look down nor up nor sideways! Look 
 
 ii 
 
right at me and hold on tight!" Austin shouted. But 
 his advice was too late. 
 
 Abe fell in. The water was deep— seven or eight 
 feet deep, and neither Abe nor Austin could swim. 
 
 Austin thought quickly. He snatched a long stick 
 and pushed one end into the stream. Abe grabbed it 
 when he came up. He hung on for dear life, and Aus- 
 tin pulled him to shore. There he held Abe by the 
 arms and shook him, then rolled him on the ground to 
 get the water out of him. Austin had saved Abe's life. 
 
 Another time the two boys went bathing on pur- 
 pose. They shed their shirts, which were all the 
 clothes they usually wore except on special occasions, 
 and lay around in the sun— lay around for a long time. 
 Even though his skin was dark, Abe got badly sun- 
 burned, and a few days later all the skin on his back 
 peeled off. 
 
 The fact that Abe often wore only a shirt caused 
 trouble. It was a sign he was poor. Boys who were 
 rich enough to own jeans or buckskins to cover their 
 shanks called him "a shirttail boy." Those were fight- 
 ing words. One day while he was on his way to the 
 mill with corn to be ground, Abe fought three boys all 
 at once because they called him a shirttail boy. Even 
 before he was seven Abe wasn't afraid of a fight. 
 
 And he wasn't afraid of work, although he didn't 
 exactly like it. There was plenty of work to do, too. 
 He carried big buckets of water; he filled the wood 
 
 12 
 
box; he cleaned the fireplace where his mother did all 
 the cooking. He hoed weeds on the farm. But the 
 farm didn't grow enough food to keep the family. So 
 he and Sarah had to go into the woods and gather 
 berries and grapes and nuts. When his father plowed, 
 Abe sat astride the horse and guided it around the 
 fields. 
 
 The plow was made of wood with only a little iron 
 on the share— the part that dug into the earth. It didn't 
 do a very good job of turning the soil, and the soil was 
 poor anyway. So the crops weren't large. To help 
 feed his family, Thomas Lincoln sometimes worked 
 as a carpenter, but still it was hard to make out on the 
 farm at Knob Hill. 
 
 One spring day little Abe went out with his father 
 to a seven-acre field that was ready for planting. 
 First his father and some older neighbor boys put in 
 the corn. It was Abe's job to plant pumpkin seeds 
 along with the corn in every other row. At last it was 
 done. Two days later a big rain came. It washed out 
 all the corn and all of Abe's pumpkin seeds, too. 
 
 Abe's father decided to move. He had heard there 
 was good land farther west— a hundred miles by river 
 or trail, over in Indiana. Thomas Lincoln sold his farm 
 for ten barrels of whiskey, which many people on the 
 frontier used instead of money. They had to trade 
 in whiskey or hides or other things because there was 
 very little money around. 
 
 13 
 
Then Thomas Lincoln built a flatboat. People said 
 it was a "crazy craft" and would never get to Indiana. 
 But Abe's father put the whiskey and his carpenter 
 tools and his few pieces of furniture aboard, and one 
 day he started out in it alone to look for a new home. 
 
 After a while he came back and told the family he 
 had found the place he wanted on Little Pigeon Creek 
 in Indiana. He'd had only one accident with the flat- 
 boat. It had tipped over and spilled everything into 
 the river. But somehow he managed to get most of the 
 stuff out of the water, even the whiskey barrels, and 
 it was all over on the other side of the Ohio River 
 now, waiting for them. They would pick it up and 
 take it in a wagon to their new home. 
 
 Abe's mother and sister climbed on one horse. Abe 
 and his father mounted another, and they started out 
 to ride the hundred miles to Indiana. Thomas Lincoln 
 knew it was a hundred miles because he had walked 
 all the way back from Little Pigeon Creek. 
 
 The country they rode through was real wilder- 
 ness, and sometimes it was so hard for the horses to 
 move along that Abe's father and mother had to get 
 off and walk. Abe was now one of the thousands and 
 thousands of Americans who called themselves 
 "mo vers"— people who kept moving West, pushing 
 the frontier farther and farther into the great central 
 part of America. 
 
 Abe's people had been movers from a long way 
 
 14 
 
back, and as he jounced along astride the horse, 
 deeper and deeper into the wilderness, he may have 
 thought about his grandfather, the one after whom 
 he had been named. Grandfather Abraham had been 
 a pioneer in Kentucky right after the American Rev- 
 olution. He had been a friend of Daniel Boone and 
 had moved over the mountains from Virginia into 
 the new western lands Boone had explored. 
 
 Young Abe had often heard the story about his 
 grandfather, and this was the way it went: 
 
 One day in 1784 Grandfather Abraham went out 
 to the field near his new log cabin in Kentucky. As he 
 worked that morning, he had his three sons with him. 
 Mordecai was fourteen and old enough to help dig the 
 stubborn roots out of the newly broken earth. Josiah 
 was younger but big enough to help some and to take 
 some responsibilities, too. Then there was Thomas 
 who was only knee-high and just tagged along for 
 company. As Tom played, he imitated the motions 
 his father and his older brothers made while they 
 worked getting the soil ready to grow food for the 
 family to eat. 
 
 Then suddenly, without a moment's warning, 
 Grandfather Abraham crumpled up and the three 
 boys heard a rifle shot break the quiet of the morning. 
 A bullet fired from ambush had killed him. 
 
 Mordecai knew that Indians often killed whites 
 to frighten others away from Indian lands. Quickly 
 
 15 
 
he sent Josiah running to the nearby fort. There 
 would be men at the fort who could come and help 
 fight off an Indian attack. Then Mordecai ran for the 
 cabin where there was a gun. That left bewildered 
 little Tom in the field near his father's body. Mor- 
 decai pointed his long muzzle-loading rifle through a 
 peephole in the cabin wall, ready to protect his 
 brother and get any Indian who dared show himself. 
 
 He could see Tom sitting beside his father, puzzled 
 and frightened by what had happened, and in an in- 
 stant he saw an Indian standing over little Tom. A 
 silver, crescent-shaped ornament hung on his bare, 
 brown chest. Mordecai took careful aim at the dec- 
 oration. Then, before the Indian could harm his 
 brother, he fired, and the Indian dropped to the 
 ground. 
 
 Soon there was more shooting, as Josiah brought 
 men from the fort, and another Indian was wounded 
 before the rescue party chased the raiders away. 
 
 Little Thomas was saved, and here he was now, a 
 grown man, pushing farther into the wilderness, his 
 own children going with him. 
 
 Seven-year-old Abe wondered if they would meet 
 any Indians, and he was glad they didn't. The woods 
 were quiet all around. Abe felt chilly sometimes as 
 he rode. Winter was coming, winter in the forest- 
 covered wilderness of Indiana, over on the other side 
 of the broad Ohio River. 
 
 16 
 
Chapter 11: LITTLE PIGEON CREEK 
 
 The Lincolns crossed the river in an open, flat- 
 bottomed ferry boat. As soon as they reached shore, 
 Abe could see that Indiana was going to be different 
 from the barren farm he had left on Knob Creek in 
 Kentucky. He had a feeling there were more trees 
 and fewer people than he'd been used to— and he 
 hadn't been used to many people at that. 
 
 Thomas Lincoln rented a wagon at a farm near the 
 riverbank. Then he went to pick up his tools and 
 furniture and the barrels of whiskey from the farmer 
 who had stored them for him. Abe helped load hand- 
 wrought pots and pans, big bear robes, axes, and 
 knives into the wagon. Then he watched with deep 
 
 17 
 
excitement as his father turned the horses away from 
 the river and into the woods. Abe had never traveled, 
 that he could remember, in a wagon with all his family 
 and all they owned. And he was going to a new 
 place. 
 
 A narrow wagon track was all they had to follow 
 for the sixteen miles to Little Pigeon Creek, and it 
 was overgrown with brush in some places. Once in a 
 while Abe's father had to go out ahead of the wagon 
 with his axe and clear the way. But finally they came 
 to a certain place his father recognized in the woods 
 near Little Pigeon Creek. Here was to be their home. 
 To Abe it must have seemed like a thousand other 
 places in the forest where no man had ever farmed 
 before. 
 
 The wagon went back to its owner, and Abe was 
 alone with his sister, his slow-moving father, and his 
 kindly mother. There would be few playmates here, 
 at least until more movers came in and tried to start 
 farms. Winter was coming on, and the Lincolns did 
 not even have a place to sleep. 
 
 Abe, who was not yet eight, set to work with his 
 family to make some kind of shelter. They built a 
 three-sided shack of small logs or poles. It was like 
 many other shacks on the frontier which people called 
 pole sheds or open-faced camps. Abe's pole shed was 
 open to the weather on one side all year round. 
 
 When the three walls had been put up, a roof of 
 
 18 
 
poles was laid over the top. Then Abe and the others 
 got a lot of mud and chinked it into the spaces be- 
 tween the poles. Finally they piled brush and dried 
 grass over the roof so that rain wouldn't beat down 
 hard enough on the mud to wash it out. 
 
 This was the house Abe was going to live in, and 
 that's all there was to it. The open side faced south 
 to get the warmth of the sun whenever the sun was 
 showing. The only other heat came from logs which 
 burned all day and all night in front of the open side 
 of the shed. Abe's mother did her cooking over the 
 burning logs. 
 
 There were no beds, just piles of dry leaves in the 
 two back corners. That was Abe's home for a year, 
 in the middle of the forest, far from any neighbors. 
 It was a mile even from the nearest spring. Abe and 
 Sarah had to go there often with a bucket to bring 
 water for cooking and drinking and washing. When 
 the weather was good they went barefoot, but in 
 winter they had homemade moccasins. 
 
 The pole shed wasn't meant to be a real house, but 
 the Lincolns had to have something to stay in while 
 Abe's father was getting a real log cabin built and 
 while he was hunting. It was lucky he liked to hunt 
 because the family needed the bear meat and venison 
 and wild turkey and wild hog meat he brought out of 
 the woods. It wasn't hard to shoot deer at first. Lots 
 of them came to a place called a salt lick about a mile 
 
 19 
 
from the camp. The ground was salty there, and the 
 deer licked it up. 
 
 Just as the Indians did, the Lincolns saved the skins 
 of the deer to make their buckskin clothes and moc- 
 casins. 
 
 Although Abe didn't help his father much with 
 the hunting, he did help build the new log cabin. Not 
 long after he was eight, he chopped down trees and 
 notched the logs, working along with his father. 
 Thomas Lincoln was a carpenter so he could show 
 Abe how to work with wood. 
 
 The new cabin wasn't much bigger than the open- 
 faced camp. It had only one room, eighteen feet on a 
 side. But it was more solidly built, with four walls to 
 keep out wind and snow. For some reason Thomas 
 Lincoln didn't get around to building a door. The 
 entrance was just a low hole in one wall. The cabin 
 was always dark because it had no windows. Mrs. 
 Lincoln used burning pine knots instead of candles 
 or lamps, and these, together with the fire in the fire- 
 place, gave off enough light to cook and eat by. The 
 fireplace chimney was made of mud and sticks. 
 
 For beds the Lincolns had rough bunks made of 
 poles fastened to the cabin walls. Abe's was in a kind 
 of loft right under the roof. He climbed up to bed on 
 a ladder of pegs in the wall, and he slept on a mattress 
 of dry leaves. 
 
 Some days when he and Sarah weren't carrying 
 
 20 
 
water or helping their tired mother around the camp- 
 fire and listening to her sing her Kentucky songs, they 
 went off to school. It's not surprising that they didn't 
 go very often during their first year in Indiana be- 
 cause the schoolhouse was nine miles away. They 
 had to walk eighteen miles every one of the few days 
 they did attend. 
 
 Nearly a year passed on Little Pigeon Creek— a 
 lonesome year— but one day in the fall, after the first 
 crops were in, Abe caught a sound he had waited a 
 long time to hear. Off in the woods, in the direction 
 of the wagon trail his family had followed, he hecrd 
 the creak and rumble of a wagon. Maybe this was the 
 wagon he had been waiting for. Tom and Betsy Spar- 
 row and Dennis Hanks were coming out to Indiana 
 to join the Lincolns. 
 
 Abe ran barefoot through the woods toward the 
 wheel sounds. Sure enough, his old friends from Ken- 
 tucky had come. At the clearing where the new cabin 
 and the open-faced camp stood, the Sparrows and 
 Dennis unloaded the wagon. They moved into the 
 pole shed which Abe and his family had just moved 
 out of. 
 
 Dennis was always full of good spirits and practical 
 jokes. It was fun to have him around, even if he was 
 seventeen and Abe only eight. Dennis gave a hand 
 with the work, too, and that helped a lot. 
 
 But before a year was up, Dennis had to help Abe's 
 
 21 
 
father with the saddest thing either of them ever had 
 to do or Abe had to watch. They dug graves on a 
 little hill in the woods not far from the cabin for 
 Dennis's foster parents, Tom and Betsy Sparrow, and 
 then for Abe's beloved mother. All three had died 
 of a strange sickness of those times called "the milk- 
 sick." 
 
 Just after his mother died, Abe sat for a long time 
 and whittled and wondered and felt lost. He whittled 
 little pine pegs that his father used instead of nails in 
 the coffin he was making for Nancy. Abe watched 
 Dennis and his father pulling the whipsaw back and 
 forth as they cut boards from the logs that had been 
 left over from the cabin. And then he saw his father 
 plane down the boards and bore holes and pound 
 Abe's pine pegs into them. Thomas Lincoln had never 
 managed to make a very good home for Nancy, but 
 he seemed to be trying to make her the best coffin he 
 could. Abe wasn't quite sure how he felt about his 
 father. He got along with him by obeying and doing 
 the work he was told to do, and by keeping out of the 
 way when he wanted to do things his own way. And 
 now his mother, who loved him and whom he loved, 
 was gone. 
 
 A new mother came, though, in a few months— 
 a mother who loved nine-year-old Abe as much as any 
 real mother could. 
 
 22 
 
Chapter III: ABE GETS A NEW MOTHER 
 
 It had been hard for everybody in the cabin during 
 the time after Nancy and Tom and Betsy Sparrow 
 died. It was hardest of all when Abe's father went 
 away for a while the next winter, leaving only scatter- 
 brained young Dennis to take care of him and his 
 sister. Besides getting the water from the spring a 
 mile away and keeping the fire in the fireplace going, 
 they had to do all their own cooking. It was cold and 
 lonesome, and Abe knew there were wolves and 
 bears out there in the woods. 
 
 At last one day in February a wagon pulled up at 
 the cabin. Abe and Sarah and fun-loving Dennis were 
 happy and excited—then surprised. Out of the wagon 
 
 23 
 
climbed Abe's father and his tall, proud-looking new 
 wife whose name was Sarah. Then came her three 
 children— little Matilda and John and Sarah. That 
 made three Sarahs in the cabin— the new little girl, 
 Abe's own sister, and his new "Mammy." 
 
 Abe's new Mammy was someone Thomas Lincoln 
 had known in Kentucky. He knew that her husband 
 had died, and he went back on purpose to find out if 
 she would come and be a mother to his two children. 
 Although she had lived in a comfortable house in a 
 town, she liked the idea of moving out to the frontier 
 with the Lincoln family. And so she married Thomas, 
 and here she was. She was strong and comforting and 
 large and calm and friendly, and she made things hum 
 wherever she went. 
 
 Abe was glad to have all of his new family, par- 
 ticularly his new Mammy. She was glad to discover 
 Abe, too. "He never gave me a cross word, and I 
 never gave him a cross word," she said later. "His 
 mind and mine seemed to run together." 
 
 Abe liked the presents she had brought along with 
 her from Kentucky. That very first night he slept 
 with the other children on a feather mattress and 
 feather pillow, instead of the pile of dried corn husks 
 which had taken the place of the dry leaves he had 
 slept on at first. His new Mammy tossed the corn 
 husks out right away, but she didn't waste them. She 
 said they would come in handy for the pigs when they 
 
 24 
 
got some later on. The next day she gave Abe and his 
 own sister Sarah and Dennis all some new clothes. 
 
 There was bustle in the cabin for a long time after 
 Abe's new mother arrived. She got his father to lay a 
 wooden floor. She didn't like the old dirt floor. She 
 got him to cut two windows so light could come in, 
 and he hung a door to keep the weather cut. She ar- 
 ranged the furniture, putting the clothes chest she had 
 brought by the fireplace. 
 
 Gradually things settled down in the little log 
 cabin, although its one room sometimes seemed about 
 to burst with five children, Dennis, and Abe's father, 
 and his new mother living there. New pots and pans, 
 knives and forks, a black walnut dresser, a clothes 
 chest, a real table, and better chairs, all made life in 
 the crowded cabin easier and more pleasant in some 
 ways than it had ever been. 
 
 The year Abe was ten his new mother sent him 
 off to school whenever it was possible. His father 
 said this was silly. But Sarah Lincoln thought a lot of 
 education and of Abe— and she won out. 
 
 Even so, Abe couldn't write yet, and he wasn't 
 too sure of his reading. Maybe if he had learned to 
 read earlier he would have been at home looking at a 
 book one night instead of going out with his new 
 foster-brother Johnny and some other boys. And, if 
 he hadn't been out, he wouldn't have got into trouble 
 and done something he was very sorry about. 
 
 25 
 
Abe and Johnny and the others sometimes sneaked 
 away at night to go coon hunting. They weren't 
 supposed to. Abe's father said they couldn't, but they 
 went anyway, and one night they took with them a 
 little yellow watchdog named Joe who belonged to 
 Abe's father. 
 
 The boys finally caught a coon and skinned it. 
 Then somebody had an idea that it would be funny to 
 fasten the skin onto the little dog and make him look 
 like a coon. Joe didn't like the whole business. He 
 yapped and struggled as the boys fixed the fresh skin 
 on him so it wouldn't come off. When they let him 
 loose, he made a beeline for home. 
 
 Some larger dogs who were out that night smelled 
 the coon smell on Joe and saw the coon look of him. 
 They went after him, and that was the end of the little 
 yellow dog. 
 
 Nobody is sure just how old Abe was when this 
 coon hunt happened, but one thing is certain. When 
 Abe was eleven, he suddenly began to grow. People 
 said he grew faster than any boy they had ever seen. 
 As he grew he worked. His tall body took on strength 
 while he cut wood day after day. He cleared away 
 trees to make room for new fields, and he learned all 
 the tricks of swinging an axe. People nicknamed him 
 "Longshanks" and said he was awkward the way he 
 walked, but no one remembers any such talk about 
 his handling of an axe. In fact, it wasn't long before 
 
 26 
 
one man said, "Abe can sink an axe deeper into wood 
 than any man I ever saw." 
 
 Often he would do his chopping far from any 
 cabin. He would take his lunch— a corn dodger or 
 cake of coarse cornmeal— and go out to work alone all 
 day. From sunrise to sunset was a regular day's work. 
 Abe cut down walnut, beech, oak, elm, and maple 
 trees, and he cleared out dogwood and wild grape 
 vines. 
 
 "If you heard him fellin' trees in a clearin'," a 
 friend said, "you would say there was three men at 
 work by the way the trees fell." 
 
 As Abe swung his axe rhythmically, he swayed his 
 body to get the most out of his swing. Month by 
 month and year by year he gained strength from the 
 chopping and from trimming logs and splitting fire- 
 wood. He used a huge kind of mallet or maul to drive 
 wedges into logs and split them lengthwise. This gave 
 him more strength. And it gave neighbors puncheons. 
 These were half logs which made good floor boards 
 or table tops with the flat side up. 
 
 Abe did farm work, too. He helped his father who 
 raised mostly corn. But, as Dennis said, there was 
 some wheat, too— "enough for a cake Sunday morn- 
 ing." And there were a few sheep and cattle to care 
 for. Abe wrestled with a plow when it was time to get 
 the fields ready for planting. In the fall he cut and 
 stacked big bundles of corn stalks for fodder. 
 
 27 
 
As Abe grew stronger, he grew taller still. His 
 body seemed to be reaching up toward the tops 
 of the trees he was cutting. By the time he was seven- 
 teen, he had reached his full height— six feet four 
 inches. 
 
 Abe's father said, "He was the ganglin'est, awk- 
 wardest feller that ever stepped over a ten-rail snake 
 fence. He had to duck to get through a door. He ap- 
 peared to be all j'ints." But with his wiry strength, 
 Abe knew just how to use all that height to get the 
 most out of it. He knew just how to hold himself so 
 as to do the most work with the least strain. 
 
 One day he showed grown men what he could do. 
 Four of them were standing by a new corn crib. They 
 had poles they were going to put under the crib so 
 they could lift it and carry it to the place where it was 
 supposed to be set up. They figured it would be quite 
 a job, even for four of them. Then Abe, who was 
 watching, stepped over to the crib. He knew just how 
 to tilt it so he could get his shoulders under it. He 
 heaved it up and walked over to the spot the farmer 
 had chosen for the crib, with the whole building on 
 his shoulders. 
 
 He could lift other heavy loads the same way, al- 
 though he weighed only a hundred and sixty pounds. 
 Once he carried a chicken coop which people guessed 
 weighed about six hundred pounds. Another time he 
 carried off two logs at once. Three grown men had 
 
 28 
 
been standing there wondering if the three of them 
 could carry one log at a time. 
 
 While he had been working alone in the woods, 
 wrestling with big logs, Abe had had plenty of time 
 to figure out how to use all the length and weight of 
 him as a lever. He had plenty of time to think about a 
 lot of things, and he always liked to think and figure 
 and plan. 
 
 Something happened out in the woods once which 
 led him to tell his little stepsister Matilda what he had 
 figured out about honesty. 
 
 Matilda, or Tilda as Abe called her, often wanted 
 to tag along with him when he went off on his all-day 
 working trips. But her mother wanted the mis- 
 chievous Tilda around the cabin where she could 
 keep an eye on her. She told the little girl to stay 
 home. One day, however, Tilda slipped away after 
 Abe when her mother wasn't looking. 
 
 Abe followed a deer trail toward the clearing 
 where he was to work, and as he walked he made 
 such a racket with his tuneless singing that he couldn't 
 hear Tilda on the path behind him. She sneaked up, 
 and then to give Abe a good surprise, she ran and 
 jumped on his back with a hand on each shoulder and 
 a knee in between. She had often seen boys topple 
 each other over this way, just for fun. And big though 
 Abe was, her jump so surprised him that he fell. 
 
 Tilda, of course, fell with him, and she got a nasty 
 
 29 
 
cut in her leg from the axe Abe had in his hand. He 
 tore strips of cloth off his shirt and Tilda's dress and 
 made a bandage to stop the bleeding. 
 
 The cut hurt a good deal, and Abe comforted Tilda 
 as she cried. He knew that she was not supposed to 
 follow him off to work and, when she had stopped 
 crying, he said, "Tilda, what are you going to tell 
 your mother about getting hurt?" 
 
 The question set Tilda to crying again, and be- 
 tween sobs she answered, "Tell her I did it with an 
 axe. That will be the truth, won't it?" 
 
 "Yes, that's the truth," Abe admitted, "but it's not 
 the whole truth." Then he advised her, "Tell her the 
 whole truth, Tilda, and trust your good mother for 
 the rest." 
 
 Tilda wasn't the only one who played practical 
 jokes. Once, when he had already grown tall and 
 strong, Abe played one on his mother that set her to 
 laughing for an hour before she made him clean up 
 the mess he had made. 
 
 When she moved into the Lincoln cabin, she had 
 done a lot of things to make the place cheerier. For 
 one thing she had whitewashed the low ceiling. Sarah 
 was proud of that ceiling, and she joked with Abe, 
 telling him to keep his head clean so as not to get the 
 ceiling dirty. She didn't care so much about the dirt 
 he brought in on his feet— the floor was easier to clean. 
 Maybe that was what gave Abe his idea. 
 
 30 
 
Anyway, one day he got the barefoot boys around 
 to wade in the mud. Then he held them upside down, 
 and the boys walked across the ceiling leaving good 
 big muddy tracks. They made you think the world 
 had gone crazy and the cabin had flopped upside 
 down, turning the ceiling into the floor. 
 
 After she had her laugh, Abe's mother pretended 
 to get serious and told the young giant that he ought 
 to be spanked. She also told him, of course, to clean 
 the ceiling, and he did. 
 
 3* 
 
mi- 
 
 Chapter IV: LONGSHANKS FINDS JOBS 
 
 Abe and the other boys his age often had wrestling 
 matches and races and jumping contests when they 
 got together. Abe was the best wrestler anywhere 
 around. He could take the big maul he used in split- 
 ting logs and throw it farther than anyone else could. 
 He could pitch a crowbar farther, too, and run faster. 
 His long legs made him the best broad jumper. 
 
 He had a chance to meet others and match skills 
 with them whenever he took corn or wheat to the 
 mill to grind. The mill was seven miles away, and the 
 men and boys from all the farms around gathered 
 there. Someone was almost always waiting for his 
 turn, and there was plenty of wrestling and joking 
 
and talking. Abe liked all that, and he liked to watch 
 the working of the simple machinery of the mill, too. 
 
 When his turn came he put his corn between the 
 heavy millstones, then hitched his horse out at one end 
 of the "arm" or pole fastened to the upper millstone. 
 The horse walked around and around in circles, turn- 
 ing the upper stone and grinding the corn under it 
 into meal. 
 
 Once Abe took a bag of corn and made the ride to 
 the mill on an old, flea-bitten gray mare. A lot of 
 others were ahead of him, so his turn didn't come un- 
 til it was almost dark. Abe had to hurry now if he was 
 to get his grinding done. He hitched the old mare to 
 the end of the arm and perched himself on the pole to 
 give it more weight. (This also saved him the trouble 
 of walking round and round.) Then he tried to get 
 some speed out of the horse. He snapped his whip and 
 kept yelling, "Git up, you old hussy! Git up, you old 
 hussy!" 
 
 The mare didn't like the whip or the yelling either, 
 and before long she let fly with her hoofs, just as Abe 
 was in the middle of a shout, "Git up . . ."A hoof 
 struck Abe in the forehead and knocked him uncon- 
 scious. 
 
 The miller sent for Abe's father, seven miles away. 
 Thomas Lincoln came in a wagon and took him home. 
 Abe stayed unconscious all the way back to the cabin 
 and all night long after they put him into bed. Then 
 
 33 
 
toward morning he came to. And he finished the sen- 
 tence the mare had interrupted with her kick— ". . . 
 you old hussy!" 
 
 Abe was persistent that way. When he made up his 
 mind to do something, he generally finished it, al- 
 though it sometimes took a long while. 
 
 Before long he recovered from the kick in the head 
 and was back at work. Because of his strength, he 
 often got jobs with farmers when they were butcher- 
 ing. He could lift a two-hundred-pound hog by its 
 hind legs and hang it up ready to be dressed. He could 
 swing his maul at just the right spot on a steer's head 
 and kill it at one blow. 
 
 Abe learned all about butchering and skinning and 
 tanning hides, too. These were good things to know 
 on the frontier. Meat was necessary. But Abe never 
 liked to hunt for it. He had never fired at a wild ani- 
 mal since the time he was nine, when he shot a wild 
 turkey through a chink in the cabin wall. Long as he 
 lived after that Abe never hunted. Maybe it was be- 
 cause his father loved hunting, and Abe wanted to be 
 different. Or maybe it was for some other reason. Abe 
 didn't like fishing, either. 
 
 But he did like rivers and boats. When he was six- 
 teen he worked for a while on a farm on the bank of 
 the Ohio River. In between farm chores he ferried 
 people over the water in a flatboat. He stood in the 
 stern of his boat and made it go by wiggling a large 
 
 34 
 
oar, called a scull, out behind like a fishtail. Handling 
 a scull was not as easy as it sounds. Abe sometimes 
 said he thought it was the hardest work he ever did. 
 
 In those days before railroad trains, people traveled 
 by steamboat on the Ohio River. Once two men 
 wanted to catch a steamboat which was waiting for 
 them out in the river. "I was about eighteen years of 
 age," Abe said later, "and belonged, as you know, to 
 what they call down South the 'scrubs.' I was very 
 glad of the chance of earning something and supposed 
 each of the men would give me a couple of bits 
 [twenty-five cents]. I sculled them out to the 
 steamer. They got on board, and I lifted the trunks 
 and put them on deck. The steamer was about to steam 
 again when I called out, 'You have forgotten to pay 
 me.' Each of them took from his pocket a silver half- 
 dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat." 
 
 Abe went on to say, "It was a most important inci- 
 dent in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor 
 boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by 
 honest work I had earned a dollar. I was a more hope- 
 ful and thoughtful boy from that time." 
 
 Abe had earned more in one day than he had ever 
 earned in three days before. And even when one of 
 the half dollars slipped out of his hand into the water, 
 he still had more money than he had ever earned be- 
 fore in a day. 
 
 Abe decided to do more ferrying. He hired out to 
 
 35 
 
a man who owned a good landing on the river. He 
 was to earn only thirty-seven cents a day— a boy's pay 
 instead of a man's. And he had to build his own flat- 
 boat besides. 
 
 Abe did all the work on the boat himself, begin- 
 ning with cutting down the trees. Next he sawed the 
 logs into planks and smoothed them down with a 
 drawknife. He planned out the size and shape of his 
 boat and put the planks together with the same kind 
 of pegs he had whittled when his mother died. There 
 was not a nail in the boat—nails were scarce on the 
 frontier. 
 
 The boat worked well. Now Abe could be a regu- 
 lar ferryman, and he made frequent trips with passen- 
 gers and baggage out to steamboats in the river. It was 
 good to have a job, for his family had never seen much 
 cash money from one year's end to the next. But Abe 
 soon found there were troubles where money was 
 concerned— troubles of a kind he'd never known. 
 
 One day he saw that someone on the Kentucky 
 side of the river wanted him to cross over. He thought 
 it was a passenger. But when he got there, two broth- 
 ers who were ferrymen on the Kentucky side jumped 
 on him and started to throw him into the river. They 
 didn't know what Abe could do as a wrestler. In the 
 end they decided to take him to the local justice of the 
 peace instead of trying to heave him into the Ohio. 
 Of course, they couldn't have made Abe go if he 
 
 36 
 
hadn't been willing. But there was something happen- 
 ing here that he didn't understand, and he wanted to 
 find out about it. 
 
 The brothers told the justice of the peace they 
 wanted Abe arrested. Then he was tried for breaking 
 a Kentucky law which said that only boats from Ken- 
 tucky could bring paying passengers to the Kentucky 
 shore. Abe explained that he only carried passengers 
 out to the middle of the river to steamboats. He didn't 
 carry them all the way across, and the brothers didn't 
 claim that he did when they got right down to talk- 
 ing to the judge. Maybe they were just trying to 
 frighten Abe away from ferrying so they could have 
 all the business on both sides of the river. 
 
 Anyway, the justice of the peace told Abe he 
 wasn't guilty of breaking the law, and he had a good 
 talk with him after court was over. 
 
 This day's happenings set Abe to thinking about 
 laws and courts. There was a lot about them that 
 seemed worth knowing. Many times after that he 
 sculled across the river to watch cases going on before 
 that same justice of the peace. And one day he walked 
 thirty-four miles just to hear a lawyer in another court 
 make a speech. 
 
 37 
 
Chapter V: "A LEARNER ALWAYS" 
 
 There had never been a book, except maybe a 
 Bible or a newspaper, in the Lincoln cabin in Ken- 
 tucky. The same was true in Indiana for a good while, 
 even after Abe's new mother came. He had never had 
 a story read to him until one day when a wagon broke 
 down near the cabin. While the man who owned the 
 wagon was repairing it, his wife and two daughters 
 stayed at the cabin. "The woman had books and read 
 us stories," Abe said later. "They were the first I ever 
 heard." And Abe was interested. 
 
 All the time he was growing and getting strong and 
 working at different jobs, he was learning. But not 
 much of that learning was done in school. For one 
 
 38 
 
thing, school cost money. Besides, there were no regu- 
 lar classes in all of southern Indiana. From time to 
 time a wandering teacher came along and gave lessons 
 for a few weeks in one vacant cabin or another, but 
 that was all. 
 
 A little schooling when he was eleven, and again 
 when he was about thirteen, and again when he was 
 seventeen helped Abe with his reading and writing. 
 And so did his stepmother. She saw something was 
 going on in his head. He really wanted to learn. After 
 he finally got the hang of it, she made a rule that when- 
 ever he was reading around the cabin no one could 
 disturb him. But Abe's father saw things differently. 
 He thought "eddication" wasn't important. 
 
 Much of the time Abe could only learn by asking 
 questions, and he asked a lot. He was inquisitive. 
 Whenever a stranger passed by the Lincoln cabin, 
 Abe would be sure to ask the first question. His father 
 didn't like that. Once Abe was perched on the fence 
 when he started questioning a passer-by. His father 
 knocked him clear off the fence and onto the ground. 
 Whenever something like this happened Abe was si- 
 lent. He didn't howl or cry. Only a few silent tears 
 betrayed the anger and humiliation he felt inside. And 
 he didn't stop learning. 
 
 When there was a chance to go to school he was al- 
 ways there early. His friends noticed that he was often 
 quiet outside the one-room log cabin school at play- 
 
 39 
 
time. He seemed to like being alone and thinking, but 
 whenever there was trouble between other boys he 
 was likely to be the one who settled it. 
 
 Inside the school a dim light came through the 
 greased-paper windows. There was almost no glass in 
 frontier country. The pupils could see that Abe was 
 working harder and learning more than the rest of 
 them. They agreed that he was the best student in his 
 class. 
 
 The lessons Abe had were mainly in reading, writ- 
 ing, and "ciphering," that is, arithmetic. But there 
 was one school he attended awhile when he was 
 thirteen or fourteen that gave a special course in man- 
 ners. Abe would have to leave the log cabin classroom 
 and come in as a gentleman was supposed to enter a 
 fashionable drawing room. Then he would be taken 
 around the room and introduced with great polite- 
 ness to all his playmates. Abe was probably laughing 
 inside fit to kill while all these shenanigans were going 
 on. And he probably was not at the head of the class 
 in the study of manners. The rules about manners 
 were one thing he never learned, nor tried very hard 
 to learn, as long as he lived. He got on with people 
 just by being fair and funny and human. 
 
 This is how Abe looked when he had his lessons in 
 entering a room like a gentleman: A classmate said 
 that "his skin was shriveled and yellow." He was often 
 barefoot, but he might have had on moccasins or 
 
 40 
 
rough handmade shoes. He wore buckskin breeches 
 and a homemade shirt of linsey-woolsey, that is, part 
 linen and part wool. Outdoors he wore a coonskin or 
 squirrel skin cap. His buckskin breeches were baggy 
 and short, showing his shin bones, which a classmate 
 said were u sharp, blue, and narrow." 
 
 Abe might not have been dressed like a gentleman, 
 and he probably didn't act exactly like one, but he 
 was good at spelling, and he liked Kate Roby, a pretty 
 girl in the class who was a little older than he was. One 
 day the schoolmaster tested the class in spelling. The 
 students stood in two lines facing each other on oppo- 
 site sides of the room. The word the teacher gave them 
 was "defied." Several students missed, and then it 
 came Kate's turn. 
 
 "Abe stood on the other side of the room and was 
 watching me," Kate said later. "I got as far as d-e-f-, 
 and then I stopped, hesitating whether to proceed 
 with an i or a y." Kate looked up and saw Abe with a 
 grin on his face, pointing to his eye. Kate knew what 
 he meant and spelled the word correctly. 
 
 Abe liked Kate very much. He even used to go on 
 walks with her. But he was more interested in learn- 
 ing, in figuring things out, than he was in girls. One 
 evening the two of them sat on the riverbank, dan- 
 gling their bare feet in the water and watching the 
 moon go down. This set Abe to talking. He explained 
 that the moon didn't really sink at all. He said the 
 
 4 1 
 
movement of the earth made it seem as if the moon 
 sank. 
 
 Kate thought this was a downright silly notion. 
 Anybody could see that the moon went down. She 
 argued with Abe, but he stuck to his point and gave 
 quite a lecture on astronomy. Kate still was not con- 
 vinced and didn't admit she was wrong until a long 
 time later. But she did wonder how Abe had learned 
 so much and how he could explain things so clearly. 
 Abe certainly hadn't learned about the moon and 
 stars in school. 
 
 He learned about them and about lots of other 
 things by reading. People said he read everything there 
 was to read for fifty miles around the Lincoln cabin. 
 "The things I want to know are in books," Abe used 
 to explain. "My best friend is the man who'll git me a 
 book I ain't read." 
 
 By the time he was fourteen he read every minute 
 he could. One of his companions said, "When Abe 
 and I returned to the house from work, he would go 
 to the cupboard, snatch a piece of cornbread, sit 
 down, take a book, cock his legs up as high as his head, 
 and read. We grubbed, plowed, mowed, and worked 
 together barefoot in the field. Whenever Abe had a 
 chance while at work in the field, he would stop and 
 read." 
 
 Not all the farmers liked this habit of Abe's. One 
 of the neighbors for whom Abe worked said, "He 
 
 42 
 
was always reading and thinking. I used to get mad at 
 him. I say he was awful lazy. He would laugh and 
 talk, crack his jokes and tell stories all the time; didn't 
 love work half as much as his pay. He said to me one 
 day his father taught him to work, but he never taught 
 him to love it." 
 
 But Abe's mind wasn't lazy. It was always work- 
 ing, even when his body wasn't. And sometimes he 
 had to do hard physical work in order to pay for the 
 work his mind did. 
 
 One time he borrowed Parson Weems's Life of 
 Washington from a stingy farmer whom he called 
 Blue Nose because of the way his nose looked. When 
 Abe wasn't reading this book he put it on a shelf in 
 the cabin. As luck would have it, there was a crack be- 
 tween two logs behind the shelf, and one night rain 
 came through the crack and damaged the covers of 
 the book. 
 
 Old Blue Nose said the damage was worth seventy- 
 five cents, and he made Abe work three whole days at 
 twenty- five cents a day pulling cornstalks for fodder 
 in order to pay for the damage. 
 
 Abe liked the book about Washington, and he 
 liked another book by the same author about another 
 Revolutionary hero, Francis Marion, who was called 
 the Swamp Fox. These books set him thinking about 
 how Americans got their freedom, and what that 
 freedom was. He understood the Swamp Fox— a 
 
 43 
 
smart young man on the frontier who knew all about 
 rivers and swamps and how to hide in them. The 
 Swamp Fox knew how to fool the well-equipped 
 British soldiers and how to lick them in the end. 
 
 Abe understood Robinson Crusoe, too. Here was 
 another smart man who used his wits in a place that 
 was like the frontier, and who managed to get along 
 all right where you wouldn't think anybody could get 
 along at all. He liked Aesop's Fables, too. Abe had 
 grown up among animals. Here was a book with ani- 
 mal characters in it, some of them like the ones he 
 knew. Every story had a point, and that was the way 
 Abe liked stories. 
 
 When Abe read these books, or a history of the 
 United States, or the Bible, he used to lie under the 
 shade of a tree if he could. At night he stretched out 
 flat on his stomach in front of the fireplace and read 
 by the firelight. When he read silently his lower lip 
 stuck out, a habit he kept all his life. But often as not 
 he read aloud, the way he had learned to read in the 
 schools he had gone to. This way, he said, he could 
 read a book twice and all at the same time. One read- 
 ing was with his eyes and the other was with his ears. 
 
 Abe also studied arithmetic. He seldom had paper 
 and never had a blackboard. Instead he wrote his fig- 
 ures with charcoal on a broad wooden shovel. When 
 the shovel was covered with figures, he planed it down 
 and began again. He also practiced his arithmetic on 
 
 44 
 
the flat sides of the logs in the cabin walls and on 
 boards. Using chalk, he filled up every flat space he 
 could find, then rubbed out the chalk marks and be- 
 gan again. 
 
 Abe began to write down what he learned and the 
 ideas he had. When he could get paper he wrote on 
 it with a pen he made out of a quill from a turkey buz- 
 zard. He made ink out of the juice of a brier root. One 
 day he showed a friend an article he had written 
 against cruelty to animals. As long as he lived he hated 
 to see an animal hurt. Another day he read the class 
 a theme about liquor-drinking. Abe thought then, and 
 thought all his life, that people were better off if they 
 did not drink whiskey. He had seen people on the fron- 
 tier who had had too much to drink. He knew how it 
 hurt them and hurt their families. 
 
 There were speeches, too, at school, and debates. 
 On the days when there were "exercises" or special 
 performances, students argued all kinds of things— 
 whether the bees or the ants were better, whether 
 wind or water was stronger, whether Negroes or In- 
 dians had the most right to complain. Abe liked these 
 debates and speeches. 
 
 He also liked the debates and speeches he heard at 
 Jones's store in the town of Gentryville, which had 
 grown up since the Lincolns moved to Indiana. He 
 went to the store as often as he could because Mr. 
 Jones subscribed to a Louisville newspaper— it was the 
 
 45 
 
only paper anywhere around— and because there were 
 always men and boys there, talking politics, discussing 
 sermons, or cracking jokes. Abe did his share of the 
 talking, perhaps more than his share, but no one 
 minded that. Abe entertained the whole town. 
 
 He had a wonderful memory and could repeat all 
 the poems and speeches in the school readers. He re- 
 cited them to the audience at the store. He got a real 
 pleasure out of having an audience. He also repeated 
 the sermons he heard wandering preachers give and 
 imitated each preacher exactly as he spoke. He was a 
 good actor. Sometimes he would step up on a tree 
 stump by the store and repeat a speech he had heard 
 a lawyer make in court. He made speeches of his own 
 that way, too. One of his friends said that his speeches 
 were always "calm, logical, and clear," and the same 
 friend said that Abe's jokes and stories were so origi- 
 nal and funny that he sometimes would keep most of 
 the people in the little town up until midnight listen- 
 ing to him. 
 
 Abe was busy with serious things as well as funny 
 stories. One time when he was not going to school he 
 wrote an article on preserving the Constitution. He 
 was already interested in that. He showed it to a law- 
 yer friend from whom he had borrowed lots of books, 
 and the lawyer said, "The world couldn't beat it." 
 The lawyer liked the article so much he wanted to 
 take Abe into his office to study law. Abe would have 
 
 46 
 
liked that, but he said his family was so poor they 
 couldn't spare him. 
 
 Abe had studied the Constitution and the Declara- 
 tion of Independence which said, "all men are created 
 equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with 
 certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, 
 liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and he had 
 read a law called "The Ordinance of 1787" which 
 declared that slavery was illegal in the area where 
 Indiana and Illinois became states. 
 
 Abe practiced speech-making in just the way he 
 studied and practiced anything else he wanted to 
 learn. Sometimes out in the woods when he was work- 
 ing alone he would stop work and climb up on a stump 
 and orate to the trees. He made speeches to other boys 
 when they were all supposed to be working on a farm. 
 
 And Abe wrote poems— serious poems and funny 
 ones. But he soon found he wasn't as good at that as at 
 speech-making. Sometimes he used these funny poems 
 or the stories he made up to get even with people he 
 thought had been mean to him or to someone he 
 loved. 
 
 In those days Abe was sensitive, and he resented in- 
 sults. He answered them by using his wits and the 
 learning he already had about words and how to use 
 them. But once he found that words were not enough, 
 and he ended up in a battle royal. 
 
 For some reason Abe had never got on very well 
 
 47 
 
with the Grigsby family. They were the richest peo- 
 ple in Gentryville, and Abe thought they put on airs. 
 He also thought they didn't treat his sister Sarah well 
 after she married one of the Grigsby boys. So he 
 wrote a poem which had the whole town laughing 
 at the Grigsbys. Abe also wrote stories he called 
 "Chronicles" which he pretended were newly dis- 
 covered parts of the Bible. Everybody knew that these 
 stories poked fun at the Grigsbys. 
 
 One of these was the story of the double wedding 
 of two Grigsby boys— a wedding to which Abe was 
 not invited. Though Abe wasn't there he had friends 
 who were, and he plotted with them to get things 
 mixed up. His allies carried out the plot so well that 
 the Grigsby boys almost got married to the wrong 
 girls. The "Chronicle" Abe wrote about the wedding 
 didn't mention that he had anything to do with the 
 mix-up, but it did show a suspicious lot of knowledge 
 about just what happened. 
 
 The Grigsbys didn't like either the joke or the 
 story, although almost everybody in Gentryville 
 thought the whole affair was very funny. Some peo- 
 ple say it was this joke and the "Chronicle" about it 
 which led to a big fight. At any rate William, one of 
 the Grigsby boys, challenged Abe to a fight. Abe 
 looked down at William, who was much smaller, and 
 shook his head. He said he figured his stepbrother 
 John would be about the right size. Abe persuaded 
 
 48 
 
John to take on the fight. A big crowd came to watch, 
 standing in a circle, inside which the fighters had to 
 stay. William and John, stripped to the waist, stepped 
 into the circle and began to pound each other. 
 
 Before long, Abe, towering above the crowd, could 
 see that his brother was being badly beaten. Maybe he 
 was sorry he had got John into this. Or maybe he 
 didn't want people to think he had been afraid to fight. 
 Anyway he stepped into the ring, grabbed William 
 Grigsby, and threw him right out into the crowd. 
 
 Then, remembering how he'd seen bucks boss a 
 whole herd of deer at the salt lick near his home, Abe 
 called out, "I'm the buck of this lick. If any of you 
 want to try it, come on and whet your horns." 
 
 That started a free-for-all, with Grigsby friends 
 and Lincoln friends slugging and "wrassling" each 
 other to their hearts' content. Nobody is sure which 
 side won, but everybody there agreed it was a good 
 fight. They also agreed Abe was the best fighter of 
 all. He was really buck of the lick, and not because he 
 went around picking quarrels. He didn't. 
 
 Most people respected him because he was funny 
 and smart and knew a great many things. There 
 weren't many fights like this. Abe was too busy in 
 school and out and with what he wanted to do— and 
 that was learning. As he said later, he was "a learner 
 always." 
 
 49 
 
Chapter VI: ABE MOVES AGAIN 
 
 While Abe was working on the river as a ferryman, 
 he saw thousands of people moving West. These 
 movers would go as far as they could by boat and then 
 push on by ox trains or even on foot. 
 
 Abe understood moving. He knew his grandfather 
 had come to Kentucky from Virginia. He himself 
 had moved in Kentucky when he was only three, and 
 then he had come to Indiana when he was seven. It 
 seemed that moving was one thing most people did. 
 
 When Abe was sixteen and seventeen a lot of peo- 
 ple were moving to a place called New Harmony in 
 Indiana. Some came down the river in a boat. Others 
 drove through Gentryville in an ox train. They were 
 
 50 
 
all going to a huge farm where everybody was sup- 
 posed to work together to help each other out. No 
 one was to make any profit from anyone else's 
 labor. 
 
 Abe heard there were many learned men among 
 these settlers going to New Harmony to try out what 
 they called the socialist way of living. People said they 
 had many books with them. The thought of being 
 with scholars, and perhaps being able to borrow their 
 books, interested Abe. But in the end he stayed home 
 to work for his father. 
 
 Abe was restless, though, and he wanted some 
 change. Many times he had seen the big steamboats 
 going up and down the river. They seemed closer to 
 the big things happening in the world than his farm 
 work did. Possibly he could get a job on one of these 
 boats. He had a friend, a lawyer, from whom he had 
 often borrowed books, and he went to him and asked 
 for a letter of recommendation to the officers of some 
 steamboat. 
 
 The lawyer refused to give the letter and explained 
 why. The law in those days said a son couldn't leave 
 home and work for himself until he was twenty-one. 
 The lawyer's advice settled the matter for Abe. He 
 decided he would return home and work for his father 
 or for the neighbors. He would turn over his earn- 
 ings to his father until he was twenty-one. 
 
 But Abe couldn't get his mind off the river. One of 
 
 5i 
 
the neighbors for whom he worked had thoughts of 
 the river, too. He was James Gentry who owned large 
 farms and had potatoes, pork, apples, bacon, meal, 
 and flour to sell or trade. Gentry needed a good re- 
 liable boatman to take his crops to market in New Or- 
 leans. He decided Abe was that boatman. He knew 
 Abe had a reputation for being honest, and Abe was 
 strong and a good fighter. He could hold his own 
 against any tough "half horse and half alligator" who 
 might start trouble. "Half horse and half alligator" 
 was the name people had for river boatmen, and there 
 were pirates among them. 
 
 Abe knew how to build flatboats, too. So Gentry 
 put him to work, while it was still winter, felling oaks, 
 making planks, and building them into a large, double- 
 bottomed boat. Abe built a house on the boat large 
 enough to shelter him and the other member of the 
 crew who was Allen Gentry, the son of the owner. 
 Abe shaped four long oars— two for the bow and two 
 for the stern. And he built posts into the boat against 
 which the oars could be braced for steering. 
 
 Early in the spring of the year Abe was nineteen, 
 he and Allen loaded their boat and started to float the 
 thousand miles to New Orleans. As the boat drifted 
 along at four or five or six miles an hour, Abe had to 
 keep on the lookout for lots of things— snags and sand 
 bars and other flatboats and steamboats. He and Allen 
 had to do all their own cooking on the deck of the 
 
 52 
 
boat. And at night they had to beware of river pirates. 
 
 The two of them were relieved when they passed 
 Cave-in-Rock, a famous pirate hangout on the Illi- 
 nois shore. Many boatmen had been murdered here 
 by the pirates who hid the bodies in a secret room in 
 the big cave. Years later when the secret room was dis- 
 covered, there were sixty skeletons in it. 
 
 Pirates hid out other places, too, along the river, 
 looking for good cargoes to steal as the wealth of the 
 North and the West floated down to market in New 
 Orleans. One night seven of these pirates boarded 
 Abe's flatboat as it was tied up to the shore below 
 Baton Rouge in Louisiana. Abe grabbed a crab-tree 
 club, and swinging it at the end of his long arms, he 
 went after the invaders. The pirates fought back, but 
 Abe managed to chase them off into the woods. Abe 
 had saved his own life and Allen's that night, and 
 saved the cargo, too. But as long as he lived he had a 
 scar over his right eye to remind him of the battle. 
 
 In New Orleans Abe and Allen sold their flatboat 
 for lumber and traded their cargo for sugar, tobacco, 
 and cotton which was to go north with them by 
 steamer. 
 
 Then they saw the sights for a few days. New Or- 
 leans was the first city Abe had ever been in, and there 
 was plenty to amaze and puzzle him. As he wandered 
 around looking down at the crowds from his great 
 height, he saw gentlemen and ladies in fancy clothes. 
 
 53 
 
He saw gamblers, and sailors from strange foreign 
 countries, and slaves. He saw Negroes in chains. 
 
 Some of the things Abe saw seemed to trouble him, 
 and when he was troubled he didn't talk much. After 
 he finished his three months' trip and came back to 
 his cabin on Little Pigeon Creek, he didn't have much 
 to say about New Orleans. Often Abe would think a 
 long time about things before he spoke. 
 
 The twenty-four dollars he had earned for his 
 three months' work didn't go far to help his family 
 over the next year. Things were bad on the farm. 
 They never had been good, but this year the milksick 
 came again. No one in those days knew what caused 
 the milksick. They thought it was a disease like others 
 that came in epidemics. Scientists know now that the 
 milksick is not a disease at all, but a poison that cows 
 get by eating the leaves of the snakeroot plant. Cows 
 pass the poison to people through their milk, and the 
 poison kills both cattle and human beings. 
 
 None of the Lincoln family died, but Dennis 
 Hanks alone lost four milk cows and eight calves in 
 a week. He said, "I'm goin' to git out o' here and hunt 
 a country where the milksick is not; it's like to ruined 
 
 me." 
 
 Abe's father felt the same way. He had set Abe to 
 work making lumber for a new house. But he sold the 
 lumber and he sold his farm. After clearing the farm 
 and working it for fourteen years, he sold it for less 
 
 54 
 
than he paid for it in the beginning when it was just 
 wilderness. 
 
 Abe spent the winter he was twenty-one helping 
 his family get ready to move West again. This time 
 they were going to a new frontier— out of the wood- 
 lands and onto the prairie in Illinois. This time they 
 would go by ox wagon, and Abe would help build it. 
 The big wagon was to carry all the things his family 
 owned. 
 
 He cut huge trees and then sawed off sections from 
 the biggest part of the trunks. With a hole in the cen- 
 ter and an iron rim around the outside, these solid sec- 
 tions made wheels. He cut hickory poles for axles. 
 He made boards and pounded them together into a 
 wagon bed, using wooden pegs instead of nails. Three 
 days after his twenty-first birthday the wagon was 
 finished and loaded. 
 
 Before they left, Abe went to Jones's store in Gen- 
 tryville and bought a supply of buttons and pans and 
 needles and pins and such things. He intended to make 
 some money by selling them along the way to Illinois. 
 He was a grown man now and needed to think how 
 he was going to get on in the world. When he was 
 just a little boy he had begun to work for his father, 
 and he had worked the full time he owed his father ac- 
 cording to the law. After he got his family settled in 
 their new home he could begin to work for himself. 
 
 55 
 
Chapter VII: YOUNG MAN ON THE FRONTIER 
 
 Before he helped put the heavy wooden yokes 
 over the necks of the oxen which were to pull the 
 wagon, Abe had one thing to do. He went to visit the 
 place where he had helped bury his mother when he 
 was seven years old. Visiting the grave wouldn't 
 change anything or help anything, but still he wanted 
 to do it. 
 
 His mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, had died when 
 she was only thirty-six. She had died of the milksick, 
 and the Lincoln family was running away from the 
 milksick now. Abe's mother had worn herself out 
 working before she caught the disease. Maybe that's 
 why it took her away so easily. Abe felt it was only 
 
 56 
 
right to visit her grave. It might be for the last time. 
 
 When the visit was over and the oxen were hitched 
 to the wagon, Abe shouted, "Git up!" The Lincolns 
 began to move again. Abe had become the leader in 
 his family. It was he who drove them to Illinois in the 
 changeable winter weather. He would see that they 
 were settled before he struck out for himself. His 
 friend John Hanks had gone ahead to look for a new 
 place on which they could live. 
 
 For two weeks Abe drove the oxen, and the heavy 
 wagon creaked and groaned. At night the ground 
 froze and in the daytime it thawed. When it thawed, 
 there was often deep mud. But he kept on going West. 
 There were no bridges over creeks. He had to drive 
 right through them, and sometimes they were cov- 
 ered with thin sheets of ice through which the oxen 
 had to break. 
 
 As the Lincolns moved slowly along— oxen were 
 much slower than horses— their little dog padded 
 along behind. At one ice-covered creek they forgot to 
 put the dog on the wagon, and when they got across, 
 Abe heard him barking at them from the other side. 
 
 Climbing down from the w r agon, Abe took off his 
 shoes and socks and waded through the broken ice. 
 He picked up the little dog, put him under his arm, 
 and waded back— his big feet and thin shins aching 
 from the cold. And then he whipped up the oxen 
 again. 
 
 57 
 
As he drove on he passed many lonely frontier 
 farms far from any store. Almost every place he 
 stopped he was welcomed by people who wanted to 
 buy buttons and the other little household things 
 called "notions" which made life easier. He had 
 grown up on the frontier and he knew how wonder- 
 ful it was to buy from a traveling storekeeper some- 
 thing you'd always had to make for yourself. When 
 the trip was over, Abe wrote back to Jones, the store- 
 keeper from whom he had bought his stock of goods, 
 and said he had made a good profit. 
 
 Abe was always interested in anything that could 
 be done in a better, more modern way. That is one 
 reason he had always liked to go to mill. He thought 
 it was smarter to get a horse to do the work of grind- 
 ing than to do it by hand. He had been interested in 
 steamboats, too. They did more work than flatboats, 
 and people put less energy into them than he'd had to 
 put into sculling. 
 
 At one place along the way he saw another machine 
 which interested him—a printing press. He had never 
 seen one, although he had read every printed word he 
 could find. Here was something to think about. 
 
 Abe kept his eyes open. There were lots of things 
 to see and enjoy and joke about. In the same place 
 where he saw a printing press he ran across the first 
 juggler he had ever seen. 
 
 Much of the Illinois country Abe drove over was 
 
 58 
 
prairie, treeless, and different from the wooded land 
 he and his family had always known. Everyone said 
 the soil was rich and grew wonderful crops of corn, 
 but the Lincolns passed on toward the wooded area 
 along the Sangamon River. John Hanks knew the 
 Lincolns would feel more at home in the woods, even 
 if the soil wasn't as good for farming. 
 
 And John Hanks was waiting for them there. He 
 had picked out a site for their house on a bluff over- 
 looking the Sangamon. He had even hewed out a few 
 logs, ready for their cabin. 
 
 Abe stayed with the family on their new land and 
 helped them hew more logs and build the cabin. He 
 stayed throughout the rest of the winter and helped 
 break ground in the spring. Abe and John, using a 
 plow pulled by oxen, plowed fifteen acres and split 
 walnut rails enough to fence the place in. 
 
 Abe stayed all summer and fall, helping with the 
 crops, doing odd jobs. And as usual he told jokes and 
 made speeches. 
 
 Abe had done a lot of thinking lately about some- 
 thing that was very important to the settlers. They 
 needed roads, and the rivers ought to be dredged out 
 deep enough for cargo boats to travel safely. People 
 called such things "improvements," and Abe loved to 
 talk about them. 
 
 He got his first chance shortly after the Lincolns 
 reached Illinois. It was election time. One of the can- 
 
 59 
 
didates was against improving the Sangamon River. 
 Abe and John Hanks stood around and listened to the 
 man make a speech about it. 
 
 "It was a bad one," John said. "Abe can beat it." 
 So he got a box for Abe to stand on. Then Abe 
 climbed up and explained a whole plan he'd worked 
 out so that steamboats could go up and down the San- 
 gamon. When he finished, John said with satisfac- 
 tion, "Abe beat him to death." 
 
 Even Abe's opponent was impressed by the tall 
 stranger's ability. Although he had lost the debate, he 
 urged Abe to go on studying and speaking. 
 
 Abe stayed on in the new cabin, and he was still 
 there at Christmas time when a big blizzard came. It 
 snowed for two days and two nights, covering the 
 ground two and a half feet deep. Then this snow set- 
 tled and froze on top, and another blizzard came, pil- 
 ing the snow to a depth of four feet. People had no 
 large supplies of food in their cabins, and they could 
 not go anywhere to get food. There was only parched 
 corn to eat— if they had that. Only the wolves could 
 move freely on the icy surface of the deep snow, and 
 the wolves ate well off the farmers' cattle. 
 
 In some cabins people died of hunger. In others 
 they died of cold, and things were not much better in 
 the Lincoln cabin. Abe started out to walk four miles 
 to a place where he thought he might get some food, 
 but even his legs were not long enough to get through 
 
 60 
 
the deep snow. He nearly froze his feet, and he was 
 laid up sick afterward. 
 
 When spring came and the snow cleared away, the 
 Lincolns decided they had not picked the right place 
 for a farm after all. They pushed on another hun- 
 dred miles, this time to flat land, to a place called 
 Goose Neck Prairie. Here Abe helped build still an- 
 other cabin, and he stayed in the neighborhood doing 
 odd jobs. 
 
 Then one day John Hanks came with news. Back 
 up north on the Sangamon he had met a man named 
 Denton Offut who wanted boatmen to take a flatboat 
 to New Orleans. John Hanks had been a boatman 
 back in Kentucky, and Abe, of course, had already 
 made one successful trip to New Orleans. Abe was in- 
 terested, so he and John Hanks persuaded Abe's 
 stepbrother John Johnston to go in with them. 
 
 Abe and the two Johns looked up Offut and agreed 
 to take a boatload of stock and provisions to New Or- 
 leans for fifty cents a day each. Offut agreed to have 
 a boat ready for them in March— that was 1 8 3 1 . 
 When the time came, Abe and John Hanks canoed 
 down the Sangamon and met John Johnston. 
 
 They found Offut all right, but no boat. The man 
 had big schemes, and he talked big, but he hadn't done 
 anything practical about the trip. So Abe and his com- 
 panions had to build their own flatboat. First they 
 built a shanty and appointed Abe to be cook. Then for 
 
 61 
 
four weeks they worked on the big raft, cutting all the 
 timber for it themselves. 
 
 When it came time to launch the flatboat, Offut 
 appeared and there was a celebration. A traveling ma- 
 gician dropped by about this time. He gave a show in 
 the loft of a house near the shore where the new boat 
 was tied up. At one point he said he was going to cook 
 eggs in a hat. Looking over the crowd, he easily 
 singled out Abe who stood a full head taller than the 
 others. He asked Abe to lend his low-crowned, broad- 
 brimmed felt hat for the trick. The hat had once been 
 black, but by now, Abe said, it was "sunburned till it 
 was a combine of colors." 
 
 Abe hesitated. The crowd began to joke at him. 
 Why was he so slow? 
 
 "Out of respect for the eggs," Abe answered with 
 a grin, "not care for my hat." 
 
 Everybody laughed. They liked the big boatman 
 who stood towering above them in his blue jeans 
 which were almost too short to tuck into the tops of 
 his rawhide boots. 
 
 After the celebration Abe and his friends loaded 
 the flatboat. They put corn and barrels of pork at one 
 end. Into a pen at the other end they drove a herd of 
 live hogs. On April 19 they shoved off with their 
 cargo. But they only got as far as New Salem, a few 
 miles down the river. There they ran into trouble. 
 
 A low mill dam ran across the river at New Salem. 
 
 62 
 
Usually the flatboats just shot down over the dam 
 when the river was swollen with spring floods. But 
 Abe's boat was too heavily loaded. Its bottom scraped 
 the top of the dam, and there it was, hung up in the 
 middle of the river. The pigs let out terrified squeals. 
 People from New Salem and nearby farms came run- 
 ning to watch the excitement and to yell jokes and ad- 
 vice from the riverbank. 
 
 Abe paid no attention to any of the racket. He was 
 figuring out what to do. First he unloaded some of 
 the cargo and the hogs into another boat. Next he 
 bored a hole in the front end of the boat. That let the 
 water in. Then he began rolling barrels toward the 
 front end. This shift in weight tilted the boat for- 
 ward. At last it slipped a little, then slid safely over 
 the dam. 
 
 A great shout went up. OfTut strutted around im- 
 portantly, while Abe and the others plugged the hole 
 and struggled to get the barrels and the hogs back onto 
 the flatboat. Offut bragged that someday he'd build a 
 steamboat to run up and down the Sangamon. It 
 would have rollers to get it over dams like this one. 
 And Abe would be captain. 
 
 Abe didn't hear Offut. He just shook his head and 
 went on reminding people that rivers like the Sanga- 
 mon had to be fixed so that modern things like steam- 
 boats could help them sell their crops and buy things 
 and get from one place to another. 
 
 63 
 
To save the trouble of sculling and to make the 
 boat get along faster, Abe rigged up crude sails with 
 extra planks and some cloth. Maybe the sails helped 
 and maybe they didn't. Anyway, Abe was always 
 trying to think of better ways to do things. 
 
 They had no trouble with river pirates on this trip. 
 There were pirates around, but Abe was lucky. He 
 tied up every night, and he also stopped during the 
 day to have a look at some southern cities— Memphis, 
 Vicksburg, Natchez. 
 
 No one knows what Abe had thought of slavery 
 as he saw it on his first trip to New Orleans two years 
 before. He was a long time talking about things that 
 troubled him, and he didn't usually talk until he had 
 made up his mind. But after this second trip he had 
 made up his mind. Later he said with bitterness that 
 he had seen "Negroes in chains— whipped and 
 scourged." 
 
 Abe stayed in New Orleans a month. One morn- 
 ing he and the two Johns passed a fancy building, 
 about the most elegant building Abe had ever seen. 
 People were going in and out, so Abe took a look 
 inside, too. There he found a very large circular room 
 with imitation Greek pillars all around. Overhead was 
 a dome with fancy decorations in plaster. From the 
 top of the dome, light came through a kind of sky- 
 light. 
 
 Down between the pillars were little rounded al- 
 
 64 
 
coves which looked as if statues of famous people 
 belonged there. Instead, there were big stands like 
 pulpits, and on each one stood an auctioneer selling 
 people just as if they were cattle, or furniture, or 
 machinery. The people being sold were black, and 
 the people buying them were white, dressed ele- 
 gantly to match the great domed hall. 
 
 The white people felt the black people all over 
 just as they would cows or horses. Abe saw them do 
 this to one Negro girl. And then those who were 
 bidding for her made her run up and down the room 
 just the way they would do with a horse they con- 
 sidered buying. The auctioneer said "the bidders must 
 satisfy themselves" whether this dark-skinned girl 
 was "sound" or not. That was a word the buyers 
 used about horses, too. 
 
 Lincoln was shocked by what he saw. "Let's get 
 away from this," he said to his two friends. "If I ever 
 get a chance to hit slavery, I'll hit it hard." 
 
 A month in New Orleans was enough. After the 
 flatboat and its cargo were sold, Abe started back for 
 Illinois, working his way on a steamboat, stoking the 
 engine that made the boat go. But even there he 
 couldn't get away from slavery. There were slaves 
 aboard, held to each other with chains. Abe went as 
 far on the boat as St. Louis, and then he walked across 
 country for several days to his family's farm. 
 
 He stayed there a few weeks, visiting and helping 
 
 65 
 
out, but this was his good-by visit. He loved his step- 
 mother and hated to leave her, but after an affec- 
 tionate farewell, he finally set out completely on his 
 own. 
 
 And when he was gone his father said, "I s'pose 
 Abe is still fooling hisself with eddication. I tried to 
 stop it, but he has got that fool idea in his head, and 
 it can't be got out. Now I hain't got no eddication, 
 and I get along far better'n ef I had. Take bookkeepin' 
 —why I'm the best bookkeeper in the world. Look 
 up at that rafter thar. Ther's three straight lines made 
 with a firebrand: ef I sell a peck of meal I draw a 
 black line across, and when they pay I take a dish- 
 cloth and jest rub it out; and that thar's a heap bet- 
 ter'n yer eddication." 
 
 66 
 
Chapter VIII: ABE BECOMES STOREKEEPER 
 
 It was August i 8 3 i when Abe set out afoot to make 
 his way in the world. He headed toward the Sanga- 
 mon River, which by now he knew very well. Then, 
 in a canoe, he paddled downstream until he came to 
 New Salem, the place where his flatboat had been 
 hung up on the dam in the spring. Something about 
 this place interested him. 
 
 For one thing there was a mill at New Salem, and 
 he had always liked going to mill. This one was big- 
 ger than the others he had known and was run by 
 water power. Abe liked that— water power was more 
 efficient than horse power. Farmers came from fifty 
 miles around to grind their corn so New Salem was 
 a fairly busy place, although fewer than a hundred 
 
 67 
 
people lived there and the whole village had less than 
 twenty houses. 
 
 Another thing that interested Abe in New Salem 
 —the most important thing— was that Denton Offut 
 had big plans for the place and big plans also for Abe. 
 Offut was going to set up a store, and he wanted Abe 
 to be the clerk. But the bragging promoter hadn't 
 yet got anything to sell in the store by the time Abe 
 climbed out of his canoe at New Salem. There was 
 nothing to do but loaf around and make friends, and 
 Abe liked doing that. 
 
 As Abe lounged along the street on that first day, 
 he noticed a voting place. An election was going on 
 and there seemed to be trouble. In order to have a 
 regular election, people were saying, there ought to 
 be someone to write down the names of the voters. 
 The knowledge of writing was rare in New Salem. 
 The men who were running the election had asked 
 everybody around but found no penman. Maybe it 
 was worth asking this tall stranger. 
 
 "Oh, I guess I can make a few rabbit tracks," Abe 
 told them, and on his very first day in town he be- 
 came clerk of the election. Abe wrote down the 
 names of the voters as they stepped up and announced 
 which candidates they wanted to vote for. There 
 couldn't have been a quicker way to get acquainted 
 with all the men in town. 
 
 The voting was slow, and Abe entertained people 
 
 68 
 
in between times by telling funny stories. One of 
 them was about a wandering preacher back in Indi- 
 ana. It seems the preacher was a long talker and bor- 
 ing. People couldn't remember much about most 
 of his sermons. But there was one they never for- 
 got. 
 
 After the preacher got pretty well wound up and 
 was going on at a great rate, the audience noticed 
 that he began to wiggle in a strange way. He kept 
 on wiggling, and sometimes he slapped his leg, or his 
 side, or his back. Slap, slap, first with one hand then 
 with the other, right in the middle of fearful warn- 
 ings about hell fire and brimstone. This weird wig- 
 gling and slapping went on for quite a while. 
 
 It was too much for the fun-loving farmers. 
 Church broke up early that day amid gales of laugh- 
 ter—but not before everyone present had discovered 
 what caused the preacher's peculiar antics. A little 
 blue lizzard had crawled up his pants' leg and pro- 
 ceeded to explore! 
 
 Abe told more stories like this as the days passed 
 and no goods came for Offut's store. He was becom- 
 ing known as a real comedian. People looked forward 
 to his return when he took a brief job on a flatboat 
 on the winding Sangamon. And when Abe came 
 back, no one was disappointed. He gave them a yarn 
 about his troubles getting the flatboat around the 
 turns in the river. Sometimes, he said, the boat 
 
 69 
 
rammed up on the bank and kept going for three miles 
 out onto the prairie. 
 
 Off ut's goods still had not arrived, and Abe filled in 
 the time by building a cabin which was to be the store. 
 Finally the stuff did come. Abe and the assistant 
 clerk, eighteen-year-old Bill Green, filled up shelves 
 and part of the counter and floor with calico cloth, 
 tea, eggs, dishes, hats, hardware— everything a general 
 store carried. Then Abe and Bill moved into the 
 store themselves. They slept together on a bed so 
 narrow that when one of them turned over the other 
 had to turn over, too. 
 
 Offut bragged everywhere about how smart his 
 big clerk was. "Some day he'll be President of the 
 United States," he said. Offut also claimed Abe could 
 outrun, outwrestle, outlift any man in Sangamon 
 County. There were some rough and ready young 
 fellows at nearby Clary's Grove who doubted this. 
 The Clary's Grove Boys, as they were called, figured 
 there wasn't anybody they couldn't outfight, and 
 everybody agreed they could be plenty tough when 
 they wanted to be. 
 
 Abe didn't like the idea of starting out in New 
 Salem as if he were a bully who picked fights. It was 
 some time before Offut persuaded him to take on 
 Jack Armstrong, the leader of the Clary's Grove 
 gang. But finally the match was arranged for a Satur- 
 day afternoon, and people came from many miles 
 
 70 
 
round to watch. They looked over the two athletes. 
 Abe's six feet four inches of lean muscle impressed 
 them. He weighed about one hundred and eighty 
 pounds. Jack Armstrong was shorter and built like 
 an ox. He weighed two hundred and fourteen 
 pounds. 
 
 Two big men couldn't have been built more differ- 
 ently. Abe had sloping shoulders and a flat chest. 
 You wouldn't have seen great strength in him unless 
 you studied his long, well-muscled arms, and his 
 great, powerful-looking hands. Armstrong, on the 
 other hand, had a chest like a barrel. It was easy to 
 see the strength in him. 
 
 Both wrestlers had fans who supported them, and 
 the fans bet whatever they had. Only a few had 
 money. The others bet knives, or hats, or anything. 
 
 Abe and Jack agreed they would fight fair— no 
 hair-pulling, ear-twisting, nose-biting, or eye-goug- 
 ing. When they were both ready, Jack charged at 
 Abe with all his might and tried to rush him off his 
 feet. But Abe held him off with his long arms while 
 he tried for a crotch hold. Abe knew if he could just 
 get that hold he could lift Jack off his feet and throw 
 him to the ground. But Jack slipped out of the hold, 
 and they swayed and struggled all over the vacant 
 lot where the fight was held. 
 
 Neither one was getting the advantage, and this 
 made Jack angry. He was used to winning easily, and 
 
 7 1 
 
here he was getting tired and out of breath. Jack lost 
 his head and started to fight dirty. He stamped a boot 
 heel down on Abe's right instep. 
 
 It was Abe's turn now to lose his temper. In one 
 motion he reached out, grabbed Jack by the neck 
 and shook him like a flour sack. Then he banged him 
 down flat on the ground. 
 
 Jack's defeat was too much for the other Clary's 
 Grove toughs. They charged. Abe moved away until 
 his back was against the store building. Then he told 
 them to come on if they wanted to. But Jack was on 
 his feet again. He broke through the gang and held 
 out his hand to Abe. Then he turned to his friends 
 and told them Abe had been fair. "He's the best feller 
 that ever broke into this settlement," he said. From 
 that day on Abe and the Clary's Grove Boys were 
 friends. In fact the Boys treated him as if he had 
 earned the right to be in their gang. 
 
 Before long, Abe was a regular visitor at the home 
 of Jack Armstrong and Hannah his wife. Often he'd 
 stay overnight with them two or three times a week. 
 Hannah made cornbread and butter and mush for 
 him to eat. He brought the children candy, rocked 
 the cradle, and minded the babies. 
 
 Abe beat the Clary's Grove Boys and everyone 
 else at other sports besides wrestling. He could throw 
 a cannon ball or a maul farther than any of them, and 
 he could run faster. Once he rigged up some straps 
 
 72 
 
so as to distribute the weight on different parts of 
 his body and then lifted up a box full of stones that 
 weighed a thousand pounds. No one else could do 
 that. 
 
 There were other things that Abe could do, too. 
 He could fold up all of his six feet four inches and 
 squat down close to the ground with small boys to 
 play marbles. He always liked marbles. 
 
 No one else in New Salem could do Abe's special 
 barrel trick. One time he used this trick to help his 
 friend Bill Green get even with a gambler who had 
 tricked Bill. 
 
 Abe told Bill to bet the best fur hat in the store 
 that iVbe could lift a barrel from the floor and hold it 
 while he took a drink from the bunghole. Bill made 
 the bet. Abe took hold of the rim around each end 
 of the barrel, then squatted down and rolled the bar- 
 rel up his shins onto his knees. When the bunghole 
 was opposite his mouth he took a mouthful of whisky, 
 let the barrel down— and then spat the whiskey out. 
 
 It didn't matter to the Clary's Grove Boys that 
 lifting barrels was the only use Abe had for whiskey. 
 They thought he was a good fellow even if he didn't 
 drink, or smoke or swear, and they called on him to 
 judge horse races and rooster fights. They knew he 
 was fair, and besides, he was big and strong enough 
 to make his decisions stick. 
 
 Abe made other friends beside the Clary's Grove 
 
 73 
 
Boys, friends who in many ways were the opposite 
 of them. One was Mentor Graham, the schoolmaster. 
 Abe visited Graham's log schoolhouse and listened to 
 the lessons. He talked long with Graham, borrowed 
 books from him, and found out from him where he 
 could borrow more. Once he learned that there was 
 an English grammar at a farm six miles away. He 
 walked out, borrowed the book, walked home, and 
 then began to read it at night in the blacksmith shop 
 where he got light by burning pine shavings. He 
 studied and studied this book, and when there were 
 no customers in the store he got Bill Green to hold 
 the book and ask him questions out of it. Abe wanted 
 to learn all he could about language and how to use it. 
 
 Abe made lasting friends of customers in the store 
 by being honest. One day he discovered that a woman 
 had paid six and a quarter cents more than she owed. 
 (In those days, there were coins worth less than one 
 cent.) That night he walked six miles to the woman's 
 home and paid the money back to her. Another time 
 he made a mistake in weighing tea. He gave a woman 
 only half as much as she paid for. He took another 
 long walk and delivered the rest of the tea. 
 
 As Abe made friends, he asked them questions. 
 People said, "He could pump any man dry on any 
 subject he was interested in." And as Abe learned 
 from his questionings and from his reading, he used 
 what he had learned in speeches which he delivered 
 
 74 
 
before the literary and debating society in New 
 Salem. The president of the society, James Rutledge, 
 said Abe had more than "wit and fun" in his head. 
 This compliment pleased Abe particularly because he 
 was beginning to be interested in Rutledge's beautiful 
 daughter Ann. 
 
 Abe had plenty of time during that first winter of 
 1831-32 in New Salem to make friends, and to do 
 his studying, and to do odd jobs like building a pen 
 for a thousand hogs, or splitting rails for Offut. Busi- 
 ness at the store was slow, and as spring came it got 
 slower. Offut drank up any profits there might have 
 been, and before long the store closed and Offut left 
 the country. 
 
 Many years later Offut turned up again, still pro- 
 moting schemes. He went around wearing a bright- 
 colored ribbon sash over his shoulder, which was held 
 together at his hip by a fancy bow. He claimed he 
 was a veterinary surgeon and horse tamer and that 
 he had a secret for quieting vicious horses. If you paid 
 him five dollars and promised never to let on what 
 the secret was, he would tell you the proper words to 
 whisper in the horse's ear. No one who paid the five 
 dollars ever gave away the secret, but the guess was 
 that they didn't want to appear foolish for wasting 
 their money. 
 
 After Offut left, a new job came Abe's way— a job 
 that was brief but exciting— and it took him once 
 
 75 
 
more back onto the Sangamon River. He had talked 
 a lot about how much good it would do the farmers 
 and business people if steamboats came up the Sanga- 
 mon bringing goods all the way from Cincinnati and 
 Pittsburgh. And now suddenly a steamboat appeared 
 on the little river, right in the middle of the Illinois 
 prairie. It was the Talisman loaded with goods from 
 the East. 
 
 People all along the river were thrilled. They felt 
 that progress was coming to the Sangamon. Abe, 
 with others, went ahead of the steamboat, chopping 
 low branches oif the trees so that it could get through. 
 A boy named Bill Herndon was in the crowd and 
 saw Abe for the first time. He always remembered 
 the tall young man who seemed to know the river by 
 heart, and years later Bill became Abe's partner in 
 a law office. 
 
 The water in the river was high enough over the 
 dam at New Salem so that the Talisman could go up 
 over it without getting stuck. But the officers of the 
 boat were inexperienced. They didn't know how rap- 
 idly the spring flood waters of the Sangamon went 
 down. And besides, they were having a good time at 
 celebrations in their honor. They waited too long, 
 and then they had to hire an experienced river pilot to 
 get them back to the Illinois River where the water 
 was deeper. 
 
 The pilot everyone recommended was Abe. He 
 
 76 
 
brought the Talisman down as far as the dam at New 
 Salem. But one try showed that he would hang the 
 steamboat up just the way he had hung the raft up y 
 if he really tried to go over. So the officers argued 
 with the owners of the dam, and finally they got part 
 of the dam dug away so the boat could float through. 
 
 Abe piloted the boat safely along as far as he had 
 agreed to go. Then he was unemployed again. 
 
 Back in New Salem he wondered what to do, and 
 as he wondered he thought of a job that appealed to 
 him. He knew he would like to be a member of the 
 Illinois State Legislature. He could make a living at 
 it by giving speeches and by knowing things and by 
 thinking clearly. Abe counted over all the friends he 
 had in New Salem and close by, and he decided to 
 run for the legislature. 
 
 77 
 
Chapter IX: CAPTAIN ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 It was all very well to dream of being in the legisla- 
 ture. But elections wouldn't be held until August, 
 and it would be a time after that before the legislators 
 met and began to draw their pay. 
 
 As it happened, a job came along in the meantime, 
 and it was the kind that would help Abe's chances 
 of election. 
 
 A call went out for volunteers to fight against 
 Chief Black Hawk and the Sac Indian warriors he 
 had led across the Mississippi into northwestern Illi- 
 nois. The Sac tribe was hungry, and they had come 
 back to the land they had always lived on before 
 
 78 
 
the white man came and tricked them out of it. 
 
 To the Indians, land was like air— it could not be 
 bought or sold. It was there to be used by those who 
 had always used it. Longer than anyone could re- 
 member, the Sacs had grown corn in northwestern 
 Illinois. They saw no reason to go hungry just be- 
 cause someone had pushed them off the land and then 
 made laws saying the land belonged to the pushers. 
 The Sacs came back home. 
 
 The white men, who had worked hard to make 
 farms on the old Sac lands, felt the lands were theirs. 
 When the returning warriors and the whites met, 
 there was killing on both sides and burning of farm- 
 houses. A strong government stood behind the newly 
 arrived whites to help them keep the farms they 
 wanted and knew how to work better than the In- 
 dians did. 
 
 Abe's people had always had to fight Indians to get 
 a bare living from the soil. Often they had lived little 
 better than the Indians they drove out. But as time 
 went on the white men's land had grown more food 
 and produced more things that people needed than it 
 ever had when the Indians alone lived there. No one 
 had ever really thought through a plan which would 
 give both Indians and white men all the land they 
 needed. 
 
 Whether Abe thought about these things, no one 
 knows. It just seemed natural to fight Indians, and it 
 
 79 
 
was a job. Abe was helping the people who were 
 building up the country, who were his friends— 
 the kind of people he had to rely upon if he was 
 ever to get anywhere in the world. And Abe was 
 ambitious. 
 
 Abe was not the only young man from New Salem 
 who enlisted for the Black Hawk War. The Clary's 
 Grove Boys did, too. When a whole company of 
 volunteers had assembled, they held an election to 
 decide who should be captain. Two of the militiamen 
 were nominated. One was Abe and the other was a 
 man named Kirkpatrick, whom Abe had reason to 
 remember. 
 
 Kirkpatrick owned a sawmill. One time he had 
 hired Abe to move logs. This was heavy work even 
 if you used a cant hook— a kind of lever with a mov- 
 able hook which grabbed into logs and made them 
 easier to handle. Kirkpatrick had no cant hook, and 
 so he agreed to pay Abe two dollars extra for doing 
 the work by hand. When pay day came, however, he 
 refused to give Abe the two dollars. Abe's good 
 friends the Clary's Grove Boys knew this, and they 
 liked the idea of having Abe as a captain over Kirk- 
 patrick. 
 
 When it came time to vote, Abe and Kirkpatrick 
 stood facing each other out in front of the company. 
 The militiamen then walked out and stood behind 
 the man they wanted for captain. There were twice 
 
 80 
 
as many behind Abe as behind Kirkpatrick. This 
 election gave Abe more satisfaction than any other 
 he ever won later in life. 
 
 The militia were now entered in the records as 
 "Captain Abraham Lincoln's Company of the First 
 Regiment of the Brigade of Mounted Volunteers 
 commanded by Brigadier General Samuel White- 
 side." 
 
 Abe knew as little about discipline and military 
 drill as the wild Clary's Grove Boys, and there were 
 no horses yet for his "mounted" volunteers. For lack 
 of anything else to do, he tried to drill his men in 
 marching. He gave his first order as captain, and from 
 the ranks came the reply, "Go to the devil!" Abra- 
 ham Lincoln's Mounted Volunteers had joined up 
 to fight Indians, not to go through any monkeyshines 
 like infantry drill. 
 
 But drill they did after a fashion, and as long as 
 Abe could remember what commands to give. Once 
 he marched his men right into a fence because he 
 couldn't remember the command to get them 
 through a gate two by two. 
 
 Discipline was as new to Abe as it was to his men, 
 and sometimes he himself forgot the rules. When he 
 got his company into camp with other troops, there 
 were lots of rules that had to be obeyed. For instance, 
 no one was allowed to shoot off firearms in camp. 
 Captain Abraham Lincoln forgot about this. He'd 
 
 81 
 
never had much to do with guns, and perhaps he 
 thought he ought to practice. Whatever the reason, 
 he shot a gun, and he was punished by having to 
 spend a day under arrest. 
 
 Another time he was punished for not keeping 
 good discipline among his men. He had to wear a 
 wooden sword for two days because the Clary's 
 Grove Boys had broken into the officers' whiskey sup- 
 ply. 
 
 While Abe had no interest in getting whiskey for 
 his men, he did fight for their rights when it came to 
 food. His troop was getting very little to eat in this 
 hastily organized war. Although the Army gave food 
 to its regular soldiers, the volunteers were often hun- 
 gry. Abe went and protested to the regular army 
 officer who was over him, saying, "Sir, you forget 
 that we are not under the rules and regulations of the 
 War Department at Washington; we are only vol- 
 unteers under the rules and regulations of Illinois. 
 Keep in your own sphere and there will be no diffi- 
 culty, but resistance will hereafter be made to unjust 
 orders. My men must be equal in all particulars— in 
 rations, arms, camps— to the regular army." This 
 threat brought better treatment for Abe's men. 
 
 Nobody remembers which officer Abe said this to, 
 but people do recall that there was a Captain Jeffer- 
 son Davis in the Black Hawk War. This was the 
 same Jefferson Davis who later led the slaveholders 
 
 82 
 
against the United States Government in the Civil 
 War. 
 
 In spite of the better treatment Abe got for his 
 troop, the men still smarted. They saw that the regu- 
 lar army officers lived better than the privates. For 
 one thing, they had milk from two cows. Abe's men 
 decided to "borrow" one of these cows for their own 
 use. They chose the red one that had had her tail cut 
 short. Then they went to a slaughterhouse, got a tail 
 the same color, and fastened it onto the cow. Now, as 
 far as they were concerned, the cow was theirs. The 
 officers certainly did not own a red cow with a long 
 tail. Even the commanding officer couldn't get that 
 cow away from Abe's men. 
 
 The militia found no Indians to fight so they 
 worked off some of their energy by staging wrestling 
 matches. Abe threw every local champion that turned 
 up along the line of march. Then one day a match was 
 arranged between Abe and another soldier named 
 Thompson, whose friends claimed he was champion 
 of all the soldiers in the Black Hawk War. The first 
 man to throw the other one twice was to be the win- 
 ner. 
 
 The two wrestlers started in cautiously. Each 
 wanted to see how the other would be likely to move. 
 It wasn't long before Abe announced what he had 
 found out. Between shoves he called to his friends, 
 "Boys, this is the most powerful man I ever had hold 
 
 83 
 
of." Then Thompson got a crotch hold on Abe and 
 threw him. 
 
 Thompson threw Abe a second time, but this time 
 Abe pulled Thompson down with him. The Clary's 
 Grove Boys claimed this was a tie— a dogfall, they 
 called it— since both wrestlers were down. Thomp- 
 son's friends claimed their hero had thrown Abe, and 
 so he was winner of the match. A general free-for-all 
 started, but Abe broke it up and told his friends to 
 pay their bets. He explained, "If this man hasn't 
 thrown me fairly, he could." 
 
 Abe had never lost a wrestling match before, and 
 later when he told about his defeat he paid tribute to 
 his opponent. He said that Thompson "could have 
 thrown a grizzly bear." 
 
 Abe and the Clary's Grove Boys had enlisted in the 
 militia for a month. That was as long as anyone 
 thought it would take to drive Black Hawk and his 
 warriors back across the Mississippi. In the month 
 Abe had been scouring the country with his men, he 
 hadn't been in a fight with the Sacs. He was free now 
 to go home, but he didn't. "I was out of work," he 
 explained later, "and there being no danger of more 
 fighting, I could do nothing better than enlist again." 
 This time he served as a private. He stayed in the 
 Black Hawk War altogether for three months, and in 
 all that time he saw only one Indian. 
 
 This Indian was an old man who strayed into camp 
 
 84 
 
one day carrying a piece of paper. Some of the row- 
 dies wanted to shoot him on the spot. But Abe could 
 read the paper and saw that the old man was no 
 enemy. An army general had written that the Indian 
 was friendly to the whites and should be let alone. 
 This made no difference to some of the men who had 
 come out to kill Indians. They claimed the letter was 
 a forgery, and without a bit of evidence they called 
 the old man a spy. 
 
 This happened when Abe was a captain and could 
 give orders. And Abe was angry. He wanted to give 
 orders. 
 
 He towered over the men, and his swarthy face 
 showed every one of them how angry he was. He 
 stood between the old Indian and the soldiers. 
 
 "Men, this must not be done; he must not be shot 
 and killed by us," Abe said, and he meant it. 
 
 Someone called Abe a coward. 
 
 "If any man thinks I am a coward, let him test it," 
 was Abe's calm response. 
 
 "Lincoln, you're bigger and heavier than we are," 
 came a furious cry from among the men. 
 
 "You can guard against that," Abe shot back. 
 "Choose your weapons." 
 
 The men saw that Abe was not just an officer try- 
 ing to feel important by giving orders. He was will- 
 ing to risk his life in a duel with a private. They let 
 the old man go. 
 
 85 
 
Much as Abe wanted the friendship of his men, he 
 would not buy their friendship by letting them shoot 
 an innocent person. And although his own grand- 
 father, Abraham Lincoln, had been killed by an In- 
 dian, this Abraham Lincoln would not let an Indian 
 be killed unjustly. 
 
 86 
 
Chapter X: ABE TRIES POLITICS 
 
 When Abe finished his third month in the militia, he 
 was far off in the northwest corner of Wisconsin. By 
 any road or path he followed he would have three 
 or four hundred miles of walking in order to get back 
 to New Salem. And that was where he wanted to be. 
 Elections were coming up on August 6. 
 
 After serving in the cavalry he was supposed to 
 have a horse to ride home, but someone had stolen his 
 horse. So Abe hitched rides when he could, sitting be- 
 hind a horseback rider with his long legs dangling. 
 But much of the way he had to walk. 
 
 When he got home there was only time enough to 
 make a few speeches in New Salem and in places 
 
 87 
 
around close by. Twenty-three-year-old Abe put on 
 the best clothes he had. His coat was of coarse cloth 
 like denim and shorter than was the style in those days 
 —so short he couldn't sit on the coattails. His pants 
 were of coarse linen, six inches too short to reach the 
 top of his black boots. And he had an old straw hat. 
 
 He planned to make his first speech at a nearby 
 town where he knew a crowd was sure to collect 
 for an auction of hogs, bulls, and steers. After the 
 auction was over, Lincoln stepped up on a box. But 
 just as he began to talk in his high tenor voice, a fight 
 broke out at the edge of the crowd and Abe could 
 see a friend of his getting the worst of it. Down off 
 the box Abe came, grabbed the tough who was beat- 
 ing up his supporter, and threw him a good ten feet 
 away. That settled that fight, and the crowd gave the 
 powerful young giant its respectful attention as he 
 took off his straw hat and made his first campaign 
 speech. It was "short and sweet," as Abe said, "like 
 the old woman's dance." 
 
 As Abe walked along the country roads while he 
 was campaigning, he stopped and talked to farmers 
 working in the fields. And he did more than talk. He 
 helped them with their work. He reaped wheat in 
 one place, and no one could keep up with him as his 
 long arms swung the scythe. Another place he 
 pitched hay in a barn. He had friendly wrestling 
 matches, too, and several times showed that he could 
 
 88 
 
throw the crowbar farther than anyone else in the 
 county. 
 
 Wherever he went people liked him, but he did 
 not have time to visit the whole county. There were 
 twelve candidates, and several of them were more 
 widely known than he was. When the votes were 
 counted, Abe was seventh on the list. He lost the 
 election, but he had more votes than five of the can- 
 didates, and he was not discouraged. He saw that in 
 and around New Salem, where he was best known, he 
 got 277 votes, and all the other eleven candidates to- 
 gether got only 7 votes. 
 
 Losing the election meant that Abe was still out 
 of work. He wanted some kind of job which would 
 help him meet lots of people and which would also 
 leave him time to read. Running a store seemed to be 
 about the right kind of work. With no money at all 
 Abe managed to buy a store, just by promising to pay. 
 A little later he bought out another store the same 
 way. People trusted Abe. Then something happened 
 which Abe certainly did not approve of, but he bene- 
 fited by it all the same. 
 
 The Clary's Grove Boys had a grudge against Reu- 
 ben Radford who also ran a store in New Salem. Rad- 
 ford knew the toughs got violent when they had too 
 much to drink. So he gave orders that they could buy 
 only a little whiskey at his store. The Clary's Grove 
 gang decided to take the whiskey anyway, and they 
 
 89 
 
tore his store apart. When Radford saw the wreckage, 
 he sold his stock to Abe's old friend Bill Green, and 
 then Bill sold it to Abe and his partner William F. 
 Berry. That left Abe and Berry as owners of the only 
 store in New Salem. 
 
 Abe became a storekeeper because he thought he 
 would have lots of time for study. And he took time 
 to study instead of taking care of his business. Often 
 he read in between waiting on customers. Other times 
 he studied stretched out belly down on the counter. 
 He also went outside barefoot, lay down on the grass, 
 put his feet up on a tree— and read. 
 
 One day he found a book which interested him 
 more than any other he had seen. It was Blackstone's 
 Commentaries on the Laws of England, the most 
 famous beginning book on the study of law. 
 
 Abe got it by accident. A man who was moving 
 West in a covered wagon had a barrel he didn't need, 
 and Abe bought it, as he said, to oblige the man. 
 When he emptied the rubbish out of it, he found some 
 books, including Blackstone. The first day he had that 
 book Abe read forty pages. 
 
 Abe was thinking more and more about being a 
 lawyer, but he knew he needed a better education 
 first. A friend named Jack Kelso helped him with 
 that. Jack knew long passages from Shakespeare's 
 plays by heart. He also knew many of the poems of 
 Robert Burns— and Jack liked fishing. Abe had no 
 
 90 
 
use for fishing, but he often went to the banks of the 
 Sangamon with Jack just to hear him recite poetry as 
 he dangled his line in the water. 
 
 And Abe went to the home of Dr. Allen to learn. 
 There he heard the physician talk against slavery and 
 against whiskey. Abe had already done a good deal of 
 thinking about slavery, and he had seen what too 
 much whiskey can do to people. Denton Offut drank 
 too much, and Abe had lost his job because Offut's 
 store failed. Now Abe's partner was drinking him- 
 self to death. Abe had to run the store alone and it 
 was failing, too. 
 
 Abe needed a job outside the store to keep him go- 
 ing. He became postmaster. He liked that job because 
 it gave him a chance to read all the newspapers that 
 came to people around New Salem. But in the end he 
 didn't make money out of the postmaster's job any 
 more than he did out of the store. There was a law in 
 those days that newspaper subscribers had to pay in 
 advance for the postage on the papers. When people 
 didn't pay in advance, Abe laid out the money from 
 his own pocket. He was never very good at getting 
 people to pay him the money they owed. But he al- 
 ways paid his own debts, even if it took a very long 
 time. And Abe owed a great deal of money— $1,100 
 —when he finally had to close the store. Abe said the 
 store " winked out." 
 
 Now he needed a job again, but he did not want 
 
 91 
 
any kind of work that would keep him from saying 
 what he thought. The surveyor of Sangamon County 
 needed an assistant. People recommended Abe. Abe 
 walked twenty miles to see the man. The surveyor 
 was a Democrat and Abe wasn't. Abe wanted the job 
 as surveyor, but he also wanted to be sure that he 
 didn't have to become a Democrat to get it. When the 
 Democratic surveyor promised Abe that he could go 
 on thinking and doing as he pleased, Abe was satis- 
 fied. 
 
 Abe didn't know a thing about surveying, but he 
 set out to learn. He studied all day and sometimes all 
 night. The schoolmaster, Mentor Graham, helped 
 him. Abe worked and worked at the difficult math- 
 ematics he had to know. He got thinner and thinner, 
 and people said he would break up under the strain if 
 he kept on like this. He worked himself sick, but in 
 six weeks he had learned how to be a surveyor. 
 
 Soon he got his health back as he went around in 
 the out-of-doors finding out for people exactly where 
 the boundaries of their farms lay. He took with him 
 as helpers Jack Armstrong, the Clary's Grove Boy 
 whom he had licked in a fight when he first came to 
 New Salem, and Jack Kelso, who was teaching him 
 Shakespeare and Burns. 
 
 Even though Abe made three dollars a day at this 
 job, there were many days when he could not work. 
 He began to get into snarls about money. He couldn't 
 
 92 
 
pay all the bills for the horse and the surveying equip- 
 ment he needed in his work. He was sued in court. 
 The court took away his horse and surveying equip- 
 ment and sold them at auction for $125. The man 
 who bought them was a friend of Abe's called Uncle 
 Jimmy Short. Uncle Jimmy liked Abe, and he liked 
 the way Abe husked corn. "He husks two loads of 
 corn to my one," he said. 
 
 Abe hadn't gone to the auction where his posses- 
 sions were being sold. After it was over Uncle Jimmy 
 looked him up and gave him back the horse and the 
 things he needed to be a surveyor. Abe was deeply 
 moved by this unexpected generosity. All he could 
 think to say was, "Uncle Jimmy, I'll do as much for 
 you sometime." And Abe kept this promise. Thirty 
 years later when he heard that Uncle Jimmy needed 
 a job he got him one. 
 
 Although he didn't make much of a living, Abe 
 did get the reputation of being a good surveyor. He 
 was often called in to settle quarrels about the bound- 
 aries between farms. One time there was a good deal 
 of argument about where the corner of a farm really 
 was. The men agreed to let Abe settle the question. 
 He surveyed for three days, then put his staff in the 
 ground and said, "Gentlemen, here is your corner." 
 The men dug down a few inches in the earth, and, 
 exactly where Abe had indicated, they found the 
 bottom part of a surveyor's stake that had been put 
 
 93 
 
there three years before. Abe's survey had been ac- 
 curate to the inch. 
 
 Another time, though, he made a mistake on pur- 
 pose. He was surveying a town, and he laid out one 
 of the streets crooked. He found that if he made it 
 straight, a house which belonged to a widow and her 
 family would be right in the middle of the street. It 
 would have to be torn down, and Abe couldn't see 
 how she would get another one put up. 
 
 Abe often did things like that to help people. One 
 morning out in the country he met his old friend 
 Dr. Chandler on foot leading his horse along the 
 road toward Springfield which was twelve miles 
 away. 
 
 The day before, Dr. Chandler had found out that 
 a crook was hurrying to Springfield to cheat him out 
 of two farms he owned. The doctor galloped off at 
 midnight trying to beat the crook there. But his horse 
 was exhausted, and now he had to walk. 
 
 Abe quickly took the saddle bags off his own horse, 
 shortened the stirrups on his saddle, and said, "There, 
 doctor, mount my horse and leave me yours, and 
 don't let any grass grow under his feet on the way." 
 They agreed where to meet in Springfield and swap 
 their horses back again— and the doctor finished the 
 trip in time to save his farms. 
 
 Another day Abe saw a boy chopping up old logs. 
 The weather was cold, and the boy only had rags 
 
 94 
 
around his feet. When Abe found that the boy was 
 chopping wood to earn a dollar so he could buy shoes, 
 Abe told him to go into the store and warm his feet. 
 Later Abe came in, said the wood was cut and the 
 boy could have his shoes. 
 
 95 
 
Chapter XI: ABRAHAM LINCOLN, LEGISLATOR 
 
 The summer after Abe was twenty-five he ran for 
 the legislature again. 
 
 In the two years that had passed since he first ran 
 for office Abe had made a point of getting acquainted 
 with as many people as he could. Now, as elections 
 came again, he walked all over the county just seeing 
 people, lending a hand with the farm work, and talk- 
 ing. And this time he won. Four candidates were 
 elected in Sangamon County, and Abe got next to the 
 highest number of votes. 
 
 Now that he was a member of the State Legislature, 
 Abe thought he ought to have some decent clothes, 
 but he did not have the money to buy them. He went 
 
 96 
 
to a friend and told him he wanted to "fix up a little." 
 The friend lent him $200. Among other things he 
 bought a suit of blue jeans— a cloth like the material 
 used in overalls today. Abe had the new suit on when 
 he entered the capitol building at Vandalia and began 
 to meet the political leaders of the state. One of these, 
 Abe was told, was a very short, very young man 
 named Stephen Douglas. He was only five feet tall, 
 and Abe said he thought Douglas was "the least man 
 he had ever seen." But Abe was soon to learn that 
 Douglas was by no means least in brains and ambition. 
 
 Abe had big new plans now. He even thought of 
 going to college while he was in the legislature. He 
 would study and so would Ann Rutledge. And he 
 would try to save money to pay off his debts. He 
 wanted to do that as soon as he could because he and 
 Ann had talked some about getting married. 
 
 The trouble was that Ann had promised to marry 
 another man. He had gone away, and she had given 
 her word that she would wait until he came back. But 
 he didn't come back, and he didn't answer her letters. 
 Maybe he was sick, or maybe he was dead, or maybe 
 he had just lost interest in Ann. Nobody seems to 
 know exactly what happened, but finally Ann felt she 
 had a right to think about marrying someone else— 
 and that someone was Abe. 
 
 After sitting in the legislature all winter, Abe re- 
 turned to New Salem and to Ann. He saw her often, 
 
 97 
 
and they talked and planned. Next year, they hoped, 
 they could get married. 
 
 But that next year never came. An epidemic of 
 some kind was making people sick, and some of the 
 people were dying. Abe got sick, but he finally re- 
 covered. Then Ann got sick— very sick— and she 
 called for Abe. 
 
 Abe came and talked to Ann, whom he loved 
 dearly, but he could not give the help she needed. 
 Two days later she died. 
 
 Abe's grief was almost more than he could bear. 
 He couldn't tell his funny stories any more. He 
 wandered aimlessly around and often passed his old 
 friends without speaking. But they understood and 
 sympathized— and they took care of Abe until he got 
 over the worst of his grief. 
 
 Back in Vandalia, Abe watched how government 
 works and how T politicians work. By the end of his 
 first term in the legislature he decided he knew 
 enough to be re-elected. He ran again, and again he 
 won. This time Sangamon County had seven repre- 
 sentatives and two senators in the legislature. As it 
 happened, all the nine men were nearly as tall as Lin- 
 coln. They became known as the "Long Nine," and 
 they worked well together in supporting laws they all 
 wanted to get passed. 
 
 With Abe as leader, for instance, the Long Nine 
 managed to persuade the legislature to move the state 
 
 98 
 
capital to Springfield, and it has remained there ever 
 since. Abe worked hard on schemes for widening and 
 deepening rivers and digging canals. He was a great 
 believer in these ' 'internal improvements." And he 
 was beginning to do a lot of thinking about slavery. 
 
 Already in 1837 in the little western capital of 
 Springfield, politicians were talking about slavery. 
 There were some people called abolitionists who be- 
 lieved that slavery should be abolished. Others be- 
 lieved that slavery should be let alone and even 
 allowed to spread. And there were still others who 
 thought that slavery was wrong, but that the United 
 States Congress could not legally do anything about 
 it. They thought each one of the different states had 
 to decide about the question and make its own laws. 
 Abe was one of these. He hated slavery but he did not 
 agree with the abolitionists, and he said so in the legis- 
 lature—although only one other legislator agreed with 
 him. 
 
 The people in New Salem were proud of their 
 Long Nine who had become famous for their efforts 
 to get internal improvements. When the legislature 
 was over, they gave public dinners for the Long Nine, 
 and Abe received more praise than any other. Abe 
 liked this praise, and he liked New Salem. But what 
 he had seen in Springfield made him want to move 
 there. It was a bigger town and growing. Abe would 
 have more chance there to be a lawyer. 
 
 99 
 
In March 1837 when Abe was twenty-eight he put 
 all his belongings into his saddle bags, swung into 
 the saddle of a borrowed horse, and set out for Spring- 
 field. He owed more than a thousand dollars— some 
 of the debt going back to the time his store had 
 " winked out." And he had seven dollars in cash in his 
 pockets. 
 
 He tied his horse to the hitching rail by Joshua 
 Speed's store in Springfield. He went in and inquired 
 about bedding. It would cost $17.00 to buy covers 
 for a single bed, and Abe did not have that much. 
 " Cheap as it is, I have not the money to pay," he said, 
 "But if you will credit me until Christmas, and my 
 experiment as a lawyer here is a success, I will pay 
 you then. If I fail in that I will probably never pay 
 you at all." 
 
 Something about the sad, honest tone of Abe's 
 voice interested the storekeeper. Instead of selling 
 him the blankets on credit, Joshua Speed offered to 
 let him share his own double bed upstairs. Abe 
 accepted, and, after taking his saddle bags up, he 
 came down and announced, "Well, Speed, I'm 
 moved." 
 
 At first Abe shared a law office with John T. Stew- 
 art, a man he had met in the Black Hawk War. The 
 office was above the county courtroom. An old wood 
 stove provided heat. There was a table, a chair, a 
 bench, a small bed, and a buffalo robe. The few law 
 
 100 
 
books the two lawyers had stood on rickety shelves 
 of loose boards. 
 
 At first Abe didn't have much work to do as a 
 lawyer, and sometimes he didn't have a horse to ride 
 when he went from one place to another. So he 
 walked or hitchhiked. 
 
 One day he was trudging along a road when a man 
 driving a buggy overtook him. Abe hailed him and 
 said, "Will you have the goodness to take my over- 
 coat to town for me?" 
 
 "With pleasure," the man answered, "but how 
 will you get it again?" 
 
 He explained that would be easy. He said, "I'll just 
 stay in it." 
 
 Abe had a way of making friends with strangers, 
 and people began to come to him with their law prob- 
 lems. A farmer might be angry with a neighbor be- 
 cause the neighbor's pigs got into his corn field. There 
 might be an argument about which of two men really 
 owned a horse, or about who was to blame for start- 
 ing a fight in which somebody got hurt. Sometimes 
 farmers wanted to be sure they really owned the 
 farms on which they had worked hard. Abe 
 straightened out quarrels whenever he could without 
 going to court. He advised old friends and new 
 friends, and he kept up his interest in politics. 
 
 There was a lot of politics to keep up with, and 
 sometimes Abe saved time and energy by lying flat on 
 
 IOI 
 
his stomach in his office over the courtroom, listen- 
 ing to the political speeches made there at times when 
 there was no court. He just opened a trap door in the 
 floor of his office, right over the platform where the 
 speaker stood. 
 
 One time a friend of his named Baker, who had 
 criticized a local newspaper, was speaking. The 
 brother of the newspaper editor tried to get men in 
 the audience to stop Baker. It looked to Abe like there 
 was going to be a riot. To everyone's amazement he 
 swung all the length of him down through the trap 
 door and dropped on the platform. 
 
 Then he shouted, "Hold on, gentlemen, let us not 
 disgrace the age and country in which we live. This 
 is a land where freedom of speech is guaranteed. Mr. 
 Baker has a right to speak and ought to be permitted 
 to do so." Abe said he would protect the speaker, and 
 Baker was allowed to finish his speech. 
 
 Other things besides politics and law took some of 
 Abe's time in Springfield. 
 
 One day he was walking down the street and saw 
 a little girl in tears. He stopped and said, "Why, 
 what's the matter?" 
 
 "I'm going on a trip, but the man hasn't come 
 to take my trunk. Now I'm going to miss the 
 train!" 
 
 "How big's the trunk?" Abe asked. "There's still 
 time if it isn't too big." 
 
 102 , 
 
Abe went into the house. "Oho!" he cried when 
 he saw it. "Wipe your eyes and come on quick." 
 
 The trunk seemed small on his shoulders as he 
 carried it out of the house and down the street. The 
 little girl had to trot to keep up with him, drying her 
 tears as she went. At the station Abe put her trunk 
 on the train and kissed her good-by. And that was 
 that. 
 
 Before long, Abe was known around Springfield 
 as a smart young lawyer who was always very fair. 
 Often he did not ask for any pay. One time a man 
 who hired Abe as a lawyer had been accused of at- 
 tacking another man. 
 
 This case had to be discussed before a jury. Abe 
 wanted to prove that there was a reason why his 
 friend had got into the fight. All he had to do was tell 
 a story to the jury: 
 
 "There was a man going along the highway with a 
 pitchfork over his shoulders. He was attacked by a 
 fierce dog and killed him. 'What made you kill my 
 dog?' said the farmer. 'What made him bite me?' the 
 man asked. 'Why didn't you hit him with the other 
 end of the pitchfork? ' asked the farmer. 'Why didn't 
 he come at me with his other end?' the man replied." 
 
 With this, Abe whipped up his coattails and with 
 his long arms dangling pretended to look like a dog 
 barking up at the jury. 
 
 The jury laughed, and they agreed with Abe that 
 
 103 
 
his friend had a right to defend himself from a mean 
 man in a fight. Abe won the case. 
 
 Abe was always doing tricks like that to help out 
 what he thought was the right side. He could act like 
 a clown, and after people stopped laughing they saw 
 his point. 
 
 104 
 
Chapter XII: ABE GOES TO CONGRESS 
 
 Sometimes, after the day's work was done, men 
 gathered around the fireplace in Speed's store and 
 laughed at Abe's jokes. And sometimes they didn't 
 laugh— they just argued about politics. The best 
 arguer against Abe was little Stephen Douglas. 
 
 Although Abe was a lawyer now, he intended to 
 run for office again someday. He knew that Douglas 
 was the man he'd have to beat if he was going to be a 
 success in politics. And that wasn't all. Both Abe 
 and Douglas were interested in Mary Todd. Mary 
 was a pretty and strong-minded young lady who had 
 decided that the man she married would someday be 
 President of the United States. 
 
 105 
 
In November 1 842 it was Abe, not Douglas, who 
 married Mary Todd. 
 
 At first Abe couldn't afford a home for himself 
 and his bride. He was still paying back those old debts 
 to people in New Salem. So for about a year Abe 
 and Mary lived at a tavern in Springfield, and there 
 their first son was born. They called him Robert 
 Todd Lincoln, after Mary's father. When a second 
 son, Edward Baker, was born in March 1 846, Abe 
 and Mary and little Bob were living in their own 
 home— the home which was to be theirs as long as they 
 stayed in Springfield. 
 
 Abe kept on with his work as a lawyer, traveling 
 around Illinois, making more and more friends. In 
 those days judges rode from one town to another. 
 They would hold court in one place until all the law 
 cases had been taken care of, then they'd move on to 
 the next place. This was called circuit riding. On 
 horseback or in a buggy, Abe followed the judges, 
 making the rounds of the courts. And everywhere 
 he told stories. He told them to other lawyers. He told 
 them to judges and juries or to just anybody who 
 happened to be around. 
 
 Abe sometimes made wisecracks, but the stories he 
 liked best were the quieter kind that make you think 
 for a minute before you laugh. For instance, if you 
 got into a serious fix just because you were stubborn, 
 he might tell this one: 
 
 106 
 
Some boys went hunting for wild boar in the early 
 days. As luck would have it, a fierce old boar sneaked 
 up and attacked the hunters when they weren't ex- 
 pecting it. The boys shinnied up trees in a hurry— all 
 except one who was determined not to give up so 
 easily. He grabbed the boar's ears and hung on for 
 dear life. Round and round they went. Now the boy 
 didn't dare let go. If he did, he might get the worst of 
 it, because boars who'd had their ears pulled were not 
 exactly friendly. 
 
 The boys in the trees watched but didn't make a 
 move. At last the one on the ground yelled angrily, 
 "Come on down and help me let go! " 
 
 And then there was the story Abe had for people 
 who wanted to know other people's secrets: 
 
 A lazy old fellow named Jake always got more 
 prairie chickens than anyone else when he went hunt- 
 ing. Another hunter couldn't understand Jake's luck. 
 He had a better gun than Jake had, and dogs to help 
 besides. 
 
 "How do you do it?" he asked. 
 
 Jake grinned. "I jest go ahead and git 'em." 
 
 "But how do you do it?" 
 
 "You'll tell the other fellows," Jake protested. 
 
 "Honest, Jake, I won't say a word. Hope to drop 
 dead this minute." 
 
 "Never say anything if I tell you?" 
 
 "Cross my heart three times," the hunter said. 
 
 107 
 
At this Jake whispered in his ear, "All you got to 
 do is hide in a fence corner and make a noise like a 
 turnip. That'll bring the chickens every time." 
 
 Sometimes Abe told lawyers who opposed him that 
 their arguments were as thin as "soup made by boiling 
 the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death." 
 
 One time at a political meeting a speaker took off 
 his coat and paced around, shouting and talking a lot 
 of hot air. Abe said in a loud whisper, "If someone cut 
 the speaker's suspenders he would rise up just like a 
 balloon." 
 
 When Abe wanted to explain how to get people to 
 agree with you, he would say it was easier to catch 
 flies with honey than with vinegar. 
 
 More and more people all over the state of Illinois 
 began to know Abe or to know about him. They re- 
 told his stories. They talked of his honesty and the 
 generous things he did. By August 1846 enough 
 people knew Abe so that he was elected to Congress. 
 
 There were many famous men in Congress, but 
 Abe did not feel shy among them. He wasn't one to 
 keep silent if he had something to say. And there was 
 something he very much wanted to say when Con- 
 gress met the next year. A war between Mexico and 
 the United States had started. Although Mexico was 
 accused of invading the United States, Abe didn't 
 think this was so. He felt that the United States had 
 attacked Mexico, and he criticized the President, say- 
 
 108 
 
ing that his war talk was like "the half -insane mum- 
 blings of a fever dream." 
 
 When Abe saw the war couldn't be stopped right 
 away, he did the next best thing. He voted to send 
 supplies to the soldiers in the Army so they wouldn't 
 suffer from lack of equipment and food. 
 
 Abe often did things that way. He was courageous 
 about things he thought were right. But he wasn't pig- 
 headed. 
 
 While he was in Congress, he did another coura- 
 geous thing. He introduced a bill to abolish slavery in 
 the District of Columbia. He hoped this could be done 
 gradually and with the consent of the slaveowners. So 
 he proposed that the government should pay them for 
 the slaves that were freed. The bill was not passed, 
 but people have always remembered it because it 
 showed how Abe felt about slavery. 
 
 When he wasn't busy with his serious work in 
 Congress, he often played with his two little boys. 
 Sometimes he went bowling. And he loved to wander 
 through the streets of Washington, which in those 
 days were often muddy, with pigs rooting around 
 close to the Capitol. 
 
 At other times Abe studied as hard as he had when 
 he was learning to be a surveyor. Once people saw 
 him go to the library, take out books, wrap them in 
 his big handkerchief, tie the bundle to his cane, and 
 walk away with it hung over his shoulder. No other 
 
 109 
 
congressman would have been seen doing such a 
 thing, but Abe didn't care. It was a good comfortable 
 way to carry a lot of books. 
 
 Abe entertained congressmen one day by making a 
 speech that poked fun at General Cass who was a 
 Democrat and wanted to be President. Cass had been 
 in an Indian war, and he was being talked about as a 
 military hero, which Abe felt pretty sure he wasn't. 
 These are some of the things Abe said: 
 
 "Did you know I am a military hero? Yes, sir. In 
 the days of the Black Hawk War, I fought, bled, and 
 came away. It is quite certain I did not break my 
 sword, for I had none to break; but I bent my musket 
 pretty badly on one occasion. If Cass broke his sword, 
 the idea is he broke it in desperation; I bent the musket 
 by accident. . . . If he saw any live, fighting Indians, 
 it was more than I did; but I had a good many bloody 
 battles with mosquitoes, and although I never fainted 
 from the loss of blood, I can truly say I was very 
 often hungry." 
 
 After Abe's term in Congress was over, he went 
 home to Springfield, and he made a roundabout trip. 
 He visited Niagara Falls and said he wondered where 
 so much water could come from. He took a boat up 
 Lake Erie. At one place his boat was stranded on a 
 sand bar. The sailors had collected all the loose planks 
 and empty barrels they could find and were forcing 
 them down under the sides of their boat. After a 
 
 no 
 
while the planks and barrels lifted the boat up high 
 enough so it could float free from the sand bar. 
 
 This fascinated Abe. He thought about it all the 
 way home. Instead of starting right in with his law 
 work, he spent a long time in his office working on an 
 invention that would get boats off sand bars. His 
 scheme was to have a kind of bellows placed along 
 each side of a vessel. Then if the vessel got stuck, the 
 bellows would be pumped full of air. And the air 
 would raise the boat up so it could float free— just as 
 the planks and empty barrels had raised the boat he 
 had seen. 
 
 Abe thought so much of this idea that he got it 
 patented. Then he went back to work as a lawyer 
 with his partner, William Herndon. He spent most of 
 his time on law now and not on politics. 
 
 Abe was often away from home, taking care of 
 court cases in other towns. There were many hours 
 in which he* had no work to do, so he and other 
 lawyers thought up things to amuse themselves. One 
 time he and the judge of the court got to joshing each 
 other about which was the better horse trader. In 
 those days people often swapped horses, trying to 
 trick the other fellow into taking a bad horse in ex- 
 change for a good one. 
 
 Abe and the judge agreed that the best way to 
 settle their argument was to make an actual trade and 
 see who got the worst of it. They agreed that neither 
 
 1 1 1 
 
of them could back out of the bargain, and they were 
 to meet with their horses at nine o'clock the next 
 morning. 
 
 Word got around about the deal, and quite a crowd 
 collected to see what was going to happen. The judge 
 arrived on time, leading the oldest, skinniest, most 
 sway-backed horse anybody had ever seen. 
 
 A few minutes later Abe ambled up with a wooden 
 sawhorse perched on his sloping shoulders. The 
 crowd guffawed. Then they laughed even harder 
 when Abe put down his sawhorse and said with a 
 look of great dismay, "Well, judge, this is the first 
 time I ever got the worst of it in a horse trade." 
 
 Abe's sawhorse was in usable condition, but the 
 judge's plug was no good for anything at all. 
 
 When he was at home, Abe found plenty of hours 
 to play with his two boys. He liked to carry them 
 pickaback and take them on long walks around 
 Springfield. Sometimes he gave them rides in a toy 
 wagon. Once he didn't pay attention to his job. He 
 got to thinking about something else and walked 
 along with the wagon empty. The baby had tumbled 
 out onto the street and was crying at the top of his 
 lungs. 
 
 The boys came to visit Abe at his office, too. They 
 would rush in, climb all over him, take books off 
 shelves, mess up papers, and have a generally wonder- 
 ful time. Abe's partner, William Herndon, didn't 
 
 112 
 
particularly like these visits, but Abe never scolded 
 the children. Any disciplining had to come from their 
 mother. 
 
 One time he wrote to a friend, saying, "Since I 
 began this letter, a messenger has come to tell me that 
 Bob was lost. But by the time I reached home, his 
 mother had found him and had him whipped, and by 
 now very likely he has run away again." 
 
 In 1850 little Ed Lincoln died. Later that year 
 Abe's and Mary's third son, William Wallace, was 
 born, and in 1853 Thomas was born. Thomas was 
 nicknamed "Tad," and he turned out to be the most 
 mischievous and fun-loving of all the Lincoln boys. 
 
 113 
 
Chapter XIII: ABE TALKS ABOUT SLAVERY 
 
 The year after Tad was born, Abe suddenly took 
 a lot of interest in politics again. Congress had passed 
 a new law which allowed slavery to spread into parts 
 of the country where it had never been before. This 
 seemed like a very bad idea indeed to Abe and to 
 many others. 
 
 The new law was supported by Abe's old rival, 
 Stephen Douglas, who was now a senator. Abe began 
 to make speeches against it, and he decided he would 
 try to get elected to the Senate himself. The country 
 was being more and more divided by the fight about 
 slavery, and he thought it was very important to hold 
 
 114 
 
the United States together. He could help do this if 
 he were in the Senate. 
 
 Abe lost the election, but he didn't stop talking 
 and thinking about slavery. It was the most important 
 question in the country. But different people thought 
 about it in different ways. The Negroes wanted free- 
 dom, of course. Some of them tried to get it by revolt- 
 ing against their owners. Others ran away from the 
 South to Canada, where they would not be caught 
 and returned to their owners. Wherever they could, 
 they worked with white people to persuade the 
 United States Government that all slaves should be 
 freed. 
 
 Many white people believed that slavery was 
 wicked and unjust. They said no man had a right to 
 own another man. Many of them called themselves 
 abolitionists, which meant they wanted to have 
 slavery abolished. They held meetings and made 
 speeches and published newspapers. They had big 
 conventions. 
 
 Many businessmen opposed slavery, and they had 
 an extra reason for doing so. They saw that modern 
 factories and industry could not grow in the states 
 which the slaveowners controlled. One reason was 
 this: masters did not dare educate slaves enough so 
 that they could be efficient factory workers. Edu- 
 cated slaves were almost certain to revolt. And so 
 slaveowners only dared to use their slaves for the 
 
 "5 
 
simplest kind of work on plantations or around the 
 house. 
 
 Although the plantations were huge, they weren't 
 very profitable because they weren't really farmed 
 properly. The soil was wearing out. And so slave- 
 owners wanted new territories in which to start new 
 plantations on fresh soil. Of course, they planned to 
 take their slaves with them into the great western part 
 of the United States where very few people lived. 
 
 The men who opposed slavery wanted these new, 
 unsettled lands to be open for modern industry and 
 for free farmers who would work the land better than 
 slaves did. 
 
 Up to now, the slaveowners had controlled the 
 government of the United States, even though there 
 were not really very many of them. Abe thought it 
 was important to have the government controlled 
 democratically by the majority of the people— not 
 just by a few. 
 
 In 1856 the whole country grew more and more 
 excited. A new political party was set up by men who 
 were against slavery. They called it the Republican 
 party, and they almost nominated Abe to run as their 
 candidate for Vice-President. 
 
 Abe didn't have any idea he would be nominated. 
 At the time, he was with several other lawyers in a 
 town in Illinois where a circuit-riding judge was hold- 
 ing court. The lawyers and the judge all stayed in 
 
 116 
 
the same hotel, and they all had a complaint against 
 the hotel owner. For some reason, he always had a 
 loud dinner gong rung very early in the morning. 
 It woke his guests long before they wanted to get up. 
 So the lawyers discussed this serious problem, and 
 they elected Abe to solve it. 
 
 Next day Abe quietly left the courtroom just be- 
 fore noon dinner. He sneaked into the hotel dining 
 room and swiped the bell. Hiding it under his coat, 
 he had started to tiptoe out of the dining room when 
 Judge Davis and one of the other lawyers hurried in. 
 They came with the news that the Republicans had 
 seriously considered running Abe for Vice-President. 
 
 Then Judge Davis pointed to the stolen dinner bell 
 and said, " Great business this, for a man who hopes to 
 by Vice-President of the United States!" 
 
 "Surely, 'tain't me," Abe answered, greatly sur- 
 prised. He'd had no warning that anyone would men- 
 tion his name. He knew there was another prominent 
 man named Lincoln who lived in Massachusetts. "I 
 reckon it's him," he said. It wasn't till later that he 
 really believed the news. 
 
 One of the reasons why Abe's name had been 
 brought up by the Republicans was that he had made 
 a remarkable speech a few weeks before. He often 
 wrote out his speeches ahead of time, but this one he 
 didn't. Instead, he just got up and talked. 
 
 At this time there were already many people who 
 
 117 
 
said that the slaveowners would set up a separate 
 country of their own if they didn't get their way 
 about having slavery wherever they wanted it. Abe 
 opposed the spreading of slavery, and he said there 
 must be no breaking up of the country. 
 
 He spoke so well this time that the whole audience 
 was thrilled. Even the newspaper reporters were so 
 much interested that they forgot to take notes as 
 they usually did. Everybody remembered what Abe 
 meant, but there was no record kept of his actual 
 words. This speech became known as the "Lost 
 Speech," and it was as famous as many that were 
 taken down word for word. 
 
 Shortly after this, Abe began to do some law work 
 for a railroad, and he was given a free ticket, called 
 a pass, to use whenever he wanted to ride on trains. 
 A pass was called a "chalked hat" because conductors 
 usually stuck the ticket, which was white, into the 
 band of the passenger's hat, making it look as if it had 
 been marked with chalk. 
 
 The passes were dated, and they couldn't be used 
 after the day marked on them. When Abe's pass was 
 used up, he wanted another, and this is what he wrote 
 to the railroad: 
 
 Dear Sir: 
 
 Says Tom to John, "Here's your old rotten wheel- 
 barrow. I've broke it, usin' on it. I wish you would mend it, 
 'cause I shall want to borrow it this afternoon." 
 
 118 
 
Acting on this as a precedent, I say, "Here's your old 
 chalked hat. I wish you would take it, and send me a new 
 one, 'cause I shall want to use it by the first of March." 
 
 Yours truly, 
 
 A. LINCOLN 
 
 The hat in which Abe wore his pass was a tall, 
 black silk kind called a "stovepipe hat," and he 
 couldn't do without it. It was a kind of briefcase that 
 he carried around with him. He stuffed it full of legal 
 papers, letters, his bankbook, and notes for the 
 speeches he was making. There was much about slav- 
 ery in that hat— and under it. The whole country was 
 rising to a fever pitch on the question of whether 
 slavery should be allowed to spread. 
 
 In the midst of all this excitement, Abe still had 
 time to do the kind, generous things for which he 
 was so well known. One day he saved a man from 
 prison. The man was Duff Armstrong, a son of Jack 
 Armstrong, the Clary's Grove Boy who had been 
 his friend for such a long time. This is what hap- 
 pened: 
 
 Duff Armstrong had been arrested for murder. 
 His mother Hannah came to Abe for help. In the 
 days when Abe was a young surveyor, he used to 
 sit and play with Duff and the other Armstrong chil- 
 dren while Hannah mended his clothes and "foxed 
 his britches"— which meant sewing buckskin on the 
 legs to keep briers from scratching through the cloth. 
 
 119 
 
Now Hannah told Abe she was sure Duff was inno- 
 cent. Abe agreed to be his lawyer. 
 
 At the trial a witness said Duff had got into a fight 
 one night and killed a man by hitting him on the head 
 with a slingshot— a little metal weight covered with 
 leather. The witness claimed he'd seen Duff commit 
 the murder. He said he'd seen everything clearly be- 
 cause the moon was so bright. 
 
 Abe asked some questions, then he sent out of the 
 courtroom for an almanac. He turned the pages and 
 began to read to the jury. The almanac proved that 
 the moon was so low on the night of the murder it 
 could not possibly have given enough light for any- 
 one to see what happened in a fight. The jury agreed 
 that the man who accused Duff was lying, and Duff 
 went free. 
 
 Not long after this, Abe was nominated by the 
 Republican party to run for the United States Senate. 
 On the day they nominated him, Abe made a speech 
 —one of the most famous speeches in American his- 
 tory. He said, "A house divided against itself cannot 
 stand. I believe this government cannot endure per- 
 manently half slave and half free." 
 
 Now Abe was in the greatest fight he'd ever made 
 in his life. His opponent was his old rival, Stephen 
 Douglas, who was called "The Little Giant." 
 
 For two months before the election, Lincoln and 
 Douglas went all over the state of Illinois, holding big 
 
 120 
 
debates with each other. People flocked to the meet- 
 ing halls to hear the two men argue. The next day 
 people in the whole country opened their newspapers 
 eagerly to read what Abe and the Little Giant had 
 said. News about them was all the more exciting be- 
 cause many felt sure the two men would run against 
 each other for President two years later. So the things 
 Lincoln and Douglas said about slavery, way out in 
 Illinois, in the year 1858, were listened to in every 
 state in the Union. 
 
 Abe knew from the beginning that he didn't have 
 a very good chance of being elected. And so he 
 worked out one of the smartest plans that was ever 
 made. In this contest for the Senate, Abe actually 
 defeated Douglas in the election for President which 
 came two years later! 
 
 This is the way Abe figured things out: the Re- 
 publicans were against slavery and so was he. That 
 meant he would get a big solid chunk of Republican 
 votes. Stephen Douglas belonged to the Democratic 
 party. It was bigger than the Republican party, but it 
 wasn't such a solid group. The Democrats in the 
 South wanted slavery, but in the North they were 
 divided. Some wanted slavery and some didn't. 
 
 Abe knew that this was the Little Giant's weak 
 spot. Douglas was hoping he could keep all the Dem- 
 ocrats together and make them all vote for him. 
 There was only one way he could do this— by letting 
 
 121 
 
the South think he was for slavery while the North 
 thought he was against it. 
 
 Abe deliberately forced Douglas to make state- 
 ments the slaveowners didn't like. This pleased the 
 voters in Illinois. They elected Douglas to the Senate, 
 not Abe. 
 
 But the Democrats in the South were very angry. 
 They refused to have anything more to do with 
 Douglas. Abe had done just what he wanted to do. 
 By his careful planning, by the questions he asked 
 Douglas in the debates, he managed to split his oppo- 
 nents into southern Democrats and northern Demo- 
 crats. Now Abe had a much better chance of being 
 elected President in i860. More important, it gave 
 people who were against slavery a chance to run the 
 government. 
 
 Abe had a wonderful time during the debates. 
 Douglas traveled around from town to town in a 
 special train. He had a band on the train and a cannon 
 that was shot off to announce his arrival. But Abe 
 just sat in any old train along with the other passen- 
 gers. If the railroad schedule wasn't right, he bummed 
 a ride in the caboose of freight trains. He and the 
 freight conductor had a good laugh one day when 
 their train was sidetracked so that the Little Giant's 
 special could roar on ahead to the next debate. Doug- 
 las got more and more exhausted, while Abe put on 
 weight. 
 
 122 
 
Abe enjoyed the trick he was playing on Douglas, 
 but that wasn't the most important thing to him. He 
 had a vision of a great, free, developing country. And 
 he knew that what he was doing would help the 
 dream to come true. 
 
 123 
 
Chapter XIV: ABE GETS READY TO BE 
 PRESIDENT 
 
 Although Abe knew he was going to be defeated 
 in the election for the Senate, still he was disap- 
 pointed. He said he felt like a boy who had stubbed 
 his toe— "It hurt too bad to laugh and he was too big 
 to cry." 
 
 But, just as he had thought, people began to talk 
 seriously with him about his running for President. 
 Among those looking for a candidate who opposed 
 slavery were the abolitionists. They knew that Abe 
 disagreed with some of their ideas, but many of them 
 thought he would do a better job than anyone else 
 as President. 
 
 124 
 
One of the abolitionists who had his own ideas 
 about how to end slavery was a man named John 
 Brown. He believed so intensely in freedom for the 
 slaves that he led a small band of men into Virginia, 
 where they tried to help the slaves themselves start 
 a rebellion. John Brown knew that there had been 
 many small revolts and that the slaveowners feared 
 them. Now he hoped that a few men could start a 
 big rebellion that would succeed in freeing all the 
 slaves. John Brown failed. He was captured and 
 hanged. But he became famous in the United States 
 and all over the world. A song about John Brown 
 was on the lips of the soldiers who fought against 
 slavery when war finally came— a song Americans 
 still sing today: 
 
 John Brown's body lies a-mould'ring in the grave, 
 John Brown's body lies a-mould'ring in the grave, 
 John Brown's body lies a-mould'ring in the grave, 
 His soul goes marching on! 
 
 Chorus: Glory, glory! Hallelujah! 
 Glory, glory! Hallelujah! 
 Glory, glory! Hallelujah! 
 His soul is marching on! 
 
 He captured Harper's Ferry with his nineteen 
 
 men so true, 
 And he frightened old Virginia till she trembled 
 
 through and through. 
 
 125 
 
They hung him for a traitor, themselves the 
 traitor crew, 
 But his soul is marching on! {Chorus.) 
 
 John Brown died that the slave might be free, 
 John Brown died that the slave might be free, 
 John Brown died that the slave might be free, 
 And his soul is marching on! {Chorus.) 
 
 The stars of Heaven are looking kindly down, 
 The stars of Heaven are looking kindly down, 
 The stars of Heaven are looking kindly down 
 On the grave of old John Brown. {Chorus.) 
 
 Now has come the glorious jubilee, 
 Now has come the glorious jubilee, 
 Now has come the glorious jubilee, 
 
 When all mankind are free. {Chorus.) 
 
 Abe was now so famous that he was asked to speak 
 to a meeting of the most important people in New 
 York City. He talked in a building called Cooper 
 Union, and his "Cooper Union speech" won him 
 great admiration. "Here is a man who could be Presi- 
 dent," people in the eastern part of the country be- 
 gan to say. From now on Abe worked hard to make 
 friends who would support him. He had decided he 
 really did want to be President of the United States. 
 
 Of course, he had to be nominated first. When 
 the Republicans met in Chicago to decide on their 
 candidate, thousands and thousands of people came 
 from all over to say that they wanted Abe. Railroads 
 
 126 
 
had to run special trains. Forty thousand people in 
 all poured into Chicago. The meeting hall could hold 
 only ten thousand. The others milled around outside, 
 shouting and cheering for Abe. And Abe was nom- 
 inated. 
 
 At home in Springfield the Lincoln family waited 
 for the news. Abe had decided not to go to Chicago. 
 Instead, he sat in the office of the local paper, joking 
 and talking. At last a messenger brought a telegram 
 that said the Republicans had chosen Abe as their 
 candidate for President. 
 
 "I reckon there's a little short woman down at our 
 house who would like to hear the news," Abe said, 
 and he went home to report to Mary. 
 
 All over the states that were opposed to slavery, 
 people celebrated Abe's nomination. They burned 
 tar barrels at night and held torchlight parades. Ev- 
 erywhere they sang: 
 
 Old Abe Lincoln came out of the wilderness, 
 Out of the wilderness, out of the wilderness, 
 Old Abe Lincoln came out of the wilderness, 
 Down in Illinois. 
 
 Now that Abe was so famous, he had to have his 
 picture taken many times for posters and news stories 
 and election handbills. Portrait painters came, too, 
 and put his long, sad-looking face on canvas. 
 
 One day a barefoot boy sneaked into the room 
 
 127 
 
where Abe was sitting for an artist. He wanted to 
 see the great Lincoln. Abe laughed and called the 
 boy over to shake hands. Another time two boys 
 crept in. Abe said to one of them, "What's your 
 name?" 
 
 "Folks," the boy answered. 
 
 "Well, that's wrong," Abe said, pretending to be 
 serious. "Don't you see that you're only one, and 
 'folks' means more than one? Tell your father I say 
 your name should be Folk." Abe shook hands and 
 patted the boy on the head. 
 
 The other boy said his name was Knotts. 
 
 "Well, if there isn't another mistake!" Abe 
 laughed. "Don't you see that you're only one, and 
 'knotts' means more than one? Tell your father I say 
 your name should be Knott!" Then he shook hands 
 with this boy and patted him on the head, too. 
 
 Young Tad Lincoln was playing around the house 
 one day when he saw one of the unfinished portraits 
 of his father. He yelled out to another boy who was 
 visiting him, "Come here, Jim. Here's another Old 
 Abe." Lincoln heard him and laughed. 
 
 While the painters were working, Abe sat and 
 swapped stories with them. Here is one which an 
 artist told and which Abe loved to tell afterward. 
 
 It seems there was a politician who needed a horse 
 to take him to a convention. He went to the livery 
 stable and rented one from a man who didn't like 
 
his politics. The horse went so slowly that the con- 
 vention was over before they got there, and the poli- 
 tician didn't get nominated for a job he wanted. 
 When he took the horse back, he said to the livery- 
 man, "See here, you've been training this animal to 
 be a hearse horse." 
 
 The liveryman protested that the horse was as 
 good as any in his stable. 
 
 But the politician said, "Don't deny it. I know by 
 his gait you've spent a good deal of time training him 
 to go before a hearse. But he will never do. He is so 
 slow he couldn't get a corpse to the cemetery in time 
 for the Resurrection." 
 
 The men who were managing Abe's election cam- 
 paign did lots of things to attract attention to him. 
 They got everybody to calling him "Old Abe" or 
 "The Rail Splitter." When he was a young man, 
 Abe had been famous for the way in which he split 
 big logs and made them into rails used in building 
 fences. 
 
 One time at a meeting John Hanks came into the 
 hall carrying a fence rail. He took it up to the plat- 
 form and announced that this was one Abe had split. 
 
 Somebody yelled, "How can you prove it?" 
 
 Abe examined the rail, grinned, and said he 
 couldn't be sure. "But," he added, "I've split a lot 
 better ones than this." That tickled everybody. 
 
 Some of the campaign pictures of Abe were deco- 
 
 129 
 
rated with split rail fences. They went all over the 
 country. A little girl in a small New York town saw 
 one of them and wrote Abe a letter which said: 
 
 "I am a little girl only eleven years old, but want 
 you should be President of the United States very 
 much, so I hope you won't think me very bold to 
 write such a great man as you are. Have you any 
 little girls about as large as I am? If so, give them 
 my love and tell her to write me if you cannot answer 
 this letter. I have got four brothers and part of them 
 will vote for you anyway, and if you will let your 
 whiskers grow, I will try and get the rest of them to 
 vote for you. You would look a great deal better 
 for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers, 
 and they would tease their husbands to vote for you, 
 and if I was a man I would vote for you, too. But I 
 will try and get everyone to vote for you that I can. 
 I think that rail fence around your picture makes it 
 look very pretty. I have got a little baby sister. She 
 is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be." 
 
 Abe wrote and thanked the little girl for her letter 
 and told her he was sorry he had no daughter. He 
 asked her if she didn't think it would be silly for him 
 to start growing whiskers now. 
 
 But apparently Abe changed his mind about look- 
 ing silly. Soon after he got the little girl's letter, he 
 began to grow a beard, the first one he'd ever worn 
 in his life. 
 
 130 
 
Chapter XV: THE LINCOLNS MOVE TO THE 
 WHITE HOUSE 
 
 At last election day came. The whole United States 
 was worked up with excitement. Abe knew how im- 
 portant it was for him to win, and naturally he felt 
 nervous and restless. He walked around Springfield. 
 Once he stopped and played catch with a lawyer 
 friend of his. "Tossing ball" they called it. He played 
 several games of billiards. Then he settled down in a 
 big armchair in the newspaper office to wait for the 
 news. When word came that he was to be the next 
 President, he was happy, but he also knew what a 
 hard job it was going to be. 
 
 Abe was elected on November 6, i860, but in 
 
 131 
 
those days a new President didn't actually start to 
 work until four months later, in March of the follow- 
 ing year. Much happened in those four months. As 
 soon as the slave-owning states knew that Abe had 
 won, they knew their power over the government 
 had ended. One by one these states seceded— that is, 
 they said they were no longer part of the United 
 States. They set up their own governments and joined 
 together in what they called the Confederate States 
 of America. 
 
 All this was done before Abe went to Washington. 
 It was clear to everyone that a war would surely come 
 between the United States and the Confederate 
 States. It happened that all the Confederate States 
 were in the South, and people got into the habit of 
 saying that the South was on one side and the North 
 on the other. But the disagreement hadn't just started 
 because northerners and southerners were against 
 each other. The fight was really between two groups 
 of people who had very different ideas. 
 
 One group believed in better, more modern, more 
 efficient ways of doing things, and this included the 
 idea that white men and black men had the same dem- 
 ocratic rights. A great many people who belonged 
 to this group actually lived in the South. 
 
 The other group held onto old-fashioned ways. 
 They wanted slavery to continue, although most 
 other modern countries had already ended slavery. 
 
 132 
 
They did not like the ideas of industry and science 
 and education for everybody. And there were north- 
 erners as well as slaveowners who supported the Con- 
 federate States. 
 
 Before Abe went to Washington, he had to take 
 care of a number of things. He rented his simple, 
 ordinary kind of house and sold the furniture. He 
 sold his cow, too— the cow he'd often milked himself 
 in the years when he was becoming famous. He 
 couldn't take care of these chores all at once because 
 he had to see people who came from all over the 
 country. Some of them just wanted to congratulate 
 him, but most of them wanted him to promise them 
 jobs or do them favors of some kind. 
 
 Abe did not like talking to those who just came 
 hoping for easy jobs, but he did enjoy visiting with 
 some of the Republican leaders who came. One of 
 them stayed overnight. The next morning at break- 
 fast the guest said how good the sausages were in 
 this part of the country where "hogs were cheaper 
 than dogs." Abe gave him a sly look and said that 
 reminded him of a story: 
 
 There was a grocer in Illinois who was supposed 
 to make good pure pork sausage. People bought lots 
 of it until the grocer had a quarrel with a neighbor. 
 On Saturday when the store was full of customers 
 buying the famous sausage, the neighbor stalked in 
 carrying two large dead cats. He slapped them down 
 
 i33 
 
on the meat counter and shouted so everybody could 
 hear, "That makes seven for today. I'll come back 
 Monday and get my pay." 
 
 At last almost everything was ready for the trip 
 to Washington. Abe wrote a speech he intended to 
 make at the inauguration ceremonies that are always 
 held when a President takes office. He hoped this 
 speech would help to prevent a war. Then he rode 
 across the state of Illinois to visit his stepmother. 
 
 He found her in the little log cabin which he him- 
 self had helped to build when his family finally 
 settled down. After a good long talk with his step- 
 mother, Abe said good-by. Later she told people that 
 she was sure then she would never again see her son 
 alive. Old Hannah Armstrong, the wife of Jack Arm- 
 strong and the mother of Duff, shared this same fear. 
 There had been so much talk of violence and so much 
 hatred against Abe by those who were slaveowners or 
 friends of slaveowners. 
 
 "They'll kill ye, Abe," she said. 
 
 And he replied, "Hannah, if they do kill me, I 
 shall never die another death." Then he went calmly 
 back to Springfield. 
 
 Many friends came to see Abe at his home. One 
 was a hatmaker who brought a present— a new tall 
 black silk hat. Abe turned to Mary and said, "Well, 
 wife, if nothing else comes out of this scrape, we're 
 going to have some new clothes." 
 
 i34 
 
Abe started out from Springfield alone. Then 
 Mary and the three boys joined him, and they all 
 went on together. Time and time again their train 
 stopped so that people could see the new President. 
 
 Instead of going straight to Washington, they 
 made a zigzag trip, visiting many towns and cities on 
 the way. In New York City the whole family went 
 one afternoon to see Barnum's Museum. They looked 
 at freaks and animals and all kinds of things that 
 Barnum later turned into a circus. 
 
 Bob, who was old enough now to be in college, 
 almost got Abe into real trouble once along the way. 
 He had been carrying the case in which Abe had put 
 his inaugural speech. Suddenly Bob realized that the 
 case was gone. He had mislaid it somewhere. The 
 speech, which Abe hoped would prevent war, was 
 lost. Fortunately it was found after considerable 
 search. For the first time in his life Abe got really 
 angry at one of his boys, and he kept the case in his 
 own hands for the rest of the trip. 
 
 Something even more serious happened during the 
 last part of the trip. The famous detective, Allan 
 Pinkerton, came to Abe and told him there was a 
 plot to assassinate him when he went through Balti- 
 more. 
 
 "But why— why do they want to kill me?" Abe 
 asked. 
 
 He could not understand yet how much the 
 
 *35 
 
friends of the slaveowners hated him. They hated him 
 because he, more than anyone else, had broken their 
 control of the government of the whole United 
 States. Many of them were willing to kill the Presi- 
 dent, or start a war if they had to, in order to have a 
 government they could run without interference 
 from the majority of the people. 
 
 Pinkerton told Abe how the plot had been worked 
 out. In those days trains headed for Washington 
 stopped on one side of Baltimore, and the engine was 
 uncoupled. Then the passenger cars were pulled 
 across the city by horses. At the other side another 
 engine w r as coupled on. The plotters had decided to 
 attack the President's car as horses pulled it slowly 
 through the city. 
 
 At last Abe was convinced that Pinkerton knew 
 what he was talking about. He agreed to go to Wash- 
 ington earlier than he had planned, taking a train that 
 would cross Baltimore at night. 
 
 No one was told about this change in schedule. Abe 
 went to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he was sup- 
 posed to stay overnight. But at six o'clock in the even- 
 ing he left his hotel and stepped into a carriage that 
 was waiting. In his pocket he carried a soft felt hat 
 which he was going to wear as a disguise, because 
 people were used to seeing him in a tall silk one. 
 
 Nobody suspected what Abe was up to. But even 
 if anyone had guessed, it would have been impossible 
 
 i 3 6 
 
to send word out of Harrisburg that night. All tele- 
 graph wires from the city had been cut. (There were 
 no telephones in those days.) 
 
 Abe rode away in a special train with only a body- 
 guard for company. His car crossed Baltimore in the 
 dead of night. Soon he was safe in Washington. 
 
 By that time the telegraph wires at Harrisburg had 
 been mended, and a message reached there in code. It 
 said, "Plums delivered nuts safely." This was the sig- 
 nal that Abe had arrived safely at the end of his jour- 
 ney. Now he could be inaugurated as President. The 
 first attempt at violence by friends of the slaveowners 
 had failed. 
 
 But only a few weeks after Abe became President, 
 the Confederates tried violence again. They fired on 
 Fort Sumter, a United States Government fort in the 
 bay at Charleston, South Carolina. The Civil War 
 had been started by the slaveowners. Now Abe had 
 a greater responsibility than any President had ever 
 had— even George Washington. 
 
 i37 
 
&M<ioa£ 
 
 Chapter XVI: ABE IN THE WHITE HOUSE 
 
 The Lincoln family had moved into the White 
 House in Washington. Bob was almost eighteen years 
 old, so he spent most of his time away from home at 
 college. Willie was ten, and Tad was eight. While 
 Mary Lincoln was busy discovering all the things that 
 a President's wife should know about such a huge new 
 home, the two little boys explored the attic and the 
 garden and the stables. They didn't know anyone in 
 Washington yet, but it wasn't long before they found 
 friends who had just as much mischief in them as the 
 Lincoln children. 
 
 One day two very well-dressed boys sneaked 
 through the White House garden gate and asked the 
 
 138 
 
gardener to tell Willie and Tad that Holley and Bud 
 Taft had come to call. They found the two young 
 Lincolns watching goldfish in a water lily tank. From 
 then on no one knows just where the four boys spent 
 the afternoon, but when the once spic-and-span Taf ts 
 got home, their sister Julia said they looked as if 
 they'd been hunting coons in the brush. 
 
 As the war went on, people in the Confederate 
 States came to be called "rebels" or "secessionists." 
 If you wanted to say you sympathized with them, 
 you said you were "secesh"— short for secessionist. 
 The Lincoln boys learned the names and used 
 them. 
 
 Sometimes Willie and Tad went with the Taft 
 boys to their church. It happened that a number of 
 people who attended that church were friends of the 
 rebels. Whenever the minister prayed for the Presi- 
 dent, they would get up, bang the pew doors, and 
 walk out of church. This always amused Tad. It 
 broke the monotony of the long prayers. "I don't see 
 why preachers pray so long for Pa," he said. 
 
 One Sunday a young army lieutenant decided he'd 
 stop all such disrespect for the President. He ordered 
 everyone to remain in church during prayers. Tad 
 was disappointed because there was no racket that 
 day. 
 
 "If I was secesh, I wouldn't let them stop me bang- 
 ing pew doors," he said. 
 
 i39 
 
"Yes," answered Willie, "and get put in the guard- 
 house." 
 
 "Well, I guess Pa could get me out," Tad replied. 
 
 Tad was always up to tricks. One day he found a 
 Confederate flag that had been captured from the 
 enemy and given to his father. When Abe was stand- 
 ing in front of the White House reviewing troops, 
 Tad waved the Confederate flag behind his father. 
 
 Another time he and Willie heard rumors that the 
 enemy might attack Washington. Tad bragged that 
 he wasn't afraid. "You ought to see the fort we've got 
 on the roof of our house," he boasted. "Let 'em 
 
 come." 
 
 The fort Willie and Tad had built on the White 
 House roof consisted of a small log, which was sup- 
 posed to be a cannon, and several old, useless rifles. 
 They also built rifle pits in the garden behind the 
 White House. They organized soldier companies of 
 the neighbor boys and elected themselves officers. 
 Then they held a big review, with Abe and their 
 mother reviewing them just as they did regular troops. 
 
 Tad and Willie were interested in all the soldiers 
 who swarmed through Washington during the war, 
 but their favorites were a regiment called the Fire 
 Zouaves. These men were all New York City fire 
 fighters, and they wore uniforms like those of some 
 famous French and Algerian soldiers who were called 
 Zouaves. They had big, baggy red pants. 
 
 140 
 
When the Zouaves arrived in Washington they 
 played all kinds of tricks. They let themselves down 
 by ropes from the third floor of the building in which 
 they lived. They ordered meals in taverns and then 
 as a joke charged them to the Confederacy. They 
 held mock sessions of Congress in the Capitol and 
 then did stunts two hundred feet in the air on the roof 
 of the Capitol where the dome was not yet finished. 
 
 Once when they saw a fire the Zouaves broke into 
 a firehouse and got the engines to the fire before the 
 regular Washington firemen arrived. Everybody who 
 saw it talked about the way the Zouaves held one man 
 by his feet upside down over the edge of the roof so 
 he could point a hose at the fire through the window 
 of the top floor of the burning building. 
 
 When these Zouaves became part of the United 
 States Army, Tad was there at the ceremonies, hold- 
 ing Abe's hand, as Abe stood in the midst of a lot of 
 generals and senators and other important people. 
 
 So Willie and Tad naturally were interested in a 
 doll dressed like a Zouave which they were given. 
 They named him Jack and pretended he was a spy for 
 the enemy. Time after time they had to shoot Jack at 
 sunrise. They had heard that was what was done to 
 enemy spies. Then, after the execution, they always 
 held a military funeral for Jack in the garden. They 
 dug up so many rose beds to make his graves that 
 Major Watts, the gardener, decided he had to do 
 
 141 
 
something. He held a conference with the boys, and 
 a minute later they were knocking at the President's 
 door. Abe came out to see what was going on. 
 
 Tad told him they'd come to ask for a pardon for 
 Jack. 
 
 "You want a pardon for Jack? You know, Tad, it's 
 not usual to grant pardons without some sort of 
 hearing. You come in here and tell me why you think 
 Jack should have a pardon." 
 
 Abe sat down looking very much like a judge, then 
 said solemnly, "State your case, Tad." 
 
 Tad started in, "Well, you see, Pa, almost every 
 day we try Jack for being a spy or a deserter or some- 
 thing. Then we shoot him and bury him. Julia Taft 
 says it spoils Jack's clothes. Major Watts says it digs 
 up his flowers. So we have to get you to pardon him." 
 
 The President thought about it and said, "Yes, 
 Tad, I think you've made a case. It's a good law that 
 no man shall twice be put in jeopardy of his life for 
 the same offense. You've already shot and buried 
 Jack a dozen times. I guess he's entitled to a pardon." 
 
 Abe wrote this on a piece of paper and handed it 
 to Tad: 
 
 The doll Jack is pardoned by order of the 
 President. 
 
 A. LINCOLN 
 
 Then Abe added to his secretary, "I wish pardons 
 were always that easy to give." 
 
 142 
 
Although the boys had fun playing games about 
 the war, they wished their father didn't have to spend 
 so much time with military officers. Tad said he 
 didn't like "those plaguey old generals." He and Wil- 
 lie sometimes showed very little respect for the im- 
 portant people who came to the White House. 
 
 Once Tad, who was watering the lawn, turned the 
 hose on an important cabinet member whom he over- 
 heard disagreeing with his father as they walked into 
 the White House. 
 
 The boys sometimes brought their goats indoors, 
 hitched them to big chairs, and then drove them up 
 and down the hall to the amazement of elegant visi- 
 tors who were waiting for their father. Willie and 
 Tad often interviewed the visitors themselves. If they 
 found just an ordinary person whom they particu- 
 larly liked, they would lead him around to a side door 
 and take him in to see Abe, while high government 
 officials had to wait impatiently outside. 
 
 Besides their goats, they had ponies in the stables, 
 and they loved to ride them around Washington. 
 They also had cats and dogs. They loved playing with 
 these pets and so did Abe. 
 
 Once, on the same day, a cat belonging to one of 
 the boys had kittens, and a dog belonging to the other 
 boy had puppies. Both Willie and Tad were very 
 much excited. Abe told the news to senators and gen- 
 erals who came in to see him on important business. 
 
 *43 
 
The boys still remembered Barnum's Museum, so 
 they organized a circus of their own one day in the 
 attic, admission five cents. 
 
 They asked all the gardeners and guards and others 
 who worked in the White House to come and watch. 
 Willie had written out a program. Tad had tried to 
 black his face with shoe polish. Holley Taft had on a 
 fancy costume, and his brother Bud wore an elegant 
 dress that belonged to Mrs. Lincoln. 
 
 Julia Taft was worried about the dress. She also 
 wondered whether the President knew about the 
 circus at all. 
 
 "Yep," said Tad. "Pa knows and he don't care, 
 neither. He's coming up when those generals go 
 away." 
 
 Tad entertained the crowd by singing "Old Abe 
 Lincoln Came Out of the Wilderness." In the middle 
 of the show one of Abe's secretaries came angrily up 
 to the attic looking for the President's spectacles. Im- 
 portant work was being held up. Sure enough, the 
 boys had them as part of a costume. When the secre- 
 tary went back downstairs, they still needed glasses, 
 and they figured out where to get them. An old man 
 was visiting at the White House, and he had two 
 pairs. The boys snitched one of them. . . . And, as 
 Abe said he would, he climbed up later to the attic to 
 see the show. 
 
 Willie and Tad made a good profit from the circus, 
 
 144 
 
and the money came in handy a short time later when 
 there was a big military review. Both of them had 
 been out in the rain and caught cold, so their mother 
 was afraid they would get sicker if they went out 
 again. The boys had orders to stay home. 
 
 But the minute their parents left the White House, 
 Tad, Willie, and the Taft boys took their circus 
 money, rented an old cart, and drove as fast as the 
 mule could pull them. They reached the military 
 parade ground just behind the President's carriage 
 and drove solemnly along in front of the soldiers who 
 stood at attention. Tad and Willie and the Tafts stood 
 in the cart, just like soldiers, holding old rusty swords 
 at salute. 
 
 The Tafts' sister Julia often went with them to 
 the White House to see that the boys didn't get into 
 too much trouble. One day she missed them all, and 
 then she heard a terrible racket. The President could 
 never work through that much noise, she knew, and 
 she ran to find out what was going on. When she 
 found them, they were all on top of the President, 
 wrestling and pushing and yelling and trying to hold 
 Abe's six feet four inches down flat on the floor. 
 
 Tad always did things with a great rush. One day 
 he ran into the room where Abe was having an im- 
 portant conference, found something he was looking 
 for, dashed over to his father, gave him an enormous 
 hug, and then dashed out. 
 
 H5 
 
Another time he was bouncing a new ball all over 
 the house. Suddenly it hit a large mirror and smashed 
 the glass. A crowd of people came running to see 
 what had happened. 
 
 "Well, it's broken," Tad told them. "I don't be- 
 lieve Pa will care." 
 
 "It's not Pa's looking glass," Willie protested. "It 
 belongs to the United States Government." 
 
 This thought impressed Tad, and he decided he'd 
 better try to get out of the scrape. But then he heard 
 Holley Taft say, "If you break a looking glass you'll 
 have bad luck for seven years unless you throw salt 
 over your left shoulder and say the Lord's Prayer 
 backwards." 
 
 So Tad rushed out, got a handful of salt and threw 
 it over his left shoulder, making even more mess on 
 the carpet. Then he started on the Lord's Prayer. He 
 got stuck at the second word. Off he dashed to find 
 Abe's Bible so he could read it backwards. His search 
 for the Bible ended suddenly when he heard that one 
 of the goats had escaped from the stable. He and 
 the other boys ran off looking for the goat, which 
 they found peacefully chewing up flowers in the 
 garden. 
 
 Abe played with Tad and Willie whenever he 
 could, between meetings and conferences about 
 battles. Sometimes he would take his two boys, the 
 two Taft boys, and even their older sister Julia all on 
 
 146 
 
his lap at once and tell them stories about the old days 
 on the frontier. 
 
 In many ways Mrs. Lincoln didn't approve of the 
 freedom which Abe allowed the boys. She was much 
 more formal than Abe and wanted her sons to grow 
 up to be what she called "gentlemen." Still she helped 
 Abe a great deal. Presidents have to give parties and 
 dinners and receptions for important people, and she 
 liked entertaining guests. She also loved to dress in the 
 most fashionable way. Abe didn't think it was very 
 important what kind of clothes people wore, and he 
 sometimes poked sly fun at her. One night she came 
 into the room wearing a new white satin dress 
 trimmed in black lace, with a very long train flowing 
 out behind. 
 
 Abe was standing by the fireplace when the rustle 
 of her dress made him look up. He studied her for a 
 while, then said, "Whew! Our cat has a long tail to- 
 night!" 
 
 Both Tad and Willie were sick that evening, and 
 all through the party Abe kept going upstairs to see 
 how they felt. Now Abe had a deep new worry 
 added to the worries he already had about the war. 
 
 Willie grew worse. Shortly afterward he died. 
 While Abe had to bear the great sorrow of losing 
 Willie, he also had to bear the greatest troubles of the 
 whole country. But throughout his sorrow and his 
 worries Abe got strength from the people. He had 
 
 i47 
 
only one unbreakable rule at the White House: he 
 wanted to see and talk to as many people as possible. 
 He liked being with them and learning from them. 
 
 Abe's secretaries thought he ought to be let alone, 
 and they tried to make rules that would keep visitors 
 from seeing the President. But he paid no attention to 
 them. After he had listened to visitors' requests, he 
 asked what they thought about all kinds of things. He 
 wanted to learn everybody's opinions, and he called 
 his visits with people of all kinds his "public opinion 
 baths." 
 
 148 
 
Chapter XV U: THE WAR IS WON 
 
 During the first two years, the war had not gone well 
 for the United States, or the Union, as people called 
 it. A great army had been built up by General Mc- 
 Clellan, but he didn't use it. Nobody is quite sure 
 why, but for a long time he kept his troops from fight- 
 ing, with one excuse or another. The Confederate 
 troops won important battles. They almost captured 
 the city of Washington. 
 
 Then they took a big old wooden battleship called 
 the Merri?nac, covered it with iron plates, and began 
 destroying the United States Navy which had only 
 plain wooden ships. 
 
 149 
 
Abe had always been interested in vessels of every 
 sort since his days as a river boatman. So, when a 
 Swedish inventor, John Ericsson, came with a plan 
 for a new kind of iron-covered warship, Abe listened 
 carefully. Naval officers were doubtful about Erics- 
 son's plan. But Abe said, "All I have to say is what 
 the girl said when she put her foot into the stocking. 
 It strikes me there's something in it." 
 
 And there was. Ericsson was told to go ahead and 
 build his vessel, the Monitor. It was small, and noth- 
 ing much showed above the low, flat deck except a 
 round metal gun turret. People said it looked like a 
 cheese box on a raft, or a tin can on a shingle. But 
 it was the best warship afloat. 
 
 The fast little Monitor defeated the huge Merri- 
 mac and proved that it could defeat any ship made of 
 wood. Modern industry and science had built a better 
 fighting ship than the Confederacy, without industry, 
 could produce. 
 
 Abe had conferences with all kinds of people about 
 war problems. One day a group of men came in with 
 a scheme which impressed him. He sent an order to 
 the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, saying the 
 scheme should be studied. Later one of the men came 
 back to Abe and said that Stanton had turned the idea 
 down. "And he called you a darn fool." 
 
 "Did Stanton say I was a darn fool?" asked Abe. 
 
 "He did, sir, and repeated it," the man replied. 
 
 150 
 
Abe thought for a while and then said, "If Stanton 
 said I was a darn fool, then I must be one, for he is 
 nearly always right and generally says what he means. 
 I will slip over and see him." 
 
 Stanton often disagreed with Abe, but one time 
 he gave Tad some fun by making him an honorary 
 lieutenant in the Army. 
 
 Tad took his job seriously. He got some old worn- 
 out muskets and drilled the menservants in the house 
 with them. They enjoyed being his private army, and 
 one night, when no one was looking, Tad ordered 
 them to stand guard around the White House. He dis- 
 missed the regular guard. Since he was a lieutenant 
 in uniform, the soldiers had a good laugh and went 
 off to their quarters. 
 
 Abe smiled when he heard what had happened, but 
 he refused to countermand Lieutenant Tad's orders. 
 It was only after Tad was asleep that Abe, the highest 
 officer in the country, went out and changed the 
 guard back. 
 
 There were times when Abe had trouble with the 
 real officers in the Army. Sometimes the generals 
 talked big about their battles but never seemed to win 
 them. He said they reminded him of a man who 
 bragged he had a dog that was a great wolf hunter. 
 The dog just hankered to get at the wolves. 
 
 The man's friends doubted this, so one day they 
 made up a hunting party and invited him and his dog 
 
 151 
 
to go along. He made a lot of excuses, but finally he 
 started out. When they found some wolves, the dog 
 bounded off. Away went the wolves and the dog. It 
 looked as if the dog was living up to his reputation. 
 
 The hunting party galloped after. Soon they met 
 a farmer and asked him if he'd seen a wolf dog and 
 a pack of wolves. 
 
 "Yep," he said. 
 
 "How were they going?" 
 
 "Purty fast," the farmer answered. "And the dog 
 was a leetle bit ahead." 
 
 Lincoln said that's the way most of the big-talking 
 generals were when they got into a battle. 
 
 One battle was fought very near Washington, at 
 Bull Run. In the beginning it looked as if the Union 
 forces would win. Crowds of people came out from 
 Washington to watch the fighting. The way wars 
 were fought in those days, it wasn't too dangerous to 
 stand off at a distance, out of reach of the guns, and 
 observe what was happening. 
 
 But defeat came suddenly. The inexperienced 
 Union soldiers fled in terror, and with them the spec- 
 tators. 
 
 Fortunately the Confederate generals did not know 
 how easy it would have been to capture Washington. 
 They might have come right on that day and seized 
 the Capitol. Satisfied with putting the Union Army to 
 flight, they did not pursue them all the way. Many 
 
 152 
 
times after that Lincoln could look through a spyglass 
 from the White House window and see a Con- 
 federate flag just on the other side of the Potomac 
 River. 
 
 The Union Army won a few victories, but it also 
 had other defeats. Actually the Union had many 
 more men than the Confederate States, and more 
 wealth, more food, much better industry. But many 
 of the best-trained army officers were slaveowners, 
 and they were directing battles for the Confederacy. 
 They had been preparing for war in the long months 
 between the time Abe was elected and the time when 
 he became President. 
 
 Many people who were known as Radicals had 
 been urging Abe to win all the slaves to the Union 
 side by setting them free. At first Abe said no. For one 
 thing, the slaveowners had invested about three billion 
 dollars in slaves, and some of these men lived in states 
 which had not seceded— states like Maryland and 
 Kentucky which lay in between the North and the 
 South. Abe hoped to keep their friendship for the 
 Union side. There was another thing that Abe feared, 
 too. He was afraid that freeing the slaves would make 
 their owners so angry that they would commit 
 terrible acts of revenge. 
 
 But after two years of war, he decided he needed 
 the four million Negro slaves as allies. At the same 
 time he decided he must not antagonize the slave- 
 
 i53 
 
owners in places which were not fighting the Union. 
 So on January i, 1 863, he made the famous Emanci- 
 pation Proclamation. This was an order which told 
 the slaves in the Confederate States that the Union 
 considered them free, and it invited them to join the 
 Union Army. The order did not apply to slaves in 
 states that had remained loyal to the Union. Very 
 soon thousands of Negroes began to escape to the 
 Union side, and they fought with great bravery. Al- 
 together two hundred thousand Negro soldiers 
 joined the Army of the United States. 
 
 The Confederate troops invaded the loyal state of 
 Pennsylvania, but they were defeated at Gettysburg 
 and had to retreat to Virginia. 
 
 The victory at Gettysburg greatly encouraged the 
 Union side. The next day, July 4, 1863, there came 
 more encouragement when General Ulysses S. Grant 
 captured Vicksburg on the Mississippi River. 
 
 In November that same year there was a great 
 ceremony at Gettysburg in honor of the soldiers who 
 had died there. After a two-hour speech by a famous 
 orator, Edward Everett, Abe was called on to talk. 
 He had had no time in Washington to prepare a full 
 speech. It was only at the last minute that he was able 
 to write down the thoughts that were uppermost in 
 his mind. 
 
 Abe talked for only three minutes. The audience 
 was already tired and hungry. When he finished 
 
 i54 
 
speaking, there was only a little applause. At first 
 people were disappointed that Abe had said so little. 
 He'd only got started when he stopped. But when 
 they began to see the speech in print, they realized it 
 was one of the greatest ever made. 
 
 Through all the years since then Americans have 
 been repeating, "Four score and seven years ago, our 
 fathers brought forth upon this continent a new na- 
 tion, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the propo- 
 sition that all men are created equal. ..." 
 
 As the war went on, Abe had kept looking for good 
 generals to command the Union troops. He had fired 
 General McClellan because he didn't fight and be- 
 cause he disagreed with the Emancipation Proclama- 
 tion. At last Abe put General Ulysses S. Grant in 
 command of the whole Army. There was a man, Abe 
 could see, who fought and usually won. 
 
 But the war was not yet over, and a new election 
 for President was coming up. Some people said that 
 the country needed a dictator, and that Abe or some- 
 body else should be that dictator. But Abe believed 
 in the people and their right to decide how the coun- 
 try should be governed. He ran again for President, 
 and this time his opponent was General McClellan 
 whom he had fired. 
 
 Abe won. The Confederate armies began to col- 
 lapse very quickly. Congress showed that it intended 
 to abolish all slavery everywhere in the United States. 
 
 i55 
 
It passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitu- 
 tion, which became law in December 1865. Abe ap- 
 proved this amendment which said, "Neither slavery 
 nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the 
 United States. . . ." 
 
 A month after Abe was inaugurated for the sec- 
 ond time, the Union troops captured Richmond, Vir- 
 ginia, the capital of the Confederacy. And Abe 
 walked through the streets of Richmond the next 
 day with only twelve sailors as his guard. Hundreds, 
 thousands of Negroes had passed the word around 
 that Lincoln was coming. Some, rejoicing in their 
 freedom, kneeled down before him. 
 
 Abe told them not to kneel, but one old man said, 
 "After being so many years in the desert, it's mighty 
 pleasant to be lookin' at last on the spring of life." 
 Many Negroes cried out their joy and stretched out 
 their hands toward him. 
 
 To the Negroes, Abe was a hero and a savior, but 
 to many of the whites in Richmond he was something 
 else. They did not cheer, nor did they protest. No one 
 even tried to shoot Lincoln, although it would have 
 been easy. Here, the defeated slaveowners and their 
 friends saw, was a very brave man who represented 
 something new and powerful in the world. Here was 
 a man and a world they would have to learn about. 
 
 Not all the supporters of slavery were willing to 
 learn the lessons of their defeat. There were still many 
 
 156 
 
who thought they could accomplish something by 
 violence or who were willing even to kill a man for 
 revenge. 
 
 One of them was an actor named John Wilkes 
 Booth. He had been a Virginia soldier who watched 
 the execution of John Brown who tried to start a 
 rebellion of the slaves. Now Booth determined to kill 
 the man who had at last been so important in helping 
 the slaves get their freedom. 
 
 Five days after the Confederate General Robert 
 E. Lee surrendered at a place called Appomattox, Abe 
 went to Ford's Theater in Washington. He was tired. 
 He wanted to relax, and he had always liked plays 
 since the days when he began to read Shakespeare. 
 
 Abe sat in a rocking chair in a box, laughing 
 heartily at the comedy on the stage that night of 
 April 14, 1865. Then, when the play was almost 
 over, John Wilkes Booth quietly opened the door be- 
 hind Abe's box. Before anyone noticed him, he shot 
 Abe in the back of the head. For nine long hours after 
 that, all the tough strength in Abe struggled against 
 death. But a little after seven the next morning he died 
 in a rooming house across the street from the theater. 
 
 Meanwhile John Wilkes Booth was trying to 
 escape. He knew Ford's Theater well, and he had 
 planned the murder with great care. He had a horse 
 waiting for him outside the theater. After he fired his 
 treacherous shot, he jumped from the box down to 
 
 i57 
 
the nearby stage. But as he jumped, one of his spurs 
 caught in the United States flag draped around the 
 President's box. He broke a leg as he fell nine feet to 
 the stage. 
 
 Even with a broken leg, Booth managed to get on 
 the horse, and he fled to Virginia. Here, he thought, 
 former Confederate sympathizers would regard him 
 as a hero and give him protection. But he was wrong. 
 He had killed a man whom every supporter of slavery 
 had learned was both just and generous. They knew 
 that Abe would not be too harsh with them after the 
 war, and they refused to help the man who had ended 
 Abe's life. 
 
 For days Booth hid like a hunted animal. Then on 
 April 2 6 he was cornered in a barn. The barn was set 
 fire, but he refused to come out. Then he was shot 
 and dragged out. He died a little later, hated by all 
 good men the world over. 
 
 And the people of the entire world wept for Abe. 
 
 158 
 
Chapter XVIII: THE REAL ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 Now Abe was dead— murdered by a man who 
 wanted to keep some people slaves. Abe, who be- 
 lieved the majority of the people should rule, had 
 been killed by a man who was angry because his side, 
 the minority, had lost. 
 
 The great majority were for progress and against 
 old-fashioned slavery, and they wept when they 
 heard the news that The Rail Splitter, Old Abe, 
 Father Abraham, was dead. People felt they had lost 
 a dear friend and adviser— someone they had known 
 intimately and loved. And everyone knew it would 
 be a long time before the country would find a leader 
 
 i59 
 
who was so good at getting all kinds of people to 
 work together for the good of all. 
 
 Everyone felt it was right that Abe should be re- 
 turned to Illinois, where he had swung an axe and 
 built cabins and piloted flatboats— where he had been 
 a storekeeper and postmaster and horseback-riding 
 country lawyer. It was in Illinois that Abe first struck 
 out as a man and began the slow business of doing all 
 one man can do to leave the world a better place. The 
 people in Illinois remembered better than people any- 
 where the Abe who told funny stories, the Abe who 
 helped people without pay, the Abe who never 
 cheated a man in his life. 
 
 It was right for Abe to go back to the place where 
 the frontier had been when he was young. He had 
 died, just as his grandfather Abraham had died, on a 
 frontier. He had led in opening up all the country to 
 a new and better way of living— and, like many other 
 frontiersmen, he had lost his life while winning 
 against the past. 
 
 Abe's grandfather had died when an Indian shot 
 him from ambush. But poor as they were, Abe's 
 family pushed on and made a far richer country than 
 had the Indians whose land they took over. 
 
 Abe, too, was killed from ambush. His murderer 
 also was a man who wanted the old ways of doing 
 things instead of new ways. 
 
 The millions who wanted the new ways, or just de- 
 
 160 
 
cent human ways, wept. They stood in deepest 
 silence, lining the streets of city after city, as the 
 funeral procession slowly wound around the country 
 toward Springfield. And everywhere there were 
 some in the crowds who had some personal reason to 
 love the man whom they mourned. 
 
 There were mothers of soldiers he had pardoned 
 after they had fallen asleep on guard duty. There 
 were those who knew that Abe forgave soldiers easily 
 because he himself had made mistakes when he was a 
 young man in the Black Hawk War. 
 
 Others had been at military reviews during the 
 Civil War as Abe merely saluted the officers when 
 they passed but took off his hat when the common 
 soldiers marched by. They remembered that. And a 
 few remembered how Abe had argued for the rights 
 of his men in the Black Hawk War. 
 
 Abolitionists, who thought Abe had been too slow 
 about freeing the slaves, mourned. They knew that in 
 the end Abe had seen what had to be done and had 
 done it with great courage. 
 
 And Negroes, more than any others, mourned. 
 They were no longer property, like cattle. They were 
 human beings now, with rights. They looked forward 
 to owning their own farms or working for wages, the 
 same as anyone else. And with Abe gone they were 
 not so sure they would have all the chances they 
 should have to do these things. 
 
 161 
 
Children who had played with Abe knew they had 
 lost their best friend. 
 
 People in all churches mourned, though Abe be- 
 longed to no church. They saw in Abe the most up- 
 right man they knew. 
 
 In faraway England textile workers sorrowed 
 when they heard of Abe's death. They had gone 
 hungry a long time during the Civil War rather than 
 weave cotton which came from the slave-owning 
 states. They wanted slavery ended, and they had 
 helped Abe by doing what they could to keep the 
 slaveowners from getting money for their cotton. 
 
 Unknown men and great men in countries where 
 there was no democracy were saddened by Abe's 
 death. They knew they had lost a great friend of 
 democracy. 
 
 The common people knew Abe. He had come 
 from among them, and he always stayed close to 
 them, as they well knew. He was part of the people. 
 He wanted for them what they themselves needed. 
 He was better than anyone else at expressing what the 
 people wanted. 
 
 The people loved Abe as he loved them, and Abe 
 had faith that in the end the people were right and 
 that right would win out against everything that hurt 
 the people. 
 
 162 
 
4PPENDIX 
 
REAL DATES IN THE LIFE OF 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 18 op February 12, Sunday, Abraham Lincoln is born in a 
 log cabin on a frontier farm near Hodgenville, Ken- 
 tucky. His parents are Thomas Lincoln and Nancy 
 Hanks Lincoln. 
 
 1811 The Lincolns move to a farm on Knob Creek, also 
 near Hodgenville. 
 
 1816 The Lincolns move to southern Indiana. 
 
 1818 Nancy Hanks Lincoln dies. 
 
 1819 Abe's father marries Sarah Bush Johnston. 
 
 1820 February. Abe's new mother and her three children 
 arrive at Little Pigeon Creek in Indiana. 
 
 1828 Abe makes his first flatboat trip down the Mississippi 
 
 to New Orleans. 
 1830 March. Abe moves with his family to Illinois. 
 
 165 
 
183 1 Spring. Abe makes his second natboat trip down 
 the Mississippi to New Orleans and sees a slave 
 market. 
 
 1831 Summer. Abe becomes a storekeeper in New Salem. 
 
 1832 Spring. Abe announces he is a candidate for the State 
 Legislature. 
 
 1832 Summer. Abe is a soldier in the Black Hawk War. 
 1832 August. Abe is defeated for the legislature. 
 
 1832 Autumn. Abe starts a store of his own in New Salem 
 in partnership with William Berry. 
 
 1833 Spring. Abe becomes postmaster of New Salem. 
 1834. Summer. Abe is elected to the State Legislature. 
 
 2 83 j Spring. Abe becomes a lawyer and moves to Spring- 
 field. 
 184.2 November. Abe marries Mary Todd. 
 
 1843 August. Robert Todd Lincoln is born. 
 
 1844 December. Abe takes William H. Herndon as his 
 law partner. 
 
 1846 March. Abe's second son, Edward Baker, is born. 
 1846 August. Abe is elected to Congress. 
 / 848 January. Abe in Congress opposes the Mexican War. 
 2849 January. Abe proposes abolition of slavery in the 
 
 District of Columbia by paying the slaveowners for 
 
 their slaves. 
 
 1849 May. Abe patents an invention for lifting boats over 
 shoals. 
 
 1850 February. Abe's son Edward dies. 
 
 1850 September 18. Fugitive Slave Act becomes law. 
 
 1850 December. Abe's third son, William Wallace, is 
 born. 
 
 18 ji Publication of Uncle T orris Cabin, a book denounc- 
 ing slavery. 
 
 166 
 
1 8 53 April. Abe's fourth son Thomas, "Tad," is born. 
 z#yy February. Abe is defeated for United States Senate. 
 1856 June. Abe's friends try to get the new Republican 
 party to nominate him for Vice-President. 
 
 1856 November. The Republican presidential candidate, 
 whom Abe supported, gets a large vote but is de- 
 feated. 
 
 1857 March. Two days after the inauguration of Demo- 
 crat James Buchanan as President, the Supreme Court 
 announces the Dred Scott decision saying that Ne- 
 groes cannot be citizens and that Congress cannot 
 prevent the spread of slavery. 
 
 1858 May 7. Abe proves Duff Armstrong innocent of 
 murder by using an almanac. 
 
 1858 June 16. Abe gives his "House Divided Against It- 
 self" speech after he is nominated by the Republicans 
 to run for the Senate. 
 
 1858 August 21-October 15. Lincoln and Douglas have 
 seven debates in different parts of Illinois. 
 
 1859 October-November. John Brown tries to start a 
 slave uprising in Virginia, is captured and hanged. 
 
 i860 February. Abe impresses important people in New 
 York with a speech about slavery at Cooper Union 
 in New York. 
 
 i860 March. Abe begins to work hard to get the Republi- 
 can nomination for President. 
 
 i860 May. Republicans nominate Abe for President. 
 
 i860 November 6. Abe is elected President. 
 
 i860 December 17. South Carolina decides to withdraw, 
 or secede, from the United States. 
 
 1861 January, February. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, 
 Georgia, Louisiana, Texas secede. 
 
 167 
 
1 86 1 February 23. Abe arrives secretly in Washington 
 after avoiding a plot to assassinate him in Baltimore. 
 
 1861 March 4. Abe becomes President and delivers his 
 first inaugural address. Stephen Douglas holds his hat 
 while he speaks. 
 
 1 86 1 April 12. The slaveowners' army fires on Fort Sum- 
 ter at Charleston, South Carolina, thus starting the 
 Civil War. 
 
 1861 June 3. Stephen Douglas dies. 
 
 1861 July 21. The Union Army is defeated at Bull Run in 
 Virginia and retreats to Washington. 
 
 1862 February. Lincoln's son Willie dies. 
 
 1862 March. The Union iron-clad ship Monitor defeats 
 the Confederate iron-clad Merrimac. 
 
 1862 April. The Union's Admiral Farragut captures New 
 Orleans after forcing his way up the Mississippi. 
 
 1862 June. After being frequently urged by Lincoln to 
 fight, General McClellan gets almost within sight of 
 Richmond, the Confederate capital, where he waits 
 three weeks and is then defeated. 
 
 1862 July. Lincoln decides to free the slaves after the next 
 Union victory. 
 
 1862 September. General McClellan wins the battle of 
 Antietam and Lincoln announces he will free the 
 slaves January 1 wherever there is still rebellion at 
 that time. 
 
 1862 October. Lincoln visits McClellan and urges him to 
 pursue Confederate General Lee's army, but Mc- 
 Clellan moves too late. 
 
 1862 December. The Union loses the battle of Fredericks- 
 burg in Virginia. 
 
 1863 July 1-3. The Union Army under General Meade 
 
 168 
 
defeats Confederate soldiers under General Lee at 
 Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. 
 1863 July 4. The Union's General Grant captures Vicks- 
 burg, Mississippi, thus giving the Union control of 
 the whole Mississippi River. 
 
 1863 November. Lincoln makes his "Gettysburg Ad- 
 dress." 
 
 1864 March. Lincoln makes General Grant commander of 
 all the armies of the Union. 
 
 1864 May. The Union's General Sherman starts toward 
 Atlanta, Georgia, to cut the Confederacy in two. 
 General Grant moves toward the Confederate capital 
 at Richmond, but loses the Battle of the Wilderness, 
 and battles at Spottsylvania Court House, and at Cold 
 Harbor, Virginia. 
 
 1864 June. Lincoln is nominated again to run for Presi- 
 dent. 
 
 1864 August. The northern Democrats nominate General 
 McClellan, whom Lincoln had fired, to run for 
 President. 
 
 1864 November. The people elect Lincoln for a second 
 term as President. 
 
 1864 December. General Sherman completes his march 
 which splits the Confederacy. 
 
 1865 March 4. Lincoln begins his second term as President 
 and makes his second inaugural address. 
 
 186$ April 3-4. Union troops under General Grant cap- 
 ture Richmond, and Lincoln walks through the city 
 with a very small bodyguard. 
 
 1865 April 9. Confederate General Lee surrenders to 
 General Grant at Appomattox Court House, Vir- 
 ginia. 
 
 169 
 
1865 April 14. John Wilkes Booth, a supporter of slavery, 
 shoots Lincoln in Ford's Theater in Washington. 
 
 1865 April 15. Lincoln dies. 
 
 1865 May 3. Lincoln's body returns to his home town, 
 Springfield, Illinois, after passing through many sor- 
 rowing cities on the way. 
 
 170 
 
THINGS THAT LINCOLN REALLY SAID 
 
 Abraham Lincoln wrote many wonderful things that 
 are true and important for us today. Altogether he wrote 
 more words than Shakespeare did. He wrote more words 
 than there are in the whole Bible. Here are a few of them. 
 
 The Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863 
 
 Lincoln said this at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, at a 
 ceremony in honor of the men who died in the Battle 
 of Gettysburg: 
 
 Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth 
 on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and 
 dedicated to. the proposition that all men are created equal. 
 
 Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether 
 that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, 
 can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that 
 war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a 
 final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that 
 that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper 
 that we should do this. 
 
 But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate— we cannot 
 consecrate— we cannot hallow— this ground. The brave 
 men, living and dead, who struggled here, have conse- 
 crated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The 
 
 171 
 
world will little note nor long remember what we say here, 
 but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the 
 living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work 
 which they who fought here have thus far so nobly ad- 
 vanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great 
 task remaining before us— that from these honored dead we 
 take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave 
 the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly re- 
 solve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this 
 nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and 
 that government of the people, by the people, for the peo- 
 ple, shall not perish from the earth. 
 
 Advice to Lawyers, about 1850 
 
 Resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own 
 judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be 
 honest without being a lawyer. 
 
 Letter to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855 
 
 Joshua Speed was the man who shared his bed with 
 Lincoln when he first came to Springfield, and they 
 remained close friends. When Lincoln wrote this let- 
 ter, there was a political party called the Know-Noth- 
 ings which was made up of people who hated immi- 
 grants and Catholics. Lincoln wrote to Speed: 
 
 As a nation we began by declaring that "All men are 
 created equal." We now practically read it "All men are 
 created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Noth- 
 ings get control, it will read "All men are created equal, 
 except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." 
 
 172 
 
From a speech in Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858 
 
 In a speech about the problem of slavery, Lincoln 
 made a phrase from the Bible bring home to his listen- 
 ers the most important thing before the people: 
 
 "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe 
 this government cannot endure permanently half slave and 
 half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved— I do 
 not expect the house to fall— but I do expect it will cease to 
 be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. 
 Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further 
 spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest 
 in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; 
 or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become 
 alike lawful in all States, old as well as new, North as well 
 as South. 
 
 From a letter to William Herndon, February 15, 1848 
 
 Lincoln believed that the Constitution did not give 
 President Polk the right to declare war against Mexico. 
 He wrote to his law partner, William Herndon: 
 
 Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation 
 whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, 
 and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say 
 he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him 
 to make war at pleasure. 
 
 From a speech at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854 
 
 When the white man governs himself, that is self-gov- 
 ernment; but when he governs himself and also governs 
 
 173 
 
another man, that is more than self-government— that is 
 despotism. . . . No man is good enough to govern another 
 man without that other's consent. 
 
 From a speech at Alton, Illinois, October 15, 1858 
 
 Here is one of the many things Lincoln said in his de- 
 bates with Douglas: 
 
 It is the eternal struggle between these two principles- 
 right and wrong— throughout the world. They are the two 
 principles that have stood face to face from the beginning 
 of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the 
 common right of humanity, and the other the divine 
 right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it 
 develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and 
 work and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what 
 shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who 
 seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by 
 the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an 
 apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical 
 principle. 
 
 The Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863 
 
 As soon as Lincoln was elected President, people be- 
 gan urging him to free the slaves. He believed he had 
 no right to do so under the Constitution. But as the 
 Civil War went on, he saw that the Union could win 
 the war more quickly if the slaves were freed and al- 
 lowed to fight with the Union troops. As Commander- 
 in-Chief of the Army, he had a right to do whatever 
 
 174 
 
was necessary to win the war. So in September 1862 
 he announced he was going to free the slaves wher- 
 ever slaveowners were still in rebellion against the 
 United States by the following January 1. On that 
 day he carried out his announcement with the Emanci- 
 pation Proclamation. By April it was clear that Lin- 
 coln had been right. Well over a hundred thousand 
 Negroes had already joined the Union forces in the 
 three months since the slaves were freed. This is part 
 of the Proclamation: 
 
 Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the 
 United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as 
 Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United 
 States, in time of actual armed rebellion against the au- 
 thority and government of the United States, and as a fit 
 and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, 
 do, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one 
 thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance 
 with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full 
 period of one hundred days from the day first above men- 
 tioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States 
 wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in 
 rebellion against the United States: 
 
 [Here Lincoln listed the states and parts of states, and 
 he went on: ] 
 
 I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves 
 within said designated States and parts of States are, and 
 henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Gov- 
 ernment of the United States, including the military and 
 naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the 
 freedom of said persons. . . . 
 
 175 
 
And I further declare and make known that such persons 
 of suitable condition will be received into the armed service 
 of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, 
 and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said 
 service. 
 
 And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of 
 justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military neces- 
 sity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and 
 the gracious favor of Almighty God. In witness whereof I 
 have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the 
 United States to be affixed. 
 
 From Lincoln } s First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1 86 1 
 
 When Lincoln became President, he made a speech as 
 all Presidents do. Several states had already seceded. 
 Here is part of what he said: 
 
 Fellow-citizens of the United States: 
 In compliance with a custom as old as the government it- 
 self, I appear before you to address you briefly, and to take 
 in your presence the oath prescribed by the Constitution 
 of the United States to be taken by the President "before 
 he enters on the execution of his office." 
 
 [Speaking of the fact that slavery existed in one section 
 of the country but not in another, Lincoln said: ] 
 Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot re- 
 move our respective sections from each other, nor build an 
 impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be 
 divorced, and go out of the presence and beyond the reach 
 of each other; but the different parts of our country can- 
 not do this. They cannot but remain face to face, and 
 
 176 
 
intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue be- 
 tween them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse 
 more advantageous or more satisfactory than before? Can 
 aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can 
 treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than 
 laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you can- 
 not fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, 
 and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical 
 old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon 
 you. 
 
 This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people 
 who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the 
 existing government, they can exercise their constitutional 
 right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dis- 
 member or overthrow it. 
 
 [After discussing how slavery could be abolished by 
 constitutional means, Lincoln went on to say: ] 
 In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and 
 not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The gov- 
 ernment will not assail you. You can have no conflict with- 
 out being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath 
 registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I 
 shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and 
 defend it." 
 
 I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We 
 must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, 
 it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords 
 of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot 
 grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this 
 broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when 
 again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels 
 of our nature. 
 
 177 
 
From Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1864 
 
 When Lincoln became President the second time, he 
 was thinking of peace, and here is part of what he said: 
 
 Fondly do we hope— fervently do we pray— that this 
 mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if 
 God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the 
 bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil 
 shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the 
 lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was 
 said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The 
 judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." 
 
 With malice toward none; with charity for all; with 
 firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us 
 strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the 
 nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the 
 battle, and for his widow, and his orphan— to do all which 
 may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among 
 ourselves, and with all nations. 
 
 178 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
 The facts in this book all come from other books by 
 people who knew Abraham Lincoln or who spent a long 
 time studying his life. Those who knew Lincoln often 
 wrote down exactly what he said, and that is why it is pos- 
 sible to give his actual words, even in conversations. The 
 books which have the most about him are the six volumes 
 called Abraham Lincoln, by Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, 
 Brace and Company), and nobody could write a new story 
 of Lincoln without owing the greatest debt to Mr. Sand- 
 burg. 
 
 Lincoln's law partner, William H. Herndon, realized 
 when Lincoln died how important it was to gather together 
 all the information he could about Lincoln. With the help 
 of Jesse W. Weik he wrote a famous biography which is 
 known as Herndon 's Life of Lincoln. Then Julia Taft 
 Bayne— the Julia whose brothers played with the Lincoln 
 boys in the White House— wrote Tad Lincoln's Father 
 (Little, Brown and Company) . Many, many other people 
 made collections of Lincoln's stories which the author of 
 The Real Book about Abraham Lincoln has consulted. Re- 
 cently, Philip Van Doren Stern went through everything 
 Lincoln himself wrote, and selected the parts most interest- 
 ing for us today. These are published, together with a 
 biography, in The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln 
 (Modern Library). 
 
 179 
 
All of these books are for grownups, and so is Albert 
 Shaw's Abraham Lincoln. But Dr. Shaw's book, which is 
 called a "Cartoon History," has a great many cartoons and 
 pictures which are fun for anybody of any age to look at. 
 
 To these books and to many more the author— and you— 
 are indebted. 
 
 1 80 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abolitionists, 115, 124-25 
 Aesop's Fables, 44 
 Allen, Dr., 91 
 Armstrong, Duff, 1 19-20 
 Armstrong, Jack, 70-72, 
 
 119 
 Assassination of Lincoln, 1 
 
 58 
 
 Baker, Mr., 102 
 Barnum's Museum, 135 
 Berry, William F., 90 
 Bibliography, 179-80 
 "Blab" school, 9 
 Black Hawk War, 78-86 
 
 Blackstone's Commentaries, 
 
 90 
 Books about Lincoln, 179-80 
 Booth, John Wilkes, 157-58 
 92, Brown, John, 125-26 
 Bull Run, battle, 152 
 
 57- 
 
 Cass, General Lewis, 1 10 
 
 Chandler, Dr., 94 
 
 Chronological table, 165-70 
 
 Circus in the White House, 
 
 144 
 Civil War, 149-56 
 Clary's Grove Boys, 70-73, 
 
 80, 81, 82, 84, 89 
 
 183 
 
Confederacy, 132, 149-56 Grant, General Ulysses S., 
 
 Coon hunting, 26 154—55 
 
 Cooper Union speech, 126 Green, Bill, 70, 73, 90 
 
 Grigsby family, 48-49 
 Dates in the life of Lincoln, 
 
 165-70 Hanks, Dennis, 8, 21-25, 54 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, 82-83 Hanks, John, 57, 59-60, 61, 
 
 Douglas, Stephen, 97, 105, I20 
 
 120-2 3 Hanks, Nancy. See Lincoln, 
 
 Duncan, Johnny, 10 Nancy Hanks 
 
 Herndon, William H., 76, 
 
 Elizabethtown, Kentucky, 9 in 
 
 Emancipation Proclamation, Hodgenville, Kentucky, 7 
 
 r 54 
 
 Ericsson, John, 150 Indians> ^^ ?8 _ 86 
 
 Everett, Edward, 154 
 
 ^ . Johnston, John, 6 1 
 
 Ferrying, 34-37 J ,J 
 
 Fire Zouaves, 140-41 
 
 Flatboat, 34-37 Kelso > J ack > 90-91. 9 2 
 
 Ford's Theater, Washington, Kirkpatrick, 80-81 
 
 j --__g Knob Creek, Kentucky, 9 
 
 Gentry, Allen, 52-53 Lincoln, Abraham (Abe's 
 
 Gentry, James, 52-53 grandfather), 15 
 
 Gentryville, Indiana, 45-46, Lincoln, Abraham 
 
 48 In the Wilderness, 7-16 
 
 Gettysburg, 154-55 Little Pigeon Creek, 17-22 
 
 Gollaher, Austin, 11- 12 Abe Gets a New Mother, 
 
 Goose Neck Prairie, Illinois, 23—3 1 
 
 61 Longshanks Finds Jobs, 
 
 Graham, Mentor, 74, 92 32—37 
 
 184 
 
"A Learner Always," 38- 
 
 49 
 Abe Moves Again, 50-55 
 Young Alan on the Fron- 
 tier, 56-66 
 Abe Becomes Storekeeper, 
 
 67-77 
 Captain Abraham Lincoln, 
 
 78-86 
 
 Abe Tries Politics, 87-95 
 
 Abraham Lincoln, Legis- 
 lator, 96-104 
 
 Abe Goes to Congress, 
 105-13 
 
 Abe Talks About Slavery, 
 114-23 
 
 Abe Gets Ready to Be 
 President, 124-30 
 
 The Lincolns Move to the 
 White House, 131-37 
 
 Abe in the White House, 
 138-48 
 
 The War Is Won, 149-58 
 
 The Real Abraham Lin- 
 coln, 159-62 
 Lincoln's Writings and 
 Speeches, Selections, 
 171-78 
 Lincoln, Edward Baker, 106, 
 
 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 105-6, 
 *47 
 
 Lincoln, Matilda, 24, 29-30 
 Lincoln, Nancy Hanks, 8-9, 
 
 22, 56 
 Lincoln, Robert Todd, 106, 
 
 135, 138 
 
 Lincoln, Sarah (Abe's sister), 
 8 
 
 Lincoln, Sarah (Abe's step- 
 mother), 23-25, 30-31, 
 
 r 34 
 
 Lincoln, Thomas (Abe's 
 father), 7, 15-28,33,54- 
 55 ,66 
 
 Lincoln, Thomas (Abe's son, 
 "Tad"), 113, 128, 138- 
 
 47. 151 
 Lincoln, William Wallace, 
 
 113, 138-47 
 Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 
 
 120-23 
 Little Pigeon Creek, Indiana, 
 
 14, 17-22 
 Long Nine, 98-99 
 "Lost Speech" at Springfield, 
 
 118 
 
 McClellan, General, 149, 155 
 Marion, Francis, 43-44 
 Merrimac, 149-50 
 Mexico, War with, 108-9 
 Milksick, 22, 54, 56 
 Monitor, 150 
 
 185 
 
New Harmony, Indiana, 50- Short, Uncle Jimmy, 93 
 
 51 Slave auction, 64-65 
 
 New Orleans, Louisiana, 53- Slavery, 99, 108, 114-23, 
 
 54, 64-65 132-33. 153-57 
 
 New Salem, Illinois, 62-63, Sparrow, Tom and Betsy, 7, 
 
 67-77, 87-99 21-22 
 
 Speed, Joshua, 100, 105 
 
 Oflut, Denton, 61-63, 68-70, Springfield, Illinois, 99-100 
 
 75, 91 Stanton, Edwin M., 150-51 
 
 Stewart, John T., 100 
 Pinkerton, Allan, 135-36 
 
 Pole sheds, 18-19 Taft, Holley and Bud, 138- 
 
 39. H4> x 45> H 6 
 
 Radford, Reuben, 89-90 Talisman, 76-77 
 
 Reading, 42-44, 74, 90 Things That Lincoln Really 
 
 Real Dates in Lincoln's Life, Said, 171-78 
 
 165-70 Thirteenth Amendment, 156 
 
 Republican Party, 1 16-17, Thompson (wrestler), 83-84 
 
 120, 121, 126-27 Todd, Mary. See Lincoln, 
 Richmond, Virginia, 156 Mary Todd 
 
 Robinson Crusoe, 44 
 
 Roby, Kate, 41-42 Vandalia, Illinois, 97, 98 
 
 Rutledge, Anne, 75, 97-98 Vicksburg, 154 
 Rutledge, James, 75 
 
 Wagon-building, ^ 
 
 Sac Indians, 78-86 Washington, George, 43 
 
 Sangamon River, 59, 60, 67, Weems, Parson, 43-44 
 
 76 White House, 138-48 
 Schooling, 9, 25, 38-42, 45 
 
 Secession, 132 Zouaves, 140-41 
 
 186 
 


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