He was a good-humoured, rather idle, imaginative boy who appears to have been a general favourite. Unlike the typical fron tiersman he never became a hunter, never pulled a trigger on anything larger than a wild turkey. "I was raised to farm work," he writes. Even as a boy he exhibited a faculty for story-telling, could make jingling rhymes on occasion and was a droll mimic. His easy-going camaraderie informs an oft-repeated anecdote. In spelling class a little girl hesitated between "i" and "y"; Lincoln slyly put his finger on his own eye. About the same time occurred his first experiment with imagination. A party of travellers stopped briefly at his father's house while their wagon was being mended. Among them was a little girl who took the boy's fancy. After she had gone he wove out of the memory an elaborate romance in which he was the hero of an elopement and she the heroine. Talking long after of this boyish dreaming he said, "I think it was the beginning of love for me." Of his real experiences the first that opened up the world beyond Pigeop Creek occurred when he was 19. This raw farm-hand was engaged as "hired man merely" to go down to New Orleans on a flat-boat. The strange old semi-Spanish city even as late as 1828 was a striking, exotic place unlike anything else in the United States. The strength of the imaginative faculty in Lincoln is attested by much evidence both direct and indirect. Who can doubt that New Orleans was as wonderful to him as the Arabian Nights? And yet with singular reticence he has left no record of his impressions. Reticence, degenerating at times into secretiveness, is one of his fixed char acteristics. A second journey to New Orleans three years later is also without the slightest explanatory comment either in his letters or his table talk.
Between these two journeys, the Lincoln family with several of their "in-laws" formed a small migration to Illinois (March 183o). The women went in a wagon drawn by oxen. The men walked. Abraham was the ox-driver during much of the journey.
By this time he was a very tall young man, six feet three or four, raw-boned, lanky, but possessed of immense physical strength. He was noted for the skill and power with which he could wield an axe. During his first autumn in Illinois he made use of his skill as an axe-man splitting fence rails. A contract to split three thousand rails was not filled until late in the following winter.
At this time he was casting about for other employment. His father was comfortably settled on a new farm, but the son had had enough of farming. Presently, he fell in with a trader, Denton Offcutt, who engaged him for that second trip to New Orleans already mentioned. A good deal of legend has grown up about this journey. Most of it may be discarded. It seems likely, however, that he saw more of slavery than on the previous jour ney and that what he saw shocked him. But the evidence is irregular.
First Essay in Politics.—One result of this journey was the employment of Lincoln as clerk in a general store which Offcutt decided to open in the village of New Salem, Ill. During six years (1831-37) Lincoln counted himself a resident of New Salem. It was a forlorn village, one of those accidental conges tions of population that often appeared on the frontier with no true reason for their existence and that eventually melted off the map. There was a mill, a tavern, a few stores and a handful of people. The Offcutt store proved a failure. Offcutt left town and Lincoln was without employment. He turned to politics. This move had been made possible by events that reveal two more of his fundamental characteristics. New Salem contained a group of young roughs known as the Clary Grove Boys, who were eager to try the mettle of any new-comer in the town. A wrestling match was arranged between their best man and Lincoln in which the unexpected happened, the local hero was overthrown.
The astonishing part of the episode was the promptness with which Lincoln, while not displacing their leader in their estimation, won over both him and them, with the result that they formed the nucleus of a devoted personal following. A peculiar power to attract men, joined with complete ability to remain himself, be comes hereafter characteristic of all he does. The secret appears to lie in the blending in his own mind of humour and toleration combined with a singular non-censorious purity of life, and all reinforced by his immense physical strength. How far his peculiar character was enhanced, in the eyes of ordinary humanity, by his capacity for what Stevenson would have called "a large and genial idleness" is worth considering.
His first candidacy for the legislature (1832) was unsuccessful. Two years later New Salem changed its mind and elected him. He continued to represent the town during the remainder of his stay there. All the while he was extremely poor. For a time he tried to keep a store in partnership with a man named Berry. They failed, leaving debts which Lincoln assumed and which he slowly, painfully paid off during the next 15 years. He obtained the beggarly office of postmaster at New Salem but this did not suffice for a livelihood. In desperation he borrowed a book on surveying and with extraordinary mental quickness made himself at home in it. He subsisted by working as a surveyor during several years. Meanwhile, he formed a friendship with John T. Stuart who advised him to study law. To gain admittance to the bar in a frontier community was, in those days, a simple matter. Lincoln read hard by himself, obtained a licence to practise, re moved to Springfield and on April 12,1837, entered into partner ship with Stuart. An episode of his life at New Salem was his enlistment as a volunteer in the Black Hawk War (1832). His Clary Grove friends also enlisted and made their earliest display of devotion by electing him captain of their company. This was in the midst of his first candidacy for the legislature. He saw no fighting. Apparently he was so easy-going as an officer that the real soldiers at the front regarded him as inefficient. The one valuable result of the episode is a fragment of writing in which he describes the scene of a skirmish where he arrived with his company in time to bury the dead. The few sentences, in which we glimpse the dead men "painted all over" by the red sunset, have a strange undertone that is perhaps the first appearance in his preserved memorabilia of the mystical vein which was part of his distinctiveness. Mysticism of some sort was universal in the frontier people. Usually it took a supernatural bent. One cannot doubt that Lincoln's mother was an instinctive mystic in the familiar sense. But her sort of mysticism did not descend to her son. In its place, the same fundamental impulse toward wonder and awe established a frame of mind that might be called natural istic mysticism. Years afterward, on his first visit to Niagara, Lincoln was for the moment lost in reverie; but the subject of his reverie was neither supernatural nor, as so readily it might have been, literary ; he was lost in wondering where all the water came from. This ability to be so impressed by the stark realities of life and death and nature that they took on all the significance of the supernatural reappeared frequently throughout his later life. Along with it were evidences of the familiar forms of super naturalism. He confessed himself to be "superstitious." He be lieved in dreams as omens. On the day before his death he nar rated a dream which he had the night before. He told the cabinet he had had that same dream preceding all the great events of the war. He was sure its recurrence presaged a great and fortunate happening.