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Training For Greatness
by
In March, 1828, Lincoln was employed by one of the leading men of Gentryville to take a load of produce down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. For this service he was paid eight dollars a month and his rations.
This visit to New Orleans was a great event in his life. It showed him the life of a busy cosmopolitan city, which was a perfect wonderland to him. Everything he saw aroused his astonishment and interest, and served to educate him for the larger life on which he was to enter later.
The next important event in the history of the Lincoln family was their removal from Indiana to Illinois in 1830. The farm in Indiana had not prospered as they hoped it would,–hence the removal to new ground in Illinois. Abraham drove the team of oxen which carried their household goods from the old home to their new abiding place near Decatur, in Macon County, Illinois. Driving over the muddy, ill-made roads with a heavily laden team was hard and slow work, and the journey occupied a fortnight. When they arrived at their destination, Lincoln again helped to build a log cabin for the family home. With his stepbrother he also, as he said himself, “made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year.”
In that same year, 1830, he reached his majority. It was time for him to be about his own business. He had worked patiently and cheerfully since he was able to hold an ax in his hands for his own and the family’s maintenance. They could now get along without him, and he felt that the time had come for him to develop himself for larger duties.
He left the log cabin, penniless, without even a good suit of clothes. The first work he did when he became his own master was to supply this latter deficiency. For a certain Mrs. Millet he “split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans, dyed with white walnut bark, necessary to make a pair of trousers.”
For nearly a year he continued to work as a rail splitter and farm “hand.” Then he was hired by a Mr. Denton Offut to take a flatboat loaded with goods from Sangamon town to New Orleans. So well pleased was Mr. Offut with the way in which Lincoln executed his commission that on his return he engaged him to take charge of a mill and store at New Salem.
There, as in every other place in which he had resided, he became the popular favorite. His kindness of heart, his good humor, his skill as a story teller, his strength, his courtesy, manliness, and honesty were such as to win all hearts. He would allow no man to use profane language before women. A boorish fellow who insisted on doing so in the store on one occasion, in spite of Lincoln’s protests, found this out to his cost. Lincoln had politely requested him not to use such language before ladies, but the man persisted in doing so. When the women left the store, he became violently angry and began to abuse Lincoln. He wanted to pick a quarrel with him. Seeing this Lincoln said, “Well, if you must be whipped, I suppose I may as well whip you as any other man,” and taking the man out of the store he gave him a well-merited chastisement. Strange to say, he became Lincoln’s friend after this, and remained so to the end of his life.
His scrupulous honesty won for him in the New Salem community the title of “Honest Abe,” a title which is still affectionately applied to him. On one occasion, having by mistake overcharged a customer six and a quarter cents, he walked three miles after the store was closed in order to restore the customer’s money. At another time, in weighing tea for a woman, he used a quarter-pound instead of a half-pound weight. When he went to use the scales again, he discovered his mistake, and promptly walked a long distance to deliver the remainder of the tea.