Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser Read Free Book Online

territories: any state, once it was established, could introduce slavery if it chose to do so.) Coles ran for governor in 1822 to keep Illinois free. He won the governorship and the fight to keep Illinois a free state, although tough laws restricting free blacks remained (they could not vote, for example). A county east of Decatur was named after Coles the year the Lincolns arrived; Thomas and Sarah Bush Lincoln moved there in 1831.
    That same year Abraham Lincoln turned twenty-two, becoming legally independent of his father. He wanted a physical separation as well, so he moved in the opposite direction, to New Salem, a village down the Sangamon River to the west. He arrived, as he later put it, like a piece offloating driftwood.
    River work drew him first. There was a merchant in New Salem, Denton Offut, a typical American type: a promoter, a big talker, a horse whisperer on the side. He wanted some young men to take a flatboat of hogs down the Sangamon to the Illinois River, and so to the Mississippi and New Orleans. Lincoln signed up.
    Lincoln had already made one flatboat trip to New Orleans in 1828, when he was still living in Indiana, via the Ohio and the Mississippi. Rivers were the easiest transportation in a vast frontier with a few wretched roads; the Mississippi was the watershed of half a continent, and New Orleans at its mouth was the spigot. It was the fifth-largest city in the United States, with over 40,000 people (New Salem only had one hundred). It was a creole city with a French and Spanish colonial past, only recently overlaid by English speakers; it was also filled with slaves and free Negroes. A rustic like Lincoln had never seen anything like it. It was the only city in the Deep South he would ever see.
    Given Lincoln’s later history, the men who accompanied him on these trips would look for portents in his youthful reactions. The spectacle of a slave metropolis, with auctions and buyers inspecting the bodies of the merchandise, might be revolting on first acquaintance; to some minds, it might be thrilling. Lincoln’s friends testified that the experience haddistressed him. But were their recollections authentic? Allen Gentry, who went on the first trip, left only thirdhand testimony, reporting Lincoln’s feelings—“Abraham was very angry”—to his son, who told someone else. John Hanks, who went on the second trip, said that Lincoln’s “heart bled” in New Orleans. If it did, Hanks did not see it, because he went no farther than St. Louis (though of course Lincoln might have told him what he had seen and felt in New Orleans after theyboth came home).
    The one memory that Lincoln himself ever recorded was that during the first trip the flatboat was attacked by a gang of black thieves—escaped slaves lurking along the riverbank—whom the Illinoisans fought off. Poor white men could have unpleasant interactions with those who were worse off yet.

    Lincoln did not stay with the river. For the rest of 1831, he clerked in Offut’s store and did odd jobs. He wrestled the local tough guy, one Jack Armstrong, who managed to throw him only by using a trick hold. That was good enough to make Lincoln accepted by Armstrong and all his pals. Like father, like son.
    In 1832 Lincoln performed the only military service of his life. An old Sauk chief named Black Hawk, who had fought alongside the British during the War of 1812, led 450 warriors into northwestern Illinois in a forlorn attempt to reclaim their lost homeland (the US government had required the Indians of the Northwest to move beyond the Mississippi). To repel him Illinois called out the militia. Lincoln enlisted for three months. For the first month he served as a captain, elected by his own company, a mark of recognition that pleased him no end (Armstrong was his sergeant).
    Lincoln’s war was not a very martial experience. Black Hawk was cornered and captured without the participation of Lincoln’s unit; he saw no action, and in later