In early days men traveled many miles to attend court, not because they had business there, but because the coming of the judge and lawyers from near and far brought into the life of the people something that was unusual and often dramatic. To the court house at Boonville, the nearest county seat, lawyers sometimes came from as far away as Louisville to try their cases, to settle for all time the questions of property rights, or to defend men charged with crime. Witnesses were examined, and speeches made. In spite of the prohibition of slavery in the constitution of Indiana, appeals were made to these courts to permit the holding of negro slaves in the State. To these meetings of the court the young man Lincoln walked through the woods fifteen miles, whenever he could manage to get away from his work. And here he fed his fancy and his ambition with thoughts of something greater in his own life than day labor. Here, too, he got a copy of the laws of Indiana from one of the lawyers, and found within its covers the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of Indiana. Here he read for the first time the protest of a free people against the wickedness of human slavery.

As he listened to the lawyers, as in school and out he labored over his compositions, and as he read the few books that he could borrow, one great need impressed itself more and more upon him. He must learn how to make perfectly plain to others the thoughts that men and books suggested to him. Often he would hear words whose meaning he could not understand and about which his father would not let him ask questions, or he would find in his books things that nobody could explain to him, and as he struggled to make these things clear to his own mind, he saw how

necessary it was to use the right words in order to make his thought plain to others. "I remember," he once said, "how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I do not think I ever got angry at anything else in my life; but that always disturbed my temper, and has ever since. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings. I could not sleep, although I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for an idea, until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over; until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and bounded it east, and bounded it west."

CHAPTER V

THE LAND OF FULL-GROWN MEN

THE time had come for restless Thomas Lincoln to undertake another migration. The earnings of the Indiana farm, added to what money father and son could save from their wages, had not been enough in fourteen years to enable them, with their ways of doing business, to pay the price of two dollars an acre for which the father had bought the place. Thomas Lincoln had begun to hear stories of the richness of the Illinois prairie land. The tide of westward emigration was setting in once more, stronger than ever, and as usual Thomas Lincoln was drifting with the tide.

The three families of Lincoln, Hanks, and Johnston, with Abraham Lincoln as chief teamster, got their worldly goods together in February, 1830, and started their ox-cart caravan on its westward journey. The State toward which they were bent bore the Indian name, Illinois, which means "the land of fullgrown men." Surely, here was a country in which the young Lincoln, now six feet and four inches tall, would find a place for himself. Abraham was twenty-one years old, and his own master. He laid in an outfit of notions, and as they traveled through the new country, sold them to the farmers and, by good bargaining, doubled his original capital of thirty dollars.

The roads were heavy with frost and mud. At the fords for there were no bridges the ice had to be

broken to let the wheels pass. The first of the company to get into trouble was a small dog that at one

of these crossings was left behind and ran up and down the farther bank protesting piteously. "I could not endure the idea of abandoning even a dog," Lincoln said, "so I took off my shoes, waded across the stream, and triumphantly returned with the shivering animal under my arm. His frantic leaps of joy and gratitude amply repaid me for all the exposure I had undergone."

After helping the others establish themselves in their prairie home, Abraham Lincoln found his way to the village of New Salem, on the banks of the Sangamon. Here he entered the employ of Denton Offutt, by turns conducting his general store and flouring-mill, and finally undertaking for him a trading expedition to New Orleans. For this journey he built a flatboat and loaded it with bacon and farm produce, which he was to sell down the river. The venture was a financial success, and won for the young man Mr. Offutt's enthusiastic good will. Three years before, he had made a similar journey for Mr. Gentry, so that the Mississippi was not strange to him. The woodsman's habit of close observation now led him, unconsciously, to note the physical features of the country through which the great river was carrying him, so that his retentive memory enabled him thirty years later to follow the movements of the vessels of Farragut and Porter and the armies of General Grant as they closed in upon Vicksburg and permitted "the Father of Waters again to go unvexed to the sea." At New Orleans he attended the slave auction. Here he saw husbands and wives separated and children taken from their mothers and sold to strangers. The unspeakable cruelty of it all stirred the heart of the young man, who, as a boy, had been willing to fight his playmates to save a turtle from abuse, and who, as a man, had waded barefooted

through the ice rather than abandon even a little dog. When he returned to Illinois, it was with a deepened sense of the injustice of human slavery. The sight of men and women in chains was still a "continued torment" to him.

In his new home, as in Indiana, he was the strongest man in all the countryside. Wherever men gathered, his admiring employer, Mr. Offutt, was given to bragging of his clerk's strength, thus involving him in athletic contests. One of these rough-and-tumble affairs proved more important than Lincoln imagined. Jack Armstrong, the champion of the near-by settlement, Clary's Grove, had heard Mr. Offutt's boasts of young Lincoln's prowess until he could stand it no longer. He challenged Lincoln to a wrestling-match, which a touch of foul play converted into a fist-fight, and in which the champion of Clary's Grove bade fair to be defeated. Before he had finished, Lincoln had to whip the entire gang, one at a time, but he did it so thoroughly and with such good humor that he won their hearty friendship and kept it ever afterward.

In 1832, war with the Indians broke out in northern Illinois, and troops were called for to march against Black Hawk and his Indian braves. Lincoln, being out of a job, was among the first to enlist. Through the help of his new friends from Clary's Grove he was chosen captain. This was his first assurance that the thing he had always most desired, the good will of his fellow men, was his. The election to the captaincy was a success, as he declared long afterward, “which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since." By the time Captain Lincoln's company reached the front the war was over. The leisure time of this famous military campaign Lincoln spent in athletic sports,