CHAPTER V

LINCOLN SECURES À POSITION-HE STUDIES GRAMMARFIRST APPEARANCE IN POLITICS

THE month in New Orleans passed swiftly, and in June, 1831, Lincoln and his companions took passage up the river. He did not return, however, in the usual condition of the river boatman "out of a job." According to his own way of putting it, "during this boat-enterprise acquaintance with Offutt, who was previously an entire stranger, he conceived a liking for Abraham, and believing he could turn him to account he contracted with him to act as a clerk for him on his return from New Orleans, in charge of a store and mill at New Salem." The store and mill were, however, so far only in Offutt's imagination, and Lincoln had to drift about until his employer was ready for him. He made a short visit to his father and mother, now in Coles County, near Charleston (fever and ague had driven the Lincolns from their first home in Macon County), and then, in July, 1831, he went to New Salem, where, as he says, he "stopped indefinitely, and for the first time, as it were, by himself."

The village of New Salem, the scene of Lincoln's mercantile career, was one of the many little towns which, in the pioneer days, sprang up along the Sangamon river, a stream then looked upon as navigable and as destined to be counted among the highways of commerce. Twenty miles northwest of Springfield, strung along the left bank of the Sangamon, parted by hollows and ravines, is a row of high hills. On one of these a long, narrow ridge, beginning with a sharp and sloping point near the river, running south, and parallel

with the stream a little way, and then, reaching its highest point, making a sudden turn to the west, and gradually widening until lost in the prairie-stood this frontier village. The crooked river for a short distance comes from the east, and, seemingly surprised at meeting the bluff, abruptly changes its course, and flows to the north. Across the river the bottom stretches out half a mile back to the highlands. New Salem, founded in 1829 by James Rutledge and John Cameron, and a dozen years later a deserted village, is rescued only from oblivion by the fact that Lincoln was once one of its inhabitants. The town never contained more than fifteen houses, all of them built of logs, but it had an energetic population of perhaps one hundred persons, among whom were a blacksmith, a tinner, a hatter, a schoolmaster and a preacher. New Salem boasted a grist-mill, a saw-mill, two stores and a tavern, but its day of hope was short. In 1837 it began to decline and by 1840, Petersburg, two miles down the river, had absorbed its business and population. Salem Hill is now only a green cow pasture.

Lincoln's first sight of the town had been in April, 1831, when he and his crew had been detained in getting their flatboat over the Rutledge and Cameron mill-dam. When he walked into New Salem, three months later, he was not altogether a stranger, for the people remembered him as the ingenious flat-boatman who had freed his boat from water by resorting to the miraculous expedient of boring a hole in the bottom.

Offutt's goods had not arrived when Mr. Lincoln reached New Salem; and he "loafed" about, so those who remember his arrival say, good-naturedly taking a hand in whatever he could find to do, and in his droll way making friends of everybody. By chance, a bit of work fell to him almost at once, which introduced him generally and gave him an opportunity