第9章 A VILLAGE LEADER(2)

It was formally arranged.A ring was formed;the whole village was audience;and Lincoln thrashed him to a finish.But this was only a small part of his triumph.His physical prowess,joined with his humor and his companionableness;entirely captivated Clary's Grove.Thereafter,it was storekeeper Lincoln's pocket borough;its ruffians were his body-guard.

Woe to any one who made trouble for their hero.

There were still other causes for his quick rise to the position of village leader.His unfailing kindness was one;his honesty was another.Tales were related of his scrupulous dealings,such as walking a distance of miles in order to correct a trifling error he had made,in selling a poor woman less than the proper weight of tea.Then,too,by New Salem standards,he was educated.Long practice on the shovel at Pigeon Creek had given him a good handwriting,and one of the first things he did at New Salem was to volunteer to be clerk of elections.And there was a distinct moral superiority.

Little as this would have signified unbacked by his giant strength since it had that authority behind it his morality set him apart from his followers,different,imposing.He seldom,if ever,drank whisky.Sobriety was already the rule of his life,both outward and inward.At the same time he was not censorious.He accepted the devotion of Clary's Grove without the slightest attempt to make over its bravoes in his own image.He sympathized with its ideas of sport.For all his kindliness to humans of every sort much of his sensitiveness for animals had passed away.He was not averse to cock fighting;he enjoyed a horse race.[5]Altogether,in his outer life,before the catastrophe that revealed him to himself,he was quite as much in the tone of New Salem as ever in that of Pigeon Creek.When the election came he got every vote in New Salem except three.[6]

But the village was a small part of Sangamon County.Though Lincoln received a respectable number of votes elsewhere,his total was well down in the running.He remained an inconspicuous minority candidate.

Meanwhile Offut's grocery had failed.In the midst of the legislative campaign,Offut's farmer storekeeper volunteered for the Indian War with Black Hawk,but returned to New Salem shortly before the election without having once smelled powder.

Since his peers were not of a mind to give him immediate occupation in governing,he turned again to business.He formed a partnership with a man named Berry.They bought on credit the wreck of a grocery that had been sacked by Lincoln's friends of Clary's Grove,and started business as "General Merchants,"under the style of Berry &Lincoln.There followed a year of complete unsuccess.Lincoln demonstrated that he was far more inclined to read any chance book that came his way than to attend to business,and that he had "no money sense."The new firm went the way of Offut's grocery,leaving nothing behind it but debt.The debts did not trouble Berry;Lincoln assumed them all.They formed a dreadful load which he bore with his usual patience and little by little discharged.

Fifteen years passed before again he was a free man financially.

A new and powerful influence came into his life during the half idleness of his unsuccessful storekeeping.It is worth repeating in his own words,or what seems to be the fairly accurate recollection of his words:"One day a man who was migrating to the West,drove up in front of my store with a wagon which contained his family and household plunder.He asked me if I would buy an old barrel for which he had no room in his wagon,and which he said contained nothing of special value.I did not want it but to oblige him I bought it and paid him,I think,a half a dollar for it.Without further examination I put it away in the store and forgot all about it Sometime after,in overhauling things,I came upon the barrel and emptying it upon the floor to see what it contained,Ifound at the bottom of the rubbish a complete edition of Blackstone's Commentaries.I began to read those famous works,and I had plenty of time;for during the long summer days when the farmers were busy with their crops,my customers were few and far between.The more I read,the more intensely interested I became.Never in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed.I read until I devoured them."[7]

The majesty of the law at the bottom of a barrel of trash discovered at a venture and taking instant possession of the discoverer's mind!Like the genius issuing grandly in the smoke cloud from the vase drawn up out of the sea by the fisher in the Arabian tale!But this great book was not the only magic casket discovered by the idle store-keeper,the broken seals of which released mighty presences.Both Shakespeare and Burns were revealed to him in this period.Never after did either for a moment cease to be his companion.These literary treasures were found at Springfield twenty miles from New Salem,whither Lincoln went on foot many a time to borrow books.

His subsistence,after the failure of Berry &Lincoln,was derived from the friendliness of the County Surveyor Calhoun,who was a Democrat,while Lincoln called himself a Whig.