McClures Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 | Page 2

RUTLEDGE.--ABRAHAM LINCOLN AT TWENTY-SIX YEARS
OF AGE.
_Embodying special studies in Lincoln's life at New Salem by J.
McCan Davis._
LOOKING FOR WORK.
It was in August, 1832, that Lincoln made his unsuccessful canvass for
the Illinois Assembly. The election over, he began to look for work.
One of his friends, an admirer of his physical strength, advised him to
become a blacksmith, but it was a trade which would afford little
leisure for study, and for meeting and talking with men; and he had
already resolved, it is evident, that books and men were essential to him.
The only employment to be had in New Salem which seemed to offer
both support and the opportunities he sought, was clerking in a store;
and he applied for a place successively at all of the stores then doing
business in New Salem. But they were in greater need of customers
than of clerks. The business had been greatly overdone. In the fall of

1832 there were at least four stores in New Salem. The most
pretentious was that of Hill and McNeill, which carried a large line of
dry goods. The three others, owned by the Herndon Brothers, Reuben
Radford, and James Rutledge, were groceries.
DECIDES TO BUY A STORE.
Failing to secure employment at any of these establishments, Lincoln,
though without money enough to pay a week's board in advance,
resolved to buy a store. He was not long in finding an opportunity to
purchase. James Herndon had already sold out his half interest in
Herndon Brothers' store to William F. Berry; and Rowan Herndon, not
getting along well with Berry, was only too glad to find a purchaser of
his half in the person of "Abe" Lincoln. Berry was as poor as Lincoln;
but that was not a serious obstacle, for their notes were accepted for the
Herndon stock of goods. They had barely hung out their sign when
something happened which threw another store into their hands.
Reuben Radford had made himself obnoxious to the Clary's Grove
Boys, and one night they broke in his doors and windows, and
overturned his counters and sugar barrels. It was too much for Radford,
and he sold out next day to William G. Green for a four-hundred-dollar
note signed by Green. At the latter's request, Lincoln made an
inventory of the stock, and offered him six hundred and fifty dollars for
it--a proposition which was cheerfully accepted. Berry and Lincoln,
being unable to pay cash, assumed the four-hundred-dollar note
payable to Radford, and gave Green their joint note for two hundred
and fifty dollars. The little grocery owned by James Rutledge was the
next to succumb. Berry and Lincoln bought it at a bargain, their joint
note taking the place of cash. The three stocks were consolidated. Their
aggregate cost must have been not less than fifteen hundred dollars.
Berry and Lincoln had secured a monopoly of the grocery business in
New Salem. Within a few weeks two penniless men had become the
proprietors of three stores, and had stopped buying only because there
were no more to purchase.
[Illustration: THE EARLIEST PORTRAIT OF ABRAHAM
LINCOLN (REPRINTED FROM McCLURE'S FOR NOVEMBER).
From a daguerreotype in the possession of the Hon. Robert T. Lincoln,
taken before Lincoln was forty, and first published in the McCLURE'S
Life of Lincoln. Of the sixty or more portraits of Lincoln which will be

published in this series of articles, thirty, at least, will be absolutely
new to our readers; and of these thirty none is more important than this
early portrait. It is generally believed that Lincoln was not over
thirty-five years old when this daguerreotype was taken, and it is
certainly true that it is the face of Lincoln as a young man. "About
thirty would be the general verdict," says Mr. Murat Halstead in an
editorial in the Brooklyn "Standard-Union," "if it were not that the
daguerreotype was unknown when Lincoln was of that age. It does not
seem, however, that he could have been more than thirty-five, and for
that age the youthfulness of the portrait is wonderful. This is a new
Lincoln, and far more attractive, in a sense, than anything the public
has possessed. This is the portrait of a remarkably handsome man....
The head is magnificent, the eyes deep and generous, the mouth
sensitive, the whole expression something delicate, tender, pathetic,
poetic. This was the young man with whom the phantoms of romance
dallied, the young man who recited poems and was fanciful and
speculative, and in love and despair, but upon whose brow there
already gleamed the illumination of intellect, the inspiration of
patriotism. There were vast possibilities in this young man's face. He
could have gone anywhere and done anything. He might have been a
military chieftain, a novelist, a