The Boys Life of Abraham Lincoln | Page 8

slight training gained from his studies greatly broadened and
strengthened the strong reasoning faculty with which he had been
gifted by nature. His wit might be mischievous, but it was never
malicious, and his nonsense was never intended to wound or to hurt the
feelings. It is told of him that he added to his fund of jokes and stories
humorous imitations of the sermons of eccentric preachers.
Very likely too much is made of all these boyish pranks. He grew up
very like his fellows. In only one particular did he differ greatly from
the frontier boys around him. He never took any pleasure in hunting.
Almost every youth of the backwoods early became an excellent shot
and a confirmed sportsman. The woods still swarmed with game, and
every cabin depended largely upon this for its supply of food. But to his
strength was added a gentleness which made him shrink from killing or
inflicting pain, and the time the other boys gave to lying in ambush, he
preferred to spend in reading or in efforts at improving his mind.
Only twice during his life in Indiana was the routine of his employment
changed. When he was about sixteen years old he worked for a time for
a man who lived at the mouth of Anderson's Creek, and here part of his
duty was to manage a ferry-boat which carried passengers across the
Ohio River. It was very likely this experience which, three years later,
brought him another. Mr. Gentry, the chief man of the village of

Gentryville that had grown up a mile or so from his father's cabin,
loaded a flatboat on the Ohio River with the produce his store had
collected--corn, flour, pork, bacon, and other miscellaneous
provisions--and putting it in charge of his son Allen Gentry and of
Abraham Lincoln, sent them with it down the Ohio and Mississippi
Rivers, to sell its cargo at the plantations of the lower Mississippi,
where sugar and cotton were the principal crops, and where other food
supplies were needed to feed the slaves. No better proof is needed of
the reputation for strength, skill, honesty, and intelligence that this tall
country boy had already won for himself, than that he was chosen to
navigate the flatboat a thousand miles to the "sugar-coast" of the
Mississippi River, sell its load, and bring back the money. Allen Gentry
was supposed to be in command, but from the record of his after life we
may be sure that Abraham did his full share both of work and
management. The elder Gentry paid Lincoln eight dollars a month and
his passage home on a steamboat for this service. The voyage was
made successfully, although not without adventure; for one night, after
the boat was tied up to the shore, the boys were attacked by seven
negroes, who came aboard intending to kill and rob them. There was a
lively scrimmage, in which, though slightly hurt, they managed to beat
off their assailants, and then, hastily cutting their boat adrift, swung out
on the stream. The marauding band little dreamed that they were
attacking the man who in after years was to give their race its freedom;
and though the future was equally hidden from Abraham, it is hard to
estimate the vistas of hope and ambition that this long journey opened
to him. It was his first look into the wide, wide world.

II. CAPTAIN LINCOLN.
By this time the Lincoln homestead was no longer on the frontier.
During the years that passed while Abraham was growing from a child,
scarcely able to wield the ax placed in his hands, into a tall, capable
youth, the line of frontier settlements had been gradually but steadily
pushing on beyond Gentryville toward the Mississippi River. Every
summer canvas-covered moving wagons wound their slow way over
new roads into still newer country; while the older settlers, left behind,
watched their progress with longing eyes. It was almost as if a spell had
been cast over these toil-worn pioneers, making them forget, at sight of

such new ventures, all the hardships they had themselves endured in
subduing the wilderness. At last, on March 1, 1830, when Abraham
was just twenty-one years old, the Lincolns, yielding to this
overmastering frontier impulse to "move" westward, left the old farm in
Indiana to make a new home in Illinois. "Their mode of conveyance
was wagons drawn by ox-teams," Mr. Lincoln wrote in 1860; "and
Abraham drove one of the teams." They settled in Macon County on
the north side of the Sangamon River, about ten miles west of Decatur,
where they built a cabin, made enough rails to fence ten acres of
ground, fenced and cultivated the ground, and raised a crop of corn
upon it that first season. It