The Lincoln Story Book | Page 7

$10 a month.)
(Related by Frank B. Carpenter, the portrait-painter, as given out by
President Lincoln to a party of friends in the White House executive
chamber, Secretary Seward, notably, being among them.)
* * * * *
CONVICTION THROUGH A THRASHING.
In 1831, Abraham Lincoln, returning from a voyage to New Orleans,
paid the usual filial visit to his father, living in Coles County. A famous
wrestler, one Needham, hearing of the newcomer's prowess in
wrestling, more general than pugilism on the border, called to try their

strength. As the professional was in practise, and as the other, from his
amiable disposition and his forbidding appearance was not so, the latter
declined the honor of a hug and the forced repose of lying on the back.
Nevertheless, taunted into the trial, he met the champion and defeated
him in two goes. The beaten one was chagrined, and vented his
vexation in this defiance:
"You have thrown me twice, Lincoln, but you cannot whip me!"
"I do not want to, and I don't want to get whipped myself," was the
simple reply.
"Well, I 'stump' you to lick me!" went on Needham, thinking he was
gaining ground. "Throwing a man is one thing and licking him
another!"
"Look here, Needham," said the badgered man, at last, "if you are not
satisfied that I can throw you every time, and want to be convinced
through a thrashing, I will do that, too, for your sake!"
The man "backed out." But he was ever afterward one of the
champion's warmest friends.
* * * * *
BOATING ON GROUND "A LEETLE DAMP."
In a letter of August, 1862, the President alludes to the amphibious
minor navy, which made their tracks "wherever the ground was a little
damp." This is hardly an exaggeration of Western shallow-water
navigation. Lincoln, as pilot on the Sangamon River in 1831, was
engaged to run a steamboat called the _Talisman_, after Sir Walter
Scott's popular romance. It was to test the point whether the Sangamon
River was navigable or not, an important local problem on which
Lincoln, later, got into the legislature. As he had "tried" the river a
good deal with the flatboats, he answered, he would try and do the best
he could. A large crowd flocked in from all sides to witness the
experiment. Lincoln guided the bark well up to the New Salem dam.
Here a gap had been cut to let the vessel slip through. But at a place
called Bogue's Mill, the water was rapidly lowering, and they had to
wheel about and get back, or be shoaled and be held there until the
spring freshets. The return trip was slow, as, though the stream was in
his favor, the high prairie wind delayed the boat. The falling water had
made the broken hole in the dam impracticable. But Lincoln backed the
Talisman off as soon as she stranded and stuck; and, by casting an

anchor so as to act as a gigantic grapnel, to tear away some more of the
dam, the opening sufficed for the boat to "coast" on the stones and get
over into deep water. "I think," says an old boatman--J. R. ("Row")
Herndon--"that the captain gave Lincoln forty dollars to keep on to
Beardstown. I am sure I got that!"
* * * * *
THE INITIATOR INSTALLED.
As a fruit of incessant study Abraham Lincoln fitted himself to accept
the post of clerk at Offutt's store, in New Salem, in 1831. It was a
responsible position, requiring strict honesty, intelligence, glib talk,
attention, and courtesy to the few dames in the population of twenty
households, "with the back settlement to hear from." In fact, Lincoln's
gifts and cultivated acquirements made him such a favorite that the list
of customers from out of town was extensive. This promotion of a
newcomer nettled the bad element of the region. They were located
from congeniality in a suburb termed Clary's Grove. Like the tail which
undertakes to wag the dog, this tag constituted itself the criterion and
proposed "initiating" any accession to the inhabitants. To take the
conceit out of the upstart who had leaped from the flatboat deck to
behind the counter at the store--the acme of a bumpkin's ambition--they
selected their bully. This Jack Armstrong was held so high by Bill
Clary, "father" of the Grove boys, that he bet with Offutt, over-loud in
praise of his help, that Jack could beat Abe, "and your Abe has got to
be initiated, anyway!"
Abraham refused under provocation to have anything to do with
"rough-and-tumble" fighting--as also known as "scuffle and tussle,"
and "wooling and pulling"--in short, these agreeable features promise
to include all brutalities save gouging, which was unfashionable so far
to the North. But a man could not live