Sangamon, a stream which empties into the Ohio.  Here Thomas Lincoln renewed the familiar process of “starting in life,” and with an axe, a saw, and a knife built a rough cabin of hewed logs, with a smoke-house and “stable.”  Abraham, aided by John Hanks, cleared ten or fifteen acres of land, split the rails and fenced it, planted it with corn, and made it over to Thomas as a sort of bequest at the close of his term of legal infancy.  His subsequent relationship with his parents, especially with his father, seems to have been slight, involving an occasional gift of money, a very rare visit, and finally a commonplace letter of Christian comfort when the old man was on his deathbed.[23]

At first Abraham’s coming of age made no especial change in his condition; he continued to find such jobs as he could, as an example of which Is mentioned his bargain with Mrs. Nancy Miller “to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark that would be necessary to make him a pair of trousers.”  After many months there arrived in the neighborhood one Denton Offut, one of those scheming, talkative, evanescent busybodies who skim vaguely over new territories.  This adventurer had a cargo of hogs, pork, and corn, which he wanted to send to New Orleans, and the engagement fell to Lincoln and two comrades at the wage of fifty cents per day and a bonus of $60 for the three.  It has been said that this and a preceding trip down the Mississippi first gave Lincoln a glimpse of slavery in concrete form, and that the spectacle of negroes “in chains, whipped and scourged,” and of a slave auction, implanted in his mind an “unconquerable hate” towards the institution, so that he exclaimed:  “If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard.”  So the loquacious myth-maker John Hanks asserts;[24] but Lincoln himself refers his first vivid impression to a later trip, made in 1841, when there were “on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons.”  Of this subsequent incident he wrote, fourteen years later, to his friend, Joshua Speed:  “That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave border.  It is not fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable."[25]

Of more immediate consequence was the notion which the rattle-brained Offut conceived of Lincoln’s general ability.  This lively patron now proposed to build a river steamboat, with “runners for ice and rollers for shoals and dams,” of which his redoubtable young employee was to be captain.  But this strange scheme gave way to another for opening in New Salem a “general store” of all goods.  This small town had been born only a few months before this summer of 1831, and was destined to a brief but riotous life of some seven years’ duration.  Now it had a dozen or fifteen “houses,” of which some had cost only ten dollars for the building; yet to the sanguine Offut it presented a fair field for retail commerce.  He accordingly equipped his “store,” and being himself engaged in other enterprises, he installed Lincoln as manager.  Soon he also gave Lincoln a mill to run.