MCCLURE’S MAGAZINE

VOL.  VI.  JANUARY, 1896.  NO. 2.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

Edited by Ida M. Tarbell.

Lincoln as storekeeper and soldier in the black hawk war.

This article embodies special studies of Lincoln’s life in New Salem made for this Magazine by J. McCan Davis.

LINCOLN’S FIRST EXPERIENCES IN ILLINOIS.

It was in March, 1830, when Abraham Lincoln was twenty-one years of age, that he moved from Indiana to Macon County, Illinois.  He spent his first spring in the new country helping his father settle.  In the summer of that year he started out for himself, doing various kinds of rough farm work in the neighborhood until March of 1831, when he went to Sangamon town, near Springfield, to build a flatboat.  In April he started on this flatboat for New Orleans, which he reached in May.  After a month in that city, he returned, in June, to Illinois, where he made a short visit at his parents’ home, now in Coles County, and in July went to New Salem, to take charge of a store and mill owned by Denton Offutt, who had employed him on the flatboat.[A] The goods for the new store had not arrived when Lincoln reached New Salem.  Obliged to turn his hand to something, he piloted down the Sangamon and Illinois rivers, as far as Beardstown, a flatboat bearing the family and goods of a pioneer bound for Texas.  At Beardstown he found Offutt’s goods waiting to be taken to New Salem.  As he footed his way home he met two men with a wagon and ox-team going for the goods.  Offutt had expected Lincoln to wait at Beardstown until the ox-team arrived, and the teamsters, not having any credentials, asked Lincoln to give them an order for the goods.  This, sitting down by the roadside, he wrote out; and one of the men used to relate that it contained a misspelled word, which he corrected.

IN CHARGE OF DENTON OFFUTT’S STORE.

The precise date of the opening of Denton Offutt’s store is not known.  We only know that on July 8, 1831, the County Commissioners’ Court of Sangamon County granted Offutt a license to retail merchandise at New Salem; for which he paid five dollars, a fee which supposed him to have one thousand dollars’ worth of goods in stock.  When the oxen and their drivers returned with the goods, the store was opened in a little log house on the brink of the hill, almost over the river.

[Illustration:  The Kirkham’s grammar used by Lincoln at new Salem.—­Now first published.]