Though the humor of these stories was Falstaffian, to say the least, though Lincoln was cock of the walk among the plowboys of Pigeon Creek, a significant fact with regard to him here comes into view.  Not an anecdote survives that in any way suggests personal licentiousness.  Scrupulous men who in after-time were offended by his coarseness of speech—­for more or less of the artist of Pigeon Creek stuck to him almost to the end; he talked in fables, often in gross fables—­these men, despite their annoyance, felt no impulse to attribute to him personal habits in harmony with his tales.  On the other hand, they were puzzled by their own impression, never wavering, that he was “pureminded.”  The clue which they did not have lay in the nature of his double life.  That part of him which, in our modern jargon, we call his “reactions” obeyed a curious law.  They dwelt in his outer life without penetrating to the inner; but all his impulses of personal action were securely seated deep within.  Even at nineteen, for any one attuned to spiritual meaning, he would have struck the note of mystery, faintly, perhaps, but certainly.  To be sure, no hint of this reached the minds of his rollicking comrades of the harvest field.  It was not for such as they to perceive the problem of his character, to suspect that he was a genius, or to guess that a time would come when sincere men would form impressions of him as dissimilar as black and white.  And so far as it went the observation of the plowboys was correct.  The man they saw was indeed a reflection of themselves.  But it was a reflection only.  Their influence entered into the real man no more than the image in a mirror has entered into the glass.

III.  A VILLAGE LEADER

Though placid, this early Lincoln was not resigned.  He differed from the boors of Pigeon Creek in wanting some other sort of life.  What it was he wanted, he did not know.  His reading had not as yet given him definite ambitions.  It may well be that New Orleans was the clue to such stirring in him as there was of that discontent which fanciful people have called divine.  Remembering New Orleans, could any imaginative youth be content with Pigeon Creek?

In the spring of 1830, shortly after he came of age, he agreed for once with his father whose chronic vagrancy had reasserted itself.  The whole family set out again on their wanderings and made their way in an oxcart to a new halting place on the Sangamon River in Illinois.  There Abraham helped his father clear another piece of land for another illusive “start” in life.  The following spring he parted with his family and struck out for himself.(1) His next adventure was a second trip as a boatman to New Orleans.  Can one help suspecting there was vague hope in his heart that he might be adventuring to the land of hearts’ desire?  If there was, the yokels who were his fellow boatmen never suspected it.  One of them long afterward asserted that Lincoln returned from New Orleans fiercely rebellious against its central institution, slavery, and determined to “hit that thing” whenever he could.