It is doubtful whether he felt himself much superior to his surroundings, although he confessed to a yearning for some knowledge of the world outside of the circle in which he lived.  This wish was gratified; but how?  At the age of nineteen he went down the Mississippi to New Orleans as a flatboat hand, temporarily joining a trade many members of which at that time still took pride in being called “half horse and half alligator.”  After his return he worked and lived in the old way until the spring of 1830, when his father “moved again,” this time to Illinois; and on the journey of fifteen days “Abe” had to drive the ox wagon which carried the household goods.  Another log cabin was built, and then, fencing a field, Abraham Lincoln split those historic rails which were destined to play so picturesque a part in the Presidential campaign twenty-eight years later.

Having come of age, Lincoln left the family, and “struck out for himself.”  He had to “take jobs whenever he could get them.”  The first of these carried him again as a flatboat hand to New Orleans.  There something happened that made a lasting impression upon his soul:  he witnessed a slave auction.  “His heart bled,” wrote one of his companions; “said nothing much; was silent; looked bad.  I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion on slavery.  It run its iron in him then and there, May, 1831.  I have heard him say so often.”  Then he lived several years at New Salem, in Illinois, a small mushroom village, with a mill, some “stores” and whiskey shops, that rose quickly, and soon disappeared again.  It was a desolate, disjointed, half-working and half-loitering life, without any other aim than to gain food and shelter from day to day.  He served as pilot on a steamboat trip, then as clerk in a store and a mill; business failing, he was adrift for some time.  Being compelled to measure his strength with the chief bully of the neighborhood, and overcoming him, he became a noted person in that muscular community, and won the esteem and friendship of the ruling gang of ruffians to such a degree that, when the Black Hawk war broke out, they elected him, a young man of twenty-three, captain of a volunteer company, composed mainly of roughs of their kind.  He took the field, and his most noteworthy deed of valor consisted, not in killing an Indian, but in protecting against his own men, at the peril of his own life, the life of an old savage who had strayed into his camp.

The Black Hawk war over, he turned to politics.  The step from the captaincy of a volunteer company to a candidacy for a seat in the Legislature seemed a natural one.  But his popularity, although great in New Salem, had not spread far enough over the district, and he was defeated.  Then the wretched hand-to-mouth struggle began again.  He “set up in store-business” with a dissolute partner, who drank whiskey while Lincoln was reading books.  The result was a disastrous failure and a load of debt.  Thereupon he became a deputy surveyor, and was appointed postmaster of New Salem, the business of the post-office being so small that he could carry the incoming and outgoing mail in his hat.  All this could not lift him from poverty, and his surveying instruments and horse and saddle were sold by the sheriff for debt.