For some years yet he must continue to earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, having absolutely no means, no home, no friend to consult.  More farm work as a hired hand, a clerkship in a village store, the running of a mill, another trip to New Orleans on a flatboat of his own contriving, a pilot’s berth on the river—­these were the means by which he subsisted until, in the summer of 1832, when he was twenty-three years of age, an event occurred which gave him public recognition.

The Black Hawk war broke out, and, the Governor of Illinois calling for volunteers to repel the band of savages whose leader bore that name, Lincoln enlisted and was elected captain by his comrades, among whom he had already established his supremacy by signal feats of strength and more than one successful single combat.  During the brief hostilities he was engaged in no battle and won no military glory, but his local leadership was established.  The same year he offered himself as a candidate for the Legislature of Illinois, but failed at the polls.  Yet his vast popularity with those who knew him was manifest.  The district consisted of several counties, but the unanimous vote of the people of his own county was for Lincoln.  Another unsuccessful attempt at store-keeping was followed by better luck at surveying, until his horse and instruments were levied upon under execution for the debts of his business adventure.

I have been thus detailed in sketching his early years because upon these strange foundations the structure of his great fame and service was built.  In the place of a school and university training fortune substituted these trials, hardships, and struggles as a preparation for the great work which he had to do.  It turned out to be exactly what the emergency required.  Ten years instead at the public school and the university certainly never could have fitted this man for the unique work which was to be thrown upon him.  Some other Moses would have had to lead us to our Jordan, to the sight of our promised land of liberty.

At the age of twenty-five he became a member of the Legislature of Illinois, and so continued for eight years, and, in the meantime, qualified himself by reading such law books as he could borrow at random—­for he was too poor to buy any to be called to the Bar.  For his second quarter of a century—­during which a single term in Congress introduced him into the arena of national questions—­he gave himself up to law and politics.  In spite of his soaring ambition, his two years in Congress gave him no premonition of the great destiny that awaited him,—­and at its close, in 1849, we find him an unsuccessful applicant to the President for appointment as Commissioner of the General Land Office—­a purely administrative bureau; a fortunate escape for himself and for his country.  Year by year his knowledge and power, his experience and reputation extended, and his mental faculties seemed to grow by what they fed on.