Lost Conversations with Abraham Lincoln (eBook)

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Thomas Lincoln’s Son Encounters the World Beyond Pigeon Creek

Abraham Lincoln awoke suddenly from his troubled dream, his stepmother’s cries still ringing in his ears: “Stop it! Stop it! Please, stop it!”

In his dream, Sallie Lincoln had been trying to wedge her way between Abraham and his enraged father. The two had begun to argue, and their dispute had escalated rapidly.

“Yer lazy, boy! I’m gettin’ fed up with yer books and yer writin’ and not payin’ attention to yer work! We gotta finish harvestin’ our own crops, and old man Gentry’s already askin’ fer yer help ta bring in his crops and split some new fence rails fer his store! We’re gonna need his money ta help pay taxes on this land, and fer some new shoes and supplies fer yer ma and the farm that we cain’t afford right now!”

“But I already done twice as much work as Johnston!” Abraham heatedly countered. “He’s the lazy one! And yesterday, I done at least as much as you in the field! You take a break every hour in the shade and drink half our water, while I keep workin’. I only read my books while you and Johnston are eatin’ lunch!”

“Listen ta me! I’m yer pa!” Thomas Lincoln remonstrated. “I know yuh think yer better’n the rest of us, but yer not as smart as yuh think!”

“I don’t think I’m better! I just think there outta be more ta life than cuttin’ down forests and plowin’ and plantin’ crops and prayin’ you’ll have enough food ta last through the winter. Folks who do better’n us, who improve themselves and live civilized lives and rule over the likes of us, know how ta read—they’re educated!”

“Civilized?! Are you sayin’ we ain’t civilized? By God I won’t tolerate such talk under my own roof!” Thomas roared, as he lurched forward to lay hands on his impertinent son.

That was the moment when, in Abraham’s dream, Sallie had intervened and he had awoken.

Lying in the stillness of the cabin loft where he shared a cornhusk bed with his stepbrother and cousin, Abraham shuddered. It was only a bad dream. Even so, with his heart still racing, he silently conceded to himself the hard truth the dream had conveyed about his escalating tension with his father. Abraham was eighteen years old and had been seriously entertaining the idea of leaving home to strike out on his own for some time. But unable to coolly dismiss the deeply conflicted feelings conjured in his dream—especially his stepmother’s anguished cries—he resolved once again to stay, to stifle his growing restlessness and resentment. He was not yet ready to abandon the only life he had known for an uncertain incursion into the larger world beyond Pigeon Creek, nor did he wish to betray the hopes and affection of his stepmother, to whom he had become strongly attached.

***

Four years later, standing on a Saint Louis pier on the banks of the Mississippi River, twenty-two year-old Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks were about to part company. “Take care’a yerself, Abe. You been down this little creek b’fore and know what yer doin’,” John said in farewell. “I don’t reckon you’ll need my help much more ta get Offutt’s cargo down ta N’Arleans. Any messages yuh want me to carry back ta yer ma and pa?” he queried, adding, “They musta started clearin’ land again somewhere in the Goosenest Prairie by now.”

“Tell Ma she’s in my thoughts every day, and I’ll try ta find a way ta see her after I get back this summer,” Lincoln answered, but he avoided saying anything about his father or the new land clearing project. “And yuh might tell her that I’ll keep a watchful eye on Johnston (which is what Abraham called his stepbrother, John Johnston). He’s not likely ta get inta much trouble so long as I’m around.”

John Hanks was yet another of Nancy Lincoln’s cousins, who had lived with the Lincolns for three or four years—along with Dennis Hanks—as an older teen in Indiana when Abraham was a boy. John subsequently married and moved to Illinois. Shortly thereafter, he persuaded Thomas Lincoln in 1830 to abandon his hardscrabble, forested acreage in Indiana to join him in building life anew on the sod grass prairie of central Illinois. It was also John Hanks who, a year later in the spring of 1831, had negotiated with fast-talking frontier entrepreneur Denton Offutt of Springfield to float a flatboat of his goods with wages for a crew of men down the Mississippi—reverentially known as The Father of Waters by the region’s Indian tribes—to cosmopolitan New Orleans. The crew turned out to be John Hanks, Abraham Lincoln, and John Johnston. Of the three young men, Lincoln was by far the most experienced and skilled boatsman, having acquired considerable practice as a teenager ferrying riders from the Indiana shore to steamboats anchored on the Ohio River. This was followed by his maiden voyage in a flatboat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans hauling farm produce for the Lincoln’s Pigeon Creek neighbor, James Gentry, in 1828.

The 1831 venture was delayed for over a month after Lincoln and Hanks found Offutt drunk in a Springfield saloon with no flatboat procured when they arrived in mid-March. Seemingly unashamed of his negligence and unfulfilled promises of commencing the enterprise as soon as the winter ice had melted, Offutt forthwith hired Lincoln and his companions to cut trees and have their trunks milled as planks for the construction of an 80-foot flatboat. The labor and trials that consequently went into the boat’s construction are a fit story for another day. Suffice it to say that this project took close to six weeks, and the 1,500-mile voyage to New Orleans didn’t get underway until the middle of April. The planned river route to that distant southern port commenced on the Sangamon River a few miles northwest of Springfield on the outskirts of a tiny village known as New Salem. The Sangamon is a circuitous, east–west stream that feeds the Illinois River, which in turn flows in a southwesterly course and empties into the Mississippi a few miles north of Saint Louis.

By the time they reached Saint Louis, John Hanks’s original calendar calculations to make some hard cash were being squeezed by the unanticipated delay in Springfield. He missed his wife and two young children and was increasingly troubled by how much his little family needed him at home. It was these concerns that prompted him to leave the Mississippi expedition and bid farewell to his cousin, Abraham. Offutt likewise disembarked at Saint Louis to transact some business matters and entrusted Lincoln with his cargo. Offutt’s plan was to arrive in New Orleans ahead of Lincoln and his flatboat of goods by steamboat from Saint Louis to negotiate prices for his heavy sacks of corn, sides of bacon, barrels of pork, live hogs, and other livestock. It was now up to Abraham and his stepbrother Johnston to get his cargo there without mishap.

Big flatboats, like the one Offutt paid to have constructed, normally required a crew of at least four men and a pilot. They were steered from the stern by a long rudder or steering oar and featured long “sweeps” on both sides for directing the boat into a river’s current. Offutt skimped on hiring his crew before leaving on the journey from Springfield—counting himself as a crewman along with Lincoln, Hanks, and Johnston. When he and Hanks got off at Saint Louis, another boatsman had to be hired, constituting a skeleton crew of three. Lincoln piloted and manned the steering oar, while Johnston and the newly hired hand managed the sweeps. On the back of the Mississippi’s wide, relentless current, they faced another thousand miles of river travel to safe harbor in New Orleans. At an average rate of 60 to 65 miles a day, they anticipated a journey of a little over two weeks. Along the way they would pass river towns that were later destined to gain fame and notoriety as contested battle sites during America’s fratricidal civil war: Memphis, Helena, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and the slave-dependent sugar plantations above New Orleans.

Figure 4: Nineteenth-century Mississippi River flatboat

***

Seven days had passed since they’d left Saint Louis behind. The sun was setting, and Abraham Lincoln stood watchfully astern their crudely fashioned craft, steering around occasional river debris as the great river rolled smoothly southward at a deceptively swift speed. The hired hand was snoring loudly on the other side of the boat, and Lincoln and Johnston were reminiscing about their boyhoods together in Pigeon Creek, Indiana.

“Abe, d’yuh remember that fight yuh got me inta with that son-a-bitch, Will Grigsby?” Johnston asked.

“Sure I do. Grigsby was only half my size, but he called me out and said I was a yaller dog if I refused to fight’m. All of them Grigsbys was hotheads—and you know what I thought about his older brother, Aaron.” Aaron Grigsby had married Lincoln’s sister Sarah in 1826. When Sarah died in childbirth two years later, Lincoln blamed Grigsby for neglecting his sister’s care and well-being. “Anyway, I thought if Will wanted ta fight, it’a be a fairer contest against you, since you were about the same size at the time. And he was just as mad at you as he was at me. So that’s what I told him, and the little pipsqueak took me up on it.”

“Well, I don’t know whether to thank yuh or not,” Johnston replied. “He gouged my eye and started...