promising. One of these included a voyage down the river to New Orleans with a flatboat cargo of Illinois produce. He proposed to John Hanks that he and Lincoln should be the crew of that boat, both having some river experience, and they, after some demur on the part of Hanks, induced John Johnston to join them. The pay offered was high for those times, being fifty cents a day while at work and a bonus of twenty dollars each in case of a successful trip.

The bargain was made in February, 1831, and in March, when the hard Winter at last broke up, the three young men went down the Sangamon in a canoe to Judy's Ferry, five miles east of Springfield. They walked over to this place, where Offutt had appointed to meet them, and found him at a tavern, ready to tell them that he had failed to procure a flatboat and that they must build one. Ship builders now as well as sailors, they went about five miles. northward to the mouth of Spring Creek, where the timber stood on "Congress land," never yet owned by any individual. In a fortnight they had enough trees cut for the proposed boat, in shape to raft down to Sangamontown, where there was a sawmill. While chopping they had found a boarding place, a mile away from their work, but now they built a shanty and boarded themselves. was well and strongly made, or it would survived its next, or rather its very first perience. Two full weeks were required to put it together, and when it was launched it was speedily freighted with salt pork, hogs, and corn. It floated

The boat

not have rough ex

well with the current until it was helplessly swept upon Rutledge's mill dam at New Salem. The bow went up and the stern went down, water began to pour in, and it looked as if the voyage of Mr. Offutt's new craft had suddenly ended. The entire population of New Salem came out to see the shipwreck, while Abe Lincoln, the bow hand of the stranded boat, studied the unlooked-for problem in river navigation. He solved it by getting the cargo out of the stern to lighten that end, and by boring holes forward to let the water out as the stern arose and the bow went down. It was a feat which gained him more than a little applause, and made a fine beginning for the strong hold he was soon to win upon the good opinion of the people of New Salem and vicinity. All their admiration must have been bestowed upon the performance itself, for those who afterward described the appearance of the man who saved the boat declared that his outer man was uncommonly rough even for a Sangamon River bow hand. His shrunken trousers reached but a few inches below his knees, they were short at the waist also, and there were defects in his other garments. Decidedly the most enthusiastic observer was Mr. Offutt himself, as he was afterward ready to show. Perhaps it was this first, offhand invention which led, many years afterward, to another, more deliberately made but practically less profitable. This was "A. Lincoln's improved manner of buoying vessels' to lift them over river shoals, for which a patent was awarded him in 1849, and of which the model, whittled out by himself,

may still be seen in the Patent Office at Washington.

Below Rutledge's dam there were only the ordinary difficulties of river navigation to be encountered, and the trip to New Orleans was made quickly and safely. The bow hand of the flatboat had earned his wages and his bonus, and had accomplished more than he yet knew for his own immediate prospects. While in New Orleans he also accomplished something of vast importance for the future of his country, for he obtained vivid and indelible impressions concerning the nature of slavery and of the buying and selling of human beings. If he learned anything, or saw or felt anything with reference to the subject during his first trip with Allen Gentry, there is no record of it, but John Hanks is a trustworthy witness in this instance, and he says: "There it was we saw negroes chained, maltreated, whipped, and scourged. Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much; was silent from feeling, was sad, looked bad, felt bad, was thoughtful and abstracted. I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinions of slavery. It run its iron into him then and there, May, 1831. I have heard him say so, often and often.”

Into these words of John Hanks may be condensed, in a manner, the substance of letters and utterances of Mr. Lincoln himself in after years, declaring that his convictions upon the subject of slavery came to him as the fruit of personal observation. Then and afterward he saw for himself, heard for himself, and was ready at any time for whatever act

or effort in behalf of freedom his sober reason might

approve.

The trip having proved a success, the entire party took passage for the North in June. At St. Louis Mr. Offutt left his crew, and the three friends walked twenty-five miles across the country to Edwardsville, Ill. At this place they separated, Hanks taking the Springfield road, while Lincoln and Johnston trudged on together for a visit to the new home which Thomas Lincoln had recently found for himself in Coles County,

CHAPTER V.

A Wrestling Match-Piloting on the SangamonClerk in a Country Store-Foreman of a Mill- The Clary's Grove Boys-English Grammar-Coopershop Studies-Out of Work-The Black Hawk War-Captain Lincoln.

LINCOLN'S visit in Coles County continued until August, and the only incident of it on record is a wrestling match with one Daniel Needham, up to that hour an acknowledged champion, who believed that no other man could throw him. Needham was now defeated with such apparent ease that he lost his temper, and the match would have ended in a fight but for the good-humored bantering of the victor.

One of Mr. Offutt's business plans, already discussed with his bow hand, was the opening of a country store in New Salem. It was a business point rather than a village, for it did not contain more than a score of houses, all small, and its population was too drifting and uncertain for any trustworthy census. Rutledge's and Cameron's mill, at the dam upon which Lincoln had rescued Mr. Offutt's flatboat, had been built in 1829, when the bluff was bare prairie. The bluff, about a hundred feet in height, is there now, but the town has disappeared.