Another Migration—Of full Age and Free-Farmhand and FlatboatmanMore Southern Studies-1830.

RAPIDLY as the young State of Indiana was filling up with sturdy farmers from the older settlements, it was still a very new country. And yet there was a newer and a more wonderful region spread out beyond it. The vast expanse of prairie and forest between the Indiana line and the Mississippi River had been formed into the State of Illinois. Men told marvelous tales of its fertility, and of the ease with which farms. could be opened on land where so much and so perfect a clearing had been made by the hand of Nature.

John Hanks, a cousin of the Lincolns, had settled near Decatur, in central Illinois, in 1828, and his letters fired the imagination of Dennis Hanks to such a degree that he talked of little else than prairie-farming. He even made a visit to Illinois, and after his return the question of emigrating or not was as good as settled for the whole family. Dennis had now married the oldest daughter of Abe's good stepmother, and had made a sort of start in life for himself, so that he was in some degree an independent person; but Abe had yet a few short months to wait for manhood and freedom.

There were agencies at work to drive as well as to attract, for the "milk-sick" had appeared again, and was at work with terrible energy upon both beasts and human beings. In spite of that, however, a whole year was consumed in the process of getting away from the old place.

Another daughter of Mrs. Lincoln had married Levi Hall,

and the young couple joined the westward movement. Yet, when land and corn and stock had been sold, one large wagon held all the household stuff of the three families of Hanks, Hall, and Lincoln. They waited until the latter part of the winter of 1830, and Abraham Lincoln became of age but a few days before they set out for Illinois.

A worse time of the year could hardly have been selected for wagoning over western roads, but the choice of it was characteristic of Tom Lincoln. The four yoke of oxen over which Abe held the "gad" were barely sufficient to overcome the unending succession of mudholes, sloughs, and rivers through which the clumsy vehicle had to be hauled. It was an unusually good wagon for those days, although it was the very first Tom Lincoln ever owned, and it held together well.

On the first day of March, 1830, after two weeks of slow and laborious travel, the journey ended at the house of John Hanks near Decatur.

Abraham Lincoln had reached the scenes of his further education, his trials and his triumphs for the thirty years which then lay between him and his highest uses. He would need all the time, and a good use of all his opportunities: and these could hardly be fewer or poorer, nor could the obstacles to be overcome confront him with more insurmountable stubbornness, than those he had left behind him in the fever-haunted woods of Indiana.

He was

Some oppressions, indeed, were now removed. twenty-one, and was a free man and a voter. He could come and go as he pleased, and such wages as he might earn would be all his own. Beyond that, however, there was little to be said for him. Trade, profession, manual skill of any special kind, he had none except the coarse arts of the wood-chopper, the boatman, and rough farmer.

He was free, but his first work in Illinois was given to his father, or rather to his well-beloved stepmother; for he joined the other males of the family in building a house on a high

bank of the north fork of the Sangamon River, out of some logs already cut there, and given them for the purpose by John Hanks.

After the new homestead was completed and the family had moved into it, Abe and Dennis plowed up fifteen acres of prairie-land for corn, and split rails enough to fence it in. He had done what he could to leave matters in good shape behind him as he went out to toil for himself. But he severed no tie of affection in his going. To his dying day he never ceased to care for his "mother" and her comfort, and there was no interruption of the full current of her love for him.

It was a great day for Abraham Lincoln when, all present filial duty well performed, he once for all cut himself loose from the heaviest part of the load he had carried for twentyone long years. The crushing weight of that oppression no man can estimate. Not even if he has studied never so carefully what it is, and then was, to be a "poor white" in a new settlement; for different men take up different weights in the same pack. Young Lincoln himself had but dim and formless perceptions of the truth. Neither he nor any one else could know or comprehend, moreover, the wonderful manner and degree of the gain he had won from his very disadvantages. No one could discern or measure the internal growth, as all could the physical and external; but a giant had been trained and was still in training for a life-long wrestle with opposing forces of every name and nature.

It was about the middle of spring before a beginning could be made in the new career, but from that time forward Abe ceased to make his father's house his home. Except that it contained his mother, it could not be a home for him in any true sense. He never had had one: only a log-shelter to eat and sleep in; while the cattle he drove were better provided for, considering their natures and requirements. The life he had led had shown him the insides of many homes, and the life before him was to do the same: but none of these had been,

and none was to be, his own. There was that in his organism, both as to its plan and size, which almost forbade the idea of his fitting perfectly into any one house or family circle, so that it should be to him much more than a sort of "boardinghouse."

He was now not only homeless but penniless, and it was needful that he should make a start somewhere; also that he should begin in the line to which his previous life had accustomed him. His capacity and willingness for hard work at once secured him pretty steady employment. He did not love such drudgery, but he did it faithfully, earning his daily bread under a sort of perpetual protest, and all the while he was winning for himself a local popularity similar to that which he had enjoyed in Indiana. His friends, and even some of his relatives, had a certain amount of faith in him, and were disposed to force him into activity when an occasion offered.

There was a little political excitement in the fall of that year, and the question of the improvement of the Sangamon River for purposes of navigation was a leading topic of debate. There was the usual stump-speaking, of course, and among the orators who traveled through the prairie country on that errand was a man named Posey. He came to Decatur, and he made a speech which so much disgusted John Hanks as to bring from him the remark,

"Mister, I tell ye what: Abe Lincoln can beat that all hollow. Abe, try him on."

A box was turned over for Abe to stand upon, and his career as an Illinois political stump-speaker fairly began. Not only did he beat the speech of Mr. Posey, but he so completely conquered that gentleman that, after the debate was over and when the opponents came together, the vanquished campaigner frankly asked his rough antagonist "where he learned to do it."

Abe replied freely, and even told the nature and extent of his reading, as if he owed his power as an orator in great

measure to his books.

A host of mere bookworms could have

undeceived him on that point if he could have tested them in attempts to address crowds of miscellaneous hearers. Mr. Posey honestly and earnestly encouraged his queer acquaintance to persevere; but he was quite likely to do that.

The year went by and Abraham Lincoln was still a mere farm-hand, jobbing his strong body to one employer after another. It did not seem that he had climbed a single round of the long ladder of worldly success. But the return of his

birthday brought him something new. A man named Denton Offutt hired John Hanks and John Johnston and Abe Lincoln to take a flatboat for him down the Sangamon River all the way from Springfield to New Orleans. He promised them fifty cents a day for the entire trip, with an additional sixty dollars to be divided among them at the end of it. For those times. such wages were extraordinary.

The bargain was made in February, and in March the three friends went down the Sangamon from Decatur in a canoe. For some reason they left their boat five miles above the town and walked the rest of the way. They found their employer easily enough, but they also found that he had failed to procure for himself a flatboat for the proposed voyage. If, therefore, they were to go down the river that season they must provide their own shipping. The construction of a flatboat was no formidable affair to men who had been brought up as they had.

They went to the mouth of Spring Creek, five miles north of Springfield, and set to work.

The land they were on and the trees they cut down were still the property of the United States Government, although so near the future capital of the State of Illinois. The logs when cut were rafted down the river, to be sawed into planks at the Sangamontown saw-mill. That work was done in a fortnight, and in two weeks more the industrious trio had their flatboat in the water. All the while they lived in a shanty of their