Work’n Hard with an Axe

Number Three

From Lincoln’s Autobiographies and other Sources

[the selections with bracket “first-person wording” is from

an interview of presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, by John L. Scripps of the Chicago Press and Tribune]

 

            Indiana was a wild country full of animals and big trees.  In order for a family to make a farm in Spencer County, a lot of wood cuttin’ had to be done.  Good straight hardwood logs would be made into logs for cabin building, and rails for fences.  To clear the fields for corn and other crops, many trees were burned out.  Whatever I could earn outside of my own father’s farm would be given to his father until age twenty-one. 

            At age nine, I was very tall and strong.  I could weal an axe as any man could.  To survive in the wilderness of Indianny, the whole family had their duties and chores.  I knew the arts of log building, fence building, and making a crop.  I did not like any of them.  My father tried to prevent his me from becoming an “eddicated” person, and leaving the profession he loved. 

            “In my tenth year I was kicked by a horse, and apparently killed for a time. When I was nineteen, still residing in Indiana, I made my first trip upon a flatboat to New Orleans. I was a hired hand merely, and a son of the owner and myself, without other assistance, made the trip. The nature of part of the "cargo-load," as it was called, made it necessary for us to linger and trade along the sugar-coast; and one night we were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob us. We were hurt some in the mêlée, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat, and then "cut cable," "weighed anchor," and left.”   A. Lincoln--Scripps Interview

            In 1830, at the age of 21, John Hanks and I  would start a new business in Illinois (Macon County), being a “rail enterprise.”  It is said that I once split some 4,000 rails at Decatur to earn enough material for a pair of britches.  I would use my manual labor skills even at New Salem, but did not want to. 
           The name “Rail Splitter Candidate,” would carry with Abraham into his Presidential campaigning.  John and Dennis Hanks of Coles County, Illinois would be responsible for this new nick-name.  They gathered up actual old rails from Illinois to carry into the National convention at Chicago and thus the nick-name was put on the candidate.  Rails would be used again on a large float in the parade for me in the 1858 Charleston Lincoln-Douglas Debate.