Lincoln Unbound by Rich Lowry

gone.
    â€œHe never once,” Michael Burlingame writes, “invited Thomas or his wife to Springfield during the entire twenty-­four-­year span Lincoln lived there.” He didn’t visit his father in 1851 when the latter was dying. In a letter to his stepbrother, he pleaded the press of business and Mary’s illness. However, he added that his stepbrother should tell his father “that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”
    When Lincoln left home, he got his “start” with a figure, the merchant Denton Offutt, who was the opposite of his father in every important respect, for good and mostly ill. Unlike Thomas Lincoln, Offutt was a hard-­drinking, unreliable, and improvident huckster. Unlike Thomas Lincoln, he always had an eye on the main chance and lurched from one get-­rich-­quick scheme to another. Unlike Thomas Lincoln, he saw only limitless possibilities in the young Lincoln and bootstrapped him into his business ventures.
    Offutt hired Lincoln, along with two others, to take a flatboat with produce down to New Orleans with him. John Hanks, part of the entourage, described the journey to Herndon and painted a picture of the multifaceted ardors of such a trip at the time. First, “I and Abe went down the Sangamon River from Decatur to Springfield in a canoe.” (Lincoln explained in his own account that melting snows made the roads impassable.) They found a spot where they “cut & cared—­& hewed timber to frame a flat boat—­80 feet long & 18 feet wide.” They floated the timbers down to Sangamon town in a raft and built the boat while they camped out—­“done our own Cooking—­mending & washing.” Then the completed boat was “loaded with bacon—­pork—­Corn & live hogs,” and on its way.
    On the return trip, according to Hanks (although Lincoln remembered him not making it all the way to New Orleans), he and Lincoln got back to St. Louis together, and from there they walked. They got “out to Edwards afoot and there the Roads parted, he taking the Charleston–Coles Co Road & I the Decatur Road—­both afoot all the way.”
    During the trip, Offutt grew quite enamored with Lincoln, who cleverly saved the boat when it got hung up on the mill dam at New Salem, Illinois, on the Sangamon River. He enthused that “Lincoln can do any thing. I really believe he could take the flat-­boat back again up the river.” As Lincoln remembered it, Offutt “conceved a liking for A. and believing he could turn him to account, he contracted him to act as a clerk for him.” Lincoln worked in the store Offutt opened in the promising village of New Salem.
    Â­People moved into Illinois starting in the south, and at the time of its establishment two years prior to Lincoln’s arrival, New Salem didn’t have many appreciable settlements to its north. Perched on a bluff above the Sangamon, it began with the typical nucleus of a pioneer village—­a mill, a store, and a saloon—­and catered to the commercial needs of farmers in the vicinity. It had a tiny population consisting of a ­couple of dozen families, including a large contingent who were, like Lincoln, originally from Kentucky. Its structures were mostly one-­story high, one-­ or two-­room log houses. After social gatherings at night, hosts and guests might all bed down to sleep on the floor together.
    A major urban center compared to his former homes, New Salem constituted a perfect launching pad for Lincoln. “Like Westerners in general,” historian Benjamin Thomas writes, “the ­people of New Salem were young, enthusiastic, self-­reliant, willing to take a chance. Equality of opportunity was in large degree a fact, and courage, endurance, and ingenuity were the requisites of success.” Conscientious and courteous, Lincoln