Lincoln Unbound by Rich Lowry Page A

impressed ­people and won friends at Offutt’s (short-­lived) store. He had two qualities that served him well in this coarse, male-­dominated world. Big, strong, and athletic, he had the physical prowess on which labor and manly prestige depended. And he could make men laugh.
    He had always been an unusual physical specimen. His father had said, as only a carpenter could, that he “looked as if he’d been chopped out with an axe an’ needed a jack-­plane tuk to him.” At six feet four, 180 pounds as a grown man, Lincoln excelled in the competitions that were a running strongman contest on the frontier. He could outrun, outjump, and outlift his peers, or as Stephen Douglas put it in his first debate with Lincoln in 1858, “he could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper.”
    Lincoln brought an irresistible sense of humor to gatherings of men. He had a limitless supply of stories, some so ribald—­or “on the vulger order,” as an old listener put it—­that friends hesitated to repeat them for posterity’s sake after he had achieved greatness. He could be an inspired practical joker. When he was the local postmaster, Lincoln was irked by an illiterate man named Johnson Elmore who repeatedly asked if he had any letters. Knowing that the man would take it to friends to read for him, Lincoln finally wrote a fake letter to Elmore from a black woman in Kentucky in a familiar tone that concluded, “Johns—­Come & see me and old master won’t Kick you out of the Kitchen any more.”
    Lincoln’s trustworthiness made him a natural umpire in the competitions that enlivened the community. He refereed the horse races, and a witness attests it was his disinterestedness in judging these contests that first earned him the sobriquet “Honest Abe.” According to one story, Lincoln was the judge of a cockfight involving a rooster of one Babb McNabb. When it came time for the match, McNabb’s rooster ran off and perched itself on a fence, where it displayed itself proudly. McNabb upbraided the bird: “Yes, you little cuss, you’re great on dress parade, but not worth a damn in a fight.” During the war, Lincoln compared the impressive-­looking but battle-­shy General McClellan to Babb McNabb’s rooster.
    â€œLincoln had nothing only plenty of friends ,” someone who knew him in New Salem recalled. Historian William Miller notes that once Lincoln set out on his own, “it is striking how rapidly his life opens out and heads upward. How easily the doors open for him. How few barriers there appear to be. How readily he finds sponsors, and supporters—­including persons in the upper ranks.” Lincoln himself wrote of New Salem, “Here he rapidly made acquaintances and friends.”
    Some of them convinced him to run for the state legislature in 1832. During this, his first race, he was just twenty-­three and had been away from home for a year. To go from rootless flatboat operator and store clerk to elected official—­even in the decidedly non-­august Illinois legislature—­represented a giant leap. Not everyone may have taken it seriously. One friend said of Lincoln’s promoters, “He was so uncouth and awkward, and so illy dressed, that his candidacy afforded a pleasant diversion for them, but it was not expected that it would go any further.”
    But Lincoln knew the Sangamon River, the artery on which the future of the town depended. Could it become a viable throughway, putting New Salem on the commercial map and providing easier access to textiles and farm implements from the east? Whether the river could be improved was as important, in mid-­nineteenth-­century terms, as whether an interstate highway would be built near­by with an exit at the town. As it stood, the Sangamon was a sorry and sinuous river fit