such stirring
in him as there was of that discontent which fanciful people have called
divine. Remembering New Orleans, could any imaginative youth be content
with Pigeon Creek?

In the spring of 1830, shortly after he came of age, he agreed for once
with his father whose chronic vagrancy had reasserted itself. The whole
family set out again on their wanderings and made their way in an oxcart
to a new halting place on the Sangamon River in Illinois. There Abraham
helped his father clear another piece of land for another illusive
"start" in life. The following spring he parted with his family and
struck out for himself.(1) His next adventure was a second trip as a
boatman to New Orleans. Can one help suspecting there was vague hope in
his heart that he might be adventuring to the land of hearts' desire?
If there was, the yokels who were his fellow boatmen never suspected
it. One of them long afterward asserted that Lincoln returned from New
Orleans fiercely rebellious against its central institution, slavery,
and determined to "hit that thing" whenever he could.

The legend centers in his witnessing a slave auction and giving voice to
his horror in a style quite unlike any of his authentic utterances. The
authority for all this is doubtful.(2) Furthermore, the Lincoln of 1831
was not yet awakened. That inner life in which such a reaction might
take place was still largely dormant. The outer life, the life of the
harvest clown, was still a thick insulation. Apparently, the waking of
the inner life, the termination of its dormant stage, was reserved for
an incident far more personal that fell upon him in desolating force a
few years later.

Following the New Orleans venture, came a period as storekeeper for
a man named Denton Offut, in perhaps the least desirable town in
Illinois--a dreary little huddle of houses gathered around Rutledge's
Mill on the Sangamon River and called New Salem.(3) Though a few of
its people were of a better sort than any Lincoln had yet known except,
perhaps, the miller's family in the old days in Kentucky--and still a
smaller few were of fine quality, the community for the most part was
hopeless. A fatality for unpromising neighborhoods overhangs like a doom
the early part of this strange life. All accounts of New Salem represent
it as predominantly a congregation of the worthless, flung together by
unaccountable accident at a spot where there was no genuine reason for
a town's existence. A