ble, the more interesting these are to
most people. It is quite enough to say that no man in the United States
ever reached eminence from a more obscure origin.
Rail-splitting did not achieve the results to which the ambition of
young Lincoln aspired, so he contrived to go into the grocery business;
but in this he was unsuccessful, owing to an inherent deficiency in
business habits and aptitude. He was, however, gifted with shrewd sense,
a quick sense of humor with keen wit, and a marked steadiness of
character, which gained him both friends and popularity in the miserable
little community where he lived; and in 1832 he was elected captain of
a military company to fight Indians in the Black Hawk War. There is no
evidence that he ever saw the enemy. He probably would have fought well
had he been so fortunate as to encounter the foe; for he was cool,
fearless, strong, agile, and active without rashness. In 1833 he was
made postmaster of a small village; but the office paid nothing, and his
principal profit from it was the opportunity to read newspapers and some
magazine trash. He was still very poor, and was surrounded with rough
people who lived chiefly on corn bread and salt pork, who slept in
cabins without windows, and who drank whiskey to excess, yet who were
more intelligent than they seemed.
Such was Abraham Lincoln at the age of twenty-four,--obscure, unknown,
poverty-stricken, and without a calling. Suppose at that time some
supernatural being had appeared to him in a dream, and announced that he
would some day be President of the United States; and not merely this,
but that he would rule the nation in a great crisis, and save it from
dismemberment and anarchy by force of wisdom and character, and leave
behind him when he died a fame second only to that of Washington! Would
he not have felt, on awaking from his dream, pretty much as did the aged
patriarch whose name he bore, when the angel of the Lord assured him
that he would be the father of many nations, that his seed would
outnumber the sands of the sea, and that through him all humanity would
be blessed from generation to generation? Would he not have felt as the
stripling David, among the sheep and the goats of his father's flocks,
when the prophet Samuel announced to him that he should be king over
Israel, and rule with such success and splendor that the greatness and
prosperity of the Jewish nation would be forever dated from his
matchless reign?
Th
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