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By Root 1698 0

forest teemed with wild game that they hunted for food. Physically strong, Lincoln was assigned to manual labor from an early age. Indiana law, like the law of nearly every state in the Union, gave parents the right to the “service” of their children until the age of twenty-one, and Thomas Lincoln frequently sent his son to work for neighbors to pay off debts. One of his acquaintances later recalled Lincoln remarking, “I used to be a slave,” a reference to his father’s appropriation of his labor. In Lincoln’s early experiences may lie the origins of his intense later commitment to the idea that all persons have a natural right to the fruits of their toil.8

Lincoln’s two round-trip journeys to New Orleans (in which he traveled by both flatboat and steamboat) illustrated how he grew to adulthood in a period of transition between old and new technologies, and between the household and market economies. Even when the Lincoln family moved in 1830 to the rich farming land of Sangamon County in central Illinois, river transport remained unreliable and commerce restricted. When frontier families produced a surplus, they were eager to market it to local merchants, who, in turn, shipped it to New Orleans. In exchange, farm families and residents of small towns acquired products that could not be produced at home, including glass, tableware, and other consumer goods transported from the East via Pittsburgh and the Ohio River, or from St. Louis. Nonetheless, New Salem and Springfield, where Lincoln moved in 1837, were small communities isolated from larger markets. Merchants tended to fail, as Lincoln did when he ran a store in New Salem. Residents of Illinois stood poised between “rude unsophisticated life and a civilized comfort,” in the words of a journalist who visited the state. Not until the 1840s, when the National Road reached Illinois from Maryland and railroad construction began, did the state become fully integrated into the national market economy.9

Lincoln never romanticized his backwoods youth. When his 1860 campaign biographer John L. Scripps asked about his upbringing, Lincoln replied with a line from the English poet Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: “the short and simple annals of the poor.” Early in life, Lincoln decided that he did not want to live like his father, who in his son’s eyes exemplified the values of the pre-market world where people remained content with a subsistence lifestyle. From age twenty-one, Lincoln lived in towns and cities and evinced no interest in returning to the farm or to manual labor. He held jobs—storekeeper, lawyer, and surveyor—essential to the market economy. The storekeeper brought manufactured goods from afar to isolated communities. The bulk of legal work revolved around land titles, business arrangements, bankruptcy cases, and the credit and debt that oiled the market revolution. The surveyor transformed land into private property with clearly identified boundaries, ready to be bought and sold. Lincoln was so enmeshed in market society that during the 1840s and 1850s, even while pursuing his legal and political careers, he provided credit reports about his Springfield neighbors to the Mercantile Agency, a credit rating company founded in New York City by the abolitionist Lewis Tappan.10

Like many ambitious, successful sons, Lincoln did everything he could to distance himself from his father. He did not invite Thomas Lincoln to his wedding or, indeed, to visit his family in Springfield at any time. In 1851, when Lincoln’s stepmother informed him that his father lay on his deathbed a hundred miles from Springfield, Lincoln declined to visit him, explaining that “if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.” In the autobiographical account he composed for Scripps, Lincoln wrote that his father “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name,” a description so uncharitable that Scripps chose not to include it in the biography he produced. Lincoln had a similar attitude toward his stepbrother,