He won some
local reputation by navigating the steamboat Talisman up the Sangamon
River to Springfield; but nothing came of it.
The foregoing narrative ought to have given some idea of the moral and
physical surroundings of Lincoln's early days. Americans need to carry
their memories hardly fifty years back, in order to have a lively
conception of that peculiar body of men which for many years was pushed
out in front of civilization in the West. Waifs and strays from highly
civilized communities, these wanderers had not civilization to learn,
but rather they had shuffled off much that belonged to civilization, and
afterwards they had to acquire it afresh. Among them crudity in thought
and uncouthness in habits were intertwined in odd, incongruous crossings
with the remnants of the more respectable customs with which they had
once been familiar. Much they forgot and much they put away as being no
longer useful; many of them--not all--became very ignorant without being
stupid, very brutal without being barbarous. Finding life hard, they
helped each other with a general kindliness which is impracticable among
the complexities of elaborate social organizations. Those who were born
on the land, among whom Lincoln belonged, were peculiar in having no
reminiscences, no antecedent ideas derived from their own past, whereby
to modify the influences of the immediate present. What they should
think about men and things they gathered from what they saw and heard
around them.
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