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 casual town, created by drifters, and void of
settled purpose. Small wonder that ere long it vanished from the map;
that after a few years its drifting congregation dispersed to every
corner of the horizon, and was no more. But during its brief existence
it staged an episode in the development of Lincoln's character. However,
this did not take place at once. And before it happened, came another
turn of his soul's highway scarcely less important. He discovered, or
thought he discovered, what he wanted. His vague ambition took shape. He
decided to try to be a politician. At twenty-three, after living in New
Salem less than a year, this audacious, not to say impertinent, young