witnessed a slave auction. "His heart bled," wrote one of his
companions; "said nothing much; was silent; looked bad. I can say,
knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion on
slavery. It run its iron in him then and there, May, 1831. I have heard
him say so often." Then he lived several years at New Salem, in
Illinois, a small mushroom village, with a mill, some "stores" and
whiskey shops, that rose quickly, and soon disappeared again. It was a
desolate, disjointed, half-working and half-loitering life, without any
other aim than to gain food and shelter from day to day. He served as
pilot on a steamboat trip, then as clerk in a store and a mill; business
failing, he was adrift for some time. Being compelled to measure his
strength with the chief bully of the neighborhood, and overcoming him, he
became a noted person in that muscular community, and won the esteem and
friendship of the ruling gang of ruffians to such a degree that, when the
Black Hawk war broke out, they elected him, a young man of twenty-three,
captain of a volunteer company, composed mainly of roughs of their kind.
He took the field, and his most noteworthy deed of valor consisted, not
in killing an Indian, but in protecting against his own men, at the peril
of his own life, the life of an old savage who had strayed into his camp.

The Black Hawk war over, he turned to politics. The step from the
captaincy of a volunteer company to a candidacy for a seat in the
Legislature seemed a natural one. But his popularity, although great in
New Salem, had not spread far enough over the district, and he was
defeated. Then the wretched hand-to-mouth struggle began again. He "set
up in store-business" with a dissolute partner, who drank whiskey while
Lincoln was reading books. The result was a disastrous failure and a
load of debt. Thereupon he became a deputy surveyor, and was appointed
postmaster of New Salem, the business of the post-office being so small
that he could carry the incoming and outgoing mail in his hat. All this