IT

was a bright November morning when I went out alone from Mr. Herndon's house in Springfield, and walked quickly towards the Capitol. I wanted to stand within the walls which had thrilled so often to Abraham Lincoln's voice, to stand in the spot where his body had received the heart-felt honors of an uncounted crowd. No one followed me into the semicircular room, as plain as unpainted deals can make it, which is the hall of the House of Representatives for the State of Illinois; yet I did not fail of my purpose. I had heard two Englishmen - one of them a Professor at Oxford, another a member of Parliament struggling for popular rights-express in strong terms their sense of the service done for mankind within these walls. "I have known most of the great men of my time," said the latter, the great men of Europe, Asia, and America,· but I know of no speeches like these." As I stood there, the walls seemed to throw back the dead words, and some of the stir and tumult of 1839 passed into my veins. Half unconsciously I watched the old janitor, a man who loved to prate about the dead President, as he turned the key in the sacred lock, and then stopped before the door of the State Library, that he might show me, as he expressed it, "a power of books." As I entered the half-lighted hall, I did indeed start back, awed, but not by the power of books! The library had been temporarily turned into a studio for the artist who had just finished a magnificent portrait of Lincoln. As I entered, half a dozen finished portraits of Illinois men seemed to start from the canvas, and group themselves as in life. Some I had seen, and recognized at once, but without comprehending what subtile change had now emphasized their natural power. As I stood before them, the words, "And there were giants in those days," flitted across my mind; but the stalwart

or keenly strung frame of each tall man was balanced on the canvas by a brain ponderous in proportion. The liberty the artist had taken had spent itself on the tint of the skin; he had given to each of these men the wholesome, ruddy tint which it is to be hoped will belong to their grandchildren. “And these are the men who are to reign over us," I said to myself, seeing something quite other than New England acuteness in that grand group, and recognizing for the first time that, when Abraham Lincoln took his seat in the White House, it was not so much himself as his race that entered there. I tried to remember where I had seen frames like these, and I recalled the Houses of Congress, twentyfive years ago, with the sturdy shoulders of Southern men looming far above those of their Eastern brothers, and the counterfeit Duke of Sonora offering an arm which seemed on a natural level with the crown of a woman's head! Then I recalled Professor Gould's statement at the meeting of the National Academy, when he told us that the slaves of certain Southern States were taller and stronger than our free colored men, but added also that the same thing was true of the white citizens of the same States.

"Be a little patient, men of Southern blood," I thought as I sat there, "and you shall have back, in full measure, pressed down and running over, the power for which you pine. But it will not come to the men whom you have delighted to honor. The 'poor white trash' of your proud States, carrying such portion of your best blood as you gave them in hours of lawless indulgence, or haughty contempt, driven out of your borders by your denial of human rights, having had a hand-to-hand fight with nature and circumstance, having developed moral perceptions before they knew a moral life, having taken in the idea of God and justice

before they could master that of man and purity, these men shall come back to reign over you,-to defeat, with the hot blood of your own hearts, with the strong muscles you strapped across their bones, the very purpose of your restless, ambitious lives."

And here in Springfield two men had met, prepared, it would seem, by the Divine Hand, and held apart till the right moment, who were to wield such an influence over each other and over mankind,—who were to love each other with such passion, trust each other with such implicit faith, -as had hardly been since the days of the Paladins. These men, too, were to represent the two orders of poor whites; the one born of good blood, but impoverished in his ancestry by a law of primogeniture, which the State of Virginia refused to repeal, yet born under the shelter of all legal helps and certainties, in a family which made a home, with a mother tender, devoted, and dignified, who honored God and freedom; the other born of that "poor white trash" which could not dare look back, race desperate, peculiar, undescribed, careless of legal restraints, scarce conscious of family centres, emigrating in hordes, kind-hearted, but with their hand against every man, as every man's was against them.

a

Yet it was this stone, which any cunning builder of us all would have rejected, which was already bearing the Divine signet, marked "Head of the Corner!"

The history of William Henry Herndon cannot be indifferent to a nation which honors Abraham Lincoln, for these two men for twenty-five years complemented each other; and if the passionate idealism of the one had not leavened the plodding, conscientious intellectual processes of the other, we might never have had the Proclamation of Emancipation.

William Herndon was the grandson, on both sides, of men who had fought in the war of the Revolution. In 1731, his grandfather, Colonel Day, "desiring that no man should ever again call

him master," emancipated his slaves in Western Virginia, and emigrated into Kentucky. He had received his small patrimony while the law of primogeniture was still in force; and when he parted with his slaves, he was compelled to work. One of his brothers had married the youngest sister of Patrick Henry, and the two families went together. "I was too young," said old Mrs. Herndon, when she told me the story, "to remember much of the first hardship we encountered; but I know that we were comfortable then, compared to what I was afterwards in Illinois. We had to work, but not roughly, for there were slaves in the neighborhood who could be hired; and, wild as our life was, I grew up, like other Southern girls, without much When my husband asked me to come to Illinois, I consented, of course. I thought all places were alike."

care.

And what was Illinois in 1826, when the Herndons first came to it? I will tell you, in the very language of a pioneer; for it is fit that we should see it, if we can, with his eyes.

There

"We had no need of Agassiz out here to tell us what things meant," began my friend. "It was written plain on the face of the prairie. Anybody who could run could read it. was once a great lake stretching from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains, and drenching all the land south of the Laurentian Hills. At last this sea broke bounds, and between the tall bluffs in Missouri and Kentucky, opposite St. Louis, it poured itself out. Three great sucks,' as we call them here, the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi, drained out the land; but at the best, the southern half of Indiana and Illinois was a great bog. Such a looking land as that water left! You laughed when I told you that this mud is twenty-five feet deep; but it is true. Underneath is a clay bed without a crack. The moisture can't drain away. Either the sun will drink it, or we must. Suckers' we are and must be ; for, till the water is out of the soil, it is a struggle with death. The coal-fields

all lie at the same depth. The bog which made the prairie was the very bottom of that sea, its last rich fat mud. The glaciers, starting far above the Laurentian Hills, not only melted from their moorings and floated south; they were sucked' into the great lines of drainage, and dropped their burdens of boulder, drift, and gravel, in almost parallel ridges, up and down the land. The rich mud settled upon, fattened, and drained away from these rocks. The retreating wave naturally left its heaviest seed, the acorns or beech-mast, on these summits; so the oak openings came at last to bless the land. Beside this, the smaller 'sucks,' or rivers, which remained after the great sea had hurried to the ocean, brought down their share of gravel, and piled it right and left. These ridges are like gigantic furrows thrown upon the face of the soil. The summits crumble down, and build by crumbling a sort of descent into the dreary bog. These ridges were the salvation of the country, not that we could ever have settled it without the 'gopher,' but farms had to be in the timber or on its edge. Neither men nor cattle could stand the undrained muck. On it the grass grew so high that one spark of household fire might at any moment have swept destruction over a whole township. In the cold weather the unbroken prairie-wind was too sharp for man or beast; in the hot, flies destroyed the cattle, and gallinippers drove desperate the men."

"What are gallinippers?" I asked. "Mosquitoes," he replied, "with stings three quarters of an inch long." "But I thought those were mythical mosquitoes, invented on purpose to torment the womanly credulity of Ida Pfeiffer."

"No, indeed," said Mr. Herndon, "they were substantial facts. We looked abroad over the face of the land. Skeletons of elk and deer, of extinct creatures, many of them now in the Museum at St. Louis,―and great herds of buffalo, stranded on the soil, were nuisances almost as great as the heaps of stone you take out of your 'strong

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land' at the East. We settled first on the Sangamon. My father took the ferry; in his first ploughing he turned up horns of the elk that would have arched in a doorway. I have seen their curves meet over the head of a man seven feet high. There, too, I once fled at night from the Indians. I saw the savage lift my mother's long hair and threaten to scalp her. I was but five years old, yet I shall never forget that. Make mother tell you."

I

"We were none of us likely to forget it," said the dignified Virginian, from her invalid's seat by the fire. "We had to go ninety miles to mill at first, and thought ourselves fortunate when it came to be only forty. It was a cool October evening. My husband had been gone since daybreak, and there had been rumors of Indian slaughter not far off. At nightfall I saw the red men coming. I had to think quick. 'Where is your man?' said the foremost as he came up to me. In the woodland,' I answered. Some folks," continued Mrs. Herndon, speaking with great deliberation, and in a musing mood, "some folks say they never told a lie. I told a lie that night. 'Go after him,' replied the man. turned back to the house to get my baby, and he thought I meant to cheat him. In a moment he had drawn out my comb, and, lifting my long hair, made a quick, warning sign with his scalping-knife. I heard William scream; his eye had caught the gleaming steel. I ran back to the house, put him through some open boards at the back, and told him to run to the wood for his life. I seized my shawl, and, hiding my baby under it, started after him. The Indians watched me, till the trees hid my retreating figure. Then they began to suspect. They mimicked my husband's voice, - -a baby's cry, the voices of the neighbors. Still I kept on. I had found William in the wood. I had only a mile and a half to go to our next neighbor's; but, what with him and the baby, it was late at night when I got there. They were all in bed, but sleeping with one eye open

for fear. I cried out, and asked if they would take me in. 'Yes,' they said; but they could not open the door; no one could tell how near the red men were. I must crawl up over the logs.' In those days, we used to barricade doors and windows, and set our guns in the crevices of the logs, but leave an open hole in the roof, near the chimney. So I climbed the low roof, let my baby down through the hole, handed Will to my neighbor, and dropped in myself."

"We only stayed a few years at the Sangamon," resumed William Herndon; " and I well remember how we moved up to the ridge where Springfield now is. I have told you about the 'gopher.' The little animal always has the sense to make his hummocks higher than the winter rains will rise. The whole way was clear bog; father made a small board cart, into which he threw the chickens, the little pigs, and the young children. He and I and mother walked beside the cart, which had two wheels. We skipped from hill to hill; and when the wheels of the cart stuck or floundered, we lifted them out of the mud and balanced them somehow on one of the hummocks."

The "gopher," which ought to be borne on the shield of Illinois, is really a marmot, - a little squirrel with long hind legs, sitting like a watch-dog at the door of its lodge, and skipping over the ground like a tiny kangaroo. The name is given in Canada, not only to the prairie-dog, but to a long-legged rat, which naturalists decline to class with the marmots.

"We reached Springfield at last," said Mr. Herndon; "and a most unlikely place it was. We had to build our log cabin on the edge of a ridge, while we labored to subdue the muck. The marks of bears' claws were deep in the trees right round us. Ten years later I have killed a hundred snakes in the three quarters of a mile between my own house and my father's, so you may guess what it was then. There they all were, rattlesnakes, vipers, adders, and copperheads."

"And what sort of a snake is the copperhead?" I asked.

"A mean thing. A rattlesnake rattles, a viper hisses, an adder spits, a black snake whistles, a water-snake blows, but a copperhead just sneaks! At nightfall we laid green logs in parallel rows, set them on fire, and drove the cattle between. Then whichever way the wind blew, we could keep off the mosquitoes and relieve the creatures. The dumb beasts knew what it meant, and we never had to drive them again. They went in of themselves. Words cannot make you understand this life. The prairies of Illinois are watered with the tears, and enriched by the graves, of her women. The first generation have you any dim, glimmering sense of what men they must have been who turned this sea into dry land? - the first generation lived on mush and pork. Fencing was too costly to be obtained. No gardens could stand the herds of cattle, a thousand strong, which might come swooping over at any minute. Just as our corn was ripe, the bears would strip the ears; just as the pumpkins grew golden, herds of deer would hollow out the gourds. As we got more land, there was no transportation to carry away the crops. Butter was five cents a pound, eggs were three cents a dozen; corn was six cents a bushel, wheat twenty-five cents. A cow was worth five dollars, and a man's labor fifty cents a day. Do you wonder we clamored for railroads, lied for them, went in debt for them, — did anything till we got them ?”

I remembered the thronging lines of railroad that I had often seen steering to some tiny depot in the vast prairie, and saw afresh that these lines were built for freight, not travel. The latter was an accident, happy or unhappy, as the case might be.

"And now we come to the saddest point," I said. "I want to understand the people born of this contest with the soil, the first white race born on it. Standing in a log cabin on the edge of a prairie, the other day, and looking over the half-drained surface, I said,

almost unconsciously, 'I am sure this land was settled before the Lord was willing."

"I am thankful to hear you say so," said a woman at the wash-tub near me. "I have thought so ever since I came here; and that," she added with a sigh, "is nigh on thirty year."

"New England people, travelling through your large towns, rarely see any of this great controlling population of pioneers. How can I give them any idea of the race of men among which you and Abraham Lincoln grew up? It is easy to understand the low, stupid type of man represented by the dwellers in Lacustrian towns, who were set to conquer nature for the whole race; but to understand the pioneers, you must know, first, how civilization had wronged them as poor whites; next, how nature gradually restored what civilization took. Of the rude virtues, bravery, honesty, and generosity, it is easy to get some idea. The man at the corner refused to take any pay yesterday for six sheets of brown paper; the money was not worth speaking of, he said. In Chicago, where the Southern element has made itself felt, in a way, I must not as a guest pay for my postage, my omnibus fare, my telegrams; but no sooner had I passed into the Yankee atmosphere of Milwaukee, than I felt the change like a sudden chill. There, it was quite evident, the laws of thrift prevailed, and I must pay my own way, as at home. Nor am I quite sure that the terrible preponderance of vice in Chicago bears any real relation to the morals of the prairies. It may be only the natural proportion of a city which is so placed as to be a great thoroughfare for the lower classes of many nations. It may not be an exponent of this State. We know at the East something of your lawless classes; but I believe we think they all perished a century ago; we have no idea of what this lawlessness involves, nor have we dreamed, as yet, that among them and of them-sharing, for a time at least, all that we shrink from in

them, except drunkenness Lincoln grew up."

"What would you have?" said my friend, rising in his excitement, and pacing rapidly back and forth. "To do the work which I have shown you must be done, an enormous, an abnormal vitality was required. Such a vitality could not exhaust itself on the soil. No social excitement, no lecture, theatre, book, or friendly talk, offered itself to the tired laborer when he came home at night. To drink, to indulge his passions, was the only change life offered him. For the women,-God forgive the men who brought them here!if they sought stimulants or anodynes, how could they be to blame? And Dr. Holland said, that the pioneers were an inefficient set, who wandered from State to State, from pure shiftlessness! I tell you, that since the days of the Anakim God never made such men as the men who redeemed the State of Illinois. Whatever else you do, don't call us shiftless !”

And because my own testimony would hardly be sufficient, I copy from the lecture on Ann Rutledge what Mr. Herndon himself has said of these men. Speaking of the people of New Salem, where Mr. Lincoln came, partly as shopkeeper and partly as surveyor, just as he attained his majority, the lecturer says:

"Here it was that every new-comer was initiated, quickly, sharply, and rudely, into the lights and mysteries of Western civilization. The stranger was compelled, if he assumed the appearance of a man, to walk through the strength and courage of naturally great men. They were men of no college culture, but they had many and broad, well-tested experiences. They had good sense and sound judgment, and, if the stranger bore himself well, he became a brother of the clan forever. If he failed, quickly, amid their mocking jeers, he sank out of sight. He existed, if at all, to be an enemy, to be killed at first sight by any of the clan, or to be scorched in a social hell forevermore. This is not a fancy pic