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Taken from an old print

Lincoln debating with Douglas in 1858

It is hard to realize that, even later in his career, and with all his mighty strength and courage, the man who preserved “government of the people, for the people, and by the people” to the world could earn only thirty-seven cents a day, and that he had “to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark that would be necessary to make him a pair of trousers.”

When he was President of the United States he told Secretary Seward the story of how he had once taken two men and their trunks to a river steamer in a flatboat built by his own hands, and got a dollar for it.

“In these days it seems like a trifle to me,” he added, “but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar.”

In 1828 Mr. Gentry, of Gentryville, loaded a flatboat with produce, put his son in charge of it and hired Lincoln for eight dollars a month and board to work the bow oars and take it to New Orleans. Near Baton Rouge the young men tied the boat up at night and were asleep in a cabin when they were awakened to find a gang of negroes attempting to plunder the cargo. With a club Lincoln knocked several of the marauders into the river and chased the rest for some distance, returning bloody but victorious. The boat was then hurriedly cut loose, and they floated on all night.