Jairo Ramos

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Chapter #3

In 1832 Abraham formed a partnership with William F. Berry,

A preacher’s son,

To buy Offut’s store,

And Lincoln and Berry took it over too

There was some talk that is owner had been driven out by Clary Grove Boys.

The entire purchase was made possible through the acceptance of promissory notes,

By which Lincoln and Berry assumed a considerabledebt payable to sundry genial New Salemites who believed in them.

Billy Herndon asserted that no more unfortunate partner than Berry could have been found.

“For while Lincoln’s was at one end of the store dispensing political information,

Berry at the other was disposing of the firm’s liquors…

Lincoln’s application to Shakespeare and Burns was only equaled by Berry’s attention toSpiggott and Barrel”

The business struggle,

By the following spring,

Two brothers purchased the store from Lincoln and Berry,

But before there notes fell due,

They in turn had gone broke and fled without paying a cent.

Lincoln could have sought refuge in bankruptcy.

But there was rectitude in him,

A seriousness about a capital,

That compelled him to assumed and pay it off,Over the better part of the next few decades,

The entire dept.

Apart from the impact on his honor,

A failure to do so would have destroyed his only political base,

Though it was an increasingly dwindling one,

At New Salem.

In 1833,

Probably through the good offices of influential friends,

The democratic president,

Andrew Jackson,

Was persuades to appoint Lincolnpostmaster at New Salem.

The wages were thirty dollars per annum,

Not enough to make a dent in his financial burden,

Which with typical irony he named the

“National dept”.

The post office,

However, did not occupy him continuously,

The spite the fact that his frontier scrupulousness had him pursuing for miles a costumer who had over paid for postage,

And taking time-consumingpains to hunt down the addresses of letters.

The rest of the time he cut rails,

Worked at the mill or sawmill,

And help out with harvest and in new Salem’s surviving stores.

The survivor of Sangamon also offered to the pute to Lincoln any surveying work within his part of the county,

And so Abraham procured a compass and chain,

Studied surveying books

“a little”,

And wentat it.

In this task,

This took him to many parts of the county,

His amiability impressed the citizenry.

The People of Coles County became used to the site of the gangling postmaster-surveyor hauling his instruments across a complicated and heavily wooded landscape,

With letters stock into him hatband for the livery to farms along the way.

Some notes he had signed to avoidbankruptcy became due for payment in 1834.

Creditors sued,

And the sheriff took possession of his horse,

Bridled, and surveying instruments.

But a friend,

A farmer named Jimmy Short,

Bought them at auction and returned them to him.

Lincoln’s partner died soon after-Herndon says because of the ruin alcoholism had wrought on his constitution.

Since the

“National dept”Included berry’s share,

It reached at total of eleven hundred dollar.

It is a credit to people’s beliefs in him that from then under were few farther prosecutions over the dept-most waited for Lincoln to pay it off because the believed he would,

And in full.

This assumption of his honesty was reflected in the voting for the legislature in 1834.

He depended purely under on the range ofvoters he had gotten to know through his services in the Black Hawk War,

And through his work as postmaster and surveyor.

In an era of multiple representations for each county,

Lincoln came in a close second in a field of 13 candidates,

And so found himself a state assemblyman,

Soon to go off to represent Henry Clay’s Whigs in the estate capital at Vandalia.

Among the other...