A few things we know about him. He had established a reputation for courage, for kindness, and for honesty. "Honest Abe" was his sobriquet, and he deserved it. Whatever his opinions, he held them honestly; and neither on earth nor in heaven can any man be rightfully condemned for the holding of an honest opinion.
We shall have occasion later to refer to Mentor Graham, and to quote him. He came into Lincoln's life at this time, and taught him Kirkham's Grammar, and the study of surveying, and assisted him with his literary composition. He knew more of the mind of Abraham Lincoln during this period than any other man, and we shall hear from him in due time.
New Salem "winked out," as Lincoln was accustomed to say. It disappeared from the map. The post-office was discontinued. There was nothing to hold Lincoln there. But the great city of Springfield, with its one thousand inhabitants and its majestic pride in its new State Capitol, which Lincoln had done much to remove thither from Vandalia, beckoned to this ambitious young lawyer and politician, and on March 15, 1837, he borrowed a horse, rode to Springfield with all his worldly goods in his saddlebags, and the saddlebags none too full, and thereafter became a resident of the capital city of Illinois, and a permanent factor in its legal and political life.
Lincoln arrived in New Salem on April 19, 1831, a tall, lank flatboat hand, with his trousers rolled up "about five feet," and he left it on a borrowed horse with all his belongings in a pair of saddlebags, March 15, 1837. So far as worldly wealth was concerned, he was richer when he arrived at the age of twenty-two than when he left at the age of twenty-eight, for he was heavily in debt. It had fared better with him financially had he spent those six years in Illinois College at Jacksonville. He might have entered Springfield at the same time with a college diploma and a smaller debt. A college education was not impossible for him, and he might have had it had he cared for it as much as did the Green brothers or the brother of Ann Rutledge, or, among his later associates, Shelby M. Collum or Newton Bateman. It is a fair question whether an education under such good and great men as Julian M. Sturtevant and Edward Beecher would have been more or less valuable than what he actually got; in any event, it was not an impossibility if he had cared as much for it as did some other boys as poor as he.