“We have the benefit,” said he. “Let us stand to our obligation like men.”[v-20]
And so they did. Yet money for the first two payments--there were to be three in all--was scraped together with some difficulty; and worse still, when the third installment came due, no funds whatever seemed collectible. Many of the subscribers had become impoverished, while none of them were flush. So the required sum, $16,666.67, was borrowed from the State Bank of Illinois on a note that bore the signatures of one hundred and one citizens. They took eight years to discharge the debt. How hard it came for some of them to meet their share, what economies were practiced, what sacrifices made, can, in the nature of things, never be known. The episode itself, stripped of all these romantic details,--a simple tale of plain good faith,--must suffice for history. And it does suffice. For now, after more than two thirds of a century has elapsed, that painfully liquidated note is still extant. Framed and displayed in a banking-house at Springfield, where all who enter may see, it serves as a memorial to the rectitude of the community during those trying times.
They were trying times, indeed, and to none of these one hundred and one signers more so, perhaps, than to him who had written the name, “A. Lincoln.” When he came to the recently chosen capital, as we have seen, shortly after adjournment of the General Assembly, to seek his fortunes at the bar, this young politician’s financial condition was, in a sense, worse than penniless. The burden of “the national debt” lay upon him, and the few dollars in his pocket did not suffice--the reader will recall--to supply his most pressing wants. How those wants were met, first by a seat at Butler’s table, then by a place in Speed’s bed, may also be recalled. And possibly it is as well to add--for all these circumstances are of peculiar significance now--even the horse which carried him, a few weeks later, on his first trip around the circuit was borrowed from a colleague, Robert L. Wilson, of the “Long Nine.” That a man who had been one of the leading actors in an orgy of extravagant legislation should emerge from the session so impoverished as to be dependent momentarily upon the hospitality of one friend for food, of another for shelter, and of still another for the means of gaining a livelihood, is its own commentary on his probity. Nor does this appear less noteworthy, in the light of a commonly accepted belief that the “internal improvement” measures were tainted with personal corruption. The whirl of enticing opportunities during those rapid days is said to have swept more than one legislator off his feet. Yet the Sangamon chief stood steadfast. He could see nothing attractive in the illicit, or at least dubious, gains which were garnered by perverting official duties to selfish ends. In fact, then and thereafter--during that sinister period, as well as throughout his entire four consecutive terms in the Illinois House--Lincoln’s record, so far as such matters went, was spotless. Like certain other political leaders to whom private fortunes have been lacking, he followed the rule laid down in one of Daniel Webster’s aphorisms: “The man who enters public life takes upon himself a vow of poverty, to the religious observance of which he is bound so long as he remains in it.”