The 22-year-old Lincoln had arrived, as he would often say, like “a piece of floating driftwood” in the village of New Salem, in Sangamon County, in the summer of 1831. He described himself as “a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat—at ten dollars per month.” New Salem had existed for barely three years and had a population of about 100, a handful of whom had attended college. It was the most civilized and populous place Lincoln had ever lived… to continue reading please click here.
