Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1887 — Lincoln as Postmaster. [ARTICLE]

Lincoln as Postmaster.

In the spring of this year, 1833, he was appointed Postmaster of New Salem, and held the office for. three years. Its emoluments were slender and its duties light, but there” was in all probability no citizen of the village who could have made so much of it as he. The mails were so scanty that he was said to carry them in his hat, and he is also reported to have read every newspaper that arrived; it is altogether likely that this formed the leading inducement to his taking the office. His incumbency lasted until New Salem ceased to be populous enough for a post-station and the mail went by to Petersburg. Dr. Holland relates a sequel to this official experience which illustrates the quaint honesty of the man. Several years later, when he was a practicing lawyer, an agent of the Postoffice Department J called - upon him, and .asked for a balance due from the New Salem office, some sl7. Lincoln arose, and opening a little trunk which lay in a corner of the room, took from it a cotton rag in which was tied up the exact sum that was required. “I never use any man’s money but my own.” he quietly remarked. When we consider the pinching poverty in which these years had been passed, we may appreciate the self-denial which had kept him from making even a temporary use of this little sum of Government money ,—Xicolay. and Hay, in th& Century. Never does a man portray his own character so vividly as in his manner of portraying another’s.