Note iv-1 — Chapter IV · DOLLARS AND CENTS

Though under very different circumstances, Lincoln’s elation seems not unlike that of another famous man whose later life touched his at several points. The first dollar earned by Frederick Douglass, on free soil, in New Bedford, was paid to him, as he tells us, for stowing away a pile of coal for Mrs. Ephraim Peabody, the wife of a Unitarian minister. “I was not long in accomplishing the job,” runs his story, “when the dear lady put into my hand two silver half-dollars. To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me,—that it was mine,—that my hands were my own, and could earn more of the precious coin,—one must have been in some sense himself a slave.” (Douglass, 210.)