Fire Memes for Traitor Haters

During this time, a group of bullies called the Clary Grove Boys was terrorizing any man who came to settle in the town. They would shove the newcomer into a barrel and let it roll downhill. One of these bullies was a big man named Jack Armstrong. Soon, villagers started urging Lincoln to take on Armstrong in a wrestling match. At the same time, Armstrong had also been hearing about this other young man who was good at grappling. Eventually, Armstrong challenged Lincoln to a fight.

Denton Offutt organized the match and prepared a wide space beside his store for the combat. He acted as if he was only offering entertainment for the local people, but he was actually after gambling and earning some money. Even though Armstrong was shorter, Offutt knew that many people would place their money on him because he was as strong as a bull. He also knew that Lincoln was good at wrestling because the young man had talked to him about his past fights. Before the fight began, Lincoln clarified to Armstrong that their wrestling match should be ruled by side holds, where either of them could throw the other rather than just hold the other down. Armstrong was not scared of Lincoln and did not care what rules they would fight under, so he agreed.

After the crowd placed their bets, the fight began. The two approached each other and started grappling and sizing up each other’s strengths. They seemed evenly matched, and no one could gain an edge to throw the other one. Eventually, Lincoln showed some signs that he was the stronger man. Sensing defeat, Armstrong attempted an underhanded move to make Lincoln stumble. Lincoln kept his balance but was angered by his opponent’s move. He gripped Armstrong’s neck with his two hands and shook him like a piece of cloth. The rest of the Clary Grove Boys moved in to gang up on Lincoln, who now had his back on the store’s wall. Lincoln shouted at them that he would take on any one of them in a fair fight. Just then, Armstrong gestured to his friends that he had lost the fight and to accept Lincoln as the winner. It was said that Lincoln and Armstrong became good friends after the fight.

There are a lot of accounts of the fight between Lincoln and Armstrong, that's only one. But, basically, he wrestled the strongest man in the county and absolutely fucked him up, and they were friends after that.

Lincoln walked over to the ax, picked it up by the butt, and held it out at arms’ length, parallel to the ground for as long as he could.

“Strong men who looked on, men accustomed to manual labor, could not hold the same ax in that position for a moment,” wrote Francis Fisher Browne, a Union soldier who authored a biography called “The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln."

The Richardson family, with whom Abe seemed to have lived as hired man, used to tell marvelous tales of his prowess, some of which may have grown somewhat in the telling. Mr. Richardson declared that the young man could carry as heavy a load as "three ordinary men." He saw Abe pick up and walk away with "a chicken house, made up of poles pinned together, and covered, that weighed at least six hundred if not much more."

When the Richardsons were building their corn-crib, Abe saw three or four men getting ready to carry several huge posts or timbers on "sticks" between them. Watching his chance, he coolly stepped in, shouldered all the timbers at once and walked off alone with them, carrying them to the place desired. He performed these feats off-hand, smiling down in undisguised pleasure as the men around him expressed their amazement. It seemed to appeal to his sense of humor as well as his desire to help others out of their difficulties.

Lincoln was walking back, late at night from Gentryville, where he and a number of cronies had spent the evening. As the youths were picking their way along the frozen road, they saw a dark object on the ground by the roadside. They found it to be an old sot they knew too well lying there, dead drunk. Lincoln stopped, and the rest, knowing the tenderness of his heart, exclaimed:

"Aw, let him alone, Abe. 'Twon't do him no good. He's made his bed, let him lay in it!"

The rest laughed—for the "bed" was freezing mud. But Abe could see no humor in the situation. The man might be run over, or freeze to death. To abandon any human being in such a plight seemed too monstrous to him. The other young men hurried on in the cold, shrugging their shoulders and shaking their heads—"Poor Abe!—he's a hopeless case," and left Lincoln to do the work of a Good Samaritan alone. He had no beast on which to carry the dead weight of the drunken man, whom he vainly tried, again and again, to arouse to a sense of the predicament he was in. At last the young man took up the apparently lifeless body of the mud-covered man in his strong arms, and carried him a quarter of a mile to a deserted cabin, where he made up a fire and warmed and nursed the old drunkard the rest of that night.

In many different ways, Abe Lincoln did not fuck around.

Edit: County, not country