A leading promoter of that enterprise, Francis Arnez, edited the Beardstown Chronicle, whose columns in November 1834 contained a slashing attack on Peter Cart-wright, a prominent Methodist minister and Jacksonian politico. Though signed “Sam Hill,” the piece was actually written by Lincoln, who sent it to Arnez after the Sangamo Journal had rejected it. (Arnez agreed to run it only as a paid advertisement.) The irascible, vindictive Hill, known as “the rich man of the village” and “the potentate” with “a peculiar temper” so explosive that he could not drive a carriage team, had been quarreling with the belligerent Cartwright, who lived 6 miles from New Salem in Pleasant Plains. During an earlier squabble with Jack Armstrong, Hill had hired someone to thrash that leader of the Clary’s Grove boys. Now he employed Lincoln to attack Cart-wright with a pen rather than fists. Lincoln had no special fondness for Cartwright, one of the four candidates who had beaten him out for a legislative seat in 1832. Lincoln’s inflammatory 1,500-word philippic, dated September 7, 1834, accused Cartwright of being “a most abondoned hypocrite” and concluded that it was hard to tell whether he “is [a] greater fool or knave” and that “he has but few rivals in either capacity.” (The attack was clever but unfair, based on a misreading of Cartwright’s writings.) Thus began a pattern of anonymous and pseudonymous journalistic assaults that did Lincoln little credit. (He would quit that ugly practice in 1842, when an offended target of his ridicule challenged him to a duel, an episode discussed in chapter 6.)
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃