What Did the Young Lincoln Do When He Saw Boys Burning a Turtle?

Abraham Lincoln was a boy, maybe ten years old, walking with friends in Indiana.

They came across a group of other boys. The boys had found a turtle and were pressing hot coals onto its shell to watch it move.

Lincoln told them to stop.

The other boys laughed. He was scrawny, poor, the son of a struggling farmer. He had no authority. He just had the conviction that what they were doing was wrong — and that it was worth saying so out loud.

He wrote about it later in his first essay, a plea for kindness to animals. He described how the suffering of even a small creature was real and mattered. His law partner William Herndon remembered Lincoln saying, years later: "An ant's life is to her, as great, as ours to us."

The boy who stopped strangers from burning a turtle became the man who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Character doesn't appear when the stakes are high. It appears in the small moments — the ones where no one is watching, where nothing is required of you, where it would be easier and more comfortable to say nothing at all.

Lincoln said something.

He always did.