It was Weems’s book that stuck with Lincoln. When he traveled to Washington for his first inaugural, Lincoln told the New Jersey Senate he could not forget Weems’s account of Washington’s struggles at Trenton—“the crossing of the river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships . . . I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.”34 Lincoln knew by then, if not well before, that Weems’s book was as much fiction as real history, but it never bothered him. Decades before his political ascent, Lincoln understood that the myth could count even more than the facts because what people believed, what drove them to action, was what mattered most.
As late in his life as 1865, he told his friend and law partner William Herndon that the biographies of great men “are all alike. You might as well print up these biographies with blank titles and fill in the name of any subject that you please.”35 They “are written as false and misleading,” he told Herndon, “never once hinting at [the subject’s] failures and blunders.” Those “failures and blunders” were as important to Lincoln as their successes, because he learned from them both. But instead, the biographies then available “can fill up eloquently and grandly at pleasure, thus commemorating a lie, an injury to the dying and to the name of the dead.” Lincoln suggested that booksellers should have “blank biographies on their shelves always already for sale—so that, when a man dies, and his heirs—children and friends wish to perpetuate the memory of the dead, they can purchase one already written, but with blanks, which they can fill up eloquently and grandly at pleasure, thus commemorating [the] names of the dead.”36 Lincoln lived in an age without professional biographies and thus could shape his “tale” as he liked. If left unattended, his story would be up for grabs. Properly tended and with stretches of truth but not outright lies, it could be enduring.
Another book that Lincoln likely read was Lindley Murray’s Reader, which was popular in homes and schools throughout Lincoln’s youth. A strong supporter of the war for independence, Murray became a grammarian and editor of many books that were in large demand as manuals for instructing young children on reading, grammar, and writing. Issued at the end of the eighteenth century, Murray’s Reader was full of classical moral axioms from the ancient Greeks and Romans as well as from British magazines like The Spectator and other Enlightenment moral sources. Such readings enriched the appreciation of young Lincoln for writing to convey moral instruction and for constructing allegories, fables, and stories.37
The Bible, Aesop, Murray, chronicles of the lives of public figures—Lincoln considered them dynamic, elastic tools to influence opinions, not accounts of facts and not to be interpreted as such. Another influential book that shaped Lincoln’s understanding of the founding of the republic was William Grimshaw’s History of the United States, first published in 1821. Grimshaw considered himself an objective historian and wrote many history textbooks that were widely used in Lincoln’s day. This book, Grimshaw’s most popular, was intended to inspire young people to adopt the values (as Grimshaw understood them to be) of the men who wrote the Constitution and won independence. It began with the discovery of the United States and ended with Florida’s acquisition in 1819. It finished with an account of Northern states establishing laws for emancipation and prohibiting slavery. Grimshaw exhorted his readers, “Let us not only declare by words, but demonstrate by our actions, ‘That all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with the same unalienable rights; that, amongst these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”38
These stirring words were, of course, the self-evident truths set forth in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln memorized the entire document, and of all that he read in his life, its words might well have been the most influential. Indeed, he devoted his adult life to reminding the American people that these words were the promises that the American Constitution was established to ensure. In an 1856 speech, he described it as the “sheet anchor of our principles.”39 Two years earlier in Peoria, he had instructed his audience, “Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonizes with it.”40
But not everything Lincoln read was as civic-minded. Humor delighted him; he mimicked the styles of the different speakers he heard and the writers he loved, and he adored telling funny stories and jokes. There was good reason to believe his gift of storytelling came naturally or at least ran in the family. Dennis Hanks recalled that Lincoln’s father, Thomas, “could beat his son telling a story—cracking a joke.”41 Watching his father bring laughter to a room was a powerful example of how even someone whose reputation did not much include amusement and diversion could win the crowd in the right circumstance with skilled deployment of narrative.
Lincoln’s cheekiness is evident in two poems he wrote when he was in his teens if not younger, penned in his arithmetic book. The first announced, “Abraham Lincoln / His hand and pen / He will be good / But God knows when,” and the other, “Abraham Lincoln is my name / And with my pen I wrote the same / I wrote in both hast and speed / And left it here for fools to read.”42 While these rhymes may not suggest a sophisticated fascination with poetry, in fact Lincoln was genuinely entranced by the art. As a boy, he read Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” a poem he quoted often. As president, he once told campaign biographer John Locke Scripps, “It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”43
Besides the poems he encountered in the readers he had at school, Lincoln would have come across poetry in William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, another of the books that his stepmother had brought into their home. Around 1825, Lincoln began to read the Scott collection closely, which included Shakespeare, a writer who, along with Robert Burns, Lincoln quoted frequently throughout his life. (Later, as president, he wrote, “I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.”)
Lincoln’s facility with rhyme and wit was not always used virtuously. Around the age of nineteen, he wrote “Chronicles of Reuben,” based on incidents dating back to 1826, when Lincoln’s sister married Aaron Grigsby, whose family were neighbors of the Lincolns. When Sarah died in childbirth, Lincoln blamed Aaron and the Grigsbys for waiting too long to call a doctor to save her. His bitterness increased when he was not invited to the joint wedding celebration of Aaron’s brothers Reuben and Charles, who were married on the same day. Lincoln purportedly arranged, through a friend, for Reuben and Charles to be brought to the wrong bedrooms, where each other’s wife awaited after the wedding party. Lincoln wrote a description of the incident in “Chronicles of Reuben” as payback. Patterned after biblical scripture, a prose narrative was followed by a poem about Billy Grigsby, another of Aaron’s brothers, who, it says, “married Natty,” who was another man. Lincoln’s neighbor Joseph Richardson claimed that “Chronicles of Reuben” was “remembered here in Indiana in scraps better than the Bible.”44 The episode was among Lincoln’s earliest exploitations of the power of public ridicule and the sway it conferred on those who wield it. What he called “the power to hurt,” a phrase he borrowed from a Shakespeare sonnet, would remain useful, though not the “chief weapon in his rhetorical arsenal.”
A final book that fed Lincoln’s love of language and allegory was John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, first published in 1678 and quickly translated into over a hundred languages. By the time Lincoln’s father gave him a copy of the book (borrowed from a neighbor), it was second only to the Bible in its popularity in the United States. The youngster may have first discovered it when Benjamin Franklin referred to it in his autobiography, another book Lincoln loved. When Abe first discovered Bunyan’s tale, his “eyes sparkled, and all that day he could not eat, and that night he could not sleep.”45 Sometimes called (erroneously) the first lengt
hy prose narrative in English, The Pilgrim’s Progress tells the story of an everyman known as Christian who flees the City of Destruction (this world) and is instructed to follow the narrow path to the Celestial City, “That Which Is to Become” as the full title puts it. The quest is filled with set pieces that became some of Lincoln’s favorite fables, and the tale as a whole was inspiring to a young man who dreamed of beating the odds to become a hero.
III
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The histories and biographies Abe read sparked an interest in politics, as did the nearly daily conversations in his house and in the neighborhood. Thomas was a proud Democrat, as were most of the people in Abe’s family and the neighboring homes. They all felt betrayed by the federal government, which was tightening their credit and backing the big businesses gouging them. As is the wont of many children, Lincoln adopted his father’s party affiliation.
Nineteenth-century America was not ripe with the sort of “nonprofit” organizations that now constellate our daily lives. A political career held the greatest promise for a young man who saw public service, not family or acquiring money, as his principal calling. To feed his interest in what he saw as this much more virtuous pursuit, Lincoln discussed politics every chance he had with friends and neighbors. In 1828, he went to work for Colonel William Jones, a local postmaster only six years older than Lincoln. Jones hired Lincoln as a farmhand and as a land clerk in his tiny general store, where Lincoln sometimes slept, even though his family’s cabin was only about a mile and a half away. Jones was a graduate of the first public university in Indiana, Vincennes University, and his store became a popular gathering place for young men to debate political issues. Henry Clay Whitney, an Illinois friend of Lincoln’s, recalled Abe telling him, “The sessions were held in Jones’ store, where the auditors and disputants sat on the counter, on inverted nail kegs, or lolled upon barrels or bags, while the wordy contest raged.”46 He further said Lincoln explained that “the questions selected for discussion were not concrete. At one time there would be a debate upon the relative forces of wind and water; at another, upon the comparative wrongs of the Indians and the negro; the relative merits of the ant and the bee; also of water and fire.”47 Dennis Hanks, who sometimes joined in the sessions, recalled that “Lincoln would frequently make political speeches to the boys; he was always calm, logical, and clear. His jokes and stories were so odd, original, and witty all the people in town would gather around him. He would keep them all till midnight. Abe was a good talker, a good reasoner, and a kind of newsboy.”48
Similarly, Nathaniel Grigsby, who had made his peace with Lincoln by this time and had become, like Lincoln, a regular participant in the Jones’s store debate, recollected that “we attended [the debates]—heard questions discussed—talked everything over and over and in fact wore it out.”49 Grigsby acknowledged, “We learned much in this way,” and, as for Lincoln, Grigsby added (perhaps in a rose-colored recollection), “His mind and the ambition of the man soared above us. He naturally assumed the leadership of the boys. He read and thoroughly read his books whilst we played.”50 Grigsby found that “Lincoln was figurative in his speeches, talks, and conversations. He argued much from analogy and explained things hard for us to understand by stories, maxims, tales, and figures. He would almost always point [out] his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near, as that we might instantly see the force and bearing of what he said.”51 Grigsby agreed that Jones was “Lincoln’s guide and teacher in politics.”52
In the 1828 presidential election, the Democrats’ champion was John Quincy Adams’s foe, Andrew Jackson, who had lost to Adams four years before. Lincoln and Dennis Hanks “went to political and other speeches” and heard “all sides and opinions.” Hanks remembered that “Lincoln was originally a Democrat after the order of Jackson—so was his father—so we all were.”53 David Turnham and Elizabeth Crawford, who both knew Lincoln in Indiana, recalled Lincoln and his father as “Jackson men” when they left for Illinois in 1830.54 Abe had even been heard singing, “Let auld acquaintance be forgot / And never brought to mind. / May Jackson be our president /And Adams left behind.”55 This was the song of a Jackson man.
However, something happened that changed the political scene in the 1820s and 1830s. Henry Clay took the lead in assembling a new political party. He called it the Whig Party, a name he borrowed from the British political party that favored legislative rather than executive dominance, emphasizing the importance of Parliament over the king as the best and most effective representatives of the people. Dennis Hanks remembered that “Colonel Jones made [Abraham] a Whig.”56 Jones backed John Quincy Adams in 1828, and though Clay was not a candidate in that election, several contemporaries in Indiana remembered Lincoln’s memorizing Clay’s speeches, reciting them for his friends, and praising Clay, as the newspapers did, as “Harry of the West.” Jones had a library, and he subscribed to several newspapers as well as having at least temporary access to all the others that came through his office as postmaster. In those days, newspapers were the lifeblood of American democracy. They were the principal sources of news and notable speeches, particularly on the national stage. They also generally adhered to their owners’ politics. Jones introduced Lincoln to the New York Telescope, the Washington Intelligencer, the Western Register, and the Louisville Gazette, all of which were Whig papers. Thus informed and influenced, as Lincoln prepared to leave his father’s home for good, his choice on which of the two men to follow was already taking shape.
IV
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For most of Abraham Lincoln’s life, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay were the two titans fighting over the future of America. They both were born before the American Revolution ended, and both men were tall. Jackson was six one, thin and sinewy. Clay was six three, and those who came to hear his oratory often remarked how he slowly unfurled to his full height as he rose to make his point. Lincoln grew to be the tallest of the three. His stature—in both the literal and figurative sense—would one day come to dwarf both men.
Jackson was ten years older than Clay and had fought in the War of Independence. It was a well-known fact in Lincoln’s era that Jackson and his brother Robert had been captured by the British in 1781, and while in captivity, both had famously refused to shine the boots of a British officer, who slashed Jackson’s face, giving him a scar that he wore proudly for the rest of his life.
Clay and Jackson both came from modest backgrounds, though Jackson’s family was poorer. Jackson’s father had died before he was born, and Clay’s father had died when he was four. Jackson’s mother moved in with her sister’s family, while Clay’s mother remarried, so Clay grew up in a crowded home with siblings and stepsiblings. Jackson attended a one-room schoolhouse for a year before entering a local academy for a year or two, while Clay was put on a fast track to become educated in Richmond. Both men took great pains to emphasize—indeed, exaggerate—their humble origins,57 which did not slow either of them down. They both studied law. Jackson did it almost entirely on his own: he briefly apprenticed for a lawyer in Salisbury, North Carolina, and then, with the help of several other local attorneys, was admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1787. Clay secured a coveted clerkship with the Virginia Court of Chancery, and his neat handwriting caught the eye of one judge, the esteemed George Wythe, America’s first law teacher, who had mentored both Thomas Jefferson and the great chief justice John Marshall. Because Wythe had a crippled hand, he could not write for himself, so he hired Clay, then sixteen, as his secretary for the next four years. Wythe’s influence on Clay was profound. “To no man,” Clay said in 1851, “was I more indebted by his instructions, his advice, and his example.”58 Clay said that he learned his lifelong opposition to slavery from Wythe.
For a short while, Jackson practiced law but quickly moved on to become a prosecutor, land speculator, and most important, protégé of one of Tennessee’s most colorful and controversial leaders, William Blount. Blount had been one of North Carolina’s deleg
ates to the Constitutional Convention and a signatory to the Constitution. With Blount’s support, Jackson became Tennessee’s first attorney general and a delegate to Tennessee’s constitutional convention in 1796. When Tennessee became a state the next year, Jackson was elected as its first and only representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. A year later, Jackson was elected to the Senate, arriving there shortly after the House had impeached his mentor, Blount, and the Senate then expelled him for having conspired with the British to take control of Spanish Florida in exchange for money that would have helped him to pay off the enormous debts he had incurred as a land speculator.59 Jackson left the Senate less than a year later to return to Tennessee, where he was elected to the Tennessee Supreme Court, on which he served until 1804.
Clay was experiencing his own meteoric rise to power. Already established as a lawyer (who sometimes corresponded with Andrew Jackson on legal matters), he was elected to the Kentucky General Assembly at the age of twenty-six. In 1804, Aaron Burr, Jefferson’s vice president, killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and then headed west to make a fortune. He was in Kentucky when he was charged with treason. (Burr had apparently been in discussions with William Blount over some “land scheme.”) Burr turned to Clay and, with co-counsel John Allen, convinced him that the real plot was a Republican vendetta against him. Clay got the charges dismissed when a key witness failed to appear at trial. As Clay, already renowned for his eloquence, later explained,
Such was our conviction of the innocence of the accused, that, when he sent a considerable fee, we resolved to decline accepting it, and accordingly returned it. We said to each other, Col. Burr has been an eminent member of the profession, has been attorney general of the State of New York, is prosecuted without cause, in a distant State, and we ought not to regard him in the light of an ordinary culprit.60
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