The springboard to the development of Lincoln’s ambition can be traced to his recognition, even as a young boy, that he was gifted with an exceptionally intelligent, clear, and inquisitive mind. Schoolmates in the ABC school in rural Kentucky where he was taught to read and write at the age of seven recalled that he was able to learn more swiftly and understand more deeply than others. Though he was able to attend school only sporadically, when his father didn’t require his labor on their hardscrabble farm, he stood without peer at the top of every class. “He was the learned boy among us unlearned folks,” one classmate recalled. “He carried away from his brief schooling,” his biographer David Herbert Donald observes, “the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal.” A dream that he might someday be in a situation to make the most of his talents began to take hold.
In the age-old debate about whether leadership traits are innate or developed, memory—the ease and capacity with which the mind stores information—is generally considered an inborn trait. From his earliest days in school, Lincoln’s comrades remarked upon his phenomenal memory, “the best,” the most “marvelously retentive,” they had ever encountered. His mind seemed “a wonder,” a friend told him, “impressions were easily made upon it and never effaced.” Lincoln told his friend he was mistaken. What appeared a gift, he argued, was, in his case, a developed talent. “I am slow to learn,” he explained, “and slow to forget what I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.” His stepmother, who came to love him as if he were her own son, observed the arduous process by which he engraved things into his memory. “When he came upon a passage that Struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there until he did get paper,” she recalled, “and then he would rewrite it” and keep it in a scrapbook so that he could preserve it.
While his mind was neither quick nor facile, young Lincoln possessed singular powers of reasoning and comprehension, unflagging curiosity, and a fierce, almost irresistible, compulsion to understand the meaning of what he heard, read, or was taught. “When a mere child,” Lincoln later said, “I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I do not think I ever got angry at anything else in my life.” When he “got on a hunt for an idea” he could not sleep until he “caught it,” and even then was not able to rest until he had “bounded it north and bounded it south, and bounded it east and bounded it west.”
Early on, Abraham revealed a keystone attribute essential to success in any field—the motivation and willpower to develop every talent he possessed to the fullest. “The ambition of the man soared above us,” his childhood friend Nathaniel Grigsby recalled. “He read and thoroughly read his books whilst we played.” When he first learned how to print the letters of the alphabet, he was so excited that he formed “letters, words and sentences wherever he found suitable material. He scrawled them in charcoal, he scored them in the dust, in the sand, in the snow—anywhere and everywhere that lines could be drawn.” He soon became “the best penman in the neighborhood.”
Sharing his knowledge with his schoolmates at every turn, he soon became “their guide and leader.” A friend recalled the “great pains” he took to explain to her “the movements of the heavenly bodies,” patiently telling her that the moon was not really sinking, as she initially thought; it was the earth that was moving, not the moon. “When he appeared in Company,” another friend recalled, “the boys would gather & cluster around him to hear him talk.” With kindness, playfulness, wit, and wisdom, he would explain “things hard for us to understand by stories—maxims—tales and figures. He would almost always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near as that we might instantly see the force & bearing of what he said.” He understood early on that concrete examples and stories provided the best vehicles for teaching.
He had developed his talent for storytelling, in part, from watching his father. Though Thomas Lincoln was unable to read or write, he possessed wit, a talent for mimicry, and an uncanny memory for exceptional stories. Night after night, Thomas would exchange tales with farmers, carpenters, and peddlers as they passed along the old Cumberland Trail. Young Lincoln sat spellbound in the corner. After listening to the adults chatter through the evening, Abraham would spend “no small part of the night walking up and down,” attempting to figure out what they were saying. No small part of his motivation was to entertain his friends the next day with a simplified and riotous version of the arcane adult world.
He thrived when holding forth on a tree stump or log captivating the appreciative attention of his young audience, and before long had built a repertoire of stories and great storytelling skills. At the age of ten, a relative recalled, Abraham learned to mimic “the Style & tone” of the itinerant Baptist preachers who appeared irregularly in the region. To the delight of his friends, he could reproduce their rip-roaring sermons almost word for word, complete with gestures of head and hand to emphasize emotion. Then, as he got older, he found additional material for his storytelling by walking fifteen miles to the nearest courthouse, where he soaked up the narratives of criminal trials, contract disputes, and contested wills and then retold the cases in lurid detail.
His stories often had a point—a moral along the lines of one of his favorite books, Aesop’s Fables—but sometimes they were simply funny tales that he had heard and would retell with animation. When he began to speak, his face, the natural contours of which gave off a sorrowful aspect, would light up with a transforming “winning smile.” And when he reached the end of his story, he would laugh with such heartiness that soon everyone was laughing with him.
Not all his humorous gifts were filled with gentle hilarity, and he would learn to muzzle his more caustic and mocking rejoinders. An early case in point was one Josiah Crawford who had lent Lincoln his copy of Parson Weems’s Life of Washington. During a severe rainstorm, the book was damaged. Crawford demanded that Lincoln repay the value of the book by working two full days pulling corn. Lincoln considered this unfair, but nonetheless set to work until “there was not a corn blade left on a stalk.” Later, however, he wrote a verse lampooning Crawford’s unusually large, ugly nose, reciting “Josiah blowing his bugle” for the entertainment of his friends.
If he was the hub of his young circle’s entertainment, he was also their foremost contrarian, willing to face their disapproval rather than abandon what he considered right. The boys in the neighborhood, one schoolmate recollected, liked to play a game of catching turtles and putting hot coals on their backs to see them wriggle. Abe not only told them “it was wrong,” he wrote a short essay in school against “cruelty to animals.” Nor did Lincoln feel compelled to share in the folkways of the frontier—a harsh culture in which children learned, for survival and for sport, to shoot and kill birds and animals. After killing a wild turkey with his father’s rifle when he was eight years old, he never again “pulled a trigger on any larger game.”
These attitudes were not merely moral postures. The young boy possessed a profound sense of empathy—the ability to put himself in the place of others, to imagine their situations and identify with their feelings. One winter night, a friend remembered, he and Abraham were walking home when they saw something lying in a mud hole. “It was a man, he was dead drunk,” and “nearly frozen.” Abe picked him up and carried him all the way to his cousin’s house, where he built a fire to warm him up. On another occasion, when Lincoln was walking with a group of friends, he passed a pig caught in a stretch of boggy ground. The group continued on for half a mile when Lincoln suddenly stopped. He insisted on turning back to rescue the pig. He couldn’t bear the pain he felt in his own mind when he thought of the pig.
Lincoln’s size and strength bolstered his authority with his peers. From an early age, he was more athletic than most of the boys in the neighborhood, “ready to out-run, out-jump and out-wrestle or out-lift
anybody.” As a young man, one friend reported, he “could carry what 3 ordinary men would grunt & sweat at.” Blessed with uncommon strength, he was also favored with robust health. Relatives recalled that he was never sick. Lincoln’s physical dominance proved a double-edged sword, however, for he was expected, from the age of eight to the age of twenty-one, to accompany his father into the fields, wielding an axe, felling trees, digging up stumps, splitting rails, plowing, and planting. His father considered that bones and muscles were “sufficient to make a man” and that time in school was “doubly wasted.” In rural areas, the only schools were subscription schools, so it not only cost a family money to give a child an education, but the classroom took the child away from manual labor. Accordingly, when Lincoln reached the age of nine or ten, his own formal education was cut short.
Left on his own, Abraham had to educate himself. He had to take the initiative, assume responsibility for securing books, decide what to study, become his own teacher. He made things happen instead of waiting for them to happen. Gaining access to reading material proved nearly insurmountable. Relatives and neighbors recalled that Lincoln scoured the countryside to borrow books and read every volume “he could lay his hands on.” A book was his steadfast companion. Every respite from the daily manual tasks was a time to read a page or two from Pilgrim’s Progress or Aesop’s Fables, pausing while resting his horse at the end of a long row of planting.
Some leaders learn by writing, others by reading, still others by listening. Lincoln preferred reading aloud in the presence of others. “When I read aloud,” Lincoln later explained, “two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I remember it better.” Early on, he possessed a vivid sensibility for the music and rhythm of poetry and drama; he recited long stanzas and passages from memory. When the time came to return the borrowed books, he had made them his own. As he explored literature and the history of the country, the young Lincoln, already conscious of his own powers, began to imagine ways of living beyond those of his family and neighbors.
When his father found his son in the field reading a book or, worse still, distracting fellow workers with tales or passages from one of his books, he would angrily break up the performance so work might continue. On occasion, he would go so far as to destroy Abraham’s books and whip him for neglecting his labors. To Thomas, Abraham’s chronic reading was tantamount to dereliction, a mark of laziness. He thought his son was deceiving himself with his quest for education. “I tried to stop it, but he has got that fool idea into his head, and it can’t be got out,” Thomas told a friend.
At times, when the tensions with his father seemed unbearable, when the gap between his lofty ambitions and the reality of his circumstances seemed too great to bridge, Lincoln was engulfed by sadness, revealing a pensive, melancholy side to his temperament that became more pronounced as time went by. “His melancholy dript from him as he walked,” said his junior law partner William Herndon, an observation echoed by dozens of others. “No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character was so marked,” recalled his friend Henry Clay Whitney, “as his mysterious and profound melancholy.” Yet, if melancholy was part of his nature, so, too, was the life-affirming humor that allowed him to perceive what was funny or ludicrous in life, lightening his despair and fortifying his will. Both Lincoln’s storytelling and his humor, friends believed, were “necessary to his very existence”; they were intended “to whistle off sadness.”
In the end, the unending strain with his father enhanced, rather than diminished, young Lincoln’s ambition. Year after year, as he persevered in defiance of his father’s wishes, managing his negative emotions and exercising his will to slowly master one subject after another, he developed an increasing belief in his own strengths and powers. He came to trust “that he was going to be something,” his cousin Sophie Hanks related, slowly creating what one leadership scholar calls “a vision of an alternative future.” He told a neighbor he did not “intend to delve, grub, shuck corn, split rails and the like. I’ll study and get ready, and then the chance will come.”
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Opportunity arrived the moment he reached twenty-one, the age of majority, releasing him from his near-indentured lot in his father’s home. “Seeing no prospect of betterment in his condition, so long as his fortune was interwoven with that of his father,” one friend recalled him saying, “he at last endeavored to strike out into the broad world.” Bundling his sparse possessions on his shoulders, he headed west, walking more than one hundred miles to reach New Salem, where he had been promised a job as a clerk and bookkeeper in a general store. A bustling small town, recently sprung up along the Sangamon River, New Salem boasted a gristmill that “supplied a large section of the county with its meal, flour and lumber.” The entire settlement consisted of a few hundred people, fifteen log cabins, a tavern, a church, a blacksmith, a schoolmaster, a preacher, and a general store.
To the villagers of New Salem, the tall young stranger struck them as odd and unappealing. “Gawky and rough-looking,” with dark weathered skin, great ears, high cheekbones, and black quill-like hair, he was dressed in “the most ludicrous character. His long arms protruded through the sleeves of a coat,” and his pantaloons were “far better adapted for a man of much less height, which left exposed a pair of socks.”
From this unprepossessing start, how was Lincoln able to establish himself so quickly in the minds of the residents that within eight months they encouraged him to run for a seat in the state legislature? The answer, one local man explained, lay in Lincoln’s sociability, his “open—candid—obliging & honest” good nature. “Everybody loved him.” He would help travelers whose carriages were mired in mud; he volunteered to chop wood for widows; he was ever ready to lend a “spontaneous, unobtrusive” hand. Almost anyone who had contact with him in the little community spoke of his kindness, generosity, intelligence, humor, humility, and his striking, original character. Rather than golden mythmaking tales spun in the wake of Lincoln’s historic presidency, these stories, told by the score, join into a chorus of the New Salem community to form an authentic portrait of a singular young man.
Working as a clerk in New Salem’s general store provided Lincoln with an ideal foundation upon which to build his political career. The general store “filled a unique place” on the frontier. Beyond the sale of groceries, hardware, cloth, and bonnets, the village store provided “a kind of intellectual and social center,” a place where villagers gathered to read the newspaper, discuss the local sporting contests, and, mainly, argue about politics in an era when politics was a consuming, almost universal concern. For the farmers, who might ride fifty miles to grind grain into flour at the village gristmill, the store offered a common meeting place to unwind, exchange opinions, share stories.
Within weeks, a fellow clerk recalled, Lincoln’s gregarious nature and cornucopia of funny stories had made him “a Center of attraction.” The townspeople regarded him as “among the best clerks” they had ever seen. “He was attentive to his business,” one villager remembered, “was kind and considerate to his customers & friends and always treated them with great tenderness.” At the same time, his “unabashed eagerness to learn” deeply impressed the people of New Salem. A volume of poetry or book of prose was always kept behind the counter so he could read during a lull in the general store’s business. In discussions about politics, he revealed an intimate familiarity with the issues of the day. Clearly, this was no ordinary clerk. The local families were attracted by his reflective, gentle, meditative temperament. They wanted him to prosper. They felt part of his upward climb. They lent him books. The village cooper kept “a fire of shavings sufficiently bright” so that Lincoln could come into his place at night and read.
“When he was ignorant on any subject,” one friend recalled, “no matter how simple it might make him appear he was always willing to acknowledge it.” When he told the schoolmaster he had never studied grammar and wanted to do so, the schoolmaste
r agreed that if he ever wanted to speak in public this was something he had to learn. While no one in New Salem had a proper grammar text, the schoolmaster knew of a volume in a house six miles away. Lincoln rose from the table and started out on foot to procure the book. Returning with a treasured copy of Kirkham’s English Grammar, he began at once to sort through the complicated rules governing the structure of sentences and the use of adverbs and adjectives. He worked hard to develop a simple, compact style of speaking and writing, with short, clear sentences that could be “understood by all classes.”
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The handbill Lincoln published announcing his candidacy stretched to two thousand words. Clearly, he labored over the statement to let people know how he stood on public issues and to declare something of his nature and character. He ran as a member of the Whig Party in a county that was predominantly Democratic. He stood for four central ideas—the creation of a national bank, protective tariffs, governmental support for internal improvements, and an expanded system of public education. A state representative could do little to promote national banking or high tariffs. The call for public education and for infrastructure projects to improve roads, rivers, harbors, and railways was not simply a matter of Whig boilerplate, however, but an expression of deeply urgent needs involving his own aspirations and those of his little community.
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