by Rich Lowry
He remained adept with it right to the end of his life. Shortly before his assassination, he visited a military field hospital and after shaking hands all day, held out an axe at arm’s length—grasping it from the butt—to prove his arm wasn’t tired. After he left, soldiers attempted it, but none of them could equal the feat of the president.
All of this speaks to an intense relationship with a tool that had proven most useful to man since the Paleolithic period. But Lincoln would never have been on that platform in Decatur if he hadn’t been inalterably determined to escape railsplitting. To escape rural backwardness. To escape his father. Escape unrequited toil. Escape, for that matter, physical toil of any sort. “I have seen a good deal of the back side of this world,” Lincoln once told a neighbor, in a remark shorn of any sentimentality for the places where he had done his chopping.
The America of Lincoln’s boyhood remained, more or less, the world of the Founders (both Adams and Jefferson still lived). Although the population had been growing at a rapid clip, people still lived overwhelmingly in Atlantic coast states. As of 1815, only about 15 percent of Americans made their homes farther inland. Poor transportation acted as a great wall blocking intercourse between the middle of the country and the East Coast. Commerce largely depended on rivers and the oceans; those areas out of reach of them were isolated and economically stunted. Merchant capitalists clustered in the cities along an eastern seaboard that, historian George Rogers Taylor writes, “provided the chief highway for travel and transportation by methods surprisingly little changed from the days of the Phoenicians.”
The country was almost uniformly agricultural. Cities were the exception that proved the rule. Only 5 percent of people lived in the metropolises of the time—cities with populations exceeding eight thousand. There were a grand total of thirteen of them. Many of the nation’s farms were all but islands unto themselves. Historian Bruce Levine writes that “market-oriented activities remained circumscribed and subordinate aspects of life.” Rural families “produced most of what they consumed or wore; purchases were few. About two-thirds of all clothes worn in the United States were homemade,” and “[a]s late as 1820, only 20 percent of the farm crop ever reached urban markets.”
It was a country of prodigious promise, almost entirely untapped. In the coming decades, its potential would begin to be unlocked in a series of epochal changes. A tide of migration headed out beyond the Alleghenies, dragging the country’s center of gravity away from the East Coast. (Indiana became a state right around the time the Lincolns arrived there in 1816, and Illinois just two years later.) A transportation and communications revolution drew the country closer together and transformed its economy, as canals, steamboats, railroads, and the telegraph worked daily miracles and brought to bear more and more of the country’s resources. Manufacturing began to take hold, the beginning of the country’s transition into a great industrial powerhouse. In a matter of decades what had been a youthful, predominantly rural country became a budding world power.
Lincoln was born into the old world, but he could feel the new one arising. It was toward this new, more sophisticated world of runaway economic advancement that he bent all his effort, both personal and—eventually—political. He wanted to expand its ambit so more people could enter it together with him. But first, obviously, he had to get there himself. He managed to do it through self-discipline and perseverance, through cultural uplift and education, through a relentless ethic of self-improvement central to his worldview all his life. Lincoln’s political character wasn’t formed by where he came from so much as by where he went and how he got there.
His law partner and biographer William Herndon famously wrote of Lincoln’s political career, “his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” Lincoln’s life invites us to put away any hesitance we may have about celebrating ambition. When we say of someone, he’s very ambitious, there’s usually a hint of disapproval or suspicion about it. But the most celebrated figure in American history felt an ambition to the very marrow of his bones—to make the most of himself and to achieve political fame. “Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition,” Lincoln wrote in his first message to voters in a political campaign. “Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”
Herndon’s engine metaphor could reach all the way back into those Indiana woods, where something helped ignite Lincoln’s striving. A friend of the Lincoln family in Kentucky captured it nicely in a letter to Herndon: “To all human appearance the early life of Abraham Lincoln was as unpromising for becoming a great man as you could imagine, indeed I would say it was forbidding, and proves to me that nature bestowed upon him an irrepressible will and innate greatness of mind, to enable to break through all those barriers & iron gates and reach the portion he did in life.”*
Lincoln must have had a sense of his own giftedness early on. “His mind & the Ambition of the man soared above us,” a childhood friend told Herndon. “He naturally assumed the leadership of the boys.” When the family arrived in Indiana, it relied on Abraham to pen the letters to friends back in Kentucky, because his mother and father couldn’t write. When word got out in the area, according to one account, “little Abraham was considered a marvel of learning and wisdom by the simple-minded settlers.” He performed the same service for neighbors, writing their “friendly confidential letters,” recalled a friend.
His stepmother recognized him as “a Boy of uncommon natural Talents,” according to a Lincoln relative. One of the hallmarks of his mind—the penetration of his insight and his ability to think things through all the way to the bottom—became evident when he was still young. Understanding constituted a kind of compulsion with him. It went beyond mere childish curiosity to an inchoate intellectual rigor.
His stepmother told Herndon, “Abe, when old folks were at our house, was a silent & attentive observer—never speaking or asking questions till they were gone and then he must understand Every thing—even to the smallest thing—Minutely & Exactly[;] he would then repeat it over to himself again & again—sometimes in one form and then in another & when it was fixed in his mind to suit him he became Easy and he never lost that fact or his understanding of it. Sometimes he seemed pestered to give Expression to his ideas and got mad almost at one who couldn’t Explain plainly what he wanted to convey.”
Lincoln apparently reserved his childhood rage almost entirely for incomprehension. His inability to follow something so agitated him, it literally kept him up at night. On a triumphant tour of the Northeast after his Cooper Union address in 1860, Lincoln told a pastor he met on a train in Connecticut—and who had heard Lincoln speak the night before—about his youthful drive to understand. “I remember how, when a mere child,” the pastor recalled him saying, “I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I don’t think I ever got angry at anything else in my life. But that always disturbed my temper, and has ever since.”
Lincoln remembered hearing adults discuss things he couldn’t understand with his father during evenings, and staying up trying to puzzle out the meaning of what he heard: “I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over, until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me, for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north and bounded it south and bounded it east and bounded it west.”
A boy who possessed such a restless and seeking mind was unlikely to be satisfied with his lot. He would strain against his limits and those of his surroundings. By the time he was a young man, Lincoln spoke openly of his ambition. Lincoln assured neighbor Elizabet
h Crawford, “I don’t always intend to delve, grub, shuck corn, split rails, and the like.” She told Herndon later, “Abe was ambitious—sought to outstrip and override others. This I confess.” A cousin remembers him vowing to “cut himself adrift from his old world.” His friend Joseph Gentry agreed: “Abe wa[s]n’t fond of work and often told me he never intended to make his living that way—he often said he would get some profession, in fact his whole mind seemed bent on learning and education.”
Lincoln, of course, achieved what he intended. But it meant turning his back on his family—especially his father—and its way of life. A good, but limited man, Thomas Lincoln was roughhewn like one of those famous rails. With straight black hair, a low forehead, and a large Roman nose, he was built like a linebacker at five feet ten and nearly two hundred pounds. A relative told Herndon that he was “so compact that it was difficult to find or feel a rib in his body.” Before there was “Honest Abe,” there was “Honest Thomas.” He was “a plain unpretending plodding man,” “peaceable good and good natured,” according to someone who had known him in Kentucky. He loved to hunt and fish. A talented storyteller, he was considered “brilliant as a storebox whittler and leader of grocery-store dialogue” (saloons, at the time, were called groceries). He obviously passed along a gene for folksy humor to his son.
A carpenter and farmer, Thomas Lincoln didn’t particularly distinguish himself at either role. A neighbor called him a “piddler,” someone who was “always doing but doing nothing great.” He chose his land poorly and cultivated just enough of it to get by. He once let “a pair of sharpers” rip off a load of pork he planned to take on a flatboat down the Mississippi to sell in New Orleans. Another neighbor said, pungently, that he was “lazy & worthless,” “an excellent spec[imen] of poor white trash.”
His son evaluated him harshly, too. He wrote in the autobiographical sketch for Scripps that his father, born around 1778 in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, “never did more in the way of writing than bunglingly sign his own name.” His mother, Nancy Hanks, signed her name with an X and his stepmother couldn’t sign her name, either. The adverb bunglingly is pregnant with contempt. The description sounded so harsh that Scripps left it out of his biography. Lincoln’s statement to Scripps wasn’t a one-time lapse. “In all of his published writings,” historian David Herbert Donald points out, “and, indeed, even in reports of hundreds of stories and conversations, he had not one favorable word to say about his father.”
Thomas Lincoln didn’t have much of a start in life, nor much of a middle. His lament that “everything I ever teched either died, got killed or was lost” captured it all too accurately. It applied to his father, infant son, wife, and daughter.
When Thomas was a boy growing up in Kentucky, Indians attacked his family while they were planting a cornfield. The attack killed his own father, Abraham, grandfather of the future president. An Indian was about to snatch Thomas when his older brother Mordecai, who returned to the cabin for a rifle, aimed for a pendant on the Indian’s chest and shot him dead. Primogeniture meant that all the property went to Mordecai, and so Thomas was left, as his son put it to Scripps, “a wandering laboring boy.”
With what he scratched together from three-shilling-a-day labor and some carpentry, Thomas bought his first farm and started a family. He and Nancy lost a son—Abraham’s younger brother—in infancy. Two years after their move to Indiana another tragedy struck. Along with her aunt and uncle who had moved to the vicinity, Nancy fell ill with the horrific, mysterious “milk sickness.” They were poisoned with the milk of cows that ate a toxic weed while wandering in the forest. The illness galloped in about a week from dizziness and nausea, to irregular respiration and pulse, then coma and death. She died without a physician and was buried on a hill near the cabin in a wooden coffin fashioned by Thomas and his son. There wasn’t a funeral sermon until months later.
The family fell into a “sad, if not pitiful condition,” in Lincoln’s words. His twelve-year-old sister Sarah kept house, sometimes so despairing she sat and wept. A first cousin of Lincoln’s mother who lived with the family at this time, Dennis Hanks, remembered that to try to lift her spirits, “Me ’n’ Abe got ’er a baby coon an’ a turtle, an’ tried to get a fawn but we couldn’t ketch any.” Shortly thereafter, Lincoln’s father left the children to head back to Kentucky to find a new wife.
At this time and place, women tended to work ceaselessly and men might outlive two or more of their wives, for whom childbirth was a mortal threat. An English traveler called it “a hard country for women and cattle.” When Lincoln’s sister later married, she died shortly afterward in childbirth. The Lincolns blamed her in-laws, but they claimed that the nearest doctor had been too drunk to care for her.
That heartbreak was in the future, when Lincoln’s father returned from his mission with Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, who found his children hungry tatterdemalions. Sarah described the children when she first met them as “wild—ragged and dirty.” A widow, she brought three children of her own and provided a welcome dose of order and cleanliness to a suddenly overcrowded household desperately in need of female attention. Lincoln adored his stepmother and called her “mama.”
It was a symptom, though, of his larger discontent with his family (not to say his embarrassment over it) that he later told William Herndon that his biological mother, Nancy, was the illegitimate child of a Virginia nobleman. The mystery squire was presumably the source of her talent—she was widely regarded as intelligent—and his own. Lincoln underestimated his family stock.
Lincoln’s great-grandfather had enough means to give his son 210 prime acres in Virginia. Lincoln’s grandfather sold them and made the fateful move to Kentucky, where he accumulated more than five thousand acres. As mentioned earlier, his oldest son, Mordecai, inherited the property after his death at the hands of the Indians. He lived comfortably in Kentucky, a respected man and a slave owner with an interest in horse breeding. Lincoln liked to say, “Uncle Mord had run off with all the talents of the family”—another gibe at his father.
Lincoln was too hard on him. Despite much adversity, his father managed to provide for his family and was a solid, respected member of the communities where he lived. In the Kentucky county where he resided with his family in 1814, he ranked on the higher end of property owners. He served on juries and in the militia, and was active in church. In 1821, in Indiana, he was charged with supervising the construction of the local Little Pigeon Baptist Church, where he served as a trustee. He said grace before meals: “Fit and prepare us for humble service for Christ’s sake, Amen.” (After one grace for a meal of little besides potatoes, Lincoln blurted out, these are “mighty poor blessings.”)
Thomas Lincoln was by no means a reprobate. But his virtues were refracted through an environment of rural isolation. Spencer County, where he took the family in Indiana, was a vast expanse roughly the size of Rhode Island. Yet only a couple of hundred people lived there. Lincoln later wrote a poem that described the wilderness: “When first my father settled here, / ’Twas then the frontier line: / The panther’s scream, filled night with fear / And bears preyed on the swine.” The Lincolns may have gotten their light at night partly through a wick lit in a cup of bear’s grease. Another family in the vicinity recalled seeing the glowing eyes of wolves reflecting its fire through spaces in its cabin walls at night. A few years before the Lincolns arrived, a brother and sister picking grapes were attacked by a panther. The girl was killed before her brother could kill the beast with a tomahawk to the skull.
Places like this were all but untouched by the swim of commerce or the quickening effects of the cash economy. The Lincoln household, like so many others at this time, was largely self-sufficient. A. H. Chapman, who was familiar with the family, reported to Herndon: “They taned there own Leather & Young Hanks made them Shoes out of their rude Leather. There clothing was all made at hom
e & the Material from which it was made was also made at home.” The Lincolns could trade for other goods they needed, but it was mostly a barter economy, or as Dennis Hanks told Herndon, “Hogs and Venison hams was a Legal tender and Coon Skins all so.” According to Hanks, Thomas Lincoln sold his place in Kentucky for three hundred dollars “and took it—the $300—in whiskey.”
Thomas Lincoln was a pre-market man. He was blissfully untouched by what much later would be called “consumerism.” A neighbor told Herndon that he “was happy—lived Easy—& contented. Had but few wants and Supplied these.” Dennis Hanks put it in similar terms to Herndon: “He was a man who took the world Easy—did not possess much Envy. He never thought that gold was God.” Yet another observer makes the connection between these qualities in Thomas Lincoln and economic isolation: “Well, you see, he was like the other people in that country. None of them worked to get ahead. There wasn’t no market for nothing unless you took it across two or three states. The people raised just what they needed.”
It was this very contentment that must have so vexed his son. Thomas Lincoln wasn’t indolent or irresponsible; he was content and therefore lacked all ambition. For his son, it was a contentment of stagnation and wasted potential, of mindless labor and equally mindless leisure. In this difference of perspective yawned a vast, unbridgeable gap in worldview.
Historian Jean Baker writes of the contrast between the “rusticity,” with its “pre-modern sense of things,” of Lincoln’s family and what would become his own “bourgeois” mentality. Lincoln had no interest in learning his father’s carpentry, and, as his stepmother said, “he didn’t like physical labor.” Even if his stepmother is right that her husband never interfered with Lincoln’s reading—at least “if he could avoid it”—the gap between the unlettered father and his increasingly lettered son had to be another source of tension. One study of the autobiographies of self-made men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found the dynamic that characterized the relationship between Lincoln and his father was so familiar it was a cliché: “The son’s ambitions juxtaposed against the father’s failure,” while “the opportunity to quit the family farm is presented as a deliverance.”