Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  Or maybe—a minority view, but it had advocates—the founding fathers were mistaken or evil. Perhaps the Declaration’s assertion that all men are created equal was not a self-evident truth, but “fundamentally wrong,” as Alexander Stephens, a former congressman and a friend of Lincoln’s, put it. Or perhaps the Constitution, instead of securing the blessings of liberty, as the Preamble boasted, secured the institution of slavery and made thereby “a covenant with death, and with Hell,” as abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said. Maybe no faith need be kept with the men who had written, signed, and implemented such wrongheaded documents.

  Lincoln spent years contending with rival visions of the founding fathers. He contended successfully—and legitimately. For all the times he squeezed the evidence or hurried over the record, he was more right about the founders than wrong—and more right about them than any of his contentious contemporaries.

  But the main problem for Lincoln in his dealings with the founding fathers, as he (unwittingly) neared the end of his life, was that they were not quite enough for him. Their systems and their ideals would survive the Civil War, but the strain was unbearable, horrors upon horrors. By the end the father Who stood above all others was God the Father—and for Lincoln, His all-encompassing superintendence raised the further problem that, though He perhaps listened, He rarely spoke. It was lonely—soul-destroyingly lonely—to be left with a Father who left you so alone.

  This book is not a full-dress biography of Lincoln, or a history of his times. It is not about Lincoln’s marriage, or how the Battle of Gettysburg was won, though it will touch on these and many other points. It is the history of a career, and the unfolding of the ideas that animated it.

  Because Lincoln was a politician in a democracy, he had to present his ideas to the public; a history of his career is in large part a history of his rhetoric. Rhetoric is how democratic politicians point with pride and view with alarm; how they sketch their visions and justify their deals. It is one of the most important ways by which they earn their reputations, win elections, and wield power. There is a lot of Lincoln’s writing in this book—jotted down notes, state papers, private letters that were written for public consumption. There is even more of his speaking—orations before huge open-air crowds, stories told in small rooms. Because Lincoln was both self-taught and multitalented, he drew on a variety of models and genres: humor, logic, poetry; fart jokes, Euclid, Byron. He went from mocking the Bible as a youngster to channeling it as a prematurely old man. But time and again he came back to the founders, the men who most inspired him.

  This book is also a history of the afterlife of those great Americans, his predecessors—how their words and their reputations percolated into the nineteenth century, in great debates and in the frontier reading of a curious boy. Other books on Lincoln have noted his interest in the founding fathers and how he looked back to them, but here, for the first time, a historian of the founding looks ahead to Lincoln.

  This book, finally, is training—in thinking, feeling, and acting. The founding fathers were world-historical figures; so was Abraham Lincoln. If we study how Lincoln engaged with them, we can learn how to engage with them, and him, ourselves.

  PART ONE

  One

  1809–1830: YOUTH

  WHEN LINCOLN WAS A CHILD HE LEARNED TWO UNSETTLING things about his family tree, one for each branch of it.

  His paternal grandfather, also called Abraham Lincoln, was killed when he was forty-two years old. This Lincoln, a Virginian, had been a captain in the militia during the Revolution, helping to build frontier forts. As the war wound down, he moved with his family to Kentucky. One day in 1786 he was in his field with his three young sons when an Indian shot him from the cover of the trees. One boy ran for help; another, the eldest, ran for a gun. The Indian ran for seven-year-old Thomas, the youngest, but the eldest brother managed to shoot and kill him before he carried Thomas off.

  When Thomas grew up he told the story so often that it became a “legend” to his own son, Abraham, who said it was “imprinted on my mind and memory.” In the speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum, Lincoln would say that veterans of the Revolution had supplied a “living history” of the war in every American family. The repository of living history in his family was no Revolutionary War veteran, but a survivor of frontier violence. That long ago shootout, as sudden and arbitrary as it was brutal, almost erased the future: if Thomas Lincoln had been killed along with the first Abraham Lincoln, there would have been no second.

  Lincoln’s mother, Nancy, whom Thomas Lincoln married in Kentucky in 1806, was a Hanks, another family of transplanted Virginians. The recurring shadow in the Hanks family was illegitimacy. Nancy Hanks was born eight years before her mother, Lucey, married. The shadow covered a second generation: years after Nancy died, old neighbors accused her of adultery, assigning Abraham’s paternity to various men besides Thomas Lincoln. Dennis Hanks, one of Abraham’s cousins, would bluster to an inquiring biographer that “the stories going about, charging wrong or indecency [or] prostitution” in the Hanks family were false. But since Dennis Hanks had been born out of wedlock himself, he protested too much. Abraham Lincoln almost never mentioned the family stain, but he was aware of it.

  The near-death of Abraham Lincoln’s father almost canceled his existence; the mores of the Hanks family clouded his identity.

  Lincoln absorbed another life lesson when he was very young, not about himself but about the world. When he was no older than seven, he helped his father, Thomas, plant one of the family’s fields. This was a seven-acre patch laid out in cornrows. Abraham’s task was to drop pumpkin seeds in the mounds where the corn would grow—“two seeds every other hill and every other row.” The next day a cloudburst in the surrounding highlands caused a flood in the valley where the Lincoln farm lay, which swept away pumpkin seeds, corn, soil—everything.

  The flood did not sour Lincoln on work. All his life he would preach the value of hard work—not farm work, which he detested, but the labor of self-improvement, for which he had a passion. But his childhood effort, done in a day, wiped out in an hour, showed him that an otherwise-minded cosmos does not always support our efforts.

  Thomas Lincoln successively owned three farms in central Kentucky, south of Louisville. He and Nancy had three children—Sarah (born in 1807), Abraham (born in 1809), and Thomas (born in 1812, died after three days). In December 1816 the Lincolns left Kentucky, crossing the Ohio River into southwestern Indiana, where they would live until Abraham was twenty-one.

  We know almost nothing about Lincoln’s mother. No letters by or about her, no pictures, no trustworthy descriptions survive. Dennis Hanks, who knew the Lincolns in Kentucky and followed them in their later moves, recalled that Nancy Lincoln “learned” her son “to read the Bible.” She could not write, not even her name, but she probably told Abraham the stories. One of Dennis Hanks’s recollections of the Lincoln family turns on a biblical phrase, and it has the texture of a remembered scene. One day when Nancy was weaving, Abraham abruptly asked her, “Who was the father of Zebedee’s children?” (Matthew 27:56 mentions “the mother of Zebedee’s children”; Zebedee was the fisherman on the Sea of Galilee whose sons James and John became Apostles. The father of Zebedee’s children was, obviously, Zebedee.) Nancy laughed and told her son to scat: “Get out of here you nasty little pup, you.” Abraham, said Dennis Hanks, “saw he had got his mother and ran off laughing.” A simple riddle like that is just what a bright little boy would think was the funniest thing in the world; Nancy’s response is just the reaction a hardworking, affectionate mother might have, caught in the midst of her chores.

  In September 1818 Nancy’s aunt and uncle, who were neighbors of the Lincolns in Indiana, died. The cause was “milk-sick,” a disease carried in the milk of cows that had eaten white snakeroot, a poisonous wild plant. The symptoms were grotesque: coated tongue, changing from white to brown; stomach pain, constipation, vomiting. Death could come in three days. Early in O
ctober Nancy Lincoln died of milk-sick, too. Before she passed, she told her children to be good to their father and to each other, and to worship God.

  Thomas Lincoln spent a year as a widower, then at the end of 1819 went back to Kentucky looking to remarry. The woman he sought was Sarah Bush Johnston, an old acquaintance a few years his junior, now a widow herself. According to the man who issued their marriage license, the courtship was quick. Thomas told Sarah “that they knew each other from childhood, that he had no wife and she no husband, and that he came all the way to marry her and if she was willing he wanted it done right off.” Sarah said she had a few small debts she wanted to pay first. Thomas asked for a list of them, and paid them that night. He returned to Indiana with a new wife and her three children.

  Sarah Bush Lincoln is more vivid to history than Nancy Lincoln; she outlived both her husband and her famous stepson, and was interviewed in her old age. Unlike the wicked stepmothers of fairy tales (and real life), she embraced her new family as her own. She made her husband put a wood floor in the family cabin and cut a window in the walls; she mended Abraham’s and his sister Sarah’s clothes; where there had been the disorganization of death, she brought cleanliness and warmth.

  She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional. Her reminiscences of him as a boy were both observant and admiring. “He didn’t like physical labor—was diligent for knowledge—wished to know, and if pains and labor would get it he was sure to get it.” He learned by listening: “When old folks were at our house,” he was “silent and attentive . . . never speaking or asking questions till they were gone, and then he must understand everything, even to the smallest thing, minutely and exactly. He would then repeat it over to himself again and again, sometimes in one form and then in another, and when it was fixed in his mind to suit him he became easy.” He learned, most of all, by reading. “Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on, and when he came across a passage that struck him he would write it down on boards if he had no paper and keep it there till he did get paper. Then he would re-write it, look at it, repeat it.”

  Lincoln learned to read in school. He had briefly attended two country schools in Kentucky when he was little, and in Indiana he would attend three more. These schools were all short-lived ventures, depending on the presence in the neighborhood of men, generally young, who knew enough to stay ahead of their pupils, and were vigorous enough to keep the older ones in line. One of Lincoln’s schoolmasters was surnamed Hazel, which gave rise to jokes about hazelnut switches as pedagogical tools. As Lincoln aged, his attendance was limited by how long he could be spared from farm chores; all told, he spent no more than a year in his various schools. When he was a man he would say that he had not learned much in them, but he did learn to write, to do arithmetic up to the level of cross-multiplication, and to read.

  He read a few widely used primers; a few popular classics—Aesop’s Fables, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, selections from the Arabian Nights—and a few popular biographies. Reading was the skill that first gave him the power to stretch himself, to go into himself, and to get away from his surroundings. Sarah Bush Lincoln watched over these stirrings with sympathy. “His mind and mine—what little I had,” she added too modestly, “seemed to run together.”

  Lincoln’s mother died when he was nine years old; he did not meet his stepmother until he was almost eleven. His father, however, was at his side for the first twenty-two years of his life. Thomas Lincoln was the man who provided for him, exploited him, and shaped him, through repulsion and attraction both. Abraham Lincoln served his father, rejected him, and never acknowledged the ways—few but crucial—in which he took after him.

  Lincoln’s father worked at farming and carpentry all his life. His farming was small scale; the farm where Abraham was born was 300 acres, the first farm in Indiana was 160 acres. Those properties would have entitled Thomas to vote in old Maryland, though someone like Charles Carroll would have barely noticed them. As a carpenter he built his family’s houses, and made his family’s coffins; sometimes he did carpentry work for others. He never went broke, or left bad debts, and served on a few juries (a sign of respectability, if not prosperity).

  One mark of his less-than-middling status was that he never owned a slave, though Kentucky was a slave state. Slavery was one of the reasons he left for Indiana. As a small farmer Thomas Lincoln feared the competition of slave labor, and he would not find it in his new home, which was admitted to the Union as a free state in December 1816, the very month he moved there.

  Indiana had been part of the old Northwest Territory of postrevolutionary America, bounded by Pennsylvania, the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and the Great Lakes. The Northwest Ordinance, the legislation that regulated this wilderness quadrant, had ruled it out of bounds for slavery: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes.” The Northwest Ordinance was older than the Constitution; the one-house Congress of the Articles of Confederation passed it in July 1787, as the Constitutional Convention was in mid-session. After the new Constitution went into effect, the House, the Senate, and President George Washington confirmed the Ordinance in the summer of 1789.

  A more immediate reason for Thomas Lincoln’s move was challenges to his existing land titles in Kentucky—a problem faced by many Kentuckians besides him. Land ownership in the state was a nightmare of bad surveying and conflicting claims. But the land of the Northwest Territory had been laid out by the federal government, which guaranteed clear possession. As far as both slavery and land were concerned, the Lincolns knew firsthand the power and the consequences of federal legislation for the territories.

  Southwestern Indiana was forest when Thomas Lincoln took his family there—dense with trees, draped with wild grape vines, all the intertwined rankness of old-growth North America. As soon as Abraham was big enough to swing an axe, he was put to work, clearing land and splitting rails. Once the fields were cleared he plowed and reaped. He had a spurt of growth around age twelve, which sped his labors. Old friends disagreed about how much shin showed between his socks and his suddenly-too-short pants: one said six inches, one said twelve. People competed to tell tall tales about the tall boy. Whatever the length of his breeches, Lincoln’s lifelong look of awkward elongation started before his teens. Luckily for him he was as strong as he was tall, so although everyone smiled at him, no one bullied him. And meanwhile he worked—on his father’s farm, and on the farms of neighbors, his services rented out by his father, who pocketed his earnings.

  Lincoln told one of these neighbor/employers that his father had taught him how to work, but never learned him to love it. He failed to love it because he was not working for himself. Working for your father on the family farm was one thing; working elsewhere, as a hired tool or draft animal, like a plow or a horse, was something else. It is true that using family members as contract laborers was a common practice, but common practices take different people different ways. Lincoln took it badly. He would make a political philosophy, almost a theology, out of a man’s right to own the fruits of his own labor; the seeds of it may have been planted while he was planting or chopping as Thomas Lincoln’s unpaid work crew.

  What Abraham loved instead of farm work, as his stepmother testified, was reading and learning. His father had mixed feelings about that.

  Thomas Lincoln could read a little and sign his name; that was the extent of his literacy. But he wanted more for his son, which is why he sent him to school five times. Each sojourn had to be paid for, in cash or kind, and in his son’s labor lost, once Abraham was old enough to work, so there was expense involved. In her interview as an elderly widow, Sarah Bush Lincoln insisted that her husband had joined her in encouraging his son’s intellectual efforts: “Mr. Lincoln never made Abe quit reading to do anything if he could avoid it. He would do it himself first.” Reading, writing, and arithmetic were useful skills to have, and Thomas wanted
his son to have them.

  But reading was more than a skill to Abraham: it was a portal to thought and inspiration. The act of reading was also a visible mark of his aspirations. Abraham read everywhere, outdoors as well as at home; he would take a book with him into the fields when he plowed, stopping to read whenever the horse stopped to rest. He did this because, as any devoted reader knows, a book can be all-absorbing. But he also did it to show family and friends what a reader he was. All this was beyond Thomas Lincoln’s ken.

  Quick wits can make a boy forget his place, and Thomas Lincoln didn’t like that, either. If a stranger rode by the Lincoln property when father and son were at the fence, Abraham would horn in with the first question, and sometimes his father smacked him for it. When Abraham asked his mother who was the father of Zebedee’s children, she laughed and called him a nasty little pup. When he was pert in the presence of his father, Thomas gave him the back of his hand. (Sarah Bush Lincoln did not recall Abraham horning in on her, perhaps because he felt less competitive with his stepmother.)

  Father and son inhabited different mental worlds; certainly Abraham thought so. Years later, when he was running for president, he wrote in a campaign autobiography that his father “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.” How much scorn still coils in that word bunglingly. Scorn, and judgment: my father could have learned to sign his name properly if he had made the effort; after all, I did.

  Only one remark of Thomas Lincoln’s stuck in Abraham’s mind enough for him to repeat it in later years: “If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.” It is a Delphic remark. It suggests persistence, which Thomas Lincoln had; maybe stubbornness—persisting in small farming, a way of life his son came to dislike. The clearest possible meaning of Thomas Lincoln’s dictum seems to be: if you make a bad choice, try to make the best of it. Abraham did not follow this advice where Thomas was concerned; he had not chosen his father and he did not try very hard to make the best of him.