Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (3 page)

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 October 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.