Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (5 page)

One accident of biography confirmed the political nature of Washington’s fatherly role: he was childless, possibly sterile. Martha Washington had four children with her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, who died when she was twenty-six, but none with her second husband, George. There could be no Washington dynasty aspiring to a crown—“no family to build in greatness upon my
country’s ruins,” as Washington himself put it. Instead he was the father of all Americans.

The most popular early biography of Washington was
The Life of Washington
, by Mason Locke Weems, better known as Parson Weems. Lincoln read it when he was a boy.

How he got the book was a story in itself, vouched for by several of his old acquaintances. Lincoln borrowed Weems’s
Life
from Josiah Crawford, a Kentuckian who had settled near the Lincolns when they lived in Indiana. Lincoln slept in the loft of his family’s cabin; he put the book on a shelf by the window, where it got soaked by rainwater leaking in overnight. Crawford let him keep the damaged volume, but made him pay for it by pulling corn for fodder for
two or three days.

Mason Locke Weems was an itinerant minister and book dealer. Although he was an ordained Episcopal clergyman, his income came from hawking books up and down the East Coast. He calculated that a
Life of Washington
would find a market. The hero died in 1799; Weems wrote and self-published a short biography by 1800. He was right about the popularity of his subject; he brought out an expanded version of the
Life
in 1808, which would have been the one Lincoln read.

Weems boasted about his intimacy with his subject. He had exchanged a few letters with Washington—“I have taken upon me to circulate moral and religious books among the people, with which I know Your Excellency, as Father of the People, is
not displeased”—and even visited him once at Mount Vernon. From these wisps of contact Weems the biographer made an identity for himself, which he proclaimed on his title page: “Rector of Mount Vernon Parish.” But this was sheer fabrication; there was no such
parish, nor was he rector of it. These and many other inventions made Weems the butt of later Washington biographers.

Yet Weems did some actual research, hunting up old acquaintances of the great man (causing one academic historian to remark that the trouble with Weems is that he is
not lying all the time). In any case, his purpose was not archival. He aimed to tell the story of a good and great man, and to offer it as an example and inspiration.

Lincoln responded to parts of Weems’s story, though not to the parts that have become the most famous.

The purpose of Weems’s
Life
, announced at the beginning, was to hold up Washington as a model of virtues: “piety and patriotism,” “
industry and honor.” Weems began with two chapters on Washington’s childhood and youth, which presented their hero as a model boy.

Lincoln could be comforted by the fact that Washington’s education did not sound much better than his own. Weems said that Washington had only two schoolmasters, and he insisted that he “never learned a syllable
of Latin” (the mark, in both Washington’s lifetime and Lincoln’s, of a college student). Lincoln himself would write, in a note for a biographer, that if anyone “supposed to understand Latin” had appeared in Indiana, he would have been looked on “
as a wizard.” Lincoln also learned from Weems that young Washington was strong—he could throw a stone across the Rappahannock River—and that he did not fight with other boys. So far their lives were alike.

But Weems’s description of the Washington family must have struck Lincoln as alien. Weems said little about George’s mother, Mary, focusing instead on his father, Augustine Washington, and their relationship, which Weems depicted as an idyll of nurturance.

Weems presented three scenes of paternal instruction.

The first was a lesson in generosity. One autumn Augustine takes George to an orchard groaning with fruit. Back in the spring, one of
George’s cousins had given him an apple, which he had not wanted to share with his siblings, even though, as Augustine reminds him, “I promised you that if you would but do it, God Almighty would give you plenty of apples
this fall.” George sees the promised bounty and vows never to be stingy again.

The second scene of instruction was the story of the cherry tree, a lesson in honesty that is still remembered today, though the set-up is generally forgotten. Augustine begins by telling George never to tell lies—he even says he would rather see him dead—but then he pivots to explain that a child will become a liar if a parent beats him for every misdeed: “The terrified little creature slips out a
lie!
just to escape the rod.” Weems was addressing two audiences, children and parents, telling the former
Don’t lie
, telling the latter
Don’t be brutal
. Only then do we get the story of the cherry tree—George barking it accidentally with his hatchet, then admitting to his father what he has done: “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie”—whereupon Augustine practices what he has preached: “Run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it
a thousand fold.”

We do not know what Lincoln made of these lessons or of the paternal relationship that accompanied them. Smacked at the fence and hired out to work, he could have envied George and Augustine’s bond, or dismissed it as unreal.

The third scene of instruction may have seemed the strangest of all.

This was a lesson about God. One day George sees newly sprouted seedlings in a garden bed that spell out his name: GEORGE WASHINGTON. Baffled, he asks Augustine what it means, and his father begins by teasing him: “It grew there by
chance
, I suppose.” When George refuses to believe that, his father admits that he planted the seeds, in order “to introduce you to your
true
Father”—God. “As my son could not believe that
chance
had made and put together so exactly the
letters
of his name . . . then how can he believe, that
chance
could have made and put together all those millions and millions of things that are now
so exactly fitted to
his good!” Such a good world must have been made by God; George is persuaded.

This was what philosophers and theologians call the argument from design. Its persuasiveness in Weems’s telling depended on George’s sense that the world was good, and good for him. Yet Lincoln had already had a planting experience that suggested a different lesson. Thomas and Abraham had planted a field with corn and pumpkin seeds, which did not grow up to spell ABRAHAM LINCOLN; instead, a storm or a stormy God wiped them out. This made a very different argument about the design of both the Lincoln family and the world. No wise father; no friendly God.

There was a final lesson about Washington and his father and it pushed Weems’s
Life
in a different direction. At the beginning of
Chapter Three
, when George is still a boy, Augustine dies. The deathbed scene Weems wrote is in a way crueler than the real death of Lincoln’s mother: George is staying with cousins when his father sickens, and he returns too late to speak to him.

Then came a shift. As George becomes an adult and a soldier, Weems’s book willy-nilly becomes an account of his public career. Augustine suddenly shrinks in importance. “Where George got his military talents,” Weems wrote, was a mystery. “Certainly his earthly parents had no hand in it.” Both are described as creatures of peace, Augustine an “amiable old gentleman,” Mary an anxious natterer: when her son wins the Battle of Trenton, all she can say is, When is he coming home to
tend the farm?

Weems did not quite repudiate what he wrote in
Chapters One
and
Two
: Washington had already gotten his moral foundation, and Weems decided that his talents as a warrior must have been gifts of Providence. But maybe, Weems suggested, once your family receded, you could make your own way. Washington’s only chance of “rising in the world,” Weems wrote, was “by
his own merit.” That must have been encouraging to Lincoln.

But what might he rise to become? Rich? Famous? Or something more? The
Life of Washington
gave an answer to that question, and we
know Lincoln took it in, because there came a time when he said what the answer was, and where he had read about it.

In February 1861 president-elect Lincoln took a train from his Illinois home to Washington, DC, where he would give his First Inaugural Address. The trip was a political tour, showing the flag as the country fell apart, with stops in six states.

On February 21 he spoke in Trenton, to each house of the New Jersey legislature in turn. He began his address to the state senate by recalling New Jersey’s role in the Revolution. Few states, he said, had witnessed so many battles, which was true: New Jersey saw three major ones (Trenton, Princeton, Monmouth) plus a blizzard of small engagements.

“Away back in my childhood,” Lincoln went on, “ . . . I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, Weems’s
Life of Washington
.” He proceeded to tell the senate about an episode in
Chapter Nine
. Of all the battles Weems described, “none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton. . . . The crossing of the river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory.”

What else would we expect Lincoln to say? What else would any politician say? He was in Trenton, on the day before Washington’s Birthday; Weems’s book, so far from being obscure, was still in print. Bring on the clichés.

But Lincoln’s remarks did not float in the ether of buncombe; brief though they were, they tracked Weems’s account of the battle. He was not speaking in generalities but recovering a reading experience from more than thirty years earlier.

Every feature of the Battle of Trenton that Lincoln summarized—river, Hessians, hardships—was something Weems had described at length. When Weems took Washington across the Delaware, he piled on the details: “Filled with ice . . . darksome night, pelted by an incessant storm of hail and snow . . . the unwelcome roar of ice, loud crashing along the
angry flood . . . five hours of infinite toil and danger . . .
frost-bitten
.” These details—none of them, in this case, imagined by Weems, but historically accurate—also underlie Lincoln’s reference to “great hardships.” Weems gave the Hessians several pages, first as clownish marauders, speaking in crude German accents, who believed that Americans scalped, skinned, and ate their prisoners—“Vy! Shure, des Mericans must be de deble”—then as pitiable prisoners themselves, induced to switch sides by the merciful treatment they receive: “Poor fellows!” the Americans tell them, “leave [your] vile employment and come
live with us.”

But the strongest proof that Lincoln had been molded by Weems’s
Life
is that the most important lesson he drew in 1861 from the Battle of Trenton was the very lesson that Weems had presented as the most important. “I recollect thinking,” Lincoln continued, “ . . . boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for . . . something even more [important] than national independence; . . . something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.”

Weems thought so, too, and he expended his powers, such as they were, in evoking it. When Washington and his troops, having crossed the Delaware, began their march on Trenton, they were accompanied, Weems wrote, by an invisible being, “the weeping GENIUS OF LIBERTY.” This was no father figure, but a grieving mother. “Driven from the rest of the world, she had fled to the wild woods of America, as to an assured asylum of rest.” But tyranny had followed—“the
inhuman few
, with fleets and armies, had pursued her flight!” Who would fight for her? “
One little band alone
remained . . . resolved to
defend her or perish.” For Weems, the Battle of Trenton was a struggle for the world; the fate of liberty everywhere depended on it.