Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (6 page)

When the Americans finally reached Trenton, Weems gave the last word to Washington. “
All I ask of you
,” he tells his troops as they are about to charge, “
is, just to remember what you are
about to fight for
.”

Lincoln remembered. He told the New Jersey Senate that he wanted to perpetuate liberty and Union “in accordance with the original idea
for which that struggle”—at Trenton and other battles—“
was made.” Washington and his men had defended liberty, Lincoln and the nation must be ready to defend her again. Washington’s task was now his.

Lincoln found Washington in Weems, but he also had to save him from Weems, or from those chapters of
The Life of Washington
that had the greatest popular impact. So powerful were Weems’s tales of Washington’s youth that the Father of his Country became an icon of moral virtues, beyond and above politics. Thanks to Weems, the most famous thing Washington ever said—“I can’t tell a lie”—was something he almost certainly never said.

Honesty is a good thing, but it comes in different flavors. Honesty about our feelings is sincerity; honesty about our intentions is candor. But suppose our feelings or intentions are childish or evil? What then do we gain by expressing or avowing them? The most important form of honesty, especially in a leader, is discerning the right course of action and forthrightly pursuing it.

When Lincoln first read Parson Weems, he responded most not to Washington as a good boy but to Washington as a man of action and principle, and he invoked that response again during his own trials decades later. Not that he reread Weems before he spoke to the New Jersey Senate in 1861 (or maybe ever, after he first worked off the price of it for Josiah Crawford). He did not have to; Washington was inside him. As he said in Trenton, “you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than others.” The Battle of Trenton was more useful to Lincoln, as an ambitious boy and as president-elect, than the cherry tree.

Weems set out to describe a model of private virtue, but he also portrayed a champion of liberty. This was how Washington saw himself. His career, from the beginning of the Revolution to his retirement from the presidency, was a decades-long defense of his country from foreign enemies and threatening political problems. He loved life on his farm
and thought of it constantly when he was away from it in the field or in office. But he left it whenever duty called. This was the Washington who thrilled Lincoln.

But Lincoln did not own Washington. Washington was everyone’s favorite American and everyone had his own take on him. Lincoln would have to pick his way among competing visions of Washington for years to come.

There was one other way that Lincoln looked to Washington, glancingly and in secret; so far as we know he only revealed it to one friend, once.

About 1850 Lincoln and his law partner, William Herndon, were in a buggy bound for a county court where they were to argue cases. As they rode along, Lincoln revealed an astonishing thing. His mother, he said apropos of nothing much, was illegitimate. This is what most historians and genealogists now believe: Nancy’s mother, Lucey Hanks, did not get married until eight years after Nancy was born. But Nancy’s father, Lincoln now told Herndon, was not Lucey’s eventual husband, an ordinary farmer like all the other Hankses and Lincolns, but a “well-bred Virginia farmer or planter . . . a broad-minded, unknown Virginian.” It was from this man, Lincoln explained, that he derived his brains and ambition—“his better nature and finer qualities”—via heredity. The finer qualities, in other words, came straight from his maternal grandfather, skipping Thomas Lincoln entirely. The fact that these ennobling genes had been transmitted out of wedlock was also a plus, since Lincoln believed that illegitimate children were “sturdier and brighter” than those born in marriage, showing what we might now call hybrid vigor. Lincoln fell silent, Herndon did not press him. Then a chatty old man rode up alongside them, Lincoln told some stories, and the window of
revelation closed.

The secret of the noble father is a staple of fiction and fairy tales, and is sometimes found in real life. It might possibly be true of Nancy Hanks, though only Lincoln, among all the people who talked about
illegitimacy and his family, ever mentioned it, and why would he know? Children or grandchildren are typically the last people to learn such things. He gave Herndon no details. Who was the father of Lucey Hanks’s children?

The well-bred, broad-minded Virginian is a fantasy—a fantasy Lincoln entertained because it explained so much. He was different from everyone around him, his stepmother partly excepted. Certainly he was different from his father (it is interesting that he spun his theories of inheritance and illegitimacy to Herndon about 1850, as his father was failing). He could read about Washington in Weems, but there must also be a more direct connection between them: he was descended from such a man.

George Washington had no children by Martha, which suggests that he was sterile—but maybe it was she who had become infertile, and Washington was capable of having illegitimate children after all. (There are black Americans today who claim to be descendants of George Washington, by a slave named Venus; their actual ancestor is almost certainly George’s nephew, Bushrod Washington, who was the son of Venus’s owner.) There was another great Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, who had children by his wife and, it was widely believed, by his slave Sally Hemings. Lincoln would forge a moral and political bond with Jefferson that was even more explicit than his connection with Washington. But perhaps there was another bond as well.

Or, if his true maternal grandfather was neither of these great men, then maybe it was some neighbor or acquaintance, a lesser member of the interlocking Virginia gentry, a founder by proximity. By whatever channel, Lincoln himself could be the living history of the Revolution in his family.

It was food for thought, and hungry hearts and restless minds will chew on whatever crusts they can get.

Three

1830–1840: M
ANHOOD

I
N HIS TWENTIES, AFTER SOME YOUTHFUL FUMBLING
, L
INCOLN
found the careers he would pursue for the rest of his life: politics and law. He lost two lovers and made two friends. His successes and his trials would prime him for his next engagement with the founding fathers.

In 1830 the Lincoln family moved to central Illinois, near the Sangamon River village of Decatur. This was a different landscape from the tangle of southwestern Indiana—prairie crossed by winding streams that flowed ultimately into the Mississippi.

Illinois had become a state in 1818. The Northwest Ordinance had defined it as a free territory, and pioneers who were weary of slavery moved there for that reason. Edward Coles, an idealistic young Virginian who was a friend and neighbor of Jefferson and Madison, freed his slaves in 1819 and came with them to Illinois, giving each head of a household 160 acres. Other settlers wanted to change the new free state
into a slave state, however. (The Northwest Ordinance applied only so long as the areas it covered were still territories: any state, once it was established, could introduce slavery if it chose to do so.) Coles ran for governor in 1822 to keep Illinois free. He won the governorship and the fight to keep Illinois a free state, although tough laws restricting free blacks remained (they could not vote, for example). A county east of Decatur was named after Coles the year the Lincolns arrived; Thomas and Sarah Bush Lincoln moved there in 1831.

That same year Abraham Lincoln turned twenty-two, becoming legally independent of his father. He wanted a physical separation as well, so he moved in the opposite direction, to New Salem, a village down the Sangamon River to the west. He arrived, as he later put it, like a piece of
floating driftwood.

River work drew him first. There was a merchant in New Salem, Denton Offut, a typical American type: a promoter, a big talker, a horse whisperer on the side. He wanted some young men to take a flatboat of hogs down the Sangamon to the Illinois River, and so to the Mississippi and New Orleans. Lincoln signed up.

Lincoln had already made one flatboat trip to New Orleans in 1828, when he was still living in Indiana, via the Ohio and the Mississippi. Rivers were the easiest transportation in a vast frontier with a few wretched roads; the Mississippi was the watershed of half a continent, and New Orleans at its mouth was the spigot. It was the fifth-largest city in the United States, with over 40,000 people (New Salem only had one hundred). It was a creole city with a French and Spanish colonial past, only recently overlaid by English speakers; it was also filled with slaves and free Negroes. A rustic like Lincoln had never seen anything like it. It was the only city in the Deep South he would ever see.

Given Lincoln’s later history, the men who accompanied him on these trips would look for portents in his youthful reactions. The spectacle of a slave metropolis, with auctions and buyers inspecting the bodies of the merchandise, might be revolting on first acquaintance; to some minds, it might be thrilling. Lincoln’s friends testified that the experience had
distressed him. But were their recollections authentic? Allen Gentry, who went on the first trip, left only thirdhand testimony, reporting Lincoln’s feelings—“Abraham was very angry”—to his son, who told someone else. John Hanks, who went on the second trip, said that Lincoln’s “heart bled” in New Orleans. If it did, Hanks did not see it, because he went no farther than St. Louis (though of course Lincoln might have told him what he had seen and felt in New Orleans after they
both came home).

The one memory that Lincoln himself ever recorded was that during the first trip the flatboat was attacked by a gang of black thieves—escaped slaves lurking along the riverbank—whom the Illinoisans fought off. Poor white men could have unpleasant interactions with those who were worse off yet.