Lincoln Unbound (3 page)

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 home & 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.”

Lincoln found the beginning of his deliverance in words. Books lifted Lincoln's sights beyond the constraints of his immediate environs and gave him the skills to transcend his upbringing. It fell to him to discover and master them mostly on his own. As Lincoln said later of his frontier surroundings, “If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to so-­journ in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizzard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.” Famously, Lincoln had little in the way of formal schooling, less than a year total by his estimate. In a brief biographical sketch that he wrote as a congressman, he captured the matter in two words: “Education defective.” In another autobiographical account, he noted, “What he has in the way of education, he has picked up. . . . He regrets his lack of education, and does what he can to supply the want.”

As a child, he went to a tiny schoolhouse briefly in Kentucky, about two or three miles from his cabin, and not for the last time made an impression with his inappropriate attire. He came home crying the first day after the other kids made fun of him for wearing a sunbonnet. Subsequently, a man named Caleb Hazel became his instructor. A friend of the Lincoln family at the time wrote Herndon a letter noting how “Abraham Commenced trugging his way to school to Caleb Hezle—­with whom I was well-­acquainted & could perhaps teach spelling reading & indifferent writing & perhaps could Cipher to the rule of three—­but had no other qualifications of a teacher except large size & bodily Strength to thrash any boy or youth that came to his School, and as Caleb lived in hazel nut switch country, no doubt but that young Abraham received due allowances.”

Once in Indiana, Lincoln attended “ABC schools” on and off. Reading, writing, and very basic math—­the so-­called ciphering to the rule of three—­made up the curriculum in these schools. Teachers might beat the hell out of offending students. The equivalent of a gold star to reward a student might be a plug of tobacco or draft of whiskey. Teachers emphasized reading aloud (hence the term “blab” schools) and rote memorization.

Lincoln captured the pedagogical atmosphere with a story he told in the White House. A little boy named Bud was behind in his reading and had the misfortune to be selected to read aloud the story of Nebuchadnezzar and the Golden Image from the book of Daniel. The poor child mangled the names Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The instructor cuffed the lad in the head and he dissolved into tears. After the rest of the class had read, his turn again approached and he began to blubber. The teacher asked him what was wrong. He pointed at the impending verse and cried: “Look there marster, there comes them same damn three fellers again.”

Spelling was an obsession and even a public entertainment, with Fridays devoted to contests. Lincoln bested his classmates in spelling, but he hardly mastered it. He never stopped writing the possessive of “it” as “it's.” Well into his adulthood he spelled very “verry.” He lacked all self-­consciousness about his deficiency, even in the White House. He once asked a group of visitors how to spell “missile” and told Supreme Court justice David Davis at a reception in 1865 that he had only just learned the correct spelling of
maintenance
.

Altogether, Lincoln proved a diligent and impressive student. In his raccoon cap and too-­short buckskin pants—­one fellow student recalled how “there was bare & naked 6 or more inches of Abe Lincoln shin bone”—­he outpaced his teachers by some accounts. According to John Hanks, another first cousin of Lincoln's mother who lived in the Lincoln household, he “
worked
his way by toil: to learn was hard for him, but he walked Slowly, but Surely.” Lincoln explained to other students things he had read, in the kind of simple, illustrative terms that became his signature as a public communicator.

His education, though, had fundamentally to be self-­directed, “picked up.” He worked out sums on a wooden shovel, scraping and wiping it off and repeating. He practiced writing letters on whatever surface happened to be at hand. Above all, he read. Into spare moments as a boy and young adult he poured his appetite for books. He read aloud walking to and from school. He read during lunch breaks while working. He read during meals. He read during his free time on Sundays. He read, by one account, at the end of each plow furrow while allowing his horse to “breathe.”

John Hanks called Lincoln “a Constant and voracious reader.” When he got home from work, according to Hanks, “he would go to the Cupboard—­Snatch a piece of Corn bread—­take down a book—­Sit down on a chair—­Cock his legs up as high as his head and read.” The popular image of him reading by firelight is irresistible, although false according to his stepmother. She said he “studied in the day time,” and “got up Early and then read.”