Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (4 page)

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.

And yet, our fathers give us life, while this father additionally gave Abraham twenty-two years of his company. Something rubbed off.

Thomas Lincoln was a temperate man. In his time and place this was a rare distinction. Early nineteenth-century America was a nation of drunkards; Americans consumed hard liquor at a rate of five gallons per person per year; some working men drank a
quart a day. Thomas Lincoln took no part in the national binge; one in-law said he “never was intoxicated
in his life.” Abraham was as temperate as his father.

The Lincolns were differently built—Abraham (who rose to be 6’4”) lean and gawky, Thomas (who stood 5’10”) compact and solid. But both of them were powerful, and Thomas proved it when he had to. In Kentucky he fought another reputed strong man in an arranged fight, a challenge match, and beat him, after which “no one else ever
tried his manhood.” Such contests were a common feature of frontier life, a form of communal hazing; Abraham would undergo them himself, as successfully as his father.

These physical tests came to the Lincolns; neither of them looked for trouble. This, too, was noteworthy in a society of brawling and all-in fighting, which could descend to gouging, biting, and maiming. Probably their sobriety helped keep them peaceable.

But by far the most important quality father and son shared was telling stories and jokes. John Hanks, one of the many Hanks cousins who knew both men, thought Thomas was as good a storyteller as Abraham; Dennis Hanks maintained that Thomas was
even better. Maybe one reason Thomas cuffed his son when he spoke up to passersby at the fence was that he was spoiling his father’s set-ups. Stories were the only form of entertainment—apart from sermons, trials, and elections—that rural America had, and the only one that was readily available. Church congregations met once or twice a week, sessions of court and political campaigns were much less frequent. Stories were there anytime, if you knew how to tell them. Any tavern, any store, any hearth could spawn them. They passed the news, brought in company, held the darkness at bay.

Abraham Lincoln took to storytelling because he was good at it—he was an excellent mimic, and he developed a great sense of timing—and because he enjoyed the applause he got. It gave him a role in the world, his first and his longest-running. Young Lincoln was bookish and strange-looking; as he aged, he would acquire other unprepossessing traits (shyness around women, depression). But when he opened his mouth to tell a story, he could be the life of any party. He could put his height and his ungainliness to work; being funny-looking makes you even funnier.

Among the staples of his repertoire, after he graduated from riddles about the father of Zebedee’s children, were off-color stories (scatological more often than sexual, though he told both kinds). One of his favorite off-color stories—his law partner William Herndon, who wrote it down, said he heard Lincoln tell it “often and often”—incidentally showed how story- and joke-telling worked for him. It was about “the Man of Audacity.”

“There was a party once, not far from here,” it always began. Among the guests “was one of those men who had audacity . . . quick-witted, cheeky, and self-possessed, never off his guard on any occasion.” When supper was ready, the Man of Audacity was asked to carve the turkey. He “whetted his carving knife with the steel and got down to business,” but as he began, he “let a fart, a loud fart, so that all the people heard it distinctly.” Silence. “However, the audacious man was cool and entirely self-possessed. . . . With a kind of sublime audacity, [he] pulled off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, put his coat deliberately on a chair, spat on his hands, took his position at the head of the table, picked up the carving knife, and whetted it again, never cracking a smile nor moving a muscle of his face.” Then “he squared himself and said loudly and distinctly: ‘Now, by God, I’ll see if I can’t cut up this turkey without
farting.’”

If you fart, go further with it. If you are funny-looking, be funny. If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.

Storytelling served another function for Lincoln, which he discovered as early as his days in Indiana. In 1826, when he was seventeen,
his sister, Sarah, married a neighbor, Aaron Grigsby. She comes to us, still living, in the memory of one of her Grigsby in-laws, forty years after her wedding: “Her good humored laugh I can see now—is as fresh in my mind as if it were
yesterday.” In 1828, laughing Sarah died in childbirth. Of Lincoln’s blood relations, everyone—infant brother, mother, sister—was now gone, except his problematic father. In 1829 he took it out on the Grigsbys, on the occasion of a double wedding of two Grigsby brothers. With the help of friends, he contrived to have the grooms led to each other’s beds on the wedding night; he then wrote a satirical account of the mix-up, in pseudo-biblical prose. “So when [the grooms] came near to the house of . . . their father, the messengers came on before them, and gave a shout. And the whole multitude ran out with shouts of joy and music, playing on all kinds of instruments of music, some playing on harps and some on viols and some blowing
rams’ horns.” It is pretty tame stuff, but it amused the neighbors; one claimed decades later that it was still remembered in that part of Indiana, “
better than the Bible.” There truly was not much in the way of entertainment in rural America.

Mocking the Grigsbys would not bring sister Sarah back—no mockery of anyone or anything could do that—but it could distract the troubled mind. If life makes a terrible bargain for you, a funny story can push it aside for a time.

In 1830, when Abraham was twenty-one, the Lincolns moved once more, to central Illinois. A year later, Abraham and Thomas parted ways.

Abraham had little to do with his father after that; the rest of their story is quickly told. Thomas continued his life of farming. By this time he had bonded with John Johnston, his second wife’s youngest son by her first marriage, and, like Thomas, a farmer for life. Even as Sarah Bush Lincoln chose her reading stepson to be her special companion, so Thomas chose his farming stepson to be his. In the 1840s Thomas and Johnston began hitting Abraham up for small amounts of money.
Abraham paid, but came to suspect dementia in his father (who was approaching seventy), and manipulation on the part
of his stepbrother.

Shortly after New Year’s Day of 1851, Abraham got word that Thomas was dying. He wrote Johnston that he would not be able to come see his father; his own wife was sick (
I have a new family, which has replaced my old one
). He commended his father to God, “who will not turn away from him
in any extremity” (
I will, but God won’t
). Thomas died soon thereafter.

Lincoln named a horse after his father (Old Tom), and his fourth son (born in 1853). In later years, he thought of putting a tombstone on his father’s grave, but he never did.

Two

G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON AND
L
IBERTY

T
HIS WAS
L
INCOLN’S FAMILY, WHAT HE GOT FROM IT, AND
what he did not get. But since we never get everything we want or need, we look for sufficiency in surrogates—adopted families of friends, mentors, or figures of history and myth. For a boy in early nineteenth-century America the handiest surrogates, great enough to be awe-inspiring, near enough to be familiar, were the founding fathers.

Father of his country—
pater patriae
—was an honorific bestowed by the Roman Senate on Camillus, a general of the fourth century BC, who earned it by refounding the city after driving out an invasion of Gauls. Americans revived and pluralized the terms “father” and “founder” to honor the heroes of the Revolution.

Abraham Lincoln never laid eyes on an actual founding father. The only one who ever ventured near him was that honorary French founder, Lafayette. Ardent, guileless, selfless, patriotic, Lafayette loved the country
he had come to fight for during its Revolution, and America loved him back. On a triumphal tour of his second homeland in 1824–1825, the old hero was conveyed hither and yon for public celebrations and celebrity visits. He saw his old friend John Adams in Massachusetts, and his old friend Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. He dined with President John Quincy Adams at the White House, and met Andrew Jackson, hero of New Orleans, in Nashville. In May 1825, the
steamboat in which he was traveling struck a rock in the Ohio River and foundered; he abandoned ship and spent a night on the Indiana shore in the pouring rain. He was about fifteen miles from the Lincoln cabin, but the Lincolns were not on his itinerary.

If Lincoln wanted to meet a founding father it had to be in books. The book that made the greatest impression on him was about the greatest of the founders, George Washington.

When Americans used the term “father of his country” in the singular, it always, and only, meant Washington. He had earned it by his long and spectacular career—eight and a half years as commander in chief of the Continental Army during the Revolution, eight years as the first president—and even more by the personal qualities that wove an aura of confident masculinity around him. With a few exceptions—George Mason, who was eight years older; Benjamin Franklin, who seemed older than the hills—Washington was senior to most of his revolutionary colleagues: John Adams was younger by three years, Thomas Jefferson by eleven, James Madison by nineteen; Alexander Hamilton and Lafayette, who were twenty-five years younger, were mere boys next to him. At 6’3½”, Washington was generally the tallest man in any gathering, as well as the strongest and most graceful (ladies loved to dance with him). He was always the finest horseman (Jefferson, an excellent rider himself, called him “the best horseman
of his age”). Washington offered a republican substitute for the dignity of royalty—a point Washington Irving made jokingly in his 1819 story “Rip Van Winkle,” in which Rip’s enchanted sleep takes him through the Revolution; when he wakes up, the painted head on the signboard of his favorite tavern wears George
Washington’s cocked hat instead of George III’s crown. Same head, same first name; new ideal.