Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  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

  GEORGE WASHINGTON AND LIBERTY

  THIS WAS LINCOLN’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.

  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.