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.
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 ex
plained 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: MANHOOD
IN HIS TWENTIES, AFTER SOME YOUTHFUL FUMBLING, LINCOLN 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.
Lincoln did not stay with the river. For the rest of 1831, he clerked in Offut’s store and did odd jobs. He wrestled the local tough guy, one Jack Armstrong, who managed to throw him only by using a trick hold. That was good enough to make Lincoln accepted by Armstrong and all his pals. Like father, like son.
In 1832 Lincoln performed the only military service of his life. An old Sauk chief named Black Hawk, who had fought alongside the British during the War of 1812, led 450 warriors into northwestern Illinois in a forlorn attempt to reclaim their lost homeland (the US government had required the Indians of the Northwest to move beyond the Mississippi). To repel him Illinois called out the militia. Lincoln enlisted for three months. For the first month he served as a captain, elected by his own company, a mark of recognition that pleased him no end (Armstrong was his sergeant).
Lincoln’s war was not a very martial experience. Black Hawk was cornered and captured without the participation of Lincoln’s unit; he saw no action, and in later years would poke fun at his service. For all that he admired George Washington’s manly independence and idealism, he had no inclination to follow him into military life. The benefits he got from the Black Hawk War were of the peacetime sort: it made him better known among his fellow militiamen, and he earned some money at a time when he was broke.
One grim memory stayed with him, of a morning when he came upon five men who had just been killed in a skirmish and scalped. “Every man had a round red spot on top of his head, about as big as a dollar,” he recalled later. Blood seemed to be everywhere. “The red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over.” Lincoln’s unit buried the corpses. This made an impression on the grandson of the first Abraham Lincoln.
Back to New Salem, and the quest for work. Lincoln became a partner in a general store, which failed in a few months, leaving him saddled with debt (he would refer to it as “the national debt”; it took him almost a decade to pay it off). In 1833 he managed to be appointed village postmaster—this brought him some income, not much work, and the opportunity to read everyone else’s newspapers. He learned surveying, and was also appointed deputy surveyor for the county (some of the roads he laid out are still in use).
There were some educated men in New Salem, and Lincoln sought them out: a few college graduates, and a village ne’er-do-well who spent his time fishing and quoting Shakespeare and Burns. He kept reading, and reading in public. A New Salemite saw him one day sitting atop a wood pile with a book in his hand. “What are you studying?” he asked. “Law,” said Lincoln. “Great God Almighty!” exclaimed the neighbor. Since there were no law schools then, novices typically learned by studying and working in the offices of established lawyers. It was possible to teach oneself and be accepted into the profession, but that was the hard way to go about it.
Lincoln argued small cases as an amateur advocate befor
e the local justice of the peace, and he would ride, sometimes walk, to Springfield, a town a dozen miles away, to borrow books from John Stuart, a lawyer he had met in the Black Hawk War. Both the justice of the peace and the lawyer, like the neighbor at the wood pile, found him odd, even amusing at first—“he was the most uncouth looking young man I ever saw,” said Stuart’s partner—but when he spoke, they were impressed with his intelligence.
Lincoln impressed his friends with his grief. His woe began with a romance. Ann Rutledge was the daughter of New Salem’s tavern-keeper, eighteen years old when Lincoln first saw her, and a beauty—“straight as an arrow, and as quick as a flash,” is how she appeared in the mind of one neighbor thirty years later. She was engaged to a local storekeeper, but in 1832 he left town (he said) to tend to family business back East. He was gone for months, then a year, then two. Lincoln, as postmaster, could keep track of the gradual withering of the couple’s correspondence. As the fiancé’s absence lengthened, Abraham and Ann became engaged themselves.
When and how she would have broken the news to her first fiancé will never be known, for in August 1835 she got “brain fever,” presumably typhoid—the symptoms were delirium, diarrhea, and fever. When she died Lincoln was crushed. “Lincoln told me that he felt like committing suicide often,” one friend remembered. “He was fearfully wrought up,” said the daughter of another friend. “My father had to lock him up and keep guard over him for some two weeks I think.”
The weather seemed to give him particular pain. “One day when it was raining,” his landlady at the time recalled, “[he said] he could not bear the idea of its raining on her grave.” A comrade from the Black Hawk War remembered him saying the same thing: “I can never be reconciled,” Lincoln told him, “to have snow, rains and storms to beat on her grave.” Illinois had had the wettest spring and summer in the young state’s experience; it had rained continuously for four and half months. Lincoln knew the destructive power of rain from his boyhood. Dead Ann would not wash away—graves hold bodies more securely than fields hold seed. But rain dramatized her obliteration.
Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Page 4
