A Just and Generous Nation

by Harold Holzer

  For Lincoln, the choice, painful as it became, was never a hard one.

  Until his dying day, fulfillment of the American Dream remained what Lincoln called at Gettysburg his “unfinished work”—and America’s.

  PART ONE

  One. SIMPLE ANNALS OF THE POOR

  DREAMING THE AMERICAN DREAM

  NO ONE KNOWS FOR SURE if Abraham Lincoln ever heard of, much less read, Alexis de Tocqueville. But the ethos that animated Lincoln’s entire political life was an unwavering belief in pursuing the so-called American Dream, a phrase frequently attributed to the nineteenth-century French writer. Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America, based on his travels in the northern United States in the early 1830s, provided readers on both sides of the vast Atlantic Ocean the first real glimpse of what the American Dream was about. Tocqueville described the very milieu in which Lincoln labored, advanced, and succeeded against all human odds. The Frenchman’s American journey concluded in 1832, the same year in which Lincoln first entered politics as a candidate for the Illinois legislature. Viewing the early-nineteenth-century northern American economy through Tocqueville’s eyes is a good way to understand the unique society Lincoln entered in Illinois and embraced for himself.

  “Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States,” Tocqueville wrote, “nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.” No accepted aristocratic tradition existed in the northern states. In an underpopulated continent, wide opportunity remained for farmers to increase the size of their farms and for merchants and artisans of every kind to prosper with little competitive pressure on the prices they charged. In this regard, the opportunities in the North were unique in the world. Tocqueville witnessed a land alive with individual enterprise, where virtually all citizens, some a bit poorer, some a bit richer, but very few of whom were “very rich” by European standards, strove tirelessly to better their condition.

  Of course, the country was ideally suited for those seeking to improve their fortunes. It boasted virtually limitless land, a wealth of natural resources, a still small population, and a geographical location protected by ocean barriers that provided the security necessary for the peaceful flourishing of commerce.

  Above all, Tocqueville, like Lincoln, was struck by the level of social mobility in the United States. Not only were differences in wealth between rich and poor much narrower than in Europe, but most of the wealthy persons he met had made, rather than inherited, their fortunes. Even the poor expected to be wealthy someday. “I never met in America,” he noted, “with any citizen so poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich, or whose imagination did not possess itself by anticipation of those good things which fate still obstinately withheld from him.”

  Tocqueville believed that the fact that most Americans in the North were neither rich nor poor—they thought of themselves as “middle class”—lent American society enormous stability. He argued that, in combination with the opportunities for social mobility, the nation’s middle-class nature provided a barrier against social upheaval and revolution. “Between these two extremes [wealth and poverty] of democratic communities stand an innumerable multitude of men almost alike, who, without being exactly either rich or poor, are possessed of sufficient property to desire the maintenance of order, yet not enough to excite envy. Such men are the natural enemies of violent commotions; their stillness keeps all beneath them and above them still, and secures the balance of the fabric of society.”

  Not that Lincoln could remotely consider himself—until astonishingly late in his life—as belonging to the middle class characteristic of the northern states. Lincoln started life in Kentucky, on the frontier of a slave state. Like many rural children, Lincoln was born, as he put it—perhaps the better to highlight his march to success—to parents descended from “undistinguished families.” In a word, he was not only poor, but almost embarrassingly so. Isolated in rural poverty, he first saw the light of day on February 12, 1809, in a hut-size windowless, dirt-floored log cabin, in the depths of a cold prairie winter. It was no wonder that his cousin Dennis Hanks took one look at the newborn swathed in animal skins and predicted, “[H]e won’t amount to much.” As a child on the frontier of a southern state, Lincoln and his family needed to grow food and hunt and were constantly menaced by wild animals. His father was subjected to title claims that occasionally wrested their land from them. Mere survival, not upward mobility, was the family preoccupation.

  Lincoln’s early life was every bit as painfully hard as the myths have maintained: from early childhood, he worked the fields of his father’s succession of hard-to-till farms, clearing land, planting seeds, harvesting crops, and famously chopping wood and building fences out of split wooden rails. Yet deprivation somehow made Lincoln strong and fired his ambition to escape from an upbringing we tend too often to romanticize. Until a stepmother came into his life, his home lacked even a wooden floor or a book.

  Education, too, was meager—for Lincoln, no more than a year’s worth of formal schooling in the entire course of his life. Lincoln’s rise was even more remarkable because there was nothing in his early schooling, such as it was, “to excite ambition for education.” What he was able to learn, he admitted, he “picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.”

  Like all but the wealthiest families of the day, Abraham’s father, Thomas Lincoln, expected his spouse and children to contribute their own labor to the family farming enterprise. Every hand was needed for the task. Gender roles were, of course, strictly prescribed in these remote rural environs. Lincoln’s mother and sister cleaned, cooked, and sewed, and Abe was ordered into the fields when he was still young, though old enough to resent the backbreaking tasks to which he was assigned. Small, independent farmers like Thomas Lincoln usually tried to sire large families, not because feeding additional mouths was routinely easy, but in the hope of producing enough strong sons to create a dependable labor force to help work in the fields and ultimately inherit the property. In this ambition, as in so many others, Thomas proved unsuccessful. Neighbors whispered that he became sterile at one point. There is no way to know whether that rumor was true, but Abraham turned out to be Thomas Lincoln’s only male offspring, at least the only one to live to working age (a baby brother died in early infancy). Lincoln’s mother, Nancy, had no other documented pregnancy.

  Young Lincoln as the legendary young fireside reader: The Boyhood of Lincoln—An Evening in the Log Hut, a widely reproduced chromo by L. Prang & Co., Boston, after the influential 1868 painting by Eastman Johnson.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  As the sole male child, Abraham had no choice but to work hard alongside his father. The fact that he grew large and extremely strong for his age made his contributions even more essential. He learned early that the work could be not only grueling but dispiriting. At one point during his youth, Abe helped plant pumpkin seeds on a precarious hillside, then watched helplessly one day as a violent downpour flooded the field and sent the seedlings down the hillside to their destruction. It is no wonder Lincoln later frustratingly likened his childhood to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” As he later put it, “It is a great folly to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”

  In fact, the full passage from the elegy—rarely quoted in the Lincoln literature—evokes the kind of resentment over the low esteem in which some contemporaries held their impoverished neighbors. These people were the planters and harvesters, but many condemned them to a destiny of hard labor with no chance for improvement or escape. They were born to toil, not to aspire. As the poem advises:

  Let not ambition mock their useful toil,

  Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

  Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,

  The short and simp
le annals of the poor.

  But even if Thomas Gray embraced this fixed-destiny idea for the “obscure,” Lincoln did not. Obscurity was not for him. After all, that same elegy boasts a subsequent passage that suggests even the “simple poor” could enjoy the heady possibility of fame through achievement. In fashioning his own version of his life for public consumption, Lincoln liked to emphasize the grinding poverty from which he sprang, not the grinding ambition that led him to escape it. But in the later stanza from Gray’s elegy—which he likely knew—even the poor might enjoy

  Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command,

  The threats of pain and ruin to despise.

  To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,

  And read their hist’ry in a nation’s eyes.

  Thus, the young Lincoln understood early the path toward making history before “a nation’s eyes” and knew it required hard work, learning, and the striving for respect to secure the admiration of one’s peers and the right to advance in society without recourse to violence and lawlessness. It also called for “gratitude to our fathers,” as he later put it—if not to his own unsympathetic father, then to the national fathers who had created an America where a “penniless beginner,” as Lincoln described himself, could “toil up from poverty.”

  Of course, Lincoln’s own father, at best barely one step ahead of abject poverty himself, had no sympathy for such dreams, or those who harbored them, particularly his only son. Tensions thickened as Abe grew more adept at felling trees and splitting rails, even if the skill and speed at which he worked did not make him love the job. Here is where the epic confrontation between father and son really swung into high gear: Thomas wanted Abe to devote his time exclusively to his farm obligations, while Abe, encouraged by a sympathetic new stepmother who brought the family’s first books into their home, wanted more time to read and learn. To the son, farmwork meant subsistence, no more. Books opened doors to a world of opportunities beyond. To the father, books were a luxury, and his boy needed to tend to his farm obligations first and foremost, even if Thomas had to take a strap to beat some sense into him. The tension and probable domestic violence—routine as it may have been in the early nineteenth century—destroyed whatever love the son may have had for his father. Eventually, though, it helped propel young Lincoln into political sympathy with the Whigs, a party founded by a supposedly probusiness elite, but equally devoted to lifting men like Lincoln out of the grinding poverty to which they had been born and helping them toward a limitless future that depended primarily on hard work and skill.

  An additional tension between father and son complicated young Lincoln’s fraught evolution from laborer to learner. Thomas Lincoln staked his earliest claim to lands in Kentucky, where slavery was legal, even though he apparently opposed the institution vehemently. This sensibility had little to do with enlightened racial attitudes or sympathy with enslaved blacks, a number of whom the Lincoln family would have seen marching, perhaps in chains, when they lived later along the Cumberland Gap trail. For the pathway through the Appalachian Mountains, once famously explored by Daniel Boone, was later used not only by poor white settlers heading into the western territories to work the land themselves but also by wealthy slave owners transporting their black slaves to labor in plantations in the southwestern territories. Thomas was no apostle of black freedom for its own moral sake—although his local Baptist church did drum home an antislavery message. Rather, Thomas thought the slave system unfair because it advantaged rich men who could afford to own people to do their work for them and made life exponentially harder for poor whites who could not afford to buy, much less maintain, slave laborers. Proof of Thomas’s overall ambivalence came when, fully empowered by local laws and mores, he “rented” his strapping son out to local farmers to perform day labor—keeping all the money the minor earned for himself. At least one historian has claimed that the experience of performing his own service as a “slave” to his father may have converted Abe into something of an abolitionist. This is, perhaps, a bit of an exaggeration, but the experience surely reinforced Abe’s rebellion against being relegated to fixed labor in any circumstance, and for any “master,” as a permanent way of life.

  Lincoln rejected his father’s life on the frontier for another reason: it was a world in which violence—whether from predatory beasts or his fellow frontiersman—was a constant threat. The violence Lincoln encountered in the remote forests where he and his parents lived required a perpetual vigil against bears, panthers, and other “wild animals still in the woods.” Lincoln also experienced a kind of preparatory introduction to human violence when he accompanied a group of young men on a wooden flatboat loaded with cargo all the way to New Orleans. He made two such voyages down the Mississippi. On one of them, he saw a slave auction, which reportedly hardened his attitudes against the horrors of the institution. On another, he actually had to battle for his own life against people of color. “[O]ne night,” he later reported in the third person, his group was “attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them. They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat.” Lincoln bore a knife scar on his thumb for the rest of his life.

  To his credit, Lincoln did not use the episode as an excuse to hate or fear African Americans, as might many of his white contemporaries after similar experiences. Perhaps his subsequent exposure to the degradation and constant threat of violence attending slavery itself helped him to understand the anger that so easily arose both among people constantly subjected to the yoke, chain, and whip and among those who used cruelty and physical intimidation to keep them in a servile condition.

  Years later, Lincoln described his personal reaction after observing a particularly harrowing sight:

  A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in diferent [sic] parts of Kentucky and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one at a convenient distance from, the others; so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line. In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting. . . .

  That young Lincoln rejected this violent frontier world and his stagnant economic condition—for himself and for his generation, both politically and philosophically—comes as no surprise. What remains astounding is that, opportunity notwithstanding, he did not strike out on his own for a full year after he reached the age of legal emancipation, twenty-one.

  Lincoln the Rail-splitter, by Norman Rockwell, who hoped this painting would “inspire the youth of this land to appreciate this man who believed so much in the value of education.” Lincoln, who also believed in the value of banking, might also have appreciated that Rockwell’s 1965 work was commissioned by the Bank of Spokane.

  COURTESY OF THE BUTLER INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN ART, YOUNGSTOWN, OH

  Lincoln left home at the age of twenty-two, after helping his family move one final time, from the wilderness of southern Indiana to yet another hardscrabble farm in central Illinois. It is difficult to imagine that he had even a faint hint of what lay before him. The pro-Lincoln Chicago Tribune surely hit the mark exactly when, in a post-1860 election biographical sketch, it portrayed him as “toiling under the weight of poverty with a view of better days.” The comment precisely crystallized his rapidly evolving theory of American economic possibility—that even in the midst of grueling poverty he had a chance to survive, perhaps even thrive.

  In a very real way, Lincoln learned the value of economic opportunity by observing—and suffering through—his father’s frustratingly unsuccessful struggle to improve his own family’s economic circumstances. Thomas Lincoln was so unlearned that he could onl
y “bunglingly sign his own name,” as his son remembered somewhat disparagingly. In reality, Thomas Lincoln was nowhere near as lazy or shiftless as some early Lincoln admirers maintained in an effort to make Abraham Lincoln’s energy, ambition, and rise seem all the more miraculous.

  Thomas may have been unlucky in pursuit of secure land titles. But it was an age in which owning and operating even a small farm meant the difference not only between stagnation and opportunity, but between survival and starvation. Unfortunately, in an age of westward expansion, competing claims for land often ensnared barely literate men like Thomas Lincoln into futile battles over legal title to their property. Whenever and wherever he established new family farms, he at least labored hard to build cabins, clear land, plant seeds, and harvest crops. And he tried building an ancillary income stream by doing carpentry. If the surviving attributable examples of his labors are any indication, he became surprisingly accomplished in this field, so highly skilled that he could summon the professional ability to build his first wife’s coffin, while he insisted his son at least observe and probably aid in the task. This may seem to us to be an example of bad parenting, but it was also evidence of a dispassionate commitment to do what had to be done to survive the ordeals of both life and death.

  Abraham Lincoln finally left the family farm in 1830 and moved to New Salem, in the free state of Illinois. He bought a local grocery store, which sold liquor, among other items, a source of political embarrassment for him later. The enterprise eventually “winked out,” and Lincoln found himself owing so much money to his creditors that he began jokingly referring to his obligations as the “national debt.” This early attempt to lift himself out of poverty through commerce proved even less fruitful than his earlier attempt to move produce on the rivers. New Salem itself was something of a commercial house of cards. It was a mill town whose sole energy source was really no more than a stream, enough to power the local mill perhaps, but not even sufficiently deep to welcome ships that might dock there, trade goods, and expand the local economic base. Though it might have gained some benefit from the kind of “internal improvement” or, in modern terms, “infrastructure project” that Lincoln favored, New Salem eventually became a town Lincoln yearned to escape as urgently as he had thirsted to flee from the family farm. New Salem was as firmly locked into its narrow conditions as were farmers and slaves on the prairie. Lincoln eventually wanted out.