Team Of Rivals Part 4

Born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on an isolated farm in the slave state of Kentucky, Abraham had an older sister, Sarah, who died in childbirth when he was nineteen, and a younger brother who died in infancy. His father, Thomas, had never learned to read and, according to Lincoln, never did "more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name." As a six-year-old boy, young Thomas had watched when a Shawnee raiding party murdered his father. This violent death, Lincoln later suggested, coupled with the "very narrow circ.u.mstances" of his mother, left Thomas "a wandering laboring boy," growing up "litterally without education." He was working as a rough carpenter and hired hand when he married Nancy Hanks, a quiet, intelligent young woman of uncertain ancestry.

In the years following Abraham's birth, the Lincolns moved from one dirt farm to another in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. On each of these farms, Thomas cleared only enough land for his family's use. Lack of ambition joined with insufficient access to a market for surplus goods to trap Thomas in relentless poverty.

In later life, Lincoln neither romanticized nor sentimentalized the difficult circ.u.mstances of his childhood. When asked in 1860 by his campaign biographer, John Locke Scripps, to share the details of his early days, he hesitated. "Why Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence...you will find in Gray's Elegy: 'The short and simple annals of the poor.'"

The traces of Nancy Hanks in history are few and fragmentary. A childhood friend and neighbor of Lincoln's, Nathaniel Grigsby, reported that Mrs. Lincoln "was a woman Know(n) for the Extraordinary Strength of her mind among the family and all who knew her: she was superior to her husband in Every way. She was a brilliant woman." Nancy's first cousin Dennis Hanks, a childhood friend of Abraham's, recalled that Mrs. Lincoln "read the good Bible to [Abe]-taught him to read and to spell-taught him sweetness & benevolence as well." She was described as "beyond all doubt an intellectual woman"; said to possess "Remarkable" perception; to be "very smart" and "naturally Strong minded."

Much later, Lincoln, alluding to the possibility that his mother had come from distinguished stock, told his friend William Herndon: "All that I am or hope ever to be I get from my mother, G.o.d bless her."

In the early autumn of 1818, when Abraham was nine, Nancy Lincoln contracted what was known as "milk sickness"-a fatal ailment whose victims suffered dizziness, nausea, and an irregular heartbeat before slipping into a coma. The disease first struck Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow, Nancy Lincoln's aunt and uncle, who had joined the Lincolns in Indiana the previous winter. The Sparrows had parented Nancy since she was a child and served as grandparents to young Lincoln. The deadly illness took the lives of the Sparrows in rapid succession, and then, before a fortnight had pa.s.sed, Lincoln's mother became gravely ill. "I am going away from you, Abraham," she reportedly told her young son shortly before she died, "and I shall not return."

In an era when men were fortunate to reach forty-five, and a staggering number of women died in childbirth, the death of a parent was commonplace. Of the four rivals, Seward alone kept parents into his adulthood. Chase was only eight when he lost his father. Bates was eleven. Both of their lives, like Lincoln's, were molded by loss.

The impact of the loss depended upon each man's temperament and the unique circ.u.mstances of his family. The death of Chase's father forced young Salmon to exchange the warm support of a comfortable home for the rigid boarding school of a domineering uncle, a man who bestowed or withdrew approval and affection on the basis of performance. An insatiable need for acknowledgment and the trappings of success thenceforth marked Chase's personality. Carl Schurz perceived this aspect of Chase's temperament when he commented that, despite all the high honors Chase eventually achieved, he was never satisfied. "He restlessly looked beyond for the will-of-the-wisp, which deceitfully danced before his gaze."

For Edward Bates, whose family of twelve was scattered by his father's death, the loss seems to have engendered a lifelong urge to protect and provide for his own family circle in ways his father never could. To his wife and eight surviving children, he dedicated his best energies, even at the cost of political ambition, for his happiness depended on his ability to give joy and comfort to his family.

While the early death of a parent had a transforming impact on each of these men, the loss of Lincoln's mother had a uniquely shattering impact on his family's tenuous stability. In the months following her death, his father journeyed from Indiana to Kentucky to bring back a new wife, abandoning his two children to a place Lincoln later described as "a wild region," where "the panther's scream, filled the night with fear and bears preyed on the swine." While Thomas was away, Lincoln's twelve-year-old sister, Sarah, did the cooking and tried to care for both her brother and her mother's cousin Dennis Hanks. Sarah Lincoln was much like her brother, a "quick minded woman" with a "good humored laugh" who could put anyone at ease. But the lonely months of living without adult supervision must have been difficult. When Sarah Bush Johnston, Lincoln's new stepmother, returned with Thomas, she found the abandoned children living like animals, "wild-ragged and dirty." Only after they were soaped, washed, and dressed did they seem to her "more human."

Within a decade, Lincoln would suffer another shattering loss when his sister Sarah died giving birth. A relative recalled that when Lincoln was told of her death, he "sat down on a log and hid his face in his hands while the tears rolled down through his long bony fingers. Those present turned away in pity and left him to his grief." He had lost the two women he had loved. "From then on," a neighbor said, "he was alone in the world you might say."

Years later, Lincoln wrote a letter of condolence to f.a.n.n.y McCullough, a young girl who had lost her father in the Civil War. "It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it."

Lincoln's early intimacy with tragic loss reinforced a melancholy temperament. Yet his familiarity with pain and personal disappointment imbued him with a strength and understanding of human frailty unavailable to a man of Seward's buoyant disposition. Moreover, Lincoln, unlike the brooding Chase, possessed a life-affirming humor and a profound resilience that lightened his despair and fortified his will.

Even as a child, Lincoln dreamed heroic dreams. From the outset he was cognizant of a destiny far beyond that of his unlettered father and hardscrabble childhood. "He was different from those around him," the historian Douglas Wilson writes. "He knew he was unusually gifted and had great potential." To the eyes of his schoolmates, Lincoln was "clearly exceptional," Lincoln biographer David Donald observes, "and he carried away from his brief schooling the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal." His mind and ambition, his childhood friend Nathaniel Grigsby recalled, "soared above us. He naturally a.s.sumed the leaders.h.i.+p of the boys. He read & thoroughly read his books whilst we played. Hence he was above us and became our guide and leader."

If Lincoln's developing self-confidence was fostered initially by his mother's love and approval, it was later sustained by his stepmother, who came to love him as if he were her own child. Early on, Sarah Bush Lincoln recognized that Abraham was "a Boy of uncommon natural Talents." Though uneducated herself, she did all she could to encourage him to read, learn, and grow. "His mind & mine-what little I had seemed to run together-move in the same channel," she later said. "Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused in fact, or Even in appearance, to do any thing I requested him. I never gave him a cross word in all my life. He was Kind to Every body and Every thing and always accommodate[d] others if he could-would do so willingly if he could." Young Lincoln's self-a.s.surance was enhanced by his physical size and strength, qualities that were valued highly on the frontier. "He was a strong, athletic boy," one friend related, "good-natured, and ready to out-run, out-jump and outwrestle or out-lift anybody in the neighborhood."

In their early years, each of his rivals shared a similar awareness of unusual talents, but Lincoln faced much longer odds to realize his ambitions. His voyage would require a Herculean feat of self-creation. Perhaps the best evidence of his exceptional nature, as well as the genesis of his great gift for storytelling, is manifest in the eagerness with which, even at six or seven, he listened to the stories the adults exchanged as they sat by his father's fireplace at night. k.n.o.b Creek farm, where Lincoln lived from the age of two until seven, stood along the old c.u.mberland Trail that stretched from Louisville to Nashville. Caravans of pioneers pa.s.sed by each day heading toward the Northwest-farmers, peddlers, preachers, each with a tale to tell.

Night after night, Thomas Lincoln would swap tales with visitors and neighbors while his young son sat transfixed in the corner. In these sociable settings, Thomas was in his element. A born storyteller, he possessed a quick wit, a talent for mimicry, and an uncanny memory for exceptional stories. These qualities would prove his greatest bequest to his son. Young Abe listened so intently to these stories, crafted from experiences of everyday life, that the words became embedded in his memory. Nothing was more upsetting to him, he recalled decades later, nothing made him angrier, than his inability to comprehend everything that was told.

After listening to adults chatter through the evening, he would spend, he said, "no small part of the night walking up and down, and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings." Unable to sleep, he would reformulate the conversations until, as he recalled, "I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend." The following day, having translated the stories into words and ideas that his friends could grasp, he would climb onto the tree stump or log that served as an impromptu stage and mesmerize his own circle of young listeners. He had discovered the pride and pleasure an attentive audience could bestow. This great storytelling talent and oratorical skill would eventually const.i.tute his stock-in-trade throughout both his legal and political careers. The pa.s.sion for rendering experience into powerful language remained with Lincoln throughout his life.

The only schools in rural Kentucky and Indiana were subscription schools, requiring families to pay a tuition. Even when frontier families could afford the expense, their children did not always receive much education. "No qualification was ever required of a teacher," Lincoln recalled, "beyond 'readin, writin, and cipherin,' to the Rule of Three. If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizzard." Allowed to attend school only "by littles" between stints of farmwork, "the aggregate of all his schooling," Lincoln admitted years later, "did not amount to one year." He had never even set foot "inside of a college or academy building" until he acquired his license to practice law. What he had in the way of education, he lamented, he had to pick up on his own.

Books became his academy, his college. The printed word united his mind with the great minds of generations past. Relatives and neighbors recalled that he scoured the countryside for books and read every volume "he could lay his hands on." At a time when owners.h.i.+p of books remained "a luxury for those Americans living outside the purview of the middle cla.s.s," gaining access to reading material proved difficult. When Lincoln obtained copies of the King James Bible, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Aesop's Fables, and William Scott's Lessons in Elocution, he could not contain his excitement. Holding Pilgrim's Progress in his hands, "his eyes sparkled, and that day he could not eat, and that night he could not sleep."

When printing was first invented, Lincoln would later write, "the great ma.s.s of men...were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were capable of improvement." To liberate "the mind from this false and under estimate of itself, is the great task which printing came into the world to perform." He was, of course, also speaking of himself, of the transforming liberation of a young boy unlocking the miraculous mysteries of language, discovering a world of possibilities in the small log cabin on the frontier that he later called "as unpoetical as any spot of the earth."

"There is no Frigate like a Book," wrote Emily d.i.c.kinson, "to take us Lands away." Though the young Lincoln never left the frontier, would never leave America, he traveled with Byron's Childe Harold to Spain and Portugal, the Middle East and Italy; accompanied Robert Burns to Edinburgh; and followed the English kings into battle with Shakespeare. As he explored the wonders of literature and the history of the country, the young Lincoln, already conscious of his own power, developed ambitions far beyond the expectations of his family and neighbors. It was through literature that he was able to transcend his surroundings.

He read and reread the Bible and Aesop's Fables so many times that years later he could recite whole pa.s.sages and entire stories from memory. Through Scott's Lessons in Elocution, he first encountered selections from Shakespeare's plays, inspiring a love for the great dramatist's writings long before he ever saw a play. He borrowed a volume of the Revised Statutes of Indiana from the local constable, a work that contained the Declaration of Independence, the Const.i.tution, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787-doc.u.ments that would become foundation stones of his philosophical and political thought.

Everywhere he went, Lincoln carried a book with him. He thumbed through page after page while his horse rested at the end of a long row of planting. Whenever he could escape work, he would lie with his head against a tree and read. Though he acquired only a handful of volumes, they were seminal works of the English language. Reading the Bible and Shakespeare over and over implanted rhythms and poetry that would come to fruition in those works of his maturity that made Abraham Lincoln our only poet-president. With remarkable energy and tenacity he quarried the thoughts and ideas that he wanted to remember. "When he came across a pa.s.sage that Struck him," his stepmother recalled, "he would write it down on boards if he had no paper," and "when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again." Then once he obtained paper, he would rewrite it and keep it in a sc.r.a.pbook so that it could be memorized. Words thus became precious to him, never, as with Seward, to be lightly or indiscriminately used.

The volumes to feed Lincoln's intellectual hunger did not come cheaply. The story is often recounted of the time he borrowed Parson Weems's Life of George Was.h.i.+ngton from Josiah Crawford, a well-to-do farmer who lived sixteen miles away. Thrilled by this celebrated account of the first president's life, he took the book to his loft at night, where, by the light of a tallow candle, or if tallow was scarce, by a grease lamp made from hickory bark gathered in the woods, he read as long as he could stay awake, placing the book on a makes.h.i.+ft shelf between the cabin logs so he could retrieve it at daybreak. During a severe rainstorm one night, the book was badly soiled and the covers warped. Lincoln went to Crawford's house, explained what had happened, and offered to work off the value of the book. Crawford calculated the value of two full days' work pulling corn, which Lincoln considered an unfair reimburs.e.m.e.nt. Nevertheless, he straightway set to work and kept on until "there was not a corn blade left on a stalk." Then, having paid his debt, Lincoln wrote poems and songs lampooning "Josiah blowing his bugle"-Crawford's large nose. Thus Crawford, in return for loaning Lincoln a book and then exorbitantly penalizing him, won a permanent, if unflattering, place in American history.

A lucid, inquisitive, and extraordinarily dogged mind was Lincoln's native endowment. Already he possessed a vivid sensibility for the beauty of the English language. Often reading aloud, he was attracted to the sound of language along with its meaning-its music and rhythms. He found this in poetry, and to the end of his life would recite poems, often lengthy pa.s.sages, from memory. He seemed especially drawn to poetry that spoke of our doomed mortality and the transience of earthly achievements. For clearly Lincoln, this acolyte of pure reason and remorseless logic, was also a romantic. All three of Lincoln's rivals shared his early love of books, but none had as difficult a task securing them or finding the leisure to read. In the household of his cla.s.sically educated father, Seward had only to pick a book from well-stocked shelves, while both local academies he attended and Union College maintained substantial collections of books on history, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, chemistry, grammar, and geography. Chase, likewise, had access to libraries, at his uncle's boys' school in Worthington and at Dartmouth College. And while books were not plentiful where Bates grew up, he had the luxury of his scholarly relative's home, where he could peruse at will an extensive collection.

The distance between the educational advantages Lincoln's rivals enjoyed and the hards.h.i.+ps he endured was rendered even greater by the cultural resistance Lincoln faced once his penchant for reading became known. In the pioneer world of rural Kentucky and Indiana, where physical labor was essential for survival and mental exertion was rarely considered a legitimate form of work, Lincoln's book hunger was regarded as odd and indolent. Nor would his community understand the thoughts and emotions stirred by his reading; there were few to talk to about the most important and deeply experienced activities of his mind.

While Lincoln's stepmother took "particular Care not to disturb him-would let him read on and on till [he] quit of his own accord," his father needed help with the tiresome ch.o.r.es of felling trees, digging up stumps, splitting rails, plowing, weeding, and planting. When he found his son in the field reading a book or, worse still, distracting fellow workers with tales or pa.s.sages from one of his books, he would angrily halt the activity so work could continue. The boy's endeavors to better himself often incurred the resentment of his father, who occasionally destroyed his books and may have physically abused him.

Lincoln's relations.h.i.+p with his father grew strained, particularly when his last chance for schooling was foreclosed by his father's decision to hire him out. He labored for various neighbors butchering hogs, digging wells, and clearing land in order to satisfy a debt the family had incurred. Such conflict between father and son was played out in thousands of homes as the "self-made" men in Lincoln's generation sought to pursue ambitions beyond the cramped lives of their fathers.

The same "longing to rise" that carried Seward away from the Hudson Valley brought Chase to the infant state of Ohio, and sent Bates to the Missouri Territory propelled Lincoln from Indiana to New Salem, Illinois. At twenty-two, he departed his family home with all his meager possessions bundled on his shoulder. New Salem was a budding town, with twenty-five families, three general stores, a tavern, a blacksmith shop, a cooper shop, and a tannery. Working simply to "keep body and soul together" as a flatboatman, clerk, merchant, postmaster, and surveyor, he engaged in a systematic regimen of self-improvement. He mastered the principles of English grammar at night when the store was closed. He carried Shakespeare's plays and books of poetry when he walked along the streets. Seated in the local post office, he devoured newspapers. He studied geometry and trigonometry while learning the art of surveying. And then, at the age of twenty-five, he decided to study law.

In a time when young men were apprenticed to practicing lawyers while they read the law, Lincoln, by his own account, "studied with n.o.body." Borrowing law books from a friend, he set about on his own to gain the requisite knowledge and skills. He buried himself in the dog-eared pages of Blackstone's Commentaries; he unearthed the thoughts in Chitty's Pleadings; he a.n.a.lyzed precepts in Greenleaf's Evidence and Story's Equity Jurisprudence. After a long day at one of his various jobs, he would read far into the night. A steadfast purpose sustained him.

Few of his colleagues experienced so solitary or steep a climb to professional proficiency. The years Seward and Chase spent in college eased the transition into legal study by exposing them to history, cla.s.sical languages, and scientific reasoning. What is more, Lincoln had no outlet for discourse, no mentor such as Seward found in the distinguished author of The Practice. Nor did Lincoln have the social advantages Chase enjoyed by reading law with the celebrated William Wirt or the connections Bates derived from Rufus Easton.

What Lincoln lacked in preparation and guidance, he made up for with his daunting concentration, phenomenal memory, acute reasoning faculties, and interpretive penetration. Though untutored in the sciences and the cla.s.sics, he was able to read and reread his books until he understood them fully. "Get the books, and read and study them," he told a law student seeking advice in 1855. It did not matter, he continued, whether the reading be done in a small town or a large city, by oneself or in the company of others. "The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places.... Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing."

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

Wedded to him, not through union,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

-Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

At New Salem, Lincoln would take his law books into the woods and stretch out on a "wooded knoll" to read. On these forays he was likely accompanied by Ann Rutledge, whose father owned Rutledge's Tavern, where Lincoln boarded from time to time.

Ann Rutledge was, to our knowledge, Lincoln's first and perhaps most pa.s.sionate love. Years after her death, he reportedly divulged his feelings for her to an old friend, Isaac Cogdal. When Cogdal asked whether he had been in love, Lincoln replied, "it is true-true indeed...she was a handsome girl-would have made a good loving wife...I did honestly-& truly love the girl & think often-often of her now."

Not a single piece of correspondence has been uncovered to doc.u.ment the particulars of their relations.h.i.+p. It must be pieced together from the recollections of neighbors and friends in the small, closely knit community of New Salem. Ann was a few years younger than Lincoln, had "Eyes blue large, & Expressive," auburn hair, and a beautiful face. "She was beloved by Every body." Her intellect was said to be "quick-Sharp-deep & philosophic as well as brilliant." New Salem resident William Greene believed "she was a woman worthy of Lincoln's love." What began as a friends.h.i.+p between Ann and Abraham turned at some point into romance. They shared an understanding, according to friends, that they would marry after Ann completed her studies at the Female Academy at Jacksonville.

Ann was only twenty-two in the summer of 1835. While New Salem sweltered through one of the hottest summers in the history of the state, a deadly fever, possibly typhoid, spread through the town. Ann, as well as several of Lincoln's friends, perished in the epidemic. After Ann's death, Abraham seemed "indifferent, to transpiring Events," one neighbor recalled, "had but Little to say, but would take his gun and wander off in the woods by him self." Elizabeth Abell, a New Salem neighbor who had become a surrogate mother to Lincoln, claimed she had "never seen a man mourn for a companion more than he did." His melancholy deepened on dark and gloomy days, for he could never "be reconcile[d]," he said, "to have the snow-rains and storms to beat on her grave." Acquaintances feared he had become "temporarily deranged," and that unless he pulled himself together, "reason would desert her throne."

Lincoln himself admitted that he ran "off the track" a little after Ann's death. He had now lost the three women to whom he was closest-his mother, his sister, and Ann. Reflecting on a visit to his childhood home in Indiana some years later, he wrote a mournful poem.

I hear the loved survivors tell

How naught from death could save,

Till every sound appears a knell,

And every spot a grave.