eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Well over a thousand books about Lincoln have been written and still the enigma remains, perhaps because it is the enigma of a young country finding its footing and its destiny. Yet, no part is deeper, more perplexing, than Lincoln’s own beliefs about God and destiny.
Featuring a foreword by Pulitzer prize-winning author Eric Foner, Lincoln For Beginners sets to demystify the man behind the legend.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781934389867 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | For Beginners |
| Publication date: | 01/13/2015 |
| Series: | For Beginners |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 21 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Sharon Rudahl was one of the female comic artists who contributed to the first underground comix publications of the early 1970s, and was part of the collective that started Wimmen’s Comix in 1972.
Read an Excerpt
Lincoln for Beginners
By PAUL BUHLE, Sharon Rudahl
For Beginners LLC
Copyright © 2015 Paul BuhleAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-934389-86-7
CHAPTER 1
YOUNG LINCOLN AND HIS WORLD
There is no greater symbol of the American presidency than Abraham Lincoln—not Franklin D. Roosevelt, not even George Washington. But Lincoln himself, his personality, the sources of his dedication, and his idealism, all remain very much a mystery. The apparently sudden rise to world stature of a hard-traveling lawyer from the frontier, with no prominent family or social connections to back him, was a wonder of the age. Well over a thousand books about Lincoln have been written to date, and still the enigma remains, perhaps because it is also the enigma of a young country finding its footing and its destiny. He surely told more jokes and humorous anecdotes than anyone else in the history of the office, but it is also probably true that no president was more inclined to such deep melancholy. No part of the Lincoln enigma is more profound or more perplexing than his beliefs about god and destiny. Did he invent his own version of religion, as many around him suggested? Why did he avoid going to church for so long, and apparently invent a personal religion, when fervently religious people and institutions surrounded him from his earliest days? How did the horrific death and destruction in the years of the Civil War bring him to biblical judgments?
How did he become to the nation—but especially to African Americans—"Father Abraham," an Old Testament hero with the destiny of millions in his oversized hands?
Lincoln's most widely read biographer, the poet and folksinger Carl Sandburg, described the future leader as too "homely" and homespun, too full of dry humor and physically gawky to be romantic with women or to impress sophisticated society. If many of Lincoln's stories were easy to see through—a way to hide his real feelings as much to offer insight on some subject—his facial expressions, looked at closely, seemed to show something else. Lincoln's "face settled into granitic calm and there came into the depths of his eyes the shadows of a burning he had been through," Sandburg wrote, capturing the impression of many who met Lincoln for the first time and kept the memory close for the rest of their lives. There was a complexity to Lincoln, but only outright political enemies could call him insincere.
David Ross Locke, whose humor columns in the press the president regularly read to visitors at the White House, wrote that Lincoln's sense of humor spared him from overwhelming despair. The wartime burden of becoming the "world's hero" was too much even for Lincoln's strong character, Locke wrote, and in death the fallen leader had "the look of a worn man suddenly relieved."
Lincoln entered regional American folklore as a somewhat strange and remarkable creature even before he became president. In the end, cut down by an assassin after leading the Union to victory and preserving the nation, he became larger than life. Even today, his face stares out from the famed statue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., as well as from prints, photographs, paintings and comic art pieces of all kinds, not to mention the Lincoln penny. He belongs to all of us and to the world ... But who was he?
THE REGIONAL MAN
The great American novelist Mark Twain commented, late in his own life, that Abraham Lincoln's birth in Kentucky made him the candidate to save the United States from a fatal division. "No wintry New England Brahmin could have done it, or any torrid cotton planter ... It needed a man of the border." Twain, himself a son of Hannibal, Missouri, put his finger on something important, even decisive, in the future president's life. Raised first among poor white Southerners, transplanted with his family to Indiana and then Illinois, Lincoln experienced more variety of ordinary American life in his early years than most people of his era experienced in their lifetimes.
He was born on February 12, 1809, in a rural cabin in Hardin County, where about 1,000 slaves lived among 7,000 inhabitants at large. Slaves were transported north and south along the nearby Ohio River or on commercial roads. Slavery was a grim but accepted fact of life. The white population generally agreed that whatever their other political differences, only one thing could be worse: free blacks, whose migration into the state was forbidden by law. Viewed as a potential threat, they could never be citizens. Early in the century, not even most abolitionists could imagine blacks and whites living and working together on anything like an equal basis, even if thousands of free blacks already lived and worked in many places across the South and North. For those who did not regard slavery as just and eternal, a massive return to Africa was thought to be the only true solution.
Lincoln's parents considered themselves firmly opposed to slavery. The family joined a breakaway Baptist church congregation that rejected the idea of anyone degraded to less than human status. What larger family legacy did young Abe inherit? The Lincolns can be traced back at least to eighteenth-century Berks County, Pennsylvania, where Quaker disapproval of slavery was common. His grandmother had grown up in the faith until her marriage to a non-Quaker prompted the local Friends Meeting to exclude her, following standard practice. An ancestor named Mordecai Lincoln, who had come to Pennsylvania from Massachusetts in 1720, built one of the first iron forges in the region and later served as a public official. Selling his share in the business, he moved to a farm and started a family. He and his wife had a son named Abraham Lincoln—grandfather of the future president--who married a woman from a neighboring family named Anne Boone. A first cousin of Daniel Boone, Anne was the "excluded" Quaker.
The Boones and the Lincolns parted ways, the Boone family settling in North Carolina, and Abraham and a brother moving to Virginia and then Kentucky. President Lincoln would frequently comment on his many cousins left behind in the Virginia Commonwealth—the home of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other Confederate leaders who disliked slavery but dedicated themselves to defending their home state against the North.
Lincoln's ancestry thus included another important connection with American history and folklore. Daniel Boone, whose real and fictional adventures have been celebrated for more than two centuries, was already a major national hero during Abe's childhood, hailed as a "natural man," liberated from European affectations and limitations. Boone epitomized the free human spirit made possible by the frontier, where newly arrived (white) pioneers carved a new world out of the wilderness, facing all the dangers and adventure of encountering Indians, bears, cougars and other threats hiding in the virgin forests. Spending the last part of his life in unsettled Missouri, Daniel Boone became the original "Western" hero, clad in buckskin and wrestling bears in the most commercially popular adventure story of the expanding country.
The saga of Daniel Boone himself, according to scholars, also marked the beginning of the literary "tall tale"—a Lincoln staple. Until that time, stories and sayings of the frontier had mixed old English, Scottish and Irish folklore (the first thunder in spring wakes the snakes, birds and hens singing in the rain indicate good weather ahead, and so on); warnings about bad personal behavior ("if you sing before breakfast, you will cry before night"); and common expressions ("as welcome as flowers in May").
New tall tales and sayings were born on the frontier and began appearing in weekly and monthly newspapers appearing in the 1820s-30s. The "Humor of the Old Southwest," as it was called, described men and women who were larger than life and often too violent for anything that resembled settled society. They lived hard, died young, and fought each other at least as often as they fought "wild Indians," telling jokes and stories about themselves and the wilderness around them. In one story Lincoln liked to tell, a wife who comes across her husband fighting a bear, perhaps to the death, shouts her encouragement, "Go It, Husband! Go It, Bear!" The same wife, or someone like her, reputedly carried a small bag of eyes that she tore out of the heads of women rivals. For the semimythic male of the Old Southwest, an average meal consisted of pounds of meat and vegetables—perhaps an entire hog—washed down with jugs of applejack and gallons of coffee, providing the nourishment needed for all the adventures in a lifetime as brilliant and brief as a lightning-strike. Abe Lincoln, from his teens to the end of his life, was famous for telling the wildest, most imaginative stories and jokes, usually to make a point, often just for fun, but always with a straight face.
Physically oversized, Lincoln was also a champion wrestler and runner along the settled edge of the frontier. Like mythical characters, he was larger than life. At 6'4", he was taller than almost anyone he met and the tallest president in US history. Upon his death, the famed poet James Russell Lowell ended a poem about Lincoln by calling him the "new birth of our new soil, the first American." In him, as Lowell saw it and others agreed, the American character had crystallized; it was no longer an extension of European life, European thinking, and the European spirit.
At the same time, however, many of Lincoln's own stories expressed a set of morals different from those of the Old Southwest, a subtle repudiation of the senseless cruelty across large parts of the frontier. In this, Lincoln was far apart from Daniel Boone and closer to another legendary figure who was very real: Johnny Appleseed.
Born John Chapman in Massachusetts in 1774, Chapman joined the Swedenborgian church—based upon the wide-ranging ideas and writings of Swedish theologian, scientist, and pacifist Emanuel Swedenborg—and took to the frontier with just a sack of apple seeds. Johnny walked thousands of miles in his bare feet, slept mostly on the ground or in hollow logs, refused to kill any animal, and survived on fruits and nuts. He supplemented his diet, especially in winter, with meals offered by new and old friends among frontier settlers. He preached love and kindness wherever he went, westward past the Ohio territory into Indiana, where he died in 1845. His seeds were sown mainly to grow apples for cider and then hard cider, a popular alcoholic beverage on the frontier.
Abe Lincoln, never known to write or speak of Johnny Appleseed, carried more than a little bit of Johnny within him. Although he could bring nearly any young man his age to the ground and did, at times, hold his ground against a mob, Lincoln swore that he did not have the heart to shoot any animal larger than a turkey. He took no joy in bloodshed. He had the "mind of a child," according to a friend, and was incapable of intentional cruelty. Abe and John Chapman were alike in their fearlessness, but both saw themselves in the hands of the Almighty. They believed in the essential goodness of people, the greatness of human possibility in America, and the mystery of God beyond the dogmatic beliefs of mainstream churches.
Poet Stephen Vincent Benet, writing John Brown's Body (1928), one of the book-length poems about US history to reach popular audiences in the twentieth century, described the sixteenth president in simple terms:
Lincoln, six feet one in his stocking feet,
The lank man, knotty and tough as a hickory rail
Whose hands were always too big for white-kid gloves
Whose wit was a coonskin sack of dry tall tales
Whose weathered face was homely as a plowed field ...
Abe Lincoln was born to be the stuff of legend.
YOUNG ABE
The Lincolns, taking in the frontier world around them, were part of a considerable population of settlers—white, English-speaking, and Protestant—that actually moved with the frontier. This was not the Wild Frontier of Daniel Boone, where aging pioneers had loved the freedom of open spaces and mourned the coming of civilization, but the agricultural frontier in motion, killing or pushing out Native American peoples as they went.
We can only wonder about young Abe Lincoln's fate if his family had not moved across the river to Indiana and then to Illinois. It was a move or series of moves that thousands of other families were making at the time. Within a generation, they created new communities by clearing woods and raising crops and farm animals to load on barges and sell elsewhere, or buying manufactured goods from the east. In legend if not always in fact, neighbors came together to share goods and raise barns for newcomers.
Lincoln recalled very little from his Kentucky life beyond what he described as "stinted living"—the crude cabins and near-poverty of his own family and neighbors—along with a few boyhood adventures. Then his life changed. Remembering himself at the age of eight, shortly after the family moved to Indiana, he experienced life "in an unbroken forest" for the first time. Oversized and strong for his age, he carried an axe that he swore he had used almost every day for fifteen years, putting it down only during plowing and harvesting seasons. He had had a little schooling in Kentucky and got a bit more in Indiana, although the teachers were barely literate themselves. "I do think," he recorded later, "that the aggregate of all my schooling did not amount to one year." He made his own education, then and later, often at night with the poorest lighting. As a boy, he wrote a verse in his copybook that reflected the self-deprecating humor he would become known for:
Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen,
He will be good, but God knows when.
Was young Abe Lincoln eager to grow up? He remembered listening with great effort to grown-up talk, angry when he could not understand it, unable to sleep when he could not make out the meaning of adult conversation or when he got an idea in his head and struggled to put it into his own language. The loss of his mother Nancy, who died suddenly from the "milk disease"—milk turned poison by plants the cow had eaten—when he was only nine, must have deepened his fears about the future and his self-doubts. So perhaps did the kick of a horse a year later that briefly seemed to leave him for dead.
The move to Macon County, Illinois, near what would become Decatur, turned out to be a turning point in Lincoln's life. His father Thomas had selected the location as a good place to farm, and they settled on land ten miles west of the fledgling village in 1830. A few years after that, young Abe (according to another story he later told) fell into the Sangamon River and was nursed back to health by a kindly neighbor, with a concoction of animal fat that included skunk oil.
Abe's stepmother Sarah had long encouraged him to read, and he thirsted after knowledge from a young age, both to "improve" himself for future success and for the sheer joy of learning. As a young boy in Indiana, he later said, he had written letters for illiterate neighbors and began devouring any books he could lay his hands on. He borrowed volumes from one person or another, reading about one subject after another, never satisfied. The Bible was among the first books he read, followed by Aesop's Fables, Shakespeare's plays, and the literature of the day—poetry, fiction, and history alike. Among his favorites was the popular biography of George Washington by Parson Weems, who famously invented the story of the boy cutting down the cherry tree and unable to lie about it. Abe's father could not understand a child who wanted to immerse himself in books instead of playing outside. When Abe was a teenager, acquaintances enjoyed his lively conversation, jokes, and stories above all. But as a young man, when others would go off together for nights of drinking and carousing, Abe would head back to his room to read.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lincoln for Beginners by PAUL BUHLE, Sharon Rudahl. Copyright © 2015 Paul Buhle. Excerpted by permission of For Beginners LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword,Comics Interlude: Young Abraham,
Chapter One: Young Lincoln and His World,
Comics Interlude: Lincoln Takes a Wife,
Chapter Two: Lincoln the Politician,
Comics Interlude: A House Divided,
Chapter Three: Lincoln — Political Giant and War Leader,
Comics Interlude: Lincoln in the White House,
Chapter Four: Triumph and Tragedy,
Comics Interlude: Father Abraham,
Comics Interlude: War is Hell,
Chapter Five: Lincoln's Legacy,
Comics Interlude: Victory and Vengeance,
Further Reading,