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Chapter One “I’ll study and get ready, and then the chance will come.”
AS A CHILD, ABRAHAM LINCOLN DREAMED HEROIC DREAMS. Through stories and books he imagined a different world from his life on the harsh, isolated frontier where he was born in 1809. His family’s small, simple cabin had no electricity, no running water, and no heat, and offered little protection against the elements and the wild animals that prowled around their rough farm.
When asked later to shed light on his beginnings, Lincoln claimed his background could be “condensed into a single sentence... : ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’” His father, Thomas, had never learned to read and, according to his son, could barely sign his own name. Trapped in poverty, Thomas cleared enough land only for survival and moved the family from one dirt farm to another in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. While details about Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, are few, those who knew her agreed she was intelligent, perceptive, and kind, and credited her with sparking young Abraham’s interest in reading.
When Abraham was nine, his mother died from what was known as milk sickness, a disease transmitted by way of cows that had eaten poisonous plants. “I am going away from you, Abraham,” she reportedly told her young son shortly before she died, “and I shall not return.” After her burial, Thomas abandoned his young son and his twelve-year-old daughter, Sarah, for seven months while he returned to Kentucky to find a new wife. The children were left on their own in a floorless cabin that lacked even a door in what Lincoln described as “a wild region,” a nightmarish place where “the panther’s scream filled the night with fear and bears preyed on the swine.” Inside the cabin, there were few furnishings, no beds, and barely any bedding. Abraham’s sister did her best to take care of them both. Sarah Lincoln was much like her brother, smart, with a good sense of humor that could put anyone at ease. But the lonely months of living without adult supervision or care were harrowing.
When Abraham’s new stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, arrived with Thomas, she found the children ragged and dirty. Sarah brought with her what was needed to create a cozy and welcoming home. A floor was laid and a door and windows hung, the children received clothing, and most important for Abraham, she brought books.
Even as a young boy in this bleak setting, it was clear that Abraham was gifted with an exceptionally intelligent, clear, and curious mind; “a Boy of uncommon natural Talents” was how his stepmother described him, and she did all she could to encourage him to learn, read, and grow. Schoolmates at the ABC school in rural Kentucky, “a low-ceilinged, flea-infested cabin,” recalled that he was able to learn more swiftly and understand more deeply than others. Though he could only attend school occasionally, when his father didn’t require his labor on their hardscrabble farm, he stood at the top of every class. “He was the learned boy among us unlearned folks,” one classmate recalled. “He carried away from his brief schooling,” biographer David Herbert Donald wrote, “the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal.” A dream that he might someday make the most of his talents began to take hold.
From his earliest days in school, Lincoln’s friends remarked upon his phenomenal memory. His mind seemed “a wonder,” one friend told him. Lincoln told his friend he was mistaken. What appeared a gift, he argued, was, in his case, a developed talent. “I am slow to learn,” he explained, “and slow to forget what I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel—very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.” His stepmother, who came to love him as if he were her own son, observed the process by which he engraved things into his memory. “When he came upon a passage that Struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there until he did get paper,” she recalled, “and then he would rewrite it” and keep it in a scrapbook so that he could preserve it.
Young Lincoln also possessed remarkable powers of reasoning and comprehension, a thirst for knowledge, and a fierce, almost irresistible, drive to understand the meaning of what he heard, read, or was taught. “When a mere child,” Lincoln later said, “I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I do not think I ever got angry at anything else in my life.” And when he “got on a hunt for an idea” he could not sleep until he “caught it.”
Early on, Abraham revealed the motivation and willpower to develop his every talent to the fullest. “The ambition of the man soared above us,” his childhood friend Nathaniel Grigsby recalled. “He read and thoroughly read his books whilst we played.” When he first learned how to print the letters of the alphabet, he was so excited that he formed “letters, words and sentences wherever he found suitable material. He scrawled them in charcoal, he scored them in the dust, in the sand, in the snow—anywhere and everywhere that lines could be drawn.” He soon became “the best penman in the neighborhood.”
Sharing his knowledge with his schoolmates at every turn, he was their leader. A friend recalled the effort he took to explain to her how the heavenly bodies moved, patiently telling her that the moon was not really sinking during the night, as she had thought; it was the earth that was moving, not the moon; “we do the sinking as you call it,” he told her. “The moon as to us is Comparatively still.” His skeptical friend responded, “Abe—what a fool you are!” But that same friend said later, “I know now that I was the fool, not Lincoln. I am now thoroughly satisfied that Abe knew the general laws of astronomy and the movements of the heavenly bodies. He was better read then than the world knows, or is likely to know exactly.”
Abraham understood early on that stories, examples, and patience were the best tools for teaching. He had developed his talent for storytelling, in part, from watching his father. Though Thomas Lincoln was unable to read or write, he had an uncanny memory for exceptional stories and a flair for telling them. Night after night, Thomas would exchange tales with farmers, carpenters, neighbors, and peddlers, while young Lincoln listened intently. After hearing the adults chatter through the evening, Abraham would spend “no small part of the night walking up and down, trying to make out the exact meaning” of what the men had said so he could entertain his friends the next day with a simplified translation of the mysterious adult world.
Wherever he was, another childhood friend recalled, “the boys would gather & cluster around him to hear him talk.” He would climb onto a tree stump or log that served as an impromptu stage and mesmerize his own circle of young listeners. He had built a collection of stories and great storytelling skills and was thrilled by his friends’ reaction. At the age of ten, a relative recalled, Abraham learned to mimic the voice and style of the Baptist preachers who traveled through the region. To the delight of his friends, he could reproduce their rip-roaring sermons almost word for word, complete with full-body gestures to emphasize emotion. As he got older, he found additional material for his storytelling by walking fifteen miles to the nearest courthouse, where he soaked up the accounts of trials and then retold the sometimes gruesome cases in vivid detail.
At a time when radio, television, movies, computers, phones, and social media were unimaginable, storytelling was the most common form of entertainment, and those who could master it held a lot of influence. Abraham’s stories often had a point—a moral along the lines of one of his favorite books, Aesop’s Fables—but sometimes they were simply funny tales that he had heard and would retell with liveliness. When he began to speak, his face, which had a sorrowful appearance, would light up with a transforming smile. And when he reached the end of his story, he would laugh with such heartiness that soon everyone was laughing with him.
