Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Read Online Free Page A

what areader he was. All this was beyond Thomas Lincoln’s ken.
    Quick wits can make a boy forget his place, and Thomas Lincoln didn’t like that, either. If a stranger rode by the Lincoln property when father and son were at the fence, Abraham would horn in with the first question, and sometimes his fathersmacked him for it. When Abraham asked his mother who was the father of Zebedee’s children, she laughed and called him a nasty little pup. When he was pert in the presence of his father, Thomas gave him the back of his hand. (Sarah Bush Lincoln did not recall Abraham horning in on her, perhaps because he felt less competitive with his stepmother.)
    Father and son inhabited different mental worlds; certainly Abraham thought so. Years later, when he was running for president, he wrote in a campaign autobiography that his father “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglinglysign his own name.” How much scorn still coils in that word bunglingly . Scorn, and judgment: my father could have learned to sign his name properly if he had made the effort; after all, I did .
    Only one remark of Thomas Lincoln’s stuck in Abraham’s mind enough for him to repeat it in later years: “If you make a bad bargain,hug it the tighter.” It is a Delphic remark. It suggests persistence, which Thomas Lincoln had; maybe stubbornness—persisting in small farming, a way of life his son came to dislike. The clearest possible meaning of Thomas Lincoln’s dictum seems to be: if you make a bad choice, try to make the best of it. Abraham did not follow this advice where Thomas was concerned; he had not chosen his father and he did not try very hard to make the best of him.

    And yet, our fathers give us life, while this father additionally gave Abraham twenty-two years of his company. Something rubbed off.
    Thomas Lincoln was a temperate man. In his time and place this was a rare distinction. Early nineteenth-century America was a nation of drunkards; Americans consumed hard liquor at a rate of five gallons per person per year; some working men drank aquart a day. Thomas Lincoln took no part in the national binge; one in-law said he “never was intoxicatedin his life.” Abraham was as temperate as his father.
    The Lincolns were differently built—Abraham (who rose to be 6’4”) lean and gawky, Thomas (who stood 5’10”) compact and solid. But both of them were powerful, and Thomas proved it when he had to. In Kentucky he fought another reputed strong man in an arranged fight, a challenge match, and beat him, after which “no one else evertried his manhood.” Such contests were a common feature of frontier life, a form of communal hazing; Abraham would undergo them himself, as successfully as his father.
    These physical tests came to the Lincolns; neither of them looked for trouble. This, too, was noteworthy in a society of brawling and all-in fighting, which could descend to gouging, biting, and maiming. Probably their sobriety helped keep them peaceable.
    But by far the most important quality father and son shared was telling stories and jokes. John Hanks, one of the many Hanks cousins who knew both men, thought Thomas was as good a storyteller as Abraham; Dennis Hanks maintained that Thomas waseven better. Maybe one reason Thomas cuffed his son when he spoke up to passersby at the fence was that he was spoiling his father’s set-ups. Stories were the only form of entertainment—apart from sermons, trials, and elections—that rural America had, and the only one that was readily available. Church congregations met once or twice a week, sessions of court and political campaigns were much less frequent. Stories were there anytime, if you knew how to tell them. Any tavern, any store, any hearth could spawn them. They passed the news, brought in company, held the darkness at bay.
    Abraham Lincoln took to storytelling because he was good at it—he was an excellent mimic, and he developed a great sense of timing—and because