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Contents
Reading Lincoln’s Words 1
CH A P T E R 1
“All the Books He Could Lay His Hands On,” 1809–1825 3
CH A P T E R 2
Shakespeare, 1825–1834 30
CH A P T E R 3
Burns, Byron, and Love Letters, 1834–1837 60
CH A P T E R 4
“How Miserably Things Seem to Be Arranged,” 1837–1842 99
CH A P T E R 5
“Were I President,” 1842–1849 144
CH A P T E R 6
“Honest Seeking,” 1849–1854 198
CH A P T E R 7
“The Current of Events,” 1855–1861 242
[ v ]
Contents
i
CHAPTER 8
The Master of Language and the Presidency, 1861–1865 294
Annotated Bibliography 357
Notes 363
Acknowledgments 385
Index 387
About the Author
Other Books by Fred Kaplan
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Reading Lincoln’s Words
For Lincoln, words mattered immensely. His increasing skill in their use
during his lifetime, and his high valuation of their power, mark him as the
one president who was both a national leader and a genius with language
at a time when its power and integrity mattered more than it does today.
His was a personality and a career forged in the crucible of language.
The novelist William Dean Howells’s claim about his friend Mark Twain,
that he was the “Lincoln of our literature,” can effectively be rephrased
with the focus on our sixteenth president: Lincoln was the Twain of our
politics. Since Lincoln, no president has written his own words and ad-
dressed his contemporary audience or posterity with equal and enduring
ef
fectiveness.
Lincoln was born into a national culture in which language was the
m
ost widely available key to individual growth and achievement. It dom-
inated public discourse. No TVs, DVDs, computers, movie screens,
rad
ios, or electricity, and no sound-bites. Language mattered because
it was useful for practical communication and for learning and because
it could shape and direct people’s feelings and thoughts in a culture in
which spoken or written words had no rival. In Lincoln’s case it also mat-
tered immensely because it was the tool by which he explored and de-
fined himself. The tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became insepa-
rably one. He became what his language made him. From an early age, he
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Fred Kaplan
began his journey into self-willed literacy, then into skill, and eventually
into genius as an artist with words.
Lincoln is distinguished from every other president, with the excep-
tion of Jefferson, in that we can be certain that he wrote every word to
wh
ich his name is attached. Though some presidents after him wrote
well, particularly Grant, Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt, the articula-
tion of a modern president’s vision and policies has fallen to speechwrit-
ers and speech-writing committees, with the president serving, at best,
a
s editor in chief.
Lincoln was also the last president whose character and standards
i
n the use of language avoided the distortions and other dishonest uses
of language that have done so much to undermine the credibility of na-
tional leaders. The ability and commitment to use language honestly and
co
nsistently have largely disappeared from our political discourse. Some
presidents have been more talented in its use than others. Some, such
as Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, have had superior speech-
writers. But the challenge of a president himself struggling to find the
co
njunction between the right words and honest expression, a use of
language that respects intellect, truth, and sincerity, has largely been
abandoned.
CHAPTER 1
“All the Books He Could Lay
His Hands On”
1809–1825
At six years of age, for a few weeks in the fall of 1815, in the town of
Knob Creek, Hardin County, Kentucky, the boy went to his first school,
taught by a typical frontier teacher commissioned by local parents to pro-
vide children with basic skills and only sufficiently knowledgeable him-
self to rise modestly above that level. Teachers were in short supply on
the frontier that ran along the western ridge of the Appalachians; beyond
was the sparsely settled western portion of Ohio and the territories of
Indiana and Illinois; southward, much of the states of Kentucky and Ten-
nessee. Cash also was in short supply. Material possessions were mini-
mal. By modern standards it was a starkly rudimentary life.
In this community of Protestants the supremacy of the Bible as the
book of daily life encouraged acquiring basic reading skills. Simple arith-
metic came next. “His father,” the grown-up boy later recalled, “sent him
to this school with the avowed determination of giving him a thorough
education. And what do you think my father’s idea of a thorough educa-
tion was? It was to have me cipher through the rule of three.” Beyond
that, education was a luxury that neither time nor money permitted. In-
tellectual curiosity in a society in which it had no likely practical reward
was rare, except for the occasional child who, inexplicably, without any
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Fred Kaplan
relation to who his parents were and what the community valued, was
transfixed by the power of words.
Words and ideas were inseparable in a nation in which the Bible dom-
inated. It was given full currency as the source of the dominant belief
syste
m. It was also the great book of illustrative stories, illuminating ref-
erences, and pithy maxims for everyday conduct. More than any other
g
lue, it held the society together, regardless of differences of interpreta-
tion among Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. This was a world
o
f believers. Here and there was a deist, an agnostic, or an atheist, but
even those who had grounds of disagreement with Christian theological
claims generally did so within the tribal circle and expressed themselves
in small deviances, such as not attending church regularly or at all. De-
istic voices from afar, from the East Coast, from the Founding Fathers,
e
ven from Europe, occasionally could be heard in the Appalachian woods
and beyond. The deists rationalized religion, eliminated mystery: there is
a creator, a God; otherwise, human beings are on their own, dependent
on reason and action. But rural American Protestants in the nineteenth
century much preferred miracle, redemption, brimstone, the literal
truth of the Bible, and the apocalypse to come. As six-year-old Abraham
Lincoln began to learn to read, his household text was the Bible.
His parents were fundamentalist believers, regular worshippers.
W
ithout education and illiterate, Thomas Lincoln was also blind in one
eye and had weak sight in the other, which may have perpetuated his il-
literacy. To sign his name, he made his mark. To worship, he recited and
sa
ng memorized prayers and hymns. Since words and beliefs were insep-
arable, he depended on cues from others and especially on his memory,
wh
ich was the agent of sacred prayer and biblical knowledge. Both liter-
ate and illiterate American Christians often memorized long stretches of
t
he Bible. And as young boys like Abraham became literate, they devel-
oped their ability to remember. From an early age, Lincoln had a tena-
cious memory. By modern standards, few books were available to him.
T
hose he could recite almost by heart.
His first teacher was his mother, who had learned to read but not
Lincoln
[ 5 ]
write. Thin, slight, dark-haired, Nancy Hanks was born in 1783 in Vir-
ginia, the daughter of Lucy Hanks and an unidentified father. In 1806,
she married Thomas Lincoln. The next year, in Hardin County, Ken-
tucky, where they had settled, she had her first child, Sarah; on Febru-
ary 9, 1809, Abraham; then another son, who died in infancy. Unlike
h
er prolific Hanks predecessors and contemporaries, she was to have no
more children.
What young Abraham learned from his father had nothing to do with
boo
ks. In his later testimony to the absence of family distinction, he gave
short shrift to his father’s contribution to his upbringing. His stocky,
muscular, dark-haired, large-nosed father, about six feet and almost two
hundred pounds, seemed a Caliban of the carpentry shop and the fields.
Thomas Lincoln’s illiteracy, though, was less remarkable to his son than
what the boy took to be his father’s disinterest in learning to read and his
lack of ambition in general. It left him a marginal man who at an early
age had fallen out of the mainstream of American upward mobility, a
plodder without ambition to rise in the world. But he had not been born
to that necessity. The father that the young adult Lincoln knew had been
substantially formed by circumstances, though for the son the totality
was subsumed into a sense of his father’s character. It was not a char-
acter that he admired. And it was one that he needed later to distance
h
imself from. Thomas Lincoln “was not a lazy man,” a contemporary of
Abraham’s remembered, but “a piddler—always doing but doing nothing
great—was happy—lived Easy—and contented. Had but few wants and
Supplied these.”
Both father and son knew less than modern scholars about the paternal
f
amily’s history, mostly because Thomas Lincoln had been cut off from
much of his past. He knew only that his great-grandfather came from
Berks County, Pennsylvania, to Rockingham County, Virginia, where
his grandfather, the Abraham he named his son after, had four broth-
ers. Everything before was lost in the haze of illiteracy and family trag-
edy. Actually, the first American Lincoln, Samuel, had emigrated from
E
ngland to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. A next generation
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Fred Kaplan
had been Quakers in Pennsylvania, where Samuel’s grandson, Morde-
cai, had prospered. Mordecai’s son, John, became a well-to-do farmer
in Virginia. And it was one of John’s sons, Abraham, who moved in the
1780s from Virginia to Kentucky with his five children, three of whom
were sons, Mordecai, Joseph, and Thomas. In 1786, while planting a
cornfield, Abraham was killed by Indians. As his body lay in the field,
ten-year-old Thomas sat beside it. An Indian ran out of the woods toward
him. Fifteen-year-old Mordecai, concealed in the cabin, aimed and shot
the Indian in the chest. It was the eponymous story of Thomas’s life,
retold many times by a man who had a gift for narrative, got along with
his neighbors, and attended church regularly.
Primogeniture gave his eldest brother the family possessions. The
o
ther sons were expected to move on. Thomas was not sent to school,
even to learn arithmetic. A manual laborer as a teenager, then a carpen-
ter, and then a farmer, he managed sustenance and little more. He made
r
ough tables and cabinets on commission, built barns and cabins, made
coffins. When he eventually acquired property, it provided mostly back-
breaking work and disappointment. He had bursts of pioneer energy, re-
settling twice. Decent in every way, he struggled through life, gave no
o
ne any trouble, and made do. He started more strongly than he finished
and, as he grew older, did only the irreducibly necessary.
In spring 1806 he had a glimpse beyond Kentucky. Hired to build a
fl
atboat for a local merchant, he took it, loaded with goods, to New Or-
leans via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. As a carpenter and day laborer,
h
e accumulated enough cash to buy, soon after his son was born, almost
350 acres in Hardin County. He still owned some of the 200 he had pur-
chased in 1803, on Nolin River, near Hodgenville, called Sinking Spring
Fa
rm. Then, in 1811, he bought 230 acres on Knob Creek, northeast of
Hodgenville, to which he moved his family. On each farm, he built a one-
room log cabin. So, too, did everyone else of his station and means, and
the small commercial buildings of the local townships were identical, at
most slightly larger. Thomas Lincoln’s land transactions, including prom-
issory notes and delayed sales, had title and debt complications. In the
Lincoln
[ 7 ]
end, their actual value amounted to the equivalent of three or so years
of what he could save from his earnings. It was not inestimable, given his
start, but it left a narrow margin and next to no cash.
Thomas mainly seems to have taught his son by negative example.
T
o Abraham, manual labor, especially farming, was the enemy of self-
improvement. It needed to be transcended by the accumulation of capi-
tal, profit of some sort. The capital that, from the start, overwhelmingly
a
ttracted Abraham was the capital of the mind, though in his adult life
he also revealed an affinity for literal capital, interest-bearing loans that
made his money work while, as a lawyer, he used his mind to work for
money. Poring over his first lessons, he could have had little awareness of
why he was reading. Pleasure in language and pride in literacy probably
compelled his engagement. But later, when he read for opportunity, he
certainly had a purpose. Among other things, he did not want to suffer
the economic fate of his father. And in his adult life he found little room
for his father’s presence.
At first, manual labor seemed likely to be his lifelong fate, though
co
mpetition between the attractions of intellect and the demands of phys-
ical labor began at an early age. His mother’s lessons and his own efforts
to m
erge memory and literacy as he attempted to read the Bible were
assisted by lessons in spelling and arithmetic at his first school. In 1816,
Caleb Hazel, a family friend living next to the Lincoln farm, became
Abraham’s second schoolmaster. Lincoln’s first formal lessons in literacy
came from Thomas Dilworth’s New Guide to the English Tongue, popularly
known as Dilworth’s Speller, a widely reprinted textbook first published
in London in 1740. The boy may have seen from the title page that his
copy had been published in Philadelphia in 1747, but he would not have
known that the printer was Benjamin Franklin, who had also “made the
woodprints” illustrating the selections from Aesop’s fables. Whatever the
edition he had in hand, it apparently became a family possession, provid-
ing him with his introduction, other than the Bible, to the power of the
w
ritten word.
If he puzzled, as is likely, over Dilworth’s lessons in spelling and
[ 8 ]
Fred Kaplan
grammar, he quickly mastered the former, his sharp ear picking up the
phonetic basis of English spelling and its variants, his voice soon capable
of imitation and mimicry, his acumen sufficient to make him an excel-
lent speller. A few years later, in 1818, when he attended his third school,
“w
e had Spelling Matches frequently,” a schoolmate recalled, “Abe always
ahead of all the classes he Ever was in.” Grammar came more slowly,
probably because of the gap between Dilworth’s rules and the colloquial
grammar of everyone around Abraham. The textbook’s examples of cor-
rect grammar would have seemed like the speech of aliens from another
w
orld. Like every British and American textbook in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, this New Guide to the English Tongue also taught Prot-
estant theology and moral behavior, its substance inseparable from its
pedag
ogy. The purpose of literacy was to advance the teaching of reli-
gious, moral, and civic values. For innumerable Dilworths, the only lit-
erature of value was wisdom literature: the synthesis of language, imagi-
nation, and literary devices that taught one how to live as a good and
t
heologically correct Christian. The mission of such books was to in-
troduce children, step by step, level by level, to Christian moral perfec-
tion.
With his parents, Abraham attended the Little Mount Separate Bap-
tist Church, near Knob Creek. Each Separatist Baptist congregation de-
termined church policy by democratic vote. Preachers preached. Calvin-
ist dogma was asserted. The cast of mood and expectation about this life
a
nd the next were formed. Life was depicted as a battleground between
good and evil impulses, and human destiny was in God’s hands. Indeed,
since Adam’s fall had sealed human fate in this world forever, earth was
a vale of tears where men had to earn their bread by the sweat of their
brows and women bring forth children in pain. There was also the ex-
pectation of rebirth for the saved and a strong sense of communal soli-
darity, the conviction that believers shared a moral foundation, a spiri-
tual communion, and a social connectedness that made them an engaged
co
mmunity. One was never alone if one had a church. Lincoln’s parents
and their church believed that only adults should be baptized into mem-