Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (2 page)

If the dying founders were anxious about their legacy, their heirs were no less troubled to see them go. Fathers should die before their children; it is the order of nature. But then responsibility and anxiety shift to new shoulders.

In January 1838 Abraham Lincoln gave a speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” His speech was both a farewell to the founding fathers and a somewhat fearful look ahead.

Lincoln himself was a young man as he delivered it—he would turn twenty-nine in two weeks. No curious foreigner interviewed him; his remarks were printed in the
Sangamo Journal
, a local newspaper.

Illinois was the west that Carroll had spoken of to Tocqueville—almost the frontier of American civilization. Northwestern Illinois had been the scene of an Indian war only six years earlier (Lincoln had served in it). No one would ever mistake Lincoln for an English aristocrat: he was the son of a subsistence farmer and carpenter, and his own property consisted mostly of debts. He had spent his early twenties bouncing from job to job—river boatman, clerk, storekeeper, postmaster, surveyor—until he settled on politics and law, getting himself elected to the state legislature and becoming the law partner of an older
officeholder. Socially he belonged to the democratic mass, and the life he had chosen to pursue was climbing the ladders of democratic politics and litigation.

Lincoln was an autodidact—all his schooling amounted to no more than a year in one-room schoolhouses—and he gave an autodidact’s speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum: well-planned, but stiff and a little fancy, like a brand-new suit. One phrase foreshadowed the Lincoln to come: in his peroration, he said, of the founding fathers, “what invading foemen could
never do
, the silent artillery of time
has done
. . . . They are gone.” Lincoln’s artillery metaphor had the force and paradox of great poetry: artillery is the loudest thing on a battlefield, as it is the most destructive; but the deadliest artillery of all is noiseless, quieter even than the ticking of a watch. Lincoln’s metaphor also had the music of great poetry. It was a three-word variation on the letters
i
and
t. Silent
—a long
i
, trailed by a soft final
t. Artillery
—a sharp
t
, followed immediately by a short
i. Time
, the monosyllable—a sharp
t
with a long moaning
i
. The music underscored the image:
Silent
(ready)
artillery
(aim)
time
(fire—direct hit). For the rest, Lincoln’s thoughts and his language were sometimes interesting, sometimes half baked. That was all right; he had years of baking ahead.

The institutions whose perpetuation he discussed at the Lyceum were those of American democratic republicanism: “a system,” he told the young men grandly, “conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.” This system was the handiwork of the founding fathers: “a legacy bequeathed us” by “hardy, brave and patriotic” ancestors.

How was the legacy doing in 1838? Lincoln was worried; though he had not read Carroll’s or Madison’s last thoughts, some of his worries echoed theirs. He had a lot to say about mobs—an “increasing disregard for law,” he argued, “pervades the country,” a point he illustrated by describing recent lynchings in Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois. If mobs raged unchecked, the people, disgusted, might turn to a Napoleon, a dictator, to tame them. He had a little to say about slavery:
the man the Illinois mob had lynched—in Alton, a town only sixty miles southwest of Springfield—had been the editor of a crusading antislavery newspaper.

But the backdrop for Lincoln’s talk—its framing anxiety—was the passing of the founding fathers and the void they left. The men who had built the country had been personally committed to its success, but now that they were gone, that commitment would inevitably weaken. “I do not mean to say, that the scenes of the [American] revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten; but that like every thing else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time.” History would tell the story of the founding fathers’ great deeds, but now that they had died, it could no longer be living history. “They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with
other pillars.”

In 1838 Lincoln had a not-quite-thirty-year career ahead of him; much of it would be preoccupied with the founding fathers—their intentions and their institutions, and how to fulfill and perpetuate them. As a lawmaker and a lawyer, he worked within the systems they had left behind. As a politician, he wanted to wrap himself in their aura. As a poet and a visionary, he drew on them for rhetoric and inspiration.

But Lincoln invoked the founding fathers not just to do his jobs, win elections, or speak well, but also to solve America’s problems. His perceptions of those problems would change over the years, but in the climax of his career, from 1854, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise “aroused him,” as he put it, “as he had
never been before,” through 1865, the end of his presidency and the Civil War, he tried to solve the problem of slavery—James Madison’s—by solving the problem of democracy—Charles Carroll’s.

America had been a continent of slaveholders since colonial times, and the founding fathers had accepted the evil fact (reluctantly, Lincoln said). But, he would argue, they had hoped slavery would one day die out, and they had taken steps to contain it (ending the slave trade,
forbidding slavery in the Northwest Territory). They had left words expressing their repugnance: the first self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence was that “all men are created equal.” They had also left silences: even though the Constitution protected slavery in several ways, it never named it (so that, Lincoln said, there should be no trace of slavery “on the face of the great
charter of liberty” after slavery had finally vanished).

But how could an institution as deeply rooted as American slavery ever be made to vanish, even over the very long haul? (At different times Lincoln envisioned end-dates as remote as 1893, 1900, or deep into the twentieth century.) The forum of democratic politics posed a danger—and offered an opportunity. If Americans embraced slavery, or even became indifferent to it, then it would spread nationwide (Lincoln would fear it was doing just that in the 1850s). If a minority of Americans, having lost an election, simply left the country, as happened in 1861, they could take slavery with them—and cripple the very notion of republican government on their way out. (What good is a form of government that cannot maintain itself?) But if Lincoln could convince enough Americans that slavery was a blight and persuade them to vote their convictions, then slavery would be contained. If he could convince enough of them that the Union was worth fighting for, then it could be saved—and slavery extinguished sooner than 1893.

Lincoln’s most important allies in these efforts were the founding fathers. They were dead. “They
were
a forest of giant oaks,” Lincoln told the young men of Springfield, “but the all resistless hurricane has swept over them.” But Lincoln called them back to life for his purposes. Their principles, he maintained were his; his solutions were theirs. He summoned the past to save the present. (To make the founding fathers effectual allies, he first had to edit them a bit—to use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.) Lincoln turned the founding fathers into his fathers—and the fathers of a revitalized American liberty to come.

For Lincoln, the road to the future always began in the past—America’s, and his. As a boy he admired George Washington as a champion
of liberty. As a young man he found in Thomas Paine lessons about religion, which he ultimately abandoned, and about how to win arguments, which he retained for the rest of his life. At the height of his career he embraced Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence as a statement of principle (an “
apple of gold,” he called it, quoting the Bible) and the Preamble to the Constitution, which named the people as the beneficiaries and guardians of freedom.

The life of a man so preoccupied with symbolic fatherhood naturally makes us curious about his relationship with his actual, flesh-and-blood father. What did Abraham Lincoln owe Thomas Lincoln (1778–1851)? Not a lot, Abraham himself would say when he talked about his origins, which was seldom. But the son owed Thomas more than he ever admitted. Some women also had a profound effect on him—though not his lovers, except for one who died. Some of the most potent women in Lincoln’s life were widows, beginning with his stepmother; some were figures of his imagination (and some of these imaginary women were black).

There were many problems for Lincoln in his efforts to use the founding fathers. Not least was the fact that other politicians and writers used them too, for very different purposes of their own. Maybe the founders were models of moral virtue, with no application to modern political problems. “Give us his
private virtues
,” wrote Parson Weems in his
Life of Washington
, which Lincoln read. “It was to those
old-fashioned
virtues that our hero owed everything. . . . Private life is always
real life
.” Or maybe the problems that Lincoln found so pressing were not problems at all, and the founders were the source and bulwark of an ideal status quo. “Why cannot this government endure divided into free and slave states, as our fathers
made it?” asked Stephen Douglas, a senator and an old rival of Lincoln’s.

Or maybe—a minority view, but it had advocates—the founding fathers were mistaken or evil. Perhaps the Declaration’s assertion that all men are created equal was not a self-evident truth, but “
fundamentally wrong,” as Alexander Stephens, a former congressman and a friend of
Lincoln’s, put it. Or perhaps the Constitution, instead of securing the blessings of liberty, as the Preamble boasted, secured the institution of slavery and made thereby “a covenant with death, and
with Hell,” as abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said. Maybe no faith need be kept with the men who had written, signed, and implemented such wrongheaded documents.

Lincoln spent years contending with rival visions of the founding fathers. He contended successfully—and legitimately. For all the times he squeezed the evidence or hurried over the record, he was more right about the founders than wrong—and more right about them than any of his contentious contemporaries.

But the main problem for Lincoln in his dealings with the founding fathers, as he (unwittingly) neared the end of his life, was that they were not quite enough for him. Their systems and their ideals would survive the Civil War, but the strain was unbearable, horrors upon horrors. By the end the father Who stood above all others was God the Father—and for Lincoln, His all-encompassing superintendence raised the further problem that, though He perhaps listened, He rarely spoke. It was lonely—soul-destroyingly lonely—to be left with a Father who left you so alone.

This book is not a full-dress biography of Lincoln, or a history of his times. It is not about Lincoln’s marriage, or how the Battle of Gettysburg was won, though it will touch on these and many other points. It is the history of a career, and the unfolding of the ideas that animated it.

Because Lincoln was a politician in a democracy, he had to present his ideas to the public; a history of his career is in large part a history of his rhetoric. Rhetoric is how democratic politicians point with pride and view with alarm; how they sketch their visions and justify their deals. It is one of the most important ways by which they earn their reputations, win elections, and wield power. There is a lot of Lincoln’s writing in this book—jotted down notes, state papers, private letters that were written for public consumption. There is even more of his speaking—orations before huge open-air crowds, stories told in small rooms. Because
Lincoln was both self-taught and multitalented, he drew on a variety of models and genres: humor, logic, poetry; fart jokes, Euclid, Byron. He went from mocking the Bible as a youngster to channeling it as a prematurely old man. But time and again he came back to the founders, the men who most inspired him.

This book is also a history of the afterlife of those great Americans, his predecessors—how their words and their reputations percolated into the nineteenth century, in great debates and in the frontier reading of a curious boy. Other books on Lincoln have noted his interest in the founding fathers and how he looked back to them, but here, for the first time, a historian of the founding looks ahead to Lincoln.

This book, finally, is training—in thinking, feeling, and acting. The founding fathers were world-historical figures; so was Abraham Lincoln. If we study how Lincoln engaged with them, we can learn how to engage with them, and him, ourselves.

PART ONE

One

1809–1830: Y
OUTH

W
HEN
L
INCOLN WAS A CHILD HE LEARNED TWO UNSETTLING
things about his family tree, one for each branch of it.

His paternal grandfather, also called Abraham Lincoln, was killed when he was forty-two years old. This Lincoln, a Virginian, had been a captain in the militia during the Revolution, helping to build frontier forts. As the war wound down, he moved with his family to Kentucky. One day in 1786 he was in his field with his three young sons when an Indian shot him from the cover of the trees. One boy ran for help; another, the eldest, ran for a gun. The Indian ran for seven-year-old Thomas, the youngest, but the eldest brother managed to shoot and kill him before he carried Thomas off.