Lincoln
Th e B i o g r a p h y
o f a W r i ter
Fred Kaplan
To the memory of my father, Isaac Kaplan (1906 1987); and
to Hattie M. Strelitz, the teacher who, on the Lower East Side
of New York City in December 1918, awarded him a copy of
The Perfect Tribute, an idealistic myth about the writing of the
Gettysburg Address. It was given to him for “Proficiency and
Excellent Class Spirit” and came into my hands a generation
later. It impressed me deeply with a truth that empowers us
all: the power of Lincoln’s language.
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 ]

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
[ 2 ]
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

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

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
[ 6 ]
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

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

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-
Lincoln
[ 9 ]
bership in the congregation. The boy would come to that when he was of
an age to feel God’s presence and make an informed decision.
In the meantime, Di

was created but a little inferior to the Angels above, is now made but
little superior to the Angels below.” The phrase stayed strongly enough
in Lincoln’s consciousness to emerge eventually as an expression of post-
Calvinist appeal to “the better angels of our nature.”
It was also a short distance from Dilworth’s expression of the common
[ 10 ]
Fred Kaplan
wisdom about obedience to Lincoln’s adult view. “Obedience compre-
hendith the whole duty of man,” he read in Dilworth’s New Guide to the
English Tongue, “both towards God, his neighbor, and himself; we should
therefore let it be engraven on our hearts, that we may be useful in the
common-wealth, and loyal to our magistrates.” Lincoln was continually
to give highest priority to his duty to the law, as embodied in the Con-
stitution, and to the preservation of the commonwealth. Obedience to
t
he magistrates became the guiding pole of his public life. More or less,
he walked in the paths of such communal piety always, except in regard
to Christian theology, though even there Dilworth’s language remained
part of him. During the last half-dozen years of his life, when the pres-
sures of war and his obligation to rally the nation in terms that it under-
stood pushed hard, he drew heavily upon the Judeo-Christian language
t
hat had dominated his childhood.
As the repository of the values of a widely shared common culture,
D
ilworth played both a germinating and a reinforcing role. Lincoln’s pri-
vate life and his public image merged as an exemplification of the maxim
t
hat “Personal merit is all a man can call his own. Whoever strictly ad-
heres to honesty and truth, and leads a regular and virtuous life, is more

sto
ries he invented to amuse and persuade others, became self-defining.
He also read, probably aloud, the small number of poems in Dil-
worth, sounding out the verses as a strange but beautiful use of language.
T
hough the Calvinistic frame of mind judged much poetry frivolous, the
poetry the boy encountered now was as pedagogic as Dilworth’s prose
maxims. It too focused on developing Christian character, and it seems
likely that Dilworth either created or borrowed many of the selections
from unidentified sources. One dealt with “Ambition,” a topic that soon
preoccupied Lincoln, on which he was to quote other, more famous au-
thors later in his life, and to write and speak about publicly. The note of
t
he adult Lincoln’s concern is struck:
Dazzled with hope, we cannot see the cheat
Of aiming with impatience to be great.
When wild ambition in the heart we find,
Farwell content, and quiet of the mind:
For glittering clouds, we leave the solid shore,
And wanted happiness returns no more.
Another poem, “Heavenly Love,” emphasizing forgiveness and recon-
ciliation, summarized a less deterministic view of the drama of Christian
sa
lvation than that of his parents’ church:
[ 12 ]
Fred Kaplan
Christ’s arms do still stand open to receive
All weary prodigals, that sin do leave;
For them he left his father’s blessed abode;
Made son of man, to make man son of God:

And all his life is but a winter’s day.
Lincoln
[ 13 ]
***
Knob Creek provided his earliest impressions of daily life, his first
memories of any specific place. Nothing distinguished the farm, with
its hogs and four horses, from many other low-yield properties. Some of
the land was still being cleared; all of it needed constant maintenance.
It was rocky, difficult to work, and barely profitable. There were the
usual animal and agricultural smells, the daily labor, the seasonal con-
ditions—mild autumns, early springs, humid summers, winter cold, a
single fireplace for heating and cooking. Hunting provided meat, with
butchering and death a household commonplace. Huge flocks of birds,
especially pigeons, filled the sky in Audubon’s avian paradise. Boys
chased and shot them for sport and food. Water had to be carried from
a distance. Sarah and Abraham were kept busy with suitable chores.
It was, though, far from an isolated existence. There were neighbors.
Hodgenville, where they bought supplies, was ten miles distant. The
well-traveled Cumberland Road between Louisville and Nashville ran
directly by the property. Travelers going southwest and returning were
in sight and hearing.
News of national events came by voice to people who did not subscribe
to n
ewspapers, even if they could read. Travelers brought news that Con-
gress had declared war against Great Britain in 1812, that the war was
g
oing badly between 1812 and 1814, and that the nation had good reason
to crow in January 1815 when Andrew Jackson’s army defeated the Brit-
ish at New Orleans. Some soldiers, returning home, “came by Lincolns
h

tist Church abjured slavery. Most Kentuckians did not.
Thomas Lincoln’s economic viability had been shaky from the start,
i
ncluding his land purchases. Title in Kentucky was complicated by the
established practice of each property owner’s setting out his own bound-
aries. Consequently, clear title was often difficult or impossible to es-
tablish. The farm Lincoln had purchased at Mill Creek in 1803 was inse-
cure because of an erroneous recording of the survey. In 1811, when he
a
ttempted to sell his Sinking Spring farm at Nolin Creek, a legal tangle
ensued. Getting his money back was difficult. In the meantime, his own-
ership at Knob Creek was compromised, mainly because a Philadelphia
f
amily claimed a huge tract that included his farm. In 1816 he received
an eviction notice. Rather than contest the Philadelphia family’s claim
to Knob Creek, he decided to leave Kentucky. He wanted to go where
government-owned land was for sale and where solid procedures were in
place to guarantee clear title. In the tradition of his family, he again went
west, this time northwest to Indiana.
Lincoln
[ 15 ]
In fall of 1816, Thomas sold his farm for about three hundred dol-
lars worth of whiskey, a portable and salable commodity, probably the
best offer he could get. He built a flat boat at the mouth of Knob Creek,
loaded the whiskey, his tools, and some of the family possessions, and
pushed off by himself onto the Rolling Fork River, his passageway to the
Ohio River and then to Indiana, the same route that had started him on
his way to New Orleans ten years earlier. When the boat turned over, he
lost much of the whiskey and most of his tools. With the wet remnants,
he and the flatboat made it to Indiana. Seventeen miles northwest of the

game,” he told his campaign biographer in 1860. The axe was the daily
weapon of choice. By his seventh birthday that February, tall, lithe, and
muscular for his age, he could swing it effectively. Father and son spent
hours chopping trees and clearing land through snowy weather.
The Lincolns spent the next year establishing themselves in a one-
r
oom cabin, clearing six acres, and registering the land. Soon they had
long-term visitors, Nancy Lincoln’s aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Thomas
Sparrow, who also had been ejected from their Hardin County farm and
who brought with them eighteen-year-old Dennis Hanks, Elizabeth’s
nephew and Nancy Lincoln’s first cousin. They all crowded into the tem-
porary structure, a testimony to frontier hospitality and the sacredness
o
f family. They also soon shared disaster, a depth of misery for which not
even Dilworth’s gloomy meditations could have prepared Abraham. Eliz-
abeth Sparrow became sick in September. So did her husband. The illness
wa
s brucellosis, a form of poisoning spread by cows that had grazed on
the snakeroot plant when dry weather made better grazing sparse. It was
widely known as “milk sickness” because it was connected with drinking
milk, though its basic chemistry and origin were then unknown. Late
summer was its season. It signaled its presence with trembling in poi-
soned cows. Then, with seeming randomness, its human victims became
f
evered, chilled, nauseated, and comatose. Within a week, most were
dead. The Sparrows died in late September 1818.
At the end of the month, Nancy Lincoln became ill. “There was no
ph
ysician near than 35 miles,” Dennis Hanks remembered. “She knew
she was going to die & Called up the Children to her dying side and

rite in early December 1819. Sally was thirty-one years old, Thomas ten
years older. “Thomas Lincoln and Mrs Lincoln never had any Children,
accident & nature stopping things short,” Dennis Hanks later remarked,
though both were well within child-bearing age. Thomas was now the
father and sole support of three more children, the price of the mar-
riage, and the husband of a literate and competent wife. They journeyed
b
y wagon, loaded with Sally’s possessions, the same route that Thomas
Lincoln had traveled twice before.
The eleven-year-old boy, who deeply, silently missed his mother, was
a
t times chatty, assertive, and social; at other times withdrawn, moody,
and silent. He also had an alert interest in the world, an attraction to
verbal performance and jokes, an inquiring interest in the complexities
of adult life. He asked questions, sometimes persistently. He read and
reread as much as time and his few books allowed. Except for his sister
and an occasional playmate, he was often alone. He began to find it com-
fortable to alternate between solitude and talkative sociability. He could,
[ 18 ]
Fred Kaplan
though, switch quickly from one to the other, and when Sarah Bush Lin-
coln arrived at Pigeon Creek, she brought with her three children who
would become playmates, a predilection for order and cleanliness, and
also a small but marvelous library. The new regime flared into excite-
ment when she took from her luggage the Arabian Nights, Da
niel De-
foe’s Robinson Crusoe, Noah Webster’s Speller, Lindley Murray’s The English
Reader, and William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution.
The autodidact was about to become immersed in new reading expe-
riences. Previously limited to the Bible and Di

[ 19 ]
of moral perfection and heavenly salvation, and the Puritan tradition of
allegory was sufficiently alive in his Baptist world for him to have felt at
home with its abstractions. He seems not to have taken to heart the un-
derlying theology. But the story of a young man struggling on his journey
to
ward a higher life could readily be adapted to his own secular version,
particularly how to find a path out of the limitations of his father’s world.
Pilgrim’s Progress could be read as a story about upward mobility.
With eight people crowded into the one-room cabin, it had to be a
c
hallenge to find space and light, as well as time, for reading, more dif-
ficult in the short winter days than in the summer. He “would go out in
t
he woods & gather hickory bark—bring it home & Keep a light by it
and read by it—when no lamp was to be had—grease lamp—handle to
it which Stuck in the crack of the wall,” John Hanks remembered. Abra-
ham, his stepbrother John D. Johnston, and his cousin Dennis slept in
t
he loft. Sarah Lincoln, her two stepsisters Elizabeth and Matilda John-
ston, and Thomas and Sally Lincoln slept in the ground-level single room.
Den
nis and John Johnston, who were not readers and went to bed early,
the norm in rural society, learned to sleep with a light burning close to
them. “As Company would Come to our house,” his stepmother recalled,
“Abe was a silent listener—wouldn’t speak—would sometimes take a
book and retire aloft—go to the stable or fields or woods” in the good
weather and read. The classic image of the solitary boy reading by the
fireplace in a log cabin would rarely have been the reality.
But he read whenever and wherever he could. “Abe was not Energetic