Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday we celebrate today, entered this world accompanied by a less-than-hopeful prophecy.
“He’ll never come to much,” his cousin Dennis Hanks commented as the newborn fussed in his arms.
It should have been a safe prediction. Raised in the wilds of Kentucky and Indiana, Lincoln went to school “by littles,” as he put it—a little here and a little there—his formal education amounting to less than a year of study in one-room schoolhouses. His father put an ax in his hands when he was eight years old. Frontier life valued hard labor over too much book learning.
Yet Abraham would learn. He thought nothing of walking miles to borrow a book. His stepmother recalled that “he read all the books he could lay his hands on.” He once worked three days in the cornfield of neighbor Josiah Crawford to pay for a biography about George Washington that had been water-damaged in his possession.
Words fascinated him. As a boy, he would mount a tree stump and repeat the sermons of itinerant preachers for anyone who would listen. When he lacked paper to write on, he scribbled on boards and the flat sides of hewn logs.
Twice he rafted to New Orleans to see something of the world. On the second trip, his flatboat lodged on a dam across the Sangamon River at New Salem, Ill. He impressed the villagers by devising a way to drain the swamped boat and slide it free.
Abe returned to New Salem to clerk in a general store. To prove his mettle he wrestled Jack Armstrong, leader of a local gang called the Clary’s Grove Boys. They liked the way he handled himself, and the Clary’s Grove Boys stood by him the rest of his days.
He marched as a captain in Illinois’s Black Hawk War and joked that he “had a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes.” But he learned something about a soldier’s life and how to handle men.
He opened his own store with a partner, and when it failed he found himself owing creditors much money. It took him years to pay off his “national debt,” as he called it.
He joined a local debating club to practice speaking, and its president observed that “there was more in Abe’s head than wit and fun.” Folks in New Salem often found him stretched out in the shade of a tree, poring over a grammar book to master rules such as “adverbs qualify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs.”
Legend says that he found a copy of Blackstone’s
Commentaries on the Laws of England at the bottom of a barrel of junk. More likely, he bought the book at an auction. One day a friend, Russell Godbey, found him sitting on a woodpile and asked what he was reading.
“Ain’t reading, I’m studying law,” Abe replied.
“Law,” Godbey cried, “Great God Almighty!”
Urged on by friends, he ran for the Illinois legislature in 1832 and lost, placing eighth in a field of 13 candidates. Two years later he tried again and was elected to the state house, the first step on a long road to the presidency.
Lincoln’s journey from log cabin to White House is not sentimental American mythology. It is real, and it reminds us that with hard work, education, good character, and a little luck, anyone has a chance to succeed in this land of possibilities.
This is still the land of dreams. Still a nation full of stories that sound almost like fairytales: the child of a laborer who grows up to be a doctor; the stay-at-home mom who turns a hobby into a flourishing business; the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas who becomes president.
It is reported that when a visitor to the White House asked Lincoln how he intended to solve the many crises before him, the president responded with one of his homespun expressions. “Oh,” he said, “there is no alternative but to keep pegging away.”
It is not an elegant motto, but a commonsense rule by which he came to much after all, an emblem of a man whose remarkable life still inspires the country he saved.
— William J. Bennett and John Cribb are coauthors of The American Patriot’s Almanac (Thomas Nelson, 2008). Bennett is also the Washington Fellow of the Claremont Institute.
