Nancy Hanks Lincoln died on October 5th, 1818, age thirty-four. Thomas buried her on a hillside behind the cabin.
Abe was alone in the world.
His mother had been his soul mate. She had shown him love and encouragement since the day he was born. She had read to him all those nights, always holding the book in her left hand and gently twirling a finger through his dark hair with the right as he fell asleep on her lap. Hers had been the first face to greet him when he entered the world. He hadn’t cried. He had simply looked at her and smiled. She was love, and light. And she was gone. Abe wept for her.
No sooner was she buried than Abe resolved to run away. The thought of staying in Little Pigeon Creek with his eleven-year-old sister and grief-stricken father was more than he could bear. Before his mother was thirty-six hours dead, Abe Lincoln, nine years old, trudged through the Indiana wilderness, carrying all of his meager possessions in a wool blanket. His plan was brilliantly simple. He would walk as far as the Ohio River. There, he would beg his way onto a flatboat and float down to the lower Mississippi, then into New Orleans, where he’d be able to stow away on any number of ships. Perhaps he’d find his way to New York or Boston. Perhaps he’d sail to Europe, to see the immortal cathedrals and castles he’d often imagined.
FIG. 12-B. - YOUNG ABE STANDS OVER HIS MOTHERS’S GRAVE IN AN EARLY 1900’S ENGRAVING TITLED ‘A PLEDGE OF VENGEANCE’.
If there was a flaw in his plan, it was his time of departure. Abe chose to leave home in the afternoon, and by the time he’d put four miles behind him, the short winter day was fading to darkness. Surrounded by untamed wilderness, with nothing more than a wool blanket and a handful of food to his name, Abe stopped, sat against a tree, and sobbed. He was alone in the dark, and he was homesick for a place that no longer existed. He longed for his mother. He longed to feel his sister’s hair against his face as he wept on her shoulder. To his surprise, he even found himself longing for his father’s embrace.
There was a faint cry in the night—a long, animal cry that echoed all around me. I thought at once of the bears that our neighbor Reuben Grigsby had spotted near the creek not two days before, and felt like a rube for leaving home without so much as a knife. There was another cry, and another. They seemed to move all around me, and the more I heard, the more obvious it became that no bear, or panther, or animal was making them. They had a different sound. A human sound. All at once I realized what I was hearing. Without bothering to take my belongings, I jumped up and ran toward home as fast as my feet would carry me.
They were screams.
TWO
Two Stories
And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.
—Abraham Lincoln, in an address to Congress
July 4th, 1861
I
If Thomas Lincoln ever tried to comfort his children in the wake of their mother’s death—if he ever asked them how they felt, or shared his own grief—there is no record of it. He seems to have spent the months after her burial in near-total silence. Waking before dawn. Boiling his coffee. Picking at his breakfast. Working till nightfall, and (more often than not) drinking himself into a stupor. A short grace at supper was often the only time Abe and Sarah heard his voice.
Be present at our table, Lord—
Be here and everywhere adored.
Thy mercies bless and grant that we—
May strengthened for thy service be.
But for all his faults, Thomas Lincoln had what the old-timers called “horse sense.” He knew that his situation was untenable. He knew that he couldn’t keep his family going alone.
In the winter of 1819, just over a year after Nancy’s death, Thomas abruptly announced that he would be leaving for “two weeks or three”—and that when he returned, the children would have a new mother.
This took us quite by surprise, for we had scarcely heard him utter a word for the better of a year, and were unaware that he had any such designs. Whether he had any particular woman in mind, he did not say. I wondered if he meant to take an advertisement in the Gazette, or simply wander the streets of Louisville proposing to any unaccompanied lady who walked his way. Neither, I admit, would have surprised me much.
Unbeknownst to Abe and Sarah, Thomas did have someone particular in mind, a recently widowed acquaintance in Elizabethtown (the very place he’d first laid eyes on his Nancy some thirteen years before). He meant to show up on her doorstep unannounced, propose marriage, and bring her back to Little Pigeon Creek. That was it. That was the extent of his plan.
For Thomas, the trip marked an end to his silent grieving. For nine-year-old Abe and eleven-year-old Sarah, it marked the first time they’d ever been left alone.
At night we left a candle burning in the center of the room, hid beneath our covers, and barricaded the door with father’s bed. I know not what we meant to protect ourselves from, only that we felt better for having done it. We remained this way well into the night, listening to the noises that came from all around us. Animal noises. Far-off voices carried on the wind. The cracking of twigs as something walked around the cabin. We shivered in our beds until the candle finally died, then fought in whispers over who would leave the safety of their covers and light the next. When father returned, we were each given a good thrashing for having burned through so many candles in such a short time.
Thomas was true to his word. When he returned, he was accompanied by a wagon. In it were all the earthly possessions (or at least, the ones that would fit) of the newly minted Sarah Bush Lincoln and her three children: Elizabeth, thirteen; Matilda, ten; and John, nine. For Abe and his sister, the sight of a wagon brimming with furniture, clocks, and tableware was akin to beholding “the treasures of the maharaja.” For the new Mrs. Lincoln, the sight of these barefoot, dirt-covered frontier children was equally shocking. They were stripped down and scrubbed thoroughly that very night.
There were no two ways about it—Sarah Bush Lincoln was a plain woman. She had sunken eyes and a narrow face, which conspired to make her look perpetually starved. She had a high forehead made larger by the fact that her wiry brown hair was forever pulled back in a tight bun. She was skinny, knock-kneed, and missing two of her bottom teeth. But a widower with few prospects and nary a dollar to his name couldn’t be picky. Nor could a woman with three children and debts to pay. Theirs was a union born of good old-fashioned horse sense.
Abe had been quite prepared to hate his stepmother. From the moment Thomas announced his intentions to marry, he’d busied his head with schemes to undermine her. Imagined faults to hold against her.
It was inconvenient, therefore, that she was kind, encouraging, and endlessly sensitive. Sensitive in particular to the fact that my sister and I would always hold a tender place in our hearts for our sweet mother.
Like Nancy before her, the new Mrs. Lincoln recognized Abe’s passion for books and resolved to nurture it. Among the possessions she’d carted in from Kentucky was a Webster’s Speller, which proved a gold mine to the unschooled boy. Sarah (who, like her new husband, was illiterate) often asked Abe to read from her Bible after supper. He delighted in regaling his new family with passages from Corinthians and Kings; with the wisdom of Solomon and the folly of Nabal. His faith had grown since his mother’s passing. He liked to imagine her looking down from heaven, running her angel fingers through his soft brown hair as he read. Protecting him from harm. Comforting him in times of need.
Abe also took a liking to his new stepsiblings, particularly John, whom he dubbed “the General” for his love of playing at war.
Where I was reluctant to stand, John was reluctant to stand still, always concocting this imagined battle or that and rounding up the required number of boys to fight it. Always urging me to leave my books and join his fun. I would refuse, and he would harass, promising to make me a captain or colonel. Promising to do my chores if I joined in. Badgering me
until I had no choice but to leave the comfort of my reading tree and run wild. At the time, I considered him something of a simpleton. I now realize how wise he was. For a boy needs more than books to be a boy.
On his eleventh birthday, Sarah presented Abe with a small, leather-bound journal (against Thomas’s wishes). She’d bought it with money earned by cleaning and mending clothes for Mr. Gregson, an elderly neighbor whose wife had passed away years before. Books were hard enough to come by on the frontier, but journals were truly a luxury—particularly for little boys in poor families. One can only imagine Abe’s joy at receiving such a gift. He wasted no time making his first entry, dutifully recorded in his unpolished hand on the very day he received it.
This is the Journal of Abraham Lincoln.
9 February 1820—I have been given this book as a gift for my elevnth [sic] birthday by my father and stepmother, who is named Mrs. Sarah Bush Lincoln. I will endevor [sic] to use it daily for the purpose of improving my letters.
—Abraham Lincoln
II
One early spring night, not long after those words were carefully composed, Thomas called his son outside to sit by the fire. He was drunk. Abe knew this, even before being summoned to sit on a stump and warm himself. His father only made a fire outside when he felt like getting particularly plastered.
“I ever tell you about your granddaddy?”
It was one of his favorite stories to tell when he was drunk: the story of witnessing his father’s brutal murder as a boy, an event that left him deeply scarred. Unfortunately the comforts of Sigmund Freud’s couch were still decades away. In its absence, Thomas did what any self-respecting, emotionally crippled frontiersman did to deal with his troubles: he got blind, stinking drunk and hung them out to dry. If there was any consolation for Abe, it was this: his father was a gifted storyteller, with a knack for making every detail come alive. He would mimic accents, mime actions. Change the tenor of his voice and the rhythm of his delivery. He was a natural performer.
Unfortunately, Abe had seen this particular performance many, many times. He could recite the story word for word: how his grandfather (also named Abraham) had been plowing a field near his Kentucky home. How eight-year-old Thomas and his brothers had watched him toil in the heat of that May afternoon, turning over the soil. How they’d been startled by the yells of a Shawnee war party as it sprang out of hiding and attacked. How little Thomas took cover behind a tree and watched them beat his father’s brains in with a stone hammer. Cut his throat with a tomahawk. He could describe it all—even his grandmother’s face as young Thomas relayed the news after running home.
But that wasn’t the version Thomas told him now.
The story began as it always had, in the heat wave of May 1786. Thomas was eight years old. He and two of his older brothers, Josiah and Mordecai, had accompanied their father to a four-acre clearing in the woods, not far from the farmhouse they’d helped him build some years before. Thomas watched his father guide the small plow as it scraped along behind Ben, an aging draft horse that had been with the family since before the war. The blistering sun had finally dipped below the horizon, leaving the Ohio River Valley in soft, blue-leaning light, but it was still “hotter than a woodstove in hell,” and humid to boot. Abraham Sr. worked without his shirt, letting the air cool his long, sinewy torso. Young Thomas rode on Ben’s back, working the reins while his brothers followed behind, broadcasting seed. Waiting for the welcome clang of the supper bell.
So far Abe knew every word. Next would come the part where they’d been startled by the war cries of the Shawnee. The part where the old draft horse reared up and threw Thomas to the ground. Where he ran into the woods and watched them gore his father to death. But the Shawnee never came. Not this time. This was a new story. One that Abe paraphrased in a letter to Joshua Speed more than twenty years later.
“The truth,” father told me in a half whisper, “is that your granddaddy wasn’t killed by any man.”
The shirtless Abraham had been working the outer edge of his clearing, right up against the tree line, when there was “a great rustling and cracking of branches” from the nearby woods, no more than twenty yards from where he and his boys worked.
“Daddy told me to pull up on the reins while he gave a listen. It was probably nothing but a few deer making their way, but we’d seen our share of black bears, too.”
They’d also heard the stories. Reports of Shawnee war parties preying on unsuspecting settlers—killing white women and children without shame. Burning homes. Scalping men alive. This was still contested land. Indians were everywhere. There was no such thing as an excess of caution.
“The rustling came from a different part of the woods now. Whatever it was, it wasn’t any deer, and it wasn’t alone. Daddy cussed himself for leaving his flintlock at home and started unhitching Ben. He wasn’t about to let the devils have his horse. He sent my brothers off—Mordecai to fetch his gun, Josiah to get help from Hughes’s Station.” *
The rustling changed now. The treetops began to bend, like something was jumping across them, one to the other.
“Daddy hurried with the straps. ‘Shawnee,’ he whispered. My heart just about thumped a hole in my chest at the sound of it. I followed those treetops with my eyes, waiting for a pack of wild savages to run out of the woods, whooping and hollering and waving their hatchets. I could see their red faces staring at me. I could feel my hair being pulled tight… my scalp being clipped off.”
Abraham was still struggling with the hitch when Thomas saw something white leap from a treetop “some fifty feet up.” Something the size and shape of a man.
“It was a ghost. The way it flew above the earth. The way its white body rippled as it moved through the air. A Shawnee ghost, come to take our souls for trespassing.”
Thomas watched it soar toward them, too frightened to yell. Too frightened to warn his father that it was coming. Right above him. Right now.
“I saw a glint of white and heard a shriek that would’ve woke the dead a mile off. Old Ben spooked, threw me in the dirt, and took off running wild, the plow hanging on by one strap, bouncing around behind him. I looked up where Daddy’d been standing. He was gone.”
Thomas struggled to his feet with a head full of stars and (though he wouldn’t realize it for hours) a broken wrist. The ghost stood fifteen or twenty feet away with its back to him. Standing over his father, patient and calm. Glaring at him like a God. Reveling in his helplessness.
“He wasn’t no ghost. No Shawnee, either. Even from the back, I could tell this stranger wasn’t much more than a boy—no bigger than my brothers. His shirt looked like it’d been made for somebody twice his size. White as ivory. Half tucked into his striped gray trousers. His skin was damn near the same shade, and the back of his neck was crisscrossed with little blue lines. There he stood, with not a twitch or breath to set him apart from a statue.”
Abraham Sr. was barely forty-two years old. Good genes had made him tall and broad shouldered. Honest work had made him lean and muscular. He’d never seen the losing end of a fight, and he sure as hell wouldn’t see it now. He got to his feet (“slow, like his ribs were broke”), squared his body, and clenched his fists. He was hurt, but that could wait. First, he was going to knock this little son of a—
“Daddy’s jaw went slack when he got a look at the boy’s face. Whatever he saw scared the hell out of him.”
“What in the name of Chr—?”
The boy swung at Abraham’s head. It missed me. Abraham took a step back and lifted his fists, but stopped short of throwing a punch. It missed. He felt a stinging on the left side of his face. Didn’t it? A tingling under his eye. He lifted the tip of his index finger to his face… the slightest touch. Blood began to run down in sheets, pouring out of the razor-thin slice that ran from his ear to his mouth.
It didn’t miss.
These are the last seconds of my life.
Abraham felt his head snap backward. Felt his eye sock
et shatter. Light everywhere. He felt the blood running from his nostrils. Another blow. Another. His son screaming somewhere. Why doesn’t he run? His jaw broken. His teeth knocked loose. The fists and the screaming growing farther away. To sleep now… never to wake.
It held Abraham’s body by the hair, striking and striking until his forehead finally “caved in like an eggshell.”
“The stranger wrapped his hands around Daddy’s neck and lifted him in the air. I cried out again—sure he meant to strangle the last of him away. Instead he pushed those long thumbnails, those knives, through Daddy’s Adam’s apple and—pop—tore his neck open from the middle. He held his mouth underneath the hole, guzzling like a drunk with a whiskey bottle. Swallowing mouthfuls of blood. When it didn’t come quick enough, he wrapped an arm around Daddy’s chest and hugged him tight. Squeezed his heart till the last ounce was gone—then dropped him in the dirt and turned around. Looked dead at me. Now I understood. Now I knew why Daddy’d been so scared. It had eyes black as coal. Teeth as long and sharp as a wolf’s. The white face of a demon, God strike me down if I lie. My heart thumped away. My breath abandoned me. It stood there with its face covered in Daddy’s blood and it… I swear to you it clutched its hands to its chest and… sang to me.”