Abraham Lincoln: A Penguin Life - Rilegato

Keneally, Thomas

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670031755 ISBN 13: 9780670031757

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2002

Riassunto

Offers insight into the life of the Civil War president to cover his early poverty and ambitions; the impact of religion, slavery, and business on his political views; the fateful twists of his election; and his grim day-to-day conduct of the war. 35,000 first printing.

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L'autore:

Thomas Keneally has won international acclaim for his novels Schindler's Ark, Confederates, Gossip from the Forest, Playmaker, Woman of the Inner Sea, and A River Town. He is most recently the author of the biography American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

1

ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS BORN on a mattress of corn husks in a nest of bear rugs on the morning of February 12, a Sabbath, 1809. The United States was then an infant nation with another risky war against Great Britain ahead of it. The birthplace for this new child of the republic was a one-room, windowless, dirt-floored log cabin in Hardin County, near Hodgenville in Kentucky. The cabin stood on land to which his father's title was uncertain.

Abraham's mother was a tall, bony, sinewy, undemanding woman of about twenty-five, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, a bastard child, a good wrestler on a frontier where wrestling was an important sport engaged in by both men and women. As one witness said, she was "a bold, reckless, daredevil kind of a woman, stepping to the very verge of propriety." Two years before, she had given birth to a daughter, Sarah.

For the greater part of his life, and in three states, the boy would be said to come from unrespectable stock. According to Abraham Lincoln's later law partner, William H. Herndon, there was a report that Thomas Lincoln, for a consideration from one Abraham Inlow, a miller of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, assumed the paternity of the infant child of Nancy Hanks, and though the tale does not fit with the 1806 marriage date of Tom and Nancy, the story was just one that would later haunt and help form Abraham.

Thomas was a stocky, thirty-year-old hardscrabble farmer and carpenter who had a reputation among his neighbors as a raconteur, a fact that gives some support to the idea that he was the boy's biological father, for Abraham would all his life sprout with rustic tales and parables to an extent that sometimes bemused even his friends. Thomas meant to call the child Abraham after his father, a pioneer from Virginia, whom in 1786- when Thomas was a little boy-he had seen killed before his eyes by British-allied Indians.

Plagued by Kentucky's uncertain land titles, Tom Lincoln moved his family, when Abraham was still an infant, ten miles to a 230-acre farm on Knob Creek. Of sturdy Tom Lincoln many contradictory things are said-that he was industrious, that he was lazy; that he was shiftless, that he had the pioneer spirit; that he was proud of the intellectual leanings of his frontier son, and that he punished Abraham for them. One thing is certain-that Tom was in his way an archetype of the Protestant subsistence farmer, who, according to Thomas Jefferson's dream, was the stuff of American virtue and the fit occupier of the frontier. Tom and his type would inherit the American earth without recourse to the corrupting influence of banks, and though they might not be able to read and write with any fluency, their native wisdom and their democratic impulse would derive directly from the ennobling soil. Tom Lincoln was probably unaware in any explicit way that he embodied that ideal, but the boy early on refused to buy the concept. Where Jefferson believed he saw forthright independence, Lincoln saw ignorance and brutalizing labor. He would not grow up admiring his hardhanded father.

And though, in growing, Abraham developed a body and a physical endurance appropriate to a frontier boy, his spirit was always uneasy in the backwoods. When he was nominated a candidate for his presidency and was being harried by a Chicago newspaperman, John L. Scripps, for information on his childhood for a campaign biography, Abraham quoted Gray's Elegy: "'The short and simple annals of the poor.' That's my life, and that's all you or anyone else can make of it."

In Knob Creek, at six years of age, Abraham began to learn his letters from a slave-owning Catholic teacher in a log schoolhouse on the Cumberland Road. This institution was what they called on the frontier a "blab school," where students learned by rote. There, with his older sister, Sarah, during one brief session in 1815 and another the following year, Abraham learned to write his name and to count.

His parents worshiped at an antislavery Baptist church. That controversial allegiance in a slave state and constant title fights over the Knob Creek farm made Thomas decide that they would be better off in the newly proclaimed, more exactly surveyed Indiana Territory. Thus the family became early Hoosiers, a name originally applied to Indiana settlers arriving from the South. Tom Lincoln went off first, with his possessions on a flatboat, down Salt Creek and into the Ohio, then ashore to reconnoiter for a farm. He found a location sixteen miles in from the river, near the small town of Gentryville. The family, when they moved, did so on foot, accompanying the bullock wagon carrying their goods. Rather late in the year, they came to Tom's claim of 160 acres of dense thickets, in the Little Pigeon Creek community. Here Tom and Nancy again sought membership in an antislavery Baptist church. For their first three months there, eight-year-old Abraham and his family lived in the three-sided "pole-shed" that Tom had constructed hurriedly to deal with the imperatives of the season. The open side of the shed faced south, away from the prevailing wind and snow, and a large fire was kept going there day and night. Here, with either snow or the smoke of that fire billowing in the hut, Abraham and Sarah ingested Bible tales as narrated by Nancy, and the founding principles of their Calvinist view of the world, together with sundry peasant superstitions about phases of the moon, ghosts, and other matters. The young Lincoln, socially precocious enough to call out to passersby and thus to earn his father's anger, was already a farm laborer and experienced the demanding but bodybuilding life of a farm boy-helping his father clear fields, split rails, plow, and thresh wheat. But as for the complete stereotype of the backwoods boy: Once, seeing a wild turkey approach the farm, Abraham fetched a gun and shot it from within his own doorway. The experience of destroying animal life, of seeing the gush of blood, repelled him, and he would never become the deadeye frontier marksman of American myth.

Nancy Lincoln's aunt and uncle, the Sparrows, arrived in Indiana on the Lincolns' heels, carrying in tow the semiliterate bastard child of one of Nancy's sisters, one Dennis Hanks. Between the boy Lincoln and the adolescent Dennis, a lout in the eyes of some, an intense friendship developed. Those who disapproved of Abraham Lincoln's later tendency to tell off-color stories often attributed the habit to Dennis's influence. But Dennis did not like the way Tom Lincoln treated the boy, and would influence Lincoln's earliest biographers to judge Tom rather severely.

The boy Lincoln had had many mysterious experiences of the will of that Calvinist God to whom most of America was in thrall. He had already lost a baby brother, Tom. And now, in the summer of 1818, a visitation of the disease the settlers called "the milk sick" struck the Little Pigeon Creek area. Manifesting itself in the white-coated tongues of the sufferers, it was believed to be passed through the milk of cows that had eaten of the poisonous white snakeroot, and were themselves doomed. The Sparrows caught the disease first and died while being nursed by Nancy, whom Dennis Hanks would later honor as the most affectionate woman he had ever met. Falling ill herself, Nancy died with seven days, unattended by a doctor-since there was none-and calling Sarah and Abraham to her bedside. Tom Lincoln fashioned her coffin from black cherrywood, and she lay in state in the one-room cabin before making her final mile-long journey to a grave on a knoll in the woods. She was thirty-four years old, but already withered and toothless, like many a frontier woman.

Tom Lincoln took Dennis Hanks in, and he slept with Abraham in the loft. For the entirety of the bitter winter, twelve-year-old Sarah became the woman of the household, with all the chores involved in that description. Then, in the spring, after planting, Tom Lincoln left the farm in the care of Dennis, Abraham, and Sarah and headed down to Kentucky to propose marriage to a woman he had admired from boyhood, the recently widowed Sarah "Sally" Johnston. Sally was healthy and of a positive mentality and a more elevated class than Nancy. She had some furniture, including a fine bureau; and after the marriage Tom loaded it all up on his wagon and took it over the Ohio, along with his new bride and her three children, who would become Abraham and Sarah's stepbrother and -sisters. Not only did Abe now make a close acquaintance with his first feather mattress, pillows ditto, with a bureau and proper kitchen chairs instead of stools, but the tall Sally proved another kindly mother. Lincoln would later say that she was his best friend in the world. She saw that Abraham and Dennis Hanks were dressed mainly in buckskins, and introduced them to a better kind of denim clothing. She also insisted that Tom Lincoln lay down a floor in the cabin, and put in some windows.

Dennis Hanks liked Sally too, but again said of Thomas that he treated his precocious boy "rather unkindly than otherwise, always appeared to think much more of his stepson John D. Johnston than he did of his own son Abraham."

Despite the rawness of the Lincolns, their lives now did take on some signs of the Arcadian settler life envisioned by Jefferson. The government was selling land at $1.25 an acre, and Thomas bought one hundred acres. His carpentry was so much in demand that he was given the largely volunteer job of building the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church. The young Abraham, pressed into work as sexton, probably heard many of the minister's antislavery sermons, and they may have reinforced his inchoate sense that slavery was the founding serpent in the American garden.

Tom Lincoln hired his son out to other farmers at twenty-five cents a day, especially after the age of eleven, when he began to shoot up in height and demonstrated a particular gift with the ax. Occasionally he attended the school of one Hazel Dorsey, a mile and a half from the Lincoln farm. He brought to that log school a chaotic hunger for literacy, fostered by his stepmother, Sally, who nearly fifty years late...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0670031755
• ISBN 13: 9780670031757
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 176