Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lincoln chose her reading stepson to be her special companion, so Thomas chose his farming stepson to be his. In the 1840s Thomas and Johnston began hitting Abraham up for small amounts of money.Abraham paid, but came to suspect dementia in his father (who was approaching seventy), and manipulation on the partof his stepbrother.
    Shortly after New Year’s Day of 1851, Abraham got word that Thomas was dying. He wrote Johnston that he would not be able to come see his father; his own wife was sick ( I have a new family, which has replaced my old one ). He commended his father to God, “who will not turn away from himin any extremity” ( I will, but God won’t ). Thomas died soon thereafter.
    Lincoln named a horse after his father (Old Tom), and his fourth son (born in 1853). In later years, he thought of putting a tombstone on his father’s grave, but he never did.

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    G EORGE W ASHINGTON AND L IBERTY
    T HIS WAS L INCOLN’S FAMILY, WHAT HE GOT FROM IT, AND what he did not get. But since we never get everything we want or need, we look for sufficiency in surrogates—adopted families of friends, mentors, or figures of history and myth. For a boy in early nineteenth-century America the handiest surrogates, great enough to be awe-inspiring, near enough to be familiar, were the founding fathers.
    Father of his country— pater patriae —was an honorific bestowed by the Roman Senate on Camillus, a general of the fourth century BC, who earned it by refounding the city after driving out an invasion of Gauls. Americans revived and pluralized the terms “father” and “founder” to honor the heroes of the Revolution.
    Abraham Lincoln never laid eyes on an actual founding father. The only one who ever ventured near him was that honorary French founder, Lafayette. Ardent, guileless, selfless, patriotic, Lafayette loved the countryhe had come to fight for during its Revolution, and America loved him back. On a triumphal tour of his second homeland in 1824–1825, the old hero was conveyed hither and yon for public celebrations and celebrity visits. He saw his old friend John Adams in Massachusetts, and his old friend Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. He dined with President John Quincy Adams at the White House, and met Andrew Jackson, hero of New Orleans, in Nashville. In May 1825, thesteamboat in which he was traveling struck a rock in the Ohio River and foundered; he abandoned ship and spent a night on the Indiana shore in the pouring rain. He was about fifteen miles from the Lincoln cabin, but the Lincolns were not on his itinerary.
    If Lincoln wanted to meet a founding father it had to be in books. The book that made the greatest impression on him was about the greatest of the founders, George Washington.
    When Americans used the term “father of his country” in the singular, it always, and only, meant Washington. He had earned it by his long and spectacular career—eight and a half years as commander in chief of the Continental Army during the Revolution, eight years as the first president—and even more by the personal qualities that wove an aura of confident masculinity around him. With a few exceptions—George Mason, who was eight years older; Benjamin Franklin, who seemed older than the hills—Washington was senior to most of his revolutionary colleagues: John Adams was younger by three years, Thomas Jefferson by eleven, James Madison by nineteen; Alexander Hamilton and Lafayette, who were twenty-five years younger, were mere boys next to him. At 6’3½”, Washington was generally the tallest man in any gathering, as well as the strongest and most graceful (ladies loved to dance with him). He was always the finest horseman (Jefferson, an excellent rider himself, called him “the best horsemanof his age”). Washington offered a republican substitute for the dignity of royalty—a point Washington Irving made jokingly in his 1819 story “Rip Van Winkle,” in which Rip’s enchanted sleep takes him through the