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

Revolution; when he wakes up, the painted head on the signboard of his favorite tavern wears GeorgeWashington’s cocked hat instead of George III’s crown. Same head, same first name; new ideal.
    One accident of biography confirmed the political nature of Washington’s fatherly role: he was childless, possibly sterile. Martha Washington had four children with her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, who died when she was twenty-six, but none with her second husband, George. There could be no Washington dynasty aspiring to a crown—“no family to build in greatness upon mycountry’s ruins,” as Washington himself put it. Instead he was the father of all Americans.
    The most popular early biography of Washington was The Life of Washington , by Mason Locke Weems, better known as Parson Weems. Lincoln read it when he was a boy.
    How he got the book was a story in itself, vouched for by several of his old acquaintances. Lincoln borrowed Weems’s Life from Josiah Crawford, a Kentuckian who had settled near the Lincolns when they lived in Indiana. Lincoln slept in the loft of his family’s cabin; he put the book on a shelf by the window, where it got soaked by rainwater leaking in overnight. Crawford let him keep the damaged volume, but made him pay for it by pulling corn for fodder fortwo or three days.
    Mason Locke Weems was an itinerant minister and book dealer. Although he was an ordained Episcopal clergyman, his income came from hawking books up and down the East Coast. He calculated that a Life of Washington would find a market. The hero died in 1799; Weems wrote and self-published a short biography by 1800. He was right about the popularity of his subject; he brought out an expanded version of the Life in 1808, which would have been the one Lincoln read.
    Weems boasted about his intimacy with his subject. He had exchanged a few letters with Washington—“I have taken upon me to circulate moral and religious books among the people, with which I know Your Excellency, as Father of the People, isnot displeased”—and even visited him once at Mount Vernon. From these wisps of contact Weems the biographer made an identity for himself, which he proclaimed on his title page: “Rector of Mount Vernon Parish.” But this was sheer fabrication; there was no suchparish, nor was he rector of it. These and many other inventions made Weems the butt of later Washington biographers.
    Yet Weems did some actual research, hunting up old acquaintances of the great man (causing one academic historian to remark that the trouble with Weems is that he isnot lying all the time). In any case, his purpose was not archival. He aimed to tell the story of a good and great man, and to offer it as an example and inspiration.
    Lincoln responded to parts of Weems’s story, though not to the parts that have become the most famous.

    The purpose of Weems’s Life , announced at the beginning, was to hold up Washington as a model of virtues: “piety and patriotism,” “industry and honor.” Weems began with two chapters on Washington’s childhood and youth, which presented their hero as a model boy.
    Lincoln could be comforted by the fact that Washington’s education did not sound much better than his own. Weems said that Washington had only two schoolmasters, and he insisted that he “never learned a syllableof Latin” (the mark, in both Washington’s lifetime and Lincoln’s, of a college student). Lincoln himself would write, in a note for a biographer, that if anyone “supposed to understand Latin” had appeared in Indiana, he would have been looked on “as a wizard.” Lincoln also learned from Weems that young Washington was strong—he could throw a stone across the Rappahannock River—and that he did not fight with other boys. So far their lives were alike.
    But Weems’s description of the Washington family must have struck Lincoln as alien. Weems said little about George’s mother, Mary, focusing instead on his father,