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

Augustine Washington, and their relationship, which Weems depicted as an idyll of nurturance.
    Weems presented three scenes of paternal instruction.
    The first was a lesson in generosity. One autumn Augustine takes George to an orchard groaning with fruit. Back in the spring, one ofGeorge’s cousins had given him an apple, which he had not wanted to share with his siblings, even though, as Augustine reminds him, “I promised you that if you would but do it, God Almighty would give you plenty of applesthis fall.” George sees the promised bounty and vows never to be stingy again.
    The second scene of instruction was the story of the cherry tree, a lesson in honesty that is still remembered today, though the set-up is generally forgotten. Augustine begins by telling George never to tell lies—he even says he would rather see him dead—but then he pivots to explain that a child will become a liar if a parent beats him for every misdeed: “The terrified little creature slips out a lie! just to escape the rod.” Weems was addressing two audiences, children and parents, telling the former Don’t lie , telling the latter Don’t be brutal . Only then do we get the story of the cherry tree—George barking it accidentally with his hatchet, then admitting to his father what he has done: “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie”—whereupon Augustine practices what he has preached: “Run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for ita thousand fold.”
    We do not know what Lincoln made of these lessons or of the paternal relationship that accompanied them. Smacked at the fence and hired out to work, he could have envied George and Augustine’s bond, or dismissed it as unreal.
    The third scene of instruction may have seemed the strangest of all.
    This was a lesson about God. One day George sees newly sprouted seedlings in a garden bed that spell out his name: GEORGE WASHINGTON. Baffled, he asks Augustine what it means, and his father begins by teasing him: “It grew there by chance , I suppose.” When George refuses to believe that, his father admits that he planted the seeds, in order “to introduce you to your true Father”—God. “As my son could not believe that chance had made and put together so exactly the letters of his name . . . then how can he believe, that chance could have made and put together all those millions and millions of things that are nowso exactly fitted tohis good!” Such a good world must have been made by God; George is persuaded.
    This was what philosophers and theologians call the argument from design. Its persuasiveness in Weems’s telling depended on George’s sense that the world was good, and good for him. Yet Lincoln had already had a planting experience that suggested a different lesson. Thomas and Abraham had planted a field with corn and pumpkin seeds, which did not grow up to spell ABRAHAM LINCOLN; instead, a storm or a stormy God wiped them out. This made a very different argument about the design of both the Lincoln family and the world. No wise father; no friendly God.
    There was a final lesson about Washington and his father and it pushed Weems’s Life in a different direction. At the beginning of Chapter Three , when George is still a boy, Augustine dies. The deathbed scene Weems wrote is in a way crueler than the real death of Lincoln’s mother: George is staying with cousins when his father sickens, and he returns too late to speak to him.
    Then came a shift. As George becomes an adult and a soldier, Weems’s book willy-nilly becomes an account of his public career. Augustine suddenly shrinks in importance. “Where George got his military talents,” Weems wrote, was a mystery. “Certainly his earthly parents had no hand in it.” Both are described as creatures of peace, Augustine an “amiable old gentleman,” Mary an anxious natterer: when her son wins the Battle of Trenton, all she can say is, When is he