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
