Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [32]
ABRAHAM LINCOLN faced obstacles unimaginable to the other candidates for the Republican nomination. In sharp contrast to the comfortable lifestyle the Seward family enjoyed, and the secure early childhoods of Chase and Bates before their fathers died, Lincoln’s road to success was longer, more tortuous, and far less likely.
Born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on an isolated farm in the slave state of Kentucky, Abraham had an older sister, Sarah, who died in childbirth when he was nineteen, and a younger brother who died in infancy. His father, Thomas, had never learned to read and, according to Lincoln, never did “more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.” As a six-year-old boy, young Thomas had watched when a Shawnee raiding party murdered his father. This violent death, Lincoln later suggested, coupled with the “very narrow circumstances” of his mother, left Thomas “a wandering laboring boy,” growing up “litterally without education.” He was working as a rough carpenter and hired hand when he married Nancy Hanks, a quiet, intelligent young woman of uncertain ancestry.
In the years following Abraham’s birth, the Lincolns moved from one dirt farm to another in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. On each of these farms, Thomas cleared only enough land for his family’s use. Lack of ambition joined with insufficient access to a market for surplus goods to trap Thomas in relentless poverty.
In later life, Lincoln neither romanticized nor sentimentalized the difficult circumstances of his childhood. When asked in 1860 by his campaign biographer, John Locke Scripps, to share the details of his early days, he hesitated. “Why Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence…you will find in Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”
The traces of Nancy Hanks in history are few and fragmentary. A childhood friend and neighbor of Lincoln’s, Nathaniel Grigsby, reported that Mrs. Lincoln “was a woman Know(n) for the Extraordinary Strength of her mind among the family and all who knew her: she was superior to her husband in Every way. She was a brilliant woman.” Nancy’s first cousin Dennis Hanks, a childhood friend of Abraham’s, recalled that Mrs. Lincoln “read the good Bible to [Abe]—taught him to read and to spell—taught him sweetness & benevolence as well.” She was described as “beyond all doubt an intellectual woman”; said to possess “Remarkable” perception; to be “very smart” and “naturally Strong minded.”
Much later, Lincoln, alluding to the possibility that his mother had come from distinguished stock, told his friend William Herndon: “All that I am or hope ever to be I get from my mother, God bless her.”
In the early autumn of 1818, when Abraham was nine, Nancy Lincoln contracted what was known as “milk sickness”—a fatal ailment whose victims suffered dizziness, nausea, and an irregular heartbeat before slipping into a coma. The disease first struck Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow, Nancy Lincoln’s aunt and uncle, who had joined the Lincolns in Indiana the previous winter. The Sparrows had parented Nancy since she was a child and served as grandparents to young Lincoln. The deadly illness took the lives of the Sparrows in rapid succession, and then, before a fortnight had passed, Lincoln’s mother became gravely ill. “I am going away from you, Abraham,” she reportedly told her young son shortly before she died, “and I shall not return.”
In an era when men were fortunate to reach forty-five, and a staggering number of women died in childbirth, the death of a parent was commonplace. Of the four rivals, Seward alone kept parents into his adulthood. Chase was only eight when he lost his father. Bates was eleven. Both of their lives, like Lincoln’s, were molded by loss.
The impact of the loss depended upon each man’s