The Making of a Myth

For some months now, worshippers of Abraham Lincoln have been accusing me of everything from quoting him out of context to downright character assassination. Nobody really disputes my facts; but some people only want to hear facts that fit their sanctified image of Lincoln.

The real man is more interesting than the myth. I simply want to see him in three dimensions, without the halo, but also without horns. And I’ve found some surprises.

For instance, I’m convinced that the key to Lincoln’s character is that his father was a drunk, and probably a mean one. There is little positive proof, but the circumstantial evidence is strong. As Abe grew up, he wanted to be as different from the (by one account) “roving and shiftless” Thomas Lincoln as he could possibly be. This was the spring of Abe’s intense ambition, which a friend described as “a little engine that knew no rest.”

A happy boy wants to emulate his father. But an unhappy son may recoil from his father and strive to oppose everything his father represents in his mind. Abe belonged to the second type.

Abe wasn’t even sure that Thomas was his father. There were whispers that Thomas was incapable of siring a child and that Abe more strongly resembled a man named Abraham Enlow. Scholars no longer give these rumors credence, but Abe heard them. He was also keenly aware that his mother had been illegitimate. The poor boy could take no pride in his roots. Anything he became in life would have to result from his own achievements.

Thomas seems to have shown Abe little affection, and Abe, as far as we know, never said a single favorable word about Thomas. When he spoke of him at all, his tone was distant, almost contemptuous. In a brief campaign autobiography, Abe recalled tartly that Thomas was “without education. He never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.”

Thomas also seems to have resented Abe’s voracious reading and his desire to improve his mind. A relative recalled that Thomas, when annoyed with Abe, “would sometimes knock him over. When thus punished he never bellowed, but dropped a kind of silent, unwelcome tear.”

We are also told that Thomas “had no marked aversion for the bottle.” Could this be why Abe became a teetotaler and, for a time, a temperance crusader? I think so. It would also explain the extraordinary fact that Abe never introduced his wife and children to Thomas. As a grown man, prospering as a lawyer and rising socially, he pretty much shut Thomas out of his life. When Thomas, on his deathbed in 1850, begged Abe to visit him for the last time, Abe made an excuse not to come, and he didn’t attend his funeral a few weeks later. For 10 years Abe allowed Thomas’s grave to remain unmarked.

It’s now well known that children of alcoholics tend to acquire certain personality traits in self-defense. Often they try to conceal their painful and shameful home life. Abe was constantly noted by his friends as a “secretive,” “reticent,” “shut-mouthed” man. He might speak eloquently about “our [national] fathers,” but about his own ancestry he was remarkably silent. He was also a loner, prone to deep depression — another mark of the alcoholic’s child.

At the same time, he became a doting and indulgent father, never scolding or punishing his own sons. It sounds very much as if he wanted to spare them the kind of childhood Thomas had inflicted on him, even if he had to go to the other extreme.

Because he was so secretive about his background, we know very little of Abe Lincoln’s inner life; he kept no diary and had no intimate confidants. He worked amiably with his law partner Billy Herndon for 16 years, yet never invited him to his home for dinner.

None of this is meant to disparage Lincoln; on the contrary, I find it touching and in some ways admirable. Most men with his background would become failures like their fathers; he refused to.

But posterity, knowing little about the inner man, has filled the vacuum with mythology, as if abolishing slavery had been his conscious mission from his youth onward. The truth, I think, is homelier: Abraham Lincoln was merely trying not to become another Thomas Lincoln.

Joseph Sobran