The Soul of Abraham Lincoln

by William E. Barton

What kind of man had been produced in this environment and as the result of the conditions of his heredity and of his inherent qualities? What do we know about the Abraham Lincoln who in 1830 took simultaneous leave of Indiana and his boyhood, and entered at once upon his manhood and the new State, that, twin-born with him, was waiting his arrival?

He was a tall, awkward, uncouth backwoodsman, strong of muscle, temperate and morally clean. He had physical strength and was not a bully; was fond of a fight but fought fairly and as a rule on the side of weakness and of right. He was free from bad habits of all kinds, was generous, sympathetic, and kind of heart. He was as yet uninfluenced by any women except his own dead mother and his stepmother. He was socially shy, and had not profited greatly by the meager lessons in social usage which had been taught in Andrew Crawford's school. He was fond of cock-fighting and of boisterous sports, and had a sufficient leadership to proclaim himself "the big buck of the lick" and to have that declaration pass unchallenged.

He could read, write, and cipher, and was eager for learning. He was ambitious, but his ambitions had no known focus. He was only moderately industrious, but could work hard when he had to do so. He had some ambition to write and to speak in public, but as yet he had little idea what he was to write or speak about. He was a great, hulking backwoodsman, with vague and haunting aspirations after something better and larger than he had known or seemed likely to achieve.

What do we know about the spiritual development of the young Boanerges who grew almost overnight in his eleventh year into a six-footer and was so wearied by the effort that he was slow of body and mind and was thought by some to be lazy ever afterward?

We know the books he read—the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, Æsop's Fables, Robinson Crusoe, and Weems' Life of Washington. It was a good collection, and he made the most of it. Sarah Bush Lincoln noted that while he did not like to work he liked to read, and she said, "I induced my husband to permit Abe to study" (Herndon, I, 36).

John Hanks said of him, "He kept the Bible and Æsop's Fables always within reach, and read them over and over again."

Sarah Bush did not claim that he showed any marked preference for the Bible. Lamon quotes her as saying, "He seemed to have a preference for the other books" (Life, pp. 34, 486). But he certainly read the Bible with diligence, as his whole literary style shows. Indeed, if we had only his coarse "First Chronicles of Reuben," which we could heartily wish he had never written, and whose publication in Herndon's first edition was one of the chief reasons for an expurgated edition,[10] we should know that even then Abe Lincoln, rough, uncouth and vulgar as he was, was modeling his style upon the Bible.

We are told that when he went to church he noted the oddities of the preachers and afterward mimicked them (Lamon: Life, pp. 55, 486). This might have been expected, for two reasons. First, he had a love of fun and of very boisterous fun at that; secondly, he had a fondness for oratory, and this was the only kind of oratory he knew anything about.

It is a remarkable fact that the Lincoln family appears never at any time in its history to have been strongly under the influence of Methodism.[11] This is not because they did not know of it; no pioneer could hide so deep in the wilderness as to be long hidden from the Methodist circuit riders. But the prevailing and almost the sole type of religion in that part of Indiana during Lincoln's boyhood was Baptist, and in spite of all that Mrs. Lincoln believed about the freedom of it, it was a very unprogressive type of preaching. The preachers bellowed and spat and whined, and cultivated an artificial "holy tone" and denounced the Methodists and blasphemed the Presbyterians and painted a hell whose horror even in the backwoods was an atrocity. Against it the boy Abe Lincoln rebelled. Many another boy with an active mind has been driven by the same type of preaching into infidelity.