Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 LINCOLN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
This self-made man from a log cabin-the great orator, the Emancipator, the savior of the Union, the martyr-was arguably our greatest president; but it takes a master storyteller like Thomas Keneally, author of the award-winning novel that inspired the film Schindler's List, to bring alive the history behind the myth. Acclaimed for his recent Civil War biography, American Scoundrel, Keneally delves with relish-and a keen, fresh eye-into Lincoln's complicated persona. Abraham Lincolndepicts all the amazing man's triumphs, insecurities, and crushing defeats with uncanny insight: his early poverty and the ambition that propelled him out of it; the shaping of the man and his political philosophy by youthful exposure to Christianity, slavery, and business; his tempestuous marriage and his fatherly love. We see him, elected to the presidency by a twist of fate, unswerving in the grim day-to-day conduct of the war as his vision and acumen led the country forward. Abraham Lincolnis an incisive study of a turning point in our history and a revealing portrait of its pivotal figure, his greatness etched even more clearly in this very touching human story.
Author Notes
Thomas Keneally was born in Sydney, Australia on October 7, 1935. Although he initially studied for the Catholic priesthood, he abandoned that idea in 1960, turning to teaching and clerical work before writing and publishing his first novel, The Place at Whitton, in 1964. Since that time he has been a full-time writer, aside from the occasional stint as a lecturer or writer-in-residence.
He won the Booker Prize in 1982 for Schindler's Ark, which Stephen Spielberg adapted into the film Schindler's List. He won the Miles Franklin Award twice with Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete. His other fiction books include The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, Confederates, The People's Train, Bettany's Book, An Angel in Australia, The Widow and Her Hero, and The Daughters of Mars. His nonfiction works include Searching for Schindler, Three Famines, The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame, and American Scoundrel. In 1983, he was awarded the order of Australia for his services to Australian Literature.
Thomas Keneally is the recipient of the 2015 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. The award, formerly known as the Writers' Emeritus Award, recognises 'the achievements of eminent literary writers over the age of 60 who have made an outstanding and lifelong contribution to Australian literature.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Keneally offers up a new volume in the popular Penguin Lives series of short biographies. Some writers appear to benefit from the forced brevity. Keneally, however, seems inhibited and constrained by the limitation in his life of Abraham Lincoln. Unlike his previous, lengthier nonfiction outings (notably The Great Shame and the recent American Scoundrel), his life of Lincoln reads not as a great illuminating narrative placing past events in a fresh perspective, but rather like a Cliffs Notes version of better books by such scholars as David Donald. The facts of Lincoln's life as related are both true and readable, but the author offers no new insights, no imaginative or interpretive leaps, no poetry. Keneally is at his best, perhaps, in presenting Lincoln in his final stage, a calculating and at times ruthless war leader. This is the Lincoln whom Keneally's "American scoundrel," Dan Sickles, knew best and with whom Keneally also seems to be pretty well acquainted. Still, all the other Lincolns here-the wilderness child, the prairie lawyer, the husband, the father, the fledgling politician-come across as little more than hollow robots walking doggedly from one well-known benchmark to the next, lacking that one element so essential to real life: a soul. (On sale Dec. 30) Forecast: Lincoln sells, and so does Keneally. So, despite its flaws, will this brief bio. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The ever-popular Keneally, who previously depicted bad-boy Union general Daniel Sickles in American Scoundrel [BKL F 1 02], lends his talented pen to the publisher's series of 180-page biographies. The subject of Lincoln has been thoroughly mined, yet this author's skill at characterization reveals a new angle: a sensitive discernment of Lincoln's anxieties. Although Lincoln's depression is an old chestnut with Lincoln writers, not many crystallize it like this: "No man ever entered Springfield, a town that would become his shrine, as tentative, odd-seeming, and daunted as Abraham Lincoln." The sentence expresses the hesitancy with which Lincoln entered the marriage he made in that town, and Keneally regularly touches on Mary Todd's caprices in passages about Lincoln's political career, which his wife keenly promoted. This emphasis on Lincoln's worries also marks the description of his youth, his casting about as boatman, storekeeper, and surveyor--seeking anything but the subsistence farming that he grew up in and loathed. Keneally succinctly and insightfully presents a humanized Lincoln. --Gilbert Taylor
Guardian Review
The legends of Abraham Lincoln have always infected his biographers. Honest Abe, the splitter of rails and utterer of home truths, a towering (6'4") backwoodsman who freed the slaves - the images are stock and the effect invariably larger than life. So what makes this elegant biography by novelist Thomas Keneally remarkable is its appealingly understated portrait of Lincoln the man. Lincoln was born in Kentucky in 1809 to poor farming parents. Years later, during his presidential campaign in 1860, journalists tried to spin a romantic frontier myth about Lincoln's childhood, but he would have none of it. "The short and simple annals of the poor," he said, quoting Gray's Elegy . "That's my life, and that's all you or anyone else can make of it." The loss of his mother when Lincoln was only nine was made less devastating by his father's immediate remarriage to Sarah Sally Johnston, who for the first time brought elements of gentility and learning into Lincoln's world. He adored her, and she encouraged him to read and write despite the disapproval of his father. The family were regular churchgoers, and Lincoln assimilated a Calvinist guilt that affected him all his life. His legendary honesty (he would ride miles to refund a customer who had overpaid him even slightly) was one mildly neurotic result; a lifelong disposition to depression (which he called the hypo), was another. After a stint as shopkeeper-cum-handyman, Lincoln became postmaster in the small town of New Salem, Illinois. A growing interest in politics - coinciding with a tendency to talk to groups in a shrill, distinctive voice - resulted in his entry into the state legislature when he was just 25. In the new state capital of Springfield he joined a law practice and was soon making a good living. From the start, Lincoln was out of sympathy with the south-ern Democrats who dominated American politics. He could not share Jefferson's patrician vision of an agrarian America, full of happy plantations, happy owners and happy slaves. As a Whig, he believed in progress; as a north-erner, he felt this progress would be chiefly industrial, and could be boosted by large-scale government intervention. Although Lincoln was opposed to slavery, this was less on ethical grounds (he had no qualms about the dispossession of native Americans) than because of its threat to paid labour. For Lincoln, workers were never wage slaves, but rather potentially "ascendant in society, liberated by American Republican classlessness". Like many self-made men, he believed anyone could make it and had little sympathy for those who couldn't. Lincoln was awkward with women; his height and ill-fitting clothes meant he cut a gawky figure. After the death of one fiancee and a broken engagement to another, he eventually married the much younger Mary Todd. It was not a particularly happy union. They had three sons, though Eddie, Mary's pet, died young, and she became for a time virtually demented with grief. Lincoln could be equally difficult to live with, for though fundamentally easy-going and affectionate, he was often working away; during his extensive depressions he stayed home but drew impenetrably into himself. With his election to Congress in 1846 Lincoln reached the national stage, but he stayed in Washington for only one, fairly unimpressive term. About to turn 40, he had a good but parochial reputation; popular with his peers and an able public speaker, he had pulled himself into prosperity through sheer hard work. But none of these are unique qualities, and it is hard to reconcile the Lincoln of 1848 with the great figure we now know. What accounts for the transformation? Events, chiefly - he was in the right place at the right time. By 1850, the latent divisions between north and south - over slavery, federal power, the contrasting objectives of growing industrial power in the north and the persistently agrarian base of the south - had become explicit and Lincoln made major speeches attacking the extension of slavery into the western territories. After one aborted run for the senate, he tried again in 1858, running as a Republican. He lost the senate election but he was now prominently identified with the Republican party and the interests of the north. Travelling east, he gave a triumphant address in New York to press and political kingmakers and suddenly emerged as a presidential contender. Nominated at the Republican convention of 1860 in Chicago, he romped home. Once president, Lincoln erred gravely by underestimating the southern states' determination to secede; he was surprised by the rapid creation of the Confederacy and by the attack on Fort Sumter, which signalled the beginning of the civil war. He entered the war reluctantly, and not, as he repeatedly reminded Americans, to free the slaves but to preserve the Union. He endured major defeats in the first two years of war, and his unpopularity was worsened by the introduction of income tax and conscription (from which one of his sons was notoriously exem- pted). Yet he not only survived, he prevailed, moving away from his attempts to find consensus where none existed towards a fierce anti- slavery position exemplified by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Lincoln hardened, in other words, and by the end of the war had assumed the unyielding qualities of a conqueror rather than the more magnanimous aspect of a healer. Had he lived it seems unlikely he would have been at all successful in pacifying a vanquished Confederacy, which saw him as the personification of everything it had fought against. His assassination by a deranged actor in 1865 was unsurprising, for it might have come from any number of resentful southerners. Even in his greatest moments - the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg address (no one clapped), his second inaugural speech - Keneally's Lincoln is a simple figure, utterly without affect, heroic only in his ability to overcome the unending barrage of problems that assailed him in the civil war White House (his "hypo", the suffocating number of patronage requests) and focus on the momentous issues of civil war, slavery and the forcible preservation of the Union. In a sense, Lincoln seemed to stumble into his convictions as the war went on, and there remains in Keneally's account a gulf between the ordinary man and the president's extraordinary determination. This gulf creates a mystery most biographers have solved by embracing the myth of Lincoln's life- long greatness. It is Keneally's simple concentration on the man himself that makes this biography so unusual and alluring. Andrew Rosenheim's novel Stillriver will be published by Hutchinson next year. To order Lincoln for pounds 12.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-lincoln.1 Even in his greatest moments - the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg address (no one clapped), his second inaugural speech - [Thomas Keneally]'s Lincoln is a simple figure, utterly without affect, heroic only in his ability to overcome the unending barrage of problems that assailed him in the civil war White House (his "hypo", the suffocating number of patronage requests) and focus on the momentous issues of civil war, slavery and the forcible preservation of the Union. In a sense, Lincoln seemed to stumble into his convictions as the war went on, and there remains in Keneally's account a gulf between the ordinary man and the president's extraordinary determination. This gulf creates a mystery most biographers have solved by embracing the myth of Lincoln's life- long greatness. It is Keneally's simple concentration on the man himself that makes this biography so unusual and alluring. From the start, Lincoln was out of sympathy with the south-ern Democrats who dominated American politics. He could not share Jefferson's patrician vision of an agrarian America, full of happy plantations, happy owners and happy slaves. As a Whig, he believed in progress; as a north-erner, he felt this progress would be chiefly industrial, and could be boosted by large-scale government intervention. Although Lincoln was opposed to slavery, this was less on ethical grounds (he had no qualms about the dispossession of native Americans) than because of its threat to paid labour. For Lincoln, workers were never wage slaves, but rather potentially "ascendant in society, liberated by American Republican classlessness". Like many self-made men, he believed anyone could make it and had little sympathy for those who couldn't. - Andrew Rosenheim.
Kirkus Review
A fine, brief life of the Great Emancipator by the Australian novelist (Woman of the Inner Sea, 1993, etc.) and biographer (American Scoundrel, p. 31, etc.). Keneally voices an antipodean appreciation for Lincoln as a child of the rough, violent frontier, a milieu that did much to forge his character and sorrowful countenance. (Lincoln once remarked to a journalist of his childhood, " The short and simple annals of the poor.' That's my life, and that's all you or anyone else can make of it.") From this setting, the author teases out little-reported data, including the fact that while serving in the frontier militia, Lincoln may have contracted syphilis from a prostitute, which led him to much subsequent worry about his fitness as a father--though not, as it no doubt would in the present political climate, to any public scandal. Keneally's Lincoln is a man of extraordinary character built against extraordinary odds, but also a man of ordinary mortal failings, as fond of dirty jokes as he was of the works of Daniel Defoe and William Shakespeare. He emerges in these pages as nothing short of a hero, though a human one; this slim volume does not in any way resemble Carl Sandburg's two-volume hagiography. Keneally conveys an informed understanding of just how controversial Lincoln was in his time (he writes, for instance, that the "house divided" speech ran the risk of killing Lincoln's political career, which was salvaged largely by soundly showing up opponent Stephen Douglas in the barnstorming debates of 1858) and just how close he came to failure in attempting to restore the Union, which even Lincoln's great admirer Horace Greeley was moved to call "our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying nation" during the reelection campaign of 1864. In short, his view of Lincoln is so fresh that one wishes only that the Penguin Lives format afforded Keneally room to say still more about this iconic leader. Exemplary and illuminating, even for readers well versed in Lincolniana.
Library Journal Review
Abraham Lincoln was several times accused of "spirit-rapping," whereby he called on the dead to speak. Novelist and biographer Keneally has worked just such magic in his eloquent and insightful brief biography of America's most complicated subject. Like Lincoln, Keneally tells a good story, finding the right anecdote to make his case and never forgetting the moral of the tale. Keneally's Lincoln is a self-actuated farm boy made good by self-discipline, savvy instincts, wit, the wisdom acquired from courtrooms, friendships, and political huckstering-and luck. He is an individual of principle committed to promoting the self-made man through government support for economic improvements and opening a West free of slavery. Keneally recounts Lincoln's early missteps in romance, business, and politics and his self-doubts and depression as his star dimmed several times, and he concedes Lincoln's erratic course toward emancipation and a successful strategy for Union victory during the Civil War. But in the end, Keneally's Lincoln emerges almost as a "father Abraham" anointed for his great role in leading a chosen people toward redemption and their rendezvous with destiny. This is an epic compressed into a tightly written biography that all Americans might read with profit. Keneally's occasional tendency to let folklore stand as fact notwithstanding, there is no better brief introduction to Lincoln and his American dream. For all libraries.-Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS BORN on a mattress of corn husks in a nest of bear rugs on the morning of February 12, a Sabbath, 1809. The United States was then an infant nation with another risky war against Great Britain ahead of it. The birthplace for this new child of the republic was a one-room, windowless, dirt-floored log cabin in Hardin County, near Hodgenville in Kentucky. The cabin stood on land to which his father's title was uncertain. Abraham's mother was a tall, bony, sinewy, undemanding woman of about twenty-five, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, a bastard child, a good wrestler on a frontier where wrestling was an important sport engaged in by both men and women. As one witness said, she was "a bold, reckless, daredevil kind of a woman, stepping to the very verge of propriety." Two years before, she had given birth to a daughter, Sarah. For the greater part of his life, and in three states, the boy would be said to come from unrespectable stock. According to Abraham Lincoln's later law partner, William H. Herndon, there was a report that Thomas Lincoln, for a consideration from one Abraham Inlow, a miller of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, assumed the paternity of the infant child of Nancy Hanks, and though the tale does not fit with the 1806 marriage date of Tom and Nancy, the story was just one that would later haunt and help form Abraham. Thomas was a stocky, thirty-year-old hardscrabble farmer and carpenter who had a reputation among his neighbors as a raconteur, a fact that gives some support to the idea that he was the boy's biological father, for Abraham would all his life sprout with rustic tales and parables to an extent that sometimes bemused even his friends. Thomas meant to call the child Abraham after his father, a pioneer from Virginia, whom in 1786- when Thomas was a little boy-he had seen killed before his eyes by British-allied Indians. Plagued by Kentucky's uncertain land titles, Tom Lincoln moved his family, when Abraham was still an infant, ten miles to a 230-acre farm on Knob Creek. Of sturdy Tom Lincoln many contradictory things are said-that he was industrious, that he was lazy; that he was shiftless, that he had the pioneer spirit; that he was proud of the intellectual leanings of his frontier son, and that he punished Abraham for them. One thing is certain-that Tom was in his way an archetype of the Protestant subsistence farmer, who, according to Thomas Jefferson's dream, was the stuff of American virtue and the fit occupier of the frontier. Tom and his type would inherit the American earth without recourse to the corrupting influence of banks, and though they might not be able to read and write with any fluency, their native wisdom and their democratic impulse would derive directly from the ennobling soil. Tom Lincoln was probably unaware in any explicit way that he embodied that ideal, but the boy early on refused to buy the concept. Where Jefferson believed he saw forthright independence, Lincoln saw ignorance and brutalizing labor. He would not grow up admiring his hardhanded father. And though, in growing, Abraham developed a body and a physical endurance appropriate to a frontier boy, his spirit was always uneasy in the backwoods. When he was nominated a candidate for his presidency and was being harried by a Chicago newspaperman, John L. Scripps, for information on his childhood for a campaign biography, Abraham quoted Gray's Elegy: "'The short and simple annals of the poor.' That's my life, and that's all you or anyone else can make of it." In Knob Creek, at six years of age, Abraham began to learn his letters from a slave-owning Catholic teacher in a log schoolhouse on the Cumberland Road. This institution was what they called on the frontier a "blab school," where students learned by rote. There, with his older sister, Sarah, during one brief session in 1815 and another the following year, Abraham learned to write his name and to count. His parents worshiped at an antislavery Baptist church. That controversial allegiance in a slave state and constant title fights over the Knob Creek farm made Thomas decide that they would be better off in the newly proclaimed, more exactly surveyed Indiana Territory. Thus the family became early Hoosiers, a name originally applied to Indiana settlers arriving from the South. Tom Lincoln went off first, with his possessions on a flatboat, down Salt Creek and into the Ohio, then ashore to reconnoiter for a farm. He found a location sixteen miles in from the river, near the small town of Gentryville. The family, when they moved, did so on foot, accompanying the bullock wagon carrying their goods. Rather late in the year, they came to Tom's claim of 160 acres of dense thickets, in the Little Pigeon Creek community. Here Tom and Nancy again sought membership in an antislavery Baptist church. For their first three months there, eight-year-old Abraham and his family lived in the three-sided "pole-shed" that Tom had constructed hurriedly to deal with the imperatives of the season. The open side of the shed faced south, away from the prevailing wind and snow, and a large fire was kept going there day and night. Here, with either snow or the smoke of that fire billowing in the hut, Abraham and Sarah ingested Bible tales as narrated by Nancy, and the founding principles of their Calvinist view of the world, together with sundry peasant superstitions about phases of the moon, ghosts, and other matters. The young Lincoln, socially precocious enough to call out to passersby and thus to earn his father's anger, was already a farm laborer and experienced the demanding but bodybuilding life of a farm boy-helping his father clear fields, split rails, plow, and thresh wheat. But as for the complete stereotype of the backwoods boy: Once, seeing a wild turkey approach the farm, Abraham fetched a gun and shot it from within his own doorway. The experience of destroying animal life, of seeing the gush of blood, repelled him, and he would never become the deadeye frontier marksman of American myth. Nancy Lincoln's aunt and uncle, the Sparrows, arrived in Indiana on the Lincolns' heels, carrying in tow the semiliterate bastard child of one of Nancy's sisters, one Dennis Hanks. Between the boy Lincoln and the adolescent Dennis, a lout in the eyes of some, an intense friendship developed. Those who disapproved of Abraham Lincoln's later tendency to tell off-color stories often attributed the habit to Dennis's influence. But Dennis did not like the way Tom Lincoln treated the boy, and would influence Lincoln's earliest biographers to judge Tom rather severely. The boy Lincoln had had many mysterious experiences of the will of that Calvinist God to whom most of America was in thrall. He had already lost a baby brother, Tom. And now, in the summer of 1818, a visitation of the disease the settlers called "the milk sick" struck the Little Pigeon Creek area. Manifesting itself in the white-coated tongues of the sufferers, it was believed to be passed through the milk of cows that had eaten of the poisonous white snakeroot, and were themselves doomed. The Sparrows caught the disease first and died while being nursed by Nancy, whom Dennis Hanks would later honor as the most affectionate woman he had ever met. Falling ill herself, Nancy died with seven days, unattended by a doctor-since there was none-and calling Sarah and Abraham to her bedside. Tom Lincoln fashioned her coffin from black cherrywood, and she lay in state in the one-room cabin before making her final mile-long journey to a grave on a knoll in the woods. She was thirty-four years old, but already withered and toothless, like many a frontier woman. Tom Lincoln took Dennis Hanks in, and he slept with Abraham in the loft. For the entirety of the bitter winter, twelve-year-old Sarah became the woman of the household, with all the chores involved in that description. Then, in the spring, after planting, Tom Lincoln left the farm in the care of Dennis, Abraham, and Sarah and headed down to Kentucky to propose marriage to a woman he had admired from boyhood, the recently widowed Sarah "Sally" Johnston. Sally was healthy and of a positive mentality and a more elevated class than Nancy. She had some furniture, including a fine bureau; and after the marriage Tom loaded it all up on his wagon and took it over the Ohio, along with his new bride and her three children, who would become Abraham and Sarah's stepbrother and -sisters. Not only did Abe now make a close acquaintance with his first feather mattress, pillows ditto, with a bureau and proper kitchen chairs instead of stools, but the tall Sally proved another kindly mother. Lincoln would later say that she was his best friend in the world. She saw that Abraham and Dennis Hanks were dressed mainly in buckskins, and introduced them to a better kind of denim clothing. She also insisted that Tom Lincoln lay down a floor in the cabin, and put in some windows. Dennis Hanks liked Sally too, but again said of Thomas that he treated his precocious boy "rather unkindly than otherwise, always appeared to think much more of his stepson John D. Johnston than he did of his own son Abraham." Despite the rawness of the Lincolns, their lives now did take on some signs of the Arcadian settler life envisioned by Jefferson. The government was selling land at $1.25 an acre, and Thomas bought one hundred acres. His carpentry was so much in demand that he was given the largely volunteer job of building the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church. The young Abraham, pressed into work as sexton, probably heard many of the minister's antislavery sermons, and they may have reinforced his inchoate sense that slavery was the founding serpent in the American garden. Tom Lincoln hired his son out to other farmers at twenty-five cents a day, especially after the age of eleven, when he began to shoot up in height and demonstrated a particular gift with the ax. Occasionally he attended the school of one Hazel Dorsey, a mile and a half from the Lincoln farm. He brought to that log school a chaotic hunger for literacy, fostered by his stepmother, Sally, who nearly fifty years later would say, in remembrance that had a ring of authenticity to it, "I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home as well as at school. At first he was not easily reconciled to it." Physically Abraham resembled his late mother. As he reached puberty, he developed a capacity for the spellbinding telling of proper and-in notable number-improper stories. Somewhere he acquired a collection of indecent jokes named Quin's Jests, which he read at night to a delighted, barely literate Dennis. Abraham remembered its contents as he did everything he read. His occasional schooling was fitted in between winter harvest and spring planting. Apart from Webster's and Dillworth's Spelling Books, both of which had improving tales in them, one cornerstone of Abraham's adolescent reading would be Parson Weems's Life of Washington ; and another, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe . Aesop's Fables , Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress , the Bible-all these had a formative influence on the strange mixture of the sonorous and the rustic that would characterize his discourse. A family copy of Barclay's Dictionary enlarged his armory of words. The marks of the adolescent Lincoln were his buckskin clothing (and the fact that he was always growing comically too tall for his pants) and the ridicule this attracted from girls, so that he would never be fully comfortable with women; his capacity for reading, and the fact that by frontier standards he was precociously literate; and-once again-his strength. "[Y]ou would say there was three men at work by the way the trees fell," said one acquaintance of Abraham's axmanship. Contradictorily, though, Dennis Hanks argued that, "Lincoln was lazy....He was always reading-scribbling-writing-ciphering-even Sally Lincoln would admit that he wouldn't like physical labor, though he had the strength for it, but was 'diligent for Knowledge.'" He was also making things difficult for his future promoters by developing skepticism about predestination, about the God of Calvinism, who had from eternity damned many and saved a few. What sort of God was it who would create human beings, having known from eternity that he would damn some of them and save others? In the words of Abraham's favorite poet, Burns, a God who: Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell A' for thy glory, And no one for ony guid or ill They've done afore thee! It was a conundrum that concerned many sensitive souls in nineteenth-century America, and despite his rugged body, Abraham was such a soul. His sister, Sarah, had married one Aaron Grigsby, whom Abraham Lincoln did not like. When Abraham was seventeen years of age, she and the child to whom she was trying to give birth both perished. Here was God's inscrutable will at work once more, its irrationality a further test to young Lincoln's soul, which both despised yet yearned for the comforts of ordinary belief. Abraham had taken to hiring himself out for books now, rather than store goods. Thus he acquired Caleb Bingham's The American Preceptor and Columbian Orator , both designed to equip youth for the arts of eloquence. Similarly he showed an enthusiasm for rivers, as a way out of puzzles. Little Pigeon Creek might have been "the most unpoetical place on earth," and forest-locked, but the currents of the western river system promised arrival at places designed for reinvention of the self. At the confluence of the Anderson and Ohio Rivers he worked at ferrying travelers to meet steamers or to go south into Kentucky. One day he rowed two businessmen out into midstream in his cockboat to catch an oncoming steamer. As they climbed aboard, both men threw a silver half-dollar into the bottom of Lincoln's boat. It is hard for us to imagine how momentous an event this was for an Indiana farm boy. Despite the modest accumulation of specie Tom had put together for buying acreage, the Lincolns had never lived on a regular basis in the cash economy. Tom Lincoln did not pay for things: He grew his own wheat, corn, and vegetables; tanned his own leather; made clothing out of buckskin, cotton, and flax of his own raising; and when he bought sugar and coffee from the store in nearby Gentryville, paid for them with hogs, venison hams, and coonskins. Abraham's labor was generally paid for in store goods. But now he saw, glinting on the boards of his boat, his liberation from the cashless world in which brain-numbing labor and raw muscle were respected over scholarship. Here too was the true fuel of those improvements in roads, canals, and river navigation that would be the chief element of his burgeoning political ideas. Later, in the White House, he would say of this incident, "Gentlemen, you may think it a very little thing...but it was the most important incident of my life...the world seemed wider and fairer before me." --from Abraham Lincoln: A Penguin Lives Biography by Thomas Keneally, Copyright © January 2003, Viking Press, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.
