PRAISE FOR
THE MAKING OF AMERICA
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
“The strength of the book is the generous use of Hamilton’s own words . . . A solid introduction to a charismatic founding father.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Thoroughly researched and cited, this book is accessibly written and full of valuable information . . . Hamilton’s intelligence, ceaseless drive, and penchant for speaking his mind come across, giving readers a clear view of Hamilton’s character and his role in creating America.”
—Booklist
“Kanefield is a capable nonfiction writer, organizing an eloquent review of Hamilton’s life while balancing the perspectives of his adversaries and skeptics . . . the story is told easily, making a founding father accessible to young readers the way Lin-Manuel Miranda has done on Broadway.”
—Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA)
There is properly no history, only biography.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Making of America series traces the constitutional history of the United States through overlapping biographies of American men and women. The debates that raged when our nation was founded have been argued ever since: How should the Constitution be interpreted? What is the meaning, and where are the limits, of personal liberty? What is the proper role of the federal government? Who should be included in “we the people”? Each biography in the series tells the story of an American leader who helped shape the United States of today.
Abraham Lincoln, lithograph by J. H. Bufford’s Sons, 1865
All images used in this book are public domain.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-3159-4
eISBN 978-1-68335-360-7
Text copyright © 2018 Teri Kanefield
Book design by Sara Corbett
Published in 2018 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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Lithograph, by J.H. Buffond Sons, 1865 (Library of Congress)
On April 11, 1865, a crowd gathered in front of the White House, calling for President Abraham Lincoln to give a speech. For two days the nation had been rocked by the news that Confederate general Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Union general Ulysses S. Grant. Everyone understood this meant that the Civil War was at last ending. The day before, Lincoln dodged requests for a speech, but this evening he heeded the call and stepped to the window. At his side was his twelve-year-old son, Tad. In Lincoln’s hand was a piece of paper—which was unusual. He rarely read from a prepared speech.
Lincoln was gaunt and rawboned, described once as “thin as a beanpole and ugly as a scarecrow,” but he was a riveting speaker. When he began to speak, the deep sadness that lined his face and the sorrowful aspect of his eyes lifted, and his face came alive.
Seeing him, the crowd erupted with joy, cheering and swaying, glowing with adoration, waiting for the stirring and poetic words they had come to expect. The crowd was diverse—blacks and whites together cheering the president who, two years earlier, signed the Emancipation Proclamation and was now throwing his weight and influence behind a new amendment to the Constitution that would forever abolish slavery in the United States.
Not everyone in the crowd, however, was feeling joyous. Standing among the cheering throngs was a man named John Wilkes Booth. Booth, a well-known actor, had spent some of his youth in the South. He was a passionate supporter of the Confederacy and a strong believer that blacks belonged in slavery. Like former vice president John Calhoun, he believed that slavery was a “positive good.”
For Booth, elevating the status of blacks was an insult to white people and a step in the direction of destroying the white race. “This country,” Booth said once, “was formed for the white, not for the black man.” When he heard about General Lee’s surrender, he wrote in his diary, “Our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done.” He hated Lincoln with a passion.
“We meet this evening,” Lincoln began, “not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart.” Then, instead of launching into the stirring victory speech many in the crowd expected, he spoke somberly on the difficult topic of how to bring the Southern states back into the Union.
Lincoln didn’t come right out and say that blacks should be given the right to vote. Instead he dropped hints, saying, “It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man.” He talked about the proposed amendment to the Constitution that would ban slavery, and concluded by saying, “In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.”
Booth caught Lincoln’s drift. He turned to his companion, a former Confederate soldier named Lewis Powell, and said, “That means n— citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”
Four days later on the evening of April 15, 1865, Lincoln made plans to attend a play called Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. John Wilkes Booth had plans of his own. Learning that Lincoln would be at the theater, he, too, intended to be there—with a fully loaded .44 caliber pistol.
When first my father settled here, ’Twas then the frontier line: The panther’s scream filled night with fear And bears preyed on the swine.
—Abraham Lincoln
The man who John Wilkes Booth planned to kill was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin on a small, isolated farm deep in the backwoods of Kentucky. The cabin had a dirt floor and windows without glass. The land was rocky and poor—“a barren waste, save some patches of creek bottom.” Abraham—who disliked the nickname Abe—lived with his parents and his sister, Sarah, who was two years older. He would have had a younger brother as well, but Thomas died while still a baby.
Abraham’s parents had trouble growing enough food to feed the family, so when he was still a toddler, the Lincolns moved ten miles north in search of more fertile land. They settled on the banks of Knob Creek, a stream so clear you could see a pebble at the bottom ten feet down. While stunningly beautiful, the land wasn’t much better for farming, with deep hollows and ravines, surrounded by gorges that often flooded.
Neighbors described the Lincolns as among “the very poorest people.” Abraham later recalled when “my toes stuck out through my broken shoes in winter; when my arms were out at the elbows; when I shivered with the cold.” The Lincolns lived near the Cumberland Trail, the road leading from Nashville, Tennessee to Louisville, Kentucky. Abraham saw soldiers traveling on their way home from the War of 1812. He also saw slave traders driving coffles of enslaved men and women.
Lincoln Cabin, Birth Place of Abraham Lincoln, from a postcard published by the Kraemer Art Company, Cincinnati, Ohio, date unknown
Abraham’s family belonged to the Separate Baptist Church. They believed in predestination and followed a strict code of behavior condemning profanity, drunkenness, gossip, and horse racing. Not long before Abraham was born, there was a split in the local Baptist church over slavery. The Lincolns went with the antislavery group. Abraham absorbed his church’s strict standards of behavior and antislavery sentiments. “I am naturally antislavery,” he later remarked. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel.”
Abraham’s roots went deep in American history. The first Lincolns came from Norwich, England in 1638 and settled in Massachusetts. Some of Abraham’s ancestors were Pennsylvania Quakers. All four of his grandparents settled in Virginia before moving to Kentucky to seek their fortunes. His paternal grandparents headed west after a distant relative, Daniel Boone, told them about wide expanses of land on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains. When settlers from Virginia poured into what is now Kentucky and wrested the land from the Shawnee, Abraham’s paternal grandfather joined a militia and fought the native people.
The family legend that, in Abraham’s words, was “more strongly than all the others imprinted upon my mind and memory,” was the story of how his paternal grandfather died in an Indian attack. The story went like this: Abraham’s grandfather was planting a cornfield not far from a Kentucky fort called Hughes Station with his three sons, Josiah, Mordecai, and Thomas, when an Indian shot him from the woods. The Indian who killed him was a Shawnee—a member of the tribe that had been driven from the land that Lincoln farmed. After the shot was fired, fourteen-year-old Mordecai ran to a nearby cabin and peeked from between the logs. He saw his youngest brother, six-year-old Thomas, sobbing over their dead father’s body—and an Indian coming from the woods toward the child. Mordecai grabbed a flintlock rifle, poked the muzzle between the logs, aimed at a silver pendant the Indian wore on his chest, and fired. He killed the Indian. The child, Thomas Lincoln, would become father to America’s sixteenth president.
Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap, by George Caleb Bingham, 1851–1852. The trail took settlers through the Appalachian Mountains from Virginia to Kentucky.
Thomas grew into a “plain unpretentious plodding man.” He spent years working as a day laborer until he saved enough to buy his own farm. He never learned to read or write. The first woman he proposed to, Sarah Bush, could read and was considered well educated by the standards of the community. After she turned him down, he proposed to Nancy Hanks, who accepted him. Nancy, a quiet and sad woman, was described by neighbors as “a woman known for the extraordinary strength of her mind among the family and all who knew her; she was superior to her husband in every way.”
Abraham was seven years old when the Lincolns were driven out of Kentucky by a lawsuit: Wealthier settlers claimed to be the rightful owners of the Lincoln farm. Thomas Lincoln didn’t have the money to pay a lawyer to prove that he had bought the land. The problem, as Thomas understood it, was slaveholders who wanted to enlarge their plantations by pushing away their poor neighbors who owned no slaves and worked the fields themselves. Lawyers wanted to work for the plantation owners, who had plenty of money for legal fees. Thomas Lincoln didn’t want to fight with large plantation owners, and—having no wish to be a slave owner himself—he had no desire to try to join their ranks. The only solution was to leave Kentucky.
The Lincolns were thus in desperate need of a new home when President James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, announced that lands in the Indiana Territory would be offered to settlers. The settlers would be able to buy their land directly from the federal government, so they would have proof of their purchase and recorded title to their property, which meant they wouldn’t have to worry about any more ejection lawsuits.
Thomas Lincoln journeyed northward across the Ohio River to stake his claim. Indiana was still mostly pathless and unbroken. Thomas selected a site in the little Pigeon Creek Community in southern Indiana, a land dense with maple, hickory, and oak trees. As was customary, he burned trees to mark the boundaries of his claim and piled brush on the corners of his new tract.
After he arrived back home, the family packed their household possessions into a wagon: A feather bed, a spinning wheel, a skillet, a Dutch oven, a kettle, dishes, and other small household items. They left on a cold day in December with their wagon, cow, and four horses. When they reached the Ohio River at what is now Cloverport, Kentucky, they crossed on a makeshift ferry. Once in Indiana, they passed through forests so thick with tangled underbrush that they had to hack a trail with axes.
Upon arriving at their tract of land, they built a crude lean-to cabin. Because of the freezing weather, they could not properly seal the spaces between the logs with clay and grass, so all winter bitter winds swept through. The family survived by hunting deer and bears.
Other relatives, including Nancy’s maternal aunt and uncle, also lost their homes through ejection lawsuits, so they, too, staked claims in Indiana and moved north. When spring came, the settlers helped each other build sturdier log cabins. Next they faced the daunting task of clearing away trees and undergrowth so they could plant corn.
Abraham was expected to do his share. He was eight, but large and strong for his age. An axe was put in his hand and he fought “the trees and logs and grubs . . . until he reached his twentieth year.”
Tragedy struck when Nancy Lincoln fell ill with what was then known as milk sickness—she became dizzy with stomach pains, trembling, and irregular breathing. The settlers understood that the illness was somehow connected to milk, but they didn’t understand that cows eating the poisonous white snakeroot plant caused the problem. Nancy held on for weeks. When she knew she was on the brink of death, she called Abraham and Sarah to her. She told them to be kind to their father, to one another, and to the world. She died on October 5, 1818. Abraham was nine years old.
A devastated Abraham took to reciting his mother’s favorite Bible stories, for they brought back memories of her voice. His sister Sarah tried to keep house, but she often sat by the fire, crying. A cousin, Dennis Hanks, moved in to help with the chores, but the Lincoln household fell into disarray.
Life improved the following year when Thomas Lincoln returned to Kentucky to propose marriage to the woman who had once rejected him, Sarah Bush Johnston—who was now a widow with three children. His proposal, delivered while she was doing laundry, was straight to the point and unsentimental. “I have no wife,” he told her, “and you have no husband. I came a purpose to marry you. I knowed you from a gal and you knowed me from a boy—I have no time to lose and if you are willing, let it be done straight off.” This time she accepted him and they were married on December 2, 1819.
After the ceremony, they journeyed together to Indiana, bringing Sarah’s three children: twelve-year-old Elizabeth, nine-year-old John, and seven-year-old Matilda. Upon their arrival, Sarah found Abraham and his sister “wild and ragged,” and in need of a good washing. “The first time I saw Abe,” she said, “he was the ugliest chap that ever obstructed my view.” She took a special liking to Abraham, saying he was the most well-behaved boy she had ever seen.
A school opened about a mile from the Lincolns’ house, and all the youngsters in the household attended sporadically. “I never went to school more than six months in my life,” Abraham said later, “but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.”
Abraham, who was mostly self-taught, developed a passion for books and reading. His love of reading put him at odds with his father and stepbrother. Both Thomas Lincoln and John Johnston believed “bone and muscle sufficient to make the man” and that “time spent in school was double wasted.” Johnston could not understand how Abraham could care about “some old musty books,” and he was convinced that Abraham’s love of reading was “clear proof of Abe’s insanity.” Thomas Lincoln saw his son’s reading as a waste of time, coming from a lazy desire to sit and do nothing instead of working. “I ain’t got no education,” Thomas Lincoln said, “but I get along far better than if I had.” He added that “if Abe don’t fool away all his time on books, he may make something yet.” He sometimes whipped Abraham for what he called laziness.
But young Abraham had a stubborn streak. When his father tried to break his habit of reading, he dug in his heels and resisted. Ignoring the ridicule of his father and stepbrother, he read every book he could get his hands on, starting with the few his stepmother brought from Kentucky, and then borrowing books from neighbors. He read Pilgrim’s Progress, a volume of Aesop’s Fables, The Arabian Nights, and Robinson Crusoe. Because he had so few books, he reread the ones he had until he had memorized entire passages.
Abraham rejected the popular backwoods pastimes. He disliked hunting and cared nothing for guns. He exhibited other qualities considered odd in a backwoods boy. He was unusually sensitive, reacting strongly to cruelty to animals. When his step-brother crushed a turtle for sport, Abraham “quivered all over” and explained that even an “ant’s life was to it as sweet as ours to us.”
Abraham, quiet and introspective, withdrew into himself for long periods. He fell in love with poetry. He read and memorized poems and wrote his own rhymes. At the age of eleven, he wrote:
Abraham Lincoln
His hand and pen
He will be good but
God knows when.
As a teenager, Abraham wrote:
Abraham Lincoln is my name
And with my pen I wrote the same
I wrote it in both haste and speed
And left it here for fools to read.
While Thomas Lincoln bonded with his stepson, finding that he had more in common with Johnston than his own son, Abraham and his stepmother formed a bond of their own. Sarah often protected Abraham from his father’s anger. Abraham described his stepmother as his best friend in the world, and said that no son could love a mother more than he loved her.
Abraham grew so large and strong that he could beat the other boys in races, wrestling, and other sports. He could “sink an axe deeper into a tree and strike a heavier blow with a maul than anyone.” His physical strength and intelligence made him a natural leader. In the words of one contemporary, he “soared above us. He naturally assumed the leadership of the boys.”
None of this helped him with the girls, though, who found him unattractive and awkward. Whenever he tried to “go with” a girl, she’d “give him the mitten every time.” Abraham remained good humored. When the girls made fun of his looks, he laughed with them and made jokes at his own expense—which he continued to do throughout his life. Years later, when a political opponent called him two-faced, he said, “I leave it to my audience. If I had two faces, would I wear this one?” Another time he joked that the Lord preferred common-looking people, which was why he made so many more of them.
It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.
—Abraham Lincoln
When Abraham was fifteen, his father lent money to a friend who was unable to repay the loan, sending the Lincolns’ finances into a downward spiral. To get out of trouble, Thomas put Abraham to work as a hired hand. For the next few years, a miserable Abraham worked as a butcher, woodchopper, and farmhand. By law, he had to turn his wages over to his father. He became angry and bitter over what he called “parental tyranny.” He came to hate the heavy labor and drudgery of farmwork.
He comforted himself with books. After working hard all day, he often read until past midnight. By this time, he was reading political biographies and histories. He read William Grimshaw’s History of the United States, a biography of politician Henry Clay, and Parson Weem’s biography of George Washington. He wrote an essay—now lost—on national politics.
The Boyhood of Lincoln—An Evening in the Log Hut, by Eastman Johnson, 1868
He also found time to build a small boat with a friend. The boat caught the attention of two gentlemen traveling through town, who asked Abraham to row them and their trunks to a steamer on the Ohio River. Abraham readily agreed. After he rowed the men to their steamer, they stunned him by tossing two silver half dollars into his boat—an unheard of sum of money for a few hours’ work. “It was the most important incident in my life,” Abraham said later. “I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day.”
He took to rowing other passengers to their steamers—until one day he was arrested and brought to court for operating a ferry without a license. The judge pulled a statute book from the shelf and found a loophole in the law: It was illegal for unlicensed persons from operating ferries from one riverbank to the other, but the law said nothing about rowing passengers partway across the river. The judge was thus able to find Abraham not guilty. All of this stimulated Abraham’s curiosity about the law. He borrowed a copy of the Statutes of Indiana and read the entire volume.
Abraham was nineteen when his world was again rocked with grief. His sister, Sarah, who eighteen months earlier had married a young man named Aaron Grigsby, died in childbirth. When Abraham learned of her death, he “sat down on a log and hid his face in his hands while the tears rolled down through his long bony fingers. Those present turned away in pity and left him to his grief.” He suffered a lengthy bout of what was then called melancholy, but today is called depression. Reserved and inward by nature, he said very little about the deaths of either his mother or his sister. Later though, he wrote, “In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. I have had experience enough to know what I say.”
He dealt with his grief by plunging into his work. His job at the time was clerking in a store owned by a prosperous merchant. As a shopkeeper, he had access to newspapers, which he devoured. Stores in frontier towns were often social gathering places where men met to discuss the pressing questions of the day: Should women be educated? Was slavery right or wrong? Should the federal government raise money for building roads and canals?
The year Sarah died in childbirth, 1828, was the year General Andrew Jackson won the presidency against the incumbent president John Quincy Adams. Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, championed the rights of farmers and frontiersmen. Jackson’s political opponents, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, in contrast, represented the interests of cities and industry, advocating what Henry Clay called “the American System”—a plan for strengthening industry and commerce through a strong national bank and federally funded internal improvements like roads and canals.
Thomas Lincoln—and indeed most of the Lincolns’ friends and neighbors—were Jackson supporters. On the other hand, William Jones, the prosperous merchant who owned the store where Abraham worked, passionately supported Henry Clay. Abraham and Jones had long, thoughtful political discussions. Soon Abraham, too, was an admirer of Clay and the American System. One historian concluded that Abraham rejected Jackson’s ideals because he associated them with rural backwardness, lack of education, and his father’s way of life, while he associated Henry Clay’s American System with ambitious and enterprising merchants and lawyers.
Abraham thus turned his back on the political ideals of his father and neighbors, but all his life he carried a deep understanding of the rural Democrats. His understanding of the fears and hopes of Andrew Jackson’s admirers later served him well.
Late in 1828, a wealthy merchant named James Gentry needed someone to help his son take a cargo boat to New Orleans. He offered the job to Abraham. Abraham accepted and spent two weeks building a flatboat with Gentry’s son, Allen. Then in December of 1828, Allen and Abraham set off down the river. On their way to New Orleans, they fought off a band of would-be robbers.
Abraham’s first time in a large city opened his eyes to the world beyond his backwoods farm and community. He was awed by the row of ships and bustling waterfront, but disgusted by the sight of a slave auction. He was silent for a while, taking in the sight of the auction. Then he turned to Allen and said, “That is a disgrace.”
A Slave Father Sold Away from His Family, artist unknown, 1860
Lincoln the Rail Splitter, by J. L. G. Ferris, 1909