truth,” remarked a journalist who met with Lincoln several times during the Civil War.73 Poetry gave order and meaning to life experiences that tended toward the chaotic or uncontrolled. If, as Mikhail Bakhtin suggests, language is a centripetal force that helps regulate centrifugal reality, we can say that Lincoln found in poetry, the most structured form of language, a means of arranging and giving meaning to his experience.74 In turn, he gave structure and meaning to the national experience in pithy, poetic speeches that had the cadences and resonant imagery of poetry.
Before he reached the point that he could do so, he went through a process of maturation that broadened his vision and engaged him with the cultural and political world around him. This process was sped by his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln.
FAMILY RELATIONS AND TEENAGE ROMANCES IN INDIANA
The period Abe lived in Indiana in his stepmother’s presence, from 1819 to 1830, was a crucial time in his formation. Many of the traits and convictions that later flowered in him were seeded during these years. Sarah Bush Lincoln helped cultivate them.
Abe and his stepmother loved and respected each other. Sarah testified that “Abe was the best boy I Ever Saw or Ever Expect to see,” adding that “I can say what scarcely one woman—a mother—can say in the thousand and it is this—Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused in fact, or Even in appearance, to do anything I requested him.”75 Abe called Sarah Mama and told an Indiana neighbor that “she had been his best Friend in this world & that no Son could love a Mother more than he loved her.” They bonded psychologically and intellectually. “His mind & mine,” Sarah recalled, “seemed to run together—move in the same channel.” Lincoln, for his part, remarked that he appreciated “the encouragement he always had received from his Step Mother.”76
The granddaughter of a Dutchman who had emigrated from Rotterdam to New York, Sarah Bush was born in 1788 in Hardin County, Kentucky.77 When she was two, she was taken to live in Elizabethtown, where she grew up. Her father, Christopher Bush, was a slave patrol leader and landholder who owned more than two thousand acres in Kentucky by the time Sarah was fifteen. Sarah had eight siblings, including six brothers locally known as rough-and-tumble fighters. “There was no backout in them,” a family friend observed; “they never shunned a fight where they considered it necessary to engage in it, and nobody ever heard them cry ‘enough.’”78 (One of them reportedly refused anesthetics when doctors made a nine-inch incision in his back to remove a bullet.) Sarah developed into a strong yet gentle woman, described as “quick and strong-minded,” “kind,” and “a woman of great energy, of remarkable good sense, very industrious.”79 Tall, ringleted, and fair-complexioned, she had an erect posture and a sprightly personality.
In 1806, at eighteen, she married Daniel Johnston, a hard-luck man of obscure background who was constantly in debt. The Johnstons had three children: John, Elizabeth, and Matilda. After eight years of financial struggle, Daniel was hired as the keeper of the Hardin County jail in Elizabethtown. The family of five moved into an area in the forty-two-by-twenty-two-foot stone jail, where Sarah served as cook and cleaning woman.
After her husband’s death from cholera in 1816, Sarah lived as a single mother until her marriage in December 1819 to Thomas Lincoln, whom she had known from a young age when they lived near each other in Kentucky. There are various accounts of Thomas’s proposal to Sarah shortly after he arrived in Elizabethtown after his trip from Indiana. A popular one is that he showed up one day and told her, “I have no wife and you no husband. I came a-purpose to marry you. I knowed you from a gal and you knowed me from a boy. I’ve no time to lose; and if you’re willin’ let it be done straight off.”80 He paid her small debts, and their marriage ceremony, conducted by a Methodist minister in an old log house on Elizabethtown’s main street, took place on December 2. Thomas loaded the wagon with Sarah’s possessions—a bureau, a table, a set of chairs, kitchenware, and some books and clothing—and the couple and her children made the 140-mile trek westward to the Lincoln cabin in Little Pigeon Creek, Indiana.
Ten-year-old Abe and his sister Sally, twelve, must have been excited by the arrival of their stepmother and three stepsiblings. Sarah’s belongings added luxury to the bare cabin, which profited from her oversight. She persuaded Thomas to improve the cabin by laying down a wood floor, fixing the roof against the elements, and adding a sleeping loft for the three boys (Abe, John Johnston, and Dennis Hanks) and a feather bed beneath it for the three girls (Sally and her stepsisters). Sarah attended to the orphaned Abe and Sally. Dennis Hanks recalled “she Soaped—, rubbed, and washed the Children Clean. . . . She sewed and mended their Clothes & the Children once more looked human as their own good mother left them.”81
By 1820, the family living in the Pigeon Creek cabin included the forty-two-year-old Thomas and his wife Sarah, ten years his junior, along with Dennis Hanks, twenty-one; the thirteen-year-old stepsisters Sally Lincoln and Elizabeth Johnston; the eleven-year-old Abe and his stepbrother John D. Johnston, ten; and stepsister Matilda Johnston, nine.
The relationship between Abe, his sister, and the three stepsiblings was affectionate. His sister Sally—short, somewhat heavyset, with dark eyes and chestnut-brown hair (“just as pretty as Abe was homely,” said a neighbor)—was described as “a quick minded woman & of extraordinary Mind,” not just “intellectual & intelligent” but also eminently practical. She was “a gentle, Kind, smart—shrewd—social” woman, always ready with a friendly laugh.82 In 1823 she became a member of the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church, as did her father and stepmother, but not her brother, who never joined a church. Three years later, at nineteen, Sally married a fellow Baptist, Nathaniel Grigsby. Tragically, she died a year and a half later after giving birth to a stillborn child. When Abe received the news 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.”83 He blamed the Grigsby family for not summoning a doctor in time to save her; his anger helped fuel his satirical attack on the Grigsbys in his biblical poem the “Chronicles of Reuben.”
Among his stepsiblings, Abe formed a special bond with Matilda, known as Tilda. She recalled that he was “good to me, good to all. . . . Abe seemed to love Everybody and Everything; he loved us all and Especially mother.”84 Tilda noted his studiousness, commenting that “Abe was not Energetic Except in one thing—he was active & persistant [sic] in learning—read Everything he Could—Ciphered on boards—on the walls.”85 She said that she and Abe “grew up loving one another as brother and sister.”86
Abe once gave Tilda a memorable lesson in honesty. Her mother had warned her against following him into the woods when he went to fell trees. One day she sneaked away from the cabin, followed him, and surprised him from behind by leaping on him, grabbing him by the neck and kneeing him in the back, causing him to tumble on the ground. While falling, she was cut badly by his axe. As he staunched her wound with pieces of his shirt, he advised her to tell her mother the truth about the incident, instead of covering it up, as she intended to do.
Tilda’s brother, John D. Johnston, was a problematic figure in Abe’s life. On the one hand, he was a kind, generous, and frank person who grew close to Abe. The two worked together on canal building in Louisville, Kentucky, and later on the construction of a flatboat that they and two other men navigated down the Mississippi in 1831. However, John was temperamentally very different from Abe. Shiftless and unintellectual, he became a favorite of Thomas Lincoln, while Abe was preferred by his stepmother. John made few efforts to get ahead in life and at times became a financial drain on Abe, who lent him money to the point of exasperation. “You are not lazy,” Lincoln wrote him in December 1848, “and still you are an idler.”87 Warning John to stop “uselessly wasting time,” Abe generously offered to match any earnings John made over the succeeding five months. Despite Abe’s frustration with his stepbrother, he spoke of him “in the Most affectionate Manner,” saying that he and John “were raised together, slept together, and liked each other as well as actual brothers could do.”88
Although Lincoln was shy and awkward around girls, some of whom laughed at his odd looks and ungainliness, he had several romances in Indiana. After his death a number of women reported having had a relationship with Abe, including Elizabeth Tully, who called herself Abe’s “first regular company” and said that he signaled his marriage intentions to her; Elizabeth Ray, who kept in her possession a pair of earrings she reported to have received from him; Caroline Meeker, a Kentucky girl he visited and flirted with at a corn-husking bee; Elizabeth Wood, the daughter of a good friend of Abe’s who rejected him because of “his awkwardness and large feet”; the beautiful, well-to-do Hannah Gentry, who insisted she would have been Mrs. Lincoln if Abe had not been “too fond of onions, as she could not endure them”; and Julia Evans,“a very beautiful girl. . . . My heart was in a flutter,” Abe reportedly said of her after meeting her while working in Princeton, Indiana.89
What are we to make of such claims of romantic attachments to the young Lincoln? Surely several of them reflected wishful exaggeration on the part of women to whom the ungainly, reticent Abe took on romantic charm when viewed through the retrospective lens of national hagiography. Most of these relationships appear to have been passing teenage crushes. Taken cumulatively, however, they were the early signals of what later was described as Lincoln’s strong passion for women.
That said, while living in Indiana, Lincoln was far less interested in romance than in improving his mind. As John D. Johnston said, Abe didn’t take much truck with girls. “[H]e was too busy studying at the time.”90
And that studying paid off handsomely.
