incoln grew up in the kind of physical and cultural environment that American thinkers often turned to for inspiration. Many easterners looked to the West for the vigor and creativity that they considered authentically American. Walt Whitman was hardly alone when he fantasized that a sturdy, western “blacksmith or boatman” would rescue America politically.1 Emerson urged American writers to turn their eyes “westward” and take lessons from “the Kentucky stump-oratory, the exploits of Boone and David Crockett, the journals of the western pioneers, agriculturalists,” which Emerson called the nation’s “genuine growths.”2 Emerson’s friend Thoreau, who lived for two years near Walden Pond to get close to nature, extolled the untamed vigor of the West. He wrote, “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and . . . in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”3 Later, the aristocrat-turned-outdoorsman Teddy Roosevelt formed the nationwide Boone and Crockett Club, designed to foster frontier values such as “energy, resolution, manliness, self-reliance, and a capacity for self-help”—qualities he saw in Lincoln, whom he called “my great hero.”4
Lincoln did not have to join a club or spin fantasies about the West. Nor did he have to leave town to adopt a life in nature by building a cabin in the woods. Close to nature from the beginning, he was immersed in the Boone-Crockett culture Emerson and Roosevelt praised. Like David Crockett, Lincoln was a backwoodsman who became a Whig politician. Not only had Lincoln’s ancestors befriended and intermarried with the Boones, but Daniel Boone had also played a large part in the emigration of the Lincolns from Virginia to Kentucky—an interfamily affiliation highlighted in William Thayer’s 1863 book The Pioneer Boy, the bestselling contemporary biography of Lincoln.
Growing up on the frontier, the future president experienced American life in its crudest forms. He was not what the popular adventure writer Thomas Mayne Reid denigrated as a “closet-naturalist” (a mere spectator of nature) or what Teddy Roosevelt called a “parlor reformer” or what Lincoln himself dismissed as a “silk stocking” politician.5 He had a vital, organic closeness to nature that formed the bedrock of his politics and his presidential policies.
HUMAN AND NONHUMAN
In September 1846, as twenty-nine-year-old Henry David Thoreau was descending Maine’s Mount Katahdin after a failed attempt to reach the summit, he came upon an area so savagely beautiful that he had a virtual meltdown. He wrote: “This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. . . . Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,—. . . rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!”6 The rugged Katahdin scene, so different from what Thoreau called the “tame, cheap” landscape of his rustic town, Concord, fed his passion for the wild that lay behind his nature writing in the remaining sixteen years of his life.7
Lincoln’s life followed an altogether different trajectory. It began with immersion in nature, later followed by town life and entry into law and politics. Lincoln did not have to experience anew contact with harsh nature, for he’d had it from the beginning. Nature-anchored philosophy led Thoreau to live deliberately outside the whirl of society, while it spurred Lincoln’s efforts to change society and government. Thoreau, rebelling against mainstream American culture, rejected the technological improvements associated with capitalism; for him, they represented the intrusive “machine in the garden” that threatened to disrupt his private meditation on higher truths.8 Politically, Thoreau believed that the principled individual was greater than the government—which explains his public championing of the vigilante abolitionist John Brown. Lincoln, in contrast, took the Whig view that the government should promote improvements such as the railroad, the telegraph, canals, and roads, which bound people together and stimulated commerce.9 If a deep awareness of nature ushered Thoreau toward self-absorbed philosophizing, it prompted Lincoln to seek ways to control nature’s powers and put them to practical use.
One of Lincoln’s earliest recollections was of the power of nature. Although his native Kentucky wasn’t the “howling wilderness” that Daniel Boone had encountered on his first exploratory trip in 1769, it was still developing when Lincoln lived there.10 Most Kentuckians were farmers and hunters, and many of them lived in log cabins and got by on barter or subsistence living.
He had no memories of the birthplace farm, which his family left when he was two, but he did recall Knob Creek, where he worked as a boy on the three fields that had been cleared for farming. One day he helped out by placing pumpkin seeds on small mounds while others planted corn. A few days later, a hard rain in the surrounding hills caused the fields to flood, washing away the seeds. Vibrant matter, in the form of an unexpected flood, squelched human effort, teaching the young Abe a lesson about nature he would not forget.
Even more vivid exposure to untamed nature came when the family moved to Indiana. Nearly as large as Kentucky, Indiana was far more sparsely settled; in 1821 its population was only 147,178, compared to Kentucky’s 564,317.11 Southern Indiana was truly a frontier—“a wild region,” as Lincoln recalled it, “with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.”12 A diarist wrote, “Indiana is a vast forest just penetrated in places by backwoods settlers who are half hunters, half farmers.”13 Countless varieties of trees, some of them enormous, covered the land, their branches and tops often enveloped in lush, serpentine vines. The undergrowth was so thick that “a man Could scarcely git through on foot,” a Lincoln neighbor wrote; Dennis Hanks reported the brush was matted together so tightly that “as the old Saying gowes [sic] you could Drive a Butcher Knife up to the Handle in it.”14 Swarms of insects—mosquitoes, black flies, and poisonous yellow flies—filled the air, as did many kinds of birds, notably clouds of pigeons that darkened the sky when they flew overhead.15 The region was alive with animals: wildcats, panthers, bears, raccoons, grouse, and wild turkeys.
In February 1817, just before Abe turned eight, a flock of wild turkeys approached the cabin while Thomas was away. Spotting the fowls, Abe seized his father’s rifle, pointed it through a crack in the wall, and fired, killing one of the turkeys. A terrible feeling overcame him at what struck him as a senseless murder of a living being. As he later reported through a campaign biographer, “He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.”16
This simple statement opens vistas on Lincoln that are appreciated only when we consider its cultural contexts. Abe’s animus against hunting placed him among a small group of environmentally conscious Americans who recoiled from the killing of animals. The animal that aroused Abe’s emotion was of central interest to his contemporary John James Audubon, a progenitor of environmental awareness. Audubon praised “the great size and beauty of the wild turkey,” which he called “one of the most interesting of the birds indigenous to the United States of America.”17 Audubon’s esteem for the bird led him to feature his painting of the wild turkey as Plate I in his landmark volume Birds of America.
At the time Abe killed the bird, the Haitian-born Audubon lived in Henderson, Kentucky, forty miles from Pigeon Creek. Audubon can be credited with preserving in art hundreds of birds, six of them now extinct, including two breeds then common in Indiana, the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet. Unlike Abe, however, Audubon had no qualms about killing birds, no matter how beautiful. Hunting aided his ornithology; he killed birds to examine them. Here he differed not only from Lincoln but also from Thoreau, who abandoned the killing of animals because of his growing sympathy for them. Thoreau admitted that for a while he killed “new and rare birds” in order to analyze them, but he gave up the practice. And as he explains in Walden, “I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.”18 There was a more basic reason Thoreau dropped the gun. “To be serene and successful we must be at one with the universe,” he noted. “The least conscious and needless injury inflicted on any creature is to its extent a suicide. What peace—or life—can a murderer have?”19
Remarkably, Lincoln felt this way at seven. He was a skilled marksman, and he sometimes joined family members on hunts for raccoons, deer, or other animals. But he did not hunt enthusiastically. Here he differed from his father, who found “no small amusement and pleasure” in killing all kinds of game, which the family needed for food, skins, and material for barter.20 He also differed from most American boys, for whom hunting was a popular pastime.21 Dennis Hanks recalled, “We all hunted pretty much all the time,” with the exception of Abe.22 He “was not so fond of the gun or the sport as I was,” said an Indiana neighbor.
Lincoln’s reluctance to hunt was especially remarkable in his frontier environment. From Daniel Boone onward, frontiersmen were literally defined by the rifle. Hunting was more than a sport, more even than a source of food or a tool of survival—it was integral to frontier manhood. This remained true right up to the late 1880s, when Teddy Roosevelt formed the Boone and Crockett Club “to promote manly sport with a rifle.”23 The club’s constitution stipulated that “No one shall be eligible for membership who shall not have killed with a rifle in fair chase . . . at least one individual of one of the various kinds of American large game.”
Lincoln disliked hunting because, like Thoreau, he felt a kinship with animals. He often bore sad witness to the cruel treatment of animals. One of the most popular activities at frontier events like logrolling and militia musters was the gander pull, a blood sport in which galloping horsemen tried to seize and pull off the greased head of a suspended live goose. Whoever tore off the head received a small prize, usually the goose for cooking. Another source of entertainment was burning small animals alive. Men would “round up a chip-munk, a rabbit, or a snake, and make him take refuge in a burning log-heap and watch him squirm and fry.”24
During his Indiana years, Abe intervened a number of times when he witnessed friends inflicting tortures such as pouring live coals on the backs of turtles or poking toads with sharp sticks. His stepsister Matilda Johnston recalled an incident when her brother John caught a turtle and “brought it to the place where Abe was preaching—threw it against the tree—crushed the shell and it suffered much—quivered all over—Abe preached against cruelty to animals, contending that an ant[’]s life was to it, as sweet as ours to us.”25 This proanimal declaration was one of several times that Abe spoke out on the topic in his youth. At both Swaney’s and Dorsey’s schools, he composed “short sentences against cruelty to animals” and “essays on being kind to animals and crawling insects.”
He did not go as far as some, then and now, who oppose all killing of animals. He ate meat, and parts of his clothing were made of animal skins. In the mid-1820s, he worked for a time butchering hogs. He wielded the club and assisted in dumping the hogs’ carcasses in scalding water and scraping off the bristles. But he never lost his sympathy for animals. Ward Hill Lamon explained that Abe “could not endure to witness the needless suffering even of a brute.”26 Joshua Speed summed up Lincoln’s empathetic nature when he generalized that “Lincoln had the tenderest heart for anyone in distress, whether man, beast, or bird.”27
Abe knew the power of nonhuman forces well. In his youth he twice almost lost his life to them. As a seven-year-old in Kentucky, he and a friend, Austin Gollaher, tried to cross a stream by walking on a narrow log. Austin safely crossed, but Abe lost his footing and fell into the water, which was seven or eight feet deep. Neither boy could swim. Abe floundered in the water until Austin managed to pull him out with a long stick. Austin later recalled, Abe was “almost dead. I got him by the arms and shook him well, and then rolled him on the ground, when the water poured out of his mouth.”28
Another near-death experience caused by a nonhuman power came three years later, when Abe was a ten-year-old in Indiana. One day he rode to a mill two miles away from the family cabin, carrying a sack of corn to be ground into meal. He had to wait in line to do his work, and it was sundown before his turn came to attach his mare to the rotating beam that drove the grindstone. As the horse walked round and round, Abe whipped it, crying, “Get up—you lazy old divil.”29 He did this a number of times before the horse, irritated by the goading, kicked Abe in the forehead. Abe had just said, “Get up” before he was knocked out by the horse’s hoof. Abe was taken home, where he lay unconscious until early the next morning, when he awoke and finished his command: “you lazy old divil.” In his many retellings of this story, Abe attributed his completion of the spoken command to physical forces. He told William Herndon that he believed “that the mental energy—forces had been flash[e]d by the will on the nerves & thence on the muscles; and that that [sic] the energy—force or power had fixed the muscles in the exact shape . . . to utter those words” automatically.
The nonhuman affected Abe strongly not only in such dramatic episodes but at every turn on the frontier. When he was young, his father made him and his sister toys made out of corncobs, twigs, and corn silk. His clothing consisted of animal hides—buckskin pants and a coonskin cap—and a rough linsey-woolsey shirt. His chores and jobs brought him into direct contact with nature. He cut and sold firewood to steamboats on the Ohio River, served as a ferryman by rowing a boat back and forth across the hundred-foot mouth of Anderson Creek, plowed, killed hogs, made fences, and took two trips hauling goods by flatboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans—the kind of extended experience in river life that Mark Twain would immortalize in Life on the Mississippi and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Payments for goods or services on the frontier were often made by barter. Legal mediums of exchange included corn, wheat, whiskey, wool, hogs, venison, coonskins, or other natural items. Preachers were paid by whiskey, corn, or smoked meat.30 For example, when Thomas Lincoln contributed to his Baptist church, he gave corn, not cash, as indicated in the church records: “Thomas Lincoln, white corn, manufactured pounds 24.”31 One could improvise exchanges, as Abe did when he traded a cord of wood for fine cloth from which he “had a shirt made, and it was positively the first white shirt . . . which he had ever owned or worn.”32
Abe wrote with a pen made of turkey buzzard feathers, using pokeberry ink.33 When he had no paper, he wrote on walls, fences, or floors. He was so eager to learn that, as a neighbor said, he wrote words and sentences “with charcoal, he scoured them in the dust, in the sand, in the snow—anywhere and everywhere the lines could be drawn.”34
Given his interest in words and his closeness to the nonhuman world, it’s understandable that he would create stories or jokes that brought together people and animals, the human and the nonhuman. He spent so much time spinning yarns and telling jokes—from his Indiana youth to his many years on the Illinois law circuit through his two terms as president—that storytelling and humor stand out as preferred modes of public communication for him.
He frequently used nonhuman images. At different times, he compared political opponents to ticks, a dog, a lost pig, and a corncob. He was just as likely to use nonhuman images on allies as on opponents. When someone advised him to dismiss all seven members of his cabinet, he said he was reminded of a western farmer who, trying to get rid of skunks on his property, laid a trap and caught a skunk that made “such an infernal stench that he thought he had better let the rest go.”35 Aware that his treasury secretary Salmon Chase was scheming to run against him for the presidency, Lincoln laughed and said, “I suppose he will, like the bluebottle fly, lay his eggs in every rotten spot he can find.”36
He often compared his generals to animals. Battlefield commanders were like bulls crowding a farm, and sending more and more troops to demanding generals like George McClellan was like “shoveling fleas across a barn floor—half of them never get there.”37 In another of Lincoln’s jokes, the timid McClellan was a scared rooster who fled a cockfight. 38 Praising the toughness of his two greatest generals, Lincoln declared, “Grant has the bear by the hind leg, while Sherman takes off the hide.”39
Lincoln even applied nonhuman imagery to himself. After the defeat at Chickamauga he confessed that he felt “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.”40 A joke that he used on himself and others involved chickens whose legs were tied so often to a wagon when they were transported that whenever the birds saw wagon sheets, they turned over and held up their legs for tying. He said he felt like that when he was inundated by requests or advice from visitors; if he listened to everyone, he said, “I had just as well cross my hands and let you tie me.”41
RING-TAILED ROARERS AND FEMALE SCREAMERS
Lincoln understood American humor well, especially one of the most popular genres, frontier humor. Besides hearing this humor delivered orally on the frontier, he read comic almanacs, jest books, humorous newspaper columns, and anthologies of humor. He told the journalist Noah Brooks that “the grim grotesqueness and extravagance of American humor were its most striking characteristic.”42 Indeed, from the appearance of James Kirke Paulding’s fictional Letters from the South (1817) and Paulding’s long-running play The Lion of the West (1831) to the magazine tales about the boatman Mike Fink (introduced to readers in 1828) through the immensely popular Davy Crockett almanacs (1835–56) and William T. Porter’s humor columns in The Spirit of the Times (1831–61), Americans feasted on backwoods humor of the most violent, bizarre variety.
This humor was, in effect, the American frontier on steroids. Lying, bragging, rough-and-tumble fighting, and all the rest were taken to sensational extremes. A common narrative thread in the popular stories, the fight scene, was based on a pattern that Lincoln witnessed often at the frontier events he attended.43 Many of these fictional scenes involved two or more muscular frontiersmen, fired up by alcohol, who get into a bragging match about who is the best man; the boasting escalates into a rough-and-tumble fight that ends in a maiming, with the victor gaining the respect of spectators and the defeated combatant. Sometimes women fighters were involved, as in the memorably titled piece “A Desperate Fight Between Two Women, One Man, and Two Bears” (the women save the man by killing the bears with an axe and boiling syrup).44
References to scalping, blood drinking, and cannibalism abounded in the popular humor. Gouging out eyes became a source of mass entertainment, especially in the Crockett almanacs, where screamers—wild, boastful men and women of the frontier—collect eyeballs. In one episode, a man courts a woman by giving her two eyeballs he has gouged out; she dries them and wears them as earrings to church. In another story, a female screamer dons a long necklace of eyeballs she has won in her rough-and-tumbles with women. Not only are the screamers sadistic and bloodthirsty, they are superhuman: Crockett, finding the earth and sun frozen in place, kills a huge bear and squeezes its blood over the sun and the world’s axis, freeing up both.
