Person of Interest: A Man of Many Fathers

Sons look to their fathers for support and example; they need to be nourished, instructed, and inspired. But when fathers fall short, sons often look for father figures, in life, history, or myth, to supply what their flesh-and-blood fathers didn't.

Abraham Lincoln and his father differed in almost every way. Thomas Lincoln, a subsistence farmer and carpenter, was emotionally self-contained, marginally literate, and unambitious. His son Abraham was sensitive, enamored of language and logic, and determined to rise in the world. Fortunately for the younger Lincoln, where his own father lacked, early 19th-century America presented a handy supply of patriarchs: the founding fathers, heroes of the generation just past who had won the country's independence and established its institutions. Abraham Lincoln was inspired by them as a boy and a young man, he turned to them as a mature politician, and he relied on their guidance during the fiery trial of the Civil War.

Abraham was born in 1809 in Kentucky and, in 1816, moved across the Ohio River to the brand-new state of Indiana with his father, his mother, Nancy, and his sister, Sarah.

Thomas was a good husband and father from a certain perspective: He never went broke or left bad debts; he didn't drink, which was nearly unheard of in alcoholic early America; and he sent his children to one-room schools to learn to read and write—skills he barely possessed himself.

But father and son never truly saw eye to eye. Thomas, always a manual laborer, wanted Abraham to be literate but couldn't understand reading as a passion. Abraham, by contrast, was serious and inquisitive, and hungered for every book he could get hold of, even taking books along as he plowed the fields to read when his horse was at rest. In a campaign autobiography for his first presidential run in 1860, Lincoln wrote that his father "never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name." How much scorn coils in that word bunglingly.

In addition to their intellectual differences, the two Lincolns were emotionally mismatched. Thomas was stubborn and set in his ways. The only saying of his that his son ever recalled was a counsel of persistence: "If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter." Abraham could be persistent, as his firmness during the Civil War would eventually show, but he was temperamentally high-strung, in love with the dark poetry of Byron and Shakespeare, and prone to depression.

Thomas Lincoln was content with his station in life while Abraham wanted something more. "His ambition," his law partner William Herndon would write, "was a little engine that knew no rest."

In 1830, the Lincolns moved to Illinois; a year later, at age 21, Abraham struck off on his own and rarely saw his father again.

By then, the founding fathers had already begun making their formative mark on Lincoln's psyche, figuratively supporting and guiding him in ways that his biological father did not. The first founder with whom Lincoln connected significantly was George Washington, through the classic biography The Life of Washington, by Parson Weems. Weems was a mythmaker; the story he told about young George and the cherry tree is so resonant that it still lingers in popular consciousness. In the tale, George's father gives him a hatchet with which he accidentally chops down a prized cherry tree; when Mr. Washington asks who did it, young George says, "I cannot tell a lie!" and admits his mistake, whereupon his honesty is praised. Story told, lesson learned.

What most impressed Lincoln, however, was not Weems's tale of Washington as a good boy but his account of Washington as a great man. In 1861, when President-elect Lincoln passed through Trenton, New Jersey, en route to his first inauguration, he recalled in a speech that it was from Weems that he had first learned about the Battle of Trenton, Washington's wintry surprise attack that saved the Revolution at a desperate low point. "I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for...something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come." What Washington and his men struggled for while crossing the icy Delaware and fighting at Trenton, Lincoln realized, was liberty. Washington was a great leader serving a great cause. That, rather than the story of the cherry tree, was what most inspired him.

When he was in his 20s, Lincoln bonded with a second founding father, the patriot journalist Thomas Paine. Paine was best known for "Common Sense," his eloquent pamphlet calling for American independence, as well as "The Age of Reason," a full-throated attack on Christianity that made him infamous among the devout. Lincoln first read him soon after moving to Illinois.

Paine's favorite weapons were biting humor and literalism. About the Virgin Birth he wrote: "Were any girl, that is now with child, to say, and even to swear it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed?" Paine attacked a hallowed story by translating it into everyday terms and judging it by the standards of common sense.

Lincoln had grown up attending Baptist churches with his family, but in the first flush of manhood he swallowed Paine's arguments whole (perhaps as a rebellion against his own religious father). James Matheny, a judge who was close friends with Lincoln when both were young, remembered him often reading a passage from the Bible and then showing "its falsity and its follies on the grounds of reason."

The Bible, however, is more than literal history or biography—it seeks to explain God and man's place in the world—and Lincoln outgrew Paine's irreligion as he aged. But Paine's method of argument stayed with him all his life. When Lincoln took up law and politics, he used humor to make serious points much as Paine had. In the 1850s, when Democrats—the party of slavery—accused Republicans, its enemies, of race-mixing, Lincoln responded with a Paine-like line: "I do not understand that because I do not want a Negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone." He cut through racial and sexual panic with a joke while planting a serious thought: that to let someone alone is to let him or her be free.

The third founder to teach and inspire Lincoln was Thomas Jefferson, whom he embraced for his anti-slavery conviction. In 1776, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, whose first self-evident truth is "that all men are created equal." As a congressman in 1784, he proposed banning slavery beyond the Appalachians. Three years later, Congress endorsed half of this idea, declaring the Northwest Territory—the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin—off-limits to slavery. In 1807, President Jefferson signed a law banning the foreign slave trade. To Lincoln, Jefferson's record was clear: He theoretically declared freedom an inalienable right, and he politically backed a strategy of containment, blocking slavery's westward expansion while cutting off its supply from Africa. As Lincoln put it in 1859, "The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society."

Yet Jefferson was a more ambivalent figure than Lincoln liked to admit, illustrating how a relationship with a father figure can be as complicated as that with an actual father, requiring mental compartmentalization to cordon off unattractive parts. Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves and was accused of fathering children with one of them, Sally Hemings. As an old man, he abandoned his containment strategy, arguing instead that slavery would be more effectively weakened if it were spread thinly over the entire West. (This brainstorm ignored the fact that slavery was devilishly hard to uproot even where it was sparse—the process of emancipation in New York State took almost three decades.) Yet Lincoln ignored Jefferson's contradictions and what now would be called flip-flopping. The Jefferson that mattered to Lincoln was the visionary who had opened the Declaration of Independence with his unflinching statement about "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times." Sons need their fathers to be at their best; sometimes they need to believe them to be better than they actually are.

Another problem for Lincoln was that every politician of his day wanted to claim the founders for himself. If your father figures are public figures, then other would-be sons are likely to fight you over what they represent. Democrat Stephen Douglas, Lincoln's longtime rival in Illinois politics, thought the founding fathers had established an ideal status quo: "This republic," he said, "can exist forever divided into free and slave States, as our fathers made it"—so Lincoln and the Republicans should keep quiet about slavery. Lincoln had a rebuttal to this position: The founding fathers had not made the nation half free and half slave, but inherited it as such as a legacy of its colonial past; containing slavery was the best solution they could think of. This was a subtle counterargument, but struggling for the attention and approval of our parents, even symbolic parents, is always hard work.

Lincoln won against Douglas politically, beating him for the presidency in the election of 1860. But when 11 slave states seceded after Lincoln's victory, more than mere containment was needed. Lincoln invoked the founding fathers throughout the Civil War, most memorably in the Gettysburg Address, which looked back to Jefferson's Declaration and the "new nation, conceived in liberty."

Nevertheless, Lincoln faced a final problem with his father figures: Their spiritual guidance was no longer enough. Although their heroism and principles were still inspiring, the carnage of the war was too much for the country to bear.

The bloodshed was awful for everyone. For a man prone to depression like Lincoln, it must have been even worse. When his old friend Joshua Speed spent an afternoon with him in the White House overhearing the petitions of war mothers and wives, Speed said, "Lincoln, with my knowledge of your nervous sensibility it is a wonder that such scenes as this don't kill you."

So Lincoln turned to one more father figure—God. In his last years, he brooded about God's purpose in letting the war happen and drag on. "[I am] a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father," Lincoln told a White House visitor in 1862. "But if after endeavoring to do my best [to end the war] I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me, He wills it otherwise."

More than two years and thousands of deaths later, Lincoln believed he had finally discerned God's purpose, which he explained in his second inaugural address. It employed religious reasoning far beyond the level of Paine's fault-finding. The war, he said, was the nation's punishment for slavery. "If God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword...it must be said, 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'"

Lincoln's God was severe—more so even than Thomas Lincoln. But there was a coda: "With malice toward none; with charity for all," he said, Americans should "strive on...to bind up the nation's wounds." Inspired by the founding fathers and chastened by God the Father, Lincoln and the nation would have to take up the long hard work of peace.

Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of

National Review and the author of Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln.

Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of