The center of activity was the East room which contained the life sized portrait of George Washington. With his arm held out in welcome Washington appeared to invite each individual into the room. Lincoln was shaking the hand of a near stranger and asking about his wife by name. Confident and gracious, he remembered many of their stories. He would not acknowledge the fact but he liked it when the men he was addressing smiled because the President of the United States cared enough to know about them. Mrs. Lincoln’s jealousy was well known to be capricious and could lead to humiliating scenes but she was out of the room so the President was also enjoying the attention of the ladies present.
Suddenly, raised voices were heard in a corner of the room by a door. Everyone knew that the President had received many death threats and for a moment the room fell silent and still. Lincoln felt his neck warm and his pulse quicken. With the threat of violence he automatically became an experienced frontiersman again; senses heightened he was aware of the hiss of the gaslights, the perfume of the ladies and the tight collar of his shirt. Lincoln looked over the crowd into the corner and focused. Today had been an excellent day, but would this be the day?
There was no threat. He understood. The commotion was Frederick Douglass escorted by White House guards who presumed that a black man was not welcome at a White House social event. But here was Douglass exercising his right as a citizen to shake the hand of the President. Lincoln was glad to see him and felt that he knew him better than would be expected after only meeting two times. He happily anticipated the brief conversation they would have. But would Douglass get the jump on him again? Seeing him always triggered a childhood memory of Lincoln’s. He would be diverted by the memory of an Indiana drama and lose his focus.
Lincoln recalled the first time they met in August of 1863; he was deep in concentration focusing on a tall pile of papers for his review and signature. His secretary was introducing him to someone and Lincoln didn’t want to lose his place so he glanced just above the paper he was reading and saw the muscled torso of a man with his hands behind his back. The man’s posture somehow expressed distance and disapproval. Lincoln felt the presence of his father.
Thomas Lincoln was a talented, intelligent and physically impressive man with a sharp sense of humor. Raised on the edge of civilization in Virginia, the six year old Thomas witnessed the murder of his father and was nearly killed himself in an Indian raid. Held by an attacker poised to kill him with a knife Thomas was saved by a fortunate rifle shot from his older brother Mordicai. His life changed, with no inheritance or education the discontented teen aged Thomas moved to Kentucky. He learned to defuse disappointment by curbing his ambition. Still, he soon had a family of his own and thanks to a government seizure of Indian lands, a home and land in southern Indiana. Thomas Lincoln did not get along with his son. He did not understand how it was that Abraham aimed for a life different from the near subsistence frontier farming life they shared.
Abraham Lincoln did not complain about his difficult life on the frontier but it was not one that he ever desired for himself. The land was beautiful but also hard and unforgiving. He suffered losses. His mother had been supportive of his intellectual inclinations. He later wrote that any admirable qualities that he had came from her. At the age of nine he helped to make her casket after she died suddenly. His older sister, the person with whom he shared the most memories died in childbirth when he was nineteen. Hard labor was constant. Before he was ten years old he was handed an ax and told to clear a forest for farming. He had perhaps a single year of cumulative school. The land was so primitive he heard panthers screeching and bears trying to get after the pigs in the night just outside their crude log cabin. He was different. Early on he could see that he did not enjoy hunting, drinking and church functions. These were activities in which his neighbors spent so much time and found so much pleasure and satisfaction. And no matter how independent his efforts, any money he earned went to his father.
Thomas Lincoln was uncomfortable with his son wanting to know more than he could teach him and he thought his son too ambitious. Thomas was clever with words and would point out where Abraham fell short of his ambition. Angry, humiliated, keeping his secret to himself, the younger man would count the days until at the age of twenty-one he could leave his father behind. Years later Lincoln refused to visit his dying father. His father, the only individual with whom the adult Abraham Lincoln would be cruel.
Now a parent himself he was aware of the view from the other side of the fence. Lincoln learned that it was an acquired taste to find joy in your child’s choices. Your first inclination is to expect the child to choose what you want him to choose, to be disappointed when he does not. It took Lincoln a while to decipher that a child’s experience of life could be different from his parents yet just as valid. His relationship with his first child, Robert, now a college student suffered for it. Lincoln was much more comfortable and warm with his younger children; with them he delighted in their delight.
The memories of his father and their frontier life were complex. Lincoln had written a poem:
“My childhood’s home I see again
and sadden with the view.
And still as memory crowds my brain
there’s pleasure in it too.”
There were also good memories. In Indiana he began to discern that his physical and intellectual abilities were considerable. He could tell a story as well as his father. A typical frontier childhood afforded great opportunities for fun. His poem notes, “scenes of play and playmates loved so well”. With the son of a local store owner he built a flatboat, loaded it with produce and navigated the Mississippi River eventually selling the goods in New Orleans. When Lincoln with his family left Indiana just after he turned twenty he was experienced for his age, confident and ambitious.
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