I
AMBITION AND THE RECOGNITION OF LEADERSHIP
ONE
ABRAHAM
âEvery man is said to have his peculiar ambitionâ
Lincoln was only twenty-three years old on March 9, 1832, when he declared his intention to run for a seat in the Illinois state legislature. The frontier state had not yet developed party machinery to officially nominate candidates. Persons desiring to run simply put forward their own names on a handbill expressing their views on local affairs.
âEvery man is said to have his peculiar ambition,â Lincoln began. âI have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed. I am young and unknown to many of you.â
For many ambitious young men in the nineteenth century, politics proved the chosen arena for advancement. While Lincolnâs ambition was as central to his makeup as his backbone, it was, almost from the start, two-fold. It was not simply for himself; it was for the people he hoped to lead. He wanted to distinguish himself in their eyes. The sense of community was central to the master dream of his lifeâthe desire to accomplish deeds that would gain the lasting respect of his fellow men.
He asked for the opportunity to render himself worthy: âI was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me. If the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.â
Where did this ambition come from, his âstrong conviction,â as one friend described it, âthat he was born for better things than seemed likely or even possibleâ?
When asked later to shed light on his beginnings, Lincoln claimed his story could be âcondensed into a single sentence: The short and simple annals of the poor.â His father, Thomas, had never learned to read, and, according to his son, never did âmore in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.â Trapped in an exitless poverty, Thomas cleared only sufficient land for survival and moved from one dirt farm to another in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. While traces of the life of Lincolnâs mother, Nancy Hanks, are sketchy, those who knew her agreed âshe was superior to her husband in Every way.â She was described as âkeenâshrewdâsmart,â endowed with a strong memory and quick perception. âAll that I am or hope ever to be I get from my mother,â Lincoln later said.
When Abraham was nine, Nancy Hanks died from what was known as milk sickness, a disease transmitted by way of cows that had eaten poisonous plants. After her burial, Thomas abandoned his young son and his twelve-year-old daughter, Sarah, for a period of seven months while he returned to Kentucky to find a new wife. They were left on their own in what Lincoln described as âa wild region,â a nightmarish place where âthe pantherâs scream filled the night with fear and bears preyed on the swine.â When Abrahamâs new stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, returned with Thomas, she found the children living like animalsââwildâragged & dirty.â She was stunned to find that the floorless cabin lacked even a door. Inside, there were few furnishings, no beds, and scant bedding. From the store of goods she had brought with her in the wagon, the industrious Sarah created a âsnug and comfortableâ home. A floor was laid, door and windows hung, and she provided clothing for the children. How, within the confines of this desolation, did Lincoln develop and sustain a grand, visionary ambition, a belief that he was meant for higher and better things?
The springboard to the development of Lincolnâs ambition can be traced to his recognition, even as a young boy, that he was gifted with an exceptionally intelligent, clear, and inquisitive mind. Schoolmates in the ABC school in rural Kentucky where he was taught to read and write at the age of seven recalled that he was able to learn more swiftly and understand more deeply than others. Though he was able to attend school only sporadically, when his father didnât require his labor on their hardscrabble farm, he stood without peer at the top of every class. âHe was the learned boy among us unlearned folks,â one classmate recalled. âHe carried away from his brief schooling,â his biographer David Herbert Donald observes, âthe self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal.â A dream that he might someday be in a situation to make the most of his talents began to take hold.
In the age-old debate about whether leadership traits are innate or developed, memoryâthe ease and capacity with which the mind stores informationâis generally considered an inborn trait. From his earliest days in school, Lincolnâs comrades remarked upon his phenomenal memory, âthe best,â the most âmarvelously retentive,â they had ever encountered. His mind seemed âa wonder,â a friend told him, âimpressions were easily made upon it and never effaced.â Lincoln told his friend he was mistaken. What appeared a gift, he argued, was, in his case, a developed talent. âI am slow to learn,â he explained, âand slow to forget what I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steelâvery hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.â His stepmother, who came to love him as if he were her own son, observed the arduous process by which he engraved things into his memory. âWhen he came upon a passage that Struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there until he did get paper,â she recalled, âand then he would rewrite itâ and keep it in a scrapbook so that he could preserve it.
While his mind was neither quick nor facile, young Lincoln possessed singular powers of reasoning and comprehension, unflagging curiosity, and a fierce, almost irresistible, compulsion to understand the meaning of what he heard, read, or was taught. âWhen a mere child,â Lincoln later said, âI used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I do not think I ever got angry at anything else in my life.â When he âgot on a hunt for an ideaâ he could not sleep until he âcaught it,â and even then was not able to rest until he had âbounded it north and bounded it south, and bounded it east and bounded it west.â
Early on, Abraham revealed a keystone attribute essential to success in any fieldâthe motivation and willpower to develop every talent he possessed to the fullest. âThe ambition of the man soared above us,â his childhood friend Nathaniel Grigsby recalled. âHe read and thoroughly read his books whilst we played.â When he first learned how to print the letters of the alphabet, he was so excited that he formed âletters, words and sentences wherever he found suitable material. He scrawled them in charcoal, he scored them in the dust, in the sand, in the snowâanywhere and everywhere that lines could be drawn.â He soon became âthe best penman in the neighborhood.â
Sharing his knowledge with his schoolmates at every turn, he soon became âtheir guide and leader.â A friend recalled the âgreat painsâ he took to explain to her âthe movements of the heavenly bodies,â patiently telling her that the moon was not really sinking, as she initially thought; it was the earth that was moving, not the moon. âWhen he appeared in Company,â another friend recalled, âthe boys would gather & cluster around him to hear him talk.â With kindness, playfulness, wit, and wisdom, he would explain âthings hard for us to understand by storiesâmaximsâtales and figures. He would almost always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near as that we might instantly see the force & bearing of what he said.â He understood early on that concrete examples and stories provided the best vehicles for teaching.
He had developed his talent for storytelling, in part, from watching his father. Though Thomas Lincoln was unable to read or write, he possessed wit, a talent for mimicry, and an uncanny memory for exceptional stories. Night after night, Thomas would exchange tales with farmers, carpenters, and peddlers as they passed along the old Cumberland Trail. Young Lincoln sat spellbound in the corner. After listening to the adults chatter through the evening, Abraham would spend âno small part of the night walking up and down,â attempting to figure out what they were saying. No small part of his motivation was to entertain his friends the next day with a simplified and riotous version of the arcane adult world.
He thrived when holding forth on a tree stump or log captivating the appreciative attention of his young audience, and before long had built a repertoire of stories and great storytelling skills. At the age of ten, a relative recalled, Abraham learned to mimic âthe Style & toneâ of the itinerant Baptist preachers who appeared irregularly in the region. To the delight of his friends, he could reproduce their rip-roaring sermons almost word for word, complete with gestures of head and hand to emphasize emotion. Then, as he got older, he found additional material for his storytelling by walking fifteen miles to the nearest courthouse, where he soaked up the narratives of criminal trials, contract disputes, and contested wills and then retold the cases in lurid detail.
His stories often had a pointâa moral along the lines of one of his favorite books, Aesopâs Fablesâbut sometimes they were simply funny tales that he had heard and would retell with animation. When he began to speak, his face, the natural contours of which gave off a sorrowful aspect, would light up with a transforming âwinning smile.â And when he reached the end of his story, he would laugh with such heartiness that soon everyone was laughing with him.
Not all his humorous gifts were filled with gentle hilarity, and he would learn to muzzle his more caustic and mocking rejoinders. An early case in point was one Josiah Crawford who had lent Lincoln his copy of Parson Weemsâs Life of Washington. During a severe rainstorm, the book was damaged. Crawford demanded that Lincoln repay the value of the book by working two full days pulling corn. Lincoln considered this unfair, but nonetheless set to work until âthere was not a corn blade left on a stalk.â Later, however, he wrote a verse lampooning Crawfordâs unusually large, ugly nose, reciting âJosiah blowing his bugleâ for the entertainment of his friends.
If he was the hub of his young circleâs entertainment, he was also their foremost contrarian, willing to face their disapproval rather than abandon what he considered right. The boys in the neighborhood, one schoolmate recollected, liked to play a game of catching turtles and putting hot coals on their backs to see them wriggle. Abe not only told them âit was wrong,â he wrote a short essay in school against âcruelty to animals.â Nor did Lincoln feel compelled to share in the folkways of the frontierâa harsh culture in which children learned, for survival and for sport, to shoot and kill birds and animals. After killing a wild turkey with his fatherâs rifle when he was eight years old, he never again âpulled a trigger on any larger game.â
These attitudes were not merely moral postures. The young boy possessed a profound sense of empathyâthe ability to put himself in the place of others, to imagine their situations and identify with their feelings. One winter night, a friend remembered, he and Abraham were walking home when they saw something lying in a mud hole. âIt was a man, he was dead drunk,â and ânearly frozen.â Abe picked him up and carried him all the way to his cousinâs house, where he built a fire to warm him up. On another occasion, when Lincoln was walking with a group of friends, he passed a pig caught in a stretch of boggy ground. The group continued on for half a mile when Lincoln suddenly stopped. He insisted on turning back to rescue the pig. He couldnât bear the pain he felt in his own mind when he thought of the pig.
Lincolnâs size and strength bolstered his authority with his peers. From an early age, he was more athletic than most of the boys in the neighborhood, âready to out-run, out-jump and out-wrestle or out-lift anybody.â As a young man, one friend reported, he âcould carry what 3 ordinary men would grunt & sweat at.â Blessed with uncommon strength, he was also favored with robust health. Relatives recalled that he was never sick. Lincolnâs physical dominance proved a double-edged sword, however, for he was expected, from the age of eight to the age of twenty-one, to accompany his father into the fields, wielding an axe, felling trees, digging up stumps, splitting rails, plowing, and planting. His father considered that bones and muscles were âsufficient to make a manâ and that time in school was âdoubly wasted.â In rural areas, the only schools were subscription schools, so it not only cost a family money to give a child an education, but the classroom took the child away from manual labor. Accordingly, when Lincoln reached the age of nine or ten, his own formal education was cut short.
Left on his own, Abraham had to educate himself. He had to take the initiative, assume responsibility for securing books, decide what to study, become his own teacher. He made things happen instead of waiting for them to happen. Gaining access to reading material proved nearly insurmountable. Relatives and neighbors recalled that Lincoln scoured the countryside to borrow books and read every volume âhe could lay his hands on.â A book was his steadfast companion. Every respite from the daily manual tasks was a time to read a page or two from Pilgrimâs Progress or Aesopâs Fables, pausing while resting his horse at the end of a long row of planting.
Some leaders learn by writing, others by reading, still others by listening. Lincoln preferred reading aloud in the presence of others. âWhen I read aloud,â Lincoln later explained, âtwo senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I remember it better.â Early on, he possessed a vivid sensibility for the music and rhythm of poetry and drama; he recited long stanzas and passages from memory. When the time came to return the borrowed books, he had made them his own. As he explored literature and the history of the country, the young Lincoln, already conscious of his own powers, began to imagine ways of living beyond those of his family and neighbors.
When his father found his son in the field reading a book or, worse still, distracting fellow workers with tales or passages from one of his books, he would angrily break up the performance so work might continue. On occasion, he would go so far as to destroy Abrahamâs books and whip him for neglecting his labors. To Thomas, Abrahamâs chronic reading was tantamount to dereliction, a mark of laziness. He thought his son was deceiving himself with his quest for education. âI tried to stop it, but he has got that fool idea into his head, and it canât be got out,â Thomas told a friend.
At times, when the tensions with his father seemed unbearable, when the gap between his lofty ambitions and the reality of his circumstances seemed too great to bridge, Lincoln was engulfed by sadness, revealing a pensive, melancholy side to his temperament that became more pronounced as time went by. âHis melancholy dript from him as he walked,â said his junior law partner William Herndon, an observation echoed by dozens of others. âNo element of Mr. Lincolnâs character was so marked,â recalled his friend Henry Clay Whitney, âas his mysterious and profound melancholy.â Yet, if melancholy was part of his nature, so, too, was the life-affirming humor that allowed him to perceive what was funny or ludicrous in life, lightening his despair and fortifying his will. Both Lincolnâs storytelling and his humor, friends believed, were ânecessary to his very existenceâ; they were intended âto whistle off sadness.â
In the end, the unending strain with his father enhanced, rather than diminished, young Lincolnâs ambition. Year after year, as he persevered in defiance of his fatherâs wishes, managing his negative emotions and exercising his will to slowly master one subject after another, he developed an increasing belief in his own strengths and powers. He came to trust âthat he was going to be something,â his cousin Sophie Hanks related, slowly creating what one leadership scholar calls âa vision of an alternative future.â He told a neighbor he did not âintend to delve, grub, shuck corn, split rails and the like. Iâll study and get ready, and then the chance will come.â
Opportunity arrived the moment he reached twenty-one, the age of majority, releas...