Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Read Online Free

wilderness quadrant, had ruled it out of bounds for slavery: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes.” The Northwest Ordinance was older than the Constitution; the one-house Congress of the Articles of Confederation passed it in July 1787, as the Constitutional Convention was in mid-session. After the new Constitution went into effect, the House, the Senate, and President George Washington confirmed the Ordinance in the summer of 1789.
    A more immediate reason for Thomas Lincoln’s move was challenges to his existing land titles in Kentucky—a problem faced by many Kentuckians besides him. Land ownership in the state was a nightmare of bad surveying and conflicting claims. But the land of the Northwest Territory had been laid out by the federal government, which guaranteed clear possession. As far as both slavery and land were concerned, the Lincolns knew firsthand the power and the consequences of federal legislation for the territories.
    Southwestern Indiana was forest when Thomas Lincoln took his family there—dense with trees, draped with wild grape vines, all the intertwined rankness of old-growth North America. As soon as Abraham was big enough to swing an axe, he was put to work, clearing land and splitting rails. Once the fields were cleared he plowed and reaped. He had a spurt of growth around age twelve, which sped his labors. Oldfriends disagreed about how much shin showed between his socks and his suddenly-too-short pants: one said six inches,one said twelve. People competed to tell tall tales about the tall boy. Whatever the length of his breeches, Lincoln’s lifelong look of awkward elongation started before his teens. Luckily for him he was as strong as he was tall, so although everyone smiled at him, no one bullied him. And meanwhile he worked—on his father’s farm, and on the farms of neighbors, his services rented out by his father, who pocketed his earnings.
    Lincoln told one of these neighbor/employers that his father had taught him how to work, but never learned himto love it. He failed to love it because he was not working for himself. Working for your father on the family farm was one thing; working elsewhere, as a hired tool or draft animal, like a plow or a horse, was something else. It is true that using family members as contract laborers was a common practice, but common practices take different people different ways. Lincoln took it badly. He would make a political philosophy, almost a theology, out of a man’s right to own the fruits of his own labor; the seeds of it may have been planted while he was planting or chopping as Thomas Lincoln’s unpaid work crew.
    What Abraham loved instead of farm work, as his stepmother testified, was reading and learning. His father had mixed feelings about that.
    Thomas Lincoln could read a little and sign his name; that was the extent of his literacy. But he wanted more for his son, which is why he sent him to school five times. Each sojourn had to be paid for, in cash or kind, and in his son’s labor lost, once Abraham was old enough to work, so there was expense involved. In her interview as an elderly widow, Sarah Bush Lincoln insisted that her husband had joined her in encouraging his son’s intellectual efforts: “Mr. Lincoln never made Abe quit reading to do anything if he could avoid it. He would do ithimself first.” Reading, writing, and arithmetic were useful skills to have, and Thomas wanted his son to have them.
    But reading was more than a skill to Abraham: it was a portal to thought and inspiration. The act of reading was also a visible mark ofhis aspirations. Abraham read everywhere, outdoors as well as at home; he would take a book with him into the fields when he plowed, stopping to read whenever the horse stoppedto rest. He did this because, as any devoted reader knows, a book can be all-absorbing. But he also did it to show family and friends