A lesson learned from Michael Burlingame's ABRAHAM LINCOLN biography

 We can be so much more than what we are born to be.     

This simple life lesson is one that has been passed down to all of us countless times through the world of pop culture, yet it feels so many of us have a hard time truly learning and trying to benefit from. In my own personal life, I can think of countless people who came from difficult backgrounds who managed to achieve great personal and professional success, and I can likewise think of many sad stories of people who never grew past their origins (and perhaps never had any interest in doing so). On the other hand, all of us have also known of people from relatively privileged backgrounds, who completely squandered their advantages and never made much of themselves. I know of people who had much more privileged lives than myself growing up, but I also never went hungry and never lacked life’s basic luxuries. I like to hope that I’ve done the best I could with what I was given, and that I now play a role in helping others to achieve their potential as well—but like so many, I also fear I have squandered opportunities along the way. Some of us will succeed more than others, but what matters is how hard you try to become a better person beyond however you were raised, and few men in history ever learned this lesson more effectively than Abraham Lincoln.

When Michael Burlingame released his biography of Abraham Lincoln back in 2009 (a new 2023 edition of which I just finished reading), many critics made the point that it can be hard to find that much more to say about Lincoln, whose life has been summarized and eulogized from the moment of his death in 1865. Having read dozens of Lincoln books myself, it can be fascinating to see all the different interpretations of him given the focus of his biographers. One example is how people see his wife Mary; by all accounts, they had a tumultuous marriage—but not coincidentally, female authors tend to focus on her better qualities, whereas many male authors (Burlingame included) can barely hide their contempt for her. That can maybe be the focus of a different review lesson later, but for Burlingame’s work I wanted to focus on a story of which he spends a great deal of time on—Lincoln’s incredibly humble, vague, and difficult upbringing. 

Lincoln was born in the slave state of Kentucky to Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, and while his mother was beloved, she was also a bit of a social outcast on account of the long suspicion she had been from a line of bastard children (funnily, these were the distant ancestors of Tom Hanks). Thomas Lincoln was a hardened frontier farmer who valued physical strength, and by all accounts long treated Abraham with contempt for the boy’s tendency to want to quietly read whenever he got the chance to do so. Nancy died of food poisoning when Abraham was just a boy, and Thomas left his children alone for months while he went and courted a new wife (by the time the parents returned to the farm, the kids were in a feral state). Realizing that his independent farming work could never compete with the enslaved labor of massive plantations, Thomas took Abraham and the family when they were young to live in Illinois—ostensibly a free state, but also a deeply racist one full of white Southern migrants who wanted to get away from all non-white peoples.

Some historians have claimed that “Lincoln rags to President” story is somewhat exaggerated—they point out that Thomas Lincoln, by the standards of his era and region, was a relatively well-respected middle class community member. That said, young Abraham lived the rough-and-tumble life of a frontier upbringing, as his father regularly rented him out as an indentured servant to bring in more income for the family. He received no more than a cursory official education and had to satiate his need for knowledge by borrowing dusty volumes from friends and neighbors whenever possible. Growing notoriously tall and sturdy, Abraham originally won acclaim from his community most for his feats of strength, and his skills as a wrestler.

So many countless people from history, from Lincoln’s age to the present day, lived their lives as Thomas did, happy with their rural communities and never wishing to venture out into the wider world. What made young Abraham so different is speculation, as Burlingame recounts multiple theories. Was it his largely forgotten maternal line, and the apparently much greater compassion and sense of adventure that his mother had? Was it the encouragement and compassion with which his stepmother raised him? Was it influence by the much more positive adult figures whom Lincoln encountered while working for various communities as a servant? Or are we truly more than the sum of our ancestors, and can any of us choose to set ourselves down a grander path? Regardless, Lincoln came to push back against so many negative features of his upbringing. He never stopped wanting to learn more about the outside world and sought out new authors and books his entire life. He could beat anyone in a fight—occasionally tossing aside presidential hecklers like rag dolls—but he had zero interest in provoking them, and pointedly never abused his children as his father had done to him. Even as a young man, he was known for chastising the frontier people around him for their contempt and abuse toward animals.

And from that humble and troubled background, young Abraham as we all know had a rendezvous with destiny. As an amateur Lincoln scholar, I will undoubtedly read more books on him for this blog and think of more lessons we can learn from his story. One reason authors will never stop writing about him is because there is so much to analyze, most notably the deeply fascinating topic of just how much Lincoln could overcome the bigotry of his background and try to apply America’s grand principles across the color line. These are topics I will focus on more in later posts. But from the perspective of Burlingame’s book, I deeply appreciated the thought that any of us can choose to be better than what we are raised to be, and that we should never stop trying to be better versions of ourselves and to make the world a better place.