The Future Next Abraham Lincoln

It did not mean anything to me until recently that Abraham Lincoln lost his mother at age nine and was raised by his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln. So as Jake continues his struggle to define who I am to him, and chastises me for buying him the wrong conditioner or underwear, I think of Sarah Bush Lincoln. She probably went through this same thing with Abe, and look how great he turned out. And, if him dropping everything involved with being President to ride the freight train to rural Illinois to see her when she summoned him is any indication, he clearly loved her too.

Maybe one day I'll have a claim to fame like this: "But at just the right moment, she encountered a small motherless boy, and helped him to become Abraham Lincoln."

Ted Wilmer did a great blog about this on the New York Times Online. Here's some of it, click to go read the rest.

Lincoln's Other Mother

On the evening of Jan. 30, 1861, a slow freight train chugged into the small hamlet of Charleston, Ill., having completed a 12-mile run from Mattoon. Or nearly 12 miles — the train didn’t quite make it all the way to the station. A few people straggled out of the caboose and trudged through slush and ice toward the depot, where a gaggle of townsfolk loitered. To their astonishment, they realized that the tall man coming toward them, wearing a shawl, was Abraham Lincoln.

He did not seem very presidential. He had been traveling all day to cover the 120 miles from Springfield, and had missed the last passenger train to Charleston — hence the ignominious arrival by freight. According to an observer, he wore “a faded hat, innocent of a nap, and his coat was extremely short, more like a sailor’s pea-jacket than any other describable garment. A well-worn carpet-bag, quite collapsed, comprised his baggage.” He had no bodyguard.

Across the country, people were saying goodbye as the new world shaped by secession came into focus. Some did it loudly — the grandiloquent farewell speeches of Southern senators and still-serving cabinet members — but most did it quietly, inside the family. As Lincoln wrapped up his affairs in Springfield, he realized that he needed to say a special goodbye to someone who had arguably done more to shape him than any other.

And so on the morning of the 30th, this most closely observed person slipped away from it all and boarded a train in Springfield to the southeast. We know that it departed at 9:50 — the United States was beginning to acquire the railroad precision for which it would become famous. But that precision was not yet universal, and Lincoln did not make all of his planned transfers. He handled it the way he usually did — fellow passengers that day remembered that he told an endless succession of droll stories, punctuated by his own hearty laughter.

Lincoln spent the night of the 30th in Charleston, and the next morning began the final phase of his journey, to reach the secluded farmhouse where he found a 72-year-old woman, his father’s widow, Sarah Bush Lincoln.

“Stepmother” can be a fraught phrase in the telling of childhood stories — one thinks of Cinderella and the well-named Brothers Grimm — yet it was a very good day for Lincoln when she came into his life. His mother, Nancy Hanks, had died when he was nine years old, and we don’t have to look far for the sources of his legendary melancholia. In 1844, as a rising local politician, he returned to the Indiana of his boyhood and was so moved by the experience of being near the graves of his mother and sister that he wrote an uncharacteristically emotional poem about it. It began:

My childhood home I see again,

And gladden with the view;

And still as mem’ries crowd my brain,

There’s sadness in it too —

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