Becoming Abraham Lincoln: The Coming of Age of Our Greatest President

229 Pages·2017·1.6 MB·English

by  Richard Kigel

Copyright © 2017 by Richard Kigel All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Jacket design by Rain Saukas Jacket illustration: Lincoln the Rail Splitter, J. L. G. Ferris Print ISBN: 978-1-
5107-1730-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-51071731-2
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
While I was teaching in Brooklyn, I went hunting for books about famous
people who came from dire poverty but, through their passion for reading
and learning, educated themselves and made their mark in the world. The first
person I thought of was Lincoln. I looked but found no books on Lincoln’s
young manhood in backwoods America that described in detail how he picked
up his extraordinary reading and writing skills.
As C. S. Lewis once said to J. R. R. Tolkien, “If they won’t write the kind of
books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves.”
This book is dedicated to students everywhere who, like Lincoln, find
themselves stuck in an atmosphere with “absolutely nothing to excite ambition
for education,” and still they come to school, eager to learn, determined to excel,
and willing to work.
Lincoln himself knew the power of words and saw a kind of magic in their
vast reach. Words transcend barriers, enabling us to “exchange thoughts with
one another” and “converse with the dead, the absent and the unborn, at all
distances of time and space.”
If we can isolate the one quality that made Lincoln great, it would be his
hunger for reading. “The things I want to know are in books,” he said. “My best
friend is the man who will get me a book I ain’t read.”
—Richard Kigel
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: “I saw him this morning about 8:30.”
1. “My good friend is gone.”
2. “I have heard much of this blessed good woman.”
3. “Injuns!”
4. “Purty as a pitcher.”
5. “Nancy’s got a boy baby.”
6. “It was a wild region.”
7. “Constantly handling that most useful instrument.”
8. “I am going away from you, Abraham.”
9. “Here’s your new mammy.”
10. “Land o’Goshen, that boy air a’ growin’.”
11. “A real eddication.”
12. “Mighty darned good lies.”
13. “Somethin’ Peculiarsome.”
14. “Chronicles of Reuben.”
15. “Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence?”
16. “I can see the quivering and shining of that half-dollar yet.”
17. “River Man.”
18. “Snowbirds.”
19. “I found him no green horn.”
20. “I’ll hit it hard.”
21. “A kind of driftwood.”
22. “The best feller that ever broke into this settlement.”
23. “Something that was knotty.”
24. “I am young and unknown.”
25. “They surely thought it was a dream.”
26. “Captain Abraham Lincoln’s Company of the First Regiment of the Brigade
of Volunteers.”
27. “Charges upon the wild onions … Bloody struggles with the mosquitoes.”
28. “The only time I ever have been beaten.”
29. “The National Debt.”
30. “I loved the woman dearly and sacredly.”
31. “Oh! Why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”
32. “Did you vote for me?”
Bibliography
Notes
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.
O Memory! Thou midway world
’Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1844