1
Spencer County, Indiana
January 20, 1828
Young Abraham Lincoln is freezing.
In an isolated rural region near Little Pigeon Creek in Spencer County, Indiana, he’s outside, laboring in the cold.
Although only eighteen years old, he’s already over six foot two—and despite this unusual height, he weighs only about 160 pounds, stretched thin and wiry on a tall frame. His long arms are skinny but strong; his calloused hands wield tools with assurance, including a long swinging ax. On this winter day, he probably wears a rough buckskin coat over his threadbare clothes, and a hat of raccoon fur over his coarse black hair. The trees surrounding this clearing are mostly without leaves, and the ground is hard from frost.
Today, he works near a smokehouse—a small, windowless wooden structure, typically about eight feet square, with a conical roof and fire pit inside. Given the season, he’s probably chopping wood from nearby trees and pulling the logs inside to tend the fire. Perhaps he’s also hauling salt-cured slabs of meat into the smokehouse, hanging them on hooks or rafters inside, where dry heat from the fire will preserve them during the winter months.
As he works, a small group approaches, bearing solemn expressions. When they near the smokehouse, one of them calls out his name.
“Abe.”
Young Abe opens the smokehouse door to see the group. This morning, Abe’s sister, Sarah, two years older than he, has been in labor with her first child. The group approaching are members of her husband’s family. Perhaps they’re here to bring him good news about her labor—was his first niece or nephew just born?
Instead, the group brings something far more somber. The labor went awry. The nearest doctor was many miles away, not arriving in time to help. The baby was stillborn.
Not only that. The young mother—Abe’s sister—is dead.
Nine years earlier, when Abe was nine, his mother had died suddenly after contracting a disease. Since then, Sarah, his only sibling, has helped raise him.
Not long after the death of Abe and Sarah’s mother, their father traveled alone from their home in Indiana to his original home state of Kentucky to find a new wife. To make this trip, he left Abe and his sister—then roughly ten and twelve—alone in their isolated frontier cabin for many weeks to feed, clothe, and otherwise fend for themselves. When their father finally returned with a woman by his side, the new wife was alarmed to see two lice-filled and nearly starving children who were “wild—ragged & dirty.” It was only after she bathed and cleaned them that they “looked more human.”
The hardships that Abraham and his sister endured together created a deep bond between them. A relative would later recall that Abe “dearly loved his sister, she having been his only companion after the death of his mother.” Together, as brother and sister, they had navigated an often brutal childhood living in near poverty. “They were close companions and were a great deal alike,” a family friend described, and Sarah was a “kind, tender, and good natured” young woman.
Now, she is gone too. For the second time in his life, he has lost the person he loves most.
His brother-in-law, one of those in the group who delivered the news, remembered the moment: Abraham “sat down on a log and hid his face in his hands while the tears rolled down through his long bony fingers.” Another relative described the loss as a “great grief, which affected Abe throughout his life,” and also added, “from then on he was alone in the world you might say.”
The relatives who just shared the news don’t know how to respond to the young man sobbing before them. After a moment, “those present turned away in pity and left him to his grief.”
Few who witnessed the mournful scene that day would likely imagine that this tall, gawky, grief-stricken country boy, wearing tattered clothes and laboring outside in an obscure corner of the Indiana frontier near Kentucky, would ever rise above his humble station in life. Certainly, none could envision that this young man possessed qualities of mind and spirit that would one day lift him to the most exalted positions of leadership and responsibility in the land—and that would link his personal destiny to the fate of the nation.
Yet however exceptional Lincoln’s rise will be, and whatever joys and triumphs he’ll experience, he’ll never be free from the pattern of tragedy and grief that shaped his boyhood. Indeed, his adult life will be characterized by shocks of violence and suffering even greater than those of his youth—including the loss of his own children. It’s as if he’s haunted by tragedy upon tragedy, from which he’ll never truly escape.
For Abraham Lincoln, the specter of death is always near.
2
TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS LATER …
Washington, D.C.
May 22, 1856
This is an incident that illustrates the times—over four years before the Civil War, and before most Americans had ever heard of Abraham Lincoln.
It takes place on a hot summer day on May 22, 1856, in Washington, D.C.
Early on this Thursday afternoon, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts sits at his desk in the main chamber of the United States Senate. Other Senators work or mill about elsewhere on the chamber floor, hurrying to finish their work for the day. Some onlookers still sit in the upper balcony, where spectators can watch debates on the floor.
Sumner, forty-six, is a five-year veteran of the Senate. On this particular afternoon, he is franking copies of a speech he wrote and delivered to the body a few days earlier. The speech, five hours long and delivered over the course of two days, was about the most debated issue of the day—the institution of slavery—and Sumner is now sending the speech to friends and newspaper editors for public distribution.
During his time in the Senate, Sumner has gained a reputation as one of the strongest and most articulate antislavery advocates in either chamber of Congress. He intended his speech—delivered on May 19 and May 20 and soon known as “The Crime Against Kansas” speech—to be a definitive treatise against an institution that he considers immoral and that he has spent much of his public life opposing.
Sumner probably doesn’t much notice when a young Congressman enters the Senate chamber flanked by two companions. There’s no reason why the Senator would notice these visitors; while members of the House of Representatives do not conduct their official business on the Senate floor, they frequently visit the upper chamber to meet with Senators or staffers, or to attend debates.
The Congressman is Preston Brooks, thirty-six, of South Carolina’s Fourth District. He carries a walking cane in one hand, although he is perfectly healthy. Accompanying him are two other House members, one a fellow Representative of South Carolina, the other of Virginia.
At Brooks’s instruction, the three Southern Congressmen wait near the entrance to the floor for some of the aides to depart the room. Brooks pays special attention to make sure no women are anywhere in the chamber. When he sees a young woman still in the room, he asks the chamber secretary, “Can’t you manage to get her out?”
Once satisfied that no women remain, Brooks and his companions walk across the Senate floor toward the desk where Senator Sumner works.
In his speech three days earlier, Sumner had leveled verbal attacks against several of his Southern proslavery Senate colleagues. One of those he insulted with particular derision was the aging Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina—who happens to be the cousin of Preston Brooks, the young Congressman now walking toward Sumner’s desk carrying a cane. Brooks was not present for the delivery of Sumner’s speech, but he soon learned of the insults directed at his relative and read descriptions and reports of the speech in newspapers.
Brooks, still flanked by his two companions, stops in front of Sumner’s desk. He takes a breath, then says, “Mr. Sumner, I read your speech with care and as much impartiality as was possible and I feel it is my duty to tell you that you have libeled my state and slandered a relative who is aged and absent and I am come to punish you for it.”
Before Sumner can respond, Brooks raises the straight cane high above his head. The cane is solid gutta-percha, with a metal head on one end of it. The Congressman brings the cane down full force, smashing it into Sumner’s skull. Brooks raises the cane again, and again brings it down on the Senator. Sumner is immediately dazed, almost unconscious, with blood pouring from his head and face. Once again, Brooks raises the cane over his head and strikes the Senator.
Startled onlookers rush to try to stop the attack. But Brooks’s two companions hold them back so Brooks can continue the beating. One of them, Congressman Laurence Keitt of South Carolina, takes out a pistol to warn off any who would interfere. Sumner is now knocked out of his seat to the floor, his head and face badly wounded. Brooks smashes the cane down on him repeatedly as blood soaks the chamber rug. Sumner tries to crawl away but gets stuck in the desk legs that are affixed to the floor. He’s barely conscious and totally unable to defend himself as the vicious blows continue. Even when the cane breaks in two, Brooks keeps beating Sumner with the half still in his hand.
“Don’t kill him!” an older Senator, John Crittenden of Kentucky, yells out, trying to break past Brooks’s companions to save his colleague.
Finally, after Brooks has delivered twenty or thirty blows, his cane shatters for good. He throws the remaining pieces on the blood-soaked floor, turns around, and walks toward the same door from which he’d entered. His two companions quickly follow him.
As the three Congressmen exit the building, Senators and aides rush to their fallen colleague. They drag the unconscious Senator out of the chamber, desperately seeking medical attention—hoping it’s not already too late.
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