Leadership ONE ABRAHAM "Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition" Lincoln was only twenty-three years old on March 9, 1832, when he declared his intention to run for a seat in the Illinois state legislature. The frontier state had not yet developed party machinery to officially nominate candidates. Persons desiring to run simply put forward their own names on a handbill expressing their views on local affairs. "Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition," Lincoln began. "I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed. I am young and unknown to many of you." For many ambitious young men in the nineteenth century, politics proved the chosen arena for advancement.
While Lincoln''s ambition was as central to his makeup as his backbone, it was, almost from the start, two-fold. It was not simply for himself; it was for the people he hoped to lead. He wanted to distinguish himself in their eyes. The sense of community was central to the master dream of his life--the desire to accomplish deeds that would gain the lasting respect of his fellow men. He asked for the opportunity to render himself worthy: "I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me. If the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined." Where did this ambition come from, his "strong conviction," as one friend described it, "that he was born for better things than seemed likely or even possible"? When asked later to shed light on his beginnings, Lincoln claimed his story could be "condensed into a single sentence: The short and simple annals of the poor.
" His father, Thomas, had never learned to read, and, according to his son, never did "more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name." Trapped in an exitless poverty, Thomas cleared only sufficient land for survival and moved from one dirt farm to another in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. While traces of the life of Lincoln''s mother, Nancy Hanks, are sketchy, those who knew her agreed "she was superior to her husband in Every way." She was described as "keen--shrewd--smart," endowed with a strong memory and quick perception. "All that I am or hope ever to be I get from my mother," Lincoln later said. When Abraham was nine, Nancy Hanks died from what was known as milk sickness, a disease transmitted by way of cows that had eaten poisonous plants. After her burial, Thomas abandoned his young son and his twelve-year-old daughter, Sarah, for a period of seven months while he returned to Kentucky to find a new wife. They were left on their own in what Lincoln described as "a wild region," a nightmarish place where "the panther''s scream filled the night with fear and bears preyed on the swine.
" When Abraham''s new stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, returned with Thomas, she found the children living like animals--"wild--ragged & dirty." She was stunned to find that the floorless cabin lacked even a door. Inside, there were few furnishings, no beds, and scant bedding. From the store of goods she had brought with her in the wagon, the industrious Sarah created a "snug and comfortable" home. A floor was laid, door and windows hung, and she provided clothing for the children. How, within the confines of this desolation, did Lincoln develop and sustain a grand, visionary ambition, a belief that he was meant for higher and better things? The springboard to the development of Lincoln''s ambition can be traced to his recognition, even as a young boy, that he was gifted with an exceptionally intelligent, clear, and inquisitive mind. Schoolmates in the ABC school in rural Kentucky where he was taught to read and write at the age of seven recalled that he was able to learn more swiftly and understand more deeply than others. Though he was able to attend school only sporadically, when his father didn''t require his labor on their hardscrabble farm, he stood without peer at the top of every class.
"He was the learned boy among us unlearned folks," one classmate recalled. "He carried away from his brief schooling," his biographer David Herbert Donald observes, "the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal." A dream that he might someday be in a situation to make the most of his talents began to take hold. In the age-old debate about whether leadership traits are innate or developed, memory--the ease and capacity with which the mind stores information--is generally considered an inborn trait. From his earliest days in school, Lincoln''s comrades remarked upon his phenomenal memory, "the best," the most "marvelously retentive," they had ever encountered. His mind seemed "a wonder," a friend told him, "impressions were easily made upon it and never effaced." Lincoln told his friend he was mistaken. What appeared a gift, he argued, was, in his case, a developed talent.
"I am slow to learn," he explained, "and slow to forget what I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel--very hard to scratch anything on it, and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out." His stepmother, who came to love him as if he were her own son, observed the arduous process by which he engraved things into his memory. "When he came upon a passage that Struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there until he did get paper," she recalled, "and then he would rewrite it" and keep it in a scrapbook so that he could preserve it. While his mind was neither quick nor facile, young Lincoln possessed singular powers of reasoning and comprehension, unflagging curiosity, and a fierce, almost irresistible, compulsion to understand the meaning of what he heard, read, or was taught. "When a mere child," Lincoln later said, "I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I do not think I ever got angry at anything else in my life." When he "got on a hunt for an idea" he could not sleep until he "caught it," and even then was not able to rest until he had "bounded it north and bounded it south, and bounded it east and bounded it west.
" Early on, Abraham revealed a keystone attribute essential to success in any field--the motivation and willpower to develop every talent he possessed to the fullest. "The ambition of the man soared above us," his childhood friend Nathaniel Grigsby recalled. "He read and thoroughly read his books whilst we played." When he first learned how to print the letters of the alphabet, he was so excited that he formed "letters, words and sentences wherever he found suitable material. He scrawled them in charcoal, he scored them in the dust, in the sand, in the snow--anywhere and everywhere that lines could be drawn." He soon became "the best penman in the neighborhood." Sharing his knowledge with his schoolmates at every turn, he soon became "their guide and leader." A friend recalled the "great pains" he took to explain to her "the movements of the heavenly bodies," patiently telling her that the moon was not really sinking, as she initially thought; it was the earth that was moving, not the moon.
"When he appeared in Company," another friend recalled, "the boys would gather & cluster around him to hear him talk." With kindness, playfulness, wit, and wisdom, he would explain "things hard for us to understand by stories--maxims--tales and figures. He would almost always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near as that we might instantly see the force & bearing of what he said." He understood early on that concrete examples and stories provided the best vehicles for teaching. He had developed his talent for storytelling, in part, from watching his father. Though Thomas Lincoln was unable to read or write, he possessed wit, a talent for mimicry, and an uncanny memory for exceptional stories. Night after night, Thomas would exchange tales with farmers, carpenters, and peddlers as they passed along the old Cumberland Trail. Young Lincoln sat spellbound in the corner.
After listening to the adults chatter through the evening, Abraham would spend "no small part of the night walking up and down," attempting to figure out what they were saying. No small part of his motivation was to entertain his friends the next day with a simplified and riotous version of the arcane adult world. He thrived when holding forth on a tree stump or log captivating the appreciative attention of his young audience, and before long had built a repertoire of stories a.