No One Dreamed Lincoln Would Be President

In honor of Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday, I was reading a little bit today out of a book, "Herndon's Life of Lincoln." It's a pretty old biography, with Herndon being someone who knew Lincoln personally. The edition I have is revised with modern scholarship. Meaning that about every other page (so far) the modern (1960s?) editor corrects or supplements Herndon's information.

According to the blurb on the back, "Herndon admired Lincoln almost to idolatry, yet in telling Lincoln's story he told the truth unsparingly." So that's good.

I only read about 50 pages so far, but there's plenty of interesting nuggets in just that first little section. There's some of the obscurities of Lincoln's family background, which he apparently didn't like to talk about much. There's the story of his educational pursuits as a child, which were very limited. And he seems to have been kind of a rascal if provoked, even writing satirical pieces against people, quite in jest but people of course took it seriously.

Something I like is this notion that people who ran into him never "dreamed" he would be president. To which we might say, "Why would they?" I run into people all the time and don't "dream" that they'll be president someday. There's two references like this in the first 50 pages.

One, his mother is dying. "Stoop-shouldered, thin-breasted, sad -- at times miserable, -- groping through the perplexities of life, without prospect of any betterment in her condition, she passed from earth, little dreaming of the grand future that lay in store for the ragged, hapless little boy who stood at her bedside in the last days of her life." (p. 67, my emphasis.) No, she had other things on her mind, like her poor shoulders, her thin breasts, and all the groping she had to put up with!

The other passage like this is from 1830. The Lincoln family is heading for Illinois with oxen and a wagon. Abraham Lincoln is there. And Herndon says, "As these humble emigrants entered the new State little did the curious people in the towns through which they passed dream that the obscure and penniless driver who yelled commands to the oxen would yet become Chief Magistrate of the greatest nation of modern times. (p. 94, my emphasis.) I don't know, don't you dream that every obscure and penniless person you see might become president someday? Probably not. They were probably more concerned that that big skinny guy let his oxen crap on my front lawn and didn't clean it up.

(This edition is a paperback from the Fawcett World Library, 2nd Premier printing, 1965.)