"There I Grew Up": Remembering Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Youth (review)

"We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up" (1). Abraham Lincoln wrote this line in an 1859 biographical sketch at the behest of fellow-Illinoisan-Whig-turned-Republican Jesse W. Fell. Fell requested biographical information from Lincoln to share with some Pennsylvania friends who were curious about the Illinois lawyer, now famous for sparring with Stephen Douglas in a series of nationally reported debates. Fell was particularly interested in the fourteen years Lincoln spent in Indiana, the subject of William E. Bartelt's new book "There I Grew Up": Remembering Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Youth.

Lincoln's father, Thomas, moved his family from Hardin County, Kentucky, across the Ohio River to Perry County (later Spencer County), Indiana, in 1816. The Lincolns, Bartelt writes, moved partly to escape the corrupting influence of slavery, which divided Baptist churches in their Kentucky community and adversely affected free-laborers like Thomas, who competed with slaves for "hired out" jobs. Indiana was a frontier wilderness, added as a state the year the Lincolns arrived, and it was there that Abraham Lincoln spent his youth and cultivated the "rail-splitter" image so engraved in the mythology of the sixteenth president.

During his time in Indiana, Lincoln bore many hardships of pioneer life: his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, succumbed to milk sickness in 1818, because their cow had feasted on a poisonous plant, and he was forced to exchange difficult work for formal education. It was this last hurdle, along with the early lack of a public school system, that stoked Lincoln's desire to learn. He became, as his stepmother Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln recalled, "diligent for Knowledge"; the young Lincoln read every book he could acquire, often at the expense of whichever odd job he was working at the time (66).

Bartelt relies on a variety of sources for this study, including early Indiana state records; contemporary newspapers; Lincoln's own writings; and a number of interviews with Lincoln family members, neighbors, and residents of Indiana. Much of Bartelt's information comes from a series of interviews begun in 1865 by William Henry Herndon, Lincoln's former law partner, who dedicated his later life to recovering the details of the president's youth. Herndon's interviews confirmed Lincoln's devotion to reading but also revealed a compassion for animals, an ambivalence toward women, and an apparent early political fling with Jacksonian Democrats. Bartelt's book is richly detailed with illustrations, photographs, documents, and even samples of Lincoln's poetry; the author displays a knack for tracking down obscure details about the president's earliest years. That said, this study is weakened by the author's general lack of an overarching thesis. Simply put: why, in the context of the mountainous collection of Lincoln historiography, is it important to know about Lincoln's Indiana years? While Bartelt reveals a number of fascinating details about Lincoln's youth, he seems unwilling to make a concrete statement regarding the ultimate significance—politically, intellectually, socially, or otherwise—of this period in Lincoln's life.

The book's formatting is also a bit jarring at times: Bartelt reprints whole pages of original text from Herndon's interviews, for example, complete with their sporadic punctuation and spelling. Given that many of these interviews focused on mundane details, a careful summarizing of the information would have made for a smoother reading experience. These points aside, Bartelt's study is a nonetheless impressive recovery of a period in Abraham Lincoln's life that the president himself regarded with fond remembrance, and in this respect it deserves a place on the bookshelves of Lincoln enthusiasts.