Free Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser

as achurch trustee. Abraham Lincoln attended services as a boy, and afterward, he would repeat the sermons he had heard to other children as a performance, generally a humorous one. But his stepmother noticed some aloofness on his part: “Abe had no particular religion. . . . He nevertalked about it.”
    After Lincoln moved to Illinois, he read Paine and other anti-Christian authors whose works circulated even in rural America: Voltaire and another Frenchman, Constantin de Volney, whose book The Ruins was a meditation on the transience of all empires and religions. But Paine was the American skeptic, who spoke with an American voice.
    Books can both express thoughts we already have and stimulate us to have new ones. Whether because of his reading, or because he was no longer living with churchgoing parents, Lincoln in Illinois started talking about religion.
    James Matheny heard him doing it in Springfield. Nine years younger than Lincoln, Matheny clerked in various government offices there. Springfield had a small downtown, making it easy for anyone to call on anyone else. Matheny remembered that when he and his fellow clerks had “nothing to do,” Lincoln, who was by then John Stuart’s junior law partner, would drop by, “pick up the Bible, read a passage, andthen comment on it—show its falsity and its follies on thegrounds of reason.” Matheny gave as an instance Lincoln calling Christ “a bastard.” Contradictions of the Bible, the test of reason, Jesus’ illegitimacy—it sounds like a Thomas Paine triple play.
    Lincoln’s biblical exegeses were in part an act, a performance. He was older than Matheny and the other clerks; although he had never been to college, when he picked up the Bible he was taking the role of an upperclassman scandalizing the freshmen. Christ’s bastardy would also have had a special meaning for Lincoln, which he did not share with the gaping clerks: if Jesus was an ordinary illegitimate child, then the Holy Family was a lot like the Hanks family. It made the Bible less awesome, and the Hankses less deplorable.
    Lincoln did more than just talk about religion. When he was still living in New Salem, he wrote a Paine-ite pamphlet explaining that the Bible was not God’s word, and Jesus was not His Son. He read it aloud to friends during the slack hours of his postmaster’s job, and spoke of getting it printed—until Samuel Hill, an older man who owned one of the village’s stores, took the manuscript andburned it.
    Lincoln was already seeking political office. Paine’s views had injured even his considerable reputation as a patriot; writing up similar views would have snuffed Lincoln’s reputation before it was made. So Hill did the young man a good turn. The story of the burned pamphlet became a topic for local gossip even so; Hill’s son heard old folks mention it “hundreds of times.” In 1846 when Lincoln was running for Congress, Peter Cartwright, his Democratic opponent and a Methodist minister, started a whispering campaign about his irreligion. Lincoln had to issue a statement denying that he had ever been “an open scoffer” at Christianity. Shocking (and titillating) a roomful of clerks could qualify as private scoffing. Publishing a pamphlet would certainly have been open scoffing, but Lincoln, thanks to Hill, had been spared that blunder.

    Paine was the first founder Lincoln encountered writing in his own voice. Washington appeared in Weems’s Life in the third person; Weems included some of his authentic sayings and writings, but many of the words Weems assigned Washington were made up. Paine wrote for himself.
    Paine also wrote surpassingly well. Weems told good stories—we still remember the cherry tree, two centuries later—but he told them in runaway sentences, never using five words when he could use twenty. Washington’s own prose was grave and a little stiff, like the man himself. Paine had the punch of an editorial writer, with the clarity and speed of