Yesterday I noted how the Lincoln Museum whitewashes the fact that Abraham Lincoln went mostly barefoot as a boy. My guess is that the concept of going barefoot is so alien to them, and that they are so fearful, that they don’t want today’s kids to get the “wrong idea” about going barefoot.
Today I thought I’d look at some more of the descriptions of Lincoln going barefoot, thus also providing historical evidence to that effect.
One of the anecdotes that appears in Coffin’s “Life of Lincoln” is the following:
A man accused of committing murder was arraigned at Booneville, the county seat, fifteen miles distant. Abraham attended the trial. He had great respect for the judge, who represented the majesty of the law. He listened with intense interest to the argument of Mr. Breckenridge, the lawyer who defended the accused man. When the argument was finished there occurred a scene for an artist. Abraham Lincoln, tall, slim, with bare feet, wearing buckskin trousers and a jean coat, walked acrosst he room and shook hands with him. “That is the best speech I ever heard,” he said.
The original version of this story appears in Herndon’s “Abraham Lincoln: A True Story of a Great Life”. William Henry Herndon was Lincoln’s law partner, and came out with one of the first biographies of Lincoln. Herndon doesn’t specifically mention Lincoln being barefooted. Yet the incident occurred when he was in his teens and thus still likely to have dressed as Coffin described it.
Here, Herndon notes that most people at the time often went barefoot.
The houses were scattered far apart, but the people travelled great distances to participate in the frolic and coarse fun of a log-rolling and sometimes a wedding. Unless in mid-winter the young ladies carried their shoes in their hands, and only put them on when the scene of the festivities was reached. The ladies of maturer years drank whiskey toddy, while the men took the whiskey straight. They all danced merrily, many of them barefooted, to the tune of a cracked fiddle the night through.
The following anecdote, also from Herndon, occurred when Lincoln was in his 20s.
He had, doubtless, long before determined to prepare himself for the law; in fact, had begun to read Blackstone while in the store, and now went at it with renewed zeal. He borrowed law-books of his former comrade in the Black Hawk war, John T. Stuart, who was practicing law in Springfield, frequently walking there to return one and borrow another. His determination to master any subject he undertook and his application to study were of the most intense order. On the road to and from Springfield he would read and recite from the book he carried open in his hand, and claimed to have mastered forty pages of Blackstone during the first day after his return from Stuart’s office. At New Salem he frequently sat barefooted under the shade of a tree near the store, poring over a volume of Chitty or Blackstone, sometimes lying on his back, putting his feet up the tree, which provokes one of his biographers to denote the latter posture as one which might have been “unfavorable to mental application, in the case of a man with shorter extremities.”
Carl Sandburg, in his multi-volume biography, made more of Lincoln going barefoot. To Sandburg, the deep connection to the earth was important and may have helped shape the importance of his life.
Men and women went barefoot except in the colder weather; women carried their shoes in their hands and put them on just before arrival at church meetings or at social parties.
Rains came, loosening the top soil of the land where it was not held by grass roots; it was a yellow clay that softened to slush; in this yellow slush many a time Abe Lincoln walked ankle-deep; his bare feet were intimate with the clay dust of the hot dog-days, with the clay mud of spring and fall rains; he was at home in clay. In the timbers with his ax, on the way to chop, his toes, heels soles, the balls of his feet, climbed and slid in banks and sluices of clay. In the corn-fields, plowing, hoeing, cutting, and shucking, again his bare feet spoke with the clay of the earth; it was in his toenails and stuck on the skin of his toe-knuckles. The color of clay was one of his own colors.
In the short and simple annals of the poor, it seems there are people who breath with the earth and take into their lungs and blood some of the hard and dark strength of its mystery. During six and seven months each year in the twelve fiercest formative years of his life, Abraham Lincoln had the pads of his foot-soles bare against clay of the earth. It may be the earth told him in her own tough gypsy slang one of two knacks of living worth keeping. To be organic with running wildlife and quiet rain, both at the same moment, is to be the carrier of wave-lines the earth gives up only on hard usage.
(Emphasis added.)
Wow, that man could write. I bet he could write some half-decent poetry if he put his mind to it. *
Sandburg himself grew up near Galesburg, Illinois, in Knox County. Nearby was the area he called the “Barefoot Nation”.
Lincoln himself referred to going barefoot. In 1860, during the campaign, he was asked whether he was barefoot when he moved from Indiana to Illinois and crossed the Wabash at Vincennes. This is the recollection of Peter Smith.
After conversing a while said I to him, ‘Lincoln there is a rumor hi circulation in our region about you and I want you to tell me all about it.’ ‘Well’ said he, ‘what is it?’ ‘About thirty years ago rumor says that Abraham Lincoln was seen walking barefoot driving an ox team with ox waggon moving a family through our town of Lawrenceville — is that true?’ . . . . “‘In part’ says Lincoln. ‘About 30 years ago I did drive my father’s family through your town of Lawrenceville and I was afoot but not barefoot. In my younger days I frequently went barefooted but on that occasion I had on a substantial pair of shoes — it was a cold day in March and I never went barefoot in cold weather. I will remember that trip thro’ your Country as long as I live. I crossed the Wabash at Vincennes and the river being high the road on the low prairie was covered with water a half mile at a stretch and the water covered with ice — the only means by which I could keep the road was by observing the stakes on each side placed as guides when the water is over the road.
Lincoln was 21 at the time. He clearly still went barefoot then, and we’re all familiar with how that went: going barefoot when warm enough and shod in the winter.
It’s pretty clear that Lincoln really did go barefoot a lot when he was younger, just as pretty much everybody else did around that period. It’s silly for the Museum to whitewash that. Heck, they could have even had part of the exhibit devoted to the idea that bare feet worked just fine back then, and maybe would work equally well today.
Yeah, I know, I’m dreaming.
* Yes, I know who Carl Sandburg is. “City of Broad Shoulders” and all
that (I grew up in a Chicago suburb). That comment was intended as a joke.
I’ve always liked this excerpt from the biography of Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln that showed Mr. Lincoln’s sense of humor, as well as his appreciation for bare feet.
“Lincoln’s legendary sense of humor was probably influenced by his stepmother. He recalled that she was a firm but kind-hearted woman who loved to laugh. When he was eighteen years old, Lincoln, at 6′ 4″, was so tall that his head nearly touched the ceiling of the family’s farmhouse kitchen. His stepmother repeatedly joked that Lincoln was so tall that he needed to keep his hair washed or he’d leave prints on her ceiling. Lincoln decided to have some fun with this idea. One day, when his stepmother was not home, Lincoln got together a group of younger boys and had them dip their bare feet in the mud outside the farmhouse kitchen. Then Lincoln took each of the boys inside, held them upside-down, and had them walk their feet across the ceiling, leaving muddy footprints. When Sarah Lincoln saw the muddy footprints on her ceiling, Lincoln recalled, she chuckled as she threatened to spank him.”
Heh. When I was in high school I managed to put dirty bare footprints on the ceiling of our family room. It had a bit of a low ceiling and I was trying to do a handstand, using my feet on the ceiling to keep me from tipping over. I didn’t realize just how dusty my soles were.
This idea that ‘good people wear shoes even if they didn’t’ is a lot more insidious than this. Nowadays, only monsters, slaves, poor people, crazies, and villains are seen as going barefoot. For example, in animé bare feet are often used as a symbol of ‘oddness’ and therefore villainy.
Being barefoot is now lumped in with other unusual traits to create ‘monsters’ and ‘aliens’ who we are free to express our xenophobia against without repercussions. Eventually, only wild animals will go barefoot. I say wild because they already have shoes for dogs, though fortunately I have never seen them in use.
[…] about many of the descriptions of stories when Lincoln went barefoot, you can read that here, in Barefoot Lincoln. One thing I did not include there, was the story of Lincoln’s first […]
Any historical data about Honest Abe being barefoot during his presidential years in the Oval Office?
Not that I’m aware of.