So much has been written about Abraham Lincoln that it seems impossible to reveal more. Yet John Cribb’s work of historical fiction, “The Rail Splitter,” gives us the emotive, expressive, brooding, and persistent Lincoln long before he became leader of a nation burning with war. Not since Carl Sandburg’s 1926 “Abe Lincoln Grows Up” has a book so enthrallingly captured Lincoln’s mundane upbringing.
Cribb presented Lincoln familiarly in his “Old Abe,” but it was set after Lincoln was already a rising political star in Springfield, Illinois. In “The Rail Splitter,” we meet Lincoln as a youth fretting over a borrowed book soaked through due to openings in the roof of his family’s rough-hewn cabin. So burdened is the young Lincoln over what appears to be a ruined book on George Washington, his hero, that he walks miles to the book owner’s home and agrees to pull field fodder to become “square” about the loss. But instead of taking the book back, the neighbor allows Lincoln to keep it. Cribb writes, “Abraham’s mournful face brightened. … Abraham’s spirits shot up at the thought of owning the volume, even if it was in a sorry state.”
It has been said that if you wish to understand the man, you must first know the boy. … I wrote this book as historical fiction so we can walk beside Lincoln, through Indiana forests and Illinois cornfields, and come to know his hopes and struggles on the winding path to greatness.Extensive research enabled Cribb to turn historical interviews, notes, letters, and more into flesh-and-blood, poignant moments: when Lincoln’s father left Abraham and his sister to fend for themselves after their mother died; when the children met their loving stepmother; when Lincoln announced that he would not follow in his father’s footsteps as a farmer; and many more.
Importantly, Cribb takes readers into Lincoln’s psyche, sharing dramatic, low-point feelings he experienced not only when his first love died of a mysterious fever, but also during his tumultuous courtship with the woman who became his wife. On the upside, we laugh at Lincoln’s clever stories, share his thrill at reading the word “liberty” on the first silver half dollar he earned, and sigh in awe beside him as he views the original Declaration of Independence. “Abraham stood before the precious charter of freedom, softly reading aloud the hallowed words. It seemed to him that no finer thoughts had ever been conceived by the mind of man.”
