Ancestry
Like many exceptional children of unexceptional parents, Lincoln was quite curious about his ancestors, especially his grandfathers, neither of whom he knew. He was so intrigued that he planned to conduct genealogical research after he left the presidency. In 1858, when asked about his forebears, he revealed more than a passing acquaintance with his family tree: “I believe the first of our ancestors we know anything about was Samuel Lincoln, who came from Norwich, England, in 1638, and settled in a small Massachusetts place called Hingham, or it might have been Hanghim.”2 (Lincoln loved wordplay.) In two brief autobiographical sketches written for the campaign of 1860, he devoted much space to his lineage. The following year, Lincoln told a Yorkshireman that he planned to visit England, the home of his ancestors.
His father’s father was known as Captain Abraham, a rank he attained by 1776 while serving in the Virginia militia. Born in 1744 in Pennsylvania, the future Captain moved with his father, John, and the rest of their family to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia around 1766. They settled along Linville Creek in Augusta (later Rockingham) County, where John Lincoln farmed a tract of 600 acres, one-third of which he sold to his son Abraham in 1773. The following year Abraham participated in Lord Dunmore’s expedition against the Shawnees, and during the Revolution he joined General Lachlan McIntosh’s futile campaign against Fort Detroit.
For unknown reasons, in 1780 the Captain departed with his wife and children on a 250-mile trek to the remote and dangerous Indian hunting grounds of Kentucky while the Revolutionary War still raged and attacks on settlers were common. In 1784 alone, Indians killed more than a hundred migrants traveling the Wilderness Road from Virginia to Kentucky, which was little more than the trail first blazed by Daniel Boone in 1775. Perhaps Grandfather Abraham wished to avoid taxes, or he may have been lured westward by the prospect of easy gains in land speculation. His decision to sell a large farm in western Virginia for paper money showed bad judgment because the soil there was so fertile that German pioneer settlers had made the area highly productive. Captain Abraham’s inability to thrive in Virginia suggests that he may have been shiftless.
Captain Abraham died a violent death on the “dark and bloody ground” of frontier Kentucky. As a boy, the future president often heard this harrowing tale, which he called “the legend more strongly than all others imprinted upon my mind and memory.”3 Working his farm one spring day in 1786, the 42-year-old Grandfather Abraham was ambushed by an Indian, who shot him dead before the terrified eyes of his young son, Thomas (father-to-be of the sixteenth president). As the Indian prepared to kidnap the lad, his older brother Mordecai dashed back to the family cabin, grabbed a rifle, aimed at the silver ornament dangling from the Indian’s neck, and squeezed the trigger. Luckily for Thomas, his brother’s aim was true, and the boy escaped unharmed, at least physically. The Indian may have belonged to a tribe the Captain had battled during his militia service.
Lincoln’s opinion of his namesake grandfather is not recorded, but he may well have admired him. Some gifted children with disappointing fathers romanticize their grandfathers, even if they scarcely knew them. In an 1861 speech to New Jersey legislators, Lincoln paid glowing tribute to the soldiers of the Revolution, and Captain Abraham may have been a lifelong source of inspiration to Lincoln as he strove to make the most of himself. In a campaign biography that Lincoln himself read and corrected, William Dean Howells asserted that his subject had “the stubborn notion that because the Lincolns had always been people of excellent sense, he, a Lincoln, might become a person of distinction.”4
What Lincoln knew about his other grandfather is hard to say. Lincoln once described him as “a Virginia planter or large farmer” who took sexual advantage of a poor, credulous young woman named Lucey Hanks, granddaughter of William Lee, a plantation overseer accused of beating a slave to death. The fruit of that union was Nancy Hanks, mother of the future president. From this aristocratic progenitor, Lincoln believed that he inherited “his power of analysis, his logic, his mental activity, his ambition, and all the qualities that distinguished him from the other members and descendants of the Hanks family.”5
This grandfather’s identity, unknown to history, may well have been known to Lincoln, who was acquainted with several members of the Hanks family, including two great-aunts who had been born in Virginia before or during the Revolution, and also his great-uncle Billy Hanks, father of Lincoln’s rail-splitting partner, John Hanks. The Hankses played a long-lasting role in Lincoln’s life, caring for his beloved stepmother until her death in 1869. It seems likely that the Hanks family would have shared with Abe what they knew about Nancy Hanks’s father.
Lincoln’s description of his aristocratic grandsire represents a variation of the “family romance” phenomenon, which causes some children to speculate that they are actually the offspring of more distinguished parents than the ones who raised them. Most people outgrow these fantasies, but some adults—including exceptional people or men with very distant fathers—tend to maintain an unusually strong sense of family romance throughout life. Lincoln fits this category on both counts, for he was truly exceptional and had a distant relationship with his father.
Father Thomas
Lincoln’s father, Thomas, was quite undistinguished. As his son later wrote, “by the early death of his father and very narrow circumstances of his mother, even in childhood [Thomas was] a wandering, laboring boy.” Born around 1776 in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he moved with his parents and four siblings to Kentucky in 1780. Finding most land in the fertile Bluegrass region already taken, the Lincolns pushed on to the hardscrabble terrain between the Cumberland and Green rivers where they established a farm. Later, evidently fearing hostile Indians in that remote locale, they moved to a site on Long Run in Jefferson County. There they lived in a stockade, 18 miles from Louisville.
After Captain Abraham’s death, his widow, Bathsheba, and their children resettled in Washington County, where they would be safer. Bathsheba (d. ca. 1833) later stayed with her daughter Nancy, wife of William Brumfield, who owned a large farm near Hardinsburg in Breckinridge County. After Bathsheba’s son, Thomas, bought a farm in 1803 on Mill Creek, she and the Brumfields moved in. Three years later, the Brumfields purchased 225 acres a few miles to the north, where they built a log house. Bathsheba, the shrewdest and most intelligent member of the family, prodded both her rather lazy son-in-law and young Thomas, hiring the latter out for good wages.
The documentary record reveals little about Thomas’s activities in the decade after his father’s death. Under the law of primogeniture, his eldest brother, Mordecai, inherited everything from the paternal estate, which included a few hundred acres in Kentucky. Mordecai may have treated his younger brother unkindly. Emilie Todd Helm, half-sister of Mary Todd Lincoln, “said that the reason why Thomas Lincoln grew up unlettered was that his brother Mordecai, having all the land in his possession … turned Thomas out of the house when the latter was 12 years old; so he went out among his relations & the Berrys et al. and there grew up.”6 In 1795, Thomas served in the Kentucky militia for a month, and the following year he worked on a milldam in Hardin County. While laboring there, he lived with his father’s cousin, Hananiah Lincoln, a resident of Elizabethtown, 45 miles southwest of Louisville. Thomas and Hananiah remained in that village only until 1798, when they evidently headed south to Cumberland County. While in that region, Thomas spent time in Tennessee with his prosperous uncle, Isaac Lincoln, whose only child had died quite young. Thomas might have become a surrogate son, but Isaac disapproved of young Tom’s indolence and improvidence.
Returning to Kentucky the following year, Thomas shuttled back and forth between Washington and Cumberland counties. In 1802, he moved to Hardin County, where his name appeared on the tax lists for the next fourteen years. In 1803, he purchased a 238-acre farm on Mill Creek where he lived while working in nearby Elizabethtown, a hamlet whose population in 1810 numbered 181. How Thomas could afford to
buy that farm is unclear. Perhaps his brother Mordecai shared some of his patrimony with him after Thomas attained his majority, or Thomas may have purchased the Mill Creek property with the savings his mother had set aside from the wages he earned when she hired him out.
Three years after he bought the Mill Creek farm, Thomas journeyed to New Orleans. On June 12, 1806, shortly after returning from Louisiana, he married Nancy Hanks in a ceremony that took place near Poortown in Washington County. Following a brief honeymoon, the newlyweds moved to Elizabethtown, where their first child, Sarah, was born less than eight months after her parents’ wedding. A journalist described their residence as “a shed … almost bare of household fittings and quite unfit for a human dwelling place.”7 Why the couple did not live on the Mill Creek property is a mystery. Nancy perhaps wished to be closer to her family than to her husband’s relatives. She may have been lonely in Elizabethtown, where she had no kin, and perhaps for that reason at the end of 1807 Thomas moved 14 miles to a rock-strewn spread in the “Barrens” on the South Fork of Nolin Creek, known as the Sinking Spring farm. It was near the homestead where Thomas and Betsy Sparrow, who raised Nancy, lived with their foster child, Dennis Hanks, and where Nancy’s aunt, Polly Hanks Friend, had settled.
Thomas gambled when he chose that site, for rather than a deed, he purchased a title bond (an assignment of someone’s contested right to the land). He would own the property only if others met their financial obligations. Dennis Hanks, a cousin who lived with the Lincolns for three years during Abe’s youth, reported that Thomas “couldn’t make a living by his trade [of carpentry]; there was scarcely any money in the country. So Tom took up some land—mighty poor land, but the best he could get when he hadn’t much to trade for it.”8 Thomas Lincoln may have left Elizabethtown for Nolin Creek because he believed his reputation as a carpenter had been damaged when an influential citizen sued him for shoddy work. The nearest settlement, two and a half miles to the south, was in the vicinity of Hodgen’s Mill. On February 12, 1809, in a cabin that an observer called “a miserable habitation,” Nancy delivered a baby boy, who was named Abraham after Thomas’s father.9
The Lincolns remained in Kentucky until 1816, when they removed to Indiana. There Nancy Hanks Lincoln died two years later. Thomas remarried in 1819, and eleven years afterwards he moved to Illinois, where he would remain until his death in 1851. He had known more than his fair share of hardship and sorrow.
Thomas Lincoln shared only a few things in common with his son. Both were able wrestlers as well as good-natured, humorous, and gifted storytellers. A surviving example of Thomas’s humor concerns his second wife, who allegedly remarked one day: “We have lived together a long time and you have never yet told me whom you like best, your first wife or me.” He responded: “Oh now Sarah, that reminds me of old John Hardin down in Kentucky who had a fine looking pair of horses, and a neighbor coming in one day and looking at them said, ‘John, which horse do you like best?’ John replied, ‘I can’t tell, one of them kicks and the other bites and I don’t know which is wust.’ ”10
But the qualities that would make Abraham Lincoln famous—his intellectual power, ambition, idealism, eloquence, spirituality, integrity, political wisdom, judgment, leadership—were lacking in Thomas. Henry C. Whitney, to whom Lincoln described his childhood, said that from Thomas Lincoln his son “inherited only ‘infancy, ignorance and indigence.’ ”11 Few of Thomas’s neighbors could remember anything special about him other than that he was “a plain unpretending plodding man,” “a good average man,” who “attended to his work” and was “among the very commonest of the plain pioneers,” “honest and harmless,” “illiterate, yet always truthful, conscientious and religious,” and “peaceable good.”12 Thomas evidently could read a little but was unable to write anything other than his signature.
Unlike his tall, rangy son, Thomas was thick, weighing between 180 and 200 pounds. He was a bit stoop-shouldered, somewhat clumsy as he walked, and strong. Dennis Hanks found it remarkable that Thomas, though “not a fleshy man,” was “built so compact that it was difficult to find or feel a rib in his body.”13 Thomas had dark gray eyes, a low forehead, heavy eyebrows, a sharp chin, and an unusually big Roman nose, which was his most prominent feature. He was indifferent to clothes, and his taste in food was simple—two traits he also shared with his son. “His whole appearance,” said one neighbor, “denoted a man of small intel[l]ect and less ambition, and such he was.”14
If Thomas lacked intellectual power and driving ambition, he impressed people favorably as honest and sociable, slow to take offense, with a lot of common sense. Though he seldom had a cross word for anyone, he did use profanity occasionally. When his young daughter repeated an oath of his, he received a scolding from his wife and never swore again. (One day during his presidency, Lincoln used the expression “by jings” while visiting the telegraph office. When asked about that expression, he apologized to the operators for his profanity, explaining that “by jings is swearing, for my good old mother taught me that anything that had a by before it is swearing.”)15 When Lincoln’s friend William G. Greene visited Thomas in 1836, he found his manners “Back[w]oodsish” but was “charmed” by his wit and humor and thought him a “mighty hospitable, and a very entertaining host.”16
For all his humor, Thomas could be taciturn and moody. He often became depressed and withdrew into himself, sometimes wandering out in the barrens for hours on end. Bouts of depression would hardly be surprising in a man who, as a boy, had witnessed his father’s murder and then endured wandering, rootless poverty and hard labor. Other losses—recurring financial setbacks and the deaths of his second son in 1813, of his wife in 1818, and of his daughter in 1828—deepened his dejection. He frequently said, “everything that I ever teched either died, got killed or was lost.”17 On other occasions he lamented: “It’s the hand of Providence laid upon me.”
Thomas’s susceptibility to depression may have been in part genetic. His brother Mordecai and his sons were known “as men who at times communed with themselves, absorbed in their own thoughts.”18 Prone to melancholia, depression, and gloomy spells called the “horrors,” Mordecai allegedly would “come into his mother’s house and sit down for long periods of time without saying a word unless it were to mutter an oath against something or curse somebody.” He would sometimes “take up his violin … and pace the floor.”19 The “horrors” resembled bouts of delirium tremens and may in fact have been the result of heavy drinking, for he reportedly “exercised the privilege (very common in those days) of ‘indulging freely’ whenever he pleased which happened very often.”20 He also betrayed signs of paranoia, accusing Catholics of stealing his father’s land, and over time his hatred of Roman priests intensified.
Many other members of the family had “moody spells.”21 Mary Rowena Lincoln, mother of Thomas’s nephew James Lincoln, was reportedly a victim of the “Lincoln hippo [i.e., hypo or depression].” Benjamin Mudd, son of Elizabeth Lincoln Mudd, suffered from what was called “the Lincoln horrors.”22 An uncle of Thomas’s confessed to a court that he suffered from “a deranged mind.”23 Another relative in the same area, Mary Jane Lincoln, was committed to the Illinois Hospital for the Insane after a court hearing in which a jury determined “that the disease is with her hereditary.” She had gone insane in 1854 at the age of 26, was committed to the state asylum in 1867, and died there twenty-one years later.24
Thomas Lincoln prospered neither as a carpenter nor a farmer. He learned woodworking from Nancy Hanks’s uncle Joseph Hanks Jr. and made his living as a “Cabinet and House Carpenter” until he wed. Thereafter he supplemented his income by farming. His carpentry skills were so rudimentary that people called him a “rough” and “cheap carpenter” who could only “put doors, windows, and floors in log houses” and do a “tolerable” job of joining.25 He continued laboring as a carpenter after he moved to Indiana, making tables, coffins, doors, and window casings. He worked when jobs came to him, but would n
ot seek them out. Some customers were unhappy with his work. In 1807, Denton Geohegan of Elizabethtown refused to pay Thomas for hewing timbers for his sawmill; some timbers were too short, others too long. (Thomas sued for his fee and won.)
Thomas was even less successful as a farmer, partly because he chose unpromising land to till. The Nolin Creek property—birthplace of the future president—had poor soil except in a few small patches. When in 1811, Thomas abandoned that farm (after the owner took title and refused to lease the property to him), he moved to equally unpromising terrain on Knob Creek, 9 miles away. In 1816, he attempted to make a fresh start in Indiana, and unwisely selected 160 heavily timbered acres. He also built his cabin more than a mile from a reliable water source. He showed similarly bad judgment in Illinois in the 1830s and 1840s.
Even if he had selected land more shrewdly, Thomas lacked the industry, ambition, and intellect to prosper. As Dennis Hanks put it, Thomas “was a man who took the world Easy” and “never thought that gold was God.” Hanks’s son-in-law was more blunt: Thomas, he declared, “was v[er]y careless about his business, a poor Manager, at time[s] accumulated considerable property which he always managed to make way with about as fast as he made it, & was what is generally called an unlucky Man in business.”26 In 1835, Thomas and four partners leased a mill for a year; when they failed to pay the agreed-upon rent, they were successfully sued.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 2
