Several times Thomas took boatloads of pork and other goods down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, usually making little money. In a particularly unfortunate transaction, he was cheated out of the entire load. His son Abraham described that calamity: “Father often told me of the trick that was played upon him by a ‘pair of sharpers.’ It was [in 1815] the year before we moved from Kentucky to Indiana that father concluded to take a load of pork down to New Orleans. He had a considerable amount of his own, and he bargained with the relatives and neighbors for their pork, so that altogether he had quite a load. He took the pork to the Ohio River on a clumsily constructed flat boat of his own make. Almost as soon as he pushed out into the river a couple of sleek fellows bargained with him for his cargo, and promised to meet him in New Orleans where they arranged to pay him the price agreed upon. He eagerly accepted the offer, transferred the cargo to the strangers and drifted down the river, his head filled with visions of wealth and delight. He thought that he was going to accomplish what he had set out to do without labor or inconvenience. Father waited about New Orleans for several days, but failed to meet his whilom friends. At last it dawned upon him that he had been sold, and all that he could do was to come back home and face the music.”27
Thomas Lincoln also lost money buying and selling farms, especially in Kentucky, where an archaic surveying system, which permitted claims to be identified by trees, stones, creek bends, and other such imprecise landmarks, produced chaos, leading to innumerable lawsuits. Kentucky law did not require a qualifying examination for surveyors, who reportedly were never correct except by accident. Years later, Lincoln recalled how Kentuckians “used to be troubled with … mysterious relics of feudalism, and titles got into such an almighty mess with these pettifoggin’ encumbrances turnin’ up at every fresh tradin’ with the land, and no one knowin’ how to get rid of ’em.”28 Because the size of the Mill Creek farm was unclear, Thomas was able to sell it for only £100, though he had paid £118 for it a decade earlier. For $200 he purchased a title bond to the 300-acre Nolin Creek farm and lost it all, including the value of the improvements he had made on the property. He was ejected from the 30-acre Knob Creek farm, which he had leased, not purchased.
Memories of his family’s trouble with land titles may have predisposed Lincoln to become a surveyor and a lawyer. As an attorney, he advised young men aspiring to the bar, “Never stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this. Who can be more nearly a fiend than he who habitually overhauls the register of deeds in search of defects in titles, whereon to stir up strife, and put money in his pocket?”29
Thomas fared just as badly in Indiana. First, he squatted on a 160-acre tract of government land for ten months and then bought it on credit for $320. Thomas probably delayed making a down payment for the same reason that most pioneers did: lack of cash. In 1817 he put down $80, but over the following decade he made no further payments. In 1827 he relinquished half the farm, reducing his debt to $80, which he met by turning over to the government title to 80 acres in a distant county, a property that he had mysteriously acquired four weeks earlier. In 1830 he sold this $160 farm for $125. When a decade later Thomas found himself unable to meet obligations he had assumed for four parcels of Illinois land, his generous son Abraham gave him what amounted to a gift of $200 for a 50-acre tract that had cost Thomas only $50. Shortly thereafter Abraham again rescued his father by paying off a mortgage that Thomas had assumed.
Thomas made scant use of the land he occupied, usually clearing only a few acres for a garden and a corn patch. At Knob Creek, he cultivated only 6 acres along the creek in a strip about 40 feet wide on either side. He worked enough to sustain life, and no more. For the most part, Thomas avoided the market economy, remaining a subsistence farmer. He did, however, grow a little tobacco, which he peddled for 10 cents a pound. On at least one occasion he offered that commodity to satisfy a debt on a horse he had bought on credit. The creditor, impressed that a man would part with his tobacco to pay what he owed, forgave the $10.
According to Thomas’s stepson-in-law, John J. Hall, “Thomas Lincoln did not improve with age nor with increasing responsibilities. He was still the same kind and genial ‘fellow,’ but grew more and more shiftless and good for nothing as the years rolled on.” At the rocky Nolin Creek farm, Hall reported, “he did not cultivate the soil nor ‘fix up’ the old shanty.”30 In Illinois, Tom, along with his stepson, John D. Johnston, and Johnston’s five sons, tilled only 40 of their 120 acres. In an area where the average farm was worth $1,600, Tom valued his farm at $100 in the 1850 census, even though he was older than his neighbors, had had time to accumulate more property, and had a large number of family hands to work the land. Thomas ranked behind 79 percent of his neighbors in terms of wealth.31 George B. Balch, an Illinois neighbor, noted that while most farmers took their crops to market in a wagon, Tom Lincoln used “a basket or a large tray.” Balch characterized Thomas as “uneducated, illiterate, and contented with a ‘from hand to mouth’ living”—in sum, “an excellent spec[imen] of poor white trash,” “rough,” “lazy,” and “worthless.” He owned a “few sheep” behind which he “talked an[d] walked slow.” Balch added that “[s]everal anecdotes of his ignorance and singularity might be related, but we forbear.”32
Other neighbors agreed with Balch’s assessment of Thomas Lincoln. In Indiana, Nathaniel Grigsby called Thomas “a piddler—always doing but doing nothing great.… He wanted few things and Supplied them Easily.”33 William E. Grigsby regarded Thomas as “no account.”34 Robert Mitchell Thompson of Kentucky, whose mother was a cousin of Nancy Hanks, reported that “Thomas Lincoln was always poor” and “was all the time going hunting or roaming around, not satisfied to stay long in any one place.”35 Still others testified that Thomas was “rather indolent and improvident,” had an “aversion to work,” and was “careless and inert and dull.”36
William G. Greene spent time at the Lincolns’ farm at Goosenest Prairie, in Coles County, Illinois, and observed that Thomas was barely able to eke out a living. Greene found Thomas residing “in a little cabin that cost perhaps $15, and with many evidences of poverty about him.” The cabin “looked so small and humble” that Greene “felt embarrassed.” It had no stable, no outhouse, and no shrubbery or trees.37 An early historian of Coles County, who interviewed acquaintances of Thomas Lincoln, called him “one of those easy, honest, commonplace men, who take life as they find it, and, as a consequence, generally find it a life of poverty.” He “possessed no faculty whatever of preserving his money, when he made any, hence he always remained poor. He was easily contented, had few wants, and those of a primitive nature. He was a foe to intemperance, strictly honest, and, supposing others the same, often suffered pecuniary losses.”38 Sophie Hanks, who lived in the Lincoln family’s Indiana cabin for several years, had a son who attributed Thomas’s lack of ambition to frontier isolation: “he was like the other people in that country. None of them worked to get ahead. There wasn’t no market for nothing unless you took it across two or three states. The people raised just what they needed.”39
Thomas preferred hunting to farming. Dennis Hanks recalled, “[w]e all hunted pretty much all the time, Especially so when we got tired of work—which was very often I will assure you.”40 Such behavior was common on the Midwestern frontier. A Northeasterner who moved to central Illinois described the inhabitants there as “destitute of any energy or enterprise,” and “their labors and attention being chiefly confined to the hunting of game.”41 In sketches of pioneer life in that same locale, Francis Grierson portrayed a representative farmer, Zack Caverly, who explained, “My ole daddy larnt me te go through this sorrowin’ vale like the varmints do—easy en nat’ral like, never gallopin’ when ye kin lope, en never lopin’ when ye kin lay down. It’s a heap easier.”42 Thomas, in short, was a classic Southern backcountry cracker (a term originating in northern Britain). Often of Celtic background, crackers were famously easygoing, improvident, u
nacquisitive, lazy, and restless. They preferred to spend their days hunting, fishing, and loafing rather then farming. They had little use for education and were often illiterate. Their folkways and culture derived largely from northern England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and the Hebrides.
Abraham Lincoln’s view of his father’s indolence is unrecorded, but he did scold his stepbrother John D. Johnston for that flaw in letters which may reflect his attitude not only toward Johnston but also toward Thomas Lincoln. In 1848, when Johnston asked him for a loan, Lincoln declined, saying: “At the various times when I have helped you a little, you have said to me ‘We can get along very well now’ but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now this can only happen by some defect in your conduct. What that defect is, I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work, in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work; and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty; and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children that you should break this habit.” When Johnston, who was “born tired,” proposed to leave Illinois for Missouri, Lincoln scolded him in language that could well have applied to his peripatetic father: “such a notion is utterly foolish. What can you do in Missouri, better than here [in Illinois]? Is the land any richer? Can you there, any more than here, raise corn, & wheat & oats, without work? Will any body there, any more than here, do your work for you? If you intend to go to work, there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not intend to go to work, you can not get along any where. Squirming & crawling about from place to place can do no good. You have raised no crop this year, and what you really want is to sell the land, get the money and spend it—part with the land you have, and my life upon it, you will never after, own a spot big enough to bury you in. Half you will get for the land, you spend in moving to Missouri, and the other half you will eat and drink, and wear out, & no foot of land will be bought. Now I feel it is my duty to have no hand in such a piece of foolery.”43
Thomas Lincoln’s indolence, lack of ambition, and disdain for education put him at odds with his smart, enterprising son. Thomas, Abraham said, “grew up, litterally without education” and “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.”44 This patronizing language lends credence to the testimony of Dennis Hanks, who called Lincoln “a mother’s boy” and doubted “whether Abe loved his father Very well or Not,” and concluded “I Don[’]t think he Did.”45 The feeling was mutual. According to Augustus H. Chapman, Dennis Hanks’s son-in-law, Thomas Lincoln “never showed by his actions that he thought much of his son Abraham when a Boy. [H]e treated him rather unkind” and “always appeared to think much more of his stepson John D Johnston than he did of his own Son Abraham.”46 This preference is not surprising, for Thomas shared much in common with his improvident stepson.
Lincoln’s aversion to his father persisted into adulthood. He never once invited Thomas or his wife to Springfield during the entire twenty-four-year span Lincoln lived there. He rarely lent money to his cash-strapped sire. When his law practice took him near his father’s home in Coles County, Illinois, Lincoln stayed with Dennis Hanks rather than under the paternal roof. As Thomas lay dying in 1851, his 41-year-old son refused his deathbed appeal for a visit; Lincoln icily enjoined his step-brother to tell their father “that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”47 After Thomas died, Lincoln failed to attend the funeral, nor did he have a tombstone placed on the grave. Lincoln did not name a son for his father until after Thomas’s death. He belittled his father when, referring to one of Thomas’s brothers, he told a friend, “I have often said that Uncle Mord had run off with all the talents of the family.”48
Lincoln’s estrangement stemmed not just from Thomas’s emotional reserve, painful though that may have been. More deeply wounding was “his father’s cold and inhuman treatment of him.”49 Caroline Dall, who spoke with William H. Herndon (Lincoln’s law partner and biographer) in 1866 and spent three days examining the biographical materials he had accumulated, said Thomas Lincoln “ill-treated A[braham] to such an extent that he drove him from home.”50 Augustus H. Chapman deplored Thomas’s “great barbarity” in dealing with his boy.51 Dennis Hanks recalled that Thomas would whip young Abe for minor indiscretions. “Sometimes Abe was a little rude,” Hanks testified. “When strangers would ride along & up to his father[’]s fence Abe always, through pride & to tease his father, would be sure to ask the stranger the first question, for which his father would sometimes knock him a rod.” Thomas Lincoln “would pick up a big clod and knock little Abe off the fence, crying: ‘Let older people have the first say, will you boy?” Whenever he was “whipped by his father” he “never bawled but dropt a kind of silent unwelcome tear, as evidence of his sensations—or other feelings.”52
Thomas avoided whipping or scolding his son in front of visitors but would administer punishment after they had left. One day a poor neighbor named Jenkins, who usually went barefoot, called on the Lincolns. Abe greeted him heartily: “Hello, Mr. Jenkins. You are doing better than you used to. You have a new pair of boots.” Thomas took his son aside and “gave Abe a little drilling” because his remarks may have wounded Jenkins’s feelings. “ ‘Well,’ said Abe, ‘he’s got the boots.’ ”53 Lincoln’s cousin Sophie Hanks “always said that the worst trouble with Abe was when people was talking—if they said something that wasn’t right Abe would up and tell them so. Uncle Tom had a hard time to break him of this.”54 She also recalled how Lincoln “very often would correct his father in talking when his father was telling how anything happened and if he didn[’]t tell it jest right or left out any thing, Abe would but[t] in right there and correct it.”55 Thomas would then slap the lad. Abe was physically punished for other kinds of misbehavior, too. He received a beating, for instance, when he released a bear cub from one of Thomas’s traps.
Lincoln’s father regarded physical strength as sufficient to make a manly man and thought time spent on schooling was wasted. He would “slash” Abe “for neglecting his work by reading.”56 Sometimes he even threw out the boy’s books. Five years after Lincoln, at the age of 22, left his father’s home, Thomas Lincoln scoffed: “I suppose that Abe is still fooling hisself with eddication. I tried to stop it, but he had got that fool idea in his head, and it can’t be got out. Now I hain’t got no eddication, but I get along far better than ef I had.” Thomas then showed how he kept his accounts by marking a rafter with a piece of coal and proudly declared: “that thar’s a heap better’n yer eddication.” He added that “if Abe don’t fool away all his time on his books, he may make something yet.”57
Mother Nancy
Lincoln’s estrangement from his father is well documented, but little is known about his relationship with his mother, who died when Abe was just 9 years old. In fact, little is known about her at all. She was born in Virginia around 1783 or 1784. Accounts of her appearance differ widely. Her complexion was variously described as “dark,” “sandy,” “pale,” and “exceedingly fair,” while her hair was deemed light by some and dark by most. Her eyes were evidently hazel. Though one observer described her as “a heavy built Squatty woman,” most people remembered her as taller than average (one estimate placed her at 6 feet). She had “a spare delicate frame,” weighed “about 120 pounds,” and was “not at all good looking,” with a face “Sharp and angular,” “high forehead,” and “rather Coarse” features that gave her “the appearance of a laboring woman.”58 A minister who interviewed people who knew the Lincolns in Indiana said she was “about five feet ten inches” tall, “bony,” “angular,” and “lean,” with “long arms,” large ears, nose, and mouth, small gray-blue eyes, and a big head on a long, stringy neck. Her cheekbones were high and her chest was sunken.59
&n
bsp; Nancy Hanks was evidently an intelligent, kind woman. Her son called her “intellectual” and “a woman of genius.”60 Dennis Hanks agreed, praising her “quick perception” and good memory.61 Nathaniel Grigsby said she was noted throughout the family for her strong mind and was “a brilliant woman,” far “superior to her husband in Every way.”62 She was notably affectionate and displayed “tenderness—charity & love to the world.”63 Her “cheerful disposition and active habits were a dower” to the pioneers with whom she lived.64 She also enjoyed a reputation for outdoing all the local women at spinning flax. At camp meetings, the deeply religious Nancy would shout in an attempt to get others to repent.
She was not very sociable, however. She did not talk much, nor did she visit with her neighbors; they, in turn, stopped coming to see her because she did not return their calls. Her lack of sociability may have been linked to her apparent sadness, even depression. Neighbors remembered her “sad appearance” and observed that she was “rather gloomy.”65 Her son Abraham, her relative John Hanks, and Indiana neighbors all commented on her melancholy. A Kentuckian attributed her depression and aloofness to gossip: “People talked about her sometimes, and that depressed her, hurt her.”66 Those hurtful rumors perhaps concerned the unchaste ways of Nancy’s mother, Lucey Hanks, who bore Nancy out of wedlock in Virginia and was later charged with fornication in Kentucky. At first, Lucey turned baby Nancy over to her own parents; later the youngster was raised by her childless aunt and uncle, Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow. She also lived for a time with Richard Berry and his wife Polly Ewing Berry, friends of Thomas Lincoln. Her mother’s lack of interest in her may have predisposed Nancy to depression. That she was “base-born” was well known in Indiana and probably common knowledge in Kentucky, too.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 3
