Questions were raised about Nancy Hanks’s chastity as well as her mother’s. Polly Richardson, a neighbor of the Lincolns in both Kentucky and Indiana, told her daughter “that not only was Nancy Hanks an illegitimate child herself but that Nancy was not what she ought to have been,” that she was “Loose.”67 Among the people who believed this of Nancy, Judge Alfred M. Brown of Elizabethtown reported that “Rumor says that Nancy Hanks had one child before she married Tho[mas] Lincoln[,] a Son, the father of whom was Isaac Friend.”68 Others called her “of low character,” a woman who “did not bear a very virtuous name.”69 William H. Herndon believed that Nancy Hanks “fell in Kentucky about 1805—fell when unmarried—fell afterward.”70 According to Herndon, the “reputation of Mrs. Lincoln is that she was a bold—reckless—daredevil kind of a woman, stepping to the very verge of propriety.”71 Nancy Hanks’s wayward behavior may have inspired the story that in a “fair wrestle, she could throw most of the men who ever put her powers to the test.” Jack Thomas, clerk of the Grayson County Court, alleged that “he had frequently wrestled with her, and she invariably laid him on his back.”72
Nancy’s courtship with Thomas Lincoln raised some eyebrows. At the time they met she was living in the home of a woman on South Fork Creek, where Thomas Lincoln often came to visit. The young couple would take extensive trips to attend camp meetings and would stay out quite late, scandalizing the neighborhood. Finally, the woman with whom Nancy was staying scolded Thomas for such nocturnal adventures. This reprimand may have prompted Nancy to move temporarily to Washington County and later to marry Tom there, instead of in her adopted home. Other sources, perhaps describing the same woman, testify that Nancy lived with various families in Bourbon County, sewing, weaving, and doing domestic work, and that while there she was courted by Thomas Lincoln, “whose shiftless character caused her friends to think him not worthy of her.” A neighbor unrelated to Nancy, “a good kind old lady—a motherly sort of woman,” took “a great interest in Nancy” and grew upset because the young woman “got herself ‘talked about’ from allowing this ‘shiftless Linkhorn’ to wait on her.” The woman persuaded Nancy to go to Washington County with some of her relatives in the Berry family who were attending a camp meeting nearby. She agreed, but if the plan was to get her away from Tom Lincoln, it failed, for he clambered into the wagon and accompanied her.73
Some felt that Nancy was not a wanton woman but a victim of idle gossip. Nancy Lincoln Brumfield, Thomas Lincoln’s sister, asserted that Nancy Hanks “was more sinned against than sinning.” Mrs. Brumfield explained that Nancy visited Elizabethtown when Tom Lincoln was absent, causing tongues to wag. Country folk in that era believed that women should remain at home and work.74 William H. Herndon observed that “the noblest of women can lose their character quickly in a little village or in a new and sparsely settled country. Everybody knows everybody, and a man’s business is the business of the whole community. Such people love to tattle and lie about one another.”75
Stories about Nancy’s unsavory reputation, accurate or not, evidently reached the ears of her son Abe and made him ashamed of her and of her family. Herndon ascribed Lincoln’s melancholy in part to his sensitivity about “the origin and chastity of his near and dear relations” and speculated that Lincoln may have felt suicidal because of “the knowledge of his mother’s origin.”76 Lincoln “was informed of all this,” Herndon believed; “probably it was thrown up to him in Indiana.” Herndon reported that “Lincoln remembered the scorn of her neighbors.”77 J. Edward Murr, an Indianan who interviewed several Hoosier acquaintances of the Lincolns, speculated that Abraham “early knew that his mother was an illegitimate & this troubled him.”78 Lincoln described his grandmother Lucey as “a halfway prostitute” and acknowledged “that his relations were lascivious, lecherous, not to be trusted.”79 Lucey Hanks’s sister Nancy had a bastard (Dennis Hanks), and Lucey’s daughter Sarah bore six illegitimate children. It was no wonder that in Indiana the Hankses were known as “a peculiar people—not chaste.”80
Herndon contended that although Lincoln was ashamed of his mother and other Hankses, he did praise her one day around 1850 as the two men were riding in a buggy: “All that I am or hope ever to be I get from my mother—God bless her.” Often misinterpreted as a sentimental paean to Nancy Hanks, that statement was in fact a tribute to the genes she passed on to Abraham from her aristocratic father. Lincoln confided to Herndon that his mother was “a bastard,” the “daughter of a nobleman—so called of Virginia. My mother’s mother was poor and credulous, &c., and she was shamefully taken advantage of by the man. My mother inherited his qualities and I hers.” Lincoln asked Herndon: “Did you ever notice that bastards are generally smarter, shrewder, and more intellectual than others?”81 Herndon explained that “[w]hen Lincoln spoke to me as he did, he had reference to his mother’s mind, nothing else.”82 In 1887, Herndon wrote that Lincoln believed the “father of Nancy Hanks is no other than a Virginia planter, large farmer of the highest & best blood of Virginia & it is just here that Nancy got her good rich blood, tinged with genius. Mr Lincoln told me that she was a genius & that he got his mind from her.” If she had been given a decent upbringing, Herndon recalled Lincoln telling him, “she must have flourished anywhere, but as it was she was rude & rough.… She could not be held to forms & methods of things; & yet she was a fine woman naturally. It is quite possible that a knowledge of her origin made her defiant & desperate; she was very sensitive, sad sometimes—gloomy.” Then, Herndon continued, “Lincoln often thought of committing suicide. Why? Did the knowledge of his mother’s origin or his own, press the thought of suicide upon him? Who will weigh the force of such an idea, as illegitimacy on man & woman, especially when that man or woman is very sensitive, such as Lincoln was?”83 Whatever the accuracy of Herndon’s account, which some scholars doubt, the great weight of the evidence supports the conclusion that Nancy Hanks was illegitimate, that her son knew it, and that most likely Lincoln was aware of his maternal grandfather’s identity.
A campaign biographer of Lincoln, John Locke Scripps, reported that his subject “communicated some facts to me concerning his ancestry which he did not wish to have published.”84 Scripps was probably alluding to Lincoln’s knowledge of his mother’s illegitimacy. In the 1890s, eleven Hoosiers who knew Lincoln and several children of other Indiana acquaintances of Lincoln told J. Edward Murr that Nancy Hanks was born out of wedlock. Her niece Sophie also asserted that Nancy was illegitimate.
Lincoln may have harbored negative feelings for his mother. At the age of 29, he made one of the few surviving allusions to her; it was not positive. Describing a woman whom he had courted, he said that after a long separation, “when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat, to permit its contracting in to wrinkles; but from her want of teeth, [and] weatherbeaten appearance in general.”85 Lincoln failed to mark his mother’s grave with a stone. In 1844, while campaigning in Indiana, he told Redmond Grigsby that he would return soon and wanted to have his mother’s gravesite fixed up. But, Grigsby reported, Lincoln “got absorbed in politics and was never able to get away.”86 In 1860, Lincoln informed Nathaniel Grigsby that he would return to Indiana and place a monument on his mother’s grave. Four years later, a resident of Spencer County offered to do so if Lincoln would authorize it. A few weeks before his death, Lincoln allegedly wrote a friend in Gentryville saying “that in the coming summer, he intended to visit the locality and make provision for procuring a testimonial of his affection for his mother.”87 Nothing came of these good intentions.
Little is known about Nancy Hanks Lincoln’s treatment of her son. She evidently dealt out corporal punishment, for when young Abe fell into Knob Creek one summer day and nearly drowned, he feared that his mother might find out and thrash him. To escape her wrath, he dried his wet garments in the sun.
Nancy Hanks Lincoln, like many of her neighbors, seems to have
been an indifferent housekeeper. A woman settler in frontier Illinois attributed the prevalence of squalid cabins to “the incapacity of the mistress of [the] … family to appreciate a better condition, or help to create one.”88 The typical Midwestern frontier cabin was described by an English traveler as a “miserable little log-hole.”89 The Lincolns’ Sinking Spring abode fit this description. It had a dirt floor and was sparsely furnished, with rough stools serving for chairs. Four legs inserted into a hewed puncheon formed the table. Beds were fashioned from planks placed atop poles which were secured in holes bored in the wall. The dishes were pewter and tin, and the sole cooking utensils were a Dutch oven and a skillet. Only when Thomas Lincoln’s second wife, Sarah Bush Johnston, arrived in 1819 did life become less crude for Abe and his sister. Sarah brought a bureau, bed, knives, forks, cooking utensils, and other amenities, as well as a determination to see that a floor was laid, that windows were cut in the walls and covered with greased paper, that the ceiling was painted, and that other improvements were made. If she could persuade Thomas Lincoln to spruce up their abode, it is noteworthy that Nancy failed to do so.
Nancy Hanks Lincoln was content to live in the primitive manner that Thomas favored, never opposing him on any matter. Catering to his simple taste in food, she would walk miles to the nearest mill to have corn ground or to purchase bacon, which, along with cornmeal mush or johnnycake, formed the staple of the family diet.
Nancy may have been casual in her approach to childrearing. A Kentuckian who grew up near Lincoln recalled that in pioneer days “boys were men; their mothers turned them out to go when they got their diapers off and they had to ‘root hog or die,’ and they got so they could take care of themselves pretty soon. A boy that could not plow when he was eight, was not much of a boy, and all of them had to do it, and they did not whine about it. When they got orders they obeyed them very promptly, and they did not do much talking.”90 Lincoln might have felt neglected, even abandoned, if his mother raised him in this laissez-faire manner. He almost certainly felt abandoned when she died in 1818, leaving 9-year-old Abe with his sister and his unsympathetic father. He may have concluded that his mother did not love him. William Herndon and Jesse Weik, without citing a source, maintained that after Nancy’s death and the remarriage of Thomas to Sarah Bush Johnston, “her newly adopted children for the first time, perhaps, realized the benign influence of a mother’s love.”91
Frontier Poverty
Lincoln was ashamed not only of his family background but also of the poverty in which he grew up. When John Locke Scripps interviewed him in 1860, Lincoln expressed reluctance “to communicate the homely facts and incidents of his early life. He seemed to be painfully impressed with the extreme poverty of his early surroundings—the utter absence of all romantic and heroic elements,” and even questioned the proposal to have a biography written. “Why Scripps,” said Lincoln, “it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray’s Elegy;
‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’
That’s my life, and that’s all you or any one else can make of it.”92 To a close friend Lincoln described “the stinted living” in Kentucky and “pretty pinching times” in Indiana.93 In 1846 he referred to the “very poor neighbourhood” where he grew up in Indiana.94 Fourteen years later, he was asked to speak to some homeless and friendless boys in New York. In recounting this event, he recalled his own boyhood: “I thought of the time when I had been pinched by terrible poverty. And so I told them that I had been poor; that I remembered when my toes stuck out through my broken shoes in winter; when my arms were out at the elbows; when I shivered with the cold.”95
Lincoln did not exaggerate the deprivation he had known as a child. In Kentucky his family’s neighbors regarded them as “quite poor,” in fact among “the very poorest people.”96 One of those neighbors remembered the Lincoln family living “in abject poverty,” characterized Thomas Lincoln as “the poorest man that ever kept house,” and maintained that Nancy Hanks Lincoln “was a good woman, whose only fault was that she was very poor.”97 She would walk miles to do laundry at the homes of more prosperous Kentuckians. At the time of Lincoln’s birth in 1809, the family lived in “dire poverty,” a neighbor recorded.98 Dennis Hanks, who observed the Lincolns in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, described Thomas as “a Very pore man.”99 Hanks’s obituarist said of Hardin County in the early nineteenth century: “It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the rudeness of the society of that time and locality or the primitive character of the people, and there is an overabundance of testimony that the two families [the Lincolns and the Hankses] … were below rather than above the average.… All the testimony indicates that the families were of the class known as ‘poor whites.’ ”100 It was the same in Indiana, where one of the Lincolns’ sympathetic neighbors, Elizabeth Crawford, invited Abraham’s sister Sarah to live in her home. The girl paid for her board by performing housework until she married a year later. When Mrs. Crawford called at the Lincoln home, they had little to offer guests other than raw sweet potatoes, which surprised her. It was not in keeping with the hospitable customs of the frontier. Elizabeth’s husband, Josiah Crawford, hired Thomas Lincoln and young Abe to do chores, even though they were “poor help,” because he took pity on them.101
Others had similar memories of the Lincolns’ poverty in Indiana, where they “passed for honest people” but were “very poor.”102 A neighbor there recalled that Lincoln’s “folks were awfully poor.”103 Abe was not invited to Elizabeth Ray Grigsby’s wedding feast because, unlike other neighbors, he lacked appropriate clothing. At the age of 20, when he tried to buy ready-made shoes on credit, he was mortified when told to come back when he could pay for them. James Grigsby, Sarah Lincoln’s brother-in-law, often told his daughter “how poor the [Lincoln] family was.”104 A Hoosier from Rockport called the Lincolns “very poor.”105 A resident of Boonville testified that “the hardships of the [Lincoln] family were extreme.”106 Several other Indianans who had known Lincoln asserted that the “poverty of the Lincolns was extreme.” J. Edward Murr claimed that he “could detail a number of incidents touching upon the poverty, not to say the extreme want, of the Lincolns.”107 Murr cited the “extreme poverty of his parents” as a reason why Lincoln could not be considered a typical Kentuckian.108 Similarly, Joseph D. Armstrong, who during the 1860s and 1870s gathered information about the Lincolns in Indiana, concluded that Thomas “was a very poor man” and that Abe’s life “was one of hard labor, and great privation.”109 Lincoln commented wryly on the poverty of his family one evening as his father pronounced the customary blessing over dinner, which that day consisted of a small dish of roasted potatoes. Abe called them “vary poor blessings.”110
Given the economic and emotional poverty he endured in his early years, it is no wonder that Lincoln, according to his good friend Joseph Gillespie, “felt very strongly that there was more of discomfort than real happiness in human existence under the most favorable circumstances.”111 To an Illinois neighbor Lincoln confided, “I have seen a good deal of the back side of this world.”112
Old Kentucky Homes
Cut off by a 75-mile-long escarpment misleadingly named Muldraugh Hill, the isolated area of Kentucky where Lincoln spent his first seven years was exceedingly provincial, with few towns, only primitive churches, and virtually no schools. This “Pennyroyal” area got its name because its soil was so poor that nothing but the pennyroyal weed could thrive there. In these backwoods, social life was crude, marred by excessive drinking and savage fighting. Kentuckians fought for the most trivial reasons, if any at all. Often the combatants were merely testing each other’s strength, about which they liked to boast. They used their teeth, knees, head, and feet as well as fists as they punched, kicked, scratched, and bit their opponents. They also gouged each other’s eyes with thumbs and fingers.
Lincoln was born at
Sinking Creek farm, an unpromising homestead of infertile ground, nestled among unproductive ridges. It was “a place for a poet,” in the opinion of a leading Kentucky historian, Thomas D. Clark, but not for “a practical farmer who had to grub a living for a growing family from the soil.”113 Others described it as “a sterile tract of land, almost destitute of timber,” and “broken bar[r]en land.”114 The neighborhood was thinly settled; the 36-square-mile tax district where the Lincoln farm was located contained 85 taxpayers, 44 slaves, and 392 horses. When Abe was 2, his family moved a few miles northeast to a valley that penetrated Muldraugh’s Hill. This Knob Creek spread was not ideal farmland, with its bottomless hollows, deep ravines, and steep, conical hills called “knobs.” Remote, small, and subject to flooding, it was much less desirable than the farm they were leaving. Thomas may have been drawn to Knob Creek by its proximity to a ferry and inn, which made it more appealing than the lonely barrens along Nolin Creek. Perhaps he valued the abundance of timber fringing the creek. In any event, the move was uncomplicated; Thomas had two horses and only a few possessions to haul.
Little is known of Lincoln’s Kentucky years. One of his earliest memories was of the Knob Creek farm. Reminiscing in 1864, he recalled: “Our farm was composed of three (3) fields. It lay in the valley surrounded by high hills and deep gorges. Sometimes when there came a big rain in the hills the water would come down through the gorges and spread all over the farm. The last thing that I remember doing there was one Saturday afternoon, the other boys planted the corn in what we called the big field; it contained seven (7) acres, and I dropped the pumpkin seeds. I dropped two seeds every other hill and every other row. The next Sunday morning there came a big rain in the hills, it did not rain a drop in the valley, but the water coming down through the gorges washed ground, corn, pumpkin seeds and all clear off the field.”115 This episode may have been memorable to Lincoln because it represented in miniature the futile farming career of his father. Lincoln’s only other recorded reminiscence of his Kentucky youth dates from the War of 1812: “I had been fishing one day and caught a little fish which I was taking home. I met a soldier in the road, and, having been always told at home that we must be good to the soldiers, I gave him my fish.”116
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 4
