Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln/Volume 1/Chapter 1
LINCOLN THE CITIZEN
CHAPTER I
LINEAGE, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD
In the year 1619, in the then considerable, rudely built, and socially isolated city of Norwich, the shire town of Norfolk County, England, in one of the humble families, was born a child who, in due course of time, received the baptismal appellation of Samuel Lincoln.
During the same year, at Jamestown, a newly founded hamlet in the wilderness of North America, a vessel, in stress of want, cast anchor in the river and offered in exchange for supplies, as their sole vendible property, sundry human chattels, which the Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony, then in command, chiefly from considerations of humanity to the destitute sailors, accepted, and the transaction was deemed of sufficient consequence to be thus jotted down in the sober chronicles of a town gossip: "About the last of August came in a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty negars." The vessel, thus relieved, proceeded home, and, coincident with its arrival in Holland, an incident occurred in a neighboring harbor, which is thus narrated by the local historian:
So they left that goodly and pleasant City of Leyden, which had been their resting place for above eleven years: but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest Country where God had prepared for them a City (Heb. xi. 16) and therein quieted their spirits. When they came to Delfs-Haven, they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them, followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leavs of them. . . . But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away that were thus loathe to depart, their reverend pastor falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks, commended them with most fervent prayers unto the Lord and his blessing; and then, with mutual embraces and many tears, they took their leavs one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.
These several events did not appear to have any interrelation, but to be as remote in their moral as in their geographical association; but a retrospective glance reveals the truth that these incidents were acts in the same drama, cantos in the same epic, complementary in the moral world, the bane and antidote of the greatest moral offence of modern days.
When Samuel Lincoln attained the age of eighteen, he joined in the migration to New England then rife, and landed at Salem in Massachusetts, where he became an apprentice to Francis Lawes, a weaver, remaining until he attained his majority, when he shouldered his bundle and made his way on foot through the wilderness where now are Swampscott, Lynn, Chelsea, Boston, Braintree, and Quincy, to the hamlet of Hingham, which had been founded in the fall of 1635. In this same little hamlet, there had settled, in the year 1636, Thomas Lincoln, the miller, Thomas Lincoln, the cooper, and Thomas Lincoln, the weaver, the latter being a brother to Samuel; and in 1638, Thomas Lincoln, the farmer, and his brother Stephen, settled there. All came from the county of Norfolk, England: Thomas, the weaver, from Hingham, Samuel from Norwich, Thomas, the farmer, and Stephen from Windham.
A great-grandson of Thomas, the cooper, was Benjamin, a Major General in the Revolutionary War, the same who received the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, who also quelled "Shays'" Rebellion in Western Massachusetts in 1787, and to whom, when Knox retired, was tendered the position of Secretary of War in Washington's Cabinet, which honor he declined. Another descendant of Samuel Lincoln was Levi Lincoln, who was a member of Congress and Attorney General of the United States in Jefferson's Cabinet from March 5, 1801, to December 23, 1805. President Madison appointed him a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, but Lincoln was obliged to decline the appointment on account of a failure of his eyesight. A son of this Lincoln was named Levi also. He filled many high offices, including that of Governor of Massachusetts from 1825 to 1834, and Member of Congress from 1835 to 1841, and was prominently mentioned as a candidate for President of the United States. He had a brother, Enoch, who was a Member of Congress from 1818 to 1826, and Governor of Maine from 1827 till his death. These illustrious men were cousins of Abraham Lincoln in a remote degree. The similarity of their Hebraic names to those of the immediate ancestry of the President cannot fail to be noticed. Samuel Lincoln had ten children, one of whom was Mordecai, who was born at Hingham in 1657, and became a blacksmith at Hull, where he married, and in 1704 removed to the neighboring town of Scituate, where he established a furnace for the smelting of ore. He was a man of substance, and in his will bequeathed lands in both Hingham and Scituate, a saw- and grist-mill, iron works, and considerable money; he also made provision for a collegiate education for three grandsons. Of his five children, Mordecai Jr. the eldest removed from Scituate, when his eldest son, John, was born, to Monmouth County, New Jersey, and afterwards to Chester, Penn., and Berks County in Pennsylvania in due succession.
The son, John, had five sons, named respectively John, Thomas, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, together with daughters. In 1758 he removed to the northern part of Augusta County, Virginia, which county was, in 1779, detached and joined to Rockingham County.
The son, Abraham, migrated to the northwest part of North Carolina, to the waters of the Catawba River, where he married Miss Mary Shipley, by whom he had three several sons, named, respectively, Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas; and, during or about the year 1780, emigrated with several families of the Berrys and Shipleys to Kentucky, which, though known as "the dark and bloody ground," by reason of the many Indian massacres, was at that time attracting much attention through reports of its extreme fertility made by such explorers as Boone, Newton, and Clark, the explorations of the former commencing in 1769.
There were eight families in all, and these, when they arrived to within twenty-five or thirty miles southeast of Crab Orchard, were attacked by Indians, and some of the party were wounded, and one woman taken prisoner. These immigrants settled in Jefferson and Washington Counties, Kentucky, but the specific settlement of Abraham Lincoln is somewhat obscured by doubt. One excellent biographer fixes the location in Mercer County, but his authority therefor does not appear. Several others, repeating each other, name Floyd's Creek in what is now known as Bullitt County, and, in point of fact, Abraham Lincoln did on May 29, 1780, enter four hundred acres of land on Long Run, a branch of Floyd's fork of Salt River, whence there is reason to suppose that upon that land he made his settlement. Hon. J. L. Nail, a great-grandson of the pioneer, and a grandson of his daughter Nancy, who married William Brumfield, avers[1] that his ancestor settled at the present site of Louisville, and adduces in support of his statement the concurrent evidence of his great-grandmother, the wife of the pioneer, and who lived to the great age of one hundred and ten years, and of his grandmother; also of his great-uncle, Mordecai Lincoln, all of whom he has heard talk of the subject frequently.
After settling in Kentucky, there were added to his family two daughters, Mary, who afterwards married Ralph Crume, and Nancy, who thereafter married William Brumfield; and in 1784, while he was at work in the clearing, attended only by his youngest son, Thomas, the father of the President, he was fatally shot by an Indian. The eldest son, Mordecai, shot and killed the savage just as he picked up little Thomas and was starting to make off with his prize, and so the boy was saved to become the father of the President.
There is a dispute about the location of the scene of the tragedy. Mr. Nail writes:
The newspaper article stating that my great-grand- father Lincoln was killed on Lincoln's Run is altogether wrong: he was killed at "Beargrass" fort, as I got it directly from my grandmother, who was in the fort at the time, and knew what she was talking about. While he lived in the fort, he entered four hundred acres of land on Floyd's fork of Salt Run in what is now Bullitt County, Kentucky. . . . My great-grandmother, Mary Shipley Lincoln, moved with my grandfather, William Brumfield, who married her daughter Nancy, to Hardin County, Kentucky, and lived the balance of her long life with them, and died, when I was a good big boy, at the age of one hundred and ten years.
The grandmother and great-grandmother were both present at this tragedy, which must have impressed itself deeply upon their minds. So likewise must it have been ever present to the mind of his grand-uncle, Mordecai, who was one of the chief actors in that frontier tragedy; and the writer of the above, a highly intelligent and, in all respects, honorable man, professes to have heard it often talked of in the family circle. Under ordinary circumstances this would be historically conclusive, and certainly as well attested as historical facts usually are; while nobody fixes authoritatively any different locality.
As militating against the above theory is the following: Abraham Lincoln was killed in 1784. In May, 1780, the town of Louisville was chartered by the Virginia Legislature, and a tract of one thousand acres plotted into half-acre lots, the boundaries of the thousand acres being First and Twelfth Streets, and Main and Chestnut Streets. A large number of the lots were immediately sold at auction; and in 1782 there were a hundred householders there, and in 1783 a general store was established. In 1782 a fort was erected and designated "Fort Nelson," but nowhere spoken of as the "Beargrass" Fort; and in all the histories of Louisville which profess to include all names of the early pioneers, no mention whatever is made of Abraham Lincoln.
Indeed, in 1784, the date of the pioneer's death, a prosperous village of between 500 and 1,000 inhabitants was located at or near the alleged site of the murder.
The Washington County Herald (Springfield, Ky.), deriving its information from old citizens, fixes the site of the tragedy at "Lincoln's Run," about five miles northwest of Springfield. I incline to think this is correct, although I have great faith in Mr. Nail and his general accuracy about these matters.
At this time the Virginia law of primogeniture was in force, and the four hundred acres on Floyd's Creek, became vested in Mordecai, the eldest son. The widow, with her three sons, Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas, and two daugh- ters, Mary and Nancy, removed to Washington County, and, settling on a creek which from that circumstance took the name of "Lincoln's Run," remained there till all the children reached the age of maturity.
Mordecai, as I was informed by President Lincoln himself, married a Miss Mudd, who belonged to one of the best families of Kentucky. He afterwards became Sheriff of Washington County and likewise represented the same county in the Legislature. He then removed to Gray- son County, Kentucky, and ultimately to Hancock County, Illinois, where he died.[2] Josiah, the second of this name, removed early in life to Harrison County, in southern Indiana, the second county east of that in which his brother Thomas afterwards settled and there died. The eldest daughter, Mary, married Ralph Crume in Washington County, and removed to Breckenridge County in Kentucky, where they finally died. Nancy, the youngest daughter, married William Brumfield in Washington County and thereafter removed to Hardin, where they ultimately died.
The widow of Abraham Lincoln Sr. took up her abode with her youngest daughter, Nancy (Lincoln) Brumfield, and removed with her to Hardin County, Kentucky, where she died at the age of one hundred and ten years, being buried at Old Mill Creek burying-ground. Mordecai's descendants I have no trace of, except Mrs. Levi Smith, who lived a few years since near Springfield, Ky. The Hon. J. L. Nall, a grandson of the youngest daughter, Nancy (Lincoln) Brumfield, has been a member of the Kentucky Legislature and is now a merchant in southwestern Missouri. A granddaughter of the eldest sister, Mary (Lincoln) Crume, has been an inmate of Mr. Nail's family for thirty-six years past. While Mr. Lincoln was a Member of Congress in 1848, in reply to inquiries made as to his pedigree, he thus wrote to Hon. Solomon Lincoln of Hingham (since deceased): "My father's name was Thomas, my grandfather's was Abraham, the same as my own. My grandfather went from Rockingham County, in Virginia, to Kentucky about the year 1782. And two years afterwards was killed by the Indians. We have a vague tradition that my great-grandfather went from Pennsylvania to Virginia, and that he was a Quaker. Further than that, I have never heard anything. It may do no harm to say that Abraham and Mordecai are common names in our family." And in a subsequent letter written during the same year, he says: "I have mentioned that my grandfather's name was Abraham. He had, as I think I have heard, four brothers, Isaac, Jacob, Thomas, and John."[3]
Thomas Lincoln, the youngest son, who was with his father when the latter lost his life, was by this circumstance, as well as from the paucity of common schools, deprived of an opportunity to acquire an education, and never attended school in his entire life. The era of childhood was to him one of almost unrestrained liberty, privation, and adventure. He was born and spent his entire life on the frontier; had no culture and was ignorant of the restraints and refinement of enlightened society. He was, however, a man of good native abilities and kindly instincts, but with no system, progress, or normal business qualities; hence he made but little provision for the future and took little thought of the morrow.
William G. Greene, who spent one day with him, and felt interested to make a study of him, avers that he was a man of great native reasoning powers and fine social magnetism, reminding him of his illustrious son; but that, having received no education, drill, or discipline, he knew nothing of persistency of effort in a continuous line, nor of the laws of thrift or financial cause and effect; that he evidently was industrious, though shifting rapidly from one thing to another; that he was candid and truthful, popular with his neighbors, and brave to temerity. He was very stoutly built, about five feet ten inches high, and weighed nearly two hundred pounds; his desire was to be on terms of amity and sociability with every one. He had a great stock of border anecdotes and professed a marvellous proclivity to entertain by "spinning yarns" and narrating his youthful experiences.[4] He was an inveterate hunter, as, indeed, were most of the pioneers. In both Kentucky and southern Indiana, in the vicinage of his homes, every man and boy owned a rifle, and it was unsafe and also unusual to go through the woods unarmed. Game, particularly deer, was one of the chief staples of existence. Before Thomas had attained his majority, he wended his way on foot across the Cumberland Mountains, to eastern Tennessee, where he worked on a farm for his uncle Isaac, who had settled on one of the affluents of the Holstein River. Upon his return to Kentucky, he entered as an apprentice to learn the cabinetmaker's trade in the shop of one Joseph Hanks, in Elizabethtown, and while thus engaged, he became enamored of a niece of his employer by the name of Nancy Hanks.
It would appear that there were four families which had been closely and intimately associated in geographical propinquity in at least two States, if not in three or four, and were also equally associated in marital bonds. They were the Lincolns, Hankses, Berrys, and Shipleys. They probably were all of Quaker proclivities, and among that worthy class there is a spiritual intimacy unknown in other clanships. The Lincolns and Hankses had been neighbors in Berks County, Pennsylvania. The Berrys, Shipleys, Lincolns, and Hankses had owned a common tie of spiritual community in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. One Richard Berry had emigrated from North Carolina to Kentucky in the same party with Abraham Lincoln Sr. They were connected by the fact of both having married sisters of the name of Shipley. A daughter of Richard Berry Sr. had married into the Hanks family in Virginia, the issue being one child, a girl, named Nancy. When the father died the widow, Lucy (Berry) Hanks, migrated with her brothers-in-law to Kentucky, where she married a second time, this husband being one Henry Sparrow, brother to Thomas Sparrow who had espoused her first husband's sister. Prior to this second marriage, the widow and child had found a temporary home with Thomas Sparrow's family, and after the marriage, Nancy, being greatly endeared to her aunt, continued to live there for a time. Dennis Hanks, a cousin, being a child of still another Hanks, was also an inmate of the same household. The child Nancy was indifferently called by her true name of Hanks and by her mother's new name, it being also her aunt's name, of Sparrow, and by the latter name both John and Dennis Hanks knew her, and Mrs. Hanaford, in her interesting sketch of Mr. Lincoln's life, so designates her, on the authority of the two Hankses.
After living with her Aunt Sparrow for a while she made a visit to her maternal grandfather, Richard Berry, then living at Mattingly's Mills, on Beech fork, in Washington County, and was induced by him to maintain her abode there, which she did till she was married.
It may be mentioned that, prior to the betrothal of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, he had courted another girl in Hardin County, one Sallie Bush, but that for some reason the courtship either did not mature into an engagement, or else the engagement was broken off; for both parties entered into other matrimonial alliances. Thomas Lincoln's marriage with Nancy Hanks was a highly respectable one, but his alliance with Sallie Bush would have been more recherché, for the latter was connected with the élite of that part of Kentucky, as I shall hereafter show. No especial reasons are disclosed by history why Nancy did not make her home with her mother, but it is probable that, when she had so many acceptable homes, she selected that which was most agreeable; that in the depressing poverty incident to the frontier families in those days, the step-father might have found it a relief to be disencumbered of the charge and expense of a child to whom he was bound by only a conventional tie. So it is not strange that this forlorn child was reared in the home of an aunt, and her grandfather committed her destiny to the keeping of this uncouth apprentice, who was as ignorant as a cave-man of the duties and responsibilities of civilized life. At this time Nancy was in her twenty-third year. She was narrow-chested, and of consumptive tendencies. Her complexion was sallow, indicative of bad nutrition. Her hair was dark, her eyes were gray, her forehead was high, and her demeanor was reserved and sad. Moreover, in that primitive region, where there were scarcely any schools even for the better order of people, she had somehow picked up considerable education. She was intellectual in her ambition and tendencies, and she had an excellent memory, good judgment, and a fine sense of propriety. Her nature seems to have been conservative rather than aggressive. Although her ambition was above her surroundings and apparent destiny, she seems to have considered her humble lot and condition in life to be inevitable, and to have made no radical effort to change it, resting con- tent in faithfully performing her wifely and motherly duties. While biographers have not hesitated to shake the genealogical tree vigorously, in order to bring down all possible fruit availing in connection with the paternal ancestry of the martyred President, scarcely more than a passing glance has been bestowed upon the pendent boughs which could illustrate the pedigree of the maternal line; the general statement being that the mother's name was Nancy Hanks, a daughter of Lucy Hanks. The President himself states it somewhat differently thus: "My parents were both born in Virginia of undistinguished family—second families, perhaps, I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks." (This, in its normal and natural sense, implies that his mother was born in a family, of course.)
All persons are aware that there is a tendency either of adulation or detraction to locate the origin of notable persons, either in the Elysium of the blest or the limbo of the infernal. In the infinite stretch and realms of the imagination, it is not allowable that a man of unique history should have other than a unique origin. (Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf; Caesar descended from Anchises and Venus; and Napoleon from Agamemnon or Achilles.) Despite all fable, Mr. Lincoln had an origin, on both the maternal and paternal line, common to mankind in general. No fact is better avouched than that Richard Berry Sr., the grandfather of the Richard Berry Jr. who became surety on Thomas Lincoln's marriage bond, was also the grandfather of Nancy Hanks. It was so thoroughly well understood in Washing- ton County, Kentucky, as never to have been questioned. It was once disputed whether Abraham Lincoln was born in Washington or Hardin County; but the fact above given was never, and is not now, in question among an entire community who were in a position to know; and if confirmation is needed, the facts that she made her home there as one of the family, that Richard Berry Jr., her cousin, became her guardian and also became surety on the marriage bond, confirm it.
Equally conclusive is the testimony of Hon. J. L. Nall, a grandson of Thomas Lincoln's sister Nancy, and by far the most intelligent archaeologist and genealogist of that branch of the Lincoln family which includes the President. He says absolutely, and with emphasis and circumstance, that Nancy Hanks was an orphan girl at a tender age, her father being a Hanks and her mother a Berry, daughter of old Richard Berry. The latter and Abraham Lincoln Sr. married sisters by the name of Shipley, which made the President and his wife remote cousins, having the same great-grandfather and great-grandmother. Mr. Nail says specifically:
Nancy Hanks's mother was a Berry, and she married a Hanks, who was the father of Nancy; he died in Virginia and his widow married Sparrow, and Richard Berry raised Nancy. I had an uncle John N. Hill who died in Hardin County in 1883 at the age of one hundred years. He was one of the most intelligent and best posted men in Kentucky history I ever knew in my life, and this was his version of the relationship, as well as that of my grandfather William Brumfield and grandmother Nancy (Lincoln) Brumfield. Uncle Hill was not related to the Lincoln family, and, of course, had nothing to cover up or conceal. He lived in Washington County in his younger days, right by the side of the Lincoln and Berry family; and was at the wedding when Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks were married. . . . When Lincoln was nominated for President, there were quite a number of old men living in Hardin County, among whom was old Mr. Riney, to whom the President went to school, and they knew the Lincoln and Berry families and took delight in rehearsing matters they knew in connection with them, and this was their version and understanding. It indeed was not disputed and was not discussed adversely—simply assumed as a well-known fact.
One of the most prominent citizens of Springfield, Ky., Squire R. M. Thompson, feeling the honor of his own family trenched upon by the innuendo in Lamon's Life of Lincoln concerning Lincoln's parents, himself searched for and found the marriage certificate of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks; and in testifying under oath about it, embraced this paragraph: "The mother of Nancy (Hanks) Lincoln, who was the mother of President Abraham Lincoln, was an own cousin of affiant's mother." This was on the theory that she was a Berry. I repeat, the general and the particular repute that Lucy Hanks was a Berry is as firmly grounded as any fact in Washington County. The Herald of that county once stated that she was a Shipley. This was a natural mistake, her grandmother being a Shipley, and the Shipleys and Berrys being closely interrelated; her grandmother and Presi- dent Lincoln's grandmother were sisters, and, of course, their great-grandparents in that time were identical.
I am not unaware that John and Dennis Hanks call her a Sparrow, but they also call the President's grandfather Mordecai. There is no real basis for either statement, except as I have stated, nor am I unaware that a higher authority than the Hankses does not concur in my arrangement of the pedigree of Nancy Hanks; but it is a maxim in equity that "what ought to be done is considered as done," and inasmuch as this statement, well known to close students of Lincolnian biography, ought not to have been made, or, if made, ought not to be printed, it should be treated as not made at all ; and besides, however wise or interested a party might be in general, it does not follow that he knew any more (or even as much) about such a matter than others. In addition to all, in a conflict of evidence, that which is most weighty, probable, and convincing, and especially if cumulative, should prevail.
The masterpiece of Lincoln biography, Nicolay's, accepts Mr. Nail's version of Lincoln's paternal grandmother's identity as conclusive over that of Secretary Welles, who was related to the New England branch of the Lincoln family, and, by reason of his coign of vantage, should know whereof he affirmed. This distinguished and accurate kinsman had equal opportunities to know the pedigree in the maternal line, and his comments in that matter are as reliable as are the others. Superimposed upon all is the universal knowledge of the fact at the paternal home of the party herself, and which is cumulative and no wise dependent upon the clear and otherwise derived knowledge of Mr. Nall. I think I have read all that has been published on this subject; and, while it is of none but speculative interest, it is due to history as well as to the memory of a woman who should be revered by the civilized world everywhere, that her own and her mother's honor and reputation should be assured. Mr. Lincoln says his mother was born of an undistinguished family, and I claim no more, nor should the world believe any less.[5] I myself know one member of the family to have been the wife of a United States Judge and another to have been the wife of a Governor of Kansas and a United States Minister. It was an humble but respectable family in all respects.
All things being ready, as well in the program of destiny as in the few crude arrangements of the parties directly involved, Thomas Lincoln journeyed in a primitive way to the home of Richard Berry, the prospective bride's grandfather, at Mattingly's Mills, and, together with Richard Berry Jr., cousin to the bride-elect, visited the county-seat of Washington County, and executed a marriage bond of the following tenor and import, viz.:
Know all men by these presents, that Mr. Thomas Lincoln and Richard Berry are held and firmly bound unto his excellency the Governor of Kentucky in the just and full sum of Fifty pounds current money; to the payment of which well and truly to be made to the said Governor and his successors, we bind ourselves, our heirs, etc., jointly and severally, firmly by these presents. Sealed with our seals and dated this 10th day of June 1806. The condition of the above obligation is such that whereas there is a marriage shortly intended between the above bound Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks for which a license has been issued. Now if there be no lawful cause to obstruct the said marriage, then this obligation to be void, else to remain in full force and virtue in law.
Thomas Lincoln [seal]
Richard Berry [seal]
Witness: John H. Parrott.
And the Rev. Jesse Head, D. M. E. C, certifies that on June 12, 1806, he joined Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks in marriage. According to an article published in The American, a Philadelphia magazine published a few years since, it would appear that one John Hank lived on what is now the Perkiomen turnpike, six miles east of Reading in Exeter Township, in Pennsylvania, and within half a mile of the residence of Mordecai Lincoln, who would be the great-great-grandfather of the President, and that Hank grated to Augusta County in Virginia with John Lincoln, the great-grandfather of the President. In 1711, in Berks County, Pennsylvania, John Hank married one Sarah Evans and they had a son born the next year, who was living as late as 1730, as his father mentions him in his will that year. The Friends' (Quakers') record in Baltimore, still extant, mentions one John Hanke as living in Rockingham County, Virginia, probably the same who emigrated from Berks County, and in 1787 Hannah, a daughter of John Hanke, married one Asa Lupton. The only significant fact about this information is that the Lincolns and Hankses were alike Quakers and neighbors, and if this Hanke was the progenitor of Nancy Hanks, it is a coincidence that the ancestors of both should have been close neighbors, and that a century or more afterwards two members of the same families should have united their destinies with such mighty results.
The only basis in my view to avouch this John Hanke as being the progenitor of the President's mother is that the Kentucky Hankses came from Virginia, and the rarity of the name, superadded to the further fact of the Hankses' and Lincolns' intimacy, and the quite seeming probability that they might seek the same new home. Thomas. Lincoln was a second cousin of his wife, as I show; possibly the families also had in another branch several generations of neighborhood intimacy.
It has been assumed by biographers generally that immediately upon his marriage Thomas Lincoln brought his bride to Hardin County, and that in that county all three of their children were born. The President himself, in his brief sketches of his life, says he was born in Hardin County.[6]
It is an undisputed fact that Thomas Lincoln, within a year or so after his marriage, being prompted by a roving disposition, and the land hunger which he had inherited from his forbears, especially his father, removed his family to a patch of ground on which a little clearing had been made and a cabin erected, situate on the south branch of Nolin's Creek, three miles from the present village of Hodgenville, county-seat of LaRue County, and that in this rude cabin, in this neglected spot, on the twelfth day of February, 1809, the most illustrious man of his era was born.
The cabin was of the rudest kind even for those days. It is needless to attempt to describe it, for the present comfortably housed generation would deem such description to have been woven in the loom of the imagination. It suffices to say, which I do reverently, that our Saviour, who was born in a stable, had a birthplace scarcely less decent than the typical cabin of the "poor white" of the South a century ago, and that the advents respectively of the despised Nazarene and of the Kentucky carpenter's son, the one the Saviour of the world, and the other the liberator of a race, were achieved alike amid the most desolate surroundings, even for the primitive conditions of the time.
In this rude cabin the little stranger lived until he had attained his fourth year. As there were no immediate neighbors, the parents and the two little children were compelled to be company for each other, and we can only imagine—for history was then engaged on statelier themes, such as the career of Napoleon—what their daily life could have arrayed of current happiness, as a solace for prosaic and uneventful poverty and privation. That the mother, with an ambition and enterprise far above her situation, could read and write, is a basis of fact from which we may reasonably infer that she was wont to gather her little progeny at her knee and instil into their infant minds the rudiments of education which would lead them to a better condition of life than she had ever known.
Circumstances rendered it expedient for Thomas Lincoln to remove from this uninteresting place to one more desirable on the banks of Knob Creek, an affluent of Rolling Fork, about six miles distant from Hodgenville, which removal occurred in the spring of 1813, when young Abraham was four years of age.
Both father and mother appreciated the value and necessity of their children's education, the former superficially, the latter substantially and practically, and the only means and opportunities the country afforded for any means of education were eagerly embraced. One Zachariah Riney taught in the immediate neighborhood, and to his school Abraham and his sister faithfully went. He was a man of an excellent character, deep piety, and a fair education. He had been reared as a Catholic, but made no attempt to proselyte, and the still existing town of Rineysville in Hardin County is a tribute to the estimation in which his family is held. He was extremely popular with his scholars, and the great President always mentioned him in later years in terms of grateful respect. At a later period, Caleb Hazel, a youth with a little smattering of education, "took up" a school some four or five miles distant, and the faithful and tious mother would fix up her little ones the best she could and send them diurnally on the long journey. She was persistent in her determination toinculcate education in their youthful minds. The father's enthusiasm was spasmodic and unreliable; still he would occasionally glow with pride in his educational plans for his bright, intelligent boy. At the age of forty-five Lincoln told Swett that the summum bonum of his father's ambition was to give his boy a first-rate education, and that his ne plus ultra of such an education was to "larn to cipher clean through the 'rithmetic."
In 1816 the land hunger which Thomas Lincoln had inherited from his father, the Virginia emigrant, led him to barter his imperfect title to his farm for ten barrels of rye whiskey and twenty dollars in cash, and go to Indiana on a prospecting tour, with a view to emigration. Such is the usual explanation of modern scientific biographers, who find the springs of momentous events in human impulses rather than in divine foreordination. An ancient chronicler would have said: "And the Angel of the Lord came to Thomas, and commanded that he take the young child and his mother and depart out of that country."
- ↑ This history was written in 1892.
- ↑ "Old men who personally knew Uncle Mordecai said that he was a very smart man and exceedingly popular; but was a sporting man and somewhat reckless."—Nall.
- ↑ See also autobiographical data, sketches, etc., in Letters (to Fell, Hicks, et al.) in present edition.
- ↑ "I have known several old men who knew Thomas Lincoln intimately. They said he had (as they termed it) good strong horse sense and was an excellent man. He was a cabinet maker and was thrifty when he lived in Kentucky."—Nall.
- ↑ Secretary Welles states that he has heard President Lincoln say, more than once, that when he laid down his official life he would endeavor to trace out his genealogy and family history.
- ↑ It is a trait common to all men to be interested in the place of their birth, and therefore there is every reason to believe that the President knew his own birthplace. He had reached the age of clear mind and sound memory before his mother died, and it is most unbelievable that he would have received any confusing instruction on this point from her. Moreover, his stepmother was an intimate friend of his own mother at the time of his birth, and she lived until long after he had reached manhood, and in all these years she supported the mother's story of his birth. This ought to be authority enough for any biographer. Indeed, no biographer has so far ventured to set up a counter claim. But in spite of this authority and that of more than one hundred copyrighted biographies of President Lincoln, there are still a few people in Washington County, Kentucky, who claim that Abraham, the second child of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, was born in that county. It is a matter of record that the first child—Sarah—was born in Elizabethtown, which is in Hardin County, and that Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln moved from there to the farm near Hodgenville, then also in Hardin County, and now in LaRue County, where Lincoln, his mother, and his stepmother all claimed he was born, and where a second son, named William Brumfield Lincoln after his uncle Brumfield, probably began his short life, which ended at the age of four or five years. In the summer of 1906, the founders of the Lincoln Farm Association, a patriotic body organized to preserve the Lincoln birthplace farm as a national park, made a thorough investigation of the Washington County claims. Their lawyers found in all that county but four people who claimed to have any knowledge of the matter, and each of these stated upon oath that his belief arose from the statement made some twenty years before by an old citizen over ninety years of age, (who had made no assertions as to Lincoln's birthplace until his memory had become frail through age,) that as a youth he had seen Nancy Hanks Lincoln in Washington County with a babe in her arms whom he supposed to be Abraham Lincoln.—M. M. M.