A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  Recently, the question has been asked with renewed intensity: What did Lincoln really believe about slavery? Born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and becoming a politician in Illinois, Lincoln answered this question differently in his developing engagement with slavery throughout his life. One of the reasons he hated slavery was that it denied the American right to rise to African-Americans. In debates with Stephen Douglas and conversations with African-American leader Frederick Douglass, Lincoln understood that in doing battle with slavery, he was wrestling with the soul of America.

  Lincoln has often been portrayed as not religious, in part because he never joined a church. How to reconcile this, then, with the deep religious insights of his second inaugural address, given only weeks before his death? Where are the missing pieces in his spiritual odyssey? One clue is a private musing on the question of the activity of God in the Civil War found after his death by his young secretary, John Hay, in a bottom drawer of his desk. A second is a religious mentor in Washington who played a largely overlooked role in the story of Lincoln’s evolving religious beliefs.

  Lincoln would have relished each new advance in the information revolution. Before the modern press conference, he became skilled at shaping public opinion by courting powerful newspaper editors. During the Civil War he learned how to reach a large audience through the writing of “public letters.” He understood the potential of the chattering new magnetic telegraph, which allowed him to instantly communicate with generals in the field and become a hands-on commander in chief. In the last year and a half of his life, he surprised members of his cabinet by accepting a clearly secondary role in the dedication at Gettysburg, only to deliver a mere 272 words that stirred a nation.

  Even though we have no audio record of Lincoln’s words, he still speaks to us through his expressive letters and his eloquent speeches. Lincoln may not have read the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s Treatise on Rhetoric, but he embodied his definition that ethos, or “integrity,” is the key to persuasion. Even when Lincoln disappears in his speeches—as he does in the Gettysburg Address, never using the word “I”—they reveal the moral center of the man.

  Lincoln was conservative in temperament. As a young man he believed that the role of his generation was simply to “transmit” the values of the nation’s founders. Over time he came to believe that each generation must redefine America in relation to the problems of its time. By the end of 1862, Lincoln would declare, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present.” In the last two and a half years of his life, Lincoln began to think in the future tense: “We must think anew, and act anew.” However one decides to define Lincoln, whatever questions one brings to his story, his life and ideas are a prism to America’s past as well as to her future.

  CHAPTER 2

  Undistinguished Families

  1809–16

  IT IS A GREAT PIECE OF FOLLY TO ATTEMPT TO

  MAKE ANYTHING OUT OF MY EARLY LIFE.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Autobiography written for John L. Scripps, Chicago Press and Tribune, June 1860

  N MAY 1860, ABRAHAM LINCOLN BECAME THE SURPRISE NOMINEE OF the Republican Party for president. The selection catapulted the little-known lawyer from Springfield, Illinois, onto the center stage of American life. Ordinary citizens were both curious and anxious about this lanky Westerner with a meager education and limited political experience. He quickly became courted by journalistic suitors wanting to write his campaign biography. While candidate Lincoln was busy thinking about the nation’s future, the public was eager to learn more about his past.

  John Locke Scripps, a senior editor of the Chicago Press and Tribune, managed to convince Lincoln to write an autobiographical account that would serve as the basis for a campaign biography. This essay of just over three thousand words would prove to be Lincoln’s longest work of autobiography. His description of his early education is typical of the essay’s unusual third-person style: “A. now thinks that the agregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year. He was never in a college or Academy as a student; and never inside of a college or academy building till since he had a law-license. What he has in the way of education, he has picked up.”

  Lincoln began his autobiography referring to himself as “A” and progressed to “Mr. L.” Remarkably brief about certain periods of his life, the essay stops in 1856 and does not include the 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas that first brought him to national attention. Lincoln’s spare account tells us as much as he wanted the public to know.

  Scripps would recall the difficulty he encountered “to induce [Lincoln] to communicate the homely facts and incidents of his early life.” Plainly uncomfortable talking about his childhood in Kentucky and Indiana, Lincoln told Scripps, “It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.”

  AMERICANS HAVE LONG HEARD that Lincoln was little interested in his forebears. This viewpoint misses the paradox of his persistent curiosity about his family history. As he matured, Lincoln explored his family background, writing to rumored relatives in Massachusetts and Virginia, but as the 1860 presidential election approached he wished to focus the portrait of himself as a self-made man. In the nineteenth-century world of public politics, where it was an advantage to exemplify the heroic ideal of a self-constructed individual, Lincoln inquired about his family in private. In December 1859, he responded to a request for autobiographical information from a Bloomington, Illinois, newspaper editor. Lincoln said tersely, “My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families.”

  Lincoln became discouraged that he could not trace his lineage back definitively beyond his paternal grandfather. Yet the story of Lincoln’s ancestry is much more complex, and certainly more geographically diverse, than Lincoln could ever have suspected. He knew almost nothing about the generations of Lincolns that stretched all the way back to the early seventeenth century when they migrated with some of the first colonists from England to the New World.

  ON A BLUSTERY MORNING, April 8, 1637, young Samuel Lincoln boarded the Rose at the port of Great Yarmouth in the county of Norfolk, En gland, for the arduous transatlantic crossing to New England. Two years after the Mayflower had landed at Plymouth, Samuel was baptized in St. Andrews Church near Norwich on August 24, 1622. At age fifteen he decided to leave behind his village of Hingham in the east of England and journey to a new life in a New England.

  Samuel Lincoln was one of thousands of English men and women who were pushed as well as pulled from their island home during the politically tumultuous decade of the 1630s. With the flag of England, an upright dark red cross of St. George on a white background, flapping in the breeze, young Samuel became part of “the Great Migration” of nearly two hundred ships and more than thirteen thousand people who set their course for the so-called New World between 1630 and 1640.

  Derisively called “Puritans” by their opponents, these emigrants had given up hope of purifying England from the twin tyrannies of state and church. Between 1629 and 1640, King Charles I attempted to rule absolutely without Parliament. At the same time, Archbishop William Laud sought to rid the Church of England of its Puritan members while they sought to further purify it according to the beliefs and practices of the new Protestant churches of Europe. These dissenters were prepared to cross the ocean so they could practice their faith freely.

  Like many of his fellow immigrants, Samuel Lincoln may have sailed to New England for both religious and economic reasons. He was coming of age as an apprentice linen weaver just when an economic depression was hitting East Anglia. He had heard stories of higher wages in the New World, but he knew that life there could also be harder.

  After a journey of more than two months, Samuel Lincoln landed in Salem, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, on June 20, 1637. He settled in the new village of Hingham fifteen miles south of Boston. Because of an abundance of weavers, Samuel initially turned to farming. In time he would pursue business ventures e
arning him enough wealth to build a substantial house. He became a member of the Old Ship Church, which he helped build and which still stands today. For the Puritans, church membership provided not only an individual pathway to God but a community that transcended economic distinctions. Samuel Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s first American ancestor, lived a long life by the standards of the time, dying in 1690 at the age of sixty-seven.

  THE NEXT GENERATIONS of American Lincolns carried Samuel’s sense of wanderlust. They successively traveled farther and farther from their homes in search of new lands and opportunities on the frontier. The adventures of the Lincoln family’s succeeding generations offer a portrait of the shaping of the American character.

  Samuel’s son, Mordecai Lincoln, moved twice, to Hull and Scituate, both within the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Mordecai Lincoln, Jr., Samuel’s grandson, ventured nearly three hundred miles south early in the eighteenth century to the market town of Freehold, the seat of Monmouth County, in what would become New Jersey. There he married Hannah Salter, daughter and niece of two New Jersey assemblymen. Mordecai, Jr., became a successful landowner and businessman. Eventually he moved his family west along the Burlington Road into southeastern Pennsylvania. He enlarged his land holdings and became prosperous in the newly developing iron industry. He erected a forge where the French Creek flowed into the Schuylkill River at Phoenixville, about thirty miles west of Philadelphia. In 1733, he built a spacious steep-roofed brick house nestled into the side of a hill a few miles east of Reading, Pennsylvania. It still stands today. Mordecai Lincoln, Jr., the great-great-grandfather of Abraham Lincoln, lived in three different colonies before he died in 1735 at age forty-nine. He left behind a substantial estate, including more than one thousand acres of land, plus his iron business.

  His eldest son, John Lincoln, inherited lands in New Jersey but decided to continue to reside in Pennsylvania. There he married Rebecca Flower, who came from a prosperous Quaker family. In 1768, John, who headed the fourth generation of American Lincolns, traveled along the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road that ran down through Lancaster, York, and Gettysburg. He continued south, eventually reaching the Virginia Road in the Shenandoah Valley. “Virginia John” Lincoln settled on Linville Creek, a tributary of the Shenandoah River, in Rockingham County, near the site of present-day Harrisonburg. At the time, Virginians called these migrating Pennsylvanians “northern men,” a designation that meant this part of northern Virginia was becoming a southern extension of Pennsylvania. John Lincoln settled in a part of the Shenandoah Valley where Europeans had begun to live only in the 1730s. They developed small farmsteads, quite different from the large tobacco plantations of the older regions of Virginia. Many of these new immigrants were Quaker farmers who would have nothing to do with slavery.

  JOHN’S SON, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the grandfather of Abraham Lincoln, was born in Pennsylvania in 1744. He would be the last ancestor that Abraham Lincoln could learn much about. In 1770, Abraham married Bathsheba Herring, the daughter of one of the leading families of Rockingham County. He joined the Virginia Militia, becoming a captain in 1776, just as the colonies were declaring their independence. Captain Lincoln, as everyone called him, made a distinguished name for himself in his community.

  During this time, Daniel Boone was busy exploring the western part of Virginia, a region called by the Cherokee “Ken-tah-the.” Reports of Kentucky as a new “Eden of the West” sparked great interest, especially in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. In March 1775, Boone and his crew of frontiersmen started constructing the “Wilderness Road” into Kentucky. Nineteenth-century Western artist George Caleb Bingham’s painting Daniel Boone Escorting a Band of Pioneers into the Western Country depicts a strapping Daniel Boone marching through the Cumberland Gap, traversing the Appalachian Mountains just north of where the states of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky meet. This image helped mythologize the great adventure of opening up the Kentucky frontier.

  The stories of Daniel Boone’s explorations into Kentucky, the “Eden of the West,” may have inspired Lincolns grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, to take his family through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky

  Grandfather Abraham Lincoln’s decision to continue the family pattern of migration may have come from Boone’s descriptions of Kentucky. In Virginia, it was common to respond to queries regarding the whereabouts of a person by replying, “He’s gone to hell or to Kentucky.” In 1782, while peace talks to end the Revolutionary War started in Paris, Abraham and Bathsheba Lincoln and their family left the Shenandoah Valley on a two-hundred-mile journey through difficult terrain to Kentucky. Traversing the Wilderness Road, the Lincolns carried their household goods and farm tools, as well as their Bible and a flintlock rifle.

  If wanderlust was romantic, it could also be perilous. After the French and Indian War ended in 1763, Native Americans were surprised when American settlers pushed into their territories. Even after the Continental Congress established the Ohio River as a dividing line between American Indians and the settlers, colonists continued to attack tribes north of the Ohio in their relentless search for more land. The Indians retaliated with raids into Kentucky. Living at the edge of the constantly moving frontier, the settlers learned to build their homes in or near fortified stockades.

  Captain Abraham Lincoln built his family a log cabin on land near Hughes Station, probably just east of what is today Louisville. On a May afternoon in 1786, while Captain Abraham Lincoln and his three sons were out planting corn, a Native American, probably a Shawnee, shot Abraham from the nearby woods. Terrified, his sons Mordecai, fourteen, and John, twelve, ran for the safety of the stockade, leaving their brother Thomas, age six, sobbing beside his dying father. The warrior dashed from the woods, descending upon the younger brother who could be killed or taken away. Young Mordecai turned, steadied his flintlock rifle, and fired at the silver crescent suspended from the neck of the Shawnee warrior, killing his father’s assailant.

  Abraham Lincoln, the future president’s grandfather, was buried in deerskins near Hughes Station. Although only forty-two, he had followed the wealth-building pattern of his father and grandfather in Pennsylvania and Virginia, amassing more than five thousand acres of Kentucky land. Sixty-eight years later, at age forty-five, his grandson, Abraham, would recall to a newly discovered relative the story of his grandfather’s death, this “legend more strongly than all others imprinted upon my mind and memory.”

  IN A FRONTIER SOCIETY, the death of a father turned everything upside down. Abraham left his wife, Bathsheba, and their five children ample property, but his sons were too young to carry on the necessary clearing and cultivation of the land.

  Thomas Lincoln, the future president’s father, was only six years old when his father died before his eyes. His life without a father and with his oldest brother, Mordecai, managing their father’s estate, would now be lived out in different conditions from his forebears.

  Abraham Lincoln would say of his father’s youth, “Even in childhood [he] was a wandering, laboring boy.” This brief comment might suggest that Thomas Lincoln from a very young age had no home or support. In truth, relatives of Bathsheba Lincoln reached out to help after her husband’s death. Hannaniah Lincoln, a cousin who had served as a captain in the Revolutionary War, welcomed Bathsheba and her five children into his home forty miles to the south near Springfield, Kentucky.

  Within a few years of his father’s death, young Thomas Lincoln was sent out to work. He labored on neighboring farms, earned three shillings a day at a mill, and worked one year for his uncle Isaac on his farm in the Watauga River Valley in Tennessee. Returning to Kentucky, Thomas apprenticed as a carpenter and cabinetmaker in a shop in Elizabethtown.

  The lens of history has often filtered Thomas Lincoln in dark and disapproving colors, detractors framing him as lacking in initiative and economic accomplishment. Part of this portrait comes from a son who would say his father “grew up literally without education,” the very value Abraham Lincoln would co
me to prize the most.

  The filter should be removed in order to color in a more accurate picture. Reminiscences about Abraham Lincoln’s father offer an ambiguous report on what kind of man he truly was. Thomas Lincoln was a sturdy man, about five feet ten inches tall, with dark hazel eyes, black hair, and high cheekbones. Although he lacked formal education, this was not unusual on the early American frontier. He served in the local militia, on juries, and became an active member of the Baptist church. Dennis Hanks, a cousin of Abraham Lincoln’s mother, said of Thomas, “He was a man who took the world Easy—did not possess much Envy,” observing that Thomas “never thought that gold was God.” One neighbor remembered him as a “plain unpretending plodding man.” Another called him a “good quiet citizen,” and a third said he told stories with a wry sense of humor, a trait his son would inherit.

  One neighbor recalled that Thomas “accumulated considerable property which he always managed to make way with about as fast as he made it.” Like the Lincolns before him, Thomas Lincoln had a hunger for land. At the age of twenty-five, in 1803, he purchased a 238-acre farm on Mill Creek, a tributary of the Salt River, for 118 pounds in cash. At about the same time, he bought two lots in Elizabethtown. Thomas Lincoln’s accumulation of property was such that within a decade he would rank fifteenth of ninety-eight property owners listed in Hardin County in 1814. For a long time in American presidential history, the demeaning of Thomas Lincoln became a means to set up a contrast with the accomplishments of his supposedly self-made son. The truth, as always, is much more complex.