ON JUNE 12, 1806, Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks. How and when Thomas and Nancy first met and courted has unfortunately disappeared into the mists of time.
Nancy Hanks’s ancestry is also shrouded in mystery. Her forebears may well have traveled the same route as John Lincoln and his family from Pennsylvania to Virginia, also settling in Rockingham County around 1770. Nancy was born in Virginia, probably in 1784, and as a young child traveled to Kentucky in the late 1780s.
Her father, Joseph Hanks, died when Nancy was a young girl, and her mother, Nancy Shipley, died soon thereafter. The family of eight children scattered among various relatives. Her aunt, Lucy Shipley Berry, took Nancy into their family on their farm near Springfield, Kentucky.
Although we don’t know when, Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks probably met at the Berrys’ two-story log home. Their marriage, presided over by Jesse Head, a well-known Methodist minister, took place at sunset on an early summer evening. Weddings were grand social occasions for people who lived great distances from one another on the frontier. Friends of Thomas and Nancy enjoyed the wedding feast, a barbecue, accompanied by the singing of the good old tunes “The Girl I Left Behind” and “Turkey in the Straw.” On their wedding night, Thomas was twenty-eight and Nancy was twenty-two.
Thomas Lincoln lived nearly his whole life as a farmer in Kentucky and Indiana. His relationship with his son has been the subject of much speculation.
The young couple moved to Elizabethtown shortly after their wedding. Etown, as it was called, was a raw frontier settlement made up of mainly log cabins. It boasted a few frame houses, a new courthouse made with brick from the local brickyard, and a debating society. Thomas built a log cabin on one of the two lots he owned.
Thomas and Nancy’s first child, Sarah, was born on February 10, 1807. The biblical name for their daughter had appeared often in the previous generations of Lincolns. Sarah had dark hair and gray eyes. As she grew, many neighbors remarked that she resembled her father.
In December 1808, Thomas sold his first farm and purchased a second farm on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, twelve miles southeast of Elizabethtown. The Sinking Spring farm took its name from its freshwater spring at the foot of a deep cave. Thomas built a one-room rude cabin on a knoll above the farm’s spring. The sixteen-by-eighteen-foot cabin’s simple construction consisted of logs lined with clay. It had a dirt floor and a stone fireplace, standard for the day. The cabin may have had a window, without glass, covered by greased paper. Nancy gave birth to her second child, Abraham, in this new log cabin on February 12, 1809. He was named for his assassinated grandfather.
AT THE TIME OF LINCOLN’S birth, Kentucky embodied all that was new in a region people called “the West.” Like Abraham’s parents, most settlers had come from someplace else. Life was difficult on the frontier, but letters to relatives on the Atlantic seaboard told stories of people choosing pioneering life, hard though it might be, over the more settled lives they left behind.
George Washington, the nation’s first president, died in 1799, ten years before Lincoln’s birth. Such was Washington’s stature that the new nation was still mourning his passing, observing in elaborate ceremonies the dates of his birth and death. Within a month of Lincoln’s birth, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, would complete his second term as the third president of the United States. When Jefferson articulated his vision of an America of small farmers, he was thinking of people like the Lincolns.
In later years, Lincoln would say that he could remember nothing of his birthplace and the log cabin at the Sinking Spring farm. As a toddler, he may have wandered the hillsides or explored the cave by the spring. There is little reason to think it was an unhappy place to be born.
In 1811, when Abraham was two, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln moved again, their third move in five years. Drawn by more fertile land, they relocated six miles north to a farm in the Knob Creek Valley. Thomas could now work the long tongues of level land made rich by Knob Creek. Heavily wooded steep limestone bluffs, marked by deep gullies and small knob-like hills, from which the valley and creek derived their names, bounded the farm. The creek, piercing its way through the limestone rock, was adorned with sycamore and elms, their branches hanging in a protective pattern over the waters. Thomas Lincoln’s chief crop was corn, but he also planted beans. Abraham, like his father and grandfather before him, grew up a farmer’s son.
Young Abraham lived near the old Cumberland Trail, the road for travelers on their way from Nashville to Louisville. On many days the boy could watch and wonder at all kinds of people passing by: soldiers on their way home from the War of 1812, evangelists taking part in the religious revival called the Second Great Awakening, peddlers selling goods procured from a larger world, promoters of land schemes, and—every once in a while—a coffle of slaves plodding behind a slave trader.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN came of age amid a growing controversy over slavery in Kentucky. David Rice, a Presbyterian minister, had delivered an address before the Kentucky Constitutional Convention of 1792 calling “Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy.” Rice argued that slavery was “a standing monument of the tyranny and inconsistency of human governments.” He declared slavery to be not only bad for blacks, but corrosive of the values of whites as well.
Both Thomas and Nancy Lincoln experienced slavery everywhere they lived. The Berrys, with whom Nancy lived before her marriage, owned five slaves. When Thomas worked for a year in Tennessee, he came to know his uncle Isaac’s six slaves. In 1811, two years after Abraham Lincoln was born, the tax list for Hardin County listed 1,007 slaves for taxation, whereas the white male population over the age of sixteen was 1,627.
The churches in Kentucky became central players in the debate over slavery. The Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians—the largest Pro testant churches in the early settlement in Kentucky—were torn and sometimes divided by the controversy. Jesse Head, the Methodist minister who married Thomas and Nancy, had a reputation for speaking boldly against slavery; it is likely they heard him preach on the subject.
Thomas and Nancy Lincoln attended the South Fork Baptist Church, a Separate Baptist congregation two miles from their Sinking Spring farm. At the time, Baptists in Kentucky were divided into three main varieties. General Baptists emphasized free will, believing that salvation was open to anyone who desired it. Particular Baptists were more exclusive, believing in a strict Calvinism emphasizing God’s providential initiative in salvation rather than human free will. Separate Baptists, by far the largest group of the Kentucky Baptists, were more experiential and thus emotional in their worship.
In the year before Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the South Fork Baptist Church burst apart in a debate over slavery. In December 1807, the minister, William Whitman, had declared himself to be an “amansapater” (emancipator). In August 1808, fifteen members “went out of the church on account of slavery. ”
Thomas and Nancy Lincoln decided to join those helping to found the new Little Mount Baptist Church located three miles northeast of the Sinking Spring farm. William Downs, the organizing pastor, was recognized as one of the “brilliant and fascinating orators” among the Kentucky Baptists. The Lincolns, sitting through Downs’s emotional antislavery sermons, surely brought this into family conversations with young Abraham and Sarah.
“MY EARLIEST RECOLLECTION is of the Knob Creek place,” Lincoln would tell a friend many years later. “I remember that old home very well.” Lincoln recalled that one Saturday afternoon when “the other boys planted the corn in what we called the big field; it contained seven acres—and I dropped the pumpkin seeds. I dropped two seeds every other hill and every other row.” He never forgot what happened next. “There came a big rain in the hills; it did not rain a drop in the valley, but the water coming through the gorges washed ground, corn, pumpkin seeds and all clear off the field.” He was eight years old.
Abraham also remembered his brother, Thomas, Jr., born in 1812. Abraham mu
st have hoped he would have a playmate, but Thomas died within several days, the exact date unknown.
Lincoln’s campaign autobiography of 1860 included little mention of his mother. In a section describing his father, he wrote, “He married Nancy Hanks, mother of the present subject.” Neighbors remembered she had a fair complexion, with light hair and blue eyes. Friends and neighbors called her “quiet and amiable,” of “a Kind disposition,” as “Vy affectionate in her family” and with neighbors. She was illiterate. Nancy Hanks Lincoln died before the invention of photography in 1839. Yet Lincoln’s best friend, Joshua Speed, recalled that he spoke of her as his “angel mother.”
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ABRAHAM ATTENDED THE ONE-ROOM log school two miles north of the Sinking Spring farm for only short periods of time, no more than three or four months total in his five years at the farm. The terms of these subscription schools were erratic, in large measure because the settlers had to provide a stipend and sometimes room and board for the teacher.
This page from Thomas Dilworth’s New Guide to the English Tongue shows what young Abraham Lincoln first learned in school. Dilworth, an eighteenth-century minister, used the Psalms to teach spelling.
Zachariah Riney, a Catholic born in Maryland, was Abraham’s first teacher. A piece of roughly dressed timber, placed entirely across the room, served as a writing desk for the students.
These early schools were called “blab” schools. Teachers encouraged students to employ the two senses of seeing and hearing. Abraham learned his lessons by reading and reciting aloud, repeating the lessons over and over. For the rest of his life, he always read aloud.
Spelling occupied a central place in the curriculum. Thomas Dilworth’s New Guide to the English Tongue served as the main textbook. Dilworth started with one-syllable words of three letters and proceeded to one-syllable words with four, five, and six letters. Lincoln first encountered one-syllable words with three letters in verse:
No Man may put off the Law of God.
The Way of God is no ill Way.
My Joy is in God all the Day.
A bad man is a Foe to God.
Dilworth, an eighteenth-century English minister, taught moral education while teaching vocabulary and grammar. Lincoln read and memorized words from the Old and New Testaments, especially Psalms and Proverbs. Dilworth used the Psalms for students to learn rhyme and cadence.
Caleb Hazel, Lincoln’s second part-time teacher, a farmer and surveyor, lived on a neighboring farm. He “could perhaps teach spelling reading & indifferent writing & perhaps could Cipher to the rule of three.” The quality for which many remembered him was his “large size & bodily Strength to thrash any boy or youth that came to School.”
A trustees’ book for Hardin County included instructions for teachers to maintain order: restrain card playing and gambling, and suppress “cussing.” Abraham Lincoln and other students were not allowed to shoot pop guns, pin guns, or bows and arrows, nor could they throw stones or use other dangerous weapons.
IN 1816, WHEN Abraham Lincoln turned seven, the Lincoln family moved again. After living in Kentucky for thirty-four years, Thomas Lincoln repeated the Lincoln family pattern of picking up and moving in search of better lands. Forty-four years later, Abraham Lincoln would write in his 1860 campaign biography that his father left Kentucky “partly on account of slavery; but chiefly on account of the difficulty of land titles in Ky.”
A joke made the rounds in early Kentucky: “Who [ever] buys land in Kentucky, buys a lawsuit.” Thomas Lincoln purchased a farm stated to be 230 acres, but the boundaries were uneven. The Kentucky territory was originally the western part of Virginia, and Virginia did not supply surveys of its public lands. This neglect resulted in settlers purchasing “shingled” properties, lands that overlapped one another.
Thomas Lincoln had run afoul of surveying methods and land titles with all three of his farms. Nearly half of the early settlers in Kentucky lost part or all of their lands due to legal irregularities. Some settlers had to buy their land three or four times in an attempt to gain a clear title. Thomas found himself caught up in a land title struggle on the Knob Creek farm. Ten farm families, including the Lincolns, had purchased parts of the ten-thousand-acre Middleton tract. Heirs of Thomas Mid-dleton now sought the land. Lincoln was to be the test case of the ten, but before the case could be decided, Thomas made his decision to move.
The Lincolns and their neighbors were well aware that slavery would never cross north of the Ohio River. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the charter for organizing the Northwest Territory, stated in article 6, “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.” The area defined in the ordinance referred to territories and new states that would be “northwest” of the “River Ohio.” Even while fighting the court case, Thomas Lincoln decided to do what many of his friends and neighbors were doing: seek a better opportunity for his family and find a new farm north of the Ohio in the free state of Indiana.
ACROSS SEVEN GENERATIONS, the American Lincolns migrated in search of new lands and fresh opportunities. After Samuel and Mordecai Lincoln, each succeeding forebear of Abraham Lincoln lived in at least three different colonies or states. Lincoln’s cultural heritage was Puritan, Yankee, Middle Atlantic, and Upland South. One by one, all of the sons of John Lincoln who made the trek from Virginia to Kentucky would continue their migration to the free states of either Indiana or Illinois. Several of the daughters married Kentucky men and would continue to live in the South.
Abraham Lincoln thought his family background was “undistinguished.” He made this judgment primarily on the basis of what he believed was the lack of achievement of his father. Had he been able to see farther into history, he might have changed his mind. The previous generations of American Lincolns included Puritan courage, adventurous migration, bold commercial ventures, proud military service, and political office holding. Rather than being “undistinguished,” many of the qualities that Abraham Lincoln would come to prize in his own life were present in the ancestry of his long, distinguished family.
CHAPTER 3
Persistent in Learning 1816–30
YOUNG ABE WAS DILIGENT FOR KNOWLEDGE—WISHED TO KNOW & IF PAINS AND LABOR WOULD GET IT HE WAS SURE TO GET IT
SARAH BUSH LINCOLN
Interview with William Herndon, September 8, 1865
HERE I GREW UP- IS THE UNDERSTATED WAY ABRAHAM LINCOLN described his fourteen years in Indiana in his 1860 campaign autobiographical statement. Arriving with his family in the late fall of 1816 at the age of seven, Lincoln would grow from a boy to a youth to a young man who would prove different from any young man in the world around him.
The formative years from seven to twenty-one are critical for every person, and especially for Lincoln. In Indiana, the young Lincoln would grow physically, so that by the time he was twenty-one he was six feet four inches tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds, his physical strength setting him apart early in the frontier’s masculine culture. Lincoln would also grow intellectually on the small but steady diet of books he mastered. Early on, no matter how bleak and limiting life on his family’s farm became, he learned to rely on his books and his imagination to satisfy his curiosity and intellect. Finally, in Indiana, Lincoln would develop the interior moral compass that enabled him to navigate not simply the forests and streams of the state, but the more difficult terrain of ethical decisions in a young America on the rise.
IN THE FALL OF 1816, Thomas Lincoln began the first of two journeys to move his young family across the Ohio River from Kentucky to Indiana, which was about to become the newest free state. On a flatboat of yellow cedar, Thomas floated down Knob Creek into the Rolling Fork, steered his boat into the Beach Fork, and finally moved west on the broad Ohio River.
Coming ashore in Indiana at a gentle bend in the Ohio, Thomas cut his own trail through sixteen miles of dense wilderness. Only eight months later, in July 1817, Elias Pym Fordham, a young English farmer, wo
uld describe Indiana as “a vast forest, larger than England.” In the midst of this huge forest Thomas selected a quarter section, or forty acres. He marked his claim by stacking brush at the corners of his property. Thomas had purchased “Congress land,” which had been surveyed by the government; the title would be indisputable.
After many weeks on his new property, Thomas Lincoln returned to his wife, Nancy, and Sarah and Abraham at their Knob Creek farm in Kentucky. The family enjoyed reports of good land with deep, rich soil. At age seven, Abraham joined in the family preparations to move for the third time in his young life.
Thomas and Nancy had been married for ten years and had accrued a good deal of household possessions. They decided to leave their furniture behind because Thomas, a skilled carpenter, could make furniture for their new home. They packed their wagons with their featherbed, a spinning wheel, cooking utensils, and many tools, including an ax to clear their new land.
In the late fall of 1816, the Lincoln family began their trek to Indiana. Just before departing they walked to the cemetery on the top of a hill to pause at a small field stone marked with the initials T.L., the grave of little Thomas Lincoln, Jr., who had died four years before.
The Lincolns made stops to say their good-byes to friends in Eliza-bethtown and at various farms along the way. As they journeyed, Abraham and Sarah were excited to see who would be the first to catch a view of the mighty Ohio River. The 981-mile winding river had become the major interstate highway carrying settlers to new lands and adventures.
After several days, the Lincolns reached a ferry about two and a half miles west of Troy, Indiana. Fees to cross the river were one dollar for horse and wagon, twelve and a half cents per adult, and free for children under ten years, which included Abraham and Sarah. As they crossed, the children were on the lookout for flatboats and barges. Thomas Lincoln told Abraham and Sarah that they might see a steamboat, maybe the Washington or the Pike, descending the Ohio River on its way to faraway New Orleans.
A. Lincoln Page 3