Thomas Herring Lincoln
Thomas Lincoln was working in a carpentry shop in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, when he met the owner’s niece, Nancy Hanks. Nancy was the daughter of Lucy Hanks and had been born in a part of West Virginia which, at the time, was still a part of the state of Virginia. Family histories claim that Nancy’s mother was Lucy Shipley, and that she was never married to Nancy’s father, who is reported to have been a man named James Hanks.
Young Nancy lived first with her grandparents, Joseph and Ann Hanks, until her grandfather’s death. She lived with her mother for a time after Lucy’s marriage to a man named Henry Sparrow, then with Lucy’s sister, Elizabeth, who had married Henry’s brother, Thomas. At some point, she went to live in the home of Richard Berry, working as a seamstress. This is where Thomas Lincoln is said to have proposed.
Nancy was 23 when she married Thomas Lincoln and the couple moved into a home in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. It was there that a daughter, Sarah, was born. Little is known of Sarah Lincoln’s life. It would, no doubt, have been similar to her brother’s. She looked after her brother and a cousin, Dennis Hanks, between the time of her mother’s death and her father’s second marriage. In August 1826, Sarah married Aaron Grigsby, but her married life was brief. She died after only one year, on 20 January 1828, in childbirth.
Some time after Sarah’s birth and before Abraham’s, Thomas Lincoln decided his growing family needed a larger home. They moved to a farm about three miles from Hodgenville, Kentucky. Thomas was said to be an easy-going man without ambition, that he did work, but only as much as was needed to support the basic needs of his family. The rocky ground of the farm, which had been purchased on credit, failed to yield enough to support the family, and their financial situation worsened.
It was at this farm that Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809. Like most children of families in the American wilderness at that time, the home he lived in was a log cabin. Their life was so isolated the family was hardly aware that the war of 1812 with Britain had taken place. Days, for families like the Lincolns, were spent trying to scrape enough from the land to survive. The passage of time was marked by the change of seasons, when it was time for spring planting, summers spent doing work outside, fall harvesting and dormant winters spent working inside. Sundays were a day of rest for Christian families, even when there was no church nearby.
The loss of his younger brother, the move to Indiana, the death of his mother and the arrival of a stepmother were all typical of wilderness families in Lincoln’s time. Aside from his thirst for books, there was nothing to indicate that young Abraham Lincoln would ever be more than a country farm boy.
THE RAIL SPLITTER AND HONEST ABE
‘Abe was the best boy I ever saw or expect to see.’
Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln
In his autobiographies, Lincoln described his formal education as totalling less than one year. It is quite possible that this is an accurate assessment, rather than Lincoln’s well-known sarcasm. He and his sister attended what Lincoln called ‘ABC schools’. These schools were dependent upon the rare presence of anyone who was able to teach the community’s children. Such schools were funded by parents who wanted their children to learn to read, write and ‘cipher’ or do maths, which was known as the ‘Rule of Three’. Lincoln said that any education he acquired beyond that was picked up ‘under the pressure of necessity’.
That necessity seemed to drive Lincoln to use his minimal education to read and learn when and where he could. Books were a rare and valuable commodity on the frontier. Yet friends and colleagues would later speak of how Lincoln seldom was seen without a book or some sort of reading material during rare idle moments. One of Lincoln’s many nicknames, ‘Honest Abe’, was earned by his habit of borrowing books and never failing to return them.
In 1816, Thomas Lincoln put Kentucky behind him and moved his family to Spencer County, Indiana. His reasons have been variously reported as debt, difficulty with land titles, and a dislike of slavery. Whatever the reasons, his family was still living in a wilderness where 7-year-old Abe, a child big for his age, was handed an axe and expected to do his share of the work. He became very adept at splitting trees into long rails used to build fences. It was the beginning of a skill that he would practise often, and that would earn him another nickname, ‘the Rail Splitter’.
In Indiana, the family lived in what was known as a ‘half-face camp’. This was a three-sided structure of logs, with one side open to the elements. Such temporary structures were common while a permanent structure was being built. It would be a year before Thomas Lincoln completed a small log house for his family. Building the larger cabin alone was time-consuming, and there was little time to spare for the work. Land had to be cleared to grow crops to feed his family. There was only young Abe to help until the arrival of Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow, with Elizabeth’s son, Dennis Hanks, the following fall.
It was in Indiana in 1818 that Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Lincoln’s mother, died, reportedly of milk fever. It was an illness transmitted through milk from livestock that fed on a poisonous plant known as white snakeroot. Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow, who had accompanied the Lincolns to Indiana, also became ill and died. Now, Thomas was left with 19-year-old Dennis Hanks, 11-year-old Sarah and 9-year-old Abe to care for.
One year later, Thomas Lincoln returned to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to marry a widow named Sarah Bush Johnston. Sarah, often called ‘Sally’, had once been courted by Thomas before he met and married Nancy Hanks. Thomas returned to Indiana, bringing Sarah, her three children, and a wagon load of furnishings with her. Reportedly, she took one look at her new home and her new stepchildren, and began to put the goods from the wagon to use.
Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, second wife of Thomas Lincoln and stepmother to Abraham Lincoln.
Sarah Lincoln kept a proper home for her new family and saw to it that Thomas Lincoln’s children were as well dressed as her own. It would not be the only improvements for the Lincolns: Sarah would also encourage productivity in Thomas Lincoln, and goodwill between her own children and her husband’s children. Like Abe’s biological mother, Sarah encouraged her stepson’s love of books and learning. Lincoln would describe Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln as a ‘good and kind mother’.
Lincoln the Rail Splitter, a painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, portraying Lincoln with an axe, 1909.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Ohio River was the edge of the frontier, and the Mississippi River was deep into the wilderness. Both waterways were a safer and easier means of travel and transport than attempting to travel the wagon trails through the forest. At 19 years of age, Lincoln accepted a job building a flatboat to carry cargo down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. Once in the Crescent City, he sold the goods and the lumber from the flatboat before taking a steamboat back to Indiana. This is a voyage he reportedly made more than once.
A flatboat loaded with goods and manned by only Lincoln and a companion had to deal with swift, deep waters, sandbars, river traffic, and on one occasion, thieves. During one voyage, the flatboat was attacked by a band of runaway slaves in the middle of the night while it was tied to shore. Lincoln and his companion managed to defend themselves, then cut their mooring lines and escaped.
Lincoln was 21 years of