Lincoln said little about his ancestry or childhood. When campaign biographers approached him, he was brief. He told one of them, the journalist John L. Scripps, “It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.”1 He responded to another one, the politician Jesse Fell, by scribbling a cursory autobiography, explaining, “There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.”2
Lincoln pared down his life story, sketching his ancestry, his childhood in Kentucky and Indiana, his career as a lawyer and politician in Illinois, and his emergence as an antislavery spokesman in the mid-1850s.
His public cageyness about his ancestors and his youth contrasted with his intense private curiosity about them. He told Gideon Welles, his secretary of the navy, that he had “a craving desire” to gather information about his family history.3 He believed that one’s personal and cultural backgrounds strongly shaped one’s character.
Actually, he knew far more about these backgrounds than he let on. He was aware that his ancestral roots went back to early New England on his father’s side and early Virginia on his mother’s. This divided lineage, if widely known among the electorate, might have led different groups of voters to assign him one of these opposing sides. The Puritan-Cavalier opposition was so inflammatory at the time that exposing either of the ancestral strands could have been politically risky. Lincoln was a good lawyer, and as such, he knew how to present facts that helped his case. That’s what he did with regard to his ancestors. He pruned his family tree, emphasizing facts that made him attractive to a broad spectrum of voters.
If we dig into what he left out of the public record, we find a lively tangle of ancestral and cultural roots.
PURITANS AND CAVALIERS
In an influential speech in 1886, the Georgia newspaper editor Henry Grady declared that Lincoln had combined elements of the Puritan and the Cavalier. Grady told a large dinner audience:
From the union of colonists, Puritans and Cavaliers, from the straightening of their purposes and the crossing of their blood, came he who stands as the first typical American . . . Abraham Lincoln. [Loud and continued applause.] He was the sum of the Puritan and Cavalier, for in his ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both were lost. He was greater than the Puritan, greater than the Cavalier, in that he was American.4
How plausible was Grady’s idea of Lincoln as the unifier of warring sectional identities? To address this question, we must understand these identities and Lincoln’s response to them.
Grady spoke for many who held that the Puritan-Cavalier division, not slavery, had caused the Civil War. According to this view, New England had been settled by Puritans who had fled to America to escape the persecution they suffered in England under the Anglican Church and King Charles I. When, during the English civil wars of the 1640s, Charles was overthrown and Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, the South was settled by Cavaliers expelled from England by Cromwell and his Puritan followers. Natural enemies, the New Englanders and Southerners teamed up briefly during the American Revolution to fight for independence, but in the decades after the Revolution the sectional rift reappeared and then deepened.
By the late 1850s, the North and the South were widely perceived as separate peoples—so far apart that civil war was inevitable. The nation’s most widely read newspaper, the New York Herald, put it this way: “The people of the North and those of the South are distinct and separate. They think differently; they spring from a different stock; they are different every way; they cannot coalesce; the Puritan and the Cavalier . . . will always fight when they meet. There is nothing in common between them but hate.”5 A Tennessee-born army officer averred, “The dissimilarity of human nature between the Puritans of the North and the flat-head cavaliers of the South is the foundation—the bed rock cause of our political wrangling and disputations.”6
Each side touted what it saw as its virtues while vilifying the other. The South boasted of its stable institutions, especially slavery, and its traditions of honor, hospitality, and chivalry. Mark Twain had these values in mind when he wrote that the Civil War was caused by “the Sir Walter disease,” a reference to the South’s obsession with Walter Scott’s historical novels, which idealized Cavalier chivalry.7 The South viewed the North as a hotbed of anarchic reform movements, most notoriously abolitionism, which allegedly derived from Puritanism. It charged the North with fanaticism, self-righteousness, narrowness, and materialism. The Confederate president Jefferson Davis said, “Our enemies are a traditionless, rootless race. From the time of Cromwell to the present moment they have been disturbers of the peace.”8 Many Northerners, in contrast, saw themselves as worthy descendants of God-fearing Puritans who had established liberty in America. Southerners, they maintained, had created a society of oppression, decadence, and injustice.
Like most cultural myths, the Puritan-Cavalier division was based only partly on fact. Although it’s true that New England was largely settled by Puritans from eastern England, while the Chesapeake colonies, Virginia and Maryland, were inhabited by Cromwell-fleeing Cavaliers from the West Country of England during the Puritan uprising of the 1640s and ’50s, by the nineteenth century the US population had become far too diverse to assign a label to either section. But during the Civil War, Americans on both sides took seriously the Puritan-Cavalier split. An Ohio congressman declared in 1864 that the rivalry between the sections would never end “until you transplant the principles of the Puritans in the very heart of the Cavalier, of the New Englander in the Carolinian, a task which the conflicts of centuries have so far failed from accomplishing that they have but served to widen the breach and make the line of demarcation more palpable and distinct.”9
Some sensed that Abraham Lincoln represented a unique fusion of cultural traits. This fusion was very different from that of the presidents who immediately preceded him, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. Whereas they were doughfaces—Northern men with Southern principles—he was a Southern-born man, raised in what was then the West, who came to adopt Northern attitudes. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who met Lincoln in the White House in 1863, reported, “Unquestionably, Western man though he be, and Kentuckian by birth, President Lincoln is the essential representative of all Yankees, and the veritable specimen, physically, of what the world seems determined to regard as our characteristic qualities.”10 Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, wrote of Lincoln, “Coming from an old Puritan stock, and representing the faith of the Puritan intellect, as well as the strength and freedom which came from a Western education, he was the truest American we have seen for many long years.”11
It was left to the eminent journalist Henry Grady in the 1880s to describe most forcefully the section-merging Lincoln by calling him “the sum of the Puritan and Cavalier.” Reported widely, Grady’s speech was remembered as a signal event in reconciling the North and South. It contributed to the growing perception of Lincoln as a bridge across the Puritan-Cavalier gulf. Eight years after Grady’s speech, the Louisville editor Henry Watterson wrote that he had “encountered many startling confirmations” of Grady’s point about Lincoln, who now seemed a “rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and Puritan branches deep beneath the soil.”12
In his writings and conversations, Lincoln carefully avoided the sectional names Puritan and Cavalier, just as he avoided referring to the seceded states as the Confederacy without using a qualifier like “so-called.” For him, the nation was never, by definition, two or more peoples. His vision of national unity explains why the United States, typically used as a plural noun before the Civil War (as in Walt Whitman’s 1855 statement “the United States need poets”), became commonly used as a singular noun after it.
Although Southerners like Grady and Watterson used Lincoln’s example to challenge the Puritan-versus-Cavalier schism, they didn’t appreciate how he had crafted his public image so that he could nurture boldly progressive forms of social justice. He presented himself and his ancestry in such a way that they might make a powerful statement about a unified nation devoted to human equality.
CULTURAL GENEALOGY
Lincoln’s attitudes toward his ancestors can be best understood if we consider his era’s ideas about heredity. The perennial debate over nature versus nurture was played out in Lincoln’s time. On the one hand, there were those who, following in the wake of the post-Lockean European thinkers Comte Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788), Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808), and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), maintained that environment was the main factor in shaping humans. On the other hand, the case for inborn characteristics had its defenders as well. This argument had been made forcefully by the German phrenologist Franz Gall (1758–1828), who described many different brain “organs,” determined by heredity, that individually controlled religiosity, benevolence, combativeness, sexual desire, language, and so on. Later phrenologists modified Gall, making room for human variability according to culture.
This was the view of America’s leading popularizer of hereditarian science, the phrenologist Orson S. Fowler. In his often-reprinted 1843 book Hereditary Descent, Fowler argued that one’s physical and mental make-up came from one’s ancestors, reaching back “four, five, and more generations; and probably many more.”13 Fowler pointed out that like-minded people tended to settle in certain locales, creating distinct cultural identities that shape individuals from there, even when they move elsewhere. He connected New England, for instance, with morals and religion. In a chapter titled “Descendants of the Puritans,” Fowler wrote, “New England was settled by the moral sentiments. . . . This hereditary law being true, what could reasonably be expected of their descendants but that religious zeal seen wherever New England has settled?”
For Fowler, there was no clear boundary between nature and nurture. Both heredity and cultural environment were prime movers. Lincoln felt the same way. He frequently declared that “conditions make the man,” as his law partner and friend William Herndon reported; at the same time, he believed in “heredity—transmission—pre-natalism and the like.”14 Herndon writes, “Lincoln believed that men are the children of Conditions—of circumstances & of their environments which surround them, including a hundred thousand years or more of education with acquired habits & the tendency to heredity, moulding them as they are & will forever be.” Lincoln thought that he was shaped by both his immediate contexts and his ancestral past.
He was deeply curious about that past, and he learned more about it as time went on.
His famous statement “All that I am or hope ever to be I got from my mother, God bless her” reportedly came during a discussion of “hereditary qualities of mind—nature” that he had with William Herndon during a carriage ride on the Illinois law circuit court in 1850.15 The date is important, for there was great excitement then over Orson Fowler’s bestseller Hereditary Descent. Fowler popularized the phrenological view that the mental capabilities of men came mainly from their mothers. “Men distinguished for their native strength of intellect,” Fowler wrote, “have always been descended from mothers of strong powers of mind.”16 Lincoln shared this view. He said that his mother, Nancy Hanks, despite her modest education, was “highly intellectual by nature, had a strong memory, acute judgment and was cool and heroic,” an assessment confirmed by others, who used words like “beyond all doubts an intellectual woman,” “a woman known for the extraordinary strength of her mind,” and “very smart, intelligent, . . . naturally strong-minded.”17 Lincoln, who accepted contemporary ideas about heredity, attributed his own powers of mind largely to his mother.
But his debt to his mother ran deeper than her own character; it reached back to her father, who Lincoln believed—with justification, according to scholars—to have been a Virginia settler.18 Lincoln described this Southern grandfather as “a Virginia planter or large farmer” who took sexual advantage of a “poor and credulous” young woman, Lucy Hanks, the daughter of a plantation overseer.19 Although Lincoln was reportedly ashamed that his mother was born out of wedlock, he saw positive dimensions in his supposed maternal grandfather. Lincoln told Herndon he believed that through his mother he had inherited from the Virginian “his power of analysis, his logic, his mental activity, his ambition, and all the qualities that distinguished him from the other members of the Hanks family,” a clan that was otherwise, in Lincoln’s words, “a lecherous family—a family low even among the poor whites of the south” (a reference in particular to his reputedly promiscuous maternal grandmother, Lucy Hanks).20
Lincoln was proud to have been descended from a man who appears to have been a Cavalier. As far as we know, Lincoln never used that word in connection with his maternal grandfather, nor was he likely to have done so, given his distaste for sectional labels. But Lincoln’s words about the
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