Virginia planter showed his interest in the Cavalier type. In his words, “my mother . . . was the daughter of a nobleman—so called of Virginia.”21 Dennis Hanks recalled that the young Lincoln was cheered by his mother’s assurances that “Abe had jist as good Virginny blood in him as Washington.”22 Lincoln described his planter grandsire as “a Virginia aristocrat” and his mother as “a great noble woman—a woman of a very fine cast of mind—was broad-minded—liberal—generous-hearted—quickly sympathetic woman.”23 These qualities—nobility, generosity, geniality, a “liberal” nature—are ones that were typically associated with the Cavalier bloodline.
Also, Lincoln exhibited what was considered a defining Cavalier trait: honor.24 An Indiana neighbor declared, “Men would Swear on his Simple word—[he] had a high & manly sense of honor.”25 He displayed honor throughout his life, as when he accepted a duel challenge from the politician James Shields or when he kept true to his promise to wed Mary Todd despite his second thoughts about her. In marrying her, he was joining a Cavalier-like Kentucky family, with a distinguished line of Southern landowners often referred to as aristocrats.
If Lincoln derived certain Cavalier traits from his mother, he can be said to have inherited Puritan ones from his father’s side, in terms of his era’s understanding of heredity. Lincoln knew the history of Puritanism, and he could relate to it through his paternal ancestors. Lincoln was fascinated by the record of rebellions on the part of ultra-Protestants. One of his favorite books in childhood was Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, the Puritan dissenter who had joined Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army in 1642 and served in it for three years. When Lincoln was older, he favored history books that dealt with Protestant upheavals. According to his Illinois friend Joseph Gillespie, “Lincoln never I think studied history in connection with politics with the exception of history of the Netherlands and of the revolutions of 1640 and 1688 England and of our own revolutionary struggle.”26 Gillespie was referring to Lincoln’s interest in major religious rebellions: the Dutch Revolt from the 1560s to the 1640s, in which seven Protestant low countries overthrew the rule of the Roman Catholic king Philip II of Spain; the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Protestant William of Orange deposed his Catholic father-in-law, James II; and the English civil wars of the 1640s, when the Puritan Oliver Cromwell overthrew Charles I and his Cavaliers.
If, as Gillespie reported, Lincoln did explore Cromwell and his Puritan Roundheads, he found much food for thought. The Cromwellian revolution spearheaded, among other things, the notions of personal liberty and self-ownership that contributed to the antislavery impulse. While proslavery Americans insisted that the Constitution supported the right of property in man, the antislavery side held that self-ownership and control of one’s own labor were rights that preceded the Constitution. James Oakes finds roots of this view in the Puritan-led English civil wars, which, he writes, generated the radical premise that “the right of property itself originated in the universal, natural right of freedom—freedom defined as self-ownership. . . . Freedom, not slavery, was the normal condition of every human being.”27
This, exactly, became Lincoln’s view. In an 1858 speech he insisted that “the universality of freedom” was based on the principle that all humans had “God-given rights to enjoy the fruits of their own labor”—an idea he repeated, with Puritan emphasis, in the Second Inaugural Address, where he declared, “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”28
Self-ownership is just one concept Lincoln may have noticed when he reflected on the Puritan revolution under Cromwell. Another is the importance of taking a moral position on perceived social evils. Orson Fowler noted that New England was “settled by the moral sentiments” and that Puritanism was “enthroned upon our Republic.”29 For antislavery Northerners, the New England Puritans had left as one of their main legacies a righteously moral position on social issues. Southerners and Copperheads agreed but insisted that this Puritan-inspired mixture of morality and politics betrayed the Constitution and caused the Civil War. The Copperhead Samuel S. Cox, in his 1863 speech “Puritanism in Politics,” said that the Constitution was a mound that had once protected the nation but “a reptile had been boring that mound” and let loose “the deluging ocean of war.” “Puritanism,” Cox declared, “is that reptile.” He explained, “Abolition is the cause of the war. It is the offspring of Puritanism. The history of Puritanism shows that it always sought to introduce the moral elements involved in slavery into politics.”30
Lincoln, however, showed that one could adhere to the Constitution without sacrificing the devotion to morality that was then widely considered a vestige of Puritanism. The slavery issue, he said, “reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference between the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it wrong.”31 It’s likely that Lincoln, as a believer in cultural influence and heredity, would accept Fowler’s argument that “the descent of the moral affections from generation to generation” was “hereditary fact” that could be seen most commonly among “the descendants of the Puritans.”32 In this context, it’s notable that Lincoln expressed his opposition to slavery in moral terms: he called it “a great moral wrong,” and he attacked “the absence of moral sense about the question.”33 He drove his point home with a personal reference: “I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist.”
This “always” takes us back to Lincoln’s childhood. It is commonly known that there was an antislavery element in the Baptist community immediately surrounding the young Lincoln in northeastern Kentucky. But the familial and cultural roots of his specifically moral antislavery stance have been neglected.
Lincoln’s father, the barely literate Thomas Lincoln, has generally been given short shrift by biographers. But it’s important to recognize that those who knew Thomas well attested to positive qualities, including an ethical sense. John Hanks, a first cousin of Abe’s mother, reported that Thomas was “a good quiet citizen, with moral habits, had a good sound judgment, kind husband and father.”34 Others close to Lincoln in Kentucky or Indiana testified that while Thomas was neither ambitious nor intellectual, he was virtuous and pious—he was described by various people as “strictly a moral man, never used profane or vulgar language,” “a plain unpretending and scrupulously honest man,” one whose “inflexible honesty, truth, humor, and good nature . . . were his son’s direct heritage from him, . . . transmitted from his early New England ancestors.”35
Lincoln took an interest in his father’s Puritan past. Even his use of Lincoln as his surname harked back to early New England, for on the Kentucky frontier, where he spent his first years, the name was commonly spelled as Linkhorn or Linkhern. As Henry C. Whitney remarked about the name, Lincoln “seems always to have spelled it after the manner of his remote English ancestry.”36
When in 1848 a distant relative, Solomon Lincoln of Hingham, Massachusetts, heard then-congressman Lincoln give a campaign speech on behalf of presidential candidate Zachary Taylor, he expressed pride in the idea that the Puritan zeal for human liberty was being carried on by this New England–rooted relative from the West. Praising “the able speech of honorable Mr. Lincoln of Illinois,” Solomon wrote that it was “a source of gratification to those bearing his name that the old stock has not degenerated by being transplanted. On the contrary it exhibits fresh vigor in the fertile soil of the West.”37 Solomon was a historian and genealogist with a deep knowledge of Hingham, the Massachusetts town (on the Atlantic coast south of Boston) where Lincoln’s first American ancestor, Samuel Lincoln, had lived. Having written a history of Hingham, Solomon was curious about the ancestry of Abraham Lincoln, who wrote Solomon saying that he knew “little of our family history”
but that biblical names like Abraham, Mordecai, and Isaac were “common names in our family.”38 Solomon replied that “the names which he gave me . . . are all family names here and I hope yet to link you to a New England ancestry.”39
Lincoln may have already known of this ancestry. When in September 1848 he spoke in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and was introduced as “one of the Lincolns of Hingham,” Lincoln “said, playfully, that he had endeavored in Illinois to introduce the principles of the Lincolns of Massachusetts.”40 By 1859 he had gained enough knowledge of his New England past to tell the Chicago author James Grant Wilson, “I believe the first of our ancestors we know anything about was Samuel Lincoln, who came from Norwich England, in 1638, and settled in a small Massachusetts place called Hingham, or might have been Hanghim.”41 (The wordplay was a bit of Lincoln-esque humor that spoofed Southern jibes about Puritans who hanged Quakers and witches.) Lincoln’s interest in his Hingham forebears was sincere, for in 1860 he told a British visitor, the detective George Hartley, that he hoped one day to travel to England to explore their environment.42
Had he ever gotten the opportunity to take that trip, he would have visited a region with a deep history of Puritan revolt. Samuel Lincoln, who came to America in 1637 (a year earlier than Lincoln told Wilson), had been born and raised in the village of Hingham, near Norwich in Norfolk County, a rural area in eastern England.43 That part of Norfolk was a seedbed of Puritan resistance to the English church and the king. Among those associated with the area were the Reverend John Robinson, who preached in Norwich for five years before becoming the spiritual leader of the Separatist Puritans of Scrooby, who migrated to the Netherlands before some of them sailed on the Mayflower to the New World; Robert Browne, known as the father of Congregationalism, who was imprisoned in Norwich for his religious beliefs; and Oliver Cromwell, who raised many troops from the Puritans who populated the region.
Hingham’s minister, the Reverend Robert Peck, who baptized the infant Samuel Lincoln in 1624, was, like Cromwell and Robinson, a Puritan arch enemy of the Anglican Church, whose rituals and icons seemed to Peck to be profane holdovers from the Roman Catholic Church. Brought before the Anglican authorities three times for heresy, Peck was excommunicated and fled to America in 1638, months after Samuel Lincoln had immigrated there. Samuel, who lived briefly in Salem, Massachusetts, moved sixty miles south to Hingham, where he met up with Peck and his protégé Peter Hobart, another Puritan minister from England. Peck and Hobart served as copastors in the Massachusetts village until 1641, when Peck returned to Norfolk County to participate in Cromwell’s resistance movement against Charles I. Hobart stayed in Massachusetts, where he became a thorn in the side of the religious establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by demanding greater local rule and relaxing regulations for church membership.
Hobart’s parishioner Samuel Lincoln, a weaver who turned to farming, had followed two brothers, Thomas and Daniel, who had previously immigrated to America. Around 1649, Samuel was married to a minister’s daughter, Martha Lyford. They had eleven children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. Altogether, some sixty Lincolns were residents of Hingham in the first generation of immigrants. Samuel Lincoln appears to have been a devout Puritan; he helped to fund and build the Old Ship Church, which since its opening in 1681 has stood as the longest-running continuously used church in America. Heavily timbered with ceiling planks that look like the ribs of a ship, this squat, modified-Gothic edifice preceded the more familiar white, spired New England churches by more In 1921, a commemorative article on Samuel Lincoln described “the Puritan lineage of Lincoln, the idealist, the liberator, the very spirit of that democracy which we celebrate this month on Lincoln day.” The article affirmed that it was “historically proved and internationally ratified the greatest descendant of Puritan lineage is Abraham Lincoln.”44 Installed two years earlier, in St. Andrew’s Church in Hingham, England, was a bust of Abraham Lincoln, which hailed the “many generations” of Lincolns who had lived in the parish, ancestors of “Abraham Lincoln . . . greatest of that lineage.”45 In 1937, Hingham, Massachusetts, celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Samuel Lincoln by installing a tablet in the town in his honor.
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