CULTURAL MIGRATION
The liberty-nurturing Puritanism of the earliest American Lincolns came filtered to Abraham through the forward-moving, expansionist Lincolns of the intervening generations. William Dean Howells, in his 1860 campaign biography of Lincoln, connected the migrations of Lincoln’s forebears with the same spirit that had originally impelled many Puritans to come to America. Howells wrote that “the backwoods-man of today corresponds to the Puritan two centuries ago. The same work which the Pilgrim Fathers had to do is now set for the settlers of Illinois and Wisconsin.” Howells emphasized that Lincoln “finds his greatest strength from that which he sprang,” meaning the frontier, which made him seem to many the heroic backwoodsman who would rescue the nation with his sterling American values, inherited from his adventurous ancestors.46 These mobile Lincolns were on a migratory cusp that kept some of them in frontier conditions for extended periods.
Among the president’s ancestors, only Samuel Lincoln’s son Mordecai (1657–1727) remained in the state he was born in. A Hingham, Massachusetts, native, Mordecai in adulthood relocated to a nearby town, Scituate. Exhibiting technological savvy of the sort that anticipated Lincoln, the only president who has held a patent for an invention, Mordecai, a blacksmith and miller, introduced smelting furnaces to New England and powered a trip hammer in his forge by damming a brook that ran between Scituate and Cohasset. Here he produced iron products—tools, nails, hinges, shovels, kitchen utensils, and so on—that were necessities in his community. He also built two other dams that powered a sawmill and a gristmill.47
Mordecai’s first son, also Mordecai (1686–1736), initiated the migration westward or southward carried on by later generations of Lincolns. Mordecai Jr. was born in Hingham and died in Pennsylvania. In between, he lived for a number of years in Freehold Township, New Jersey, where he married Hannah Saltar, the daughter of a prominent landowner. All of his six children were born in New Jersey, where he and his brother Abraham ran an iron-producing business. Mordecai bought tracts of New Jersey land that eventually reached six hundred acres. Attracted by the rich ore available in the Schuylkill Valley west of Philadelphia, Mordecai moved in 1722 with his family to Chester County, Pennsylvania, where he became a junior partner in an ironworks. He sold his share in the company in 1725 with the plan of moving back to New Jersey, but his wife soon died, leaving five living children, and he decided to stay in Pennsylvania. He was married to Mary Robeson in 1729. The couple bought and settled on a one-thousand-acre tract in Exeter, Philadelphia County (later known as Berks County), building a farmhouse near the Schuylkill River.
A neighboring Exeter family, the Boones, were destined to have a strong influence on the Lincoln line. Squire and Sarah Boone bought their farm, a few miles away from Mordecai’s land, in 1730. Four years later their sixth child, Daniel Boone, was born. The Lincolns and Boones grew close to one another.
When Mordecai Jr. died at fifty in 1736, Squire Boone appraised Lincoln’s estate, which included two enslaved men, Negro Will and Negro John.48 The great-great-grandfather of the Great Emancipator, then, was apparently a slaveholder.
THE QUAKER BOND
Was Lincoln aware of slavery or other skeletons in his ancestral closet? If so, did he intentionally doctor his past when giving information to campaign biographers?
He was especially reserved about his ancestors. Even though he knew about the Puritan-Congregationalist and Baptist lineage of his father’s side, he told campaign biographers that he was descended from Quakers. Of his paternal grandfather, also named Abraham Lincoln, he wrote, “His ancestors, who were quakers, went to Virginia from Berks County, Pennsylvania.”49 He repeated this story to others.50
Actually, it’s probable that none of his direct male ancestors on his father’s side were Quakers. The Pennsylvania ancestor Lincoln highlighted, Mordecai Jr., appears to have carried on the Congregationalist Puritanism of his grandfather Samuel.51 Mordecai’s first wife, Hannah Saltar, was a Baptist who was descended from two New England Baptist preachers, Obadiah Holmes and William Bowne. Hannah Saltar’s Baptist faith was passed on to her oldest son, John Lincoln, the president’s great-grandfather.52
Although the woman John married, Rebecca Flowers Morris, came from a family of Pennsylvania Quakers, her religious beliefs are unknown. At any rate, when John and Rebecca in 1768 moved from Berks County, Pennsylvania, to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, he became active in the Linville Creek Baptist church. All of their six children were Baptists, including Abraham, the president’s grandfather. The Baptist faith came down to Abe’s father, Thomas Lincoln, who along with his wife Nancy Hanks, joined Baptist churches in Kentucky and, later, Indiana.
With all these Baptists in his background, why didn’t Lincoln mention that religion anywhere in his autobiographical sketches, especially because, as we’ll see later, Baptist preaching contributed powerfully to his development? And because he knew about his original American ancestor, Samuel Lincoln the Puritan, and had a strong suspicion of a Cavalier strain on his mother’s side, why did he not mention them either?
Lincoln wanted, above all, to avoid associating himself with any divisive cultural currents that might accelerate the nation’s movement toward war. The Puritans, the Cavaliers, and the Baptists all signaled division. The Puritan-Cavalier gulf seemed unbridgeable, and the Baptist Church was a stark reminder of the divide over slavery. When in 1845 America’s great evangelical churches, the Baptists and the Methodists, separated into Northern and Southern branches, several politicians predicted civil war. The Kentucky senator Henry Clay said, “[T]his sundering of the religious ties which have hitherto bound our people together, I consider the greatest source of danger to our country.”53 Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, in his last major speech before the Senate, declared that once the large Protestant churches broke apart, “nothing will be left to hold the States together except force.” By the late 1850s, nearly all Protestant denominations had been torn apart, as had other religious organizations. In his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln asked rhetorically of slavery, “Does it not enter into the churches and rend them asunder?”54 He pointed to ever-deepening rifts not only in the evangelical churches but also in Presbyterianism, Unitarianism, and the American Tract Society, which distributed vast quantities of religious literature.
There was one cultural current, however, that was not a source of intense sectional tension: Quakerism. The Quakers, once a persecuted minority, had become widely viewed as a mediating influence in America. Many Quakers had settled in the mid-Atlantic region, forming a buffer between New England and the South. While Quakers opposed slavery, appealing to Northerners, they also held attraction for many Southerners because of their tolerant outlook. As pacifists, they were not about to go to war over slavery. A contributor to the pro-Southern DeBow’s Review highlighted the Quakers in summarizing the settlement of America: “Three great elements enter into the character of the American people derived from the colonization of three distinct classes of society. These are, the Puritan, the Quaker, and the Cavalier.” The essayist said that while the Puritan and the Cavalier remained perennial enemies, the Quakers stood for reconciliation. In their geographical location and their mild faith, the Quakers promised, the essayist wrote, “to unite in an indissoluble bond the jarring interests of the Puritan and the Cavalier.”55 Southerners gave Quakers slack on their antislavery position, attributing it to their ethical stance on a number of social issues. Another DeBow’s essayist wrote, “It is consistent for a rigid sect like the Quakers to oppose slavery, because they proscribe war and luxury and all other evils.”56
For Lincoln, therefore, presenting himself as the descendant of Quakers helped identify him with a group that won sympathy in both the North and the South. Quakerism furthered his goal of national unity. Why bring up his Puritan, Cavalier, or Baptist ancestors when he knew that Quakerism had broad cultural appeal? Besides, he was genuinely attracted to aspects of the Quaker faith, especially its dismissal of creeds and its opposition to slavery.
Small wonder, given these inclinations, that when running for the presidency in 1860, he released facts about his family background that emphasized Quakerism. Readers of the some twenty campaign biographies of Lincoln that appeared in 1860 would have thought that the candidate was solely of Quaker background. The very first biography, known as the Wide Awake edition, began by stating: “The ancestors of Abraham Lincoln were of the good old stock by whom the State of Pennsylvania was founded. Members of the Society of Friends, they lived in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and emigrated from thence to Rockingham County, Virginia.”57 The next biography, by Reuben Vose, said the Lincoln forebears “were respectable members of the Society of Friends.”58 The popular Wigwam edition described Lincoln’s grandfather, Abram [sic] Lincoln, as “the old Friend,” a Quaker born in Pennsylvania (actually, he was a Baptist born in Virginia) and influencing “all the descendants” of the Lincoln clan.59 The biographies by those closest to Lincoln, John Locke Scripps and Joseph H. Bartlett, reported that his ancestors were “members of the Society of Friends” (Scripps) and were notable for “their adherence to the Quaker faith” (Bartlett).60 Another biography was cheeky in its evasiveness, using a joke about Adam and Eve to forestall all inquiry beyond the candidate’s Quaker background:
His earlier ancestors came to Virginia from Berks County, Pennsylvania. Farther back than this we do not choose to trace his lineage. Those interested in genealogical researches will doubtless find that he is descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve. These ancestors were distinguished only for honesty and industry. To say that they were Quakers is to say this much.61
Did Quakerism have the potential, as DeBow’s maintained, “to unite in an indissoluble bond the jarring interests of the Puritan and the Cavalier”? If so, that may explain why Lincoln brought Quakerism to the fore of his family past, in order to mollify contentious forces. In dealing with his ancestry, Lincoln, in Hawthorne’s view, was at once crafty and sincere—crafty in his effort to sculpt his public image, and sincere in his bedrock instinct to foster national unity. He saw that his country was threatened by a storm that could destroy it. He wanted to avert the storm or, should that prove impossible, to be the tree that best withstood the blast and sheltered a reunified, improved nation when it was over.
That he managed to become that sturdy tree attests not only to his artful shaping of his ancestral history but also to the strength and creativity he gained as a boy growing up on the Kentucky and Indiana frontier.
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