Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 1 The Lincoln Tree Part 3

Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 1 The Lincoln Tree Part 3

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 ances…