L incoln biographers have long been challenged to explain his apparently miraculous transformation from an ill-educated frontier youth into a wise statesman. Ever since William Herndon and Jesse Weik in their 1888 biography wrote that Lincoln rose from a “greater depth” than any other great person, starting out from “a stagnant, putrid pool,” Lincoln’s life has been seen as a climb from extremely adverse conditions to the height of power.1 How could someone with barely literate parents, little access to books, and less than a year of schooling become a deeply informed, tactful political leader?
Lincoln played up his image as the self-made man. To a campaign biographer, he generalized that his youth could be summed up in Thomas Gray’s phrase “the short and simple annals of the poor.”2 It was, after all, advantageous for him to claim that he came from a very lowly background, for it confirmed his image as the true democratic American—one of the people, like such national icons as Benjamin Franklin or Andrew Jackson. The difficulty of his childhood has been exaggerated by a number of commentators, including one who claims that he was “reared in gripping, grinding, pinching penury and pallid poverty, amid the most squalid destitution possible to conceive.”3
If publicly Lincoln talked down his childhood, privately he had glowing things to say about it. When he described his past to the lawyer Leonard Swett, he “told the story of a happy childhood. There was nothing sad nor pinched, and nothing of want, and no allusions to want, in any part of it. His own description of his youth was that of a joyous, happy boyhood.”4
Indeed, if we take a clear-eyed view of Lincoln’s early years, we see that his formative influences—his parents, his schooling, his reading, and frontier culture—shaped him far more positively than is usually thought. Although the frontier culture around him was crude and chaotic, he, with the aid of his parents and his reading, developed special gifts for controlling and reshaping its powerful energies.
ABE’S FATHER AS FRONTIER GUIDE
Woodrow Wilson wrote, “Abraham Lincoln came from the most unpromising stock in the continent, the ‘poor white trash’ of the South.”5 Lincoln’s father has been the target of especially severe criticism. It is commonly said that Thomas Lincoln was a shiftless, impecunious rube who kept the young Abe from his books and hired him out so regularly that, as Lincoln later said, “I used to be a slave.”6
But when we trace Thomas’s experiences in Kentucky and Indiana, we find that, despite his undeniable shortcomings, he was a steady guide through the tumultuous frontier culture and highly uncertain economic conditions.
One element of his guidance was his physical sturdiness—a great boon on the frontier. At five feet ten inches, his weight varying from 175 to 195 pounds, Thomas was compact and brawny. Dennis Hanks, who said that he could never find points of separation between Thomas’s ribs, called him “A muscular man[;] his equal I never saw.”7 With coarse black hair, gray-blue eyes, a strong nose, and a swarthy complexion, Thomas had a robust appearance borne out by his extraordinary strength and his powers of endurance. Known as “a tremendous man in a rough-and-tumble fight,” he once quickly thrashed a “monstrous bully” in Kentucky in a tussle from which Thomas emerged without a scratch A “rough-and-tumble” was, in frontier slang, the equivalent of a “gouging”—an all-out fight in which plucking out an eye was a goal. Thomas apparently proved himself “the best man” in his region without resorting to this gruesome maneuver. In fact, A. H. Chapman, an Indiana neighbor who witnessed the momentous battle, reported that “this is the only fight [Thomas] ever had. . . . No one else ever tried his manhood in a personal combat, he was a remarkable peaceable man.”9 This statement points to what may have been one of Thomas’s bequests to his son: a nature that inclined to peace rather than violence. Like his father, Abe was extraordinarily powerful and good at fighting. But also like Thomas, Abe was kindly and left no record of having maimed an opponent, as he apparently restricted himself to “scientific” fighting, in which physical injury was not the aim.
Thomas Lincoln was known as an amiable man—in various accounts, “Exceedingly good humored,” “unpretentious,” “kind,” one who “never appeared to be offended” and “loved Company—people & their Sports very much.”10 A relative said that Thomas “took the world easy” and “never thought that gold was God.”11 Similarly, an Indiana neighbor reported that he “was happy—lived Easy—& contented. . . . He wanted few things and Supplied them Easily.”12
Though not concerned with accumulating wealth, Thomas Lincoln nonetheless managed to do surprisingly well, given the adverse conditions he faced. Having witnessed at ten his father’s murder by a Native American, Thomas, along with his four siblings, was taken by his widowed mother, Bathsheba Lincoln, to live near relatives in Beech Fork, Washington County, Kentucky.13 Because of the law of primogeniture, the substantial estate of Thomas’s father, amounting to more than 4,000 acres of Kentucky land and much personal property, went to Thomas’s older brother, Mordecai. Thomas started working in his teens, and from that time forward he was employed at various times in several lines of work: primarily as a carpenter and a farmer but also as a manual laborer, a soldier in the Kentucky militia, a prison guard, and a road surveyor. By 1803, at twenty-seven, he had enough money to buy a 238-acre farm for cash near Mill Creek in Hardin County, where he lived for three years with his mother and his sister and brother-in-law.
Early in 1806 he was hired by Kentucky store owners to build a flatboat and take goods down the Mississippi River for sale in New Orleans. In June, shortly after returning from Louisiana, he was married to Nancy Hanks. According to the prevailing belief among historians, Nancy Hanks was born out of wedlock in 1784 in what is now West Virginia. At a young age, she was taken to live in Kentucky by her grandparents, Ann and Joseph Hanks, who raised her until she was twelve, when she moved in with her aunt and uncle, Betsy and Thomas Sparrow. For a time in her late teenage years, she was evidently under the guardianship of Richard Berry and his wife Polly Ewing Berry, neighbors of Thomas Lincoln in Kentucky. It was in Richard Berry’s cabin that Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks were married.
After the marriage, Thomas took Nancy to live in a small home in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, that he built on a lot he bought there; he soon purchased a second lot. Busy as a carpenter, he was a respected member of the Elizabethtown community and a regular customer at the town’s main store, Bleakley & Montgomery. On February 10, 1807, less than eight months after their wedding, Thomas and Nancy welcomed to the world a daughter, Sarah, who came to be known as Sally.
After two years in Elizabethtown, Thomas took his family to live on a 348-acre property he bought on the South Fork of Nolin Creek, about three miles south of present-day Hodgenville. On this land, commonly known as the Sinking Spring Farm, Thomas moved into a log cabin that was typical of the frontier. Measuring sixteen by eighteen feet, it had a dirt floor, a large fireplace, and one window of greased paper that allowed in diffused light. Here Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809.
The red clay soil at Sinking Spring proved to be barren, and the title to the property came under dispute. In 1811, Thomas bought a more fertile lot near Knob Creek, twelve miles to the northeast. Moving with the family there in November 1811, Thomas successfully farmed a section of that 230-acre property, located in a beautiful area noted for its unusual hills, so sharply defined that they were called knobs. He also sometimes accepted carpenter jobs. By 1814, he was ranked fifteenth among the ninety-eight residents listed in the Hardin County tax roll in terms of the value of the property he
owned.14 Of the 104 families living in that area of the county, only 6 owned as many horses as he did.15 His carpenter tools were said to be the finest in the region.
In fall 1816, Thomas took his wife, the nine-year-old Sally, and the seven-year-old Abe across the Ohio River to live in southern Indiana in Perry County (soon renamed Spencer County).
Considering his success in Kentucky, why did Thomas leave the state?
The move, Lincoln later explained, “was partly on account of slavery.”16 Thomas and Nancy Lincoln belonged to an antislavery sect of the Baptist church; their negative views of slavery, along with competition from slave labor in Hardin County, where nearly half of the adult population were enslaved, helped motivate the relocation. Under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Indiana, which became a state in 1816, was part of the territory designated by the Founders to be free of slavery.
An even more important reason for the move was the uncertainty of Kentucky real estate. Lincoln noted that his parents moved “chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Ky.” Despite his smart real estate investments, Thomas ended up losing money on his Kentucky properties because of the confusing land policies there. Originally a western extension of Virginia, Kentucky had long been exploited by eastern land speculators who laid claim to large parcels, many of them poorly surveyed or overlapping. The situation did not improve when Kentucky became a state in 1792. Land ownership remained hazy due to faulty surveys and what was known as shingling: the layering of claims on the same property by different owners. Henry Clay as a young Lexington attorney handled many cases of competing land titles; he found that the “same identical tract was frequently shingled over by a dozen claims.”17 Humphrey Marshall, the cousin of Chief Justice John Marshall, affirmed that “the face of Kentucky was covered, and disfigured by a complication of adverse claims to land, not less on an average than four fold.” The great Kentucky explorer and surveyor Daniel Boone had to leave the state due to a suit over prior claims on his property. As a Boone biographer writes, “The lawyers and land speculators were too shrewd for the pioneer,” who became “a houseless, homeless, impoverished man”; he eventually died in poverty in Missouri.18
Thomas Lincoln’s experience with Kentucky land was almost as unlucky as Boone’s. The Mill Creek property had been improperly surveyed—its area was actually 200 acres, not 238—so that when Thomas sold the parcel in 1814, he lost money on it. As for the Knob Creek farm, he lost it (and nine neighbors also lost their properties) as a result of an ejectment suit filed by the heirs of an eighteenth-century title holder, the Philadelphian Thomas Middleton, who as a Revolutionary War veteran had been awarded 10,000 acres of Kentucky land.
Land shingling also cost Thomas the birthplace farm at Sinking Spring. In 1783, the Commonwealth of Virginia had granted to one William Greene thirty thousand acres of land in what later became Hardin County, Kentucky. Half of this land was sold to Richard Mather, a New York speculator. In 1805, Thomas Vance bought three hundred acres from Mather, who took back a lien on the land to secure the unpaid purchase price. Vance sold the farm to Isaac Bush, who then sold it to Thomas Lincoln. Meanwhile, the lien had not been satisfied with Mather, who in 1813 sued Vance, Bush, and Lincoln for title to the property. Bush by then had disappeared, leaving Vance and Lincoln responsible for the debt. Lincoln wanted to settle the matter by paying off Mather, but Mather rejected the offer and in 1816, after a court battle, resumed ownership of the land.
In light of the quicksand-like conditions of Kentucky real estate, Thomas Lincoln’s decision to move to southern Indiana, where property was surveyed and sold by the federal government, was a sound one. This move from risky to secure land ownership seems to have had a lasting impact on Abraham Lincoln, many of whose later activities, as we shall see, related to his desire for justice in land policy, from his precise mapping of lots as a surveyor, through his demands as a congressman for James Polk to name the exact place where the Mexican War broke out, through to his dedication as president to providing western homesteads for the poor.
In Indiana, Thomas Lincoln proved that he was capable of navigating unpredictable economic conditions. Congress had divided Indiana land into 160-acre subdivisions cheaply priced for settlers. In October 1817, Thomas, after “squatting” for a year on property near Pigeon Creek, went on a 120-mile round-trip trek to the United States Land Office in Vincennes and purchased the land he had been farming, taking advantage of an installment plan whereby he agreed on the price of $2 an acre for 160 acres, paying only $16 as an initial down payment. Economic hard times left him cash poor and unable to complete his payments, and he returned half his acreage to the government, reducing his total debt to $160, which he paid. Later, Thomas shrewdly leveraged another Indiana property, some forty miles to the west. He managed to add 20 acres to the Pigeon Creek property, which he sold at a profit just before moving with his family to Illinois.
He handled other difficulties adeptly, too. Establishing himself on the Indiana frontier—“a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods,” as Lincoln later described it—was a severe challenge.19 On a knoll at Pigeon Creek, Thomas built an eighteen-by-twenty-foot cabin, initially windowless and floorless, which housed the Lincolns for thirteen years. Nancy’s aunt and uncle Betsy and Thomas Sparrow, along with her eighteen-year-old cousin Dennis Hanks, arrived from Kentucky in 1817 and moved into a shelter on the property that Thomas had built before the
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