house-raising. Like the Lincolns, the Sparrows had been driven from Kentucky by an ejectment suit due to prior claims on their land. In September 1818, the Sparrows died of milk sickness, caused by drinking milk from cows that eat the poisonous white snakeroot.
Even greater tragedy for Abe came when the same illness took the life of his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who died on October 5 at thirty-four. Nancy suffered from the debilitating effects of milk sickness—trembling, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Aware that she was dying, she called Abe and his sister to her side and told them to revere God and to be good to their father and to each other.20 Thomas Lincoln placed her body in a plain coffin he had built and buried it without a marker on a knoll near the Pigeon Creek cabin.
After Nancy’s death, Dennis Hanks moved into the Lincoln cabin, where he and Abe, ten years his junior, slept in a small loft reached by climbing wooden pegs. Within a year Thomas took a trip back to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he proposed to an early acquaintance of his, Sarah Bush Johnston, now a thirty-year-old widow with two daughters and a son, who ranged in age from eight to thirteen. On December 2, 1819, Thomas and Sarah were married in Elizabethtown. Thomas returned to Indiana with Sarah and her children, and Sally and Abe had a new mother and three stepsiblings. The modest cabin now housed eight people, including the Lincolns, the Johnstons, and Dennis Hanks.
In spite of his increasingly heavy family responsibilities, Thomas remained moderately prosperous, even though the economy took a six-year tumble in the wake of the Panic of 1819, the first of several downturns, followed by deep recessions that would make the nineteenth century an economic roller coaster.21 Lincoln later recalled to Leonard Swett: “It was pretty pinching times, at first in Indiana, getting the cabin built, and the clearing for the crops; but presently we got reasonably comfortable.”22 Actually, farmers like Thomas Lincoln were in a strong position during hard times, for they adopted a subsistence lifestyle. They lacked money but not provisions. As James Hall described the situation in Indiana: “The whole population trembled on the brink of ruin. . . . Yet it is not to be inferred that the people were destitute, or desperately poor; far from it. They were substantial farmers, surrounded with all the means of comfort and happiness.”23
Far from being mired in poverty, Thomas Lincoln was often in a position to be generous to others, especially to relatives he hosted or housed. As the granddaughter of his second wife recalled, “He made a good living and I reckon would have gotten something ahead if he hadn’t been so generous. He had the old Virginia notion of hospitality. Liked to see people set up to the table and eat hearty and there was always plenty of his relations and grandmother’s [sic] willing to live on him.”24
He kept his company in good humor, for he was an excellent raconteur who “loved fun—jokes and equalled Abe in tel[l]ing Stories,” according to John Hanks, who lived with the Lincolns in Indiana for four years.25 One of his jokes was later recalled by a family member. When his second wife, Sarah, asked which of his two wives he preferred, Thomas said the question reminded him of a Kentucky friend, John Hardin, who owned two fine horses and was asked which one he liked the best. Hardin’s reply: “I can’t tell, one of them kicks and the other bites and I don’t know which is wust.”26
Both Thomas and his son shifted between humorous sociability and melancholy. Thomas “often got the ‘blues,’ had some strange sort of spells” of sadness, much like Abe, whose mood shifts were noted by many who were close to him.27 It may well be that, for both, death and other forms of loss were sources of gloom. Another blow came in 1828, when Abe’s sister, Sally, who had married an Indiana neighbor, died in childbirth. Thomas also felt painfully the vicissitudes of Kentucky land ownership and the post-1819 depression in Indiana. He is sometimes accused of self-pity for his oft-repeated comment “why everything that I ever teched either died, got killed or was lost,” but for someone who witnessed at close hand his own father’s murder and who was later severely buffeted by life, the statement is perhaps understandable.28
If Thomas and his son both experienced depression, there also was a healthier bond between them: temperance. The first three decades of the nineteenth century, when Abe grew up, was a period of astoundingly high alcohol consumption in America. In 1820, Americans spent $12 million on liquor, an amount that exceeded the total expenditure of the US government.29 By the mid-1820s, the average American consumed more than seven gallons of alcohol annually (about three times today’s per capita average). Liquor was used as a medicine from early childhood and onward, and it was served at work, at virtually all social functions, and after sports and games. In an 1842 temperance speech, Lincoln recalled that during his youth “we found intoxicating liquor, recognized by every body, used by every body, and repudiated by nobody. It commonly entered into the first draught of the infant, and the last draught of the dying man.”30 People of all callings and classes, he noted, drank.
Thomas Lincoln’s family saw alcohol production, sale, and consumption up close. Distilleries were fixtures on the Kentucky scene. Early in their marriage, Thomas and Nancy lived near a distillery in Elizabethtown. When the Lincolns moved to Sinking Spring, there was a distillery on an adjoining farm. The move to Knob Creek brought them to one of the leading centers of whiskey production in the United States. What was then the nation’s largest distillery was within two miles of the Lincoln home and within sight of Abe Lincoln’s school. Other stills were within a forty-mile radius of the Lincoln property in a region now known as the bourbon capital of the world, where whiskeys like Jim Beam, Heaven Hill, and Maker’s Mark are produced.
There was also liquor production and consumption in the extended Lincoln family. Thomas’s uncle, also named Thomas Lincoln, who ran a distillery in Fayette City, had a serious drinking problem.31 When in 1810 Uncle Thomas was sued for spousal abuse by his wife, Elizabeth, his violence was attributed to “intemperance and intoxication.”32 During the trial, it came out that his wife also suffered from alcohol dependence. Another relative with drinking issues was Mordecai Lincoln, Abe’s uncle on his father’s side. Wealthy and talented, Mordecai nonetheless was so addicted to liquor that he froze to death in a snowstorm after an evening binge made him pass out in his carriage while he was driving home.
Many political leaders were bibulous. The Kentucky-bred Henry Clay was a heavy drinker who once got so inebriated that he leaped onto a sixty-foot table at a party and danced wildly down its whole length, smashing crockery and glasses as he cavorted. Other alcoholic politicians of the era included Daniel Webster, Franklin Pierce, John Randolph, and Lincoln’s arch opponent Stephen A. Douglas. In alcohol-laced America, it seemed at times that, indeed, liquor was “repudiated by nobody,” in Lincoln’s words. Even two Baptist preachers the Lincolns often heard in Kentucky, David Elkin and William Downs, were known to be dissipated.
Given the flood of alcohol around them, it is notable that Thomas and Abe Lincoln were restrained in their drinking. A relative testified that Thomas “would take his dram, [was] not a habitual drinker—never drank on Christmas[;] had one or two apple toddy.”33 Abe rarely touched alcohol; occasionally he nursed a drink in social situations for the sake of appearance. He said of liquor, “I hate the stuff. It is very unpleasant and always leaves me flabby and undone.”34
Abe kept a close watch on the ever-growing temperance movement, which went through several phases between the 1820s and 1850s. Early in this period, Lincoln wrote temperance articles for newspapers, and later he gave temperance addresses and joined the Sons of Temperance, a group opposed to alcohol abuse. But he never became a rabid temperance advocate; he avoided the extremes of total abstinence, Washingtonian Society confessionalism (the precursor of Alcoholics Anonymous), and prohibitionism. The moderation he showed foreshadowed his approach to slavery. His involvement with the temperance movement became an important factor in his political rise.
He learned to be moderate during his youth. His refusal to drink at many social events must have raised some eyebrows, but it kept him on a steady course. Here again, his father led the way in avoiding extremes. Thomas “was temperate in his Habits, never was intoxicated in his life,” said a friend.35
Also exemplary was his father’s honesty. Lincoln’s famous honesty as a lawyer and politician had a personal precedent in his father, who was widely described as truthful. Thomas’s stepgranddaughter recalled, “Uncle Abe got his honesty and clean notions of living and his kind heart from his father.”36 A minister who interviewed Thomas’s nieces and nephews similarly concluded that the president “received from his father certain qualities of mind, . . . above all, his proverbial honesty and truthfulness.”37 Others who knew Thomas concurred that he was “a Strictly honest and hard-working Man,” “a sturdy, honest God-fearing man whom all the neighbors respected.”
Like other rural Americans of the time, Thomas needed all members of the family to help out around the house and farm. Lincoln later recalled that an axe was put in his hands when he was eight, and that instrument remained there for much of his youth and early manhood. He felled trees, split rails, and built fences. He also did farmwork such as planting seeds, sowing crops, taking grain to mills for grinding, and tending animals. During the 1820s he worked successively as a supplier of wood for steamboats, a ferry operator on the Ohio River, a carpenter, and a riverboat steersman on two trips that he took by flatboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
The fact that his father often hired him out to neighbors has been called oppressive or exploitative, but this practice was common. As Sara Quay notes, “If families were to be successful on the frontier, they depended on contributions of every member of the family unit, regardless of age, size, or interest in doing so.”38 Children as young as five were given chores, and a father could claim a son’s wages until the son was twenty-one. Therefore, Thomas Lincoln was doing nothing unusual when in the mid-1820s, under financial pressure after a friend defaulted on a loan Thomas had endorsed, he hired out Abe to neighbors doing various jobs (as ferry operator, farmhand, wood chopper, butcher, store clerk, and others) that paid between ten cents and thirty-one cents a day. Like other frontiersmen’s sons, Abe worked at his father’s behest.
Did Thomas impede his son’s education? The image of Thomas as an ignorant taskmaster who scolded the studious young Abe for reading instead of doing his farmwork is a staple of books and films, based mainly on Dennis Hanks’s comment that Abe “was a Constant and I m[a]y Say Stubborn reader, his father having Sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading.”39 To the extent that this is true, it should be noted that hostility to education prevailed on the frontier. Most country folk of the time considered schooling a frivolous distraction or a threat to the rural lifestyle. The education historian Mark Friedberger explains, “Unlike middle-class urbanites, farmers did not regard education favorably. Parents wanted their children to remain on the farm, to look after them in their old age, and then to inherit the Homestead land.”40 Parents knew that children who did receive education tended to leave their farms and move to cities, where better jobs were available.
Also, Thomas Lincoln’s Baptist faith inclined him against education. The Baptist religion was simple and pietistic, and frontier preachers, most of them uneducated, denounced “book larnin’,” which they regarded as useless in gaining God’s grace.41 These frontier ministers stood opposed to public schools, regarding them as part of an elite urban conspiracy to spread false religion and destroy local control.42
But Thomas Lincoln managed at times to rise above this widespread mistrust of education. Sarah Bush Lincoln, Lincoln’s stepmother, declared, “As a usual thing Mr. Lincoln never made Abe quit reading to do anything if he could avoid it. He would do it himself first. Mr. Lincoln could read a little & could scarcely write his name: hence he wanted, as he himself felt the uses & necessities of Education his boy Abraham to learn & he Encouraged him to do it in all ways he could.”43 Abe himself reportedly said, “My father had suffered greatly for the want of education, and he determined at an early day that I should be well educated. And what do you think he said his ideas of a good education were? We had an old dog-eared arithmetic in our house, and father determined that somehow, or somehow else, I should cipher clear through that book.”44 It makes sense that Thomas would value ciphering, because measurement and proportion were important tools in his work as a carpenter and cabinetmaker.
THE ANGEL MOTHER AND FRONTIER RELIGION
Lincoln idealized his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who died when he was nine. He once called her “my angel mother,” not only to distinguish her from his stepmother but also to sanctify her as “all that I am or ever hope to be.”45 Because so little is known about Nancy—about her unidentified father, the details of her childhood, or even her looks, which were contrastingly reported—we can’t fully say what Lincoln meant by these words, except perhaps to express his pride over her supposedly aristocratic Virginia bloodline. From what we do know about her, he may also have been referring to her strong mind and her participation in frontier religion.
Whether or not Nancy was ashamed of her premarital reputation as a “loose” woman, or of the fact that her mother, Lucy, had been indicted by a jury for fornication, and Lucy’s daughter Sarah bore six illegitimate children, we may never know.46 Nor can we be sure of the accuracy of William Herndon’s report that Lincoln expressed shame over his mother’s illegitimacy and called some members of her family “lascivious—lecherous—not to be trusted.”47
We can, however, glean certain characteristics of Nancy’s from those who knew her. While she was sometimes described as sad and quiet, her mental strength and goodness shine through in virtually all contemporary commentary. An Indiana neighbor, Nathaniel Grigsby, declared that she was known for “Extraordinary Strength of mind among the family and all who knew her: she was superior to her husband in Every way. She was a brilliant woman—a woman of good sense and Modesty.”48 Others called her “highly intellectual by nature,” “a great noble woman—a woman of a very fine cast of mind,” “a gentle, kind, smart—shrewd—social, intelligent woman.”49
She was also reputed to possess courage and physical strength—perhaps extraordinarily so, if there’s validity in the comment by two of Lincoln’s friends that she was “one of the most athletic women in Kentucky. In a fair wrestle, she could throw most of the men who ever put her powers to the test,” including a law clerk who “had frequently wrestled with her, and she invariably laid him on his back.”50
Like her husband, Nancy accepted the simple faith preached at the Baptist churches she joined in Kentucky and Indiana. She was called both “resolute, fearless, . . . cool and self-possessed amidst al
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