CHAPTER I.

THE ORIGIN OF THE LINCOLN FAMILY.—THE LINCOLNS IN KENTUCKY.

The family from which Abraham Lincoln descended came to America from Norfolk, England, in 1637. A brief table[1] will show at a glance the line of descent:

_Samuel Lincoln_, born in 1620. Emigrated from Norfolk County, England, to Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1637. His fourth son was

_Mordecai Lincoln_, born in 1667. His eldest son was

_Mordecai Lincoln_, born in 1686. Emigrated to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, 1714. His eldest son was

_John Lincoln_, born before 1725. In 1758 went to Virginia. His third son was

_Abraham Lincoln_, date of birth uncertain. In 1780, or thereabouts, emigrated to Kentucky. His third son was

_Thomas Lincoln_, born in 1778, whose first son was

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Sixteenth President of the United States.

Footnote 1:

This table was prepared especially for this work by the Hon. L. E. Chittenden of New York, Register of the Treasury under Mr. Lincoln. In the Appendix will be found a full memorandum of Lincoln’s genealogy, also prepared by Mr. Chittenden.

For our present purpose it is not necessary to examine the lives of these ancestors farther back than the grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, who has been supposed to have been born in Virginia in 1760. A consideration of the few facts we have of his early life shows clearly that this date is wrong. It is known that in 1773 Abraham Lincoln’s father, John Lincoln, conveyed to his son a tract of two hundred and ten acres of land in Virginia, which he hardly would have done if the boy had been but thirteen years of age. We know, too, that in 1780 Abraham Lincoln had a wife and five children, the youngest of whom was at least two years old. Evidently he must have been over twenty years of age, and have been born before 1760. Probably, too, his birthplace was Pennsylvania, whence his father moved into Virginia about 1758.

Abraham Lincoln was a farmer, and, by 1780, a rich one for his time. This we know from the fact that in 1780 he sold a tract of two hundred and forty acres of land for “five thousand pounds of current money of Virginia;” a sum equal to about $17,000 at that date. This sale was made, presumably, because the owner wished to move to Kentucky. He and his family had for several generations back been friends of the Boones. The spell the adventurous spirit of Daniel Boone cast over all his friends, Abraham Lincoln felt; and in 1780, soon after selling his Virginia estate, he visited Kentucky, and entered two large tracts of land. Some months later he moved with his family from Virginia into Kentucky.

Abraham Lincoln was ambitious to become a landed proprietor in the new country, and he entered a generous amount of land—four hundred acres on Long Run, in Jefferson County; eight hundred acres on Green River, near Green River Lick; five hundred acres in Campbell County. He settled near the first tract, where he undertook to clear a farm. It was a dangerous task, for the Indians were still troublesome, and the settlers, for protection, were forced to live in or near forts or stations. In 1784, when John Filson published his “History of Kentucky,” though there was a population of thirty thousand in the territory, there were but eighteen houses outside of the stations. Of these stations, or stockades, there were but fifty-two. According to the tradition in the Lincoln family, Abraham Lincoln lived in one of these stockades.

All went well with him and his family until 1788. Then, one day, while he and his three sons were at work in their clearing, an unexpected Indian shot killed the father. His death was a terrible blow to the family. The large tracts of land which he had entered were still wild, and his personal property was necessarily small. The difficulty of reaching the country at that date, as well as its wild condition, made it impracticable for even a wealthy pioneer to own more stock or household furniture than was absolutely essential. Abraham Lincoln was probably as well provided with personal property as most of his neighbors, and much better than many. He had, for a pioneer, an unusual amount of stock, of farming implements, and of tools; and his cabin contained comforts which were rare at that date. The inventory of his estate, recently found at Bardstown, Kentucky, and here published for the first time, gives a clearer idea of the life of the pioneer Lincoln, and of the condition in which his wife and children were left, than any description could do:

INVENTORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S ESTATE.[2]—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.

“At the meeting of the Nelson County Court, October 10, 1788, present Benjamin Pope, James Rogers, Gabriel Cox, and James Baird, on the motion of John Coldwell, he was appointed administrator of the goods and chattels of Abraham Lincoln, and gave bond in one thousand pounds, with Richard Parker security.

Footnote 2:

We owe this interesting document to the courtesy of R. T. Durrett, LL.D., of Louisville, Kentucky, a gentleman who for many years has made a specialty of the pioneer history of his State, and through whose energetic and intelligent researches most of the documents concerning the pioneer Abraham Lincoln have been unearthed.

“At the same time John Alvary, Peter Syburt, Christopher Boston, and William [John (?)] Stuck, or any three of them, were appointed appraisers.

“March 10, 1789, the appraisers made the following return:

£. _s._ _d._ 1 Sorrel horse 8 1 Black horse 9 10 1 Red cow and calf 4 10 1 Brindle cow and calf 4 10 1 Red cow and calf 5 1 Brindle bull yearling 1 1 Brindle heifer yearling 1 Bar spear-plough and tackling 2 5 3 Weeding hoes 7 6 Flax wheel 6 Pair smoothing-irons 15 1 Dozen pewter plates 1 10 2 Pewter dishes 17 6 Dutch oven and cule, weighing 15 pounds 15 Small iron kettle and cule, weighing 12 pounds 12 Tool adds 10 Handsaw 5 One-inch auger 6 Three-quarter auger 4 6 Half-inch auger 3 Drawing-knife 3 Currying-knife 10 Currier’s knife and barking-iron 6 Old smooth-bar gun 10 Rifle gun 55 Rifle gun 3 10 2 Pott trammels 14 1 Feather bed and furniture 5 10 Ditto 8 5 1 Bed and turkey feathers and furniture 1 10 Steeking-iron 1 6 Candle-stick 1 6 One axe 9 ——— —————— ————— £68 16_s._ 6_d._

PETER SYBURT, CHRISTOPHER BOSTON, JOHN STUCK.”

Soon after the death of Abraham Lincoln, his widow moved from Jefferson County to Washington County. The eldest son, Mordecai, who inherited nearly all of the large estate, became a well-to-do and popular citizen. The deed-book of Washington County still contains a number of records of lands bought and sold by him. At one time he was sheriff of his county, and, again, its representative in the legislature of the State. Mordecai Lincoln is remembered especially for his sporting tastes and his bitter hatred of the Indians. General U. F. Linder of Illinois, who, as a boy, lived near Mordecai Lincoln in Kentucky, says: “I knew him from my boyhood, and he was naturally a man of considerable genius; he was a man of great drollery, and it would almost make you laugh to look at him. I never saw but one other man whose quiet, droll laugh excited in me the same disposition to laugh, and that was Artemus Ward. He was quite a story-teller. He was an honest man, as tender-hearted as a woman, and, to the last degree, charitable and benevolent.

“Lincoln had a very high opinion of his uncle, and on one occasion said to me: ‘Linder, I have often said that Uncle Mord had run off with all the talents of the family.’

“Old Mord, as we sometimes called him, had been in his younger days a very stout man, and was quite fond of playing a game of fisticuffs with any one who was noted as a champion. His sons and daughters were not talented like the old man, but were very sensible people, noted for their honesty and kindness of heart.” Mordecai remained in Kentucky until late in life, when he removed to Hancock County, Illinois.

Of Josiah, the second son, we know very little more than that the records show that he owned and sold land. He left Kentucky when a young man, to settle on the Blue River, in Harrison County, Indiana, and there he died. The two daughters married into well-known Kentucky families: the elder, Mary, marrying Ralph Crume; the younger, Nancy, William Brumfield.

THOMAS LINCOLN’S BOYHOOD AND YOUNG MANHOOD.

The death of Abraham Lincoln was saddest for the youngest of the children, a lad of ten years at the time, named Thomas, for it turned him adrift to become a “wandering laboring-boy” before he had learned even to read. Thomas seems not to have inherited any of the father’s estate, and from the first to have been obliged to shift for himself. For several years he supported himself by rough farm work of all kinds, learning, in the meantime, the trade of carpenter and cabinet-maker. According to one of his acquaintances, “Tom had the best set of tools in what was then and now Washington County,” and was “a good carpenter for those days, when a cabin was built mainly with the axe, and not a nail or bolt-hinge in it; only leathers and pins to the door, and no glass, except in watches and spectacles and bottles.”[3] Although a skilful craftsman for his day, he never became a thrifty or ambitious man. “He would work energetically enough when a job was brought to him, but he would never seek a job.” But if Thomas Lincoln plied his trade spasmodically, he shared the pioneer’s love for land, for when but twenty-five years old, and still without the responsibility of a family, he bought a farm in Hardin County, Kentucky. None of his biographers have ever called attention to this fact, if they knew it. A search made for this work in the records of Hardin County first revealed it to us, and we cannot but regard it as of importance, proving as it does that Thomas Lincoln was not the shiftless man he has hitherto been pictured. Certainly he must have been above the grade of the ordinary country boy, to have had the energy and ambition to learn a trade and secure a farm through his own efforts by the time he was twenty-five. He was illiterate, never doing more “in the way of writing than to bunglingly write his own name.” Nevertheless, he had the reputation in the country of being good-natured and obliging, and possessing what his neighbors called “good strong horse-sense.” Although he was “a very quiet sort of man,” he was known to be determined in his opinions, and quite competent to defend his rights by force if they were too flagrantly violated. He was a moral man, and, in the crude way of the pioneer, religious.

Footnote 3:

Christopher Columbus Graham, as reported by H. W. Cleveland of Louisville, Ky., in an interview in 1884, in Mr. Graham’s hundredth year, and never before published.

Thomas Lincoln learned his trade as carpenter in Elizabethtown, in the shop of one Joseph Hanks. There he met a niece of his employer, Nancy Hanks, whom, when he was twenty-eight years old, he married. Nancy Hanks was, like her husband, a Virginian. Her experience in life had, too, been similar to her husband’s, for the Hanks family had been drawn into Kentucky by the fascination of Boone, as had the Lincolns. But it was only in her surroundings and her family that Nancy Hanks was like Thomas Lincoln. In nature, in education, and in ambition she was, if tradition is to be believed, quite another person. Certainly a fair and delicate woman, who could read and write, who had ideas of refinement, and a desire to get more from life than fortune had allotted her, was hardly enough like Thomas Lincoln to be very happy with him. She was still more unfit to be his wife because of a sensitive nature which made her brood over her situation—a situation made the more hopeless by the fact that she had neither the force of character nor strength of body to do anything to improve it; if, indeed, she had any clear notion of what it lacked. Hers was that pitiful condition where one feels with vague restlessness that life has something better than one has found, something not seen or understood, but without which life will never be complete.

Thomas and Nancy Lincoln were married near Beechland, in Washington County, Kentucky, on June 12, 1806. The wedding was celebrated in the boisterous style of one hundred years ago, and was followed by an infare, given by the bride’s guardian. To this celebration came all the neighbors, and, according to that entertaining Kentucky centenarian, Dr. Christopher Columbus Graham, even those who happened in the neighborhood were made welcome. He tells how he heard of the wedding while “out hunting for roots,” and went “just to get a good supper.” “I saw Nancy Hanks Lincoln at her wedding,” continues Mr. Graham, “a fresh-looking girl, I should say over twenty. I was at the infare, too, given by John H. Parrott, her guardian—and only girls with money had guardians appointed by the court. We had bear-meat; ... venison; wild turkey and ducks; eggs, wild and tame, so common that you could buy them at two bits a bushel; maple sugar, swung on a string, to bite off for coffee or whiskey; syrup in big gourds; peach-and-honey; a sheep that the two families barbecued whole over coals of wood burned in a pit, and covered with green boughs to keep the juices in; and a race for the whiskey bottle.”

After his marriage Thomas Lincoln settled in Elizabethtown. His home was a log cabin, but at that date few people in the State had anything else. Kentucky had been in the Union only fourteen years. When admitted, the few brick structures within its boundaries were easily counted, and there were only log schoolhouses and churches. Fourteen years had brought great improvements, but the majority of the population still lived in log cabins, so that the home of Thomas Lincoln was as good as those of most of his neighbors. Little is known of his position in Elizabethtown, though we have proof that he had credit in the community, for the descendants of two of the early storekeepers of the place still remember seeing on their grandfathers’ account books sundry items charged to T. Lincoln. Tools and groceries were the chief purchases he made, though on one of the ledgers a pair of “silk suspenders,” worth one dollar and fifty cents, was entered. He not only enjoyed a certain credit with the merchants of Elizabethtown; he was sufficiently respected by the public authorities to be appointed in 1816 a road surveyor, or, as the office is known in some localities, supervisor. It was not, to be sure, a position of great importance, but it proves that he was considered fit to oversee a body of men at a task of considerable value to the community. Indeed, all of the documents which we have been able to discover, mentioning Thomas Lincoln, show him to have had a much better position in Hardin County than he has been credited with.