THE LINCOLN LINEAGE President Lincoln's ancestral lineage traces back to England. The first to cross over landed in Massachusetts, from whence the name appeared in Pennsylvania, later in northern Virginia and still later in Kentucky. The Lincoln ancestry were a stalwart, hardy, rugged, industrious, honest people, none having educational excellence but all averaging with their surroundings. He inherited physically the Lincolnian type, whence his personality; but mentally, the attractiveness of Nancy Hanks, whence a comprehensiveness of wonderful capacity. Thus did paternity and maternity combine in making a great life. THOMAS LINCOLN Thomas Lincoln, the President's father, was literally uneducated. He was an honest, faithful, hardworking carpenter but not thrifty. He died in Illinois in 1851 but lived long enough to see something of the future awaiting his son. NANCY HANKS All agree that Nancy Hanks was an exceptionally interesting and personally attractive woman. A devoted wife and mother. In the totality her life was admirable. This estimate exemplifies a nobility of character. HIS FATHER MOVES TO INDIANA, WHERE HIS MOTHER DIES Thomas Lincoln, with his family, when Abraham was eight, moved to Spencer County, Indiana-the year that state was admitted to the Union-where a rude home was constructed upon a contemplated farm a few miles from Gentryville. Two years later Nancy Hanks Lincoln passed to her reward. This sad loss bore heavily upon the boy Abraham. His good mother had taught him to read, and to write a beautiful, readable, round-letter hand, which he ever after used. Nancy Hanks Lincoln was buried in the rudest way in a nearby ground without service. A little later Abraham wrote a distant clergyman soliciting his service and months afterward the good clergyman, on horseback, came to the Lincoln home and held a beautiful service at the mother's grave, which was attended by the neighbors for miles around. It was a great satisfaction to Abraham that his dear mother had taught him, so that at the age of ten, he could write the clergyman, who had journeyed many miles to render the service that finally committed his mother to the care of her God. It very impressively affected the boy, greatly influencing his boyhood; and acting kindly in moulding that noble manhood upon which so many love to dwell. Nancy Hanks Lincoln's burial ground now has public recognition. THOMAS LINCOLN'S SECOND MARRIAGE Thomas Lincoln afterward married a Mrs. Johnson, a widow with three children. Abraham's new mother was a noble woman, as he in later life frequently said; and he was a noble boy, as she often said, never crossing her advice or giving her an unkind word or committing an act of disobedience. She had a fair education and kindly taught the boy in his early endeavors as he rested many an evening upon the fireplace hearth, reading some borrowed book by the light of a pine knot fire. This good woman was indeed a good mother, alike to her own and her adopted children. She had means of her own and very soon changed the open front hovel of the home she found to a closed-in, window-lighted log house. She supplied comfortable beds and bedding for the family, and otherwise made the home of Abraham Lincoln very much better than it had been. Thomas Lincoln was a better carpenter than farmer, and much of his time was spent among the neighbors doing carpenter work while his wife and the children did the farming; thus sped away, as birds on the wing, those years of his life, in which he became a young man. REMOVAL TO ILLINOIS The boy Abraham lived with his parents until of age, assisting in all helpful ways to keep the strap and buckle together. At this time, 1830, Thomas Lincoln, with his family of seven and his household effects, moved from the Indiana home, by a four-ox team driven by the boy Abraham, to a new home in Illinois near Decatur, Macon County, where Abraham assisted in opening up the new farm. He split the rails that fenced the first corn field, holding the plow that turned the sod for the corn. DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI TO NEW ORLEANS In the spring of 1828, at the age of nineteen, young Lincoln, with another young man, made a trip to New Orleans down the Mississippi, on a flat boat of his own construction loaded with bacon and other farm products. They disposed of the cargo to such excellent advantage that again, three years later, he was employed to make another trip with another young man down the same old river to the same old city with the same kind of cargo, which trip was also a success. The navigation of the river and the general management of these trips, nothwithstanding his youth, were upon young Lincoln. |