The Maturing Lincoln: A Kentucky Heritage

"I am naturally anti-slavery," Abraham Lincoln wrote. "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel."

The Revolutionary War gave birth to the United States, the world's first functioning democracy. When the war ended, many, especially veterans, headed west to expand this new democracy in a challenging frontier. Armed with their long rifles, the men and hardy pioneer women and children first moved on horseback or on foot. A trickle reached a crescendo and then became a flood as settlers swept over the Appalachian Mountains and down the Ohio River to the rich western lands.

The principles of freedom and equality were a paradigm based upon the conviction that people could govern themselves. President Abraham Lincoln would declare the Union perpetual and would fight to renew the basic principles of equality and the rights of man. Abraham Lincoln as president would overturn an unjust slave system in which one man could own another. His election as president—and, most important, his reelection in 1864—would renew this legacy of equality and freedom.

The future president was named for his grandfather, Abraham, a Revolutionary War captain shot by an Indian in 1786 while taming Kentucky land. The Indian attempted to grab Abraham's young son, Thomas. But Thomas's older brother, Mordecai, raced to the cabin, took up a rifle, and shot the Indian, saving Thomas. This left Abraham's widow, Bathsheba, a niece of Daniel Boone, her sons, Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas, and her daughters, Mary and Nancy, to make their way.

Speaking of his grandfather, the future president wrote in 1854, "The story of his death by the Indians, and of Uncle Mordecai, then fourteen years old, killing one of the Indians, is the legend more strongly than all others imprinted upon my mind and memory." Yet he was neither anti-Indian nor vindictive. The English law of descents had been repealed, but Mordecai, by common consent, managed the bulk of his father's property, although inheritances went equally to each of the children.

President Lincoln's father, Thomas, was a wandering labor boy, working at times in harness with slaves rented out by their masters. Tom Lincoln, unlike the slaves, kept his earnings, and likely came to see the slaves as fellow creatures. He apprenticed as a carpenter and at age twenty-six married Nancy Hanks. She had come to Kentucky in the arms of her single mother. The intensity and fervor of Nancy Hanks—often called Nancy Sparrow at cabin religious meetings—caught the eye of Tom Lincoln.

Tom was fresh back from one of his trips to New Orleans when he and Nancy were wed on June 6, 1806. As a married man assuming new responsibilities, Tom settled into the carpentry trade in Elizabethtown. When a daughter was born in 1807, Nancy christened her Sarah after her cousin, who became like a sister to Nancy when rescued from Indian captivity. Dennis Hanks praised the mind and heart of his maternal cousin, with whom he had been brought up in the Sparrow sanctuary.

Former senator turned historian, Alfred J. Beveridge, said of Nancy Hanks, "But the qualities of her mind and character were impressed more distinctly than was her physical appearance. All remember that she was uncommonly intelligent; had 'Remarkable Keen perception,' as Dennis Hanks put it [to Herndon]. Dennis waxed enthusiastic about the mind and heart of his maternal cousin with whom he had been brought up in the Sparrow sanctuary calling her shrewd and smart."

Hanks described both Nancy and Tom: "Her memory was strong ... her judgment was acute almost. She was spiritually & ideally inclined —not dull—not material—not heavy in thought—feeling or action. Thomas Lincoln ... could beat his son telling a story—cracking a joke ... a good, clean, social, truthful & honest man, loving like his wife everything and everybody. He was a man who took the world easy—did not possess much envy. He never thought that gold was God."

As 1807 ended, Thomas moved fourteen miles to a three-hundred-acre spread in the "Barrens" on the south fork of Nolin Creek, known as the Sinking Spring Farm. In 1808 Tom, Nancy, and Sarah moved to Nolin Creek. Tom cut logs from the forest and built a modest cabin with only a hard-packed dirt floor. Abe was born in 1809 in this Nolin cabin and named for the slain Grandpa Abraham. As he grew, Abe would trail his father in the fields and hear Nancy sing Bible verses while doing chores.

Tom and Nancy attended Long Run Baptist Church, where Ben Lynn preached. He had a long association with the antislavery Baptists associations that adopted resolutions condemning slavery as an evil. The slave patroller, Christopher Bush, was a neighbor. Bush's duties becoming demanding, Tom Lincoln was drafted to assist, but stayed only one term, suggesting an inclination against slavery. Abe wrestled with all and likely developed his conviction that slavery was wrong.

Tom often recounted the story of the death of Grandfather Abraham, the resulting hardship, and his trips to New Orleans. When strangers and neighbors stopped, Abe often too boldly took hold of the conversation, and Tom sometimes cuffed him for his brashness. Abe fetched water or tools for his father and absorbed the talk as he trailed Thomas doing his chores. After three years on this...