Childhood and the Western Frontier

I. Lincoln’s Ancestry—Lincoln seems to have cared little about his own ancestry, believing that he was a self-made man. There is much to be said for that notion, but his family tree bears some examination in order to understand the forces that shaped Lincoln’s personality and outlook.

a. Birth—Lincoln was born February 12, 1809 on Cold Spring Farm near Hogdenville, Kentucky to Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the second child born of that union (a daughter, Sarah, was born two years earlier; a second son died while still in infancy)


b. Father’s ancestors—Thomas Lincoln was the third son born to Abraham Lincoln, after Mordecai and Josiah. The elder Abraham Lincoln moved his wife and five children from Virginia to Kentucky, where he swiftly acquired more than 5,500 acres of prime farming land in that territory. Abraham was killed in an Indian attack in 1786. Under the rules of primogeniture that governed both Virginia and Kentucky at that time, the eldest son inherited the entire estate of the father when he reached the age of majority; this left both Josiah and Thomas with nothing. Mordecai became a leading citizen in Kentucky, and his youngest brother to scramble to eek out a living.


c. Mother’s ancestors—the Hanks’ also moved from Virginia to Kentucky before the turn of the 19th century, but never acquired the level of wealth the Lincoln’s did. This lower social position is evidenced by the fact that several Hanks women bore children out of wedlock. While this situation did not have the moral ramifications that it did later in the 19th century and well past the 20th century, it does indicate that the Hanks family did not have the wherewithal to force the male party to support his offspring.

i. Nancy Hanks herself was a bastard; her mother did not marry, in fact, until she bore another child out of wedlock. After marriage to Thomas Sparrow, she bore eight more children—and farmed her two older children out to relatives.

ii. Abraham Lincoln seems to have seen his mother’s illegitimacy as an asset for him, since he thought he inherited her intelligence from here, as well as admirable attributes from her supposed father, a Virginia “gentleman.”




II. Life on the Western Frontier

a. Subsistence Farming—Subsistence farming on the frontier has shaped much of our outlook on what it meant to live there. Even subsistence farming, however, did not produce everything that families needed to live in that environment. Some of the grain produced on the frontier was processed into alcohol, which both added to the value of the raw material, and made it easier to transport the grain.

b. Market Farming—Market farming has largely been overlooked in assessing life on the frontier, because historians in the past have largely overlooked its importance in sustaining the frontier. The object of most farmers moving to the frontier was not to engage in subsistence farming, however—they could more easily do that from land that they had already largely paid for. People move to the frontier, and braved the privations there, in order to increase their chances of favorably altering their economic circumstances.

c. Commanding Labor Power

i. Free Labor—by definition, that labor not performed by slaves; also by definition, free labor was that labor performed by whites. Free labor retained the hope that someday it would be self-employed labor—that is to say, that they would work for themselves. Lincoln was an advocate for free labor his entire adult life


ii. Slave Labor—by definition, obviously, that labor that was performed by slaves. In an economy where the ability to command labor made people more prosperous, slavery where it existed made slave owners richer. Whites who did not own slaves in slaveholding regions either decided to pull up stakes and move to those regions that prohibited slave-owning, or they stayed in the hope of eventually becoming rich enough to eventually acquire some slaves (or, thirdly, they found themselves stuck because they did not have the means to move to another area, or acquire any slaves.

d. Family life on the frontier

i. Definition of frontier—The frontier can best be defined as that land which is contested by new inhabitants who are attempting to displace the previous inhabitants.

ii. Patriarchal family structure—family structure on the frontier tended to have highly demarcated lines of command, with the father having complete control over the farm fields and usually the finances (women had very little control over financial matters, large as a result of legal strictures that handed control to males)

iii. Child labor—for those families outside of the slave-holding part of the country, the labor of children within the family was extremely important. The ability to command labor at critical times during the growing season (particularly at planting and harvest) was particularly important, since this meant the difference between success and failure.

1. The need to command a large labor force during these critical times in part explains the general larger size of farming families. Children generally performed a variety of tasks around the family farm (as many still do today)—planting, harvesting, weeding, and caring for the livestock, among others.

2. Lincoln’s farm labor—Lincoln performed a variety of tasks on his father’s farms. His early growth spurt undoubtedly encouraged his father to assign him more “grown-up” tasks in addition to those usually performed by his cohorts His tendency to use his time when not actively engaged in physical labor by reading—and thinking about what he read—seemed like laziness to his neighbors, and, more importantly, to his father. This became a source of conflict between the two, and led to a degree of estrangement between them.

iv. Community and isolation—Life on the frontier we generally assume to picture as a source of great isolation, yet the life of Abraham Lincoln demonstrates that this isolation varied in degrees.

1. Life among the Hanks—after his marriage to Lincoln’s mother, Thomas Lincoln chose to live close his wife’s family. After deciding to move across the Ohio River, the Lincoln’s were joined by members of his wife’s family (Nancy Hanks’ mother and father were killed by the milk sickness before it struck Lincoln’s mother).

2. This familial closeness was in part driven be economic necessity—family ties helped to provide the impetus to provide labor at these critical junctures during the farming cycle.


3. This is not meant to downplay the isolation that did define life on the frontier. For instance, there was no doctor to attend to those who fell ill, nor any minister to provide spiritual sustenance to the dying or their families (Lincoln’s mother did not get a memorial service until nearly a year after her death, because there was no minister until an itinerent preacher passed through the region).

4. The isolation that Thomas Lincoln felt after the death of his wife and her parents, and recognition that his children needed the cared and guidance of a mother that he was not capable of providing, led him to journey back to Kentucky to seek out such a woman.


a. Sarah Bush Lincoln—recently widowed herself, she agreed to pack up her own children, and the rest of her household, and move to Indiana and create a new, blended family. Her success in this endeavor can be seen in the affection that Lincoln expressed toward her throughout his life.

e. City building on the frontier—our notions of life on the frontier usually exclude the building of cities; in fact, the common view is that when cities appear, the frontier disappears. But the frontier does not exist without cities, which provide both a market for the products produced on the frontier, as well as providing the financial means to finance the development of the frontier, and to provide those goods that made life on the frontier palatable. Lincoln’s distaste for the rural life led him to leave the farm as soon as he could free himself from his father

Lincoln and the Myths of History, Part II

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

--Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

In “Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth,” historian Richard Hofstadter raises important questions about the myths that Lincoln and those around him—as well as those who opposed him—told themselves to justify their actions. This essay also raises an interesting point about the role of the historian (and history, for that matter), in peeling away the layers of the myths that we frequently tell ourselves.

1. Lincoln as Politician—In our culture today, to call someone a “politician” is akin to using a strong epitaph; the word is used to impugn someone’s reputation. For Lincoln, however, it was a badge of honor, and a position he sought only seven months into his residency in New Salem. Lincoln remained a politician most of his adult life, except for his “years in the wilderness,” between 1848 and 1854, when he held no office for ran a campaign.

2. Lincoln the Partisan—Lincoln was not only a politician, but he was a partisan politician. He held political views in large part because they were popular with voters that he was courting. Lincoln was largely what we would today call a “realist.” This was particularly true on the issue of slavery. Privately, Lincoln supported the ending of slavery, calling it “evil.” Publicly, and politically, he opposed its extension—and, significantly, not its abolition—into those areas of the country where it was not already present.

3. Lincoln and the Rule of Law—Lincoln the lawyer supported the rule of law; that is to say, he supported laws even when he found them personally reprehensible. The most significant instance of this was his view on the Fugitive Slave Law, which Lincoln again privately found distasteful, particularly because it offered no safeguards for free blacks in the north, but which he refused to speak out on as long as it remained the law of the land.

Lincoln also held onto myths from his earlier life about the ability of the “common man” to rise above his station in life by the dint of his own abilities and hard work. This is an enduring myth, one that many Americans still believe in (and which helps to explain in part the belief that starting a small business is a key to economic prosperity).

1. Lincoln and the Labor Theory of Value—Lincoln argued for the economic position most associated with Karl Marx—the Labor Theory of Value; that is, a commodity only gained value from the labor used to produce it, and the right to regain that value belonged first and foremost to the worker whose labor gave that commodity its value. This was not as radical an idea as it has become to be seen after the rise of Marxism, and was in fact held by a good many people before the turn of the century.

a. This theory retained currency in the 19th century because in many regions in the United States, and particularly in the Northwest where Lincoln spent much of his life, workers were not yet separated from the tools of their trade, and still largely controlled their output and the sale of the goods that they produced—their labor had not year become “alienated,” to use another Marxist term.

b. Lincoln argued that the role of government was to ensure that the “common man” was provided a fair opportunity to rise to his appropriate station, according to his abilities. Lincoln failed to realize that the economic changes the country was going through—particularly industrialization, a development that was sped along as the need to produce war material became greater.

2. The Value of “Free Labor”—free labor during this time period was, by definition, the labor of white men. Most advocates of this “free labor” ideology believed that free labor would be undermined if it had to compete against slave labor, which was by definition that labor done by African Americans. Therefore, many proponents of free labor not only opposed the extension of slavery, but the settlement of African Americans in those areas that supported free labor.

a. The “Black Codes” of the Old Northwest”—several of the states created from the Northwest Territory quickly passed laws after becoming states that prohibited African Americans from permanently settling in there. These laws quickly became ignored, and African Americans settled throughout the territories in small numbers.

b. Several of these states also passed laws that prevented free blacks from voting in elections, and restricted other citizenship rights.

Lincoln during his adult life sought to “make his mark” in the world, and this, it has been argued, drove his ambition; it can also be argued that Lincoln succeeded in this ambition beyond his wildest dreams

Abraham Lincoln and the Myths of History

Abraham Lincoln is generally considered one of the two or three greatest US presidents to have held that office. Many historians consider him the greatest of presidents, certainly the one who served during the most difficult of circumstances. As we will see throughout this semester, however, many--most?--contemporaries doubted that Lincoln had the capabilities to adequately perform the job. How did those perceptions change? How do we measure this nebulous concept of “greatness”?



Abraham Lincoln has come to represent for many all that is good about the United States. A self-made man who, by his own efforts and intelligence was able to rise from a lowly backwoodsman to become president of the United States. Lincoln certainly did not attain this esteemed position based upon his good looks; he himself often referred to the ugliness that his physical presence beamed to those around him. Abnormally tall for his time at 6’4”, he was also quite thin--indeed, from what we can tell from the photographs of the man, his face often took on a gaunt look that deepened the crevices in his face.



Lincoln was also famously self-educated; his only formal education was the several months in a frontier school, were they teachers were only slightly more educated than their students. Here Lincoln learned the rudiment of reading and basic math skills: “Ciphering to a factor of three.” Although initially resistant to attending even this rudimentary school, Lincoln was soon consumed with the need to acquire more knowledge, and worked his way through the meager libraries of neighbors. By the time he reached adulthood, Lincoln had memorized large parts of the Christian Bible, parts of the plays of Shakespeare, and favored poets like Robert Burns.

Lincoln’s obsessive reading is one of the enduring images that we have of him--particularly reading by the firelight in the log cabin he was raised in. Like some other aspects of his life, this scene has been idealized; his obsession with reading was, in fact, a point of contention with his father, mainly because Lincoln devoted time to reading during the working day, when there was plentiful natural light. Lincoln abhorred physical labor, and when he reached the age when he could leave the family farm, he quickly made his escape, first on a raft down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to make money, and later to the Illinois frontier settlement of New Salem, where he clerked in a general store, began reading the law, and made his first foray into politics. With his move off the farm, he abandoned the world of physical labor, and rarely looked back on it.

New Salem eventually failed because the Sangamon River, which the town had staked its fortune to, proved to be unnavigable for boats of a commercial size. Lincoln moved to a nearby city named Springfield, further downstream on the Sangamon. Springfield was a growing commercial center when Lincoln first road awkwardly into town (Lincoln, observers tell us, did most things awkwardly), although as a larger city in the middle of the state, town fathers were in the midst of making a bid toward becoming the state capitol, since the population in the northern part of the state was beginning to grow rapidly. Before this time, the southern part of the state, populated largely by poor white farmers who had been less than successful or lost their farms in the upper South (particularly Kentucky, like Lincoln’s own father) had predominated. These refugees from the upper South tended to vote for the party of low taxes and small government; this was personified by Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party. Lincoln, on the other hand, quickly became a partisan of Kentuckian Henry Clay and the Whig Party, and particularly of Clay’s “American Plan” of government assistance for internal improvement like canals and river dredging (of the sort that would have made New Salem more likely to succeed).



In Lincoln’s early political career, we see little attention paid to slavery, the issue that would come to define his later years. The main political division in the country when Lincoln first became active in politics was the main issue that divided Democrats and Whigs, the role of government in promoting economic prosperity--by either keeping taxes low and promoting free trade, or by using public funds for internal improvements and using tariffs to protect domestic industry from foreign competition. While opposition to slavery--its abolition--interested very few whites in the country, most whites in the North were hostile to the extension of Slave Power. Slavery had been prohibited from the Northwest Territory (the country north and west of the Ohio River), and by virtue of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited the extension of slavery north of the southern boundary of the state of Missouri.

As Lincoln became more deeply involved in politics, however, this dynamic began to change, and the issue of slavery came to a more prominent position in the national consciousness. As more of the North American continent was opened up to white settlement, slave owners, dependent upon the labor of their slaves for the creation of wealth, became more strident in insisting on the right to bring their “property” with them--and the opposition to slavery, perceiving that allowing slavery into this new territory would give the slave-owning class and undue advantage, became more adamant about keeping slavery out of this “free” territory. Lincoln led the opposition to the Mexican War based on his conviction that the territory gained from Mexico from this war would be added to the slave-holding column, and tip the balance of power toward the pro-slavery forces.

After retiring from politics, Lincoln re-entered the fray in response to his long-time Illinois rival Stephen A. Douglas’ advocacy of “popular sovereignty” to decide whether slavery should be extended to these new territories. While opening this question to a popular democratic vote seemed to many to be a perfectly suitable solution to this conundrum, Lincoln foresaw the instability this plan would engender (“Bleeding Kansas”), as well as facilitating slavery’s further existence; it was expected by many that by preventing slavery’s extension that this would eventually end slavery itself. This Lincoln and others saw as a desirable situation, but this, of course, roused supporters of the continuation of slavery to greater, more desperate actions to facilitate its continuation.

This conflict eventually led Lincoln to be elected President of the United States, and led in turn to the Civil War.