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
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