The Women in Lincoln’s Life

From all accounts, Lincoln was ashamed of his mother. In his autobiographical musings he said little about Nancy Hanks. He visited her grave only once and never had it marked with a headstone. In a letter written in 1836, he matter-of-factly recorded a callous description of his mother’s “want of teeth [and] weather-beaten appearance.” Yet he apparently believed that to her noble bloodline he owed much of his success. His fierce ambition-his driving desire to be someone-came, he confided to Herndon,from his mother.1
My mother was the illegitimate daughter of Lucy Hanks and a well-bred Virginia planter or farmer,” Lincoln reportedly confided to Herndon. “My grandmother was poor and credulous, and she was shamefully taken advantage of by the man. My mother inherited his qualities, and I hers.” According to Herndon, Lincoln was convinced that from this unknown grandfather he acquired his “power of analysis, logic, mental ability, ambition, and all the qualities that distinguish him from…the Hanks family.”2
Lincoln made his comments to Herndon as the two shared a buggy ride en route to a distant court case about 1851. As the buggy jolted over the country road, Lincoln added ruefully, “God bless my mother. All that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.” He then lapsed into silence and was “sad and absorbed,” Herndon said. Finally, Lincoln spoke again, telling Herndon: “Keep it a secret while I live.”3
Lincoln knew that his mother, with all her limitations – including the inability to write – was a strong woman. She was strong-minded and had “remarkably keen perception,” according to her maternal cousin Dennis Hanks. These were uncommon traits within the Hanks family, which was notable for notorious philanderers and numerous cases of illegitimacy. Lincoln’s own grandmother, Lucy hanks, was charged with “fornication” by a grand jury in Mercer County, Kentucky. No wedding certificate was ever found for her.4
Nancy Hanks may have continued the family’s illicit tradition. An Indiana neighbor who was Lincoln’s age, Laurinda Mason Lanman, told an interviewer: “My mother… liked [the Lincolns] but she always said that not only was Nancy Hanks an illegitimate child herself but that Nancy was not what she ought to have been herself. Loose.” Lincoln may have known about her disgraceful reputation, according to Herndon. Lincoln told Herndon that “his [relatives] were lascivious – lecherous not to be trusted.”5
In early childhood, nancy was taken from her mother – afterwards married to Henry Sparrow – and sent to live with her aunt and uncle, Thomas and Elizabeth Hanks Sparrow. Then inlate 1805, when Nancy was twenty-two, she drifted to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and lived briefly with her uncle, Joseph Hanks.
Thomas Lincoln, described by a neighbor as “an uneducated… plain unpretending plodding man,” walked into Hanks’s carpentry shop that winter and asked to be an apprentice. The rapidly growing frontier town needed carpenters, and Hanks needed help, so he hired Thomas. Soon, Hanks introduced Thomas to Nancy, and he began courting her.6
Like Thomas, Nancy “cared nothing for forms, ettiqutte, and customs,” according to Herndon. He further described her as “a bold, daredevil person who stepped to the very verge of propriety.” At five feet ten inches and about 140 pounds, she was tall and athletic. “Ina fair wrestle, she could throw most of the menwho put her powers to test,” a local townsman would recall. “A reliable gentlemen told me he heard Jack Thomas, clerk of the Grayson Court, say he had frequently wrestled with her, and she invariably laid him on his back.” Thomas Lincoln may never have wrestled with Nancy Hanks, but he to her, and she accepted. Thomas was twenty-eight, and Nancy was twenty-three. They were reportedly married on June 12, 1806, in Washington County, Kentucky, and afterwards set up housekeeping in a log cabin in Elizabethtown, where their first child, Sarah, was born on February 10, 1807.7
Abraham Lincoln was born in this primitive cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky, on Feb 12, 1809.