"Honest Abe": A Study in Integrity Based on the Early Life of Abraham Lincoln

He who seeks to understand the character and achievement of Abraham Lincoln must begin with a study of the man’s honesty. At the base of his nature, in the tap-root and very fiber of his being, pulsed a fidelity to truth, whether of thought or of deed, peculiar to itself. So thoroughgoing was this characteristic that it seems to have begun in him where in other men it generally leaves off. Politicians without number have yielded a work-a-day obedience to the rules of honor, but there is record of no other public leader in recent times who, among the vicissitudes of a trying career, has endeavored to balance actions and principles with such painstaking nicety. To trace these efforts from Lincoln’s early years is to pass with him, pace for pace, over part of the road that led to distinction. As we go we shall have to take account of happenings, little as well as big; for every man is the sum of all his parts, and in no other way may we hope to comprehend how the esteem that began with a few rustic neighbors grew until it filled the heart of a nation.

To what extent, if any, Lincoln inherited his uprightness of mind from remote ancestors will probably never be known. The bare lines of the genealogical chart afford no clues to the characters of the men and women whose names appear there. If any of the threads spun out of their several lives met and twined in the broad strand of blue that enriched his, there is no way of identifying the spinners. Less obscure, though perhaps of only passing interest, is what may be gleaned under this head about two of Lincoln’s nearer relations. His father’s brothers, Mordecai and Josiah, appear to have enjoyed general respect on account of their probity. “They were excellent men,” said one who claimed to know them intimately, “plain, moderately educated, candid in their manners and intercourse, and looked upon as honorable as any men I have ever heard of.”[i-1] Their younger brother Thomas, however, cannot be so readily portrayed. He has, like his illustrious son, been, in turn, depreciated and idealized to such a degree that the inquirer, who would reach safe conclusions in respect to him, must tread warily through a maze of contradictions.

Rejecting the praise as well as the blame of hearsay historians, and following the testimony of those only who knew the man, we learn from one that he was “honest”; from another that he “was regarded as a very honest man”; and still another found him “always truthful--conscientious.”[i-2] To these tributes must be added what one who was doubly connected with Thomas Lincoln had to say about him:--

“I’m just tired of hearing Grandfather Lincoln abused,” said Mrs. Dowling, the daughter of Dennis Hanks and Matilda Johnson, speaking to an attentive listener, not many years ago. “Everybody runs him down.”

Then, going on to free her mind woman-fashion, she continued:--

“Uncle Abe got his honesty, and his clear notions of living, and his kind heart from his father. Maybe the Hanks family was smarter, but some of them couldn’t hold a candle to Grandfather Lincoln when it came to morals. I’ve heard Grandfather Lincoln say, many a time, that he was kind and loving, and kept his word, and always paid his way, and never turned a dog from his door.”[i-3]

These qualities, so admirable in Thomas, were not lacking, it should be mentioned, in that particular member of “the Hanks family,” his cousin Nancy, with whom he mated.[i-4] She is said to have brought to the rude Kentucky cabin, in which they began their married life, a sweetness of spirit and a firmness of character that nicely supplemented his rugged integrity. Yet here again traditions are more plentiful than facts, and the repute of the little family, in those early days, so far as it affords a point of departure for the study of Abraham Lincoln’s straightforwardness, rests, in a manner, on the word of one neighbor,--a man of standing, however,--according to whom “they were poor,” but “they were true.”[i-5]

The poverty of the frontier, it has been said, is no poverty; but the Lincolns were poor almost to a proverb. Their condition appears to have been extreme, even for the primitive Kentucky settlement at Elizabethtown where they made their first home. The young husband was a carpenter by trade, but his new neighbors, with the self-reliance of pioneers, managed to do for themselves most of the work wherewith he had hoped to support his family. Its needs grew with the birth of a little daughter, but not its resources, which he presently sought to eke out by farming. The hut in Elizabethtown was abandoned for another hut and a piece of tillable land that Thomas had bought,--presumably on credit,--about fourteen miles away, near the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek.[i-6] There, in the following winter, was born the boy who became known to fame as Abraham Lincoln. He must have felt at an early age the tooth of the “stinted living” in those “pinching times,” to which, during later life, he once sadly referred; for his father did not prosper with the hoe, any more than he had with the hammer. After a few unfruitful years on Nolin Creek, Thomas relinquished the place for a better farm, in the Knob Creek region, about fifteen miles distant, acquired like its predecessor on easy terms. Yet the fortunes of the family did not mend. Its luckless head “was always lookin’,” as Cousin Dennis said, “fur the land o’ Canaan.” To his pioneer’s vision the There ever seemed fairer than the Here. So removal followed removal,--now in Kentucky, then into Indiana, and again into Illinois,--until, to borrow one of Abraham’s little stories, the chickens, if there were any, might have lain on their backs and crossed their legs to be tied, whenever they saw the wagon sheets brought out.[i-7]

Thomas Lincoln’s futile shifts need not be set forth at length here,[i-8] but certain aspects of his inability to get on in the world have a peculiar significance. He responded with ready good nature to calls upon his time or his hospitality; and though he appears to have understood many things, he never learned how to turn his dealings with the little world around him to his own account. The few business ventures, in which he is said to have engaged, reveal how woefully he was lacking in what has been called “money sense.” A typical instance, related by his son many years after the event, may have suggested to the narrator that there were at least two members of the Lincoln family who had each a blind side in the direction of the almighty dollar. Here is the story substantially as Abraham related it:--

“Father often told me of the trick that was played upon him by a ‘pair of sharpers.’ It was the year before we moved from Kentucky to Indiana that father concluded to take a load of pork down to New Orleans. He had a considerable amount of his own, and he bargained with the relations and neighbors for their pork, so that altogether he had quite a load. He took the pork to the Ohio River on a clumsily constructed flat-boat of his own make. Almost as soon as he pushed out into the river a couple of sleek fellows bargained with him for his cargo, and promised to meet him in New Orleans where they arranged to pay him the price agreed upon. He eagerly accepted the offer, transferred the cargo to the strangers, and drifted down the river, his head filled with visions of wealth and delight. He thought that he was going to accomplish what he had set out to do, without labor or inconvenience. Father waited about New Orleans for several days, but failed to meet his whilom friends. At last it dawned upon him that he had been sold, and all that he could do was to come back home and face the music.”[i-9]

Consoling himself after such mishaps with the indolent philosophy of “Luck is ag’in’ me,” and “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,” Thomas would return to his sporadic farming, or to what he liked better--his rod and his gun. For there is a tradition that this unthrifty fellow--honest and well-meaning though he was--had a distaste for manual labor. When work had to be done he did it, after a fashion, nor did he spare the boy who was growing up at his side; but further than that he apparently did not go. Indeed, it may be doubted whether the father ever found, along their limited horizon, the path which might have led either him or his son to business success. They certainly did not enter upon it. Yet if Thomas Lincoln failed to teach Abraham how to put money in their purse, let it be remembered, to his lasting credit, that he did show him how an empty sack might--despite a time-honored adage to the contrary--stand upright.

Noteworthy as was the father’s influence on the boy’s character, that of the mother appears to have been of deeper consequence. Lincoln’s earliest recollections of her, as he recalled in later years, pictured his sister and himself seated at her feet eagerly listening to the books that she read or the tales that she told. The poor lady succumbed early to the hardships of the Indiana backwoods; and the few facts that are known concerning her brief life set forth but a meager story.[i-10] If “the world knows nothing of its greatest men,” may this not be so, in a measure, because it knows nothing of their mothers? The deficiency, as far as Nancy Hanks is concerned, was supplied, for all time, in perhaps the most pithy yet comprehensive tribute that a distinguished son ever uttered to the memory of a parent. Looking down over his career from the last eminence, and tracing it all back again to the frail, sweet-faced woman whose life had flickered out before his wondering gaze, in the cabin home of his boyhood, Lincoln once said, with moist eyes: “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”[i-11]

When she passed on, the lad, it is true, was not quite eleven years old; nevertheless her teachings, during that first plastic period, had evidently left their sterling impress in his nature.

Nor did the home influence for right living stop there. After an interval of about a year, Thomas sought another mate. Leaving the little ones to manage the household on Little Pigeon Creek as best they might, he retraced his steps to Elizabethtown and offered himself in marriage to Mrs. Sarah Bush Johnston. She is said to have refused him, in their younger days, for Daniel Johnston, who, by a coincidence, had left her a widow with as many children as waited for her visitor at home.[i-12] On this occasion the lady listened more favorably to his proposal, yet she pointed out an obstacle, saying: “Tommy Lincoln, I have no objection to marrying you, but I cannot do it right off, for I owe several little debts which must first be paid.” To which he replied: “Give me a list of your debts.”

They amounted to about twelve dollars--not so mean a sum in those days of small things as present standards might indicate. At any rate, within a few hours our suitor had paid them, and had married the fair debtor. The settlement of these little accounts was, in a way, the central incident of their short courtship.[i-13] It puts one in mind of the good repute enjoyed by the Lincolns, from the beginning, in Elizabethtown. If the neighbor, who declared Thomas and his first wife to have been poor but true, had seen him and his second wife set out for home in a four-horse wagon loaded with her wealth of household belongings,--to say nothing of the three blooming Johnston children,--there might have been some hesitation about repeating the word “poor”; but in the face of those receipted bills, there would probably have been no desire to modify the word “true.”[i-14]