The Gettysburg Experience
magazine, a publication exploring the Gettysburg of yesterday and today. We offer an array of interesting articles – most of which have a direct relation to historic Gettysburg from the Colonial era through the turn of the 21st century, often with an emphasis on the famous battle that occurredin the summer of 1863.

The Gettysburg Experience also offers a comprehensive Events Calendar (for those who want to know what special happenings to attend when they visit – any time of the year), delicious recipes, Gettysburg trivia, profiles of people and area businesses,

Having served the Gettysburg area since 1997, The Gettysburg Experience now extends our magazine to a wider circulation of readers, offering a glimpse into one of America’s most fascinating towns.

Abraham Lincoln, the President most intimately connected with Gettysburg, lived in several places. Kentucky, the place of his birth, is one of three states associated with Lincoln. Lincoln left Kentucky when he was very young, and he rarely spoke of his childhood. His law partner William Herndon recalled that “There was something about his origin he never cared to dwell upon.” Yet, the arduous beginnings in the Kentucky woodlands helped to create a man of destiny, a future President who has been considered by many historians to be our greatest Commander-in-Chief.1

In February 1809, Thomas Jefferson was spending his last full month in the White House. Across the Atlantic, Napoleon was waging battle on the Iberian Peninsula to add Spain and Portugal to his list of conquests. In the dense wilderness of southwestern Kentucky, snow was falling. Sarah Lincoln, age two, had just passed the anniversary of her birth on Friday, February 10. The next day, Saturday, February 11, Thomas Lincoln, the son of a slain American settler, hurried to find the midwife who lived some distance from his cabin near Sinking Spring in Hardin County. His wife, the former Nancy Hanks, was in labor.
Early in the morning, before dawn on Sunday, February 12, a son was born to the couple, whom they named after Thomas’ father, Abraham. Ten-year-old Dennis Hanks, a cousin to the family, was with the Lincolns when the baby was born and claimed to be the first male to hold the newborn child. As Nancy, still weak from her recent difficult labor, admonished the boy to be careful, Dennis promptly handed the baby back to the mother and declared, apparently unimpressed, “He’ll never come to much.”2

Life in the Kentucky wilderness was filled with hardships, but the Lincolns were used to life on the frontier. Thomas Lincoln, in addition to farming, was well known in the area as a carpenter, and managed to supplement the family’s meager income with this trade. He also was popular with the people in the region as a storyteller, and was often entertaining them with colorful anecdotes – a trait his son, Abraham, would inherit.

Nancy Hanks had been raised by her aunt and uncle, Tom and Elizabeth Sparrow, in Kentucky. She could read, but was denied an education due to her circumstances. She never knew her father, but knew who he was. Lincoln once confided to his law partner, Billy Herndon, that his maternal grandfather was a Virginia planter. Nancy’s mother, Lucy Hanks, was likely not married when she bore her daughter in 1784.3

Nancy loved her guardians, and considered them her parents. By the time Abraham was born, the Sparrows had also taken in young Dennis Hanks, an orphan who spent much time at the Lincoln cabin near the town of Hodgenville.

In 1811, when Abraham was still very young, the Lincolns moved a few miles north to settle near the banks of Knob Creek. The creek and surrounding area were named for the rounded granite hills, or knobs, which bordered the fertile Kentucky loam.

The following year, Nancy gave birth to another son, named Thomas after his father. The child lived only a few days and died. He was buried somewhere on the property near the creek. Not long after Thomas’s death, the Lincolns almost lost their only surviving son, when, while playing with his young friend Austin Gollaher, he fell into the swollen waters of Knob Creek and nearly drowned. Luckily, Austin grabbed a stick and held it out to his struggling playmate, since neither of them knew how to swim.4

The Lincolns lived at the Knob Creek farm until Lincoln was six, when a flaw in his father’s deed caused another to claim the land. It was a common occurrence on frontier, but the Lincolns did not have the money for legal representation, or enough knowledge to fight the allegation. They left Kentucky forever, crossing the Ohio River and settling on the southern Indiana prairie. Fall turned into a frigid winter, and the family of four shivered through the season in a crude lean-to, surrounded by forests. Abraham remembered hearing wolves howl, and even “a panther’s scream” in the night. When the snow melted and spring arrived, a new cabin was immediately built on the banks of Little Pigeon Creek, with seven-year-old Abraham learning to split rails. Growing corn and wheat, the family looked forward to the arrival of the Sparrows. When Tom and Betsy Sparrow reached Pigeon Creek, the Lincolns gave them their smaller cabin and built a larger one not far away. It was big enough for a loft, where Abraham slept. Life, it seemed, was looking better in the year 1816.5

Abraham Lincoln inherited his mother’s gray eyes and her somber disposition. He described his mother as “highly intellectual…having a strong memory, acute judgment, and was cool and heroic.” Others remembered her as “spare and affectionate – the most affectionate I ever saw…never to be out of temper….she was keen, shrewd, and smart. Her memory was strong, her perception was quick.” Her love of learning was also soon apparent in her son, who soon became the only member of the family who was literate enough to both read and write. For a short time, Abraham and his sister, Sarah, attended school at Knob Creek, but because their father needed them at the farm, their formal education ended after several months. At night, by the fire, he read the Bible, the only book the family possessed. As he grew older, he borrowed books from others, always careful to return them promptly, as books were then a rare and expensive commodity.6

Lincoln and his father had a far more distant relationship. Thomas Lincoln often argued with his son over what he termed “laziness” and sometimes whipped him. Abraham knew how to work, but he soon realized that working with one’s brains was better than exhaustive manual labor. He preferred learning, and spent every spare moment in study. Tom Lincoln could not understand it, but Nancy did – and encouraged her son to educate himself. Dennis Hanks recalled that “Abe was a good boy – and affectionate one – a boy who loved his parents well and was obedient to their every wish.” 7

Abraham continued reading and studying, and, since he was the only member of the family who could write, he corresponded with friends and loved ones back in Kentucky. He would soon learn two of life’s hardest lessons, taught only by experience.
In 1818, when Lincoln was nine years old, he had his second brush with death. In charge of getting the horse to the mill to grind the wheat, the family horse was not moving as quickly as the impatient young Lincoln wanted. After being prodded and whipped repeatedly, the horse replied in kind, kicking Abraham squarely in the head. The blow knocked Lincoln senseless. His father carried the unconscious Lincoln into the house. He remained comatose all night long, while his family kept the vigil, fearing the worst. In the morning, he, miraculously, awoke, with little sign of his close call.8

In the autumn of that year, Death came calling again, and this time took several loved ones away.

Milk sickness was a horrible disease, caused by poisoned milk. During dry seasons, common in the frontier, cattle were forced to forage. If they ate snakeroot, a plant that grew at the forest’s edge in the wild, the poison in the plant not only sickened and eventually killed the cattle, but made their milk lethal as well. It was a disease greatly feared among the settlers, because few survived it. In southern Indiana in the late summer and early fall of 1818, milk sickness reached almost epidemic proportions. At that time, no one knew that snakeroot, called “tremetol” in those days, was the cause of the sickness.9

Nancy Hanks’ guardians, the Sparrows, came down with milk sickness first, and Mrs. Lincoln spent days nursing them. Whether she also drank the toxic milk, or if she came in contact with the poison while caring for them, it is not known. While the disease is not considered contagious, one could contract it by touching a washbasin that held the poisoned fluid and then accidentally ingesting it by eating before washing hands. Sanitation was not well known then, and it is likely that this is the way Nancy Hanks was infected with the disease. Thomas and Betsy Sparrow died within a week of contracting milk sickness. Dennis Hanks, who also fell ill with it, managed to survive. Nancy Hanks, never robust, fell desperately ill with the sickness and lasted only a few days.10

Knowing that she would not survive the illness, Nancy Hanks feebly called for her children to come to her bedside. Placing her hand weakly on Abraham’s head, she gave her last message to him to be good and kind to his father, and for both children to “live as I have taught you, and to love your Heavenly Father.” She died shortly afterward, at age 34.11

Because Thomas Lincoln was a carpenter, he was busy all season creating coffins for the victims of the milk sickness pandemic. Now, in the fall of 1818, he was especially busy. He fashioned his wife’s casket and needed Abraham and Dennis Hanks to help him. Abraham, just nine years old, was given the task of whittling the cogs to nail the planks together. Because it took a few days to finish the coffin, Nancy Lincoln lay in state in the room where she died. When the day of her burial came, Abraham and Dennis Hanks assisted Thomas Lincoln in placing her in the coffin, helping drag the remains to the place of burial, and placing them in the ground.12

There was no funeral service, no minister to give a eulogy. Only Thomas, Abraham, Sarah, and Dennis stood mutely at the grave that signaled the end of Nancy Hanks’ short life. The Lincolns endured the dreariest winter of their lives that year. It is only natural that, in losing her so young, Lincoln idolized his mother. “God bless my mother,” Lincoln said of her years later. “All that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.” 13

Thomas Lincoln did not remain a widower for long. Before the next year, 1819, had ended, he made the trek to Kentucky and stopped at the home of a childhood friend, Sarah Bush Johnston, also recently widowed, and proposed to her. 14

When Thomas Lincoln returned home that December, he brought his plaintive children a new Christmas gift. They had a new mother, three siblings (John, Sarah, and Mathilda) and a large cartful of handsome furniture, dishes, and other civilized items. The new Mrs. Lincoln ordered cracks in the logs plastered, a floor put in, and the furniture carried in. For the first time in his life, Abraham shared a room with a brother and cousin, and slept in a feather bed. 15

The new Mrs. Lincoln took an immediate liking to the two Lincoln children. Like Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Sally Lincoln saw intelligence in young Abraham and continued to encourage him to study and follow his dreams. She insisted that he go to school. A classmate, Nathaniel Grigsby, recalled that Abraham “was always at school early…and was always at the head of the class and passed us rapidly in his studies.”16

Many of Lincoln’s classmates knew he was destined for great things. One night, while watching the moon rise, he explained to one of them how the planets moved, and that the moon rising and sinking was just an illusion. “We do the sinking,” he explained. This classmate later said he was a natural teacher. “Where he could have learned so much, or how to put it so plainly, I could never understand,” she said. 17

It is likely that Lincoln’s knack for teaching was that he had been self-taught for much of his life. Though his formal education was brief, his learning would continue for a lifetime. By the time he was a teenager, he had committed several Bible stories and Aesop’s Fables to memory. He also read Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, some of the Works of Shakespeare, and The Life of Washington. The learning of the ages would aid him greatly in the years to come. 18

A story of the young Lincoln’s honesty comes from his step-sister, Mathilda Johnson, who was several years younger than Abraham. Because he was such a favorite with his newly knit family, Mathilda often wanted to go wherever he did. When he was not at school, he often was sent to the woods to chop wood for the fire, a heavy task that, often, took him all day. One day, Mathilda managed to escape from home and followed Abraham into the woods. Managing to overtake him, the young girl leaped on him and, surprising him, knocked him off balance. As they both fell to the ground, the axe Lincoln was carrying became imbedded in Mathilda’s ankle, and it bled profusely.

Knowing there would be trouble for her injury, and frightened by the blood, Mathilda began to cry and asked Abraham how she would explain this to her mother. “Tell the whole truth, Tilda,” he told her, “and trust your good mother for the rest.” 19

Though Fate would deal more cruel blows to Lincoln as he grew into manhood, the traits he gleaned from those who loved him and cared for him in his youth had created a solid foundation for him to build his life. By the time he stepped into Illinois, determined to make a place in the world, he had attempted to forget the many sorrows of his youth.

Yet, those influential years proved an integral part in forming the man who became Abraham Lincoln.

Sources: Herndon, William H. and Jesse W. Weik. Herndon’s Lincoln. Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press and the Knox College Lincoln Studies Center, 2006. (Reprint, originally published in 1889). The National Park Service, Lincoln Boyhood Home, Hodgenville, KY. The Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL. Oates, Stephen B. With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. New York: Harcourt & Brace and Co., 1954. Warren, Louis A. Lincoln’s Youth: Indiana Years Seven to Twenty-One, 1816-1830. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 1959. Whipple, Wayne. The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln. Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1908 (reprint).

End Notes:
1. Herndon, p. 15.
2. Whipple, p. 31.
3. Herndon, p. 25. Warren, p. 6, claims that Nancy Hanks descended from the Shipley family of Virginia, that her parents were married and her father died when she was an infant, but there is no written proof .
4. Story told at the Lincoln Boyhood Home, National Park Service, Hodgenville, KY.
5. Oates, p. 10.. Sandburg, pp. 10-11. Warren, p. 41.
6. Herndon, p. 16. Warren, p. 57.
7. Herndon, p. 28.
8. Sandburg, p. 9. Warren, pp. 45-46.
9. Warren, p. 53.
10. The Lincoln Boyhood Home, NPS, Hodgenville, KY.
11. Warren, p. 54.
12. Ibid. p. 55.
13. Herndon, p. 16. Not satisfied with the empty way his mother was buried, Abraham wrote to a Kentucky parson, of whose congregation they had belonged, and asked him to come to Pigeon Creek to deliver a eulogy over his mother’s grave. The parson, David Elkin, complied, and after the New Year, managed to travel to Indiana and gave a proper funeral for the late Mrs. Lincoln. (Warren, p. 57.)
14. Warren, p. 59. Herndon, pp. 32-34.
15. Ibid.
16. Sandburg, p. 14. Whipple, p. 8. Herndon, p. 25.
17. Herndon, pp. 33-34.
18. Warren, pp. 90-91.
19. Herndon, p. 34.