Lincoln's Mothers Tom and Nancy Lincoln were Christians, first affiliated with the Free-Will Baptist Church in Kentucky, and afterward with the Presbyterian Church in Indiana. Their home was a home of prayer, the Bible was read morning and evening, and Tom always returned thanks at the table. On one occasion the only thing they had for dinner was roasted potatoes. After his father had returned thanks for "these blessings", young Abe looked up and said, "Dad, I call these mighty poor blessings". His mother seems to have been a woman of superior character for her time and surroundings. She had attended a school in Virginia, and was intellectually above those around her. She was especially devoted in her Christian life, striving to live up to the teachings of the Bible, which was her daily companion, and sought to follow the scriptural injunction, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it". On Sunday she would read to her children those Bible stories so interesting to all children, and pray with them. She impressed her own ideals and convictions of righteousness indelibly on her son, and her earnest prayers made a lifelong impression upon his young mind; for he himself said, after becoming President, speaking of his mother: "I remember her prayers, and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life". "I would rather Abe would be able to read the Bible than to own a farm, if he can't have but one", said his Godly mother. As President, it was his custom when waiting for lunch to take his mother's old worn-out Bible and lie on the lounge and read. That Bible was Abraham Lincoln's guide. When Abe was nine years old his mother died, her death occurring on Octobers, 1818. A friend present at the time says: "The mother knew she was going to die, and called her children, Abe and Sarah, to her bedside. She was very weak, and the children leaned over while she gave her last message. Placing her feeble hand on little Abe's head, she told him to be kind and good to his father and sister; to both she said, 'be good to one another, expressing a hope that they might live as they had been taught by her, to love their kindred and worship God." Little did this mother, "dying amid the miserable surroundings of a home in the wilderness", dream that her name, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, was to become immortal through the ragged, barefoot, hapless lad who gazed with wondering eyes upon this strange transition. Earth's noblest crown has been wreathed about her memory, and never more beautifully told than in these words: "Though of lowly birth, the victim of poverty and hard usage, she takes a place in history as the mother of a son who liberated a race of men". The effect of this mother's prayers, teachings, and dying benediction may best be told by her own son, after he became known and loved the wide world over: "All that I am, all that I hope to be, I owe to my angel mother, blessings on her memory". Lincoln never forgot this Christian mother's life and teachings. She inspired him with pure and noble motives. Her example was one of sweetness and patience. He never forgot her motherly devotion and tenderness and care. "His character was planted in this Christian mother's life. It's roots were fed by this Christian mother's love; and those that have wondered at the truthfulness and earnestness of his mature character have only to remember that the tree was true to the soil from which it sprang". About a year after his mother's death young Abe was blessed with a stepmother, whom his father had brought from Kentucky. Her name was Sara Bush Johnston, and she was a widow with three children. She was even a stronger character than the first Mrs. Lincoln, and continued the good training and wise teaching so well begun by her predecessor. She was very fond of Abe, and he learned to love her as his own mother. She bears testimony to his goodness in these words, spoken after his death: "Abe was a good boy, and I can say what scarcely one woman in a thousand can say: "Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused in fact or appearance to do anything I requested of him. I never gave him a cross word in all my life. "His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run together, move in the same channel". He was a dutiful son to me always. I think he loved me truly." Born in a lowly hovel; reared in penury, with no gleam of light or fair surroundings; without graces, actual or acquired; without name or fame or official training; it was reserved for this strange being, late in life, to be snatched from obscurity, raised to supreme command at a supreme moment, and entrusted with the destiny of a nation. The great leaders of his party, the most experienced and accomplished men of the day, were made to stand aside; were sent to the rear, while this fantastic figure was led by unseen hands to the front and given the reins of power. During four years, carrying such a weight of responsibility as the world never witnessed before, he filled the vast space allotted him in the eyes and actions of mankind. That is to say he was inspired of God, for nowhere else could he have acquired the wisdom and the virtue. Let the nation know, let the peopled world that beheld in him "the great commoner," the incarnation of the ideal republic know, let the coming generations, looking back to him as the representative of the divine idea of free government, know that the crowning glory of Abraham Lincoln was the grandeur of his Christian Character. His faith in the living God was the supreme element in his giant personality. “He was the greatest man of his time, especially approved of God for the work He gave him to do.” (from "Abraham Lincoln, The Christian", by William J..Johnson, 1913)
Image of Lincoln superimposed on the hand written census records for Sangamom County, Springfield, Illinois, 1850. Lincoln is listed as individual #32, followed by wife Mary and son Robert. Larger Image
LINCOLN’S WORD PORTRAIT Cartoonists depicted him & word portraits were drawn by persons ranging from schoolmates to Union Soldiers. “A head, coconut shaped and somewhat too small for such a stature, covered with rough, uncombed hair, that stands out in every direction at once. His face is sharp, large-featured and unprepossessing. His eyes are deep set, under heavy brows; his forehead is high and retreating, and his hair is dark and heavy. His face was seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking. His dark-brown complexion and his black, bushy head of hair and disproportionately long neck made a fascinating combination A face furrowed, wrinkled, and indented as though it has been scarred by vitriol; a high narrow forehead, sunk beneath bushy eyebrows, too bright, somewhat dreamy eyes that seem to gaze at you without looking at you; a few irregular blotches of black bristly hair, in the place where beard and whiskers ought to grow; a close-set thin-lipped, stern mouth, with two rows of large white teeth, and a nose and ears which have been taken by mistake from a head twice the size. His hair is grizzled, his countenance sallow, and there is a sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes. His head was long and tall from the base of the brain and the eyebrow; his forehead high and narrow, inclining backward as it rose. His ears were very large and stood out; eyebrows heavy, jutting forward over small, sunken, blue eyes; nose large, long, slightly Roman and blunt; chin projecting far and sharp, curving upward to meet a thick lower lip which hung downward; cheeks flabby and sunken, the loose skin falling in folds, a mole on one cheek, and an uncommonly large Adam’s apple in his throat. His hair was dark brown, stiff and unkempt; complexion dark, skin yellow, shriveled and leathery. He had very dark skin, dry and tough, wrinkled and lying somewhat in flabby folds; dark hair, having no gray hairs, or but few, on his head. He wore a size 7 1/8 hat,. his head being six and one-half inches from ear to ear. Little gray eyes in the right place, surmounted a mole just above the right corner of his mouth. He had high, sharp and prominent cheekbones; heavy and prominent eyebrows; long, upcurved and massive jaws; a large, long and blunt nose a little awry toward the right eye; eyebrows cropped out like a huge jutting rock from the brow of a hill; a long, narrow, sallow, and cadaverous face whose flesh was shrunken, shriveled, wrinkled, and dry; a lower lip that war thick and very red-- the red being a good sign of tendency to consumption. His bushy head, with the stiff black hair thrown back, was balanced on a long and lean head-stalk. He had an odd, quaint face, sagacious not withstanding receding brow, and kindly despite the coarse, heavey-lipped mouth. He had a swarthy face with its strong features, its deep furrows, and its benignant, melancholy eyes. His neck emerged, long and sinewy, from a white collar turned down over a thin black necktie. His eyes were set so deeply that their sockets seemed to be bruised. His face, set above a wryneck, seemed like a clown face-- a sad face. “ (from Civil War Curiosities, 1994, by Webb Garrison)