Nancy Hanks Lincoln Goes Home
There is debate about just when the new Lincoln cabin was finished. Some accounts suggest that they moved into it unfinished and extrapolate from Abe’s own autobiographical account to “prove” it. At the latest, they would have moved into the place shortly after the opening of the school. It was one room, eighteen feet by eighteen feet, with a dirt floor and no windows and a bear skin hanging as a front door but, added to the exciting prospect of an education for her children, it must have seemed to Nancy that her life was showing some signs of God’s goodness.
And then came the biggest surprise of all. Again, reader, beware. The timing is suspect and there are a dozen different versions, some with the event happening earlier and some later. Nancy was at the door of her new cabin one day when a family on a wagon appeared in the clearing, only a few yards away. There were cows trailing along behind. During these years no one passed by the Lincoln cabin. This was the end of the line. The trail into the desolate farm was not made for wagons and represented a grueling engineering feat to navigate. These people could only be coming to visit the Lincolns.
Tom and Elizabeth Sparrow were Nancy’s closest living relatives and her dearest friends. This was the aunt who, according to family history, had taken her in as a youth, teaching her how to read and sew. It is hard to think of anything that could have brought more joy to her lonely life. The Sparrows were bringing along their adopted son, Dennis Hanks, the seventeen year old illegitimate nephew of Elizabeth.[i] Dennis had lived near the Lincolns in Kentucky and was in their cabin, at Nancy’s side, the very day that young Abe had come into the world.
The Sparrows had suffered the same land title problems that Thomas Lincoln had experienced and had decided to start over in Indiana. It had to be better than Kentucky. They settled into the three sided shed that the Lincoln family had just abandoned. They would build their own cabin and farm and the two families would be neighbors and there would be milk to drink! But the milk would almost kill them all.
There flourished in that part of Indiana a tall, lush, poisonous plant called white snakeroot. The cows feasted on it, passing its venom on through their milk. For many years, even into modern times, the origin of the so-called “milk sickness” defied explanation. All that was known at the time was that some fell ill to the disease and others escaped. There was speculation that it had something to do with their cows and their milk but this was a vague notion and no one could imagine the connection to the luscious weeds growing in the woods all around them.
By the late summer of 1818, the wife of the nearby bear hunter, Peter Brooner, fell ill. Nancy Hanks made the trek up to their cabin, saw the telltale white mucous on her neighbor’s tongue and then nursed the woman for a week. Mrs. Brooner endured sharp pains to her stomach and vomited so violently that she would later collapse in exhaustion. Nancy was with her to the end when her eyes rolled up into her head and she lapsed into coma. It was not an easy death. The strenuous experience, with its inevitable outcome, must have made Nancy conscious of her own mortality and how much her children needed a healthy mother. If she were to die, what would become of them all?
There was an evil omen before the end of that summer. Abe Lincoln was kicked in the head by a mule and lay bleeding and unconscious. He would later claim that he had been “killed for a time.”[ii] For several hours he could not speak but soon recovered. His mother, bracing herself against the pain of such a loss, was philosophical about it all, leaning back deeply into the comfortable embrace of her Calvinist instincts. God would do what He would do and nothing could change it. “It was not your time, Abe,” she said when he recovered and life went on.
In the fall the milk sickness struck Tom and Elizabeth Sparrow. With help from Thomas Lincoln and their nephew, Dennis, they had managed to build their own cabin, much quicker than the Lincoln’s had been able to do so by themselves and it was just in time to serve as their tomb. The dreaded white secretion was detected on their tongues and the sharp pains to the abdomen began soon after. They were both dead within a week. Nancy grieved over the loss of her aunt, the woman who had been like a mother, who had taught her to sew and to read the Bible and learn about mansions being prepared for her. And Tom Lincoln dutifully crafted two crude coffins while young Abe carved the pegs that would hold the boards together.
They were buried in a clearing on a beautiful hillside, a quarter of a mile from the cabin, in the middle of a deer-run, where the animals raced by to a watering hole at the end of a meandering creek. Nancy had to feel great shock and pain at the loss. It would have been much better to have heard of their death in Kentucky far away, than to have had them come here and brighten her lonely days and laugh with her for a few months and then practically die in her arms. In her pain, she likely thought ahead to the summer, when there would be a break in the weather and the work, and she would have the time to return to the graves of her surrogate parents and pursue the mystery of God’s providence, but God’s providence would quickly chose another direction.
There are numerous accounts of when and how she discovered her own illness. Some suggest that she was literally taken on a sled from the deathbed of Mrs. Brooner, the bear hunter’s wife.[iii] Most have it occurring immediately after the loss of her aunt and uncle. In any case, she was soon in her bed of leaves and cornhusks, buried in bearskins, crying out for water, as her stomach burned. She knew what was coming and she knew that mercifully it would be over within a week. She retched and suffered, sweating in between her worst fits. She mumbled Bible verses until she was too weak and then asked the children to read them for her. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” And of course, there was her mantra, “In my father’s house are many mansions.” Old Tom, her husband, heard a dog howl on the second night of her illness and declared it instantly fatal. Dogs knew those things.
And Nancy knew from her experience with the disease that her rational moments would be limited, that her life could now be counted in hours. So she asked the children to come close to her bed. She ran her clammy fingers through Abe’s hair and offered barely audible words of motherly advice. She told them to be kind and good to each other and to their father. Who else was left? She told them to live as she had taught them and to “worship God.”[iv] She dropped in and out of coma during those last days, her bodily functions shutting down. The “milk sickness” was insipidly predictable. The patient always died on the seventh day. Sally and Abe hoped for a miracle. They cried over her cold body and prayed for recovery, seizing on any murmur or groan as good news. But just as in the case of all the others, on the seventh day of her illness, October 5, 1818, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, passed on. Tom put copper pennies on her eyes to hold them shut and immediately started working on her casket.
Year later, Dennis Hanks told interviewers that the misery in that cabin was indescribable. The children, Sally and Abe, cried out, “Mammy, mammy,” clinging to her cold lifeless body but there was no reply. They had heard their mother describe death in her stories in the Bible. They had seen it come to their animals and most recently to their uncle and aunt. Shortly after moving into their new cabin, Abe Lincoln had pointed a rifle between the log slats and shot a turkey wandering unwittingly nearby.[v] It made him sick, he said later. He would never kill a large animal again. He took no pleasure in death. “An ant’s life to it was as sweet as ours to us,” he once lectured a playmate.[vi] But nothing prepared him for this loss.
Charles Strozier sees guilt and oedipal tension in Lincoln’s telling of the turkey story, pointing out that it comes awkwardly and seemingly unrelated in his short autobiographical sketch, right before the death of his mother.[vii] It suggests that Lincoln felt somehow responsible for her death and carried this burden for some time.
His mother had been the only tenderness in a harsh world where wolves and bears sought to devour men and giant trees and rocky soil only yielded their treasure to brute force. His father had knocked him to the ground when he asked a question of a stranger passing by but his mother had been his window to a life beyond the horizon, to places and people he could only imagine from her fireside stories. As much as he could understand, that window was now closed forever. There was only the darkness of the forest.
Years before, in that late summer after the birth of her baby Abraham, Tom and Nancy had taken their family to a Methodist camp meeting. One or two banjo players had begun picking out a familiar tune. Soon dozens of others had recognized the verse, joining in, strumming all at once, while a blend of hundreds of voices gently lifted the melody into the nighttime sky. She was young then, and not yet so worn from her work. According to the testimony of neighbors who saw her there, Nancy was joyously abandoned to song, either because she believed that God had forgiven her sordid past or because He knew the truth of her innocence. And when they had reached the chorus and the words that the whole crowd could all easily remember, words they had hummed alone to themselves alone over fires and cooking pots all year long, they broke into a giant choir, the volume renting the heavens with their voices.
“You may bury me in the east,
You may bury me in the west,
And we’ll all rise together in that morning.”
The story of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, however true or false it may be, has become an important tale in our national history. It may reveal more about us than her. Bewildered by the spectacular rise of such a great and brilliant man from such remote and limited circumstances, early witnesses and historians distorted the story of this woman far beyond our ability to accurately reconstruct it. Even the exact location of her grave is debated, though most accept that thirty-six year old Nancy Hanks Lincoln was buried without a funeral or gravestone in the grassy knoll next to Tom and Elizabeth Sparrow, her surrogate parents. They had taken her in as an illegitimate child just as they had later taken in Dennis Hanks. Elizabeth who had taught little Nancy how to sew and read now embraced her in the grave.
After burying his mother without a word or any fanfare, an angry, grieving, nine year old Abraham Lincoln sat down and wrote an eloquent letter to an old Kentucky preacher who had admired his mother’s saintliness and sagacity. Days afterward, nine year old, Abe Lincoln could be seen sitting on his mother’s grave, weeping at his loss.[ix]
A few weeks later a letter from David Elkins arrived announcing that he would come to hold a service for the departed Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Word spread through the woods that a preacher was coming and on the appointed Sunday, a rather sizeable crowd of almost two hundred people arrived from the surrounding region. According to Carl Sandburg, Elkins was an elder in the Methodist church.[x] Other historians insist that he was a Baptist preacher.[xi] In any case, regardless of his denominational pedigree, David Elkins rose to the occasion, describing with feeling, the spirit and saintliness of Nancy Hanks.
According to witnesses at the end of his sermon the audience fell to their knees, a tribute far more appropriate than any of them could have realized. Nancy Hanks Lincoln had given birth to the greatest figure in American history. She had inspired him with her stories of a world beyond the poverty and ignorance that would eventually suffocate every other childhood figure around him. She had worked and toiled and he had felt her pain and would use his power to free ten million slaves with the stroke of a pen. So passed from this life, unheralded and unacknowledged by the powerful and the mighty of her generation, the “angel mother,” the woman who had helped shape and inspire the life of Abraham Lincoln.
There is debate about just when the new Lincoln cabin was finished. Some accounts suggest that they moved into it unfinished and extrapolate from Abe’s own autobiographical account to “prove” it. At the latest, they would have moved into the place shortly after the opening of the school. It was one room, eighteen feet by eighteen feet, with a dirt floor and no windows and a bear skin hanging as a front door but, added to the exciting prospect of an education for her children, it must have seemed to Nancy that her life was showing some signs of God’s goodness.
And then came the biggest surprise of all. Again, reader, beware. The timing is suspect and there are a dozen different versions, some with the event happening earlier and some later. Nancy was at the door of her new cabin one day when a family on a wagon appeared in the clearing, only a few yards away. There were cows trailing along behind. During these years no one passed by the Lincoln cabin. This was the end of the line. The trail into the desolate farm was not made for wagons and represented a grueling engineering feat to navigate. These people could only be coming to visit the Lincolns.
Tom and Elizabeth Sparrow were Nancy’s closest living relatives and her dearest friends. This was the aunt who, according to family history, had taken her in as a youth, teaching her how to read and sew. It is hard to think of anything that could have brought more joy to her lonely life. The Sparrows were bringing along their adopted son, Dennis Hanks, the seventeen year old illegitimate nephew of Elizabeth.[i] Dennis had lived near the Lincolns in Kentucky and was in their cabin, at Nancy’s side, the very day that young Abe had come into the world.
The Sparrows had suffered the same land title problems that Thomas Lincoln had experienced and had decided to start over in Indiana. It had to be better than Kentucky. They settled into the three sided shed that the Lincoln family had just abandoned. They would build their own cabin and farm and the two families would be neighbors and there would be milk to drink! But the milk would almost kill them all.
There flourished in that part of Indiana a tall, lush, poisonous plant called white snakeroot. The cows feasted on it, passing its venom on through their milk. For many years, even into modern times, the origin of the so-called “milk sickness” defied explanation. All that was known at the time was that some fell ill to the disease and others escaped. There was speculation that it had something to do with their cows and their milk but this was a vague notion and no one could imagine the connection to the luscious weeds growing in the woods all around them.
By the late summer of 1818, the wife of the nearby bear hunter, Peter Brooner, fell ill. Nancy Hanks made the trek up to their cabin, saw the telltale white mucous on her neighbor’s tongue and then nursed the woman for a week. Mrs. Brooner endured sharp pains to her stomach and vomited so violently that she would later collapse in exhaustion. Nancy was with her to the end when her eyes rolled up into her head and she lapsed into coma. It was not an easy death. The strenuous experience, with its inevitable outcome, must have made Nancy conscious of her own mortality and how much her children needed a healthy mother. If she were to die, what would become of them all?
There was an evil omen before the end of that summer. Abe Lincoln was kicked in the head by a mule and lay bleeding and unconscious. He would later claim that he had been “killed for a time.”[ii] For several hours he could not speak but soon recovered. His mother, bracing herself against the pain of such a loss, was philosophical about it all, leaning back deeply into the comfortable embrace of her Calvinist instincts. God would do what He would do and nothing could change it. “It was not your time, Abe,” she said when he recovered and life went on.
In the fall the milk sickness struck Tom and Elizabeth Sparrow. With help from Thomas Lincoln and their nephew, Dennis, they had managed to build their own cabin, much quicker than the Lincoln’s had been able to do so by themselves and it was just in time to serve as their tomb. The dreaded white secretion was detected on their tongues and the sharp pains to the abdomen began soon after. They were both dead within a week. Nancy grieved over the loss of her aunt, the woman who had been like a mother, who had taught her to sew and to read the Bible and learn about mansions being prepared for her. And Tom Lincoln dutifully crafted two crude coffins while young Abe carved the pegs that would hold the boards together.
They were buried in a clearing on a beautiful hillside, a quarter of a mile from the cabin, in the middle of a deer-run, where the animals raced by to a watering hole at the end of a meandering creek. Nancy had to feel great shock and pain at the loss. It would have been much better to have heard of their death in Kentucky far away, than to have had them come here and brighten her lonely days and laugh with her for a few months and then practically die in her arms. In her pain, she likely thought ahead to the summer, when there would be a break in the weather and the work, and she would have the time to return to the graves of her surrogate parents and pursue the mystery of God’s providence, but God’s providence would quickly chose another direction.
There are numerous accounts of when and how she discovered her own illness. Some suggest that she was literally taken on a sled from the deathbed of Mrs. Brooner, the bear hunter’s wife.[iii] Most have it occurring immediately after the loss of her aunt and uncle. In any case, she was soon in her bed of leaves and cornhusks, buried in bearskins, crying out for water, as her stomach burned. She knew what was coming and she knew that mercifully it would be over within a week. She retched and suffered, sweating in between her worst fits. She mumbled Bible verses until she was too weak and then asked the children to read them for her. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” And of course, there was her mantra, “In my father’s house are many mansions.” Old Tom, her husband, heard a dog howl on the second night of her illness and declared it instantly fatal. Dogs knew those things.
And Nancy knew from her experience with the disease that her rational moments would be limited, that her life could now be counted in hours. So she asked the children to come close to her bed. She ran her clammy fingers through Abe’s hair and offered barely audible words of motherly advice. She told them to be kind and good to each other and to their father. Who else was left? She told them to live as she had taught them and to “worship God.”[iv] She dropped in and out of coma during those last days, her bodily functions shutting down. The “milk sickness” was insipidly predictable. The patient always died on the seventh day. Sally and Abe hoped for a miracle. They cried over her cold body and prayed for recovery, seizing on any murmur or groan as good news. But just as in the case of all the others, on the seventh day of her illness, October 5, 1818, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, passed on. Tom put copper pennies on her eyes to hold them shut and immediately started working on her casket.
Year later, Dennis Hanks told interviewers that the misery in that cabin was indescribable. The children, Sally and Abe, cried out, “Mammy, mammy,” clinging to her cold lifeless body but there was no reply. They had heard their mother describe death in her stories in the Bible. They had seen it come to their animals and most recently to their uncle and aunt. Shortly after moving into their new cabin, Abe Lincoln had pointed a rifle between the log slats and shot a turkey wandering unwittingly nearby.[v] It made him sick, he said later. He would never kill a large animal again. He took no pleasure in death. “An ant’s life to it was as sweet as ours to us,” he once lectured a playmate.[vi] But nothing prepared him for this loss.
Charles Strozier sees guilt and oedipal tension in Lincoln’s telling of the turkey story, pointing out that it comes awkwardly and seemingly unrelated in his short autobiographical sketch, right before the death of his mother.[vii] It suggests that Lincoln felt somehow responsible for her death and carried this burden for some time.
His mother had been the only tenderness in a harsh world where wolves and bears sought to devour men and giant trees and rocky soil only yielded their treasure to brute force. His father had knocked him to the ground when he asked a question of a stranger passing by but his mother had been his window to a life beyond the horizon, to places and people he could only imagine from her fireside stories. As much as he could understand, that window was now closed forever. There was only the darkness of the forest.
Years before, in that late summer after the birth of her baby Abraham, Tom and Nancy had taken their family to a Methodist camp meeting. One or two banjo players had begun picking out a familiar tune. Soon dozens of others had recognized the verse, joining in, strumming all at once, while a blend of hundreds of voices gently lifted the melody into the nighttime sky. She was young then, and not yet so worn from her work. According to the testimony of neighbors who saw her there, Nancy was joyously abandoned to song, either because she believed that God had forgiven her sordid past or because He knew the truth of her innocence. And when they had reached the chorus and the words that the whole crowd could all easily remember, words they had hummed alone to themselves alone over fires and cooking pots all year long, they broke into a giant choir, the volume renting the heavens with their voices.
“You may bury me in the east,
You may bury me in the west,
And we’ll all rise together in that morning.”
The story of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, however true or false it may be, has become an important tale in our national history. It may reveal more about us than her. Bewildered by the spectacular rise of such a great and brilliant man from such remote and limited circumstances, early witnesses and historians distorted the story of this woman far beyond our ability to accurately reconstruct it. Even the exact location of her grave is debated, though most accept that thirty-six year old Nancy Hanks Lincoln was buried without a funeral or gravestone in the grassy knoll next to Tom and Elizabeth Sparrow, her surrogate parents. They had taken her in as an illegitimate child just as they had later taken in Dennis Hanks. Elizabeth who had taught little Nancy how to sew and read now embraced her in the grave.
After burying his mother without a word or any fanfare, an angry, grieving, nine year old Abraham Lincoln sat down and wrote an eloquent letter to an old Kentucky preacher who had admired his mother’s saintliness and sagacity. Days afterward, nine year old, Abe Lincoln could be seen sitting on his mother’s grave, weeping at his loss.[ix]
A few weeks later a letter from David Elkins arrived announcing that he would come to hold a service for the departed Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Word spread through the woods that a preacher was coming and on the appointed Sunday, a rather sizeable crowd of almost two hundred people arrived from the surrounding region. According to Carl Sandburg, Elkins was an elder in the Methodist church.[x] Other historians insist that he was a Baptist preacher.[xi] In any case, regardless of his denominational pedigree, David Elkins rose to the occasion, describing with feeling, the spirit and saintliness of Nancy Hanks.
According to witnesses at the end of his sermon the audience fell to their knees, a tribute far more appropriate than any of them could have realized. Nancy Hanks Lincoln had given birth to the greatest figure in American history. She had inspired him with her stories of a world beyond the poverty and ignorance that would eventually suffocate every other childhood figure around him. She had worked and toiled and he had felt her pain and would use his power to free ten million slaves with the stroke of a pen. So passed from this life, unheralded and unacknowledged by the powerful and the mighty of her generation, the “angel mother,” the woman who had helped shape and inspire the life of Abraham Lincoln.
