Extra Credit Questions

[David Lockmiller]

(05-10-2024 01:30 PM)AussieMick Wrote:  Fascinating issue ....

(This isn't an Extra Question.... I genuinely don't know the answers. )

I hadn't considered the impact on the 3 children being left on their own.

Couple of questions, and estimates would be fine if anybody wants to make them .....
1. How soon after Nancy died did Thomas leave them?
2. How long was he away?
3. Were there any relatives close by that would have assisted the children?

1. How soon after Nancy died did Thomas leave them?

On October 5, 1818, a week after her symptoms first appeared, she died, unattended by a physician. Nancy's body was buried at a gravesite near the cabin, where Betsy and Thomas Sparrow were already buried. No tombstone marked her final resting place, and no preacher delivered a funeral sermon until months later, when David Elkin arrived from Kentucky and spoke to a group of about twenty mourners gathered at the grave. (Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. One, p. 25)

Lincoln's sister Sarah, who was only 11 when her mother died, assumed the domestic responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, washing, mending clothes, and spinning wool. . . . But even with the help of kindly neighbors who pitched in, she could hardly replace her mother in the household. The gloom that settled over the cabin after Nancy Hanks Lincoln's death would not lift for more than a year, not until Thomas remarried. (p. 26)

The following is from Chapter Two Knox College online version of Abraham Lincoln: A Life:

In 1856, Lincoln told another friend how lonely life had been in the months following his mother’s death, and how he cherished hearing the Bible stories she had once told him, for they brought her voice back to his mind’s ear. The loneliness was compounded by the lack of a truly close friend; in Indiana Lincoln formed friendships with many of his contemporaries, but none was a confidant. In January 1861, Lincoln spoke of “the sad, if not pitiful condition of his father’s family” after Nancy Lincoln’s death.

William Herndon, perhaps reporting what Lincoln had told him, asserted that after the death of their mother, “little Abe and his sister Sarah began a dreary life – indeed, one more cheerless and less inviting seldom falls to the lot of any child. In a log-cabin without a floor, scantily protected from the severities of the weather, deprived of the comfort of a mother’s love, they passed through a winter the most dismal either one ever experienced.

Despite the benefits conferred by such a stepmother, the “profound agony” of the fifteen-month period between Nancy’s death and the advent of Sarah Bush Lincoln left its mark on Abe.

Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. One, p. 26-27 continued:

In the wake of Nancy's death, Lincoln's unsympathetic father failed to provide Abe with adequate care . . . . At one point Thomas left his two children with their young cousin Sophie Hanks (who had come to live with the Lincoln's around 1818) to fend for themselves while he drifted down the Ohio River to sell pork. He again left the children when he wooed Sarah Bush Lincoln in Kentucky, where, according to family tradition, he spent more time than he had intended to. One source alleged that the children, having given him up for dead, became "almost nude for the want of clothes and their stomachs became leathery from the want of food." By the time their new stepmother arrived at the end of 1819, she found Sarah and Abe "wild--ragged and dirty," and thought her stepson "the ugliest chap that ever obstructed my view."

When Thomas proposed marriage to Sarah Bush Johnston in Kentucky in the fall of 1819, it was the second time he had asked for her hand. They had known each other since childhood. . . .

Thomas courted his prospective bride matter-of-factly, blurting out to her one day as she was doing laundry: "Well Miss Johns[t]on, I have no wife & you have no husband. I came a purpose to marry you. I knowed you from a gal & you knowed me from a boy -- I have no time to lose and if you are willing, let it be done Straight off." She replied that it was "so sudden" and "asked time to consider, but he said he was not in a mood to fool away time on such an important business as wife hunting." To this she rejoined: "Tommy I know you well & have no objection to marrying you . . . ." Her friends and brothers urged her to accept the proposal. She assented, and so they were married on December 2, 1819.

Arriving in Indiana with her three children, Sarah was taken aback by the quasi-ursine condition of the Lincoln cabin and its inhabitants and quickly proceeded to improve both. "I dressed Abe & his sister up--looked more human," she recalled. She scrubbed them until they were "well & clean" and eliminated the lice that had take up residence in Abe's unruly hair."