Lincoln and His Father

[Liz Rosenthal]

I think that what we understand about the average life expectancy of people in the mid-19th century may give us the wrong impression about how long people actually lived. The average life expectancy was probably lowered significantly by the high rate of infant and child mortality in those days. If you look at the birth and death years of a lot of Lincoln's contemporaries, you'll see that a good many of them lived into their 70s, 80s and 90s.

It's possible that Americans of the mid-19th century looked at the terms "old" and "young" a bit differently than we do now. Maybe what Lincoln meant - and I could be wrong - was that he was "mature." In other words, he wasn't one of the up-and-comers just starting out with their whole lives ahead of them.

Just to illustrate the difference in word usage between then and now, they seem to have used the word "poor," with respect to economic status, a bit differently than we do now, also. My impression is that "poor," in the mid-19th century, could mean anything from dirt-poor to working class to struggling middle class. In fact, I'm not sure that the term "middle class" had the same currency it has had in the 20th and 21st centuries. Someone else here probably knows better than I.