Abe's first cousin Jacob Lincoln (1815-1889)
Jacob's father was Josiah, brother of President Lincoln's father, Thomas.
Posted on 04/21/2008 9:32:59 AM PDT by Between the Lines
BOSTIC - For a man with "Honest Abe" as his nickname, there are plenty of Abraham Lincoln stories that may be anything but.
Lincoln did not compose the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope. No one really knows whether the store clerk Lincoln walked six miles to return 3 cents he overcharged. And his wife wasn't a Confederate spy.
Now this small town in Western North Carolina is pressing its own claim: Lincoln was a Tar Heel.
According to a tale that locals swear is true: The 16th president of the United States wasn't born in Kentucky, as commonly thought, but in Bostic to a young, unwed mother.
This month, Bostic officially opened its Lincoln Center, an old, city-owned train depot refurbished with $20,000 raised through contributions.
Inside the center, the fresh white walls feature a photo quilt that tells the North Carolina birth story. There are panels that show the Concord Baptist Church, where Lincoln's mother is said to have been a member, as well as a community meeting in the 1920s that took place on Lincoln Hill. The picture shows a few dozen people standing near a pile of rocks, the remains of the cabin where Lincoln is said to have been born.
"We're trying to put together the only way these people had of preserving these truths -- to tell them," said Keith Price, president of the Bostic Lincoln Center.
Despite the Bostic tale solidifying into bricks and mortar, Lincoln scholars say it has no substance.
"This is a lot of hokum," said Allen Guelzo, director of the Civil War era studies program at Gettysburg College.
Organizers of the Lincoln Center acknowledge that the pieces of the birth story don't fit neatly together. One problem is that various versions name three different fathers.
The center's storyboards cite a long-legged businessman named Abraham Enloe as one of the possible fathers. They also speculate about John C. Calhoun, the powerful South Carolina politician who served as vice president. And there's a local man named Richard Martin.
To untangle the paternal confusion, the folks behind the center are taking up a petition to press the federal government for a DNA test.
It could prove the Bostic story. Well, one of them, at least.
'The truthful traditions'
Price refers to the Bostic story as "the truthful traditions in this area," and dismisses the history-book version as "some supposed beginning in Kentucky."
A retired contractor with a friendly, conversational nature, Price sums up the community's story like this:
Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks, was born in Virginia and moved to her uncle's home in Gaston County before being "bound out for raising" at age 8 or 10. She was sent to the Enloe family of Rutherford County because her mother could not care for her.
Hanks became pregnant as a teenager. The father could have been Abraham Enloe, the head of the household in which she was reared, Martin or Calhoun (based on the story that Enloe took Nancy to visit South Carolina relatives).
She gave birth in the cabin outside Bostic around 1804. She later moved to Kentucky and married Tom Lincoln, the man Abraham assumed was his father.
The illegitimate birth, coupled with Lincoln's Republican politics, gave his family, and the Democrats in the area, reasons to cover up the story, Price said.
Bostic's Lincoln supporters draw much of their energy from a couple of old books. One of them, "The Genesis of Lincoln," was originally published in 1899. Author James Cathey made his case by collecting stories from people who remembered Nancy and her baby. In addition, there are people living today who remember Nancy Hanks' name on the church rolls of Concord Baptist Church. The records burned in a fire.
Lydia Clontz, vice president of the Bostic Lincoln Center, acknowledges the storytelling tradition in her part of the state and the tendency toward tale-telling.
She said a story passed from generation to generation "might be embellished a little bit. It might be changed a little bit. But there's always a grain of truth running through the whole thing."
As for the Lincoln tale, she said, "Now we might not be able to say that we've got this proof or that proof, because these people are all dead now."
The history books
The textbook version of Lincoln's origins goes like this:
Hanks was born in Virginia. She later moved to Kentucky, married Tom Lincoln and gave birth to Abraham in 1809.
Historians base the family's Kentucky timeline on court, tax and marriage records, said Sandy Brue, chief of operations for the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site in LaRue County.
Lincoln himself on multiple occasions acknowledged his Kentucky roots, said Guelzo, the Gettysburg professor. His 1809 birth date is found in a family Bible as well.
Price doesn't think the records are accurate. He says Lincoln recorded his own birth date in the Bible.
Frank J. Williams is a Lincoln scholar and chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. He has amassed more than 12,000 books on Lincoln and the Civil War. An avid collector of what is called "Lincolniana," Williams owns a signed copy of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, various legal pleadings in Lincoln's name and even a bust of Lincoln molded from chewing gum. ("Can anything be more ridiculous than that?" he asked.)
Williams becomes incredulous at the suggestion that Lincoln was born in Rutherford County.
"I am a lawyer and a judge and a historian. I've spent my whole life trying to seek the truth, or discern the truth," he said. "There's just no probative evidence of the Enloe-Lincoln connection. None! None!"
Guelzo takes it a bit further.
"Give them the phone number and the Web site of the various Lee Harvey Oswald organizations in Dallas who stand around on the grassy knoll handing out little pamphlets, indicting the mafia and the CIA. Have them call Oliver Stone. He ought to be good for this."
A DNA quest
Guelzo thinks the Lincoln paternity debates arise from the same feelings that for some have put William Shakespeare's paternity in doubt: the idea that someone so great could spring from such humble beginnings.
Put Price in that camp. He uses the word "shiftless" to describe Tom Lincoln.
"I don't want to demean somebody I've never met, but every description we've had of him, he's a little fireplug Irishman," he said. "He was a second-class muleskinner."
Price thinks Calhoun fathered Lincoln, and he wants a DNA test to prove it. The federal government owns Lincoln bone fragments.
"We don't need it for proof. But the world does," Price said. "We're trying to get at the truth, and that's what any good historian would do."
Guelzo doesn't think a DNA test is necessary.
"For the purpose of what? What great issue is at stake here? And what great evidence have people been able to produce to mandate such a drastic test? If that's the case, I should be demanding a DNA test to show whether I'm related to Abraham Lincoln."
For his part, Price is more concerned about having the test done, not proving his own theory on Calhoun's paternity.
"If it turns out he was fathered by a Chinese sailor out of Charleston or something, so be it. We know where he was born."
If they can prove it to the world, the community might profit.
"It doesn't take any Ouija board or crystal ball" to know that tourist dollars will come, said Price, who emphasizes that history, not economics, drives his quest.
On Lincoln Hill
Today, there are a lot fewer stones on Lincoln Hill. The rocks are what's left of the home's chimney and cellar, said Price, who likes to say that quite a few stone doorstops in Rutherford County came from Lincoln Hill.
After the Lincoln Center's grand opening, Price ferried visitors up the hill in a van borrowed from his church.
The hill is on the banks of picturesque Puzzle Creek, up a short dirt road and then a path marked with orange ribbons tied around the trees.
On the hill, near the rock pile and a big hole that Price said once served as the cellar, he told his version of the story. The dozen or so people along for the ride listened closely.
An older woman in the group asked Price about a man who looked like Lincoln and used to walk in nearby Forest City. She wondered whether he might be related.
Price said he doesn't know of him.
It doesn't matter anyway, she said. He died.
Unlike this story, which probably never will.
It’s his body shape. It think it’s remarkably like Lincoln’s.
That was his stepmother. His father he never saw again and did not attend his funeral.
I have the book and read it thoroughly. I do believe Enloe was Abraham Lincoln’s father.
Stepmothers aren't family?
Lincoln's brother died when he was three.
His mother died when he was nine.
His sister died when he was 19.
The only family he really had after he left home was his father and his stepmother. He was not close with his father, but he did see him again. And he kept in touch with his stepmother and visited her often when she was widowed and lonely.
His father he never saw again
He visited his father in 1849.
But he didn't tell people that his father wasn't his real father. And his father was not retarded.
His father was not an educated man, but he was a successful farmer and a trustee of his Baptist congregation.
And you're an unbiased judge, given your screenname.
Again, how is it that Nancy Hanks married Thomas Lincoln in 1806, gave birth to a daughter in 1807 and then claimed to have given birth to an already 5 year old son in 1809?
Let's see what we have going for the Ensloe theory.
(1) Ensloe's name was Abraham. However, Thomas Lincoln's father was named Abraham.
(2) Local legends say that Nancy Hanks lived with the Ensloe family in Rutherford County, NC.
There are no surviving records of any kind to link Nancy Hanks with this locale. At all.
In fact the same family reminscences that say Nancy lived with her relatives the Berrys in Charlotte County, VA and moved with them to KY during these years also contains the accurate information - corrobated by church records - about where she was baptized.
And that's all the evidence there is.
BTW - the whole call for DNA testing of Lincoln's remains is bogus.
The chance of recovering a usable DNA sample from Lincoln himself is approximately zero.
His last surviving son died 82 years ago and had no sons of his own, eliminating his Y-chromosome from the gene pool. And Thomas Lincoln's as well - after all, Lincoln's only brother died in infancy.
Chances of Robert Todd Lincoln's DNA surviving intact are also unlikely.
Do we even know if there are Ensloe direct-line males to test against?
Essentially, this is substanceless propaganda meant to cast aspersions on Lincoln's ancestry.
Jacob's father was Josiah, brother of President Lincoln's father, Thomas.
That same GGG Grandfather owned the land where Abe Lincoln's mother, and his sister Sarah were buried. That same family also owned Green River Island at Evansville. They were surrounded by a plethora of Scanderhoovians from York Pennsylvania (Sa'ami central) ~
Then there's Dwight David Eisenhower ~ when he was a student at West Point he looked remarkably like my father who later flew as flying crewchief for General LeMay ~ who hated Ike. Guess he liked to order around someone who looked like Ike.
So, what to make of this ~ well, there was a 5 times Great Grandfather who used to work moving folks West at the very time the Eisenhower family waas moving West. But, more importantly, there are nearly as many "Hanks" surnamed folks from Scandinavia as there are from the United Kingdom, and a gazillion of them from the North German plain (much of which was controlled by the King of Sweden or the King of Denmark for centuries) who spell the name "Hengst".
I think it is highly presumptuous of the Virginians and North Carolinians to claim that Nancy Hanks ever really lived in an English speaking community. In fact, Abe himself says he had great difficulty communicating with her.
I'm taking the Scanderhoovian option ~ which Carl Sandburg was too modest to do ~ although he undoubtedly knew the truth!
David Herbert Donald relates that Lincoln visited his father when he was ill in 1849, two years before his death.
And how does Lincoln's older sister factor into the mix? Who's her daddy, so to speak?
Now, something folks usually ignore ~ Abe Lincoln's parents had been members of what is usually called "the Primitive Baptist Church". In the old days it was pretty much the same thing as the Christian church (Disciples of Christ) and not like the Christian church (Independent) that grew up out of the Stone movement although some writers try to link it to Stone as well.
Basically most of these congregations were Baptists who met on Saturday but adhered to the order of worship for the Presbyterians as modified by Alexander Campbell and his ministers.
Lots of their graveyards have no headstones. There are no lists or maps telling you where people are. You have one of these guys in your lineage you are out of luck using normal research methods. Abe most likely knew there'd be no gravesite he could visit. No doubt the gravesite has been marked in later years by someone interested in doing that sort of thing.
Unmarked graves were a common American practice by the "cutting edge" folks back in the firt half of the 19th century. This practice lingered in places. Some of my cousins who live up in Alaska get upset when they come down to do pilgrimmages to the ancestors' graves in Brown County and discover there are no headstones. Last I heard they're raising a fund to mark those graves.
Whatever you read about what Abe Lincoln might have thought about his father must be taken with an enormous grain of salt. He didn't tell anyone, and most the stuff in the standard histories is sheer supposition by alleged historians.
There were also SEVERAL Nancy Hanks in the Piedmont. It’s not like this was a rare, one of a kind name. Now, how many Nancy Hengst were there?
You know, I really don’t care who Lincoln’s father was. I just think it was most likely Enloe. I’m not a judge and my screen name has nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln’s paternal ancestors. He was a misguided politician, like so many others then and now.
But he isn't the most likely father - the preponderance of the evidence is against him, mostly because there isn't any evidence at all in his favor. Whatsoever.
He was a misguided politician, like so many others then and now.
So you're saying that Lincoln's decision to enforce the Constitution was "misguided."
Fascinating.
Ironic coming from one who has a screen name of the wife of one of the most misguided politicians of all time. Boss Davis was the leader of a criminally stupid rebellion, an incompetent tyrant who presumed to be a champion of constitutional government who in practice could not respect even his confederate constitution.
I thought the document exists.
Oh, the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence "exists," all right:
Problem is, this fine-looking document was "recreated from memory" c. 1819. Said memory was probably enhanced by corn squeezin's.
And you are sadly misinformed and under educated. It was the CSA that reinforced the Constitution, the advice of Thomas Jefferson and many other early patriots.
Lincoln was at the mercy of usual suspects, the railroad and banking magnates and their desire for encompassing power over the existing and future states.
And, I STILL really don’t care who fathered Abraham Lincoln.
And you are sadly misinformed and under educated. It was the CSA that reinforced the Constitution, the advice of Thomas Jefferson and many other early patriots.
Lincoln was at the mercy of usual suspects, the railroad and banking magnates and their desire for encompassing power over the existing and future states.
And, I STILL really don’t care who fathered Abraham Lincoln.
You are far from being in a position to opine on anyone's education.
It was the CSA that reinforced the Constitution
The so-called Confederates blatantly violated the Constitution. The Constitution - which the states attempting to secede had fully ratified - says quite plainly that the act of ratification is an agreement that the Constitution is the law of the land.
And the Constitution plainly states that in any controversy between any of the states and the federal government, the dispute is left to the adjudication of the federal judiciary.
The seceding states did not even pretend to follow the Constitution they had ratified in seeking to separate.
the advice of Thomas Jefferson and many other early patriots
Thomas Jefferson had been dead for 34 years, and certainly offered no such advice.
Lincoln was at the mercy of usual suspects, the railroad and banking magnates and their desire for encompassing power over the existing and future states.
Hardly.
As the records and documents of the secession conventions show, the impetus for secession was the belief that the President-elect with the help of a possible majority of Congress would be able to successfully legislate a prohibition of the expansion of slavery to the federal territories.
Such a move would enable two or more free states to enter the Union during the course of Lincoln's presidency, which would end the ability of the slave states to block legislation in the Senate. The seceding states' future economic hopes were predicated on the aggressive expansion of plantation slavery to the Pacific.
So the economic powers that dictated disunion and war were the slaveholding class.
Northeastern bankers and railroad magnates owned more southern railroads, shipping and processing businesses in 1860 than they ever had before.
They had no economic interest in war: the war resulted in a complete interruption in commercial freight shipping to the slave states, the destruction of thousands of miles of existing tracks they had invested in, and the commandeering of railroads at below-market rates by the government for troop movements.
One of the key disagreements between free and slave states was whether the contemplated transcontinental railroad would be built below or above the 36'30" line. Northeastern railroad men and bankers didn't care, because they would have gotten the contracts no matter where it was built.
The hub of Northeastern banking and investment - New York City - itself almost tried to declare itself a neutral party in the war so it could trade with both sides and therefore its commerce would continue uninterrupted.
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