How lovely to remember my UAkron Lincoln course this evening as I reread some books about his childhood! February 5, 1784 is a traditional birthday of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who was born in 1782 or 1784 in what is now West Virginia. She married Thomas Lincoln in 1806. They had three children, of whom only Abraham survived to adulthood.
Tradition, validated by recent mitochondrial DNA analysis, identifies Nancy's mother as Lucy Hanks. Lincoln believed that a well-to-do Virginia planter took sexual advantage of the unmarried Lucy, and she gave birth to Nancy. If Lincoln knew the man's name, he never shared it. Lincoln took a psychologically interesting pride in the mental powers and acumen that he thought he gained from the upper-class Virginia roots of his mother's family---while deploring the man's behavior.
Lincoln actually didn't say much about his mother; we know much more about his beloved and supportive stepmother There is a lot about Lincoln's relationship with his parents about which we can only speculate; he dismissed his childhood as "the short and simple annals of the poor." But he did once tell his law partner William Herndon, "All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother." Herndon's record of that remark as always captured people's imagination about Nancy.
Lincoln was devastated when she died in 1818 of "milk sickness," the result of drinking the milk of a cow who had injested the toxic white snakeroot. Lincoln was only nine. His lifelong interest in theological questions, which we see in his Second Inaugural, surely began with the sad and unfair death of his young mother.
There are no pictures of Nancy, but artist and Lincoln historian Lloyd Ostendorf (1921-2000) painted this imaginary portrait based on other members of the Hanks family.
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