Perry County, Indiana - Chapter 8: Lincoln Family in Perry County, 1916

So MUCH concerning Abraham Lincoln's boyhood connection with the vicinity of Troy has been told and published that no historian of Perry County would dare omit some reference thereto, yet a regard for accuracy forbids the claim of authenticity to the greater number of

As all the world knows today, Abraham Lincoln was born February 12, 1809, in LaRue County, Kentucky, near the village of Hodgenville, Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln being his parents. While the Lincoln family came of worthy stock in Rockcastle County, Virginia, - tracing their direct descent through "Mordecai Lincoln, Gentleman" (whose will was recorded, 1735, in the Register's Office at Philadelphia) to that Samuel Lincoln, of Norwich, England, his father, the first of the line in America - no nation's hero ever made his advent under more unpromising circumstances of adversity than Abraham Lincoln.

Of all his biographers none can be considered to outrank John Hay and James G. Nicolay, and their joint work speaks with an authority which can not be questioned. In its pages we are told that "by the tirnx the boy Abraham had attained his seventeenth year the social conditions of Kentucky had changed considerably from the early pioneer days. Life had assumed a more settled and orderly course, the old barbarous equality of the earlier times was gone; a distinction

"Thomas Lincoln, concluding that Kentucky was no country for a poor man, determined to seek his fortune in Indiana. He had heard of rich, unoccupied lands in Perry County in that state, and thither he determined to go. He built a rude raft, loaded it with his kit of tools, and four hundred gallons of whiskey, and trusted his fortunes to the winding water-courses. He met with only one accident on the way; his raft capsized in the Ohio River, but he fished up his toolkit and most of the ardent spirits and arrived safely at the house of a settler named Posey, with whom he left his odd assortment of household goods for the wilderness, while he started on foot to look for a home in the dense forest."

This "settler named Posey" was, in all probability, the same Francis Posey listed among Perry County's taxpayers in 1815, living at or near Troy, then the only settlement along the Indiana shore of the river below New Albany, and the county seat as well.

Messrs. Hay and Nicolay go on by telling us that "He selected a spot which pleased him in his first day's journey," and the vigourous frontiersman, such as Thomas Lincoln was, would think nothing of sixteen miles' walk between sunrise and sunset, that being the distance from Troy to the tract of land which he entered the following year.

We are told further that "he then walked back to Knob Creek (Kentucky) and brought on his family to their new home. No humbler cavalcade ever invaded the Indian timber. Besides his wife and two children his earthly possessions were of the slightest, for the backs of two borrowed horses sufficed for the load. Insufficient clothing and bedding, a few pans and kettles were their sole movable wealth. They relied on Lincoln's kit of tools for their furniture and on his rifle for their food. At Posey's they hired a wagon, and literally hewed a path through the wilderness to their new habitation, near Little Pigeon Creek, a mile and a half east of Gentryville, in a rich and fertile forest country."

While Messrs. Hay and Nicolay give no exact date for this removal, their general description tallies closely with the recorded fact that on October 15, 1817, Thomas Lincoln made entry of a tract of land upon which he had squatted a few months before, a part of Section 32, Township 4 South ; Range 5 West. At the time it was included in Hurricane Township, Perry County, but now belongs to Carter Township, Spencer County, and is embraced within the plat of Lincoln City, laid out in 1874, by Henry Lewis, of Cincinnati, at the building of the first railroad through Spencer County.

Thus, while the Lincoln family became residents of Indiana first as citizens of Perry County, they remained such less than a twelvemonth; that is, until the separation of Spencer County by legislative enactment of January 20, 1818, so the further incidents of their sojourn in the State belong properly to historians of Spencer County, not Perry.

Nancy Hanks Lincoln died, however, on October 5, 1818, and was buried upon a spot which is now maintained at state expense as a beautiful memorial park, along one side of which runs the Cannelton Branch of the Southern Railway, so Perry County has no chance to forget her as one of its pioneer women.

Abraham Lincoln's tribute acknowledging his indebtedness to his "angel mother" pays her appropriate honour, yet a word of praise, likewise, is due his stepmother, Sarah (Bush) Johnson, whom Thomas Lincoln married within a year after being left a widower. She filled a mother's place to Nancy Hanks Lincoln's two children, generously sharing with them the additional resources she had brought into their home from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and giving them advantages

Thomas Lincoln appears, however, to have been of a roving disposition, always ready to move, and in 1830 he disposed of his encumbered acres to Mr. Gentry, sold his crop of corn and hogs, and packing his family with their household goods into a wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen, left Indiana forever, emigrating into the newer state of Illinois, with which the Lincoln name was thereafter permanently identified.

Thirteen years of boyhood and young manhood were the limits of Abraham Lincoln's residence in the vicinity of Perry County, and many of the incidents related of him by the elder generation had a substantial basis of fact, sufficient for their acceptance as truth, although unrecorded by his serious biographers. Others were highly apochryphal, some contradictory and even patently impossible from the point of time.

All describe him correctly as large and awkward in frame, doing the "general utility" work which fell to the lot of pioneer boys in his day, chopping wood, feeding cattle and hogs, and driving them to the river for slaughter, to be salted down and shipped South by flat-boat. The mouth of Anderson River was a frequent harbour for craft of this kind, and large packing houses were conducted there by James Taylor, of Troy. The Lincoln family and neighbours would naturally dispose of their produce at the nearest point accessible, hence Abraham himself Vv^as frequently in the village of Troy, and even attended school there for a short time.

No bridge spanned Anderson River, then officially classified as a 'navigable' stream, all crossing having to be done by skiff, and Lincoln's remarkable physical strength may have led him to 'hire out' for awhile as ferryman. Hay and Nicolay write of him that he felt too large for the life of a farm hand, and his thoughts - after the manner of restless Hoosier lads who were his contemporaries - turning naturally to the river as an avenue of escape from the forest, he asked an old friend to give him a recommendation to some steamboat man on the Ohio. But on being reminded that the right to dispose of his time was yet vested in his father for another year or so, he conscientiously desisted from the purpose.

The same reliable authorities tell us that in 1828 an offer was made to him by Mr. Gentry to accompany the latter's son, Allen Gentry, with a flat-boat of produce to New Orleans and return. Gladly was the opportunity embraced for a glimpse of the world such as the long voyage afforded. This is the only river trip mentioned by Hay and Nicolay, and as the start was undoubtedly made from Troy, it was most likely in connection with other vessels controlled by James Taylor and Troy citizens, since the flat-boats commonly journeyed in fleets for mutual assistance and protection.

A well-written account of Lincoln's having been once arrested in Kentucky opposite Troy and tried before a Hancock County magistrate for ferrying without license, in violation of privileges held by others, was printe'd in 1913, with some effective illustrations and interesting circumstantial detail, including a mythical love affair with a certain damsel (a picture of whose grave was shown) from whom he gallantly withdrew as a wooer upon learning that she was the betrothed of another.

Lincoln's straightforwardness in the simple pleading of his own cause was said to have obtained his prompt release by Esquire Pate, who gave him good advice toward further legal study. Altogether a romantic narrative, and not without some ground, one may readily believe, although it had probably lost nothing in being handed down through more than sixty years.

Of the love-affair, a story had been published, some fifteen years earlier, which bore strong points of resemblance, except that the maiden's name was wholly different and her suitor had less faith in the sincerity of Lincoln's withdrawal from the field, engaging him in personal conflict in a corn-crib whence Lincoln emerged with a scar above one ear which he bore to his grave.

Summing up everything, therefore, a conclusion is reached whose expression may be couched in phraseology borrowed from the subject himself: - in other words, some of the incidents related of Abraham Lincoln as occurring at Troy might have been true, but all could not have been true.