Stupid Scandal
The story that Abraham Lincoln was an illegitimate son became a matter of gossip about the time of his first nomination for the presidency and was given a wide if stealthy circulation by the malice of the disaffected. He himself always spoke with reticence of his ancestry, for the reasons that he believed his mother to have been born out of wedlock and that, supposing his parents to have been married in Hardin County, Kentucky, he had looked in vain for the record of their marriage which was all the time lying in the court house of Washington County, where Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks had been married 22 September, 1806. Lamon’s biography in 1872 first put the scandal into print, though in veiled language. Since then it has been repeated in varying forms, for the most part obscurely and always uncritically. While there has never been any good excuse for crediting it, there has come to be a better and better excuse for undertaking to refute it. That has now been done by William E. Barton in The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln, a convincing study which leaves not a square inch of ground for the scandal to stand on. Mr. Barton’s researches have been exhaustive and—barring a few minor slips—accurate; he follows the rules of evidence in a way to put to shame those many lawyers who on such trivial testimony have believed the story; at the risk of making his book too bulky he has included practically all the documents in the case; he writes everywhere with good temper, although he might well have been forgiven for being vexed at the inanity or insolence of most of those who have argued that Lincoln was the son of this or that Tom, Dick, or Harry.
Mr. Barton’s arguments remove most of the charges into the territory of the ridiculous. Abraham Enlow of Hardin County, Kentucky, for instance, turns out to have been no more than fifteen—perhaps fourteen—years old when Abraham Lincoln was conceived. As to Abraham Enlow of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, there was no such man. George Brownfield, of what is now La Rue County, was real, and may have known Lincoln’s father and mother as early as eight or nine months before the child was born, but no scandal ever touched Brownfield’s name in this connection for fifty years after 1809, and then the yarn was apparently invented because the story of Abraham Enlow of Hardin County to the older citizens in the locality seemed untenable. The “Abraham” Lincoln of Ohio who was formerly identified with the President, and about whose birth there was a scandal, turns out to have been named John. Abraham Inlow of Bourbon County is said to have paid Thomas Lincoln five hundred dollars to marry Nancy Hanks, who already had a child named Abraham; as a matter of fact, the pair had been married nearly three years when their son was born, and there is nothing in the Abraham Inlow story that even hints at an adulterous connection. If such an affair ever took place it concerned a certain Nancy Hornback. The rumour that Martin D. Hardin was the father of Lincoln died of its own impossibility with the discovery that Lincoln was neither born nor conceived in Washington County, where Hardin lived. Patrick Henry, occasionally asserted to have been Lincoln’s father, died ten years before Lincoln was born. The foolish affidavits which attempt to credit the paternity to Abraham Enloe of North Carolina are too ignorant and contradictory to be noticed. That a foster son of John Marshall was Lincoln’s father seems unlikely in view of the fact that Marshall never had a foster son; this report is about of a piece with another which says that one of Marshall’s own sons was the father of Nancy Hanks, when as a matter of fact she was a year older than the eldest of them and might have been the mother of the youngest. John C. Calhoun may possibly have indulged in a flirtation with a young woman at a tavern at Craytonville, North Carolina, in 1808-9, and she may just possibly have been a Nancy Hanks, but she cannot have been Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who had already been married for two years and had been living in Kentucky, it seems on good evidence, since early childhood.
All this is sheer gossip, motivated partly by an ugly desire to hurt Lincoln’s fame and partly by a vulgar attempt to account for his genius by giving him a father more promising than Thomas Lincoln. At the worst it is disgusting; at the best it is stupidly unimaginative, for the Hardin, Henry, Marshall, Calhoun stories are singularly frail, and the Enlows and Inlows and Enloes of the legend were certainly no more likely to beget a genius than the actual father. Even the Baconians have chosen a great man to explain Shakespeare with. The only use of the whole matter is to throw some light upon the way in which in unenlightened ages, when there was no Mr. Barton to investigate the facts and lay the ghosts, various nations of mankind have sought to explain their heroes and leaders of humble birth by finding for them, among gods or demigods, fathers more suitable than the plain men who, such is the mystery of genius, are all that need be taken into account.