That Nation Might Live: One Afternoon with Lincoln’s Stepmother Read online

  Deposition of Dennis Friend Hanks. Elder cousin of the departed President. Present the day of his birth. Widowed husband of Elizabeth Johnston Hanks, aka Betsy. Son-In-Law of Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln. He began:

  “You heard how some Copperhead fellers down at Charleston got into trouble firing on Union soldiers and were sent off to rot in prison, ain’t ye? Some smart lawyers down in Charleston tried to get Abe to let them free, but they didn’t fetch them worth a cent. So I says to myself, Dennis you’re the boy to do it, and I just told the citizens of Charleston so, and they says, ‘Hanks, we will give you twelve hundred dollars if you get them fellers released.’ You better believe that I took up the offer and waded right in, got my ticket, rode down to Washington and went right up to Uncle Abe’s house and asked to see President Lincoln.

  “It was during the war, and there were a lot of soldiers around, sticking their blamed guns in everybody’s faces. I hunted round for a back door to sneak in, but couldn’t find none. A soldier asked me what I was doing there.

  “’I want to see Abe Lincoln,’ I says.

  “’You can’t see him now,’ he says, like a smarty. Says he, ‘There’s lots of fellers in talking with him and more that want to get in that come afore you did’. Then I said to him, ‘Just show me the hole where the President goes in and out that I’ll get to see him.’ The feller at the door then said to me, ‘Who are you?’ I says, ‘My name is Hanks, I’m an American citizen, and I want to see Abe Lincoln.’ Then the other feller says ‘Where are you from?’ I says, ‘I am from Charleston, Coles County, Illinois.’ Then some other feller said, ‘That man talks like the President, his voice sounds like his, and maybe he is a relation.’

  “’You bet I’s kin. Now git!’ I says. ‘Old Dennis Hanks ain’t come clean from Illinois to git his orders from a Jaybird like you!’ Te-he-he! That feller got as red as an old turkey gobbler. I waited a minute and nobody done nothing so I just speaks up and says if you’ll take me up to his bedroom, I’ll have no trouble getting on. I look upon the sights out the window there while I wait for that Jaybird to get his orders figured. I seen Union soldiers camped beneath a half-built Washington Monument, which got this old cobbler thinking, ‘Well, don’t that beat all?’

  “A feller took me up to a door to where Seward was and I looked through a bunch of men and saw Uncle Abe by the stove playing with his little boy and handing him some lemonade or like that and laughing and talking with him. I looked at him a little bit and spoke out in a loud voice, ‘Abe what you doing there?’ Abe know’d my voice, straightened up and said, ‘Dennis is that you?’ then invited me in, and asked Mr. Seward and the other fellers to step out a few minutes, said he want to see me privately. So they all went out but me and Uncle Abe. He run and gathered me in like they did in the Bible, so I had to take out my bandanner. Abe looked kind of tired. I reckon they worked him purty hard down there, but he laughed hearty.

  “He then ask me how is Mother getting along and all the balance of the family. I just opened up and told Abe my business and let him know that I come to get them fellers in Charleston released. Abe told me that others been there on the same business, but he had not then thought the men had been punished long enough. So he says now they can go and take care of their families and try to be good men. He pulled out a piece of writing and told me to hand that to Stanton.

  “Well I took it to the right fine office of the Secretary of War, none other than Edwin M. Stanton. Quicker than a snake through a hollow log, he flew into a passion and says they did too bad a deed to be pardoned. He talked a little bit with me afore he took me with him to see Abe. Mr. Stanton warn’t one for hearing these men all have families and they want to go back and care for them and behave themselves, like Abe try to explain, but he just shut up and never said no more nohow.

  “Next morning Abe gimme the papers for my case and told me to take them over to Stanton to sign. ‘Abe,’ says I, ‘Blamed if I know where the place is!’ Abe laughed and said something about the mountain coming to someone, talking in parables like old times, and sent out a little feller that had on brass buttons enough to stock a store. Purty soon Stanton come rampaging in, snarling about them papers. But Abe made him sign them, and Mr. Stanton went out switching his spike tail coat like a pesky crow.

  “I said, ‘Abe, if I were as big as you I’d take that little feller across my knees and spank him. He’s too sassy.’ Abe, he laughed and said Stanton was a bigger feller’n him some ways, and I said he had a darned ugly way of showing it. But that was just like Abe, never running anybody down, finding the good in them, and bearing with their little meannesses. Abe didn’t know how to be mean himself. When God made Abe Lincoln He left the meanness out for other folks to divide up among them. I reckon the rest of us got our share.

  “Abe told me to look around the city and enjoy myself. ‘You go over to the house and Mary’ll give you something to eat and a shakedown.’ But I put up to a tavern where I could feel more to home. Mary was a good woman, but she was too high-falutin for me. Was home soon enough and launched into a speech a mile long with the news that old base born Denny Hanks seen Uncle Abe and we sprung them Copperhead fellers. Granmarn hung on my every word, feasting on news she could worry herself with. That’s all to say for that yarn, I reckon.”

  I asked Tildy if she would like to offer any general comments. Herein, the deposition of Matilda Johnston Hall:

  “I am the youngest stepsister of Abraham Lincoln. I remember coming from Kaintuck. Certainly remember the Ohio River. Went to school about 2 miles or more. Abe was not energetic except in one thing — he was active and persistant in learning. He read everything he could: Robinson Crusoe, The Bible, Watts’ hymns. When Father and Mother woud go to Church, they walked about 1½ miles, sometimes rode. When they were gone Abe would take down the Bible, read a verse, give out a hymn, and we would sing — were good singers. Abe was about fifteen years of age. He would preach and we would do the crying. Sometimes he would join in the Chorus of Tears.

  “One day my brother, John D. Johnston, caught a land terrapin and brought it to the place where Abe was preaching. There he threw it against the tree crushed the shell and it suffered much, quivered all over. Abe was frightful angry over it, his heart warn’t for it. He went on to preach against cruelty to animals, contending that an ant’s life is as sweet to it, as our lives are to us.

  “Abe would go out to work in the field but somehow end up on a stump speeching. Sometimes he would repeat, almost word-for-word, the sermon he had heard the Sunday before. Call the children and friends around him till Father would come and make him quit, send him to work. Often Abe would make political speeches such as he had heard spoken or seen written. He never forgot anything.

  “Once when he was going to the field to work I ran and jumped on his back. Cut my foot on the axe. He said, ‘What will we tell Mother as to how this happened?’ I said I would tell her I cut my foot on the axe since that will be no lie. Abe said maybe it was so, but it won’t be all the truth either, the whole truth. He advised me tell the whole truth and take whatever punishment Mother might deliver.

  “Abe seemed to love everybody and every thing. He loved us all and especially Mother. My Mother, I think has given Abe’s character. Denny over here is best for speeching if you are inclined to hear any more.”

  Without pause, the depostition of Dennis Friend Hanks, continued:

  “We were all nigh about tickled to death back then when Tom brung a new wife home. She’d been Sally Bush, and Tom’d been in love with her before he met up with Nancy, but her folks wouldn’t let Tom have her, because he was shiftless. So she married a man named Johnston and he died. Then her and Tom got married. She had three childern of her own, and a four-horse wagonload of goods that made a heap a difference in a backwoods cabin.

  “Yes, Granmarm Lincoln was a woman of property, and could a done better I reckon, but Tom had a kind a way with the women, and maybe it was something she took comfort in to have a man that d
idn’t drink and cuss none. She made a heap more a Tom, too, more than poor Nancy did. There were eight of us then to do fur, but Granmarm had faculty and didn’t appear to be hurried or worried none. Little Sairy just chirked right up with a mother and two sisters for comp’ny. Abe used to say he was glad Sairy had some good times. She married purty young and died with her fust baby. I reckon it was like Nancy, she didn’t have no sort of care.

  “We were all purty ragged and dirty when Granmarm Lincoln got there. The fust thing she did was to tell me to tote one of Tom’s carpenter benches to a place outside the door, near the horse trough. Then she had me and Abe and John D. Johnston, her boy, fill the trough with spring water. She put out a big gourd full of soft soap, and another one to dip water with, and told us boys to wash up for dinner. You just naturally had to be somebody when Granmarm was around. Then—te-he-he-he! She set some kind of a dead-fall trap for Tommy and got him to join the Baptist Church! Cracky, she was some punkins!

  “She didn’t have no education herself, but she know’d what learning could do for folks. Granmarm always put a candle on the mantelpiece for Abe, if she had one. And as like as not Abe’d eat his supper there, taking anything she’d give him that he could gnaw at and read at the same time. She never let the childern pester him. She always said Abe was going to be a great man someday, and she wasn’t going to have him hindered.”

  “When Abe was nineteen he was as tall as he was ever going to be, I reckon. He was the ganglin’est, awkwardest feller that ever stepped over a ten-rail snake fence. He had to duck to git through a door and appeared to be all joints. Tom used to say Abe looked as if he’d been chopped out with an ax and needed a jack plane took to him. Granmarm often told Abe that his feet being clean didn’t matter so much, because she could scour the floor, but he’d better wash his head, or he’d be a rubbing dirt off on her nice whitewashed rafters. That put an idea in his head, I reckon. Several of us older ones were married then, and there was always a passel of youngsters round the place. One day Abe put them up to wading in the mud puddle by the horse trough. Then he took them one by one, turned them upside down, and walked them across the ceiling, them a screaming fit to kill.

  “Granmarm come in, and it was so blamed funny she set down and laughed, though she said Abe’d oughter to be spanked. I don’t know how far he had to go for more lyme, but he whitewashed the ceiling all over again. Granmarm said many a time that Abe’d never made her a mite of trouble, or spoke a cross word to her since she come into the house. He was the best boy she ever seen.

  “Abe had a powerful good memory. He’d go to church and come home and say over the sermon as good as the preacher. He’d often do it for Granmarm, when she couldn’t go, and she said it was just as good as going herself. He’d say over everything from beloved brethern to Amen without cracking a smile, pass a pewter plate for a collection and then we’d all join him in singing the Doxology. Granmarm thought a heap of Abe, and he did of her, and I reckon they’d a done most anything for one another.

  “She seemed to know Abe had more pride than the rest of us. He always had a extra pair of buttenut dyed jeans pants, and a white shirt. When he was only thirteen Granmarm Lincoln said to him: ‘Abe, you git holt of some muslin somewheres and have some white shirts, so you can go to folk’s houses right.’ So he cut nine cords of wood and got nine yards of unbleached muslin, and she bleached it and shrunk it and made him two shirts. He put one of them on every Sunday. Maybe Abe wouldn’t a been the man he was if it hadn’t been for his mother and stepmother encouraging him.”

  Dennis Hanks shifted uneasily in his chair. He stared at the flickering shadows of the firelight on the wall, in dazed horror, as at some fearful whispered fate. He spoke:

  “I kain’t believe it yet. I was setting in my shop pegging away at a shoe, when a man come running in from the street, looking like a ghost, and said, ‘Dennis, honest Abe’s dead - shot dead!’

  “It was in April, and the sun was shining and the grass turning green, just as if nothing had happened, and it seemed to me like the earth had stopped. There wasn’t any trading done scarcely, and people standing round in the streets crying. I had to go out to the farm to tell Granmarm. Tom’d been dead a good while, and she was living out here on Goosenest Prairie, alone.

  “’Granmarm,” says I, “Abe’s dead.”

  “’Yes, I know, Denny. I know’d they’d kill him. I been a waiting for it,’ and she never asked no questions. She was gittin purty old, and I reckon she thought she’d soon join him. She never counted on seeing him again after he went down to Washington City nohow. He come out to the farm to see her, and when he kissed her goodbye she reached her old hands up to his shoulders and looked at him as if he’s a laying in his coffin then, and says to him: ‘You’ll never come back, Abraham!’”

  “Don’t you worry, Mama,” he says. “I’ll come back all right.”

  “Well, I myself, nothing but a little dried up nubbin of a shoemaker. Appears to me like there ain’t been nothing happened worth talking about, and nobody much worth talking to since Abe’s gone.

  “Some folks think you won’t know anybody when you git to heaven, but I bet I’ll know Abe Lincoln. He went straight there, and I ain’t taking no chances on it, but am living the best I know how, by church rules, so I can go to heaven too, and meet up with Abe. There was a preacher feller come here once, and I was talking to him about there not being any sense in Abe being shot thataway, and him only fifty-six and strong as a horse. And he said that he reckoned Abe’d done his work and the Lord know’d best.

  “‘Done his work, hey?’ I hollered. ‘He hadn’t lived his life. I wouldn’t a give a darn if he’d never done another lick of work, if he’d just come home and let me visit with him once in a while.’

  “There won’t be another man like Abe Lincoln this side of Judgement Day!”

  “Amen Son,” Mrs. Sarah Bush Lincoln spoke.

  When I was about to leave she arose — took me by the hand — wept — and bade me goodbye — Saying I shall never see you again — and if you see Mrs. Abm Lincoln and family tell them I send them my best and tenderest love — Goodbye my good son’s friend — farewell.

  Law Offices of Herndon & Orendorff

  September 8, 1865

  Charleston Depot

  Charleston, Illinois

  Dearest Anna,

  In haste I write, as my free thoughts naturally turn upon you, my love.

  I awoke this morning as full of gratitude as I could possibly be, for the many gifts given to me by Mr. Lincoln. Alas, even in his passage, he gives me more immeasurable joy – today with the introduction of his stepmother. I interviewed her in person, and took notes of her conversation. She rose in mind high above her surroundings, she was a true woman. The information thus given me by the good old lady, the kind and loving mother, God bless her, put me on nettles, as it were, and so we commenced our afternoon together. Mr. Lincoln for years supported or helped to support his aged father and mother; it is to the honor of Mr. L. that he dearly loved his stepmother, and it is equally true that she idolized her stepson. So timely was her arrival, so tender her love, to make him a person again, a man of the mud, flowers and mind that were his native West.

  On to Indiana. By your sweet side, in the comfort of your love, I yearn to be.

  Your husband,

  William H. Herndon, Billy

  Their Humble

  But Worthy Home

  The Plains whistled and whispered through nights cooler than days on Goosenest Prairie. Here in her bedside nearest the warm glow of fire rested Abraham Lincoln’s stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln; Known to some as Granmarm, Granmarm Lincoln, Sally, Sarah, Sairy, Aunt Sairy, Daughter Sarah Bush, Daughter Sarah, Sis or Mama. Here the once proud body of Elizabethtown, Kentucky relived the joys and sorrows in her dreams. So proceeded the process of departure from the living earth still lingering. Sometimes a girl of the stalwart stock that crowded the Bush family cabin back in Kaintuck, other times
she might see Tommy again.

  Ah the sweet slumber when her mind drifted backwards to a memory of her boy. Not of her, because of her. He could laugh her awake with the things he said and did, or just appearing so protruding generally. He could cry her awake too, until the day came. Abe & his Father are in Heaven she had no doubt, and she wanted to go there — go where they are — God bless Abraham.

  LINCOLN

  THOMAS and SARAH BUSH LINCOLN

  1778-1851 1788-1869

  FATHER AND STEPMOTHER

  OF OUR MARTYRED PRESIDENT

  THEIR HUMBLE BUT WORTHY HOME

  GAVE THE WORLD

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Which Mother?

  Mr. Lincoln told one of his acquaintances, Governor William Pickering, who some years later thus restated their conversation. “Once when Lincoln referred to the fact that he owed much to his mother, I asked, ‘Which mother, Mr. Lincoln, your own or your stepmother?’ To which Mr. Lincoln replied, ‘Don’t ask me that question, for I mean both, as it was mother all my life, except that desolate period between the time mother died and father brought mother into the home again. Both were as one mother. Hence I simply say, mother.’

  Photographs

  Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln

  William H. Herndon

  Thomas Lincoln

  The Saddlebag Cabin on Goosenest Prairie

  Primary Resources

  The Boyhood of Lincoln, Eleanor Atkinson

  Lincoln in New Orleans, Richard Campanella

  Abraham Lincoln and Coles County, Illinois, Charles H. Coleman