Dr. Barton’s reasons for writing another life of Lincoln are three: he has some new facts, he wishes to correct misstatements in extant biographies, and fifty years of clearing weather have added to the visibility and luminosity of the atmosphere through which the Great Liberator is to be seen. Moreover, fifty years is the gestation period of judiciality.
There are few more puerile chapters in biography than Chapter I entitled “The Birth of Abraham Lincoln,” with its trivialities and platitudes on the birthplace of eminent men, Christ included; discourses on log cabins, their shape and size and construction; homilies on the comfortlessness of Nancy Lincoln’s bed and the relationship of plains and woods to Presidents; reflections on the relationship of child culture to sanitation; the description of Nancy’s smile when she was told that she had brought forth a man child; and the astonishing statement that the author has ridden in the Kentucky mountains many miles side by side with a doctor who died soon after 1809. Any one who can get through the first chapter, brief though it is, will be able to read the book.
Abraham Lincoln held biographies in slight esteem and could scarcely be persuaded to read them. He wanted the truth about people. Hence he read the Bible. He would probably have found Dr. Barton’s three books about him far too eulogistic, but eulogy comes naturally to clergymen. “This book attempts to tell the truth about Abraham Lincoln.” So did Nicolay and Hay’s, so did Lord Charnwood’s, Miss Tarbell’s, Herndon’s, Josiah Holland’s, and others “too numerous to mention.” Dr. Barton has no corner on truth. His new facts are important, but not so important as he thinks. Aside from putting it beyond question that Abraham Lincoln was born to Nancy Hanks while she was wedded to Thomas Lincoln, there is nothing new of importance except perhaps certain emotional sidelights. He has unearthed some documents that bear directly on Lincoln’s ancestry, but we are no more interested in his grandfather than in his great-grandfather and in him no more than the grandfather who had eight or eighty grands before his father-appellation. He has had access to the diaries of Orville A. Browning, once United States Senator, but I should not consider his Excellency George Harvey’s diary a repository of facts about Woodrow Wilson. Although Senator Browning was reputed to have known Lincoln intimately, he and Judge David Davis, discussing the Nation’s loss the day after Lincoln’s death, agreed that no one knew him through and through. Moreover, Mr. Browning was a pious man and piety is a parent of prejudice.
The writer who has new facts about Abraham Lincoln should state them in plain language at the beginning of each chapter. Dr. Barton has written an enormous book, two volumes, 500 pages each, about America’s inspired statesman, of which the only interesting portion is that which treats of the parents of Lincoln, and he had already treated that subject in a book entitled The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln.
Dr. Barton writes that now for the first time he is able to give the true story of the Hanks family from which our greatest President descended. It has the hallmarks of a true story, and henceforth it must be accepted. The investigations that the author has made of the Sparrow family have been fruitful and they should forever close the controversy concerning Lincoln’s parentage. The records of Mecklenburg County, Virginia, and of Mercer County, Kentucky, have told Dr. Barton the truth about it. We could wish that he might have told it with more brevity, directness and felicitousness. He is far stronger in research than in narrative power. Digression, circumlocution, overtake him on every page.
Joseph Hanks’ eldest daughter was Lucy. She came to young womanhood in a period of license and revolt that followed the Revolutionary War, similar to that which followed the Great War. Dr. Barton thinks this explains, but does not justify her conduct. She bore a child when she was 19 and she called it Nancy. The father has been conjectured, but history does not name him. Seven years later she married, and though she “was behaving like a perfect lady when her father died, he disinherited her.” He could not forget her seven years of sin. After she had been indicted for fornication and branded publicly “with an unpleasant name,” Henry Sparrow made his beau geste. He married her and thus vested her with virtue. The indictment was quashed. From that time Lucy was known as Nancy’s Aunt. Readers of Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid will know just how Lucy felt about it. Let us hope that Elizabeth Sparrow, the real aunt, was as good a vicarious mother as Delia Lovell, and let us also hope that some day Mrs. Wharton may write her story.
Discussing the parents of Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Barton takes occasion to say that Lea and Hutchinson’s book, The Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln is not always wrong. That is Dr. Barton’s idea of high praise.
Thomas Lincoln married Nancy Hanks and a photograph of the marriage certificate which adorns Dr. Barton’s book convinces us that it was a bona fide marriage. Whether Nancy’s mother was there we are still in doubt. Dr. Barton concludes this chapter with two brief paragraphs:
“I wonder if she was there.”
“I wonder if she could keep away.”