Could 'Honest Abe' be a Tar Heel?

Raleigh News and Observer ^ | Apr 20, 2008 | Matt Ehlers

[Between the Lines]

BOSTIC - For a man with "Honest Abe" as his nickname, there are plenty of Abraham Lincoln stories that may be anything but.

Lincoln did not compose the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope. No one really knows whether the store clerk Lincoln walked six miles to return 3 cents he overcharged. And his wife wasn't a Confederate spy.

Now this small town in Western North Carolina is pressing its own claim: Lincoln was a Tar Heel.

According to a tale that locals swear is true: The 16th president of the United States wasn't born in Kentucky, as commonly thought, but in Bostic to a young, unwed mother.

This month, Bostic officially opened its Lincoln Center, an old, city-owned train depot refurbished with $20,000 raised through contributions.

Inside the center, the fresh white walls feature a photo quilt that tells the North Carolina birth story. There are panels that show the Concord Baptist Church, where Lincoln's mother is said to have been a member, as well as a community meeting in the 1920s that took place on Lincoln Hill. The picture shows a few dozen people standing near a pile of rocks, the remains of the cabin where Lincoln is said to have been born.

"We're trying to put together the only way these people had of preserving these truths -- to tell them," said Keith Price, president of the Bostic Lincoln Center.

Despite the Bostic tale solidifying into bricks and mortar, Lincoln scholars say it has no substance.

"This is a lot of hokum," said Allen Guelzo, director of the Civil War era studies program at Gettysburg College.

Organizers of the Lincoln Center acknowledge that the pieces of the birth story don't fit neatly together. One problem is that various versions name three different fathers.

The center's storyboards cite a long-legged businessman named Abraham Enloe as one of the possible fathers. They also speculate about John C. Calhoun, the powerful South Carolina politician who served as vice president. And there's a local man named Richard Martin.

To untangle the paternal confusion, the folks behind the center are taking up a petition to press the federal government for a DNA test.

It could prove the Bostic story. Well, one of them, at least.

'The truthful traditions'

Price refers to the Bostic story as "the truthful traditions in this area," and dismisses the history-book version as "some supposed beginning in Kentucky."

A retired contractor with a friendly, conversational nature, Price sums up the community's story like this:

Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks, was born in Virginia and moved to her uncle's home in Gaston County before being "bound out for raising" at age 8 or 10. She was sent to the Enloe family of Rutherford County because her mother could not care for her.

Hanks became pregnant as a teenager. The father could have been Abraham Enloe, the head of the household in which she was reared, Martin or Calhoun (based on the story that Enloe took Nancy to visit South Carolina relatives).

She gave birth in the cabin outside Bostic around 1804. She later moved to Kentucky and married Tom Lincoln, the man Abraham assumed was his father.

The illegitimate birth, coupled with Lincoln's Republican politics, gave his family, and the Democrats in the area, reasons to cover up the story, Price said.

Bostic's Lincoln supporters draw much of their energy from a couple of old books. One of them, "The Genesis of Lincoln," was originally published in 1899. Author James Cathey made his case by collecting stories from people who remembered Nancy and her baby. In addition, there are people living today who remember Nancy Hanks' name on the church rolls of Concord Baptist Church. The records burned in a fire.

Lydia Clontz, vice president of the Bostic Lincoln Center, acknowledges the storytelling tradition in her part of the state and the tendency toward tale-telling.

She said a story passed from generation to generation "might be embellished a little bit. It might be changed a little bit. But there's always a grain of truth running through the whole thing."

As for the Lincoln tale, she said, "Now we might not be able to say that we've got this proof or that proof, because these people are all dead now."

The history books

The textbook version of Lincoln's origins goes like this:

Hanks was born in Virginia. She later moved to Kentucky, married Tom Lincoln and gave birth to Abraham in 1809.

Historians base the family's Kentucky timeline on court, tax and marriage records, said Sandy Brue, chief of operations for the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site in LaRue County.

Lincoln himself on multiple occasions acknowledged his Kentucky roots, said Guelzo, the Gettysburg professor. His 1809 birth date is found in a family Bible as well.

Price doesn't think the records are accurate. He says Lincoln recorded his own birth date in the Bible.

Frank J. Williams is a Lincoln scholar and chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. He has amassed more than 12,000 books on Lincoln and the Civil War. An avid collector of what is called "Lincolniana," Williams owns a signed copy of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, various legal pleadings in Lincoln's name and even a bust of Lincoln molded from chewing gum. ("Can anything be more ridiculous than that?" he asked.)

Williams becomes incredulous at the suggestion that Lincoln was born in Rutherford County.

"I am a lawyer and a judge and a historian. I've spent my whole life trying to seek the truth, or discern the truth," he said. "There's just no probative evidence of the Enloe-Lincoln connection. None! None!"

Guelzo takes it a bit further.

"Give them the phone number and the Web site of the various Lee Harvey Oswald organizations in Dallas who stand around on the grassy knoll handing out little pamphlets, indicting the mafia and the CIA. Have them call Oliver Stone. He ought to be good for this."

A DNA quest

Guelzo thinks the Lincoln paternity debates arise from the same feelings that for some have put William Shakespeare's paternity in doubt: the idea that someone so great could spring from such humble beginnings.

Put Price in that camp. He uses the word "shiftless" to describe Tom Lincoln.

"I don't want to demean somebody I've never met, but every description we've had of him, he's a little fireplug Irishman," he said. "He was a second-class muleskinner."

Price thinks Calhoun fathered Lincoln, and he wants a DNA test to prove it. The federal government owns Lincoln bone fragments.

"We don't need it for proof. But the world does," Price said. "We're trying to get at the truth, and that's what any good historian would do."

Guelzo doesn't think a DNA test is necessary.

"For the purpose of what? What great issue is at stake here? And what great evidence have people been able to produce to mandate such a drastic test? If that's the case, I should be demanding a DNA test to show whether I'm related to Abraham Lincoln."

For his part, Price is more concerned about having the test done, not proving his own theory on Calhoun's paternity.

"If it turns out he was fathered by a Chinese sailor out of Charleston or something, so be it. We know where he was born."

If they can prove it to the world, the community might profit.

"It doesn't take any Ouija board or crystal ball" to know that tourist dollars will come, said Price, who emphasizes that history, not economics, drives his quest.

On Lincoln Hill

Today, there are a lot fewer stones on Lincoln Hill. The rocks are what's left of the home's chimney and cellar, said Price, who likes to say that quite a few stone doorstops in Rutherford County came from Lincoln Hill.

After the Lincoln Center's grand opening, Price ferried visitors up the hill in a van borrowed from his church.

The hill is on the banks of picturesque Puzzle Creek, up a short dirt road and then a path marked with orange ribbons tied around the trees.

On the hill, near the rock pile and a big hole that Price said once served as the cellar, he told his version of the story. The dozen or so people along for the ride listened closely.

An older woman in the group asked Price about a man who looked like Lincoln and used to walk in nearby Forest City. She wondered whether he might be related.

Price said he doesn't know of him.

It doesn't matter anyway, she said. He died.

Unlike this story, which probably never will.

[BitBucket]

Lincoln’s father was mildly retarded. Lincoln himself speculated that he was really the son of some southern gentleman. Saying such things was considered very bad form at the time since that effectively makes his mother a whore. After Lincoln left home he never had anything further to do with his family.

[wideawake]

Lincoln was most certainly a bastard..traitor to the US Constitution.

I certainly hope your parentage is more circumspect that your Constitutional scholarship - otherwise we have some serious projection going on here.

[Dazed_Catt]

“Lincoln was most certainly a bastard..traitor to the US Constitution.”

Yeah. There’s that little thing about slavery though, you know, treating an entire race of people as sub-human chattle?

Confederate States’ cessation speeches all referred to it too by the way. The “constitutional right” to own “property”.

[PurpleMan]

Great. I can see them coming out of the woodwork now to a former-Southerner who led the beat-down of the South.

Pretty soon we’ll find out he was directly related to Lee, Jackson, Davis, Beauregard, Longstreet, Stuart, Pickett, hood and Bragg.

[CommerceComet]

When I first saw the photograph of Wesley Enloe, I thought he really did resemble Lincoln. After seeing the side-by-side photographs, I'm much less convinced about the resemblance.

[Retired Greyhound]

seems to me much-ado about not much

[wideawake]

My guess is that it began as an urban legend, since western North Carolina in general and Rutherford County in particular were strongly Unionist during the Civil War.

Few areas of the Confederacy were more reluctant to secede than this almost slaveless region.

[Between the Lines]

My guess is that it began as an urban legend

More like a rural legend.

[fetal heart beats by 21st day]

Does anyone have a picture of Tom Lincoln?

[wideawake]

Lincoln’s father was mildly retarded.

Link, please.

Again, link please.

After Lincoln left home he never had anything further to do with his family.

Demonstrably false. In fact, before he left Springfield to be sworn in, he held up his travel by a couple of days to pay a visit to his stepmother, whom he called his "angel mother."

He visited her often and loved her dearly.

[doodad]

My Mom is from this area and I heard this story all my life. We even went to the cabin site when I was a kid.

[carton253]

But here's the thing about your "straight story." People will believe it... for a variety of reason. Sad, but true.

How are you Bubba Ho-Tep?

[kcm.org]

ping

[Old North State]

It is an Urban legend, I know for a fact he is a Duke supporter and hates the Tar Heels.

[Sax]

Lincoln on Class Envy:

"Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."

-- March 21, 1864 - Reply to New York Workingmen's Democratic Republican Association".

[southernnorthcarolina]

Lots of my fellow North Carolinians are obsessed with claiming historic events or the birth of notables, with scant regard to the facts.

We claim Andrew Jackson as a native son, despite the preponderance of evidence that he was born in South Carolina (or, as we refer to that state, Baja Carolina).

The Lincoln thing surfaces periodically, but the evidence just isn't there.

We claim to be the birthplace of aviation based on Wilbur and Orville Wright's 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, so there is at least some truth there -- but the brothers were from Dayton, Ohio, and built their gliders and later their powered aircraft there.

But my favorite is the date proudly emblazoned on our state flag: May 20, 1775. What's that, you ask? Why, it's the date of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, when that backwoods NC county (the locale of Charlotte, which later grew to significant size) declared themselves free and independent of England. Or not. There's not a scintilla of evidence that such an event took place.

Maybe we're just insecure. I dunno.

[vetvetdoug]

Boyt Henderson Cathey was a meticulous researcher and genealogist. IMO he would have stumbled upon this information while researching genealogy of the Cathey's of North Carolina. Any information showing the truth about Lincoln that could be construed as a negative are suppressed as is the information about MLK is now.

The book by B.H. Cathey, Cathey Family History and Genealogy published in 1993 is a valuable resource for anyone researching genealogy from individuals from Rowan County, NC (ie Elizabeth Dole).

[vetvetdoug]

Ok, all one has to do today is get a hair from any relative of either one and compare the DNA....that will put the story to rest....

[vetvetdoug]

Andrew Jackson learned law early in his life in Salisbury,N.C., and worked in the Henderson Law firm there.

[Kirkwood]

He doesn’t look a thing like Lincoln.