January 20, 2017
This ancestral home of the Lincoln family, located at 2995 Lincoln Farm Road in Hodgenville, Kentucky, is the same log cabin home where his mother Nancy (Hanks) Lincoln (1784-1818) died 5 October 1818.
The image of living in a log cabin has been central in American iconography for hundreds of years.
I grew up seeing abandoned cellar holes, cabins that survived – and the ruins of others. That connection to the past was all around us.
I was impressed by the log cabin imagery invoked by Daniel Webster in his speech of 19 August 1840, as published in this 1840 newspaper article.
Daniel Webster wasn’t born in a log cabin, but said that:
…my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin, raised amid the snowdrifts of New Hampshire… Its remains still exist.
The image of it immediately comes to our minds.
The family cabin was important to Daniel Webster, and he taught his children about it and their heritage. He said:
I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it, to inspire like sentiments in them, and to teach them the hardships endured by the generations which have gone before them.
He taught them about their family history:
I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections, and the touching narratives and incidents, which mingle with all I know of this humble, primitive family abode. I weep to think that none of those who inhabited it are now among the living.
Powerful.
No wonder Daniel Webster was so highly regarded as a speaker:
And, if ever I am ashamed of it, or if I ever fail in affectionate veneration for HIM who reared it, and defended it against savage violence and destruction, cherished all the domestic virtues beneath its roof, and, through the fire and blood of a seven years’ Revolutionary War, shrank from no danger, no toil, no sacrifice, to serve his country, and to raise his children to a condition better than his own, may my name, and the name of my posterity, be blotted forever from the memory of mankind!
Daniel Webster’s stirring words from 177 years ago are a call to action for all family historians to document and pass down our family history to the rising generation.
