The Emancipation Proclamation: 150th Anniversary

The first page of the handwritten Emancipation Proclamation

As we approach the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, I thought a little background might be useful in understanding this important milestone in U.S. History.  I have divided the following information up into numbered sections, simply for ease of reading.

ONE

The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by Abraham Lincoln in late 1862, scheduled to take effect on January 1, 1863.  As an executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation was not a law, but an order issued under the Constitutional powers of the president.  It sought to free slaves in areas that were then in rebellion, and made a precedent for using those freed slaves as soldiers in the Union cause.

TWO

Although Lincoln privately asserted that he personally wished to see an end to all slavery, his public position on slavery was never an abolitionist one.  On the contrary, he expressed his belief that the federal government did not have the legal right to outlaw slavery in the states, and said, instead, that his only goal was to keep slavery from spreading outside those states where it already existed.

In his first inauguration speech, in 1860, he stated emphatically: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists.  I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

THREE

Despite misconceptions to the contrary, the Emancipation Proclamation did not actually outlaw slavery, or free all the slaves.  It only freed those people who were slaves in territories that were in rebellion against the United States as of January 1, 1863.  As such, the Union slave states of Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri were exempted from the order, and their slaves would not be freed until they did it themselves (Maryland in 1864 and Missouri in early 1865) or until after the war and Lincoln's death, with the passage of the 13th Amendment in December, 1865 (Kentucky and Delaware).

It also did not affect slaves in regions of the Confederacy that had already come back under U.S. control (such as Tennessee, parts of Virginia, and the area around New Orleans).  Overall, nearly a million slaves (about 25% of the total) were exempted from the proclamation, and thus legally remained in slavery.

FOUR

In light of Lincoln's insistence that he had no intention of ending slavery, why did he change his mind and issue the Emancipation Proclamation?  Quite simply, it served two political purposes: first to threaten the Confederacy, then to punish it.

The proclamation was issued in September, 1862, and stated that any area still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, would have its slaves permanently and irrevocably freed.  As such, it served as a threat.  The threat didn't work, however; no states or territories within the Confederacy returned to the Union.

As such, when January 1 rolled around, it became a punishment: you have rebelled against the United States, so you will be punished by having your slaves freed as our armies move through and subdue your territories.  Since slaves were legally only property, they could be confiscated as part of the normal course of a war.

It's interesting to speculate about what might have happened if the states of the Confederacy had actually bowed to the threat of emancipation.  What if the rebellious southern states had put down their weapons and returned to the fold before the January 1 deadline?  Slavery certainly wouldn't still exist now, in the 21st century, but it may have carried on for several more decades than it actually did.

FIVE

Despite this, there can be no question that Lincoln's true motivation was not threats or punishments at all, but actually ending slavery.  There is also virtually no doubt that he never expected the "threat" to work; he surely didn't expect the rebellious states to drop their weapons and hang their heads in submission.  He had always publicly stated his opposition to abolition, on Constitutional grounds, but the war gave him an opportunity to get around the normal limits of the Constitution and ultimately end what he viewed as the immoral institution of slavery.

SIX

So how, exactly, did Lincoln achieve this?  After all, he had said himself, just two years earlier at his inauguration, that he had no legal right to free slaves.  So how did he justify his actions?

There is positively no question that the U.S. Constitution, in 1862, did not give the federal government the right to interfere with slavery in the states.  The 10th Amendment states that any power not expressly given to the federal government in the Constitution automatically becomes a right of the individual states.  Therefore, since the power to control slavery isn't given in the Constitution to the federal government, it must by default be a state's right.  This is why Lincoln, and most everyone else, never embraced abolition as a legal right of the federal government.  It was unquestionably a state's right.

But because the South had rebelled and was now at war with the Union, Lincoln could use the excuse of hastening the war's end by taking actions aimed at ruining the economy of the enemy - in this case ending slavery.  Many people throughout the Union, and particularly in Congress, had argued that ending slavery would decimate the South's economy and thus bring an end to the war.

This, then, is how Lincoln justified the Emancipation Proclamation from a legal standpoint.  He argued that hastening an end to the war through economic ruin was necessary to preserve the Union.  He further argued that since the president is the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, he has the Constitutional right and responsibility to do whatever he deems necessary to achieve a military victory, particularly when it affects the very preservation of the Union.  Remember that the Constitution charges the president with the duty to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution, and Lincoln saw preserving the Union as his primary duty as a wartime president.

SEVEN

One argument that Lincoln could not make, and which no doubt caused him more than a few nights of fret, was that he had the right to end slavery because the Confederacy was not part of the United States.

Normally, if a country is at war with another country, and intends to overtake and rebuild that opposing country, setting up military rule and suspending the old civil laws is typically fair game.  This is what the Allies did in Germany in World War II, and what numerous other nations have done in wars throughout history.

So Lincoln might have argued that he had the Constitutional right to free Confederate slaves simply because the Confederacy was a foreign nation that the United States was at war with.  Anything goes, as it were.

Lincoln would no doubt have loved to make this argument.  But he couldn't, because he had spent the first two years of his presidency arguing vociferously that secession was not legal to begin with, the Confederacy was not a legal or legitimate nation, and the states comprising the Confederacy were still part of the "perpetual union" of the United States.  This, in fact, had been his entire justification for waging war against the southern states in the first place: they had seceded illegally, were thus in open rebellion against the Union, and the federal government thus had the right and responsibility to subdue them and bring them back into the fold.    

With that in mind, he couldn't now turn around and claim that he had the right to free the slaves based on the fact that the Confederacy was a foreign nation and the U.S. was not obligated to recognize its laws.  That would have been a "flip-flop" and it wouldn't have sat very well with his supporters, his generals, or his soldiers dying in the fields to preserve the Union.

EIGHT

It's probably fair to say that the Emancipation Proclamation was unconstitutional.  That may sound shocking to a lot of people, but it was a common perception and criticism at the time.  Anti-war sentiment was very common throughout the North, especially in the first few years of the war.  Many people believed that the best way to end slavery in the United States was simply to let the slave states secede and go their merry way; that slaves weren't worth fighting a war over; that as long as slavery didn't expand from those states where it already existed, it wasn't a big deal.

Today we imagine a Union united behind the cause of freeing the slaves, but the fact is that the primary impetus for Union soldiers to fight wasn't freeing slaves; it was preserving the Union.  With the exception of the abolitionists, who represented just a small percentage of the whole Union population, most people didn't really have a problem with slavery continuing in the South.  Most people figured it would eventually die out on its own, and there were even political movements to give federal aid to states that voluntary repealed their own slavery laws.

So there were many critics of the Emancipation Proclamation when it was enacted, and some of their criticisms, from a purely Constitutional point of view, were probably valid.  No one, of course, questions the ethical and moral rightness of the document.  But if we look, for a moment, at the Emancipation Proclamation the way a Supreme Court justice might look at it, we're forced to accept the possibility that the entire thing was unconstitutional.

I've already provided Lincoln's own justification for issuing the proclamation.  If that passage sounded like a lot of legal mumbo jumbo and hair-splitting, that's because it basically is.  The Constitution makes the president the commander-in-chief of the military, but it also assumes that the president will be commanding the military against foreign enemies, not internal ones.  And aside from giving the president this broad power, the Constitution is mute on what, exactly, the president can do as commander-in-chief.  Hire and fire generals, certainly.  Make military decisions during times of war, absolutely.  But the actual power of waging war and conducting war belongs to Congress, not the president.  It is highly questionable whether Lincoln, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, actually had the constitutional right to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.  His justification was, in my opinion, on very shaky legal ground, and probably overstepped his constitutional powers.

NINE

Even if we accept that Lincoln had the legal power to issue the proclamation, as part of his wartime powers, there is almost no question whatsoever that the wording of the proclamation itself was unconstitutional.

The key phrase comes in the very beginning of the text: "[Beginning January 1, 1863], all persons held as slaves [within the Confederacy] shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

In other words, the proclamation isn't vague at all: as of January 1, 1863, slaves held in any territories rebelling against the Union will not just be freed, but will be forever free.

The problem here is that even by Lincoln's own justification, this proclamation was issued as part of the presidential war powers.  As such, it could only be understood to be in effect as long as the war continued.  Once the war ended, the order could no longer be in effect - meaning that the proclamation didn't actually have the legal authority to declare slaves freed under its powers as "forever" free.

The fact is that if so much of the country had not been focused on waging and winning the existing war, it is a very good possibility that the Emancipation Proclamation might have been challenged in court, and it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty that it would have been upheld as legal.

TEN

In the end, the Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important executive orders ever issued by any president.  It was radical, it was provocative, and it might even have been unconstitutional.  But it undoubtedly gave a new focus to the war and a new expectation of the war's outcome and ultimate purpose.

Yet, at the same time, it was in many ways very limited.  It did not end slavery.  It left nearly 25% of existing slaves in servitude.  It did not make the practice of slavery illegal.  It did not have any authority beyond the war itself, or upon any part of the U.S. not currently in rebellion as of January 1, 1863.  Upon its initial implementation, it hardly affected any slaves at all - the slaves that would eventually be freed by it would not be freed until the Union armies reached them, which in many cases would be many months, and even years, later.  As one critic has cynically pointed out, the only slaves it freed were those in areas not controlled by the Union - in other words, the enemy is not allowed to have slaves, but we'll keep our own.

Despite this, it is hard to underestimate the importance of this provocative historical document, and the impact is has played on racial issues in the United States for the 150 years since it was enacted.

This photograph was taken in early October, 1862, just a few weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued, to take effect the following January.

10 Fun Facts About Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States

1. Abraham Lincoln was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky, about 40 miles south of Louisville, in 1809.  Named for his paternal grandfather, who had been murdered in an Indian attack about 20 years before his birth, Lincoln's maternal grandfather's name is not known.  His mother, Nancy Hanks, was born out of wedlock (possibly even the result of rape), and her maiden name was not her father's name, but her mother's.  The actor Tom Hanks is a distant relative.

2. Despite the common belief (made famous during his 1860 presidential campaign) that Lincoln was born into virtual poverty, his father was a large landowner and, according to a number of historians, among the richest individuals in LaRue County, Kentucky, at the time of Lincoln's birth.

3. When Lincoln was still a boy, the family moved to Indiana, partly as a result of land disputes in Kentucky, and partly because of the family's strict opposition to slavery, which was legal in Kentucky.  His mother died a few years later, in 1818.  His father remarried, but in 1820 the family moved to Illinois, due to an outbreak of the same disease that had killed his mother two years earlier.

4. Lincoln is known to have been taught as a child by a series of traveling instructors, but otherwise had no formal education.  An avid reader, he was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1836 as a completely self-taught lawyer.

5. Lincoln's love life was complicated: according to his step-mother, he "never took much interest" in girls as a young man, and isn't known to have been romantically involved with any woman until his late 20's.  At that time, he was involved with a woman named Ann Rutledge, and when she died in 1835, he was evidently crushed.  Not long after, he became involved with a woman named Mary Owen, but broke off their relationship because she got too fat.  In his early 30's, Lincoln met and got engaged to Mary Todd, but called it off shortly before their January, 1841, marriage.  A year or so later, they rekindled their relationship, and were finally married in late 1842.  A number of writers and historians, going as far back as Carl Sandburg in 1926 (whose Lincoln biography won a Pulitzer Prize), have questioned Lincoln's sexual orientation, suggesting he may have been gay or at least bisexual.  Others have dismissed these theories as unlikely and supported only by circumstantial evidence.

6. The Lincolns had four children, but only one lived to adulthood.  Lincoln's sister had died in the 1820's giving birth to a stillborn child, and since Lincoln himself only had one son who lived to give him grandchildren, he had very few descendants.  His last descendant, a great-grandson named Robert, died in 1985 in Virginia.

7. In addition to his law practice, Lincoln served as a member of the Illinois General Assembly throughout the 1830's and 40's, then served one term as a U.S. Congressman from 1846 to 1848, where he took a firm anti-war stance regarding the Mexican-American War that was being waged by president James K. Polk.

8. After leaving Congress in 1848, Lincoln spent the 1850's making himself famous as a lawyer and public speaker, and while he lost bids for U.S. Senate in both 1854 and 1858, the speeches he gave in those campaigns made him a national figure and a rising star in the new anti-slavery Republican party.  He was nominated for president in 1860 and won by defeating three other candidates who effectively split the Democratic vote three ways.  Although Lincoln was not an abolitionist, and had on numerous occasions stated that his only goal was to keep slavery from expanding to new territories, the slave states of the South seceded after his victory, certain that his election spelled doom for their rights to own slaves.

9. After the start of the Civil War, which began shortly after Lincoln took office, Lincoln did eventually free the slaves, in his now famous Emancipation Proclamation.  Many people questioned if he actually had the legal right to do this; Lincoln defended the move by saying it fell under his authority as head of the military.  He argued that, because the South was in rebellion, he had the right, as commander-in-chief, to suspend their civil laws.  Despite misconceptions to the contrary, the Emancipation Proclamation only affected states and territories that were, as of January 1, 1863, still in rebellion to the Union.  Thus, Kentucky and three other border slave-states were excluded, and their slaves were not freed until the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865.

10. Lincoln was assassinated in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865, just weeks after the war officially ended.  His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was chased down and shot to death about a month later.  Several months after that, four people were hanged for conspiring with Booth, including the first woman ever executed under federal law in U.S. history.

Abraham Lincoln: A Divisive President

Abraham Lincoln, who served as president of the United States from 1861 to 1865, is widely regarded as the greatest American president.  Indeed, in numerous "ranking polls" taken over the years, asking historians and political scientists to rank the presidents, Lincoln has been the consistent winner.  According to a chart on Wikipedia, which records the results of 17 major polls taken over the last 50 years, Lincoln has never placed lower than third, and has taken first nine times - more than any other president.  His aggregate ranking in that chart places him in the top position among American presidents.

                                    

This wide-spread academic acknowledgement of Lincoln's acheivements as president is reflected in popular culture as well.  Probably no historical president is quoted, mimicked, referenced, or dramatized more often than Abraham Lincoln.  His top hat and beard have become iconic symbols of his presidency.  Children's games are named for him, in memory of his humble beginnings in a log cabin.  No American high school student makes it through a Government class without reading his Gettysburg Address.  Countless books are published about him every single year.  Even in the 21st century, "Lincoln" remains a popular boy's name.  Kentucky hails itself as "Lincoln's Birthplace," while Indiana calls itself "Lincoln's Boyhood Home," and Illinois proudly displays "Land of Lincoln" on its license plate.  

There are literally hundreds of cities, towns, and communities around the U.S. named after him.  His iconic image is stamped onto every penny minted in the United States, and he is also on our five-dollar bill.

In short, Abraham Lincoln is the most widely-regarded, well-known, and beloved of all the American presidents.

With this in mind, one might be inclined to assume that his greatness was recognized even during his life and during his time in the White House.

Surprisingly, this assumption couldn't be farther from the truth.

Everyone knows what happened after Lincoln was elected in 1860.  The southern states seceded over the issue of slavery, and the Civil War began.  

What is often overlooked in this scenario is that the southern states actually seceded in protest of Lincoln's election.

Throughout the 1850's, the issue of slavery dominated the American political environment.  There were many different perspectives on the issue, and as a result of all these perspectives, the 1860 presidential election wound up with 4 major candidates nominated by 4 different parties.

The sitting Vice-President, John C. Breckenridge, was a pro-slavery southerner, and was easily nominated as the Southern Democrat candidate in 1860.  The Northern Democrats, on the other hand, believed that slavery was a states' rights issue, and believed in allowing states, and particularly new U.S. territories, to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery (they called this platform "Popular Sovereignty").  They nominated Stephen Douglas, a well-known Illinois politician who was a political rival to Abraham Lincoln.  

Stephen Douglas

It's important to keep in mind that the labels "Northern Democrat" and "Southern Democrat," in 1860, only referred to general regional loyalties.  There certainly would have been supporters of the "Northern Democrats" in the South, and vice versa.

The Republican party, in 1860, was still a new political party, formed primarily in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.  This Act, following the platform of Douglas and the group that would come to be known as the Northern Democrats, had allowed the Kansas and Nebraska territories to choose for themselves whether they would permit slavery.

Those Whigs and Democrats who were virulently opposed to the expansion of slavery, and who, in many cases, supported outright abolition of slavery, broke away from their respective parties after 1854 and formed the Republican party, whose platform was essentially to oppose any expansion of slavery in new territories and states.  In 1860, they nominated the anti-slavery Abraham Lincoln for the presidency.   

The Constitutional Union party was a fourth party formed during the 1860 election as an alternative to all the others.  Their basic platform was to avoid the slavery issue all together.  Their primary goal was to preserve the union - hence the name.  They opposed both factions of the Democratic party, because both were seen as pro-slavery, but they also opposed the Republicans, because they felt that the Republicans were too radical and believed that a Republican victory would lead to a dissolution of the union.  In short, the Constitutional Union party sought only to preserve the union and put off discussions about slavery until later.  They nominated a Tennessee politician and slave-owner named John Bell.  

Unlike modern elections, in which third-party candidates rarely make any significant run for the White House, all four candidates in 1860 had strong bases of support and ultimately won states in the electoral college.

Stephen Douglas, of the Northern Democrats, only carried one state (Missouri), but he garnered nearly 30% of the popular vote.  John Bell, the candidate of the Constitutional Union party, carried three states, but took only 12% of the popular vote, by far the least of any of the candidates.

John C. Breckinridge, the pro-slavery incumbent Vice-President, carried every southern state except for Tennessee, and took 19% of the popular vote.

John C. Breckinridge

Abraham Lincoln took most of the northern states, as well as California and Oregon, winning 39% of the popular vote and ultimately winning the election.  However, within 10 of the 15 slaves states, Lincoln did not receive a single, solitary vote from a single, solitary voter.  He wasn't even on the ticket there.  Of the 996 counties spanning the 15 slave states, Lincoln won only 2.  

As such, Lincoln won the election not by a majority, as most candidates do, but by a "plurality" - in other words, he didn't get a majority of the votes, but he got more than anyone else.  Still, more than 60% of the U.S. population voted for someone other than Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election.  This is remarkable; Lincoln came into office with almost two-thirds of the country opposed to him.  

His election, in fact, was so divisive, that it ultimately led to the secession of the southern states, which began happening before he even took office.  The dire predictions of the Constitutional Union party were being played out before everyone's eyes.  The union was falling apart because of the election of a radical anti-slavery president.  Lincoln attempted to stop this, giving speeches aimed at the South, promising not to abolish slavery there.  It goes without saying that this failed to stem the tide.

Following Lincoln's election, the secession of the southern states, and the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln found himself up for re-election again in 1864.  Although a Union victory was no longer in doubt by the time the actual election took place in November of that year, much of the 1864 campaign season took place during a time when victory was by no means assured.

Still, considering Lincoln's confident and competent leadership of the country during the war, and considering that his famous Gettysburg Address, and his even more famous and profound Emancipation Proclamation, had both already taken place by this time, one would have expected Lincoln to win his re-election handily.

Not so.

In the 1864 election, only the northern and western states were eligible to vote - the southern states had seceded and, at that time, were no longer part of the United States.  This means that the only states who voted in the 1864 election were the states where Lincoln was already most popular.  They were made up of states that Lincoln had mostly won in 1860, and which he had subsequently led for the previous three years.  

Yet despite this, the election was not a clear-cut victory for Lincoln.  In fact, Lincoln failed to gain the re-nomination of his own Republican party in 1864.  The party, by this time, was pushing a platform that went even farther than Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.  They wanted a constitutional amendment barring slavery for good, and wanted legislation to guarantee racial equality for all people.  Lincoln was not willing to go this far, and so the party nominated John C. Fremont of California as the Republican presidential candidate.   

John C. Fremont

As such, Lincoln was forced to form a third party, called the National Union party, which included more moderate Republicans and a group of northerners known as "War Democrats."  These War Democrats were northern Democrats who were radically opposed to making peace with the Confederacy.  Their platform was essentially to win the Civil War at all costs, and ultimately re-unite the broken country through military victory.  

The Northern Democrats, by this time, had become a party advocating peace with the Confederacy.  They came to be known as the Copperheads or Peace Democrats, and their most vocal leader was Clement L. Vallandigham, an Ohio congressman.  They nominated Lincoln's former top general, George B. McClellan, as their candidate.  This was somewhat of a contradiction, because McClellan openly supported continuing the war with the Confederacy, and largely disagreed with the party platform written by Vallandigham. 

Clement L. Valladigham

As the campaign among these three candidates progressed, the Republican nominee Fremont expressed concerns about splitting the Republican vote with Lincoln's party.  He openly vowed to bow out of the election if the National Union party would nominate someone other than Abraham Lincoln.  The party, however, refused to do this, and Fremont himself finally relented, removing himself from the race in September of 1864.  

Fremont's decision to bow out of the race ultimately led to Lincoln winning the election in November of 1864.  The Northern Democrats had hurt their cause by nominating a candidate who didn't even fully agree with their own platform of peace.  

George McClellan

Furthermore, the entire peace platform was becoming irrelevant by this time, since it was becoming obvious that the Union was going to win and thus re-unite the country (this had not been the case earlier in the campaign).  As such, Americans voted to keep Lincoln in office.     

Still, while Lincoln won a landslide in the electoral college, he won only 55% of the popular vote.  Fifty-five percent!  This means that even despite his leadership during the war, and despite his Gettysburg Address and his Emancipation Proclamation, and despite the Northern Democrats making several political blunders, Lincoln was still opposed by almost half of Americans - and this, of course, does not count the southerners, who were opposed to him so dramatically that they seceded over his election and ultimately assassinated him.

In the modern day, we would consider a 55% to 45% victory in the popular vote to be a strong showing and an easy win.  And this would have been true in 1860 as well.  However, when you bear in mind what I said at the outset of this post - when you consider the way we revere Lincoln today and consider him the greatest of our American presidents - it is downright staggering that he only managed to win 55% of the popular vote in his 1864 re-election campaign. 

Abraham Lincoln's presidency was a strange one.  His entire presidency was taken up by the Civil War - which started just a few months after he took office, and ended only a few weeks before he was assassinated.  He never had the chance to be a "normal" president and to work on the "normal" things that presidents work on.  Instead, his entire presidency was marred by a civil war between the states.  He was elected initially with less than 40% of the popular vote - making him one of the most un-wanted presidents in U.S. history.  The states of the south literally seceded from the union, precipitating the Civil War, in protest of his election.  He failed to garner the re-nomination of his own party when he ran for re-election in 1864 because they didn't think his views on slavery and racial integration went far enough.  And in that race, he won only 55% of the popular vote, even though the southern states didn't even get to vote in that election.  He only had 55% support from the states where he was most widely liked!  

This fact of history, of course, is an important one to keep in mind when evaluating modern presidents.  It would be fair to say that Abraham Lincoln, if evaluated solely on his popularity during his time in the White House, may have been the most divisive person to ever serve the office of the presidency.  The simple fact is, he was not very widely popular, and was absolutely detested by a significant portion of the American people.  This is important to remember when considering the highly divisive presidents who have served over the last 20 years or so.    

The Real Lincoln Log Cabin: Fact or Fantasy?

That Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 inside a log cabin on a farm near Hodgenville, Kentucky is an undisputed fact of history. That this log cabin is still in existence, preserved inside a Beaux-Arts structure in Hodgenville, is another story.



The mythos of the Lincoln Log Cabin literally goes back to Abraham Lincoln himself. When running for president in 1860, Lincoln frequently drew on his humble roots, his birth in a log cabin in rural Kentucky, to find common ground with the common man, and to demonstrate his self-made success. He had risen literally from the humblest of beginnings.



After he was elected, interest in this storied log cabin naturally grew. Was it still there in rural Kentucky for anyone to see? Stories from the Civil War suggest that Confederate soldiers moving through the area even went so far as to look for the cabin in order to destroy it.

After the war and Lincoln’s assassination, interest in his birthplace grew even more. It was known that Lincoln’s family had moved to a neighboring farm a few years after his birth, leaving his birth cabin behind, but local residents in the area told cabin-hunters that the original cabin belonging to the Lincoln family had been dismantled by later owners and reused in a much larger home a short distance away.

Subsequently, this dwelling, believed to be built in part from the original cabin, became a sort of shrine for Lincoln enthusiasts in the latter half of the 19th century.

As interest and pilgrimages to the Lincoln farm grew, a New York businessman (of course he was from New York!) named A.W. Dennett came up with the bright idea of making some money off of it. In 1894, he purchased the farm, dismantled the dwelling there, and used what he believed were the original cabin logs to rebuild the cabin itself. How did he know which logs belonged to the original cabin? The answer to that question is anybody’s guess. Presumably Dennett chose the logs that looked the oldest, or perhaps those logs which could, together, be used to construct a cabin. Obviously, any material that was not a log (for instance, a wooden slat) would have been rejected, as would any material that did not meet the appropriate lengths, etc.

As for how he knew what the cabin would have looked like when it was in its original form, that would have been easy enough to determine simply from engineering knowledge about log cabin dimensions in west-central Kentucky in the early 1800’s. This knowledge may also have helped in choosing which logs were original and which were later designs.

Unfortunately for Dennett, the reconstruction of the cabin on the Lincoln farm did not produce the crowds of tourists he had hoped for, so he took the show on the road. Dismantling the cabin, and loading it onto a train, he toured around the country, displaying the cabin at various expositions in major cities throughout the late 1890’s. This proved much more successful for Dennett, and he eventually added a second cabin to the show – one which he claimed had been the birthplace cabin of Jefferson Davis, Lincoln’s presidential counterpart in the Confederacy during the Civil War, and also born in western Kentucky about eight months before Lincoln. Both cabins were assembled and dismantled at the beginning and end of each show, stowed in separate train cars while on the move to ensure that the logs didn’t get mixed.

After four or five years on the road, and with interest in the cabins waning, Dennett hung up his traveling clothes, stuck the cabins in storage, and moved on to bigger and better things. While in storage, the various logs from the two cabins were not separated.

A few years later, around 1906, a historical society decided to try Dennett’s first idea again – to put the cabin in its original place on the original farm, and advertise it as a tourist attraction. They purchased the cabin at auction (Dennett had gone bankrupt) and had it taken out of storage, not realizing that it was now mixed together with the logs from the Davis log cabin. Upon trying to reassemble the cabin, of course, they quickly realized the problem.

Again, how they ultimately decided which logs had belonged to the Lincoln cabin, and which logs had belonged to the Davis cabin, is anyone’s guess. Dimensions and wood type were no doubt taken into consideration.

A memorial building was erected on the Lincoln farm, in the spot where the original cabin had once stood. The cabin’s actual geographic location on the farm was easy to determine by looking at the original plats of the land, drawn up when the Lincoln family purchased it in 1807.

Once the memorial building was complete (Theodore Roosevelt laid its cornerstone in 1909), the cabin was put inside it. Unfortunately, an immediate problem arose. When rebuilt to its original dimensions (that is, the original dimensions used by Dennett), there was not adequate space around it for tourists. That problem was easily overcome by simply chopping off four feet from one side and one foot from the other. What had originally been 16x18 was now 12x17. Thus, the cabin in its present form is narrower than Dennett’s had been, and narrower than it would have been in 1809.

The memorial building, with the smaller cabin inside, was dedicated by William Howard Taft in 1911, and has now been a tourist attraction for nearly a century.

But the vital question still remains: Is the cabin really the same cabin that Lincoln was born in? Numerous assemblies and disassemblies and a trimming of the dimensions aside, is the cabin one sees inside the big stone building in Hodgenville, Kentucky built from the same logs that Lincoln’s original birthplace cabin was built from? Clearly the logs today are not necessarily in the same locations relative to one another as they may have been in Lincoln’s day, but are they at least the same logs? Did Lincoln’s father lean against those logs to take a rest from the noonday sun? Did the infant Lincoln himself crawl the dirt floor beneath and within those logs?

The answer to those questions has been the matter of much debate for quite a long time. With such a sordid history surrounding the origins and maintenance of those logs, it has been difficult, in the past, to do much more than speculate.

Recently, however, historians have moved a bit more closely to the truth. After decades of requests by various researchers, the historical society that maintains the site finally conceded to letting several scientists come in to take core samples from the logs for laboratory study.

The wood in the logs proved to be in remarkably poor condition. For a time, it even appeared that the researchers might not be able to get a viable core sample because of the extreme state of deterioration. But they persevered and managed to get several good samples from two or three different logs.

The samples were put through a litany of laboratory tests, and the results were fairly conclusive: the “Lincoln Log Cabin” needs to be renamed the “Anonymous Log Cabin.”

The tests on these core samples showed that the trees used to make the logs were cut down no earlier than 1848. That’s 40 years too late for Lincoln’s actual birthplace. The age of the trees at the time they were cut down would have made them, at best, small saplings at the time of Lincoln’s birth. The tests did confirm, however, that the logs came from trees native to the area of Kentucky where Lincoln was born. This means, at the very least, that the logs making up the cabin today did come from Dennett’s Lincoln cabin, and not from his Davis cabin. One of two conclusions is apparent: the 19th century locals were wrong when they claimed that Lincoln’s cabin had been used later to build a larger home, or Dennett chose the wrong logs.

Of course, some dissenters, spurred by romantic ideas of the cabin’s originality, might argue that these tests only prove that those specific logs were not original to the cabin. The cores, remember, only came from a few logs, because most of the logs were in such bad shape that they were untestable. Perhaps the cabin is composed of both original and non-original material. That certainly remains a possibility, but the scientific evidence, coupled with what is already known about the sordid history of the cabin itself, make any hope for original Lincoln materials in the Hodgenville cabin remote indeed.

In fact, as a result of these tests, the cabin is now billed not as Lincoln’s actual birthplace, but as a symbol of Lincoln’s humble beginnings, a replica – albeit a very early replica.

And that last phrase is the important part. As a historian with a flair for the romance of history, it is disappointing for me to know that the cabin in Hodgenville is not actually the cabin Lincoln was born in. But even if it is not Lincoln’s own cabin, it is still a very old dwelling, preserved for history in Hodgenville. Built in the late 1840’s, it remains one of the oldest log dwellings in America, even if its current form is different than its original.

Log dwellings, of course, are abundant today throughout historical sites in states like Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. But most of these structures are relatively modern replicas, built in the 20th century with 20th century technology and 20th century preservation techniques. They were never real log dwellings that real people in the real 19th century built for themselves and lived in.

The Lincoln Log Cabin, however, is just such a dwelling. Even if it wasn’t Lincoln’s family who lived in it, it was somebody’s family who cut the trees down, fashioned the wood, built the structure, and lived in it. And they did so more than 160 years ago, in a time when no one had ever heard of Abraham Lincoln, and slavery was still a thriving business in America.

That makes the dwelling historically important, and romantically significant, even if Lincoln himself never saw it.