Abraham Lincoln Birthplace Historic Resource Study

NOTES

1. Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 431-32.

2. Stephen B. Oates, Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 16.

3. Thomas, 7; Oates, With Malice Toward None, 5-6; Thomas L. Purvis, "The Making of a Myth: Abraham Lincoln's Family Background in the Perspective of Jacksonian Politics," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 75 (Summer 1982): 149-50.

4. Thomas, 4-5; Thomason, E2-E3.

5. The money for this purchase came from the sale of land inherited by Thomas and Mordecai Lincoln from their father (Beveridge, vol. I, 12).

6. Property records indicate that Thomas Lincoln believed he had purchased a 300-acre farm; a survey of the property in 1837 revealed that the tract actually contained 348.5 acres (Warren, 83-87).

7. Kent Masterson Brown, "Report on The Title of Thomas Lincoln to, And The History of, The Lincoln Boyhood Home Along Knob Creek in LaRue County, Kentucky" (Atlanta: National Park Service, Southeast Regional Office, 1998), 31.

8. Brown, 33.

9. Kent Brown convincingly argues that Thomas Lincoln was a "victim" of David Vance, one of four people involved in the 1808 Sinking Spring Farm transaction. Vance, who never appeared at the Hardin Circuit Court to testify in his defense, already had four pending lawsuits against him relating to land deals (Brown, 21).

10. In notes supplied to a journalist in 1860 for a campaign biography, Abraham Lincoln wrote that the family's removal to Indiana "was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Ky." "Autobiography Written for John L. Scripps," The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), IV: 61-62.

11. James O. Randall, "Abraham Lincoln," in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), 243-44.

12. Randall, 244-45.

13. Randall, 246-47; Oates, With Malice Toward None, 127-28.

14. State legislatures chose U.S. senators in this period; Douglas prevailed because the Democrats maintained control of the Illinois legislature.

15. Randall, 248-49.

16. Randall, 248-49.

17. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 223,234-35,271-74,278-83; Randall, 249-51.

18. Randall, 251-52.

19. McPherson, 333-34, 557-58; Oates, With Malice Toward None, 317-33. Abolitionist sentiment was strong in Britain, which had outlawed slavery in its empire in 1833 (John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967], 347).

20. Oates, With Malice Toward None, 352-53.

21. McPherson, 718-22; Oates, With Malice Toward None, 383-85.

22. McPherson, 773-75, 788-91, 805-6; Oates, With Malice Toward None, 387-97,400-1.

23. McPherson, 846-50; Oates, With Malice Toward None, 420-33.