Lincoln’s estrangement stemmed not just from Thomas’s emotional reserve, painful though that may have been. More deeply wounding was “his father’s cold and inhuman treatment of him.” Caroline Dall, who spoke with William H. Herndon (Lincoln’s law partner and biographer) in 1866 and spent three days examining the biographical materials he had accumulated, said Thomas Lincoln “ill-treated A[braham] to such an extent that he drove him from home.” Augustus H. Chapman deplored Thomas’s “great barbarity” in dealing with his boy. Dennis Hanks recalled that Thomas would whip young Abe for minor indiscretions. “Sometimes Abe was a little rude,” Hanks testified. “When strangers would ride along & up to his father[’]s fence Abe always, through pride & to tease his father, would be sure to ask the stranger the first question, for which his father would sometimes knock him a rod.” Thomas Lincoln “would pick up a big clod and knock little Abe off the fence, crying: ‘Let older people have the first say, will you boy?” Whenever he was “whipped by his father” he “never bawled but dropt a kind of silent unwelcome tear, as evidence of his sensations—or other feelings.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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