William G. Greene spent time at the Lincolns’ farm at Goosenest Prairie, in Coles County, Illinois, and observed that Thomas was barely able to eke out a living. Greene found Thomas residing “in a little cabin that cost perhaps $15, and with many evidences of poverty about him.” The cabin “looked so small and humble” that Greene “felt embarrassed.” It had no stable, no outhouse, and no shrubbery or trees. An early historian of Coles County, who interviewed acquaintances of Thomas Lincoln, called him “one of those easy, honest, commonplace men, who take life as they find it, and, as a consequence, generally find it a life of poverty.” He “possessed no faculty whatever of preserving his money, when he made any, hence he always remained poor. He was easily contented, had few wants, and those of a primitive nature. He was a foe to intemperance, strictly honest, and, supposing others the same, often suffered pecuniary losses.” Sophie Hanks, who lived in the Lincoln family’s Indiana cabin for several years, had a son who attributed Thomas’s lack of ambition to frontier isolation: “he was like the other people in that country. None of them worked to get ahead. There wasn’t no market for nothing unless you took it across two or three states. The people raised just what they needed.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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