Encounters
''primogeniture'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜encounter｜ENC｜20260904120411-06-•
The documentary record reveals little about Thomas’s activities in the decade after his father’s death. Under the law of primogeniture, his eldest brother, Mordecai, inherited everything from the paternal estate, which included a few hundred acres in Kentucky. Mordecai may have treated his younger brother unkindly. Emilie Todd Helm, half-sister of Mary Todd Lincoln, “said that the reason why Thomas Lincoln grew up unlettered was that his brother Mordecai, having all the land in his possession … turned Thomas out of the house when the latter was 12 years old; so he went out among his relations & the Berrys et al. and there grew up.” In 1795, Thomas served in the Kentucky militia for a month, and the following year he worked on a milldam in Hardin County. While laboring there, he lived with his father’s cousin, Hananiah Lincoln, a resident of Elizabethtown, 45 miles southwest of Louisville. Thomas and Hananiah remained in that village only until 1798, when they evidently headed south to Cumberland County. While in that region, Thomas spent time in Tennessee with his prosperous uncle, Isaac Lincoln, whose only child had died quite young. Thomas might have become a surrogate son, but Isaac disapproved of young Tom’s indolence and improvidence.
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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