President Abraham Lincoln was selecting his cabinet members when he took three days from his schedule to make his final visit to his beloved stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln. Sarah became his stepmother a year after his own mother had died. Thomas Lincoln, Abraham’s father, went back to Kentucky to look for a wife.
He previously knew Sarah when he lived in Kentucky and heard she had since become a widow. He asked her to marry him. From the time she and her three children came to Lincoln’s Indiana home, Abraham Lincoln called her “Mother.” Here’s a short story on honest Abe’s blended family.
After his father died, President Lincoln maintained 40 acres in his own name to be held for his stepmother as long as she lived. She died in April 1869, at the age of 80.
She treated Sarah (Abraham’s sister) and Abraham the same as her own children, earning the lasting affection of Abraham. Sarah joined the family when Abraham was 10 years old, and from that point forward he always addressed her as “Mother.” She encouraged his desire for reading and learning. As an adult, he visited her “every year or two,” and Abraham was closer to her than to his father.
There is some disagreement about exactly what was said between Abraham and his stepmother. However, historians agree they exchanged expressions of their love for one another. At separate times prior, Lincoln called his stepmother a “good and kind mother” and she said he was more well-behaved than her own children. It is this farewell exchange artist Frederic Mizen depicted in his painting below, “Lincoln’s Farewell to His Stepmother.”
Lincoln’s keen sense of humor was probably influenced by his stepmother. He recalled she was a firm, kind-hearted woman who loved to laugh. When he was eighteen years old, Lincoln, at 6′ 4″, was so tall that his head nearly touched the ceiling of the family’s farmhouse kitchen. His stepmother repeatedly joked that Lincoln was so tall she was afraid he would leave footprints on her ceiling.
Lincoln decided to have some fun with this idea. One day, when his stepmother was not home, Lincoln got a group of younger boys together and had them dip their bare feet in the mud outside the farmhouse kitchen. Lincoln took each of the boys inside, held them upside-down, and had them walk their feet across the ceiling, leaving muddy footprints.
When Sarah Lincoln saw the muddy footprints on her ceiling, Lincoln recalled, she “took a broom to my head. But I could tell she was very amused by it.”
Questions to Consider
In the days of Lincoln and earlier, do you think becoming a blended family was more out of economic necessity and practicality than love? Do you think it was easier back then to accept the new parent as “Mother” or “Father?”
- The absence of life insurance for the man who was usually the primary breadwinner.
- Widows whose primary responsibility was raising the children usually did not have a career or business to fall back on.
- The difficulty a widowed man would have had with raising children, especially young ones while fulfilling his breadwinner responsibilities.
- Most blended families were created as the result of the death of one of the biological parents.
Please leave your answers in the comments. Thanks.
