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Lot 77
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Puritan Volume Owned & 3x Signed Lincoln's Father and Likely Read by Abe
Puritan Volume Owned & 3x Signed Lincoln's Father and Likely Read by Abe
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Description:

Puritan Volume Owned by Thomas Lincoln and Perhaps Read by Abraham Lincoln

This volume, An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners by Joseph Alleine, signed by Thomas Lincoln, may have been one of the earliest books Abraham Lincoln ever read. It is an American edition of a volume by a popular seventeenth-century Puritan author. This edition was published in 1807, two years before Abraham Lincoln was born. Nearly seventy years earlier, Benjamin Franklin had printed and sold an edition of this work in Philadelphia. Each year after its founding in 1825, the American Tract Society published thousands of copies of Alleine’s Alarm for distribution. Some estimate that the book has been reprinted some five hundred times.

[ABRAHAM LINCOLN] Thomas Lincoln, Signed Book. Joseph Allein, An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners. Shewing, First, What Conversion is Not, and Correcting Some Mistakes about It. Second, What Conversion Is, and Wherein It Consisteth, &c. &c. Charlestown, MA: Samuel Etheridge, 1807. 240 pp., 4.5" x 7.125". Signed three times by Thomas Lincoln, on flyleaf, title page, and page 13. Minor foxing; significant toning on pp. 229-240; very good. Also included is a Certification by Charles Hamilton that the volume "contains three authentic signatures of Thomas Lincoln, father of Abraham Lincoln."

Historical Background
In his 1920 study Abraham Lincoln and His Books, William E. Barton insisted that Abraham Lincoln had read Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1649), a book very similar to this one by Joseph Alleine. Nearly a century later, Robert Bray observed in his study of "What Abraham Lincoln Read," "However unlikely it might seem that Lincoln spent any part of his valuable reading time turning the turgid pages of a seventeenth-century Calvinist divine’s apologetics, any conclusion of Barton’s is ignored at later scholars’ peril." Bray was cautious because Barton had claimed to own a manuscript copy of a paragraph from Baxter’s book in Lincoln’s handwriting.

Most scholars agree that Abraham Lincoln was a voracious reader as a child and youth. He often walked miles to borrow a book. It is unlikely that Thomas Lincoln could afford to purchase many books other than the Bible, though he may have received this volume from one of the societies that distributed them.

Thomas Lincoln (1778-1851) was born in Virginia and in May 1786 witnessed the murder of his father by Native Americans. His brother Mordecai killed a Native American who was going to capture or kill Thomas. Their widowed mother afterward moved the family to Kentucky. Thomas Lincoln served in the state militia at the age of 19 and in 1802, moved to Hardin County, Kentucky, where he purchased a farm. In June 1806, he married Nancy Hanks (1784-1818), with whom he had two children, including future president Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Thomas Lincoln bought successive farms in Kentucky before moving his family to Indiana in December 1816 to avoid slavery and Kentucky’s convoluted land titles. Lincoln purchased land in Indiana and settled in the Little Pigeon Creek community. After his first wife died in October 1818, he married Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow from Kentucky, in December 1819. By 1827, he owned 100 acres of land in Indiana. In 1830, he moved his family to Illinois, settling in Coles County in eastern Illinois in 1831, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Joseph Alleine (1634-1668) was a Puritan Nonconformist pastor and author. Born at Devizes, he entered Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1649, and became a scholar of Corpus Christi College in 1651, receiving the Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1653. In 1655, he became an associate pastor at St. Mary Magdalene church in Taunton, Somerset, England. The same year, he married Theodosia Alleine. He was ejected from his position as a result of the Uniformity Act of 1662 but continued preaching, which led to his imprisonment for a year in 1663-1664. Although he moved to an obscure area, he was again arrested for preaching in 1665. His primary work, An Alarme to Unconverted Sinners, was first published in 1671 and had an enormous circulation. After his death in 1668, his widow, famed Puritan Richard Baxter, and others wrote An Account of the Life and Death of That Excellent Minister of Christ, the Rev. Joseph Alleine.

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

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