Finding America's History

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2004 by Conway, Thomas G

Preserved text has been the primary basis of history. Does it follow, then, that the spoken language is of similar importance? If so, understanding life in the American West during the years of Abraham Lincoln's life can be enhanced by attention to its linguistic culture.

A scan of the first three volumes of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) contains references to such writers as Thomas Chandler Haliburton. If one has been exposed to Haliburton's creation, "Sam Slick," one might easily conclude that material that has largely been lost to history was preserved in fictional literature, even in humor. For well over a hundred years, linguists like those of the American Dialect Society have collected historical vocabulary. However, until DARE, this work had only amounted to a museum of artifacts. DARE is in the process of giving the provenance of the words and expressions. A search for evidence of the language that had been spoken by the American pioneers of Lincoln's world might show that it is possible literally to mine the sources for the vocabulary and idioms, focusing on the years preceding the Civil War. The locale of the search is the region where Lincoln lived.

When Abraham Lincoln was seven years old, his Kentucky family moved to Indiana. The year was 1816, when Indiana became a state. Shortly thereafter, the state's frontier between the American settlers and the native peoples moved northward as a result of the "New Purchase" treaty of 1818. Indiana then experienced its first burst of development as settlers poured into the new state. The Lincolns remained in Indiana until 1830 when Abraham was twenty-one. Thus, when Lincoln moved to Illinois, he would have been called a Hoosier. Did such a label carry any significance? Just what did it mean to be a Hoosier?

The Indiana Territory from 1800 to 1808 had included what later became the state of Illinois. The political divisions in the Old Northwest were much less significant than in the thirteen original states. On the Atlantic coast, history had created sharply defined loyalties to place. For example, Virginians considered themselves greatly different from Marylanders or Carolinians. In the western region, however, citizens drank from the same wellsprings of culture. The two major ones were the preaching of the circuit riders and the politicking of egalitarian leaders. The result had been a commonality of culture from south to north that the later struggle over slavery obscured.

The word "Hoosier" had deep significance for the character of Indiana society in the years before the Civil War. The label was applied to Southern frontiersmen and, also, to "hicks." Perhaps the best source of Hoosier culture was a novel, The Neiv Purchase, written in 1843 by Baynard Rush Hall under the pseudonym of Robert Carlton. Hall arrived in southern Indiana in 1823 and left the year after Lincoln did.1

While himself a college teacher, Hall's sharply observant eye focused on the sturdy backwoodsmen and their families. Possessing a gift for humorous description, his account of seven and one-half years has a quality of accurate reporting better than biographies and histories of the age and place. He discerned the ethos and charm of the pioneers who settled in the "Big Woods." Such a world was remarkably different from earlier areas of settlement as it was from the settlements on the prairies and in the Far West. In the deep shade of the forest canopy, then treated as a foe to be cut down, Hall discovered a people with their own folkways and, most notably, their own language.

Americans in the 1820s and 1830s were not the culturally homogeneous people that they later became in the age of superior transportation and the mass media. Most of the Indiana settlers were from families that had been living on the frontier for generations. It was not the consequent illiteracy that was remarkable, as many families that had not experienced the isolation of the frontier were also illiterate. What was fascinating, especially to sensitive outsiders like Hall, was that a distinct culture had evolved, unlike the world of eastern rustics. Although it was unlikely that he ever met young Lincoln, he did meet and also describe Lincoln-like prototypes. Undoubtedly, since Lincoln was a Hoosier, the language that he spoke among his family and friends was the dialect of the community in which he and his ancestors had grown. Such people had their distinct vocabulary and modified values. This is what Hall discovered and about which he wrote.

In Lincoln's day one could have spoken about "a gathering of Corncrackers, Hoosiers, Suckers, Woolverines and even some Buckeyes and Pukes."2 This odd list captures the rich vocabulary of a lost language, the non-standard English spoken as late as the nineteenth century in much of America. Possibly, the recorded dictionary of this speech and such remnants as still occur vocally can be used to recreate the America of Lincoln's youth.

Such an approach might circumvent the shortcomings of traditional sources. Unfortunately, some of the material for the history of the western frontier is so elitist that the contributions of the common people are largely excluded. Daniel Harmon Brush, in Groiving Up With Southern Illinois 1820-1861, explicitly focuses on his family who settled with some Vermont pioneers. Brush proudly claimed that these had no association with those neighbors who drank, swore, or used tobacco.3 Nonetheless, most western pioneers seemed to have done all these things.