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While investigating the immediate neighbors of Lincoln's teenage grandmother Lucey Hanks at the time of Lincoln's mother's birth, the writer was surprised to find a sister and nephew of four of the American Revolution's most prominent statesmen: Richard Henry Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee, William Lee and Arthur Lee.
The Stratford-Hall Lee sister living in the Rappahannock-Farnham Creek neighborhood was Hannah Ludwell (Lee) Corbin (1728-1782), and the Lee nephew-her son-was Elisha Lingan Hall (1764-c.1819), who was just then coming of age and into his inheritance. (The writer believes he is the first to discover the eventual fate of this Lee scion in Kentucky.)
The fact that Revolutionary-era women's rights advocate Hannah Corbin, a Baptist, resided in the Hanks' immediate Richmond County neighborhood between 1771 and 1781, and that her son Elisha was based there until 1785, is of itself an intersting coincidence. (See the Northern Neck of Virginia Historical Magazine, vol. 32, no. 1, December, 1983 for the more complete portayal of her life by Elizabeth Spencer James Pardoe.) After her husband Gawin Corbin's death about 1760, there is more about Hannah Corbin and her son that provokes intersest. The widow Hannah Corbin then broke ranks with her aristocratic brothers and sister Alice Shippen by becoming a Baptist. The Baptist interpretation of the Christian faith was at that time making its initial inroads into Virginia's Northern Neck. During those early years it was highly informal and emotional in its format and presentation. It resembled rather closely some of the Pentacostal sects of today.
No Baptist congregation was formally established in the central or eastern part of the Northern Neck until 1778. But both before and after that date, itinerant, often charismatic preachers without formal training-such as Lewis Lunsford, William McClannahan, Nathaniel Wheedon, "Negro (Ivison) Lewis", and the youthful John Taylor (who was loosely based in Hampshire County)-preached to outdoor crowds numbering in the hundreds or even thousands. The itinerant charismatics also preached in barns and warehouses, from bridges, and in some cases, in the manor halls of their small hanful of aristocratic supporters. Most of those attracted to the Baptist awakening in the Northern Neck during the 1770's and 1780's were from the lower echelon of society. Both whites and black slaves were converted and accepted in to the Baptist fellowship. The newly imported religion was threatening the strict caste system then in place in the Northern Neck, and during the 1770's its leaders were persecuted there.
While the writer has not seen the documentation, it has been claimed that Hannah Corbin also sponsored some of the Baptist preaching events. In one case reported to have occured at her plantation, a violent attack on some of the leaders is said to have erupted, perpetrated by some of the religion's local detractors.
There are convincing reasons to believe that Joseph Hanks and his family considered themselves to be Baptists at this time, and that they attended the many mass outdoor and indoor meetings and preaching sessions held locally during the 1770's and 1780's. When Joseph's daughter Lucey, after her arrival in Kentucky, married Henry Sparrow, their union was consecrated by a circuit-riding Baptist preacher. As previously stated, the birth of only one of the many children of Joseph and Ann Hanks is reported in the records of the old North Farnham Anglican Church. Moreover, the Hankses are known to have had Baptist relatives at the time.
The Baptist faith of Hannah Corbin is clearly evidenced in the letter she wrote about 1780 to her sister Alice, who lived in Philadelphia and was married to Dr. William Shippen, one of the foremost American surgeons of the time:
I hope I shall never live to see the day that I don't love God, for there can nothing I know befal[l] me so horrible as to be left to myself....Glory to be my God for his pardoning Grace, His reddeming Love.
In this same letter, it is noted with interest, she mentions her son Elisha:
Your niece [Hannah's youngest daughter Martha] has also enlisted herself amongst the poor despised Baptists. After the Lord spoke peace to her soul, she was not to be persuaded from it. Elisha delights much in the religious society, but the Lord has never yet reveal'd Himself to him.
From this last statement, we may infer that the 17-year-old Elisha Hall was getting to know the "poor, despsed" members of local Baptist society rather well-and that he found them a great delight.
Hannah Corbin, her son Elisha and daughter Martha, although very far apart from the Hankses economically and culturally, were the Hankses' close neighbors as well as their co-religionists. The widow Corbin's 500-acre plantation consisted of three tracts-Woodberry, on the Rappahannock, wher her residence stood, and two other tracts lying one and three miles north, respectively. The 151-acre tract on which, or next to which, the Hankses lived lay between the two dependent tracts. It bordered, in fact, on one of them.
In reading the various documents Hannah Corbin has left, one has the impression, fairly or unfairly, of a lonely, debt-ridden, somewhat hypochrondriacal, somewhat paranoid person who had struggled courageously but fitfully to cope with the responsibilities of managing a plantation, following the deaths of borth her spouses. She had never legally married her second "husband", physician Richard Lingan Hall, who was also a Baptist, since that would have deprived her of her life-legacy from the first spouse, Gawin Corbin. The writer assumes, however, that at some point a Baptist elder blessed her union with Richard Hall. In the Baptist faith, it could hardly have been otherwise.
The year 1781 saw a deterioration in Hannah's health. She decided to leave Woodberry and move in with Elizabeth McFarlane, another woman-planter who lived many miles away in Westmoreland County. There, in October of 1781, she wrote her will, and there, it seems, she died the following year. Her will left nearly all of her lands in Richmond and Westmoreland counties to Elisha. The right to occupy the half the house and yar at Woodberry prior to her marriage was given to daughter Martha Hall.
One cannot tell with certainty wher Hannah Corbin's son Elisha was during the time of her illness. Immediately after her death, however, he was considered to be a resident of Richmond County, because it was there that the county court certified the 19-year-old's choice of a nominal guardian, on October 7, 1782. When much of Hannah's personal estate (not the land) at Woodberry was sold at public auction on or about December 30, 1782, to satisfy her many debts, Elisha Hall was in attendance. He was by all appearances residing on his newly inherited plantation when the personal property taxes on it were assessed in April 1784, just after he had turned 21. At the time of the 1782 and 1783 taxations, Woodberry was still listed as "The estate of Mrs. Hannah Corbin, dec'd." During those years, Elisha Hall was still under twenty-one, and would not have been tithable, so his presence cannot be proven or disproven from those records.
Elisha Hall sold Woodberry and its two dependent tracts in 1785 to his renowned uncle Arthur Lee, who had represented American interests in Europe during the Revolution. Lee operated it as his country seat, and resided there occasionally until 1791, when he sold it out of the family. During the early or middle 1780's, Elisha Hall received enough medical training to become, like his father, a physician.
Elisha's whereabouts during the Lucey Hanks became pregant with Abraham Lincoln's mother (i.e., 1781-83) are not entirely certain, but the preponderance of the evidence that has been just cited suggests he was at Woodberry, his mother's estate on the Rappahannock in Richmond County. Given his mother's distressed economic state and health, he could conceivably have taken over the management of his mother's Richmond County plantation at the time of her move to Westmoreland-a heavy repsonsibility for such a young man. In 1782, Woodberry had thirty-six taxable slaves, the records show. Certainly, he could have continued living there, providing some degree of supervision to the overser William Richards.
It cannot be seriously doubted that Elisha Hall knew Lucey Hanks. They were close neighbors. They were only three or four years apart in age. Both, almost certainly, attended local Baptist meetings and activities. Lucey, having learned to read and write (possibly while employed as a servant as a servant on a local plantation), might have thought at her tender age that someone like Elisha Lingan Hall was not beyond her reach.
Both the writer and the reader, however, must resist the temptation to turn speculation and a few coincidences of time, place, age, and religion into a statement of possibility or probability concerning the paternity of Nancy Hanks, Lincoln's mother. We can only say that Elisha Hall is another neighbor who merits the further scrutiny in the search for the male half of Nancy's parentage.
In 1786, Elisha Lingan Hall, now Dr. Hall, joined the great migration of Virginians and others to Kentucky, accoring to many documents the writer has discovered. He settled in Louisville, then a strategic crossroads at the falls of the Ohio River. There, on February 3, 1787, he married Fanny Eastin. Besides practicing medicine, he served as a constable, and eventually as the county jailor. In his will, probabted March 8, 1819, he provided for his widow Fanny, and three children: Richard, Harriet, and Elisha. His son Richard served as a Louisville councilman 1828-31.
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