--- Supplemental: The Lincolns, 1814-1924 ---
Excerpts from The Ancestry of Georgina Lincoln, America’s First Female President, by Dr. Diana King, published by Hoosier Press, Indianapolis, in 2000.
While the Lincoln family can trace their lineage all the way back to Britain, the family took its first steps towards national prominence in the 1840s, when President Lincoln’s great-great-grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for the state of Indiana, one of 9 Democrats representing the state. Lincoln was known for his outspoken views against slavery, an institution he believed was holding back American expansion and development of the West. Lincoln served in the House from 1842 until 1850, whereupon he returned to Indiana and to the new family home in Indianapolis, where he had begun a law firm that was now quite prosperous. By the mid-1850s, all three of Lincoln’s sons, Thomas II, Peter, and Benjamin, had begun working at the firm.
In 1856, Abraham is convinced by several prominent businessmen and politicians in Indianapolis to put his name in the running for the open Senate seat, and is ultimately elected to the U.S. Senate. He and his wife and their daughter, Patricia, move to Franklin for Lincoln to serve his six years in the capitol, while his three sons remained in Indianapolis working for Lincoln’s law partners. Lincoln fights hard against the Republican in the Senate, and is especially outspoken against the passage of the infamous Anti-Radical Act that was passed in the wake of President Lee’s assassination, at the behest of President Hawthorne.
When rebellion broke out in New England in early 1859, Lincoln was initially quiet. While he disagreed with the actions President Hawthorne had taken after Lee’s death the year before, and had been very disappointed that he had gone on to win the 1858 Presidential Election, he did not believe in armed rebellion. However, by the time April rolled around and President Hawthorne addressed the Congress and asked for an ultimatum against the rebel states, Lincoln became more vocal. He voted against the ultimatum in the Senate, and spoke out against the more violent actions being taken by the Federal Government. Lincoln decided it was for the best to send his wife and daughter home to Indianapolis at the end of April, fearful that his outspokenness could result in arrest.
As with many families in this era, the Lincolns were split in their opinions of the war. While their patriarch remained in Franklin trying to work to soften the blow of the Republican administration, his sons bickered back and forth about the morality of the conflict. Then, shocking everyone, Thomas Lincoln II, who was 27 at the time, enlisted in the Union Army. In a letter he wrote to his sister, he stated, “This war is not about slavery. This war is about preserving the rule of law and the unity of our nation. If New England’s rebellion succeeds, America will tear itself apart in a European fashion, and there will be no end to the bloodshed.”
Abraham would vote against the war in May, and made proud and defiant speeches when his home state refused to send troops when asked. He was enraged that his son had joined “Hawthorne’s Army.” In September, following the First Battle of New York, Peter Lincoln decides to sign up for the Indiana State Militia. He told his father in a letter that, “it seems only a matter of time before some straw, such as Butcher Gain’s murder of innocents in New York, will serve as the push needed to convince the legislature to declare for the rebellion, and I intend to fight to protect our home from the Slavers.” Benjamin at first planned to join his brother, but Peter convinces his younger brother to remain at home and look after their mother.
When Indiana finally does break away from the Union in March of 1860, Abraham Lincoln is unable to escape the city before he is arrested by the army police in the capital. He will remain in custody until the liberation of Franklin by the Alliance Army one year later, at which point he returns home to Indianapolis, a man shaken. The man serving as Senator in the Free State government in Philadelphia offers to allow Lincoln to take his place, but Lincoln declines, stating that he needed to recuperate and tend to his family for a time before resuming public service. While in captivity, Thomas Lincoln II had been killed at the Battle of Albany, leaving behind a young widow and three young children.
Tragedy struck the family again in May of 1861, when Peter Lincoln is killed at the Battle of Shelbyville in Kentucky, fighting for the Alliance. He also left behind a young wife and two young children, one of which was future President Lincoln’s grandfather, Abraham Lincoln II. While both Thomas and Peter’s widows remarried after the war, Peter’s wife Gloria, and her new husband, James Presley, remained in Indiana, unlike Thomas’ wife Samantha, who moved to Illinois with her three children in 1864.
After the War, Lincoln was reelected to the Senate in the 1866 elections, and would serve one full term, returning to Indianapolis in 1875. His son Benjamin, now 41, was working as one of the senior partners at Lincoln, Bradshaw, and Jacobs, the law firm that Abraham had helped start back in the late 1830s. Lincoln’s daughter, Patricia, married one of the Jacobs sons in 1866, and the two moved to Iowa, where she gave birth to four children between 1867 and 1872. Abraham Lincoln died in his sleep at the age of 69 in 1877, likely from a brain hemorrhage.
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Abraham Lincoln II married his wife, Laura Pendleton, three months before the death of his namesake grandfather in June of 1877. Four years later, the young Abraham shocked the family when he announced that he and his wife and at the time three children, would be moving to New Harmony, the center of the Owenite Movement. Lincoln told his family that this had been something he’d been reading up on and looking into since before he and Laura had met, and her family, while not being Owenites themselves, did live closer to New Harmony and said that they agreed with some of their principals (Laura’s brother would actually go on to become a prominent Liberal politician in the state before Communism took hold). His stepfather James was outraged, as was his great uncle, Benjamin Lincoln. His mother, Gloria, however, was more supportive, as was his grandmother, Katherine. During the family debate over the move, the young Abraham produced a letter he had from his late grandfather, where the two had been debating the merits of Owen’s philosphoies. In it, the elder Abraham told his grandson, “while I do not agree with Robert Owen’s assertions of communalized property, I do believe he has something right in the maxim that a nation ought to be judged not on the might of its armies or wealth of its industry, but on its charity towards those less fortunate within its borders and without. Surely the Almighty will judge us thus.” Had Abraham Lincoln II not made the move to join the Owenites in 1881, it is likely that America would not have elected its first Communalist President in 1960, or at the very least, it wouldn’t have been Georgina Lincoln.
In 1882, while young Abraham settled his family in their new communal lifestyle in a community not far from New Harmony, Benjamin Lincoln was elected governor of Indiana, in what is often referred to as the “Democrat Twilight” in Indiana. Governor Lincoln was the next-to-last Democratic governor of Indiana. Since 1892, every governor has either been Communalist/Owenite, or Liberal. Some of this dramatic shift is actually thanks to Abraham Lincoln II, and others like him, who had moved to southwestern Indiana to learn and partake in Owenism, as it was often referred to back then, before helping it spread to other parts of the state. While his family remained in the community of Harmony Park, Abraham spent much of his time on speaking tours across the state, and was heavily involved in the gubernatorial campaign to elect Caleb Owens, the brother of Ernest Owens, the first Owenite elected to the House of Representatives in 1878.
Abraham Lincoln II would first seek higher office for himself in 1896, where he was elected to the Indiana State House of Representatives, where he would serve until 1908, when he then ran, successfully, for Governor. He became the first official Communalist governor of the state when he took office in January of 1909. By this time, his eldest son, Abraham Lincoln III, had returned from school at Harvard, the heart of Liberalism, and had married and had three children, of which future President Georgina Lincoln was the middle child. While Abe Lincoln III never gave up on Communalism, he was not a radial, indeed his time at Harvard had turned him into a moderate within the CPUS, something of a rarity. He moved his family to Indianapolis and actually took a position at the law firm founded by his great-grandfather, which was now simply known as LBJ Law Associates, and still run primarily by the sons and grandsons of Benjamin Lincoln.
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Georgina Lincoln has many fond memories of her childhood growing up in a communal neighborhood of New Owensville on the eastside of Indianapolis. The homes and common spaces were owned by the member association, which also maintained a common laundry, a school, and gathering hall for community and religious events. The family attended services nearly every Sunday in that meeting hall, where the local congregation of the Communalist Christian Assembly met, one of many sects that scholars now recognize as part of the broader “Communalist Christian Movement,” which has impacted much of the Christian community in America’s old “Middle-West.” In many interviews, President Lincoln has recalled that, “nearly every Sunday, the minister, Brother Kent, would extol the virtues of loving your neighbor and feeding the sick and tending to the needy and generally, “doing to the least of these,” which my family took to heart.” The Lincolns regularly volunteered with community projects to help the less fortunate, and also teach their fellow Hoosiers about the virtues of Communalism.
Georgina Lincoln would graduate from Hugo Brandt Tertiary School in June of 1920, during the continued upheaval of the Great Crisis which had begun 5 years earlier. She was accepted into Indiana University that year, and planned to study city planning with a minor in political studies. However, as she started her first semester, the campaign to bring about a “Communalist Revolution by Ballot,” started, aiming to drastically rewrite the constitution of the State of Indiana to bring about a miniature version of what the CPUS called, “Constitutional, Democratic Communalism,” as opposed to the program of “Radikala Komunisma Mergo” (Radical Communalist Immersion, often known simply as RadKom) that was promoted by Mathias Holtz in the Union of European Republics during that era. By 1924, when she graduated with a degree in city planning with a minor in political studies, her home state would be the first state in the Union to adopt a fully Communalist constitution, her uncle Leonard would be governor, and her father would be sitting in the U.S. Senate. Politics may have been her minor at university, but her path was now set on politics, as she took part in the campaign to change the constitution and also to help elect her uncle and father.
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Just for fun. I'm still trying to figure out religious developments, and that may get back-burnered again. As you can see this has some lovely sneak-peaks about where things will head in the next 50+ years.
I may also do one of these on the Bushes, who also have easily traced lineage back before the PoD.
Also, I knew that I would likely have a first female president by 1960, and also likely that it might be a Communalist, and so when I was reading on another thread and they asked about the fate of OTL prominent people or their families, that got me curious about the Lincolns, Bushes, Clintons, Trumps, and others, and so once I started digging things took on a life of there own.
