The 2007 Forum and the DNA Question

On 14 April 2007 — chosen because it was the 228th anniversary of Rutherford County's founding — a public forum on Lincoln's origins was held at a school administrative building in the county. About a hundred people attended, some travelling from the far ends of the state. It is the single most useful event in the tradition's modern history, and not for the reason its organisers intended.

What the meeting was for

The forum was convened to put the North Carolina case before an audience and, more ambitiously, to organise a decisive genetic test. The plan was straightforward in outline: identify living men who descend in the direct male line from each of the candidate fathers, compare their Y chromosomes, and see which — if any — matched material associated with Lincoln.

Three candidate lines were represented at or through the meeting. A descendant of Thomas Lincoln, described as the last living direct male descendant of that line, attended in person from Virginia. A descendant of Abraham Enloe had recently died, having left material for testing. A descendant of John C. Calhoun, from Georgia, was unable to attend for health reasons but had indicated willingness. A fourth candidate father, Richard Martin, was introduced through videotaped interviews with Rutherford County families who hold that tradition — Martin family recollection has it that he courted Nancy Hanks, and the family's physical resemblance to Lincoln was offered in support.

The most honest sentence in the tradition

The forum's invited scientific speaker, a physician who had spent years locating the candidate descendants, told the audience something that no advocacy text in this literature had ever conceded so cleanly:

I have not found proof that Lincoln was born here, and I know of no method of proof that he was, except through DNA.

That is worth pausing on. It was said by a speaker sympathetic enough to the project to have done years of unpaid legwork for it, in front of an audience assembled by its supporters, on the tradition's home ground. It concedes both halves of the problem: that no proof exists, and that no ordinary historical method could supply one. Every claim of “substantial evidence” made elsewhere in this literature has to be read against it.

Why the test could never do what was hoped

Four difficulties stand between the plan and a result, and none of them has been overcome in the years since.

• Paternity is not birthplace. Even a clean, unambiguous match would establish who fathered a child. It would say nothing at all about the county he was born in — which is the claim the tradition is actually making. A positive Enloe result would be a sensation and would still leave the Rutherford County birthplace exactly where it was.
• The Lincoln male line is extinct. Abraham Lincoln's last undisputed descendant died in 1985. Any comparison must therefore run through collateral relatives whose descent has to be proved on paper — reintroducing precisely the documentary problem the genetic test was meant to bypass.
• Two centuries is a long chain. A single non-paternity event anywhere in a male line spanning six or seven generations breaks the comparison, and such events are not rare. The National Human Genome Research Institute's description of Y-chromosome inheritance is the mechanism the plan relied on; it is also the mechanism that makes the plan fragile.
• Consent and custody. Physical material associated with Lincoln is held by federal and museum custodians under policies that weigh scientific value against the irreversibility of destructive sampling. Any proposal has to clear that bar, and a proposal that could not resolve the question even if it succeeded will not clear it.

What the forum actually accomplished

No test was carried out, and no finding was ever announced. Judged against its stated aim the meeting failed completely. Judged as a historical document it is the most valuable thing the tradition produced, because it is the one occasion on which the claim was examined in public by people who wanted it to be true and who nevertheless said out loud what was missing.

It also illustrates something more general about heritage disputes. A community that suspects its story cannot be proved will often reach for a technology that promises to settle everything, and will accept that technology's authority in advance. When the test is not run, or is run and does not address the actual question, the story does not retreat — it simply resumes, with the aborted test now folded in as further evidence of persecution or neglect. This tradition has done a little of that. The candid quotation above is the antidote, and it deserves to be quoted far more often than the books are.