{"id":265,"date":"2015-01-21T16:01:10","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T16:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/?p=265"},"modified":"2016-09-08T14:14:29","modified_gmt":"2016-09-08T14:14:29","slug":"lincoln-household-in-1860","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/2015\/01\/21\/lincoln-household-in-1860\/","title":{"rendered":"Lincoln Household in 1860"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen<\/a>Who was living with Abraham Lincoln in 1860? \u00a0The question is more complicated than it sounds. \u00a0A quick check of the 1860 census (via a subscription database service such as Ancestry or Fold3) reveals that in addition to his wife (Mary, age 35) and three young boys (listed by the census taker as Robert T, 16, Willie W, 9, and Thomas, 7), there was also an eighteen-year-old female servant named M. Johnson and a young fourteen-year-old male\u00a0named Phillip Dinkell.<\/p>\n

Other Lincoln scholars<\/a> have identified the servant as Mary Johnson, an Irish immigrant, who helped Mary Lincoln around the house and with the boys. \u00a0Mrs. Lincoln hired a series of young female, mostly Irish-born, domestic servants like Mary Johnson, during the 1840s and 1850s while the family was living in Springfield, Illinois. \u00a0At the White House, the Lincoln relied on a wider range of\u00a0servants –male, female, white and black– but the most important hired figure, at least in terms of the family’s life\u00a0during that period was probably \u00a0housekeeper Mary Ann Cuthbert<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is a letter from Philip Dinkel’s brother<\/a>\u00a0(note spelling) in the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Private\u00a0George J. Dinkel\u00a0reported on May 28, 1864 that Philip was in Chicago studying to be a minister. \u00a0 \u00a0Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame includes\u00a0a story in his work about Mary Lincoln allegedly berating Philip Dinkel, whom he describes as a “servant boy”:\u00a0\u00a0“she ordered a servant boy, Phillip Dinkel, ‘to\u00a0get out, and threw his suit case out the window after him.’ \u00a0However, this account is recollected, second-hand and at least some of the information in Burlingame’s footnote does not seem to be\u00a0a match for this Philip Dinkel. \u00a0The 1864 letter from brother George (not included in Burlingame’s materials) suggests that perhaps Philip was boarding at the Lincoln’s but was not a “servant,” and instead may have been more like a tutor. \u00a0Burlingame’s indispensable multi-volume biography, by the way, is available freely online from the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College. \u00a0You can find his reference to Philip Dinkel with the supporting footnotes in the PDF for Volume 1, Chapter 6<\/a>, ‘It would Just Kill Me to Marry Mary Todd’: Courtship and Marriage, (1840-42).” \u00a0Here are the details from Burlingame’s footnote to the Dinkel story:<\/p>\n

\u201cPhilip\u00a0Dingle,\u201d age five, appears in the 1850 census of Sangamon County. The 1860 census for Sangamon County\u00a0lists Phillip Dinkell living in the Lincoln household as a servant. Military records show German-born Philip\u00a0Dinkle, age 18, on the rolls of the Union Army in 1862-63. He died of consumption in 1865. Illinois State\u00a0Journal<\/em> (Springfield), 27 October 1865. His widowed mother, Barbara Dinkel, lived a block and a half from\u00a0the Lincolns, on Edwards Street between Eighth and Ninth, according to the 1860-61 Springfield City\u00a0Directory. Temple, Lincoln\u2019s Home<\/em>, 66.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clearly, there’s more to find out about Lincoln’s neighbors, the Dinkels. \u00a0And perhaps there’s even a paper to be written about a figure like Philip Dinkel….<\/p>\n

For an update on the Dinkel family research, check out this short post<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who was living with Abraham Lincoln in 1860? \u00a0The question is more complicated than it sounds. \u00a0A quick check of the 1860 census (via a subscription database service such as Ancestry or Fold3) reveals that in addition to his wife (Mary, age 35) and three young boys (listed by the census taker as Robert T, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}