By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
(Editor’s note: In 2023, the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky celebrates its 175th anniversary.)
I have many nerdy traits. One is my unusual love for history and monasteries. This eccentricity may explain the exciting jolt of adrenalin I got upon learning there are several interesting connections between Abraham Lincoln and Trappist monks.
I made this intriguing discovery while visiting the oldest Trappist monastery in America—the Abbey of Gethsemani, founded in 1848 near Louisville, Kentucky. As explained in my memoir Monastery Mornings (Paraclete Press 2021), I grew up at a monastery in Huntsville, Utah founded in 1947 by the Kentucky monks.
We were at Gethsemani Abbey on a warm autumn day in October 2022. This visit is incontrovertible proof of my wife Vicki’s generosity and kindness. For our first post-pandemic trip, she agreed to a monastery tour instead of a jaunt to the beach or an adventure in the big city.
According to the Rule of Saint Benedict they follow, monks welcome guests as if they were Christ himself. True to form, our delightful Kentucky host—Trappist Brother Luke Armour—met us when we arrived and, among other things, walked us through the abbey’s extended cemetery.
He pointed out the interesting old burial sites of several non-monks. One was for Zechariah Riney, who died in 1859. Riney was one of Lincoln’s first school teachers. The other burial site was for Amanda Jane Davis Bradford, who died in 1881. She was the sister of Jefferson Davis, infamous president of the Confederate States of America.
I was surprised and intrigued by this information. In between wonderful visits with Brother Luke and listening to the monks chant, I googled both names on my phone. I also researched Lincoln’s ties to the area.
Lincoln has deep connections to the central Kentucky counties we visited. His parents—Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks—both were born there. Lincoln was born at the Sinking Spring farm near Hodgenville in 1809. After a land dispute, the Lincolns moved ten miles away to the Knob Creek farm, where they lived for the next six years.
These wonderful places are just a short drive from Gethsemani Abbey. We saw them all. Although Lincoln later moved to Indiana and then lived in Illinois, the setting for his earliest memories was Central Kentucky. One of these memories was his first schooling under the tutelage of Zechariah Riney.
Riney was a Catholic who migrated west from St. Mary’s County in southern Maryland. He attended Kentucky’s oldest Catholic assembly at the Holy Cross Church, built in 1792 near Pottinger’s Creek. The church cemetery includes the graves of heroes of the American Revolution, as well as some of the first Trappists in America.
Lincoln remembered Riney’s name, and later wrote about how in 1815—at age six—he had attended Riney’s ABC log cabin school. At this “blab school” near Athertonville, Lincoln and other students learned their basic letters by repeating lessons aloud as a chorus. They used a book called Dilworth’s Speller, a text written in 1740 by an English schoolmaster.
Riney likely read news accounts about Lincoln’s ascent to power. When Gethsemani started in 1848, Riney was a farmer in Kentucky, and Lincoln was in Congress representing Illinois. Riney turned his farm over to the monks and lived as a resident guest at Gethsemani Abbey beginning in 1856. Lincoln was a Republican party vice presidential contender that same year.
Riney died at the monastery in 1859, just months before his most famous student was elected President of the United States in November 1860. His grandson William Benedict Riney arranged for Riney’s burial at the Gethsemani cemetery. The younger Riney worked as a professor at Gethsemani’s school and then served as a priest/monk at the abbey.
Lincoln’s Kentucky connections were significant during his adult years too. His best friend Joshua Speed lived in Louisville. Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd was from Lexington. And Lincoln’s American Civil War political nemesis—Jefferson Davis—was born in Kentucky too.
Although born in Kentucky, Davis grew up in Mississippi. After graduating from West Point, he launched a notable career in Congress and as Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. A Confederate constitutional convention elected him president after secession in early 1861.
Lincoln was raised a Baptist. Davis was an Episcopalian who, in his early years, attended a Kentucky school run by Dominican priests. Both men fought against the Know-Nothings, the anti-Catholic movement that arose in the 1840s and 1850s.
In 1855, Lincoln wrote in a letter to his Kentucky friend Joshua Speed, “I am not a Know-Nothing….Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty.”
Davis may have opposed the Know-Nothings because his own elder sister was a devout Catholic convert. I could not find much information about her, named Amanda Jane Davis but who went by the name “Mary.” She was born in 1800 and married a lawyer named David Bradford in 1820. He was a lawyer killed in a duel in Louisiana in March 1844.
Bradford’s father, nicknamed “Whiskey Dave,” participated in the Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion, a 1794 tax protest against President George Washington. After the rebellion, he escaped to Louisiana (an area then in Spanish territory) and won some land grants. President John Adams later pardoned him.
Mary lived a longer less colorful life, and in her later years stayed close to the monastery. Her son, Jefferson Davis Bradford, once stayed at the abbey on a retreat and later said, “I’ve never seen, anywhere, so many old men, after so many vigils and austerities, including hard manual labor, who are so healthy, bright eyed and cheerful.”
An 1871 newspaper article, announcing the “Death of Jefferson Davis’ Sister,” called her a “great benefactress” of Gethsemani Abbey. The obituary noted, “Mrs. Bradford was well known throughout the South, and the news of her demise will be received with the deepest regret.” Another newspaper said, “She was a lady of exalted virtues and Christian charity, beloved by all for her pure and blameless life.”
When Gethsemani started in 1848, Lincoln was in Congress. During the following seventeen years before his assassination, Lincoln was busy with his law practice and national politics, and then consumed with the Civil War.
There is no evidence that Lincoln ever went to, spoke of, or even thought about, Gethsemani Abbey. Instead, Lincoln’s connection with the monastery is derivative, running through his old Catholic teacher, through the Catholic sister of his wartime nemesis, and—150 years after his death—through a modern Catholic pope.
In September 2015, in the first papal address before an American Congress, Pope Francis said that both Lincoln and Kentucky Trappist Thomas Merton “shaped fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the American people.” According to the pope, Lincoln labored tirelessly that “this nation, under God, [might] have a new birth of freedom,” and Merton was “a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.”
Is it mere coincidence that Pope Francis connected the 16th president and Gethsemani Abbey in such an important and historic speech? Perhaps. Maybe even probably. Still, it is a very cool coincidence.
And perhaps it is one more reason why I could feel the spirit of both Lincoln and the monks so indelibly imprinted on the gentle knobs and rolling hills of Central Kentucky.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
