There stands a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Hingham, Massachusetts, New England. It’s immediately across the street from the Samuel Lincoln house. In Hingham, England, United Kingdom there is also a statue of Lincoln. But why? And who was Samuel Lincoln?
The original Samuel was an Englishman who left his home near Hingham, England (100+ miles northeast of London) and moved to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637. He settled in, where else, the new town of Hingham, Massachusetts. The New England Hingham is a coastal town southeast of Boston. Think of it this way – if you look out the window of the tallest building in Boston (the John Hancock Tower) and look southeast toward Provincetown on the very tip of Cape Cod, you’re probably looking over Hingham. In any case, Samuel made his way to the New England Hingham from the old England Hingham as a teenager and started a long line of Lincoln descendants, including the one that begat the Abraham Lincoln lineage.
Abraham Lincoln never visited Hingham, Massachusetts (and obviously, not Hingham, England). He did come close once. In 1848, while a sitting congressman, Lincoln did a tour of Massachusetts campaigning for the Whig nominee for president, Zachary Taylor. The Mexican War hero (which the Whigs “very generally opposed” as unnecessary and unconstitutional) and southern slaveholder didn’t sit well with New England’s Conscience Whigs, who spun off into a Free Soil Party. Lincoln was there to try to keep them in the Whig fold. Taylor won the election, but it was closer than it should have been. He then inconveniently died sixteen months into his presidency, thus opening the door for the Compromise of 1850 and the nightmare that turned into. But that’s for another post.
The statue in Hingham, Massachusetts is a full size President Lincoln sculpted by Charles Keck. He is depicted sitting on a large stone staring downward in deep contemplation. The statue sits on a large pedestal. Standing in front of it, he seems to be staring at the viewer (or at his own feet, depending on your perspective).
The statue in Hingham, England is actually a bust, not a full statue. It was created based on the life mask of Leonard Volk made in 1860 just after Lincoln’s nomination. It depicts a much younger, beardless (and shirtless) Lincoln. It sits in an alcove on the side of St. Andrew’s Church. The bust was installed in 1919 to commemorate the Lincoln ancestry that had for many generations worshiped at the St. Andrew parish.
I’ve had the privilege of seeing both of these Lincoln memorials recently. I visited the statue in Hingham, Massachusetts during my tours of New England tracing Lincoln’s own two tours, one in 1848 and the other in 1860. I visited the bust in St. Andrew’s Church just a few weeks ago as I toured the UK seeing Lincoln statues from Edinburgh to Durham to Manchester to (near) Wales to Bath to Hingham. All of these visits gave me more insights into the Lincoln family tree, which I discuss in my new book, Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours, which comes out March 3, 2026.
[Photos by David J. Kent, 2023, 2025]
Coming in March 2026: Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours
Join me on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.
You also follow my author page on Facebook. Also follow me on Instagram.
David J. Kent is Immediate Past President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.
His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
Another connection is to Robert Burns, the Scottish poet whom Lincoln had a particular fascination. Lincoln had supposedly discovered Burns from Jack Kelso, an enigmatic friend from Lincoln’s New Salem days. Kelso had emigrated to the United States from Scotland, where he had previously been a Glasgow schoolteacher. He apparently owned many volumes of Burns that Lincoln read over and over (ditto for Shakespeare). Lincoln was hooked and recited Burns from memory on many occasions through his life. Robert Burns is eminently present in Edinburgh, including a large monument at the foot of Calton Hill (not far from the aforementioned Lincoln statue). Burns is also one of the three Scottish writers featured in the Writers’ Museum tucked into Lady Stair’s Close a few steps off the Royal Mile that leads to the Edinburgh Castle. He is joined there by Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott.
Back in May 
The American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia once had a statue depicting Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad sitting on a park bench. As of this writing it is no longer there, and hasn’t been since 2023. So, where is it?
While at the Valentine I also got to see another “Civil War President.” A statue of Jefferson Davis had stood for many decades along Monument Avenue in Richmond. During the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, the Davis statue was vandalized with paint, then pulled down. That statue now sits – or more accurately, lays – in the Valentine’s main gallery. Pink and yellow paint splatters the bronze, Davis’s head is bashed in from the fall off his pedestal, and his right arm is nearly severed. The display symbolizes the city’s change in attitude over its prior adulation of Confederate figures. All of its many dozens of Confederate statues have now been removed, with the exception of a few remaining on the grounds of the Viriginia State Capitol (you walk past them as you proceed from the equestrian statue of George Washington to the Governor’s Mansion). They are now joined by two large group statues, one featuring the many women who fought for voting rights and the other of Barbara Johns and others who fought the battle that would become Brown v. Board of Education. Johns is scheduled to replace Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Interestingly, it was Edward Virginius Valentine who had sculpted both the Lee statue (now removed from the hall and currently at Richmond’s Museum of History and Culture) and the one of Davis now at the Valentine Museum. Hopefully, Johns will make it into Statuary Hall soon, perhaps after the new governor takes off after this fall’s election.
Abraham Lincoln is best known as the sixteenth President of the United States, long before the POTUS acronym was invented. He was elected in November 1860 and by the time he was inaugurated in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded, with four more joining them just over a month later after the new Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter. But this wasn’t the first time Lincoln had been put forward for executive office. In 1856 he was nominated by his fellow new Republican Party members for Vice President after the party had nominated John C. Fremont for President.
On June 11, 1848, congressman Abraham Lincoln arrived back in Washington, D.C. after having traveled all night from Philadelphia, where he attended the Whig National Convention that nominated Zachary Taylor for president. Upon his return he finds a letter from his wife Mary, who has been visiting her family in Kentucky for several months. These two events begin a campaign and a mystery.
A major auction of Abraham Lincoln artifacts held May 21, 2025, brought in nearly $8 million dollars. The largest amount for any single item was over $1.5 million (including auction fees) for a pair of blood-stained gloves that Lincoln wore the night of the assassination.
Abraham Lincoln was not happy. He had worked hard to get Zachary Taylor elected as president as a Whig, and yet he was being passed over for the lucrative General Land Office job. Worse, he was being ignored, something the man who had been Whig leader in the Illinois legislature and recent representative to Congress. On May 16, 1849, he made his dissatisfaction with Taylor’s appointment of Justin Butterfield to the Land Office in Illinois.
Abraham Lincoln traveled through upstate New York in early 1861 on his way to Washington, DC for his inauguration, stopping in Westfield, Buffalo, Albany, Peekskill, and New York City. Twelve years before, in 1848, he stopped in Buffalo and saw Niagara Falls on his way home between sessions of congress after he toured around eastern Massachusetts giving speeches in support of Zachary Taylor as the Whig nominee for president [Spoiler: Taylor won] In late April of this year, traveled much the same route in northern New York on my way to the Lincoln Forum spring conference at Hildene in Manchester, Vermont.
