Lincoln | Page 5

where
for many a mile the timber had been hewn away, had given place to a
ragged continuity of farmland. In such regions especially if the poorer
elements of the forest, spiritually speaking, had drifted thither--the
straggling villages which had appeared were but groups of log cabins
huddled along a few neglected lanes. In central Kentucky, a poor new
village was Elizabethtown, unkempt, chokingly dusty in the dry
weather, with muddy streams instead of streets during the rains, a
stench of pig-sties at the back of its cabins, but everywhere looking
outward glimpses of a lovely meadow land.
At Elizabethtown in 1806 lived Joseph Hanks, a carpenter, also his
niece Nancy Hanks. Poor people they were, of the sort that had been
sucked into the forest in their weakness, or had been pushed into it by a
social pressure they could not resist; not the sort that had grimly
adventured its perils or gaily courted its lure. Their source was Virginia.
They were of a thriftless, unstable class; that vagrant peasantry which
had drifted westward to avoid competition with slave labor. The niece,
Nancy, has been reputed illegitimate. And though tradition derives her
from the predatory amour of an aristocrat, there is nothing to sustain
the tale except her own appearance. She had a bearing, a cast of feature,
a tone, that seemed to hint at higher social origins than those of her
Hanks relatives. She had a little schooling; was of a pious and
emotional turn of mind; enjoyed those amazing "revivals" which now
and then gave an outlet to the pent-up religiosity of the village; and she
was almost handsome.[1]
History has preserved no clue why this girl who was rather the best of
her sort chose to marry an illiterate apprentice of her uncle's, Thomas
Lincoln, whose name in the forest was spelled "Linkhorn." He was a
shiftless fellow, never succeeding at anything, who could neither read
nor write. At the time of his birth, twenty-eight years before, his

parents--drifting, roaming people, struggling with poverty--were
dwellers in the Virginia mountains. As a mere lad, he had shot an
Indian--one of the few positive acts attributed to him--and his father
had been killed by Indians. There was a "vague tradition" that his
grandfather had been a Pennsylvania Quaker who had wandered
southward through the forest mountains. The tradition angered him.
Though he appears to have had little enough--at least in later years--of
the fierce independence of the forest, he resented a Quaker ancestry as
an insult. He had no suspicion that in after years the zeal of
genealogists would track his descent until they had linked him with a
lost member of a distinguished Puritan family, a certain Mordecai
Lincoln who removed to New Jersey, whose descendants became
wanderers of the forest and sank speedily to the bottom of the social
scale, retaining not the slightest memory of their New England
origin.[2] Even in the worst of the forest villages, few couples started
married life in less auspicious circumstances than did Nancy and
Thomas. Their home in one of the alleys of Elizabethtown was a shanty
fourteen feet square.[3] Very soon after marriage, shiftless Thomas
gave up carpentering and took to farming. Land could be had almost
anywhere for almost nothing those days, and Thomas got a farm on
credit near where now stands Hodgenville. Today, it is a famous place,
for there, February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln, second child, but first
son of Nancy and Thomas, was born.[4]
During most of eight years, Abraham lived in Kentucky. His father,
always adrift in heart, tried two farms before abandoning Kentucky
altogether. A shadowy figure, this Thomas; the few memories of him
suggest a superstitious nature in a superstitious community. He used to
see visions in the forest. Once, it is said, he came home, all excitement,
to tell his wife he had seen a giant riding on a lion, tearing up trees by
the roots; and thereupon, he took to his bed and kept it for several days.
His son Abraham told this story of the giant on the lion to a playmate
of his, and the two boys gravely discussed the existence of ghosts.
Abraham thought his father "didn't exactly believe in them," and seems
to have been in about the same state of mind himself. He was quite sure
he was "not much" afraid of the dark. This was due chiefly to the

simple wisdom of a good woman, a neighbor, who had taught him to
think of the night as a great room that God had darkened even as his
friend darkened a room in her house by hanging something over the
window.[5]
The eight years of his childhood in Kentucky had few incidents. A hard,
patient, uncomplaining life both for old and young. The men found