MOTHER
While Thomas Lincoln was living with a farmer and doing odd jobs of
carpentering, he met Nancy Hanks, a tall, slender woman, with dark
skin, dark brown hair and small, deep-set gray eyes. She had a full
forehead, a sharp, angular face and a sad expression. Yet her
disposition was generally cheerful. For her backwoods advantages she
was considered well educated. She read well and could write, too. It is
stated that Nancy Hanks taught Thomas Lincoln to write his own name.
Thomas was twenty-eight and Nancy twenty-three when their wedding
day came. Christopher Columbus Graham, when almost one hundred
years old, gave the following description of the marriage feast of the
Lincoln bride and groom:
"I am one of the two living men who can prove that Abraham Lincoln,
or Linkhorn, as the family was miscalled, was born in lawful wedlock,
for I saw Thomas Lincoln marry Nancy Hanks on the 12th day of June,
1806. I was hunting roots for my medicine and just went to the
wedding to get a good supper and got it.
"Tom Lincoln was a carpenter, and a good one for those days, when a
cabin was built mainly with the ax, and not a nail or a bolt or hinge in it,
only leathers and pins to the doors, and no glass, except in watches and
spectacles and bottles. Tom had the best set of tools in what was then
and is now Washington County.
"Jesse Head, the good Methodist minister that married them, was also a
carpenter or cabinet maker by trade, and as he was then a neighbor,
they were good friends.
"While you pin me down to facts, I will say that I saw Nancy Hanks
Lincoln at her wedding, a fresh-looking girl, I should say over twenty.
Tom was a respectable mechanic and could choose, and she was treated
with respect.
"I was at the infare, too, given by John H. Parrott, her guardian, and
only girls with money had guardians appointed by the court. We had
bear meat; venison; wild turkey and ducks' eggs, wild and tame--so
common that you could buy them at two bits a bushel; maple sugar,
swung on a string, to bite off for coffee; syrup in big gourds, peach and
honey; a sheep that the two families barbecued whole over coals of
wood burned in a pit, and covered with green boughs to keep the juices
in. Our table was of the puncheons cut from solid logs, and the next day
they were the floor of the new cabin."
Thomas Lincoln took his bride to live in a little log cabin in a Kentucky
settlement--not a village or hardly a hamlet--called Elizabethtown. He
evidently thought this place would be less lonesome for his wife, while
he was away hunting and carpentering, than the lonely farm he had
purchased in Hardin County, about fourteen miles away. There was so
little carpentering or cabinet making to do that he could make a better
living by farming or hunting. Thomas was very fond of shooting and as
he was a fine marksman he could provide game for the table, and other
things which are considered luxuries to-day, such as furs and skins
needed for the primitive wearing apparel of the pioneers. A daughter
was born to the young couple at Elizabethtown, whom they named
Sarah.
Dennis Hanks, a cousin of Nancy, lived near the Lincolns in the early
days of their married life, and gave Mrs. Eleanor Atkinson this
description of their early life together:
"Looks didn't count them days, nohow. It was stren'th an' work an'
daredevil. A lazy man or a coward was jist pizen, an' a spindlin' feller
had to stay in the settlemints. The clearin's hadn't no use fur him. Tom
was strong, an' he wasn't lazy nor afeer'd o' nothin', but he was kind o'
shif'less--couldn't git nothin' ahead, an' didn't keer putickalar. Lots o'
them kind o' fellers in 'arly days, 'druther hunt and fish, an' I reckon
they had their use. They killed off the varmints an' made it safe fur
other fellers to go into the woods with an ax.
"When Nancy married Tom he was workin' in a carpenter shop. It
wasn't Tom's fault he couldn't make a livin' by his trade. Thar was
sca'cely any money in that kentry. Every man had to do his own
tinkerin', an' keep everlastin'ly at work to git enough to eat. So Tom tuk
up some land. It was mighty ornery land, but it was the best Tom could
git, when he hadn't much to trade fur it.
"Pore? We was all pore, them days, but the Lincolns was porer than
anybody. Choppin' trees an' grubbin' roots an' splittin' rails an' huntin'
an' trappin' didn't leave Tom no time. It
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