nessed by his youngest son, a lad of but six years of age, who was with his father at the time. Two older sons, who had accompanied their father to his work, witnessed the tragedy from a distance, and knowing that the attack indicated that other savages were lurking in the vicinity, fled, one to the nearby cabin for his rifle, and the other to the settlement for help. But the boy kept his faithful vigil close beside his father's lifeless form.

The Indian, as he approached his victim, saw the lad; and as he stooped to bear him as a trophy to his fellow savages, a well-aimed bullet from the cabin terminated his life. The boy thus rescued was Thomas Lincoln who became the father of Abraham Lincoln, the honored ruler and saviour of the nation.

Under the old English law of primogeniture, which was then in force in Kentucky, the large estate of Thomas Lincoln's father was inherited by the eldest son; and Thomas became dependent upon his widowed mother who was unable to contribute adequately to his needs. Little is known of his life until he became a man and found employment at day labor in a Kentucky frontier settlement.

A typical frontiersman was Thomas Lincoln, of stalwart form, and of fine qualities of heart and mind; as brave and fearless as had been his father; and as amiable and gentle as was his mother. He was tall and of great width of shoulders, with neck, chest and limbs fitted to grapple with the heavy tasks of the timbered wilderness, and subdue it into beauty and productiveness.

By common consent he became the arbiter of difficulties among his neighbors, for he was ever wise and fair in his judgments and fearless and effective in maintaining the verdicts he so frequently was called upon to render. These qualities were in Thomas Lincoln united with a childlike piety and humble trust in God. He was not learned in scholarship or books, but he was well and widely educated in the lessons of early pioneer experience and in Christian faith and life.

Judge H. C. Whitney tells us that, "William G. Greene, who spent one day with Thomas Lincoln and felt interested to make a study of him, avers that he was a man of great native reasoning powers and fine social magnetism, reminding him of his illustrious son. He describes him as 'very stoutly built, about five feet ten inches high, and weighing nearly two hundred pounds.' His desire was to be on terms of amity and sociability with every one."

William Eleroy Curtis has this to say of him: "He must have had good stuff in him, for when he was twenty-five years old he had saved enough from his wages to buy a farm in Hardin county. Local tradition represents him to have been 'an easy going man, slow to anger, but when aroused a formidable adversary." "2

Mrs. Caroline Hanks Hitchcock says: "He had been forced from his boyhood to shift for himself in a young and undeveloped country. He is known to have been a man who in spite of this wandering life contracted no bad habits. He was temperate and honest, and his name is recorded in more than one place in the records of Kentucky. He was a churchgoer, and if tradition may be believed, a stout defender of his peculiar religious views. He held advanced ideas of what was already an important public question in Kentucky, the right to hold Negroes as slaves. One of his old friends has said of him that he was 'just steeped full of notions about the wrongs of slavery and the rights of men, as explained by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.' These facts show that he must have been a man of some natural intellectual attainment.

"Considering the disadvantages under which he labored, he had a very good start in life when he became engaged to Nancy Hanks. He had a trade and owned a farm which he had bought in 1803 in Buffalo, and also owned land in Elizabethtown. If all the conditions of his life be taken into con1 Lincoln the Citizen, pp. 6-10.

2 The True Abraham Lincoln, p. 18.

sideration, it is not true, as has been said, that Thomas Lincoln was at this time a shiftless and purposeless man."

Indeed in every needed quality Thomas Lincoln was fitted to become the father of the one who, in his day, was both the Moses and the Joshua to deliver an enslaved race from the house of bondage, and to lead them into the land of promise. No excesses of his own, or of his ancestors, mingled weakening poison in the blood which flowed throughout his stalwart frame. He possessed qualities of body and mind that constitute the richest heritage which any man can give to posterity.

And that those noble qualities might, with certainty, be inherited by his offspring, it was provided that when Thomas Lincoln stood at the hymeneal altar, Nancy Hanks should stand beside him, and then and there plight with him her solemn marriage troth. She was his superior in every high quality. In charm of personality, exuberance of spirits, and deep religious experience she was unequalled in all that frontier region. She was of worthy and distinguished ancestry, extending back through brave and brawny pioneers to the famous early heroes of Virginia.

"The roots of the husband's ancestral tree reached down to Puritan England, and on the part of the wife, to the days when a King of Britain confronted Imperial Rome."

Nicolay and Hay, President Lincoln's private secretaries, in their great work, write of Nancy Hanks as she appeared at the time of her marriage, as follows: "All accounts represent her as a handsome young woman of twenty-three, of appearance and intellect superior to her lowly fortunes. She could read and write, a remarkable accomplishment in her circle, and even taught her husband to form the letters of his name."

Noah Brooks says of Nancy Hanks that she "was a woman of great force of character and passionately fond of

Nancy Hanks, pp. 56-58.

♦ Abraham Lincoln, A History, Vol. I., p. 24.

reading. Every book on which she could lay her hands was eagerly read, and her son said, years afterwards, that his earliest recollection of his mother was of his sitting at her feet with his sister, drinking in the tales and legends that were read or related to them, by the house-mother."'5

No man in public life stood closer to President Lincoln than did Hon. Isaac N. Arnold, Member of Congress from Chicago, who has this to say: "Mrs. Lincoln, the mother of the President, is said to have been in her youth, a woman of beauty. She was by nature refined, and of far more than ordinary intellect. Her friends spoke of her as being a person of marked and decided character. She was a woman of the most exemplary character, and most tenderly and affectionately devoted to her family. Her home indicated a degree of taste and a love of beauty exceptional in the wild settlement in which she lived.

"But in spite of this she had been reared where the very means of existence were to be obtaind by a constant struggle, and she learned to use the rifle and the tools of the backwoods farmer, as well as the distaff, the cards and the spinning wheel. She could not only kill the wild game of the woods, but she could also dress it, make of the skins clothes for her family and prepare the flesh for food. Hers was a strong, self-reliant spirit, which commanded the respect as well as the love of the rugged people among whom she lived.”

Phebe A. Hanaford says: "Abraham Lincoln's mother, noble and blessed woman, was his inspiration. She was determined that her son should at least learn to read his Bible; and, before God called her to dwell with the angels, she had the satisfaction of seeing him read the volume which he never afterwards neglected. Abraham's mother might have said, as did Mary the mother of Jesus, 'From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed'; and while this generation shall revere the name and memory of the mother of George Wash'Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. VIII., p. 6. •Abraham Lincoln, p. 19.

ington, side by side with hers will it write the name of the mother of Abraham Lincoln.'

197

Dr. D. D. Thompson says: "Nancy Hanks is described as tall, dark-haired, comely, dignified and winsome, by her grace and kindness. She seemed at times as if looking far away, seeing what others did not see. She had attended school in Virginia, and stood upon a higher intellectual plane than those around her. The Bible was read morning and evening, and her conduct was in accordance with its precepts. She was on the frontier, where few books were to be had to satisfy her thirst for knowledge, and where there was little intellectual culture. She was wife, mother and teacher. . . . On Sundays she would gather her children around her, and read to them the wonderful stories in the Bible, and pray with them. After he had become President, Abraham Lincoln, speaking of his mother, said: "I remember her prayers, and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life."

Dr. L. P. Brockett says: "Nancy Hanks was a truly noble woman, as her son's life attested. From her came that deep and abiding reverence for holy things-that profound trust in Providence and faith in the triumph of truth-and that gentleness and amiability of temper, which, in the lofty station of Chief Magistrate, he displayed so strikingly during years of most appalling responsibility. From her he derived the spirit of humor and the desire to see others happy, which afterwards formed so prominent a trait in his character.""

Dr. John G. Holland, one of America's most distinguished and esteemed authors, says: "Mrs. Lincoln, the mother, was evidently a woman out of place among those primitive surroundings. A great man never drew his infant life from a purer or more womanly bosom than her own; and Mr. Lincoln always looked back to her with an unspeakable affection."1o Charles Carlton Coffin, an able journalist, says: "Nancy Hanks Lincoln, queenly in personal appearance, imperial in "Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 15. 8 Abraham Lincoln, p. 11. • Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 41.

10 Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 23.