inia. 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, Abraha