I.THE CHILD OF THE FOREST.
1.Herndon,1-7,11-14;1,anon,13;N.and H.,1,23-27.
This is the version of his origin accepted by Lincoln.He believed that his mother was the illegitimate daughter of a Virginia planter and traced to that doubtful source "all the qualities that distinguished him from other members"of his immediate family.Herndon,3.His secretaries are silent upon the subject.Recently the story has been challenged.Mrs.
Caroline Hanks Hitchcock,who identifies the Hanks family of Kentucky with a lost branch of a New England family,has collected evidence which tends to show that Nancy was the legitimate daughter of a certain Joseph H.Hanks,who was father of Joseph the carpenter,and that Nancy was not the niece but the younger sister of the "uncle"who figures in the older version,the man with whom Thomas Lincoln worked.Nancy and Thomas appear to have been cousins through their mothers.
Mrs.Hitchcock argues the case with care and ability in a little book entitled Nancy Hanks.However,she is not altogether sustained by W.E.Barton,The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln.
Scandal has busied itself with the parents of Lincoln in another way.It has been widely asserted that he was himself illegitimate.A variety of shameful paternities have been assigned to him,some palpably absurd.The chief argument of the lovers of this scandal was once the lack of a known record of the marriage of his parents.Around this fact grew up the story of a marriage of concealment with Thomas Lincoln as the easy-going accomplice.The discovery of the marriage record fixing the date and demonstrating that Abraham must have been the second child gave this scandal its quietus.N.and H.,1,23-24;Hanks,59-67;Herndon,5-6;Lincoln and Herndon,321.
The last important book on the subject is Barton,The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln.
2.N.and H.,1-13.
3.Lamon,13;N.and H.,1,25.
4.N.and H.,1,25.
5.Gore,221-225.
6.Herndon,15.
7.Gore,66,70-74,79,83-84,116,151-154,204,226-230,for all this group of anecdotes.
The evidence with regard to all the early part of Lincoln's life is peculiar in this,that it is reminiscence not written down until the subject had become famous.Dogmatic certainty with regard to the details is scarcely possible.The best one can do in weighing any of the versions of his early days is to inquire closely as to whether all its parts bang naturally together,whether they really cohere.There is a body of anecdotes told by an old mountaineer,Austin Gollaher,who knew Lincoln as a boy,and these have been collected and recently put into print.Of course,they are not "documented"evidence.
Some students are for brushing them aside.But there is one important argument in their favor.They are coherent;the boy they describe is a real person and his personality is sustained.If he is a fiction and not a memory,the old mountaineer was a literary artist--far more the artist than one finds it easy to believe.
8.Gore,84-95;Lamon,16;Herndon,16.
9.Gore,181-182,296,303-316;Lamon,19-20;N.and H.,I,28-29.
II.THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH.
1.N.and H.,I,32-34.
2.Lamon,33-38,51-52,61-63;N.and H.,1,34-36.
3.N.and H.,1,40.
4.Lamon,38,40,55.
5.Reminiscences,54,428.
III.A VILLAGE LEADER.
1.N.and H.,1,45-46,70-72;Herndon,67,69,72.
2.Lamon,81-82;Herndon,75-76.
3.Lincoln,1,1-9.
4.Lamon,125-126;Herndon,104.
5.Herndon,117-118.
6.N.and H.,1,109.
7.Stories,94.
8.Herndon,118-123.
9.Lamon,159-164;Herndon,128-138;Rankin,61-95.
10.Lamon,164.
11.Lamon,164-165;Rankin,95.
IV.REVELATIONS.
1.Riddle,337.
2.Herndon,436.
3.N.and H.,I,138.
4.Lincoln,I,51-52.
5.McClure,65.
6.Herndon,184.185.
7.Anon,172-183;Herndon,143-150,161;Lincoln,1,87-92.
8.Gossip has preserved a melodramatic tale with regard to Lincoln's marriage.It describes the bride to be,waiting,arrayed,in tense expectation deepening into alarm;the guests assembled,wondering,while the hour appointed passes by and the ceremony does not begin;the failure of the prospective bridegroom to appear;the scattering of the company,amazed,their tongues wagging.The explanation offered is an attack of insanity.Herndon,215;I,anon,239-242.As might be expected Lincoln's secretaries who see him always in a halo give no hint of such an event.It has become a controversial scandal.Is it a fact or a myth?Miss Tarbell made herself the champion of the mythical explanation and collected a great deal of evidence that makes it hard to accept the story as a fact Tarbell,I,Chap.XI.Still later a very sane memoirist,Henry B.Rankin,who knew Lincoln,and is not at all an apologist,takes the same view.His most effective argument is that such an event could not have occurred in the little country town of Springfield without becoming at the time the common property of all the gossips.The evidence is bewildering.I find myself unable to accept the disappointed wedding guests as established facts,even though the latest student of Herndon has no doubts.
Lincoln and Herndon,321-322.But whether the broken marriage story is true or false there is no doubt that Lincoln passed through a desolating inward experience about "the fatal first of January";that it was related to the breaking of his engagement;and that for a time his sufferings were intense.
The letters to Speed are the sufficient evidence.Lincoln,I,175;182-189;210-219;240;261;267-269.The prompt explanation of insanity may be cast aside,one of those foolish delusions of shallow people to whom all abnormal conditions are of the same nature as all others.Lincoln wrote to a noted Western physician,Doctor Drake of Cincinnati,with regard to his "case"--that is,his nervous breakdown--and Doctor Drake replied but refused to prescribe without an interview.Lamon,244.
V.PROSPERITY.
1.Carpenter,304-305.
2.Lamon,243,252-269;Herndon,226-243,248-251;N.and H.,201,203-12.
