The matrix

Foreword

In this period of the History of the United States of America, when men and women have again been called upon to sacrifice and die to preserve and extend the liberty upon which their great Democracy is founded, it behooves us to examine and pass judgment upon all of its foundation stones. The author claims that the Romance of Thomas Lincoln and Nancj^ Hanks, the father and mother of Abraham Lincoln, is one of those foundation stones. It has been chipped at and marred and banked over by the dust of time since those pioneer days in which it was enacted, of which so little of fact, but so much of tradition remains. The author has dug deep into all legends and collected as much as possible of documentary evidence, and now presents the reconstructed romance

FOREWORD

as a work of fiction for which she hopes she has been granted a measure of inspiration. Her hope of such inspiration is based on the fact that she was born and reared in the same Mttle Bluegrass valley which was the cradle of the great romance, and many of the traditions which she has used in her building are her inheritance. The principal source of her courage to make such an attempt, and material for the work, came from the research into the lives of these humble parents of the great Lincoln, conducted over a period of many years by her aunt, Hannah Daviess Pittman, genealogist of distinction, whose conclusions agree with those of Caroline Hanks Hitchcock, set forth in a small volume on the subject. If this story of the love of brave Nancy Hanks, who had herself been held captive by the Indians, for the simple rough abolitionist, Thomas Lincoln, in whom she must have both planted and fanned the flame of the desire for human liberty and equality, makes the reader feel

FOREWORD

that the primitive greatness of heart and soul of these two pioneers was destined to assure the production of Abraham Lincoln, and gains for them due credit for that greatness, the author will rest content.

Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, and author of the Emancipation Proclamation, said of his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln: "All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother, blessings on her memory."

Chapter I

A GREAT love is nourished by the ebb and flow of the race blood in the generations before it, and when it becomes an iridescent matrix it is very apt to produce the pearl of price. The great twilight stars watched when her father lifted wee Nancy Hanks down from a pack-saddle, in which he had brought her along the Wilderness Trail from Virginia to Kentucky, into the strong, awkward, eager arms of young Thomas Lincoln.

"Careful, Tom; the little maid is asleep," cautioned the father. "Since we got her away from the redskin devils back on the trail a month ago, she starts in her rest to fair break your heart."

Even at her father's low-voiced caution the long black lashes lifted from the big purple eyes, which were as dark as the twilight shadows coming down through the branches of the tall oaks that hovered the Lincoln cabin, and a little shudder began to thrill through the small body, which subsided at the cradling of the boy's strong arms.

"Hush-e, hush-e, honey bird," the boy crooned in a voice of the husky softness of adolescence, as he hugged her closer with a strange hunger in his serious, strong face, with its dark eyes and square jaw, surmounted by a shock of black hair.

Young Nancy took one look at her protector, snuggled her head close under his chin, and fairly melted away into the depths of sleep.

"They ain't no kind of baby Tom won't mother, from a nigger to a skunk," said Mordecai Lincoln, as he watched the boy go slowly, crooning to his burden, into the cabin. "Since Pa and Ma died last year, looks like his grieving has sorter set him on pitiful things."

"He can't look after my Nancy none too perticular, since we so near lost her," answered big Joseph Hanks, as he followed the boy and the child with keen, watchful, tender eyes. "Here, Mother Nannie, let me help you 'light. Give mother a hand on the other side, Mort ; she 's stiff from the long setting of this month's journey from Virginia."

"I make you a hearty welcome. Aunt Nancy, and I hope this house we built fer you here in Kentucky will suit your notions," said Mordecai, as he carefully helped his aunt down from the high seat on a weary mule, back of the pack saddle from which sleeping Nancy had been lifted.

"I '11 ask for nothing more than strong bars to the doors and windows from the Indian murderers that killed your Aunt Sarah Mitchell and stole her little Sarah a month gone," answered the pioneer woman in a firm voice that had in it all the sadness of bereavement but no tears.

"That you '11 have, Aunt Nancy, and muskets always on the trigger f er you and yourn. But there are 'most too many of us in this settlement for the red devils to bother us, any more now. They ain't raided since they killed Pa and we got five out of six of 'em," big Mordecai reassured her.

"I pray God it may be so," answered the mother of Nancy, as she gave a last look back into the savage-infested forest through which she had come, passed the mules of the caravan which her husband was beginning to have unloaded, and went down the path through the clearing into the home they had built in the wilderness for her.

That night there was a gathering of the Lincoln and Hanks clan in the new Hanks home, in front of the wide fireplace in which was now smoldering only a small spring fire of fragrant cedar chips, though into the wide, dark cavern there could be piled a half wagonload of logs against the chill of winter snow.

At one side of the fireplace sat huge Mordecai Lincoln with his long gun between his knees, telling his uncle Joseph Hanks the particulars of the death of his father, following whose lead Joseph, with his three brothers-in-law, Berry, Sparrow, and Mitchell, had come out from Virginia to pioneer into the lush bluegrass valleys of the Dark and Bloody Ground. Richard and Lucy Berry s:it beside him, listening and talking, eager to hear it all at once, for they were to go on farther into the wilderness to their cabin which had been built on a rich land claim at Beechland by Beach Fork River.

Mother Nancy was moving swiftly about the room, still settling her household goods though joining in and directing the conversation ; and over in the comer by the flickering light crouched Tom Lincoln, close to the rude cot of split cedar rails on whose interlaced cords was swung the feather bed, in which slept wee Nancy. A group of Berry and Hanks boys sat on the floor beyond him, listening eagerly to the talk of the men, while Betsy and Polly Hanks and Nancy Sparrow crouched opposite, knitting in the firelight.

"Pa had gone out into the clearing with Josiah and both of 'em had set their muskets against a tree about fifty feet from the one they was felling, which they ought not to have done. I had turned back to the house, when the six red devils came outen the woods and — and done for Pa." Mordecai was relating with the dignified quiet of the pioneer when under any strain of emotion. "Josiah seen them split Pa's head open and he fought himself loose from 'em and run. He got away; but after Ma died from grieving, in a little less than three months, Josh could n't stand living in the sight of that clearing and he went West. He 'lowed to kill redskins as he went and I reckon he did."

"It was the same way with Brother Mitchell," said Joseph Hanks with a huskiness in his throat, and a hard glint in his eyes as he heard this simple story of the murder of his brother-in-law by the savages, who had so nearly stolen from him his own treasure, sleeping warm and safe across the hearth from him. "After they had killed Sister Sarah and tooken Sarah, about as big as Nancy there, who somehow got back, Mitchell, he give the two boy children to their Uncle and Aunt Berry and lit out to follow and kill. He '11 do it shore."

"How 'd the redskins git at a big party like you 'alls, Uncle Jo?" asked Mordecai.

"With you and Uncle Dick Berry and Tom Sparrow, and the boys they must a-been ten men."

"We was fools, that 's how," answer Joseph as he took a twist of Virginia tobacco from his pocket, cut a quid for both Mordecai and Tom Sparrow, also one for Richard Berry, which was refused, before he put one into his own square jaw. "We was all camped down for the night by that clear spring at the foot hill just after you come through the big Gap. We 'd killed a young deer, had venison roast fer supper, et heavy and was all tired out. Mother here had put Nancy and Sarah to bed next a pillion furtherest from the fire on account of wanting 'em to go to sleep away from the talking. After we was all bedded, here the Injuns come down on us ! We had n't noticed nothing."

"Yes, we had noticed one thing," interrupted Richard Berry, as Joseph spat ex-

IQ pertly into the left-hand corner of the chimney farthest from him. "As I came back from seeing to the ox teams I heard an owl hoot in a most strange manner, and I told Jo that it gave me the creeps. Did n't I, Jo?"

"That was about the hundredth and sixth owl you had got creeps from since you started, Brother Berry," answered Joseph as he crossed fire in tobacco juice with Mordecai Lincoln.

"That 's it, sir, the man who knows nothing knows all," declared Brother Berry with genial acidity as he took out a huge gold snuff box, and by the use of the contents procured for himself an equally huge sneeze. Richard Berry, being both a philosopher and a man of comparative wealth, was regarded with respectful esteem by the entire family, though he was at all times in friendly discord with his brother-in-law, Joseph Hanks.

"You were telling JNIort about the raid, 11

Joseph," prompted Mother Nancy with pacific intent as she gave satisfied glances into the fours corners of the large cabin at all the pillowed young Hanks heads beside which were laid Mitchell orphans and a few Sparrows in the split-rail beds.

"Was I a-telling it or Brother Berry?" was Joseph's belligerent answer.

"Go on with the narrative, Brother Hanks," urged Mr. Berry courteously, though gaining the victory with the one erudite word which Joseph Hanks scorned to notice.

"As I was a-saying when cut off, we had n't noticed nothing and in the dead of night they lit on us with a yell. I kicked the chunks of fire together, and I seen a big Indian right by Sister Sarah Mitchell and — " the hardy pioneer's words faltered and Lucy Berry's soft voice took up the story with a little sob:

"She didn't suffer none, Mort, and she died before she knew about — about Sarah being stole away."

"We killed two and lit out after *em as far as we dared go from the wimmen and children in the dark," continued Joseph with hard lines across his mouth. "It was a whole hour before we found they had taken the two little girls. God, Mort, when I found my baby Nancy gone I — "

But here an interruption occurred in the tragic story; small Nancy suddenly sat up in her rude bed and began to sob, looking wildly about in the half light. Quickly her mother started to her, her father half rose from his seat, and Richard Berry was about to ponderously cross the hearth in her direction when she was gathered into Tom Lincoln's strong arms before any of them could reach her.

"Hush-e, hush-e, honey bird," he crooned with his cheek on hers ; and again his charm worked. To the astonishment of the rest of the sympathetic party the long lashes almost instantly fell over the wild purple eyes and the frightened mite nestled back into the arms she had already learned to trust.

"That 's the first time she ain't had a bad crying spell when she waked up since that morning she crawled back into camp. We have n't ever been able to ask her about how she got aloose 'cause she begins to tremble and cry for Sarah, that she loved as a sister, if she was only a cousin. We just have to tole her along not to think about it any more," said her father in an undertone, as they all sat quietly and watched the big awkward boy rock and croon over the five-yearold.

"Tom sure has got her pacified. Let 's let him take her home with him, father," said William Hanks, a big strapping young pioneer of twenty years, with a brotherly twinkle in his eyes, as he looked at the small sleeping girl in Tom Lincoln's arms.

"Rather have her than a skunk kitten, Tom?" questioned Ned Berry, a swaggering sixteen-year-old boy with bright blue eyes, a thatch of gold hair and almost as tall as his father.

A quick, rare smile spread across young Thomas' bashful face as he went on with his crooning and rocking.

"She won't be skeered any more after I git her tamed," he whispered.

"Taming a woman is a job that begins again as soon as it ends, Thomas," observed Mr. Berry over his snuff box as the men began to collect their rifles quietly, preparatory to betaking themselves to the hay mow in the field, as the cabins would be needed for the feminine and juvenile members of the family party, until the Berrys and the Sparrows should move on to their cabins at Beechland. The taming of Nancy Hanks was never accomplished by Thomas Lincoln or the world at large.

Perhaps, when offered the choice, it would have been wiser for Tom to have chosen the guardianship and education of the skunk kitten, rather than the position of protector to small Nancy, for she proved a veritable willo'-the-wisp to him, and before she was done with him, beckoned him into far places.

"Go to Tom, Nancy," became, as the days, weeks and months passed, a veritable slogan in the Hanks cabin, teeming with and running over as it was with pioneer life and activity.

"I don't see how I could make out if Tom did n't keep Nancy safe and pacified so much of the time," sighed Mother Hanks as she, her daughters, Betsy and Polly, and one of the frying-size boys began on the weekly task of dipping candles in deer and bear tallow they had rendered in the huge iron kettle in the open.

"I 'm mighty glad she don't tag me like she does Tom," young Jo Hanks congrat- 16 ulated himself as he shoved a fat pine chunk farther under the big steaming kettle.

"Nancy gits her way and goes it," observed Polly Hanks as she dipped a row of six strong cotton cords, fastened in a line on a cedar slab into the kettle of melted tallow, and waved them in the air to let the grease harden, by repeating which process she was as sure to evolve six straight and sightly candles as was the old red sun to set just as the time for lighting them would arrive. "She et five fried apple pies for her dinner and looks like her stomick could n't er held more than two under her apron. I did n't want to give 'em to her but was afraid not to."

"She tooken three of 'em to Tom, I seen her give 'em to him. His sister Susie don't give him but two for his dinner. She ain't his mother," observed young Hanks as he again fed the chunks to the fire under the candle factory.

"Nobody but mothers understand rightly that boys are hollow from hoofs to horns," observed Mother Hanks as she gave her row of candles the tenth dip and wave, which brought them to about the size of a slate pencil. "I must look more careful after Tom's fodder. I don't think Mordecai's wife is child wise and his good mother has gone on before."

"Keep her soul, Lord Jesus," said tall Betsy Hanks devoutly.

"Amen!" answered Mother Hanks as she went on with her dipping.

Pioneer women had need to lean heavily on the "everlasting arms."

And for more things than the tending of small Nancy could Thomas Lincoln be depended upon.

From his earliest years Tom had been a passionate woodsman, and he knew his Kentucky forests as well as any redskin on the Dark and Bloody Ground, and loved them as well. He watched all the trees and bushes through their spring budding, their summer leafing, past their gaudy autumn parade to their winter starkness, and knew accurately what their processes would yield in food, fuel and clothing for man and beast. The entire Lincoln household counted on the great piles of hickory and walnuts that Tom gathered, hulled, sunned and stored, while the autumn sun shone, against the long nights by the big winter fires. Day after day he brought in great branches of elderberry for wine, and long vines of wild grape for jelly, the sugar for which he obtained in the spring from tapping the tall maple trees ; and only Tom knew how to select the ears of Indian corn that would pop into white kernels on the hot stones before the fire.

"Bird, beast and root, Tom could make his living if you turned him loose in the woods," his brother Mordecai remarked boastfully to his uncle Jo Hanks, though the guardianship of young Thomas, which had fallen upon his shoulders at the death of his parents, sat lightly upon him.

"Why don't you teach him to read?" his uncle Joseph asked, as he steadied a tall cedar post that huge Mordecai was raising upon which to nail the timbers for a new shack.

"Got no time to fool with him. He 's all right; as long as a boy has rabbit and bear and turkey track to set his traps by, he don't need to read and write books." This educational value was decided by the own uncle of the man who less than a century later delivered an address at Gettysburg which is the foundation stone upon which rests American literature.

"Shoo, Nancy knows her a-b's right now, and says 'em to me every night. She is going to graduate to c-a-t tonight if I get home in time," bragged Joseph, the father of Nancy, as he tramped the dirt tight 20 around the pole, while Mordecai went on to another.

"Well, Nancy can read Tom's 'cats' to him and let him keep to the turkey tracks," Mordecai answered, as he bent his broad back to the raising of a pole that it would take four of his descendants to lift from the ground.

Thus arbitrarily was dismissed the education of Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham.

Pioneer life is hard at its best, and is there not some excuse for not setting a getter of rations at spelling book and pot hooks, when the family pot is always in danger of showing an empty bottom? It is just not to resent the fact that Thomas Lincoln was forced to spend a great part of his life in the woods tracking and trapping, until the advent into his life of Nancy Hanks, who had herself been tracked and trapped.

Chapter II

AND the arrival of Nancy Hanks into the trapping profession of Tom Lincoki on a July morning was with the cyclonic violence of cloud and tear burst followed by sunshine. It happened in this way. A half mile down on Lincoln Creek, Tom had set his traps to catch j^oung frying size turkeys, which begin to run free about the last of June. He had been urged to an early trapping because Jo and Bill Hanks had been out for deer two days before and had come in with six of the young bronze poults hanging from their belts. That night Mother Hanks had had a great wild turkey fry and Nancy had run down the dirt road to the Lincoln house to summon Tom, as was her habit when ever the huge fire in the Httle lean-to log kitchen of her own abode gave forth what seemed to her a particularly attractive odor.

"Better feed him some of that c-a-t outen your spelling book, Nancy, instead of fried turkey," teased huge Mordecai, as he pushed his rush-bottomed chair back from his own scoured table, which had been split with an axe out of a cedar tree that had grown a century for that utilitarian purpose.

"Not me, never," retorted Tom, as he wiped his mouth on his hickory shirt sleeve. "Reading is for girls."

"Or maybe he'd eat a little d-o-g for you, Nancy," jeered Mordecai's wife, Susie, as she polished the grease off a bunch of small Lincoln countenances with the end of a homespun towel, wet from a gourd dipped in the cedar piggin of water by the door.

"Hush up your mouth. Cousin Susie,"

flamed back Nancy with rage, fairly snapping from the black fringed violet eyes at what her six years was able to recognize as an insult to her beloved protector.

"Don't talk mean to Tom. My mother says always save the liver wing 'for him 'cause his mother is dead.' "

"Jest listen to the sass-box," further jeered the rough young pioneer woman, as she began to bed her two-headed brood.

"Shoo, Susie, let the little maid be," cautioned Mordecai, "don't you know that she 's Uncle Jo and Aunt Nancy's pie-child since the redskins almost got her? Here, Nancy, take a slab of Cousin Susie's sweet cake with hickory nuts in it." As he spoke he held out a slice of the delicacy to the important and offended young relative.

For a moment Nancy eyed the offered appeasement haughtily, then the sunshine broke over her face, curled the young lips into a moist rose bud flanked with rippling dimples, and she held out her brown, briarscratched little hand with a gurgle of joy.

"Thank you, Cousin Susie," she said with a funny little bob and back step of one dusty stump-toed foot, which was a pioneer version of a curtsey brought with other gentle traditions by Mother Hanks from Virginia.

Mordecai laughed heartily at the tactful assault on his rough and tumble wife, who secretly adored the dainty young lady cousin, and was determinedly modelling the tow heads upon her pattern.

"Ain't she the beauty though," observed big Mordecai, as he watched Nancy go down the road hand in hand with burly, awkward Tom in his hickory shirt and butternut jeans trousers, with rawhide suspenders holding them together. "She split that slab of cake with Tom in justice and they is both amunching away fer dear life."

"She sure have got a way with you men folks and boys. You notice her against her own good," rough Susan began to complain.

"Here, let me tote a couple of buckets of water from the spring fer you," Mordecai offered as a price for escape from a scolding, the like of which he had encoantered before. Susan's vicious jealousy was a fire that smouldered to blaze at the slightest provocation and the atmosphere of her household was often sultry from the conflagration.

"You 're soft about both Tom and Nancy and you 'd better keep it for your own children and me," she grumbled after his retreating figure.

"Well, you make it hard enough for Tom with Ma gone," Mordecai ventured back from a safe distance, then went whistling on his way.

Susan's blaze flared on the kitchen threshold.

"Git your supper outen the skillet and git out of my sight," she commanded a little 26 double jointed, round headed negro boy by name Runt, whose mother, in a high red cotton turban, was shifting the pots and skillets in the big fireplace. The Lincoln mother had brought Mammy Jude and her family from Virginia with her, and while the black woman and her husband and children had gone with the land to big Mordecai, after the English first-son custom, to which Virginians held for many generations, to Tom had been given the little Runt.

On her death bed, to which she had taken after seeing her husband brought home from the murdering Indians, gentle Mary Lincoln had said to Mordecai :

"Give Tom Jude's Runt. He's pitiful in nature and will look after the poor thing."

"All right, Ma," Mordecai had answered, and Mordecai Lincoln's word was as good as any man's word or bond. The Runt was Tom's property.

But being "Tom's nigger" often brought the hand of Susan down heavily upon the fate of Runt. He knew when to vanish into thin air.

The turkey fry at Mother Hanks' could have been fairly called a successful repast, and Nancy gathered a pile of drum bones, a few wings and a back to give on a clean cedar chij) to the Runt, who at all times squatted beside the door of any interior which contained his master, Tom.

"Runt," said Tom, as he came to the door. "We '11 set snares tonight. These Hankses beat us onct, but we '11 ketch up with 'em and get a dozen poults fer Aunt Nancy tomorrow."

"We shure will," answered the Runt with a grin nearly a foot wide as Nancy reappeared in the back door beside Tom with a slice of bread and brown sugar for him.

"Nice little Runt," she said, as she watched the dainty feed the grin. 28

The Runt's smile was sugared adoration.

It was on the following day that Tom and the Runt got into trouble with young Nancy.

It happened on the edge of the forest where they had set their snares in the dead of night and it perhaps was the spark that started the conflagration of 1861.

"Glory, Mars Tom, they is three in this pen and hit is the furst one. We '11 shore git our dozen fer Miss Nancy ter day," chuckled the Runt as he knelt by the square prison, made of latticed cedar sticks which had fallen upon the three beautiful bronze wild things when they hopped on the spring, while feeding on the corn he had spread cunningly thereunder. Runt was as captive as they, only did n't realize it and failed to beat against the custom that caged him as they beat their bronze wings and breasts against the cedar sticks.

"We '11 just tie their feet together and go get the others further down stream and kill

'em all at onct," directed Tom as he bent to examine his catch. "They shore are fat and Aunt Nancy will — "

And then the volcano whirled into the situation.

Small Nancy splashed across the creek upon her usual adventure of tagging Tom, and stood beside the two boys kneeling upon the ground, tying the feet of the young turkeys.

"I saw you a-going, Tom Lincoln, without me and then I had to come to find you and — what is that, Tom?"

The child had put her arm around Tom's neck and bent to see what it was in which he and Runt were so absorbed with excited interest, and then suddenly she stood erect with horror freezing her laughing face.

"What is it, Tom?" she asked again, with a flutter in her throat.

"It 's a snare we 've trapped some poults in fer supper, honey bird," Tom answered. 30

"We are going to tie their legs and take 'em home to kill."

"No, Tom, no ! Let 'em go quick, quick !" Nancy suddenly wailed as she stood shuddering with her face in her hands. "I can't stand it, Tom, let 'em go."

"But you et poults that Bill and Jo shot for supper last night, Nancy," remonstrated Tom, while Bunt sat back on his bare feet and rolled his big eyes with helpless astonishment as this battle, which was to be for his ultimate freedom, began. "I 'm the champ een trapper and hunter hereabouts and you don't want 'em to shame me, do you?"

"Them poults was killed when they did n't know it, Tom. They was n't tied. Let 'em go, let 'em go. I can't stand it. Nobody oughter tie nothing alive."

"But, Nancy, honey, we are going to — "

At this Nancy took her hands down from her white little face in which her violet eyes blazed with a great fire, while her small body shook from her bare stumped toes to the crown of her red-brown hair, and the wound in her own bosom was laid bare and began to flow for the saving of the small forest captives of the present, and perhaps for the liberation of a -multitude in the distant future. Fear had been dammed up in her childish heart and had eaten into her vitals. Now the gates of her emotions were opened. "Let 'em go, Tom, let 'em go," she wailed. "That Indian what carried me away in the night over his shoulder, he put his hand on my throat and squeezed it so I could n't call Daddy. He walked and he walked and he walked in the dark right towards a big star, and then he stopped and — and — and he tied Sarah and me with ropes to a tree while they all drinked outen bottles and went to sleep. Sarah cried and cried but I — I jest gnawed and gnawed at that rope until I got loose. I put my back to the star and runned 32 and runned, while the Indian was asleep, and got back to my Daddy and Mother, but, oh Tom, Sarah is still tied and crying. Nothing in this world ought to be tied. Let 'em go free, Tom, let 'em go free."