repudiated; for so pained have some persons been by the necessity of
recognizing Thomas Lincoln as the father of the President, that they
have welcomed, as a happy escape from this so miserable paternity, a bit
of gratuitous and unsupported gossip, published, though perhaps with
more of malice than of faith, by Mr. Herndon, to the effect that Abraham
Lincoln was the illegitimate son of some person unknown, presumably some
tolerably well-to-do Kentuckian, who induced Thomas to assume the rôle
of parent.

Upon the mother's side the ancestral showing is meagre, and fortunately
so, since the case seems to be a bad one beyond reasonable hope. Her
name was Nancy Hanks. She was born in Virginia, and was the illegitimate
child of one Lucy Hanks.[11] Nor was she the only instance of
illegitimacy[12] in a family which, by all accounts, seems to have been
very low in the social scale. Mr. Herndon calls them by the dread name
of "poor whites," and gives an unappetizing sketch of them.[13]
Throughout his pages and those of Lamon there is abundant and
disagreeable evidence to show the correctness of his estimate. Nancy
Hanks herself, who certainly was not to blame for her parentage, and
perhaps may have improved matters by an infusion of better blood from
her unknown father, is described by some as a very rare flower to have
bloomed amid the bed of ugly weeds which surrounded her. These friendly
writers make her a gentle, lovely, Christian creature, too delicate long
to survive the roughness of frontier life and the fellowship of the
shiftless rover to whom she was unfittingly wedded.[14] Whatever she may
have been, her picture is exceeding dim, and has been made upon scant
and not unquestionable evidence. Mr. Lincoln seems not often to have
referred to her; but when he did so it was with expressions of affection
for her character and respect for her mental qualities, provided at
least that it was really of her, and not of his stepmother, that he was