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 speaking,—­a matter not clear from doubt.[15]

On June 10, 1806, Thomas Lincoln gave bond in the “just and full sum of fifty pounds” to marry Nancy Hanks, and two days later, June 12, he did so, in Washington County, Kentucky.[16] She was then twenty-three years old.  February 12, 1807, their daughter Sarah was born, who was married and died leaving no issue.  February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born; no other children came save a boy who lived only a few days.

The domestic surroundings amid which the babe came into life were wretched in the extreme.  All the trustworthy evidence depicts a condition of what civilized people call misery.  It is just as well to acknowledge a fact which cannot now be obscured by any amount of euphemism.  Yet very many of Lincoln’s biographers have been greatly concerned to color this truth, which he himself, with his honest nature, was never willing to misrepresent, however much he resisted efforts to give it a general publicity.  He met curious inquiry with reticence, but with no attempt to mislead.  Some of his biographers, however, while shunning direct false statements, have used alleviating adjectives with literary skill, and have drawn fanciful pictures of a pious frugal household, of a gallant frontiersman endowed with a long catalogue of noble qualities, and of a mother like a Madonna in the wilderness.[17] Yet all the evidence that there is goes to show that this romantic coloring is purely illusive.  Rough, coarse, low, ignorant, and poverty-stricken surroundings