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.