This was Sunday. He turned the matter over in his mind all day Monday; and on Tuesday morning he rode over to the dirt-floor cabin that the Hanks tribe occupied and hired Lucy to be a servant in the farm-house on his plantation.
He already owned a number of slaves, and he didn’t need another servant. Nevertheless he hired Lucy, gave her some light tasks about the house, and didn’t ask her to associate with the slaves.
It was the custom of many of the wealthy families of Virginia at that time to educate their sons in England. Lucy’s employer had attended Oxford, and he had brought back to America a collection of books that he cherished. One day he drifted into the library and found Lucy seated, dust-cloth in hand, poring over the illustrations in a history book.
That was an odd thing for a servant to be doing. But, instead of censuring her, he closed the library door and sat down and read her the captions underneath the pictures, and told her something of what they meant.
She listened with very evident interest; and finally, to his surprise, she confessed that she wanted to learn to read and write.
Just how astonishing that aspiration was in a servant-girl in the year of our Lord 1781, it is difficult now to understand. Virginia at that time did not have any free schools; not half the property-owners of the State could sign their names to a deed, and virtually all of the women made their marks when transferring land.
Yet here was a servant-girl aspiring to read and write. The best people in Virginia would have called it dangerous, if not revolutionary. But the idea appealed to Lucy’s employer, and he volunteered to be her tutor. That evening, after supper, he called her into the library and began teaching her the letters of the alphabet. A few evenings later he put his hand over hers as it grasped the quill, and showed her how to form the letters. For a long time after that he taught her, and to his credit let it be recorded that he did a very good job. There is one specimen of her handwriting still in existence, and it shows that she wrote with a bold, self-confident flourish. There are spirit and personality and character in her handwriting; and she not only used the word “approbation,” but spelled it correctly. That was no little achievement at a time when the orthography of men like George Washington was not always flawless.
And when the reading and spelling lessons were finished for the evening Lucy and her tutor sat side by side in the library, looking at the dancing flames in the fireplace, and watching the moon rise over the rim of the forest.
She fell in love with him, and trusted him; but she trusted him too far. . . . Then came weeks of anxiety. She couldn’t eat. She hardly slept. She worried a haggard look into her face. When she could no longer deny the truth even to herself she told him. For a moment he considered marrying her. But only for a moment. Family. Friends. Social position. Complications. Unpleasant scenes. . . . No. Besides, he was beginning to tire of her. So he gave her some money and sent her away.
As the months went by people pointed at Lucy and shunned her.
One Sunday morning she created a sensation by shamelessly bringing her baby to church. The good women of the congregation were indignant, and one stood up in the meeting-house and demanded that “that slut be sent away.”
That was enough. Lucy’s father did not mean to have his daughter insulted any longer. So the Hanks tribe loaded their few earthly possessions into a wagon and traveled out over the Wilderness Road, through the Cumberland Gap, and settled at Fort Harrod, Kentucky. No one knew them there: they could lie more effectively about the father of Lucy’s child.
But in Fort Harrod Lucy was quite as pretty, quite as attractive to men as she had been back in Virginia. She was sought after, and flattered. She fell in love again. This time it was a little easier to stray. Somebody found it out. Somebody told somebody else. Then it was repeated at Ann McGinty’s. And, as we have already recorded, the Grand Jury indicted Lucy for fornication. But the sheriff knew Lucy wasn’t the kind of woman to have the law upon; so he stuck the summons in his pocket, and went off deer-hunting and left her alone.
That was in November. In March the court met again. And when it met, a certain woman appeared with further gossip and slander about Lucy and demanded that the hussy be haled into court and made to answer to the charges against her. So another summons was issued; but high-spirited Lucy tore it up and flung it into the face of the man who served it. In May the court would convene again; and Lucy would doubtless have been forced into court at that time, had not a remarkable young man appeared on the scene.
His name was Henry Sparrow. He rode into town, tied his horse in front of her cabin, and went in.
“Lucy,” he probably said to her, “I don’t give a damn about what these women are saying about you. I love you and want you to be my wife.” At any rate, he did ask her to marry him.
However, she was not willing to marry immediately. She was not willing to have the gossips of the town say that Sparrow had been forced into matrimony.
“We’ll wait a year, Henry,” she insisted. “During that time I want to prove to every one that I can live a decent life. If at the end of that time, you still want me, come; I’ll be waiting for you.”
Henry Sparrow took out the license at once, April 26, 1790, and nothing more was heard of the summons. Almost a year later they were married.
That set the Ann McGinty crowd to shaking their heads and wagging their tongues: the marriage wouldn’t last long, Lucy would be up to her old tricks again. Henry Sparrow heard this talk. Every one heard it. He wanted to shield Lucy. So he suggested that they move farther West and begin life all over again in kindlier surroundings. She refused that customary means of escape. She wasn’t bad, she said; and she held her head high as she said it. She wasn’t going to run away. She was determined to settle down there in Fort Harrod and fight it out.
And she did. She reared eight children and redeemed her name in the very community where it had once been a signal for coarse jests.
In time two of her sons became preachers; and one of her grandsons, the son of her illegitimate daughter, became President of the United States. His name was Abraham Lincoln.
I have told this story to show Lincoln’s more immediate ancestry. He himself set great store by his well-bred Virginia grandfather.
William H. Herndon was Lincoln’s law partner for twenty-one years. He probably knew Lincoln better than any other man who ever lived. Fortunately, he wrote a three-volume biography of Lincoln that appeared in 1888. It is one of the most important of the multitude of works on Lincoln. I quote now from pages 3 and 4 of Volume I:
On the subject of his ancestry and origin I only remember one time when Mr. Lincoln ever referred to it. It was about 1850, when he and I were driving in his one-horse buggy to the court in Menard county, Illinois. The suit we were going to try was one in which we were likely, either directly or collaterally, to touch upon the subject of hereditary traits. During the ride he spoke, for the first time in my hearing, of his mother, dwelling on her characteristics, and mentioning or enumerating what qualities he inherited from her. He said, among other things, that she was the illegitimate daughter of Lucy Hanks and a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter; and he argued that from this last source came his power of analysis, his logic, his mental activity, his ambition, and all the qualities that distinguished him from the other members and descendants of the Hanks family. His theory in discussing the matter of hereditary traits has been, that, for certain reasons, illegitimate children are oftentimes sturdier and brighter than those born in lawful wedlock; and in his case, he believed that his better nature and finer qualities came from this broad-minded, unknown Virginian. The revelation—painful as it was—called up the recollection of his mother, and, as the buggy jolted over the road, he added ruefully, “God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her,” and immediately lapsed into silence. Our interchange