“4. The Rev. E. B. Head has spoken of this fact in the family history prior to the publication of this affidavit.
“5. Dr. Graham is a competent witness, and his testimony is confirmed in every point.
“6. In view of these facts, that there should ever have been any doubts raised about the marriage of the parents of Mr. Lincoln, and that it should have been gravely discussed, and never explicitly settled in the various biographies, is remarkable.”
Soon after the publication of the above facts a historian of Louisville, Kentucky, Dr. Henry Whitney Cleveland, realizing the importance of Dr. Graham’s reminiscences, secured from him, in his hundredth year, an account of what he remembered of Thomas Lincoln. Mr. Cleveland took down word for word what Dr. Graham told him, and we print it in full below. We regard it as in many ways the most important unpublished document we have been able to discover in regard to Thomas Lincoln. As to the mental condition of Dr. Graham in 1884, we have the testimony of some of the leading citizens of Louisville. In the paper read before the Southern Historical Society in 1880, in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of Louisville, Dr. Durrett said of Mr. Graham:
“Four years more will make him a centenarian, and yet he moves along the streets every day with the elastic step of manhood’s prime, and the eagle eye which made him in youth the finest rifle-shot in the world is shorn but little of its unerring sight. He was a practising physician three-quarters of a century ago, and is the author of several learned books of a professional and philosophical character. His health is yet good, his faculties well preserved, and he seems to-day more like a man of sixty-nine than ninety-six.”
In 1884, when Dr. Graham had become a centenarian, a banquet was given him at which all the leading citizens of Louisville were present. Without exception, every one of the persons with whom we have talked of Dr. Graham’s condition at this time affirms that he was mentally vigorous and his memory trustworthy. In the face of such testimony the statements in the following document must be accepted:
DR. GRAHAM’S STATEMENT.
The original statement was written out, at Dr. Graham’s dictation, by Dr. Henry Whitney Cleveland of Louisville, Kentucky, but was signed by Dr. Graham’s own hand.
I, Christopher Columbus Graham, now in my hundredth year, and visiting the Southern Exposition in Louisville, where I live, tell this to please my young friend Henry Cleveland, who is nearly half my age. He was often at the Springs Hotel in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, then owned and kept by me for invalids and pleasure-seekers. I am one of the two living men who can prove that Abraham Lincoln, or Linkhorn, as the family was miscalled, was born in lawful wedlock, for I saw Thomas Lincoln marry Nancy Hanks on the twelfth day of June, 1806. He was born at what was then known as the Rock Spring Farm—it is now called the Creal Place—three miles south of Hodgensville, in Larue County, Kentucky.
Kentucky was first a county of Virginia after its settlement, and then was divided into three counties; and these, again divided, are pretty much the present State. The first historian was Filson, who made and published the first map of the separate territory, with the names of streams and stations as given by Daniel Boone and Squire Boone, James Harrod, and others. I knew all of these, as well as President Lincoln’s parents.