The boy drew himself up and said: “Marse Tom, that situation with all its advantages is open to you, if you want ter go an’ fill it.”

But Judge Head never encouraged any runaway, nor had any “underground railroad.” He only talked freely and boldly, and had plenty of true Southern men with him, such as Clay. The Eli Whitney cotton-gin had now made slavery so valuable that preachers looked in Hebrew and Greek Testaments for scripture for it.

Tom Lincoln and Nancy, and Sally Bush were just steeped full of Jesse Head’s notions about the wrong of slavery and the rights of man as explained by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Abe Lincoln the Liberator was made in his mother’s womb and father’s brain and in the prayers of Sally Bush; by the talks and sermons of Jesse Head, the Methodist circuit rider, assistant county judge, printer-editor, and cabinet-maker. Little Abe grew up to serve as a cabinet-maker himself two Presidential terms.

It was in my trip to Canada after my negro that I met the younger brother of the great chief Tecumseh. A mob wanted to kill me because I was after my property that had legs and a level head. The Indian was one of the finest looking men I ever saw, and in the full uniform of a British officer. He protected me, and we had a talk after the danger was over. He said that history was right about the death of his great brother Tecumseh at the battle of the Thames in 1813. But the story of his skin being taken off by soldiers to make razor-straps was all a lie, as they never had the chance. He was not even slain at the point in the battle indicated by Colonel Richard M. Johnson, whose accession to the Vice-Presidency in 1836 was largely due to the credit which he gained for this supposed exploit. My Indian protector said he was a lad at the time, but [was] there; and that the red men never abandoned their chiefs, dead nor alive.

I come back again to the Lincoln-Hanks wedding of 1806. Rev. or Judge Jesse Head was one of the most prominent men there, as he was able to own slaves, but did not on principle. Next, I reckon, came Mordecai Lincoln, at one time member of the Kentucky legislature. He was a good Indian fighter; and although some say he was the elder brother of Tom Lincoln, I understood he was his uncle, or father’s brother. The story of his killing the Indian who killed old Abraham Linkhorn is all “my eye and Betty Martin.”

My acceptance of this whole pedigree is on hearsay, and none of it from the locality of Tom Lincoln’s home. There is a Virginia land warrant, No. 3,334, of March 4, 1780, for four hundred acres of land, cost one hundred and sixty pounds, located in Jefferson County, Kentucky, on Long Run; and [there is a report of survey for the same tract (see pages [22] and [23])] signed by William Shanon, D. S. J. C., and William May, S. J. C., witnessed by Ananiah Lincoln and Josiah Lincoln, C. C. (chain-carriers), and Abraham Linkhorn, Marker, dated May 7, 1785, five years later. “Mordecai Lincoln, Gentleman,” is the title given one who died in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1735, and his will is recorded in the Register’s office in Philadelphia. New Jersey, Virginia, and Tennessee also have the name correctly, in the last century. The fame of General Benjamin Lincoln of the Revolution was on every tongue at that time. In the field-book of Daniel Boone, owned by Lyman C. Draper, five hundred acres of land was entered for Abraham Lincoln on treasury warrant No. 5,994, December 11, 1782. The officers of the land-office of Virginia could spell, and so could the surveyor and deputy surveyor (Record “B,” p. 60 of Jefferson County in 1785). The two chain-carriers spelled the name correctly. Why not also think that the third man spelled his correctly? A very illiterate man could pronounce what he could not spell, and Abraham Linkhorn, who had money and could write, knew his own name. President Lincoln told James Speed: “I don’t know who my grandfather was, and am more concerned to know what his grandson will be.” I am not sure that we know, either, perfectly yet.[[21]]

While you pin me down to facts I will say that I saw Nancy Hanks Lincoln at her wedding, a fresh-looking girl, I should say over twenty. Tom was a respectable mechanic and could choose, and she was treated with respect....

I was at the infare, too, given by John H. Parrott, her guardian, and only girls with money had guardians appointed by the court. We had bear-meat (that you can eat the grease of, and it not rise like other fats); venison; wild turkey and ducks; eggs, wild and tame (so common that you could buy them at two bits a bushel); maple sugar, swung on a string, to bite off for coffee or whiskey; syrup in big gourds; peach-and-honey; a sheep that the two families barbecued whole over coals of wood burned in a pit, and covered with green boughs to keep the juices in; and a race for the whiskey bottle. The sheep cost the most, and corn was early raised in what is now Boyle County, at the Isaac Shelby place. I don’t know who stamped in the first peach-seed, but they grew before the apples. Our table was of the puncheons cut from solid logs, and on the next day they were the floor of the new cabin.

It is all stuff about Tom Lincoln keeping his wife in an open shed in a winter when the wild animals left the woods and stood in the corners next the stick-and-clay chimneys, so as not to freeze to death; or, if climbers, got on the roof. The Lincolns had a cow and calf, milk and butter, a good feather bed, for I have slept in it (while they took the buffalo robes on the floor, because I was a doctor). They had home-woven “kiverlids,” big and little pots, a loom and wheel; and William Hardesty, who was there too, can say with me that Tom Lincoln was a man and took care of his wife.

I have been in bark camps with Daniel and Squire Boone and James Harrod. We have had to wade in the “crick,” as Daniel spelt it, to get our scent lost in the water, and the Indian dogs off our trail. When trailed and there was no water handy, I have seen Daniel cut a big grapevine loose at the bottom, with his tomahawk, from the ground. Then, with a run and swing from the tree it hung to, swing and jump forty feet clear, to break the scent on the ground. I have done it too, but not so far. He could beat any man on the run and jump, but it took more than two Indians or one bear to make him do it. If no dog barked in the silent woods, we could run backward very fast, and make Mr. Indian think we had gone the way we came. They went that way, and we the other for dear scalps and hair. Squirrels barking or chattering at Indians, or dogs, often told us of our danger. I wanted to have a pioneer exhibit at the great Louisville Southern Expositions of 1883 and 1884. I wanted the dense laurel and the papaw thickets planted in rich soil; the bear climbing the bee-tree, and beaten by the swinging log hung by the hunter in his way; the creeping Indian with his tomahawk, and the hunter with the old flint-and-steel rifle, just as I had seen them. Then I wanted to have women from the mountains and the counties that railroads and turnpikes have not opened, and have them in real life, to spin and weave, or bead and fringe the moccasin and hunting-shirt and leggings as they did when I was a boy. This, by the side of the industries and arts of the new era, and the wool and cotton machinery in its present perfection, would indeed tell to the eyes of the changes seen by an old man who has lived a hundred years. As they did not listen to me, I have asked Henry Cleveland, who was a boy and played with my little children at the Harrodsburg Springs in the forties, to write it as I talked to him. I am very deaf, but can see and talk, and will now write my autograph to what he has written and copied off, and will take up James Harrod at another time.