[1] All the quotations in this book from Herndon's Lincoln are from the first edition in three volumes.
[2] The habit of studying aloud, learned in the "blab-school," remained with him. Lamon says he read aloud and "couldn't read otherwise." Whitney tells of his writing a ruling one time when he was sitting (illegally) for Judge Davis, and he pronounced each word aloud as he wrote it. This was not his invariable custom, but it was a common one with him.
[3] Hodgenville was a Baptist settlement from its foundation. Robert Hodgen, for whom the settlement was named, and John Larue, his brother-in-law, for whom the county was named, were both Baptists, and among the first settlers was a Baptist minister, Rev. Benjamin Lyon.
[4] Baptisms of this noisy character were familiar to Lincoln in his boyhood and certainly as late as the period of his residence in New Salem. Henry Onstott, at whose tavern Lincoln boarded, tells of such baptisms performed by Rev. Abraham Bale, including one at which the husband of the lady who was being baptized called out to the preacher to hold her, as he valued her more highly than the best cow and calf in the county (Lincoln and Salem, p. 122).
[5] While the statements of Dennis Hanks are often colored by his imagination, he is, after all, our best witness concerning Lincoln's boyhood.
[6] Some writers have spoken of Mr. Elkin as a Methodist circuit rider. Mrs. Lucinda Boyd, in a book which might better not have been published and which I will not name, but which is correct in some local matters, speaks of Rev. Robert Elkin, the minister who preached the funeral sermon of Mrs. Lincoln, as belonging to the "Traveling Baptist Church." She says: "His grave is in the open field, and soon the traces of it will be lost." Apparently this grave was in Clark County, Kentucky. I think, however, that she is in error as to the name Robert. It was David.
[7] The latest writer to lend to the incident of Nancy Lincoln's funeral the aid of a vivid imagination and a versatile pen is Rose Strunsky. Discarding the theory that Abraham wrote his first letter to invite a minister to come from Kentucky to preach his mother's funeral, she sends him on foot to a nearer settlement:
"The boy Abraham had his standards of life. There were things of too much meaning to let pass without some gesture. And the unceremonious burial in the forest haunted him. When he heard that a wandering preacher had reached the neighborhood, he tramped many miles in the snow to bring him to the spot where the dead body lay, so that a funeral sermon might be delivered over the now white grave" (Abraham Lincoln, p. 6).
There was nothing unusual about the burial. Nor was there anything unusual about the deferred funeral. These writers simply do not know the conditions of life in which the boy Lincoln lived.
[8] While this manuscript was in process of writing, Professor Raymond, of Berea College, Kentucky, enumerating his summer engagements for the season of 1919, informed me of a funeral he was engaged to preach in August of a boy who died ten years ago. The boy's companions have by this time grown to manhood, but the service will be held: and before this book is published doubtless will have been held according to immemorial custom in that region. This is not because there has been no preacher in its vicinity within ten years; nor is there any reason to suppose that the delay in the case of Lincoln's mother was due to the utter absence of ministers. They were not abundant, certainly; but there is no reason whatever to suppose that in the interval between the death and funeral of Nancy Hanks no preacher had been in the neighborhood of Pigeon Creek.