Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/42

12 of the same household. The child Nancy was indifferently called by her true name of Hanks and by her mother's new name, it being also her aunt's name, of Sparrow, and by the latter name both John and Dennis Hanks knew her, and Mrs. Hanaford, in her interesting sketch of Mr. Lincoln's life, so designates her, on the authority of the two Hankses.

After living with her Aunt Sparrow for a while she made a visit to her maternal grandfather, Richard Berry, then living at Mattingly's Mills, on Beech fork, in Washington County, and was induced by him to maintain her abode there, which she did till she was married.

It may be mentioned that, prior to the betrothal of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, he had courted another girl in Hardin County, one Sallie Bush, but that for some reason the courtship either did not mature into an engagement, or else the engagement was broken off; for both parties entered into other matrimonial alliances. Thomas Lincoln's marriage with Nancy Hanks was a highly respectable one, but his alliance with Sallie Bush would have been more recherché, for the latter was connected with the élite of that part of Kentucky, as I shall hereafter show. No especial reasons are disclosed by history why Nancy did not make her home with her mother, but it is probable that, when she had so many acceptable homes, she selected that which was most agreeable; that in the depressing poverty incident to the frontier families in those days, the step-father might have found it a relief to be disencumbered of the charge and expense of a child to whom he was bound by only a conventional tie. So it is not strange that