His oldest son, working hard by, ran to the house for a gun; returning toward the spot where lay his father’s body, he saw an Indian in the act of seizing his brother, the little boy named Thomas.  He fired, with happy aim; the Indian fell dead, and Thomas escaped to the house.  This Thomas it was who afterward became the father of Abraham Lincoln.[8] Of the other sons of Mordecai (great-uncles of the President), Thomas also went to Kentucky, Isaac went to Tennessee, while Jacob and John stayed in Virginia, and begat progeny who became in later times ferocious rebels, and of whom one wrote a very comical blustering letter to his relative the President;[9] and probably another, bearing oddly enough the name of Abraham, was a noted fighter.[10] It is curious to observe of what migratory stock we have here the sketch.  Mr. Shackford calls attention to the fact that through six successive generations all save one were “pioneers in the settlement of new countries,” thus:  1.  Samuel came from England to Hingham, Massachusetts. 2.  Mordecai lived and died at Scituate, close by the place of his birth. 3.  Mordecai moved, and settled in Pennsylvania, in the neighborhood which afterward became Berks County, while it was still wilderness. 4.  John moved into the wilds of Virginia. 5.  Abraham went to the backwoods of Kentucky shortly after Boone’s settlement. 6.  Thomas moved first into the sparsely settled parts of Indiana, and thence went onward to a similar region in Illinois.

Thus in time was corroborated what Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1848 in one of the above-mentioned letters to Hon. Solomon Lincoln:  “We have a vague tradition that my great-grandfather went from Pennsylvania to Virginia, and that he was a Quaker.”  It is of little consequence that this “vague tradition” was stoutly contradicted by the President’s father, the ignorant Thomas, who indignantly denied that either a Puritan or a Quaker could be found in the line of his forbears, and who certainly seemed to set heredity at defiance if such were the case.  But while thus repudiating others, Thomas himself was in some danger of being repudiated; for so pained have some persons been by the necessity of recognizing Thomas Lincoln as the father of the President, that they have welcomed, as a happy escape from this so miserable paternity, a bit of gratuitous and unsupported gossip, published, though perhaps with more of malice than of faith, by Mr. Herndon, to the effect that Abraham Lincoln was the illegitimate son of some person unknown, presumably some tolerably well-to-do Kentuckian, who induced Thomas to assume the role of parent.