Mr. I.N.  Arnold.  “Thomas Lincoln was with his father in the field when the savages suddenly fell upon them.  Mordecai and Josiah, his elder brothers, were near by in the forest.  Mordecai, startled by a shot, saw his father fall, and running to the cabin seized the loaded rifle, rushed to one of the loop-holes cut through the logs of the cabin, and saw the Indian who had fired.  He had just caught the boy, Thomas, and was running toward the forest.  Pointing the rifle through the logs and aiming at a medal on the breast of the Indian, Mordecai fired.  The Indian fell, and springing to his feet the boy ran to the open arms of his mother at the cabin door.  Meanwhile Josiah, who had run to the fort for aid, returned with a party of settlers.  The bodies of Abraham Lincoln and the Indian who had been killed were brought in.  From this time forth Mordecai Lincoln was the mortal enemy of the Indian, and it is said that he sacrificed many in revenge for the murder of his father.”

In the presence of such dangers Thomas Lincoln spent his boyhood.  He was born in 1778, and could not have been much more than four years old on that fatal day when in one swift moment his father lay dead beside him and vengeance had been exacted by his resolute boy brother.  It was such experiences as these that made of the pioneers the sturdy men they were.  They acquired habits of heroism.  Their sinews became wiry; their nerves turned to steel.  Their senses became sharpened.  They grew alert, steady, prompt and deft in every emergency.

Of Mordecai Lincoln, the boy who had exhibited such coolness and daring on the day of his father’s death, many stories are told after he reached manhood.  “He was naturally a man of considerable genius,” says one who knew him.  “He was a man of great drollery.  It would almost make you laugh to look at him.  I never saw but one other man who excited in me the same disposition to laugh, and that was Artemus Ward.  Abe Lincoln had a very high opinion of his uncle, and on one occasion remarked that Uncle Mord had run off with all the talents of the family.”

Thomas Lincoln was twenty-eight years old before he sought a wife.  His choice fell upon a young woman of twenty-three whose name was Nancy Hanks.  Like her husband, she was of English descent.  Like his, her parents had followed in the path of emigration from Virginia to Kentucky.  The couple were married by the Rev. Jesse Head, a Methodist minister located at Springfield, Washington County, Kentucky.  They lived for a time in Elizabethtown, but after the birth of their first child, Sarah, they removed to Rock Spring farm, on Nolin Creek, in Hardin (afterward LaRue) County.  In this desolate spot, a strange and unlikely place for the birth of one destined to play so memorable a part in the history of the world, on the twelfth day of February, 1809, Abraham Lincoln the President was born.