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= Abraham Lincoln Posjt 
 
 G. A. R. Chicago, Ills. 
 
 Nancy Hanks Lincoln 
 
 A SE RMO N 
 
 Delivered at All Souls Church, Chicago, »^^^''- 
 February Eight, Nineteen Hundred and Three 
 
 Bv JENKIN LLOYD JONES. 
 
 Reprinted from UNITY of February 12, 1903 
 
 UNITY Publishing Company 
 
 3939 Langley Avenue 
 Chicago 
 

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NANCY HANKS LINCOLN. 
 
 A Sermon by Jexkin Lloyd Jones, Delivered in 
 All Souls Church, Chicago, February 8, 1903. 
 
 Mrs. Caroline Hanks Hitchcock, of Cambridge, 
 Mass., has recently published a little book entitled 
 "Nancy Hanks : the Story of Abraham Lincoln's Moth- 
 er," which is the forerunner of a larger work promised 
 on the genealogy of the Hanks family in America. The 
 book already published, with the assurance it 
 gives of the contents of the book unpub- 
 lished, throws a flood of light on what 
 was supposed to be a dark subject, and brings 
 belated assurance that the law of heredity was not 
 tricked in the birth of Abraham Lincoln. At last, tard- 
 ily, the great son isgiven back into the arms of the lit- 
 tle pioneer mother, too long deprived of the confidence 
 and love of those who have honored and revered the 
 son, although he himself, while still in obscurity, said 
 to his partner, Herndon, "God bless my mother! All 
 that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to her." 
 
 There is no sadder chapter in American history, no 
 more disgraceful manifestation of the vulgarity, bru- 
 talitv, and malignity of political methods and the ob- 
 liquity of politicians than the careless if not wilful dis- 
 honoring of the ancestry of Abraham Lincoln. The 
 idle gossip of unlettered communities set agog by politi- 
 cal bitterness, and making common cause with un- 
 scrupulous agitators, was mistaken for history by near- 
 ly all of those who hastened to meet the want of the 
 hour in their hurried biographies of Abraham Lincoln. 
 There is no lack of lives of the great President ; each 
 year adds to the already long shelf of Lincoln booksni 
 America ; but obviously the true life of Abraham Lin- 
 coln is not yet written. We are too near our subject 
 
to see him in his just perspective, and there has not 
 been time for the careful search for records, sifting of 
 evidence, and discovery of the great forces and facts 
 which are always involved in the making of a great 
 historical character. Perhaps when the real life of 
 Abraham Lincoln is written, it will be found that the 
 material for the history of his later years, the public 
 career of the greatest President and captain of the 
 greatest of armies has been reasonably compassed in the 
 books now at hand. The ten splendid volumes by 
 Nicolay and Hay, the life and correspondence, supple- 
 mented by the two great, volumes of speeches, letters, 
 and state papers of Abraham Lincoln, probably contain 
 an amphtude of documents and most of the facts avail- 
 able, but certainly the chapters concerning Lincoln's 
 fore-elders and early childhood must all be re-written. 
 Even the later lives of Hapgood and Morse reiterate 
 the old scandals of illegitimacy and uncertainties of 
 birth and marital relations which are now utterly de- 
 nied by conclusive documentary evidences found in 
 courts of record. 
 
 This cloud of obscurity and distrust has hung most 
 heavily over the name of Nancy Hanks, the mother 
 of Abraham Lincoln. But today let it be gratefully 
 noted that accurate historical researches have already 
 brought about a vindication which must result in loving 
 appreciation of this maligned and much-neglected 
 name. This vindication has come largely through the 
 diligent and fearless researches of three women, who in 
 this work have merited and will ultimately receive the 
 unmeasured gfratitude, not only of the American peo- 
 ple, but of all lovers of the race, all believers in human 
 nature who rejoice in its noblest representatives. 
 
 I refer, first, to Mrs. C. S. Hobart Vawter, a relative 
 of Vice-President Hobart, whose grandmother was 
 Sarah Mitchell, of Kentucky, a kinswoman of Nancy 
 Hanks. She it was who was instrumental in discover- 
 ing the marriage bond of Thomas Lincoln and 
 the marriage record of Jesse Head, the Methodist 
 minister who officiated at the marriage of Thomas Lin- 
 coln and Nancy Hanks on June 17, 1806. Another of 
 
these women is the CaroHne Hanks Hitchcock, already 
 mentioned, who took to herself the high task of discov- 
 ering the Hanks family, thus throwing a flood of light 
 upon the ancestry of Abraham Lincoln and consequent- 
 ly upon the foundations of his character and power. 
 
 The last of the three women referred to is Ida M. 
 Tarbell, who, in her Life of Lincoln, has risen above 
 the unfounded traditions and coarse implications of the 
 earlier biographers. They, from lack of critical ability 
 or ethical insight, mistook -campaign gossip for evi- 
 dence and idle tradition for history. 
 
 There is no doubt but that Lincoln went to his grave 
 feeling that his own antecedents were hopelessly lost 
 in the obscurity of the common people. In his blessed 
 preoccupation and manly independence of tradition, 
 inheritance, and public opinion, it probably never oc- 
 curred to him to revise the statement made to Mr. J. L. 
 Scripps, of the Chicago Tribune, in i860, who compiled 
 the first campaign biography. Said Lincoln : 
 
 'Tt is a great piece of folly to attempt to make^ any- 
 thing out of me or my early life. It can all be con- 
 densed into a single sentence, and that sentence we find 
 in Gray's Elegy, 
 
 "'The short and simple annals of the poor.' 
 ' "This is my life, and that is all you or anybody else 
 can make of it." 
 
 ''And," adds the reporter, "Mr. Lincoln seemed 
 painfully impressed with the extreme poverty of his 
 early surroundings and the utter absence of all romantic 
 and heroic elements." 
 
 It was better thus, perhaps, for this child of the 
 backwoods. He was thrown back the more surely on 
 the ultimate resources of his own manliness. 
 
 The American people have, in the main, taken liter- 
 ally Lowell's lines : 
 
 "For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw. 
 And choosing sweet clay from the breast 
 of the unexhausted West. 
 With stuff untainted shaped a hero new. 
 Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true." 
 
 Abraham Lincoln, in popular conception, was for 
 
many years a nineteenth-century Melchisedec — "a 
 prince of righteousness and King of Salem, without 
 father, without mother, without descent, having neither 
 beginning of days nor end of Hfe, made hke unto the 
 Son of God, abiding a priest continually." At least the 
 chief bit of autobiographical writing that we have 
 from the great President was taken as final. This was 
 furnished to his friend and yoke- fellow, Jesse W. Fell,, 
 of Bloomington, 111., for campaign purposes in the 
 year 1859. Mr. Fell was perhaps the most prophetic 
 of the sons of Illinois, who hailed from afar the rising 
 man of destiny. His vision was clear, even in the fif- 
 ties. In this sketch Mr. Lincoln says : 
 
 *'I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Harding County, Ken- 
 tucky. My parents were both born in Virginia of un- 
 distinguished families, second families, perhaps I 
 should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year^ 
 was of the family of the name of Hanks, some of whom 
 now remain in Adams and others in Macon Counties, 
 Illinois. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, 
 migrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Ken- 
 tucky, about 1 77 1 or 1772, and a year or two later he 
 was killed by Indians, not in battle but by stealth, when 
 he was laboring to open a farm in the forest. His an- 
 cestors, who were Quakers, went to Virginia from 
 Berks County, Pennsylvania. An effort to identify them 
 with the New England family of the same name ended 
 in nothing more definite than a similarity of Christian 
 names in both families — such as Enoch, Levi, Morde- 
 cai, Solomon, Abraham and the like. 
 
 ''My father at the death of his father was but six 
 years of age, and he grew up literally without educa- 
 tion. He removed from Kentucky to what is now 
 Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year. We 
 reached my new home about the time the State came 
 into the Union. It was a wild region with bear and 
 other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew 
 up. There were some schools, so called, but no quali- 
 fications were ever required of a teacher beyond 
 'Readin', Writin', and Cipherin' to the Rule of 
 Three.' " 
 
Here ended the question of ancestry for Mr. Lin- 
 coln himself and his early biographers, but it has now 
 been clearly established that the name of Lincoln was 
 given him by an ancestry that settles soldidly into the 
 best there is in New England life. They were among 
 those who overflowed the Norwich jail in England be- 
 cause ''they would not accept the ritual prepared for 
 them by the bishop" ; they pelted the tax-collector with 
 stones, and finally, in order to' "rid themselves of an 
 odious government," they sailed away from Yarmouth 
 Bay in 1636, and in due time founded the colony of 
 Hingham. It was these Lincoln land-owners, black- 
 smiths, early iron masters, who sent their representa- 
 tives southward into Pennsylvania, Virginia, North 
 Carolina, and at last into Kentucky. The Abraham 
 Lincoln who was fifth in descent from the Samuel Lin- 
 coln of England, and who had become owner of large 
 tracts of wild land in Kentucky, fell by the treacherous 
 bullet of a lurking Indian in the sight of his three boys 
 — Mordecai, Joseph and Thomas, the latter a six-year- 
 old boy who was saved by the timely crack of the rifle 
 in the hands of the older brother, to become the father 
 of the great Emancipator. 
 
 Thomas Lincoln was not the accident in human life, 
 the irresponsible, unaccountable, and ne'er do well that 
 even the sober biographers of Lincoln have amused 
 themselves over. The true estimate of Thomas LiTi- 
 coln has not yet been made. 
 
 But my present purpose is to try to put into our minds 
 and hearts the obscure, neglected, unappreciated little 
 mother, Nancy Hanks. Thanks to Mrs. Hitchcock, 
 we now know that Hanks is a name nobody need be 
 ashamed of. It has annals that are in themselves inter- 
 esting written deep in the history of England and 
 America. I rejoice that the greatest American wasted 
 no time in pedigree-hunting. The pride of descent is 
 poor capital. Life is too short to be wasted on geneal- 
 ogies for the sake of bolstering up family pride. But 
 there is great joy in doing justice to the memory of 
 the dead. Let those who have pitied the great Lin- 
 coln on account of his mother or written small her 
 
place in the mystic line of causes that hrought forth 
 the beautiful mystery, hasten to repent and make 
 amends. 
 
 The little woman who at thirty-five years of age 
 placed her dying hand upon the head of nine-year-old 
 Abraham away in the backwoods of Indiana, bore a 
 name that has been traced back across the sea to the 
 time of Alfred the Great, where two brothers of that 
 name received ''the commoners' rights in Malmsbury" 
 for service rendered in defeating the Danes, and the 
 name of King Athelstan, grandson of Alfred, is on 
 the deed. Thomas Hanks, a descendant, who was a 
 soldier under Oliver Cromwell, had a grandson who 
 sailed from London to Plymouth, Mass., in 1699. This 
 Benjamin Hanks was the father of twelve children, the 
 third of whom was William, born February 11, 1704; 
 William moved to Pennsylvania, and his son, John 
 Hanks, married Sarah, a daughter of Cadwallader 
 Evans and Sarah Morris. The record runs, "Jo^"*" 
 Hanks, yeoman, Sarah Evans, spinster." A grandchild 
 of this union was Joseph Hanks, who wa? borne south- 
 westward with tile tide of ^ligration inspired and in 
 a large measure headed by Daniel Boone, whose story 
 and whose blood are strangely intermingled with those 
 of the large families of Shipleys, Hankses and Lin- 
 colns, who were much intermarried. This Joseph 
 Hanks crossed the mountains with his family of eight 
 children and herds of cattle and horses. He bought 
 one hundred and fifty acres of land as his homestead 
 near Elizabethtown, in Nelson County, Kentucky. The 
 youngest of eight children in this migration was little 
 Nancy, five years of age when they crossed the moun- 
 tains. After four years of home-making in the wilder- 
 ness, Joseph came to liis death. His will, dated Janu- 
 ary 9, 1793. probated May 14. 1793, has been dis- 
 covered, and a fac simile api)ears in Mrs. Hitchcock's 
 book. It runs thus, somewhat al)breviated : 
 
 "In the name of God. amen. I, Joseph Hanks, of 
 Nelson County, State of Kentucky, being of sound 
 mind and memory but weak in body, calling to mind 
 the fraihy of all human nature, do make and demise 
 
this, my last will and testament, in the manner and 
 form following, to~wit: 
 
 "1 give to my son Thomas one sorrel horse, called 
 * Major' ; to Joshua the grey mare, 'Bonney' ; to Will- 
 iam the grey horse, 'Gilbert' ; to Charles the roan horse, 
 *Tobe' ; to Joseph the horse called 'Bald.' 
 
 "Also I give and bequeath unto my daughter Eliza- 
 beth one heifer called 'Gentle' ; to Polly a heifer called 
 'Lady,' and to my daughter Nancy one heifer, yearHng, 
 called 'Peidy.' I give and bequeath unto my wife, 
 aVanny, my whole estate during her life, afterwards to 
 be divided among all my children." 
 
 This neglected document now reproduced in fac- 
 simile in Mrs. Hitchcock's book settles once and for- 
 ever the legitimacy of the parentage of Nancy Hanks. 
 She had a father who recognized his paternity in the 
 thoughtful will of a prosperous pioneer. This in the 
 eyes of the law as well as of public opinion establishes 
 her place as a rightful child of honorable parents. 
 
 The mother survived but a few months. The story 
 of all the children is promised in the forthcoming 
 Hanks Genealogy by Mrs. Hitchcock.^ Enough for our 
 present purpose to know that the little orphaned Nancy, 
 now nine years old, found a home with her uncle and 
 •aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Berry, near Springfield, 
 Ky., Mrs. Berry being her mother's sister and a mem- 
 ber of the Shipley family. Here she lived a happy and 
 joyous life until twenty-three years old, when Thomas 
 Lincoln, who had learned his carpenter's trade of her 
 uncle, Joseph Hanks, was married to her on June 17, 
 1806, according to official records already n^entioned. 
 The "marriage bond," to the extent of fifty pounds, re- 
 quired by the laws of Kentucky at that time, signed 
 by Thomas Lincoln and Richard Berry, was duly re- 
 corded seven days before. This happy wedding was 
 celebrated as became prosperous and well-meaning: 
 pioneers. The loving uncle and aunt. gave an "in- 
 fare" to which the neighbors were bidden. ■ Dr. Gra'-. 
 harh, an eminent Naturalist of Louisville, who 'died ift 
 1885,. wrote out his remembrances of that festival aind 
 
10 
 
 testified to the same before. a notary in the 98th year 
 of his age. He said : 
 
 *'I know Nancy Hanks to have been virtuous, re- 
 spectable and of good parentage, and I knew Jesse 
 Head, Methodist preacher of Springfield, who per- 
 formed the ceremony. The house in which the cere- 
 mony was performed was a large one for those days. 
 Jesse Head was a noted man — able to own slaves, but 
 did not on principle. At the festival there was bear 
 meat, venison, wild turkey, duck, and a sheep that two 
 families barbecued over the coals of wood burned in a 
 pit and covered with green boughs to keep the juices 
 in." 
 
 The traditions of the neighborhood say that Nancy's 
 cheerful disposition and active habits were considered 
 a dower among the pioneers. She was an adept at 
 spinning fiax, and in the spinning parties, to which 
 ladies brought their wheels, Nancy Hanks generally 
 bore off the palm, ''her spools yielding the longest and 
 finest thread." 
 
 The biographers agree that she was above her neigh- 
 bors in education. She carried the traditions of 
 schooling in Virginia with her over the mountains. She 
 was a great reader ; had Esop's Fables ; loved the Bible 
 and the hymn book; had a sweet voice, and loved to 
 sins: hymns. 
 
 The old neighbors remembered her as having "a gen- 
 tle and trusting nature." A grandson of Joseph, an 
 older brother of Nancy, said : 
 
 ''My grandfather always spoke of his angel sister 
 Nancy with emotion. Slie taught him to read. He 
 often told us children stories of their life together." 
 
 The first child of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln was a 
 daughter, Sarah. Three years after marriage came the 
 boy, Abraham. Another son came and was named 
 Thomas ; he stayed but a few months, but long enough 
 to touch permanently the heart of Abraliam with a 
 sense of tenderness and awe. Before they started for 
 their new home in Indiana he remembered the mother 
 taking her two little children by the hand, walking 
 across the hills, and sitting down and weeping over the 
 
11 
 
 grave of the little babe before she left it behind for- 
 ever. 
 
 The story of that primitive home in Indiana has 
 been told over and over again, but never with sufficient 
 insight. Only pioneers can understand how piety and 
 simplicity, trust and poverty, exposure and hospitality, 
 inadequate clothing and meagerest diet, can go hand in 
 hand with cheerful content. 
 
 Among the last recorded words of Nancy Lincoln 
 was one of cheer. It was but a few days before her 
 death when she went to visit a sick neighbor, the 
 mother of one who was to become Rev. Allen Brooner, 
 who tells the story. The neighbor was despondent and 
 thought she would not live long. Said Mrs. Lincoln: 
 ''O you will live longer than I. Cheer up." And so it 
 proved. The pestilential milk sickness was abroad, 
 smiting men and cattle. Uncle Thomas and Aunt 
 Betsy Sparrow both died within a few days of each 
 other. Soon the frail but heroic little mother was 
 smitten. Said a neighbor: "She struggled on day 
 by day, but on the seventh day she died." There was 
 no physician within thirty-five miles ; no minister with- 
 in a hundred miles. Placing her hand on the head of 
 the little boy, nine years old, she left him her dying 
 bequest, and the great President many years afterwards 
 in a burst of confidence entrusted the message to the 
 memory of Joshua A. Speed, one of his earliest and 
 most intimate friends : 
 
 'T am going away from you, Abraham, and shall not 
 return. I know that you will be a good boy ; that you 
 will be kind to Sarah and to your father. I want you 
 to live as I have taught you and to love your Heavenly 
 Father." 
 
 Thomas Lincoln, wise in wood lore and not without 
 that culture that comes with the handicrafts, sawed the 
 boards with his own whip-saw from the trees he felled 
 and made the coffins with his own hands for the Spar- 
 rows and for his wife. 
 
 It was three months before Parson David Elkins 
 came on horseback from the old Kentucky home, in 
 response to the first letter that little Abraham ever 
 
12 
 
 wrote, to stand under the trees by the grave and speak 
 his word of loving remembrance and high appreciation 
 of the departed and of consolation and hope to the 
 neighbors who had gathered from far and near. 
 
 No reporter was there to take down the address, no 
 camera was there to catch the picture, and no artist 
 has risen to paint the scene, but it is one of the most 
 touching events in American history. 
 
 *'Stoop-shouldered," ''thin-breasted" were the words 
 used to describe her appearance in Indiana, but ''bright, 
 scintillating, noted for her keen wit and repartee," was 
 a phrase used by those who knew her as a girl in the 
 home of her foster parents. Uncle and Aunt Berry, in 
 Kentucky. 
 
 "The little girl grew up into a sweet-tempered and 
 beautiful woman, the center of all the country merry- 
 making, a famous spinner and housewife," says Miss 
 Tarbell. "I remember Nancy well at the wedding, a 
 fresh looking girl," said Dr. Graham. 
 
 But who has a better right to characterize the mother 
 who bore him than the great Lincoln himself ? He de- 
 scribes her as "of medium stature, dark, with soft and 
 rather mirthful eyes ; a woman of great force of char- 
 acter, passionately fond of reading; every book she 
 could get her hands on was eagerly read." 
 
 And why should she not be such? The Hanks 
 blood was vital, aggressive, virile. Mrs. Hitchcock 
 offers abundant facts to prove that "the mother of 
 Abraham Lincoln belonged to a family which has given 
 to America some of her finest minds and most heroic 
 deeds." 
 
 This same Hanks family was a "remarkably invent- 
 ive family. The first bell ever made in America was 
 cast on Hanks Hill, in the old New England home. 
 The first tower clock made in America, placed in the 
 old Dutch church in New York City, was made by a 
 Hanks. The bell that replaced the old Liberty Bell 
 in Philadelphia, as well as the great ^Columbian bell, 
 that was made from the relics of gold, silver, old coins 
 and metals sent from all parts of the world, a bell which 
 in. addition to .the, old inscriptions of, the Liberty Bell 
 
13 
 
 added, "A new commandment I give unto you — that ye 
 love one another," was cast by members of the Hanks 
 family. The first silk mills in America were built by a 
 Hanks. One of the founders of the American Bank 
 Note Company was a Hanks. ''Hanksite" is the name 
 of a mineral named after the discoverer, a state mineral- 
 ogist of Cahfornia. '^ 
 
 Lincoln used to say that his Uncle Mordecai, his 
 father's oldest brother, ''got away with all the brains of 
 the family." He was a prominent member of the Ken- 
 tucky legislature at one time. He was a famous story 
 teller, and Thomas, the carpenter, \\;as a favorite wher- 
 ever he went. He was withy, though small of stature, 
 a famous wrestler, and, when the provocation was ade- 
 quate, a terrible foe in a fight. 
 
 All these traits appear in the President, but none the 
 less perceptible is the inheritance from the mother's 
 side. Mrs. Hitchcock's little book shows two portraits 
 side by side — that of Abraham Lincoln in i860 and the 
 Rev. Stedman Wright Hanks, of Cambridge, Mass. — 
 and the resemblance is so striking that one might read- 
 ily be taken for the other. 
 
 No less marked were the characteristics of the Welsh 
 Evanses and Morrises, whose blood flowed in the veins 
 of Nancy Hanks, as shown in Coffin's life of Lincoln. 
 
 Says Noah Brooks in his life : 
 
 "Lincoln said that his earliest recollections of his 
 mother were of his sitting at her feet with his sister, 
 drinking in the tales and legends that were read and re- 
 lated to them by the house mother." 
 
 Let the land of Merlin rejoice, for, through this far- 
 off child of the wilderness, it made its contribution of 
 poetry, hope and tenderness to the life of the great 
 Emancipator. 
 
 We have seen how the estates of his ancestors, while 
 not insignificant, were untainted by claim of human 
 chattels. He himself has told us that one reason why 
 his parents left Kentucky was their antipathy to slav- 
 ery.' And Miss Tarbell has found evidence that in the 
 old Lincoln home in Kentucky there were high debates 
 
14 
 
 over the rights of man as set forth by Thomas Jeffer- 
 son and Thomas Paine. 
 
 The records of the Lincohi ancestry on both sides 
 were cruelly mutilated and for the most part destroyed 
 by the vandal hands of the war of 1861-5; the war 
 that ransacked court houses and made bonfires of rec- 
 ords. They were broken into again by that inevitable 
 abandonment of impedimenta that goes with successive 
 generations of pioneers. They who go forth to conquer 
 a new world must needs go in light marching order. 
 Those fore elders of Lincoln took their souls along 
 with them but left their records behind. In their zeal 
 for the future they grew indifferent to the past. The 
 present so absorbed them that they sacrificed their tra- 
 ditions. 
 
 Once more the Lincoln ancestry is obscured by the 
 universal indifference to the feminine links in human 
 descent. It will not always be so, for whatever her es- 
 timation may be in the statutes of men, woman has a 
 legislative and executive place in the statutes of God, 
 and she contributes her full quota towards the making 
 of man — intellectually and spiritually as well as physi- 
 cally. 
 
 Lastly, the Lincoln traditions were broken upon the 
 dead wall of slavery. The tides of New England life 
 and European energy that traveled south and south- 
 westward fared poorly compared with the same tides 
 that traveled westward. It was not the Blue Ridge 
 Mountains, but it was the black lines of slavery that 
 held down and held back that enterprising blood and 
 doomed to illiteracy that progeny of high ancestry. But 
 that great wave of noble blood at last gathered strength 
 in the zeal of Abraham Lincoln and his compatriots. 
 They dashed themselves against the wall that had well- 
 nigh wrecked them and battered it down, and pub- 
 He schools, free intercourse of man with man, the up- 
 ward reach of the common people began to redeem the 
 land and to restore the records and to vindicate the 
 law of heredity. Then let us give to Nancy Hanks 
 the place that belongs to her. 
 
 We of All Souls Church have set for ourselves the 
 
15 
 
 high task of interpreting Abraham Linoohi in terms 
 of institutional Hfe, civic energy and rehgious hberty. 
 
 We have undertaken to build an Abraham Lincoln 
 Centre across the way. Would that some one would 
 see to it that there shall be one tender shrine, one mel- 
 lowed and mellowing home corner within that building, 
 that may lovingly and gratefully bear the name of 
 Nancy Hanks Lincoln. 
 
 I wish this name might be related to an industry 
 that shall touch the lives of generations of girls 
 yet unborn with the benignant skill of horne-making, 
 the divine aptitudes of the fireside, the homely skill that 
 made the pioneer fireside of Nancy Hanks Lincoln a 
 training school for giants, a nursery of ideals, a haven 
 for the wandering and the homeless. The day of the 
 distafif and the skillet is gone ; the Dutch oven, the open 
 fireplace with its iron crane, are no longer parts of the 
 household equipment or necessary elements in the train- 
 ing of a girl, but their equivalents remain, and home- 
 making is still the finest of fine arts, the test of a 
 woman's potency now as then, as it ought to be the 
 ideal of a true woman's training now as then. 
 
 Much has been said of late about home-making; 
 much attention has been given to schools of domestic 
 science. I wish that such purposes might be touched 
 with the patriotism, the historic truthfulness, the grow- 
 ing gratitude of humanity that rightfully goes with 
 the name of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. 
 
 How benign in the Lincoln Centre would be a Nancy 
 Hanks School of Domestic Arts. What a prophetic 
 investment of money ! What a high invitation to those 
 to whom is entrusted the grave responsibilities of 
 wealth ! What a significant opportunity ! What a rare 
 chance for investing capital in a way that will bring 
 sure, lasting, aye, everlasting returns ! W^hen some one 
 thinks of it so deeply that the dream becomes a fact, then 
 the vindication of Nancy Hanks will not only have been 
 begun, but it will have been accomplished, at least in 
 one little corner of this great country ; in one Centre 
 that shall radiate life to one group of the children who 
 will thus become her unmeasured beneficiaries. 
 
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 S 12