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He became a powerfully built, square-set young man, somewhat indolent and improvident, who occasionally showed his temper and courage by knocking down a frontier rowdy.

The rough young carpenter in 1806 married Nancy Hanks, a niece of Joseph Hanks, in whose shop he worked at his trade. Nancy, who was the mother of Abraham Lincoln, was the daughter of a supposedly illiterate and superstitious family, but she was comely, intelligent, knew how to read and write and taught her husband to scrawl his name.

The great Lincoln always believed that he got his intellectual powers from his mother.

For a time this pair, who were to bring forth the savior of America, dwelt in a log hut, fourteen feet square, at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where they were married. Then a daughter was born. A year later the carpenter bought a small farm on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in Hardin County.

Here, on wretched soil overgrown with stunted brush, Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks lived with their infant daughter in a rude log cabin, enduring profound poverty.