Note 7 — Chapter III
Reading edition
The latest writer to lend to the incident of Nancy Lincoln's funeral the aid of a vivid imagination and a versatile pen is Rose Strunsky. Discarding the theory that Abraham wrote his first letter to invite a minister to come from Kentucky to preach his mother's funeral, she sends him on foot to a nearer settlement:
"The boy Abraham had his standards of life. There were things of too much meaning to let pass without some gesture. And the unceremonious burial in the forest haunted him. When he heard that a wandering preacher had reached the neighborhood, he tramped many miles in the snow to bring him to the spot where the dead body lay, so that a funeral sermon might be delivered over the now white grave" (Abraham Lincoln, p. 6).
There was nothing unusual about the burial. Nor was there anything unusual about the deferred funeral. These writers simply do not know the conditions of life in which the boy Lincoln lived.