According to Oates Lincoln felt embarrassed of his frontier past and seldom mentioned his parents. As stated by Herndon in a conversation he and Lincoln had Lincoln would confess that his biological mother to be a bastard and ask Herndon to not speak a word of this as long as he lived. In regards to Lincoln’s father it was stated that Herndon would argue that Thomas Lincoln was certainly not a “shiftless oaf” but a sober man skilled in carpentry who paid his taxes, accrued land and enjoyed the respect of his neighbors. Whatever the case, Lincoln seemed to hold his father in contempt for his intellectual limitations sharing that, “he never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name” and at the age of twenty-one Lincoln