His parents were Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks Lincoln. “Abe,” Sarah Bush Lincoln recalled years later, “was the best boy I ever saw.Abraham Lincoln was born on Sunday, February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on his father's farm in what was at that time Hardin County (today Larue County) Kentucky. “At first he was not easily reconciled to it,” she recalled, “but finally he too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent.” Sometimes the illiterate Thomas reprimanded Abraham for reading instead of doing farm chores.īut Sarah Bush Lincoln persuaded her husband to allow their son to read and study. But when his father tried to teach him carpentry, Abraham balked, fueling tension between the two, according to Herndon. On the farm, Lincoln became skillful with an ax. To make him look “more human,” Lincoln’s stepmother dressed up the poorly clad Abraham. Instead of cornhusks, Abraham and his sister slept on a feather bed. Somehow, the blended family endured in cramped conditions. She also brought several books, including the Bible and Aesop’s Fables, which she gifted to Abe.Īt his wife’s insistence, Thomas Lincoln installed a cabin floor and plastered cracks between logs. Thomas’s new wife brought along furniture (including a walnut bureau valued at $50), cooking utensils and comfortable bedding-astonishing luxuries for her new stepchildren. 2, 1819, Thomas and Sarah married and later returned to Little Pigeon Creek, accompanied by her three children: Elizabeth, 13 Matilda, 10 and John, 9. Lincoln’s Stepmother Offered Love and SupportĪrtist Eastman Johnson's 1867 oil painting 'Boyhood of Lincoln,' depicting a young Abraham Lincoln reading by firelightĮager to re-marry, Thomas Lincoln traveled to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he proposed to widow Sarah Bush Johnston, whom he had known since childhood. She accepted, provided Lincoln paid off her debts. Through a dismal winter, the motherless children and their 19-year-old orphan cousin lived in a log cabin without a floor, largely unprotected from severe weather. In a little more than a year, however, their family circumstances changed dramatically. “ittle Abe and his sister Sarah began a dreary life-indeed, one more cheerless and less inviting seldom falls to the lot of any child,” wrote William Herndon, Lincoln’s later law partner and biographer. (Some believed the cause of death was tuberculosis.) She was 34.Īfter Nancy’s death, domestic duties at the family’s one-room cabin fell to 11-year-old Sarah. An introspective, generous-hearted woman, Nancy apparently consumed milk tainted when cows ate poisonous white snakeroot. Two years later, Nancy Lincoln died in the remote wilderness-the first of Lincoln’s many family tragedies. “It was a wild region,” Lincoln recalled, “with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.” Because winter harvest was complete, the family lived off wild game, corn and pork bartered from settlers. In the winter of 1816, when Abraham was 7, the Lincolns moved to a settlement at Little Pigeon Creek in southern Indiana. Lincoln’s Family Moved to Indiana in 1816 Usually barefoot, Lincoln walked to the one-room schoolhouse, “a little log room about 15 feet square, with a fireplace at one side.” What’s certain is that another child’s death would have crushed the Lincolns, whose infant son Thomas died on the farm in 1812.Įager to learn, Abraham found few opportunities for schooling in rural Kentucky instead, he and his sister sporadically attended ABC schools-so-called “blab" schools in which students repeated their teacher’s oral lessons aloud. Whether the account-widely publicized in the late 19 th century-is accurate remains unknown. A playmate said he used a sycamore limb to pull Lincoln from the deep, raging waters. While walking across a log that spanned the rain-swollen tributary, Abraham fell in, the story goes. Abraham filled the wood box, brought water from the creek, weeded the garden, gathered grapes for wine and jelly, picked persimmons for beer making and planted pumpkin seeds.Īt the creek, where he often played with his sister, Lincoln may have nearly drowned. Stern and often domineering, Thomas Lincoln put his son to work before he turned 7. ![]() ![]() In front of the Lincolns’ door, on the road from Louisville to Nashville, the world passed: pioneers with heavily laden wagons, peddlers, local politicians, slaves, missionaries and soldiers returning from the War of 1812. ![]() On the leased, 30-acre farm, Lincoln’s father planted corn and pumpkins on wide fields with rich soil. ![]() Steep, heavily wooded hills rose on each side of the home. Young Lincoln Worked the Farm, Had Little SchoolingĪt Knob Creek, the Lincolns lived in a one-room cabin with a dirt floor, much like the one where Abraham was born roughly nine miles away near Hodgenville.
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