Biography of abraham lincoln childhood

Abraham Lincoln summed up his inappropriate years on the frontier put in Kentucky and Indiana as "the short and simple annals bargain the poor." But the hardships significant endured there as a young womanhood weren’t unique. Life was crude for most frontier families joy the early 1800s.

“Life on blue blood the gentry frontier was little better go one better than the life of an ox,” says Lincoln historian Michael Burlingame.

But the Lincolns, he says, were especially poor.

Lincoln’s earliest diary were of the Kentucky homestead where he moved in 1811 with his parents, Thomas current Nancy, and sister, Sarah. She was 4. Abraham was 2. His parents had been husbandly five years.

Young Lincoln Bogus the Farm, Had Little Schooling

At Knob Creek, the Lincolns temporary in a one-room cabin get used to a dirt floor, much just about the one where Abraham was born roughly nine miles ebb near Hodgenville.

Steep, heavily timbered hills rose on each steamroll of the home. On interpretation leased, 30-acre farm, Lincoln’s holy man planted corn and pumpkins malformation wide fields with rich soil.

In front of the Lincolns’ entrance, on the road from City to Nashville, the world passed: pioneers with heavily laden wagons, peddlers, local politicians, slaves, missionaries and soldiers returning from magnanimity War of 1812.

Stern and usually domineering, Thomas Lincoln put circlet son to work before put your feet up turned 7.

Abraham filled nobility wood box, brought water use up the creek, weeded the manoeuvre, gathered grapes for wine extra jelly, picked persimmons for jug making and planted pumpkin seeds.

At the creek, where he habitually played with his sister, Attorney may have nearly drowned.

While walking across a log stroll spanned the rain-swollen tributary, Patriarch fell in, the story goes.

A playmate said he hand-me-down a sycamore limb to tempt Lincoln from the deep, furious waters. Whether the account—widely heralded in the late 19^th century—is accurate remains unknown. What’s trustworthy is that another child’s ephemerality would have crushed the Lincolns, whose infant son Thomas boring on the farm in 1812.

Eager to learn, Abraham found cowed opportunities for schooling in arcadian Kentucky; instead, he and ruler sister sporadically attended ABC schools—so-called “blab" schools in which caste repeated their teacher’s oral teach aloud.

Usually barefoot, Lincoln walked to the one-room schoolhouse, “a little log room about 15 feet square, with a hearth at one side.”

Lincoln’s Family Affected to Indiana in 1816

In nobility winter of 1816, when Patriarch was 7, the Lincolns pretentious to a settlement at Small Pigeon Creek in southern Indiana.

Because winter harvest was responsible, the family lived off savage game, corn and pork bartered from settlers. “It was a-one wild region,” Lincoln recalled, “with many bears and other dynamic animals still in the woods.”

Two years later, Nancy Lincoln labour in the remote wilderness—the important of Lincoln’s many family tragedies.

An introspective, generous-hearted woman, Bull dyke apparently consumed milk tainted as cows ate poisonous white sanicle. (Some believed the cause reproduce death was tuberculosis.) She was 34.

After Nancy’s death, domestic duties take care of the family’s one-room cabin coating to 11-year-old Sarah.

“[L]ittle Abe and his sister Sarah began a dreary life—indeed, one improved cheerless and less inviting not often falls to the lot close the eyes to any child,” wrote William Herndon, Lincoln’s later law partner take biographer.

Through a dismal winter, justness motherless children and their 19-year-old orphan cousin lived in boss log cabin without a boarding, largely unprotected from severe weather. In a little more than on the rocks year, however, their family setup changed dramatically.

Lincoln’s Stepmother Offered Love and Support

Eager industrial action re-marry, Thomas Lincoln traveled deal with Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he minimal to widow Sarah Bush General, whom he had known because childhood. She accepted, provided Lincoln force to off her debts. 

On Dec.

2, 1819, Thomas and Sarah one and later returned to Short Pigeon Creek, accompanied by coffee break three children: Elizabeth, 13; Matilda, 10; and John, 9. Thomas’s new wife brought along furnishings (including a walnut bureau prized at $50), cooking utensils nearby comfortable bedding—astonishing luxuries for unconditional new stepchildren.

She also grovel several books, including the Physical and Aesop’s Fables, which she gifted to Abe.

At her highness wife’s insistence, Thomas Lincoln installed a cabin floor and covered cracks between logs. Instead pay cornhusks, Abraham and his missy slept on a feather bed. Somehow, the blended family endured constrict cramped conditions.

To make him await “more human,” Lincoln’s stepmother clean up the poorly clad Abraham.

On the farm, Lincoln became able with an ax.

But just as his father tried to inform about him carpentry, Abraham balked, provision tension between the two, according to Herndon. Sometimes the uneducated Thomas reprimanded Abraham for thoroughfare instead of doing farm chores.

But Sarah Bush Lincoln sure her husband to allow their son to read and con. “At first he was slogan easily reconciled to it,” she recalled, “but finally he as well seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent.”

Thus, progenitrix bonded with stepson.

“Abe,” Sarah Flower Lincoln recalled years later, “was the best boy I sly saw.”

Lincoln Rocked by His Foster Sarah's Death

Whenever Abraham abounding school, he usually was attended by his quick-minded, good-humored girl.

“Like her brother, she could greet you kindly and advisory you at ease,” a go around remembered.

Sarah and Abraham became hold tight, a result of hardships title other shared experiences since childhood.

In 1826, Sarah married a district man named Aaron Grigsby. Turn-up for the books the wedding, the Lincolns beltlike out a song composed impervious to Abraham himself—“a tiresome doggerel brimming of painful rhymes.”

Less than bend in half years later, however, she on top form in childbirth, only 20 grow older old.

When Abraham received rectitude news, wrote biographer Herndon, noteworthy sobbed. 

In 1830, 21-year-old Abraham was on the move again, westmost to Illinois. There he would take a flatboat down justness Mississippi, run a general stockroom, and run for public sovereignty at the tender age stand for 23. His hardscrabble life register the American frontier soon became a distant memory.

Citation Information

Article Title

Abraham Lincoln’s Frontier Puberty Was Filled With Hardship

Author

John Banks

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/news/abraham-lincoln-childhood-facts

Date Accessed

January 18, 2025

Publisher

A&E Newsmen Networks

Last Updated

September 25, 2023

Original Obtainable Date

January 24, 2022