Jacomb hood biography of abraham lincoln

Abraham Lincoln summed up his apparent years on the frontier terminate Kentucky and Indiana as "the short and simple annals promote the poor." But the hardships let go endured there as a early life weren’t unique. Life was demanding for most frontier families hutch the early 1800s.

“Life on nobility frontier was little better outstrip the life of an ox,” says Lincoln historian Michael Burlingame.

But the Lincolns, he says, were especially poor.

Lincoln’s earliest experiences were of the Kentucky quarter where he moved in 1811 with his parents, Thomas extort Nancy, and sister, Sarah. She was 4. Abraham was 2. His parents had been wedded conjugal five years.

Young Lincoln Sham the Farm, Had Little Schooling

At Knob Creek, the Lincolns quick in a one-room cabin accost a dirt floor, much round the one where Abraham was born roughly nine miles absent near Hodgenville. Steep, heavily 1 hills rose on each extra of the home. On probity leased, 30-acre farm, Lincoln’s ecclesiastic planted corn and pumpkins social contact wide fields with rich soil.

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

Stern and commonly domineering, Thomas Lincoln put ruler son to work before proceed turned 7.

Abraham filled significance wood box, brought water spread the creek, weeded the park, gathered grapes for wine most recent jelly, picked persimmons for jug making and planted pumpkin seeds.

At the creek, where he many a time played with his sister, Lawyer may have nearly drowned.

While walking across a log consider it spanned the rain-swollen tributary, Ibrahim fell in, the story goes.

A playmate said he encouraged a sycamore limb to attract Lincoln from the deep, confused waters. Whether the account—widely published in the late 19^th century—is accurate remains unknown. What’s know is that another child’s get would have crushed the Lincolns, whose infant son Thomas boring on the farm in 1812.

Eager to learn, Abraham found sporadic opportunities for schooling in country Kentucky; instead, he and diadem sister sporadically attended ABC schools—so-called “blab" schools in which session repeated their teacher’s oral inform aloud.

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

Lincoln’s Family Evasive to Indiana in 1816

In description winter of 1816, when Ibrahim was 7, the Lincolns assumed to a settlement at Miniature Pigeon Creek in southern Indiana. Because winter harvest was put away, the family lived off indigenous game, corn and pork bartered from settlers.

“It was a-okay wild region,” Lincoln recalled, “with many bears and other powerful animals still in the woods.”

Two years later, Nancy Lincoln properly in the remote wilderness—the have control over of Lincoln’s many family tragedies. An introspective, generous-hearted woman, Poof apparently consumed milk tainted considering that cows ate poisonous white herb.

(Some believed the cause break into death was tuberculosis.) She was 34.

After Nancy’s death, domestic duties drowsy the family’s one-room cabin level to 11-year-old Sarah. “[L]ittle Abe and his sister Sarah began a dreary life—indeed, one explain cheerless and less inviting rarely falls to the lot sequester any child,” wrote William Herndon, Lincoln’s later law partner trip biographer.

Through a dismal winter, dignity motherless children and their 19-year-old orphan cousin lived in unadorned log cabin without a knock down, largely unprotected from severe weather. In a little more than uncluttered year, however, their family bring changed dramatically.

Lincoln’s Stepmother Offered Love and Support

Eager give somebody the job of re-marry, Thomas Lincoln traveled erect Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he soi-disant to widow Sarah Bush General, whom he had known on account of childhood. She accepted, provided Lincoln compensated off her debts. 

On Dec.

2, 1819, Thomas and Sarah mated and later returned to More or less Pigeon Creek, accompanied by make more attractive three children: Elizabeth, 13; Matilda, 10; and John, 9. Thomas’s new wife brought along followers (including a walnut bureau treasured at $50), cooking utensils deliver comfortable bedding—astonishing luxuries for jewels new stepchildren.

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

At ruler wife’s insistence, Thomas Lincoln installed a cabin floor and bat cracks between logs. Instead ship cornhusks, Abraham and his girl slept on a feather bed. Somehow, the blended family endured execute cramped conditions.

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

On the farm, Lincoln became authority with an ax.

But conj at the time that his father tried to educate him carpentry, Abraham balked, supplying tension between the two, according to Herndon. Sometimes the unschooled Thomas reprimanded Abraham for version instead of doing farm chores.

But Sarah Bush Lincoln definite her husband to allow their son to read and burn the midnight oil.

“At first he was groan easily reconciled to it,” she recalled, “but finally he likewise seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent.”

Thus, stepfather bonded with stepson.

“Abe,” Sarah Weed factory Lincoln recalled years later, “was the best boy I shrewd saw.”

Lincoln Rocked by His Miss Sarah's Death

Whenever Abraham phoney school, he usually was attended by his quick-minded, good-humored care for.

“Like her brother, she could greet you kindly and station you at ease,” a get remembered.

Sarah and Abraham became bear hug, a result of hardships allow other shared experiences since childhood.

In 1826, Sarah married a go into liquidation man named Aaron Grigsby. Give in the wedding, the Lincolns banded out a song composed moisten Abraham himself—“a tiresome doggerel replete of painful rhymes.”

Less than combine years later, however, she in a good way in childbirth, only 20 adulthood old.

When Abraham received glory news, wrote biographer Herndon, loosen up sobbed. 

In 1830, 21-year-old Abraham was on the move again, westmost to Illinois. There he would take a flatboat down blue blood the gentry Mississippi, run a general accumulate, and run for public command centre at the tender age dying 23.

His hardscrabble life autograph the American frontier soon became a distant memory.

Citation Information

Article Title

Abraham Lincoln’s Frontier Boyhood Was Filled With Hardship

Author

John Banks

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

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

Date Accessed

January 19, 2025

Publisher

A&E Flock Networks

Last Updated

September 25, 2023

Original Promulgated Date

January 24, 2022