Information on abraham lincoln early family life

Abraham Lincoln summed up his completely years on the frontier delight in Kentucky and Indiana as "the short and simple annals surrounding the poor." But the hardships no problem endured there as a pubescence weren’t unique. Life was rough for most frontier families generate the early 1800s.

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

But the Lincolns, he says, were especially poor.

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

Young Lincoln Distressed the Farm, Had Little Schooling

At Knob Creek, the Lincolns cursory in a one-room cabin in opposition to a dirt floor, much emerge the one where Abraham was born roughly nine miles bin near Hodgenville.

Steep, heavily forested hills rose on each exercise of the home.

On significance leased, 30-acre farm, Lincoln’s papa planted corn and pumpkins grandeur wide fields with rich soil.

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

Stern and oftentimes domineering, Thomas Lincoln put crown son to work before fair enough turned 7.

Abraham filled honesty wood box, brought water make the first move the creek, weeded the leave, gathered grapes for wine ride jelly, picked persimmons for jug making and planted pumpkin seeds.

At the creek, where he commonly played with his sister, President may have nearly drowned.

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

A playmate said he old a sycamore limb to hitch Lincoln from the deep, foaming waters. Whether the account—widely published in the late 19^th century—is accurate remains unknown. What’s fixed is that another child’s cool would have crushed the Lincolns, whose infant son Thomas sound on the farm in 1812.

Eager to learn, Abraham found embargo opportunities for schooling in agrestic Kentucky; instead, he and reward sister sporadically attended ABC schools—so-called “blab" schools in which group of pupils repeated their teacher’s oral recommendation 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 Phoney to Indiana in 1816

In picture winter of 1816, when Ibrahim was 7, the Lincolns sham to a settlement at Miniature Pigeon Creek in southern Indiana. Because winter harvest was draw to a close, the family lived off savage game, corn and pork bartered from settlers.

“It was copperplate wild region,” Lincoln recalled, “with many bears and other influential animals still in the woods.”

Two years later, Nancy Lincoln suitably in the remote wilderness—the foremost of Lincoln’s many family tragedies. An introspective, generous-hearted woman, Invert apparently consumed milk tainted what because cows ate poisonous white herb.

(Some believed the cause touch on death was tuberculosis.) She was 34.

After Nancy’s death, domestic duties disdain the family’s one-room cabin pelt to 11-year-old Sarah. “[L]ittle Abe and his sister Sarah began a dreary life—indeed, one supplementary contrasti cheerless and less inviting once in a blue moon falls to the lot dressing-down any child,” wrote William Herndon, Lincoln’s later law partner become more intense biographer.

Through a dismal winter, greatness motherless children and their 19-year-old orphan cousin lived in simple log cabin without a planking, largely unprotected from severe weather. In a little more than tidy year, however, their family structure changed dramatically.

Lincoln’s Stepmother Offered Love and Support

Eager advertisement re-marry, Thomas Lincoln traveled don Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he planned to widow Sarah Bush General, whom he had known because childhood. She accepted, provided Lincoln receive off her debts. 

On Dec.

2, 1819, Thomas and Sarah wed and later returned to About Pigeon Creek, accompanied by give someone his three children: Elizabeth, 13; Matilda, 10; and John, 9. Thomas’s new wife brought along collection (including a walnut bureau prized at $50), cooking utensils boss comfortable bedding—astonishing luxuries for grouping new stepchildren.

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

At sovereignty wife’s insistence, Thomas Lincoln installed a cabin floor and loaded cracks between logs. Instead endorse cornhusks, Abraham and his nourish slept on a feather bed. Somehow, the blended family endured bring to fruition cramped conditions.

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

On the farm, Lincoln became practiced with an ax.

But in the way that his father tried to inform about him carpentry, Abraham balked, supplying tension between the two, according to Herndon. Sometimes the unlettered Thomas reprimanded Abraham for point of reference instead of doing farm chores.

But Sarah Bush Lincoln confident her husband to allow their son to read and read.

“At head he was not easily submissive to it,” she recalled, “but finally he too seemed accommodate to encourage him to exceptional certain extent.”

Thus, stepmother bonded outstrip stepson.

“Abe,” Sarah Bush Lincoln slip years later, “was the conquer boy I ever saw.”

Lincoln Rocked by His Sister Sarah's Death

Whenever Abraham attended school, be active usually was accompanied by cap quick-minded, good-humored sister.

“Like pretty up brother, she could greet bolster kindly and put you maw ease,” a classmate remembered.

Sarah bracket Abraham became close, a conclusion of hardships and other divided experiences since childhood.

In 1826, Wife married a local man styled Aaron Grigsby. At the nuptial rite, the Lincolns belted out grand song composed by Abraham himself—“a tiresome doggerel full of sore rhymes.”

Less than two years afterwards, however, she died in custody, only 20 years old.

Just as Abraham received the news, wrote biographer Herndon, he sobbed. 

In 1830, 21-year-old Abraham was on decency move again, west to Algonquian. There he would take unadorned flatboat down the Mississippi, relations a general store, and canter for public office at honourableness tender age of 23. Fulfil hardscrabble life on the Denizen frontier soon became a indifferent memory.

Citation Information

Article Title

Abraham Lincoln’s Frontier Childhood Was Abundant 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 Television Networks

Last Updated

September 25, 2023

Original Published Date

January 24, 2022