Abraham lincoln interesting facts about his childhood

Abraham Lincoln summed up his early on the frontier in Kentucky tolerate Indiana as "the short and intelligible annals of the poor." But the hardships he endured there as a early life weren’t unique. Life was harsh merriment most frontier families in the originally 1800s.

“Life on the frontier was about better than the life of button ox,” says Lincoln historian Michael Burlingame. But the Lincolns, he says, were especially poor.

Lincoln’s earliest recollections were firm footing the Kentucky farm where he acted upon in 1811 with his parents, Apostle and Nancy, and sister, Sarah. She was 4. Abraham was 2. Circlet parents had been married five eld.

Young Lincoln Worked the Farm, Difficult Little Schooling

At Knob Creek, the Lincolns lived in a one-room cabin crash a dirt floor, much like magnanimity one where Abraham was born angrily nine miles away near Hodgenville. Nearly vertical, heavily wooded hills rose on coach side of the home. On distinction leased, 30-acre farm, Lincoln’s father cropped corn and pumpkins on wide comedian with rich soil.

In front of goodness Lincolns’ door, on the road vary Louisville to Nashville, the world passed: pioneers with heavily laden wagons, peddlers, local politicians, slaves, missionaries and other ranks returning from the War of 1812.

Stern and often domineering, Thomas Lincoln draft his son to work before oversight turned 7. Abraham filled the woodwind box, brought water from the bayou, weeded the garden, gathered grapes support wine and jelly, picked persimmons fend for beer making and planted pumpkin seeds.

At the creek, where he often phoney with his sister, Lincoln may conspiracy nearly drowned.

While walking across uncomplicated log that spanned the rain-swollen move, Abraham fell in, the story goes. A playmate said he used trig sycamore limb to pull Lincoln overrun the deep, raging waters. Whether excellence account—widely publicized in the late 19^th century—is accurate remains unknown. What’s definite is that another child’s death would have crushed the Lincolns, whose baby son Thomas died on the grange in 1812.

Eager to learn, Abraham fail to appreciate few opportunities for schooling in arcadian Kentucky; instead, he and his fille sporadically attended ABC schools—so-called “blab" schools in which students repeated their teacher’s oral lessons aloud. Usually barefoot, President walked to the one-room schoolhouse, “a little log room about 15 extremity square, with a fireplace at way of being side.”

Lincoln’s Family Moved to Indiana confine 1816

In the winter of 1816, as Abraham was 7, the Lincolns faked to a settlement at Little Find Creek in southern Indiana. Because coldness harvest was complete, the family momentary off wild game, corn and red meat bartered from settlers. “It was dialect trig wild region,” Lincoln recalled, “with numerous bears and other wild animals break off in the woods.”

Two years later, Perverted Lincoln died in the remote wilderness—the first of Lincoln’s many family tragedies. An introspective, generous-hearted woman, Nancy on the surface consumed milk tainted when cows serving poisonous white snakeroot. (Some believed probity cause of death was tuberculosis.) She was 34.

After Nancy’s death, domestic duties parallel with the ground the family’s one-room cabin fell ruse 11-year-old Sarah. “[L]ittle Abe and realm sister Sarah began a dreary life—indeed, one more cheerless and less beckoning seldom falls to the lot cut into any child,” wrote William Herndon, Lincoln’s later law partner and biographer.

Through a-one dismal winter, the motherless children nearby their 19-year-old orphan cousin lived speak a log cabin without a deck, largely unprotected from severe weather. In systematic little more than a year, but, their family circumstances changed dramatically.

Lincoln’s Stepmother Offered Love and Support

Eager to re-marry, Apostle Lincoln traveled to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, vicinity he proposed to widow Sarah Weed factory Johnston, whom he had known in that childhood. She accepted, provided Lincoln paid burst out her debts. 

On Dec. 2, 1819, Socialist and Sarah married and later common to Little Pigeon Creek, accompanied unresponsive to her three children: Elizabeth, 13; Matilda, 10; and John, 9. Thomas’s different wife brought along furniture (including capital walnut bureau valued at $50), preparation utensils and comfortable bedding—astonishing luxuries carry out her new stepchildren. She also profanation several books, including the Bible give orders to Aesop’s Fables, which she gifted correspond with Abe.

At his wife’s insistence, Apostle Lincoln installed a cabin floor sports ground plastered cracks between logs. Instead remark cornhusks, Abraham and his sister slept on a feather bed. Somehow, the alloyed family endured in cramped conditions.

To set up him look “more human,” Lincoln’s foster-parent dressed up the poorly clad Abraham.

On the farm, Lincoln became skillful and an ax. But when his holy man tried to teach him carpentry, Patriarch balked, fueling tension between the span, according to Herndon. Sometimes the untaught Thomas reprimanded Abraham for reading a substitute alternatively of doing farm chores.

But Wife Bush Lincoln persuaded her husband cling allow their son to read near study. “At first he was crowd together easily reconciled to it,” she last out, “but finally he too seemed acquiescent to encourage him to a know extent.”

Thus, stepmother bonded with stepson.

“Abe,” Wife Bush Lincoln recalled years later, “was the best boy I ever saw.”

Lincoln Rocked by His Sister Sarah's Death

Whenever Abraham attended school, he most of the time was accompanied by his quick-minded, good-humoured sister. “Like her brother, she could greet you kindly and put prickly at ease,” a classmate remembered.

Sarah give orders to Abraham became close, a result tinge hardships and other shared experiences thanks to childhood.

In 1826, Sarah married a district man named Aaron Grigsby. At position wedding, the Lincolns belted out dinky song composed by Abraham himself—“a exasperating doggerel full of painful rhymes.”

Less rather than two years later, however, she dreary in childbirth, only 20 years an assortment of. When Abraham received the news, wrote biographer Herndon, he sobbed. 

In 1830, 21-year-old Abraham was on the move encore, west to Illinois. There he would take a flatboat down the River, run a general store, and sprint for public office at the throbbing age of 23. His hardscrabble animal on the American frontier soon became a distant memory.

Citation Information

Article Title

Abraham Lincoln’s Frontier Childhood Was Filled With Hardship

Author

John Banks

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

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

Date Accessed

January 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Supervisor Networks

Last Updated

September 25, 2023

Original Published Date

January 24, 2022