Young Abraham Lincoln: The Childhood and Early Life of Abraham Lincoln

By Howard Brinkley

Few famous humans came into the world under such humble circumstances as Abraham Lincoln on February 12, 1809. But it may very well be that the humble and unassuming life he lived actually served to shape him into the solid, moral, honest, decent, hard-working adult that he became. What were those circumstances, the formula so to speak, that molded this future president?

This biography looks at the childhood and young adulthood of Abraham Lincoln.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookCaps
• Release date: May 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310766046

Book preview

HistoryCaps Presents:

Young Abraham Lincoln:

The Childhood and Early Life of Abraham Lincoln

By Howard Brinkley

© 2011 by Golgotha Press, Inc./LifeCaps

Published at SmashWords

www.bookcaps.com

About HistoryCaps

HistoryCaps is an imprint of BookCaps™ Study Guides. With each book, a brief period of history is recapped. We publish a wide array of topics (from baseball and music to science and philosophy), so check our growing catalogue regularly (www.bookcaps.com) to see our newest books.

Introduction

The Lincoln family can be traced to a group of brothers—Samuel, Daniel, and Thomas—who came to Massachusetts from England between 1635 and 1645. Interestingly enough, the family tree has an impressive number of public service branches. Samuel Lincoln’s great-great grandson Levi was a Minuteman, a legislator, and represented Massachusetts in the Senate. He later became United States Attorney General to President Thomas Jefferson and Secretary of State to President James Madison. Levi’s son, of the same name, became the Governor of Maine and another son, Enoch, served in Congress and became the Governor of Maine. The Lincolns were likely descendants of Quakers, described as a serene, peaceable, obstinate people.¹

As a child, the young Abraham may have heard stories of his paternal grandfather and namesake, Abraham Lincoln, who also descended from Samuel Lincoln. He would have heard the story of how he was an early pioneer and farmer, and one of the more wealthy ones of the time. He may have learned of the senior Abraham’s friendship with the family of one Daniel Boone, who convinced him to sell his farm in Virginia in 1780 and move to Kentucky. During this time, clearing a farm in the Kentucky territory was dangerous business. Indians were a constant threat, and in fact most families were required to live in or near army forts or stations for protection. Most assuredly Lincoln would have been told the alarming story of how in 1788, while working the fields on his farm, his grandfather was shot and killed by an Indian, while his sons watched helplessly. As Lincoln’s father Thomas, only ten years old at the time, watched the life leave his father’s body, his eldest brother Mordecai quickly ran to the cabin, retrieved a rifle, and put a bullet in the lone Indian who had now descended upon his younger brothers. The boys were saved but no doubt forever scarred by the life-changing event.

In fact, while the eldest son Mordecai inherited most of the estate, young Thomas, with no portion, would become something of a drifter. He hired himself out as a farmhand, and often worked alongside slaves receiving the same wage, about three shillings a day. He became skilled at farm work and somewhere along the way learned carpentry, but was not extremely ambitious. Though illiterate, he was described as a quiet, moral, and religious man. Perhaps ready to settle down at age 25, he purchased a farm in Hardin County, Kentucky. He married Nancy Hanks on June 12, 1806.

If Tom’s family was marked by tragedy, Nancy’s was a picture of dysfunction. She was an illegitimate child whose mother shuffled her around to live with one relative or another most of her life. Her maternal grandparents raised her for a while until her grandfather died. She returned to live with her mother, who had married by this time, but only until another relative could be found to take her in. Despite the hardships she endured—seemingly serious enough to damage to a child’s psyche—she managed to be, by nearly all accounts, a good wife and mother. The Lincolns welcomed their first child Sarah (called Sally) into the world on February 10, 1807.

Chapter 1: Life in Kentucky

Tom Lincoln’s first farm in Sinking Spring, Kentucky was once described as a small valley farm, with not more than twelve to fifteen acres of any kind of tillable land² and said to be covered with scrubby underbrush. Nancy Lincoln was reportedly ashamed of the way they lived in those days, especially that Tom never took the time to put a floor in their cabin. But, she thought that he was doing his best to keep them fed and didn’t dwell on it.

Besides the struggles just to produce crops on the barren land, there were struggles with land titles and ownership disputes aplenty. The surveying techniques used then were troubled. These were English methods, with metes and bounds, and seemed to work well for seldom traded parcels, but in the Kentucky frontier, transactions were many and