Lincoln, Abraham (12 Feb. 1809-15 Apr. 1865), sixteenth president of the United States, was born in Hardin County, Kentucky, the son of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, farmers. Thomas Lincoln had come to Kentucky from Virginia with his father Abraham in 1782. He acquired only enough literacy to sign his name but gained modest prosperity as a carpenter and farmer on the Kentucky frontier. He married Nancy Hanks, also illiterate, in 1806. Abraham was born in a log cabin on "Sinking Spring Farm" three miles south of Hodgenville. When he was two years old the family moved to another farm on Knob Creek about seven miles northeast of Hodgenville. On this farm of 230 acres (only thirty of which were tillable) Abraham lived for five years, helped his parents with chores, and learned his ABCs by attending school for a few weeks with his older sister Sarah.
In December 1816 the Lincolns again moved, this time to the newly admitted state of Indiana. The tradition that the Lincolns moved because of dislike of slavery may have some truth; they belonged to a Baptist denomination that broke from the parent church on the slavery issue. However, the main reason for the move was Thomas's uncertainty of Kentucky land titles. Indiana offered secure titles surveyed under the Northwest Ordinance. The Lincolns lived in a rude, three-sided shelter on Pigeon Creek sixteen miles north of the Ohio River. There Abraham learned the use of axe and plow helping his father carve a house and farm out of the hardwood forest. The growing youth also snatched a few more months of schooling in the typical one-room schoolhouses of the frontier. In late 1817 or 1818 the Lincolns were joined by Nancy's aunt Elizabeth Hanks Sparrow and her husband, Thomas Sparrow, and Abraham's cousin Dennis Hanks. In the fall of 1818 the Sparrows and Nancy Hanks Lincoln all died of "milk sick," probably caused by drinking the milk of cows that had grazed on white snakeroot.
After a year of rough homemaking, Thomas Lincoln returned to Kentucky, where on 2 December 1819 he wed the widow Sarah Bush Johnston and brought her and her three children to Pigeon Creek. His stepmother provided the teenage Abraham with more affection and guidance than his natural mother or his father ever did. With a desire for learning and ambition for self-improvement, he devoured every book he could borrow from the meager libraries of friends and neighbors. Thomas Lincoln neither understood nor encouraged his son's intellectual ambition; quite the contrary, he chastised Abraham's "lazy" preference for reading over working.
Abraham's thinly veiled disdain for the life of a backwoods farmer doubtless irritated his father. Abraham in turn resented the requirement of law and custom that any wages he earned before he came of age--by hiring out to neighbors to split rails, for example--must be given to his father. One historian has suggested that Abraham Lincoln's hatred of chattel slavery, which denied to slaves the "fruits of their labor," may have originated in Thomas Lincoln's expropriation of the teenage Abraham's earnings (Burlingame, pp. 37-42). In any event, relations between Abraham and his father grew increasingly estranged. When Thomas lay dying in January 1851, he sent word that he wanted to say goodbye to his son. Abraham refused to make the eighty-mile trip, stating, "If we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant" (Basler, vol. 2, p. 97). He did not attend his father's funeral.
In 1828 Lincoln and a friend took a flatboat loaded with farm produce down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. He repeated the experience in 1831. These trips widened his horizons and, by tradition, shocked him with the sight of men and women being bought and sold in the slave markets of New Orleans. Although he came of age in 1830, he did not immediately strike out on his own. Once more his father sold the farm and set forth to greener pastures, this time in central Illinois. After helping his father clear land, Abraham hired out to split rails for other farmers, and he kept his earnings. In the summer of 1831 he settled in New Salem, a village on the Sangamon River bluff about twenty miles northwest of Springfield.
Lincoln's Formative Years in New Salem, Illinois (1831-1837)
Lincoln's six years in New Salem were a formative period. For a time he drifted from one job to another: store clerk, mill hand, partner in a general store that failed, postmaster, surveyor. Six feet four inches tall with a lanky, rawboned look, unruly coarse black hair, a gregarious personality, and a penchant for telling humorous stories, Lincoln made many friends. Among them were Jack Armstrong and his gang of young toughs, "the Clary Grove boys." As the new boy in town with a reputation for great physical strength, Lincoln had to prove his mettle in a wrestling match with Armstrong. Winning the match, Lincoln also won the loyalty of the Clary Grove boys despite his refusal to participate in their drinking and hell-raising.
In 1832 the Sac and Fox Indians under Chief Black Hawk returned to their ancestral homeland in Illinois, precipitating the short-lived Black Hawk War. Lincoln volunteered for the militia and was elected captain of his company, which included the Clary Grove boys. They saw no action, but Lincoln later recalled his election as captain as the most gratifying honor of his life.
Another side of Lincoln's complex personality was a deeply reflective, almost brooding, quality that sometimes descended into serious depression. Lincoln described this condition as "the hypo," for hypochondria, as medical science then termed it. This recurring ailment, coupled with Lincoln's almost morbid fondness for William Knox's lugubrious poem "Mortality" (1824) and his later self-reported dreams in which death figured prominently, may have resulted from the deaths of loved ones: his mother, his sister Sarah in childbirth in 1828; and Ann Rutledge in 1835. Lincoln met Rutledge at her father's tavern in New Salem, where he boarded in 1833. Their story has taken on so many layers of myth and antimyth that the truth is impossible to determine. For half a century, until the 1990s, professional historians discounted the notion of their love and engagement, but new scholarship revived the credibility of a Lincoln-Rutledge romance (Walsh, The Shadows Rise). In any event, Rutledge died in August 1835, probably of typhoid fever, and Lincoln apparently suffered a prolonged spell of "hypo" after her death.
During the New Salem years Lincoln developed new purpose and direction. The local schoolmaster, Mentor Graham, guided his study of mathematics and literature. Lincoln joined a debating society, and he acquired a lifelong love of William Shakespeare and Robert Burns. He also acquired a passion for politics and in 1832 announced his candidacy for the legislature. Although he failed of election, he received 92 percent of the vote in the New Salem district, where he was known. When he ran again in 1834, he campaigned throughout the county and won decisively.
Election to the Illinois Legislature
Lincoln was a Whig, a devotee of Henry Clay, whom Lincoln described as his "beau ideal of a statesman." Clay's American System, with its emphasis on government support for education, internal improvements, banking, and economic development to promote growth and opportunity, attracted him. In the legislature Lincoln came under the wing of John T. Stuart, a Springfield lawyer and Whig minority leader in the house. Stuart encouraged Lincoln to study law and guided him through Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) and other books whose mastery was necessary to pass the bar examination in those days. On 9 September 1836 Lincoln obtained his license. In 1837 he moved to Springfield and became Stuart's partner.
Lincoln won reelection to the legislature in 1836, 1838, and 1840. He became floor leader of the Whigs and a prominent member of the "Long Nine," Whig legislators from Sangamon County who averaged more than six feet in height. Legislative logrolling enabled the Long Nine to get the state capital moved from Vandalia to Springfield in 1837. During the same session Lincoln and one colleague from Sangamon County entered a protest against a resolution passed overwhelmingly by the legislature that denounced antislavery societies in such a way as to imply approval of slavery. Declaring slavery to be "founded on both injustice and bad policy," Lincoln and his colleague nevertheless criticized the abolitionists, whose doctrines tended "rather to increase than to abate [slavery's] evils" (Basler, vol. 1, pp. 74-75).
Although ill at ease with women, Lincoln in 1836 began a half-hearted courtship of Mary Owens, whose sister lived in New Salem. A year later she broke off the relationship, to the probable relief of both parties. In 1839 Lincoln met Mary Todd (Mary Todd Lincoln), who had come from Kentucky to live with her married sister in Springfield. Despite the contrast between the educated, cultured, and socially prominent daughter of a Lexington banker and the socially awkward, rough-hewn son of an illiterate farmer, Mary and Abraham fell in love and became engaged in 1840. What happened next remains uncertain. Lincoln seems to have developed doubts about his fitness for marriage and broke the engagement. In January 1841 he succumbed to the worst case of hypo he had yet experienced. "I am now the most miserable man living," he wrote to Stuart on 23 January. "If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth" (Basler, vol. 1, p. 229).
After a series of twists and turns, the courtship revived. Lincoln's closest friend, Joshua Speed, married in 1842; Speed's assurance that matrimony was not so frightening after all seems to have encouraged Lincoln. On 4 November 1842 he and Mary were wed. The quality of their marriage has been much debated. It produced four sons. Mary shared Abraham's lively interest in public affairs, he often sought her advice, and she encouraged his political ambition. In personality, however, they were in many ways opposites. He was disorganized, careless in dress, and indifferent to social niceties; she was quick-tempered, sometimes shrewish, dressed expensively, and lived by the strict decorum of Victorian conventions. He got along with almost everybody; she quarreled with servants, workmen, merchants, and some of Lincoln's friends. He was absent from home on the legal or political circuit for weeks at a time, leaving her to cope with the trials of household management and child rearing. His moodiness sometimes clashed with her fits of temper. Over time her mental stability became more fragile.
A Successful Law Practice and One Term in Congress (1847-1849)
After retiring from the legislature in 1841, Lincoln devoted most of his time to his law practice. In 1841 he formed a partnership with Stephen T. Logan, who helped him become more thorough and meticulous in preparing his cases. The Springfield courts sat only a few weeks a year, requiring Lincoln to ride the circuit of county courts throughout central Illinois for several months each spring and fall. Most of his cases involved damage to crops by foraging livestock, property disputes, debts, and assault and battery, with an occasional murder trial to liven interest. By the time of his marriage Lincoln was earning $1,200 a year, income equal to the governor's salary. In 1844 he bought a house in Springfield--the only home he ever owned. In 1844 he also dissolved his partnership with Logan and formed a new one with 26-year-old William H. Herndon, to whom Lincoln became a mentor. Abraham Lincoln, c. 1846-1847. Daguerreotype attributed to Nicholas H. Shepherd.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZC4-2439).
Lincoln's ambitions were not fulfilled by a successful law practice. He wanted to run for Congress from this safe Whig district, but the concentration of Whig hopefuls in Springfield meant that he had to wait his turn under an informal one-term rotation system. When his turn came in 1846, Lincoln won handily over Democratic candidate Peter Cartwright, a well-known Methodist clergyman who tried to make an issue of Lincoln's nonmembership in a church (Mary later joined Springfield's First Presbyterian Church, which Abraham also occasionally attended).
