The Early Life of Lincoln

On February 10, 1807, Sarah Lincoln was born.^[30] In December 1808, Thomas, Nancy, and their daughter, Sarah, moved from Elizabethtown to the Sinking Spring farm, on Nolin Creek, near Hodgen's Mill, in Hardin County, Kentucky. (The farm is part of the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in present-day LaRue County, Kentucky.) Abraham was born at the farm two months after the move, on February 12, 1809.^[30][31] Due to a land title dispute, the family lived at the farm only two more years before being forced to move. Thomas continued legal action in court but lost the case in August 1816. ^[32] Kentucky's survey methods, which used a system of metes and bounds to identify and describe land descriptions, proved to be unreliable when the natural features of the land changed. This issue, compounded by confusion over previous land grants and purchase agreements, caused continual legal disputes over land ownership in Kentucky.^[33][34] In the summer of 1811, the family relocated to Knob Creek farm.

Lincoln spent his formative years, from the age of 7 to 21, on the family farm in Little Pigeon Creek Community of Spencer County, in Southwestern Indiana. As was common on the frontier, Lincoln received a meager formal education, the accumulation of just under twelve months. However, Lincoln continued to learn on his own from life experiences, and through reading and reciting what he had read or heard from others. In October 1818, two years after they arrived in Indiana, nine-year-old Lincoln lost his birth mother, Nancy, who died after a brief illness known as milk sickness. Thomas Lincoln returned to Elizabethtown, Kentucky late the following year and married Sarah Bush Johnston on December 2, 1819. Lincoln's new stepmother and her three children joined the Lincoln family in Indiana in late 1819. A second tragedy befell the family in January 1828, when Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, Abraham's sister, died in childbirth.

In 1815 a claimant in another land dispute sought to eject the Lincoln family from the Knob Creek farm.^[34]

Years later, after Lincoln became a national political figure, reporters and storytellers often exaggerated his family's poverty and the obscurity of his birth. Lincoln's family circumstances were not unusual for pioneer families at that time. Thomas Lincoln was a farmer, carpenter, and landowner in the Kentucky backcountry. He had purchased the Sinking Spring Farm, which comprised 348.5 acres, in December 1808 for $200, but lost his cash investment and the improvements he had made on the farm in a legal dispute over the land title. Thomas Lincoln leased 30 acres of the 230-acre Knob Creek farm owned by George Lindsey but the family was forced to leave it after others claimed a prior title to the land.^[34] Of the 816.5 acres that Thomas held in Kentucky, he lost all but 200 acres in land title disputes. By 1816 Thomas was frustrated over the lack of security provided by Kentucky courts.

In 1858, when responding to a questionnaire sent to former members of Congress, Lincoln described his education as "defective".^[80] In 1860, shortly after his nomination for U.S. president, Lincoln apologized for and regretted his limited formal education. Lincoln was self-educated. His formal schooling was intermittent, the aggregate of which may have amounted to less than twelve months. He never attended college, but Lincoln retained a lifelong interest in learning.^[81][82] In a September 1865 interview with William Herndon, Lincoln's stepmother described Abraham as a studious boy who read constantly, listened intently to others and had a deep interest in learning. Lincoln continued reading as a means of self-improvement as an adult, studying English grammar in his early twenties and mastering Euclid after he became a member of Congress.^[83]Dennis Hanks, a cousin of Lincoln's mother, Nancy, claimed he gave Lincoln "his first lesson in spelling—reading and writing."