Abraham Lincoln's early life and career

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky in a town now known as Hodgenville. Lincoln was named after his dead grandfather, who was killed in 1786, shot from ambush by an Indian while clearing a field. At a young age Abe learned to chop wood.

Lincoln's Family

When Lincoln became famous, reporters and storytellers often exaggerated the poverty and obscurity of his birth. However Lincoln's father Thomas was a respected and relatively affluent citizen of the Kentucky backcountry. He had purchased the Sinking Spring Farm in December 1808 for $200 cash and assumption of a debt. Thomas was an opponent of slavery, and wished to raise his son in a non-slave state. Though he had virtually no formal education, historians credit his mother with instilling Lincoln's desire for knowledge. The surname Lincoln is the Welsh variant of the Latin term,"lake colony".

According to historian William E. Barton there was a rumor "current in various forms in several sections of the South" that his biological father was Abraham Enloe. Barton dismisses the rumors (which began in 1861, the same year Enloe died) as "false from beginning to end." [cite book |last=Barton |first=William E. |authorlink=William E. Barton |title=The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln: Was He the Son of Thomas Lincoln? An Essay on the Chastity of Nancy Hanks |publisher=George H. Doran Company |date=1920 |pages=19,203,319 |isbn=] [ [http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/father.htm Comments on Abraham Lincoln's Paternity ] ] [cite book |last=Young |first=Alden Franklin |authorlink=Alden Franklin Young |title=Nancy Hanks: Single Mother Of Abraham Lincoln |publisher=Author House |date=2004 |pages= |isbn=1418409561] [cite book |last=Schwartz |first=Barry |authorlink=Barry Schwartz |title=Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory |publisher=University of Chicago Press |date=2000 |pages=157 |isbn=0226741982] Enloe publicly denied this connection to Lincoln but is reported to have privately confirmed it. [cite book |last=Wead |first=Doug |authorlink=Doug Wead |title=The Raising of a President: The Mothers and Fathers of Our Nation's Leaders |publisher=Simon and Schuster |date=2005 |pages=101 |isbn=0743497260]

His parents belonged to a Hardshell Baptist church that had pulled away from a larger church because they refused to support slavery. From a very young age, Lincoln was exposed to anti-slavery sentiment. However he never joined his parents' church, or any other church, and, according to Herndon, the young Lincoln ridiculed religion. [See Abraham Lincoln and religion]

Three years after purchasing the property, a prior land claim filed in Hardin Circuit Court forced the Lincolns to move. Thomas continued legal action until he lost the case in 1815. Legal expenses contributed to family difficulties. In 1811, they were able to lease 30 acres (0.1 km²) of a 230 acre (0.9 km²) farm on Knob Creek a few miles away, where they then moved. In a valley of the Rolling Fork River, this was some of the best farmland in the area. At this time, Lincoln's father was a respected community member and a successful farmer and carpenter. Lincoln's earliest recollections are from this farm. In 1815, another claimant sought to eject the family from the Knob Creek farm. Frustrated with litigation and lack of security provided by Kentucky courts, Thomas decided to move to Indiana, which had been surveyed by the federal government, making land titles more secure. It is possible that these episodes motivated Abraham to later learn surveying and become an attorney.

In 1816, when Lincoln was seven years old, he and his parents moved to Spencer County, Indiana, he would state "partly on account of slavery" and partly because of economic difficulties in Kentucky. In 1818 Lincoln's mother died of "milk sickness" at age thirty four, when Abe was nine. Soon afterwards, Lincoln's father remarried to Sarah Bush Johnston. Sarah Lincoln raised young Lincoln like one of her own children. Years later she compared Lincoln to her own son, saying "Both were good boys, but I must say — both now being dead that Abe was the best boy I ever saw or ever expect to see." ("Lincoln", by David Herbert Donald, 1995)

In 1830, after more economic and land-title difficulties in Indiana, the family settled on government land on a site selected by Lincoln's father in Macon County, Illinois six miles west of Decatur, IL. The following winter was especially brutal, and the family nearly moved back to Indiana. When his father relocated the family to a nearby site the following year, the 22-year-old Lincoln struck out on his own, canoeing down the Sangamon River to Sangamon County, Illinois (now in Menard County), in the village of New Salem. Later that year, hired by New Salem businessman Denton Offutt and accompanied by friends, he took goods from New Salem to New Orleans via flatboat on the Sangamon, Illinois and Mississippi rivers. While in New Orleans, he may have witnessed a slave auction that left an indelible impression on him for the rest of his life. Whether he actually witnessed a slave auction at that time or not, living in a country with a considerable slave presence, he probably saw similar atrocities from time to time.

His formal education consisted of perhaps 18 months of schooling from itinerant teachers. In effect he was self-educated, studying every book he could borrow. He mastered the Bible, Shakespeare, English history and American history, and developed a plain style that puzzled audiences more used to orotund oratory. He avoided hunting and fishing because he did not like killing animals even for food and, though unusually tall (6ft 3.75in or 1.925m) and strong, spent so much time reading that some neighbors thought he must be doing it to avoid strenuous manual labor. He was skilled with an axe—they called him the "rail splitter"—and a good wrestler.

In later years, Lincoln was very reluctant to discuss his origins -- he viewed himself as a self-made man and may have also found it difficult to confront the deaths of his mother and his sister. [Donald, David Herbert, Lincoln. New York; Touchstone, 1995, pp. 1, 116-118] In response to a request for a campaign biography in 1859, he quoted "the short and simple annals of the poor" from Thomas Gray's [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Elegy_Written_in_a_Country_Churchyard "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"] . Very little is known about Nancy Hanks Lincoln or Abraham's sister Sarah; neighbors interviewed by William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner and biographer, agreed that they were both intelligent but gave contradictory descriptions of their physical appearances. [Donald, 22-23] Lincoln spoke very little about either woman (Herndon had to rely on testimony from Dennis Hanks to get an adequate description of Sarah Lincoln Grigsby), although those who knew Lincoln as a teenager recalled him being deeply distraught by his sister's death and an active participant in a feud that erupted with the Grigsbys afterwards. [Donald, 34-35; Herndon, William, The History of Abraham Lincoln. Springfield, The Lincoln Printing Co., 1888, p. 12] Lincoln's relationship with his father was strained; Thomas Lincoln did not fully appreciate his son's ambition, while Abraham Lincoln never knew of Thomas' early struggles. [Donald, 22]

Early career

Lincoln began his political career in 1832 at the age of 23 with a campaign for the Illinois General Assembly as a member of the Whig Party. The centerpiece of his platform was the undertaking of navigational improvements on the Sangamon River in the hopes of attracting steamboat traffic to the river, which would allow sparsely populated, poor areas along and near the river to grow and prosper. He served as a captain in a company of the Illinois militia drawn from New Salem during the Black Hawk War, although he never saw combat. He wrote after being elected by his peers that he had not had "any such success in life which gave him so much satisfaction."

He later tried and failed at several small-time business ventures. He held an Illinois state liquor license and sold whiskey. Finally, after coming across the second volume of Sir William Blackstone's four-volume "Commentaries on the Laws of England", he taught himself the law, and was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1837. That same year, he moved to Springfield, Illinois and began to practice law with Stephen T. Logan. He became one of the most highly respected and successful lawyers in the prairie state, and grew steadily more prosperous. Lincoln served four successive terms in the Illinois House of Representatives, as a representative from Sangamon County, beginning in 1834. He became a leader of the Whig party in the legislature. In 1837 he made his first protest against slavery in the Illinois House, stating that the institution was "founded on both injustice and bad policy." [http://www.hti.umich.edu/l/lincoln/]

It was in 1837, that Lincoln met his most intimate friend, Joshua Fry Speed.

In 1841 Lincoln entered law practice with William Herndon, a fellow Whig. In 1856 both men joined the fledgling Republican Party. Following Lincoln's assassination, Herndon began collecting stories about Lincoln from those who knew him in central Illinois, eventually publishing a book, "Herndon's Lincoln". Although Lincoln never joined an antislavery society, and often reputiated the methods of radical abolitionists, Lincoln considered slavery an evil institution that should be abolished by legal means.The fact that he married into a prominent slave-owning family from Kentucky, and allowed his children to spend time there surrounded by slaves, were considered concessions to the times in which he lived. Several of his in-laws became Confederate officers. He greatly admired the science that flourished in New England, and was perhaps the only father in Illinois at the time to send his son, Robert Todd Lincoln, to elite eastern schools, Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College.

Marriage

On November 4, 1842, at the age of 33, Lincoln married Mary Todd. The couple had four sons.
*Robert Todd Lincoln: b. August 1, 1843, in Springfield, Illinois; d. July 26, 1926, in Manchester, Vermont.
*Edward Baker Lincoln: b. March 10, 1846, in Springfield, Illinois; d. February 1, 1850, in Springfield, Illinois.
*William Wallace Lincoln: b. December 21, 1850, in Springfield, Illinois; d. February 20, 1862, in Washington, D.C.
*Thomas "Tad" Lincoln: b. April 4, 1853, in Springfield, Illinois; d. July 16, 1871, in Chicago, Illinois.

Only Robert survived into adulthood. Of Robert's three children, only Jessie Lincoln had any children (two: Mary Lincoln Beckwith and Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith). Neither Robert Beckwith nor Mary Beckwith had any children, so Abraham Lincoln's bloodline ended when Robert Beckwith (Lincoln's great-grandson) died on December 24, 1985. [http://members.aol.com/beaufait/biography/geneology.htm]

Illinois politics

In 1846 Lincoln was elected to one term in the U.S. House of Representatives. A staunch Whig, Lincoln often referred to party leader Henry Clay as his political idol. As a freshman House member, Lincoln was not a particularly powerful or influential figure in Congress. He used his office as an opportunity to speak out against the war with Mexico, which he attributed to President Polk's desire for "military glory — that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood."

Lincoln was a key early supporter of Zachary Taylor's candidacy for the 1848 Whig Presidential nomination. When Lincoln's term ended, the incoming Taylor administration offered him the governorship of remote Oregon Territory. Acceptance would end his career in the fast-growing state of Illinois, so he declined. Returning instead to Springfield, Illinois he turned most of his energies to making a living at the bar, which involved extensive travel on horseback from county to county.

It was during this stage of his life, however, that Lincoln gave one of the most pivotal speeches [http://www.lincolnatpeoria.com/] of his life - speaking not as a politician, but as a private citizen. Opposed to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln spoke to a crowd in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, outlining the moral, political and economic arguments against slavery [http://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org/inside.asp?ID=11&subjectID=2] that he would continue to uphold throughout his career. This speech marked his re-entry into public life.

Prairie lawyer

By the mid-1850s, Lincoln faced competing transportation interests — both the river barges and the railroads. In 1849, he received a patent related to buoying vessels, achieved in by lessening the draft of a river craft by pushing horizontal floats into the water alongside the hull when near shoal waters.cite web|url=http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=19|title=Abraham Lincoln's Patent Model: Improvement for Buoying Vessels Over Shoals|publisher=National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution|accessdate=2008-06-17] Lincoln represented the Alton & Sangamon Railroad in an 1851 dispute with one of its shareholders, James A. Barret. Barret had refused to pay the balance on his pledge to that corporation on the grounds that it had changed its originally planned route. Lincoln argued that as a matter of law a corporation is not bound by its original charter when that charter can be amended in the public interest, that the newer proposed Alton & Sangamon route was superior and less expensive, and that accordingly the corporation had a right to sue Mr. Barret for his delinquent payment. He won this case, and the decision by the Illinois Supreme Court was eventually cited by several other courts throughout the United States.

Another important example of Lincoln's skills as a railroad lawyer was a lawsuit over a tax exemption that the state granted to the Illinois Central Railroad. McLean County argued that the state had no authority to grant such an exemption, and it sought to impose taxes on the railroad notwithstanding. In January 1856, the Illinois Supreme Court delivered its opinion upholding the tax exemption, accepting Lincoln's arguments.

Lincoln's most notable criminal trial came in 1858 when he defended William "Duff" Armstrong, who was on trial for the murder of James Preston Metzker. The case is famous for Lincoln's use of judicial notice, a rare tactic at that time, to show an eyewitness had lied on the stand, claiming he witnessed the crime in the moonlight. Lincoln produced a Farmer's Almanac to show that the moon on that date was at such a low angle it could not have produced enough illumination to see anything clearly. Based upon this evidence, Armstrong was acquitted.

Notes