Early Life and Career of Abraham Lincoln

Early Life And Career Of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin in LaRue County, Kentucky, on a farm near Hodgenville. Lincoln was named after his grandfather, who died in 1786 when he was ambushed and shot by a Native American while clearing a field.

Lincoln lived in Kentucky, until a land dispute forced his father to move to Indiana, when Lincoln was a boy. There Lincoln lost his mother at age 9, and gained a new step-mother. As was common on the frontier, Lincoln received little formal education. In his young adulthood, he moved with his family to Illinois, where he worked as a boatman, store clerk, surveyor, militia soldier, and ultimately a lawyer. He was elected to the Illinois Legislature, and to the United States Congress from Illinois. In 1842, he married Mary Todd; they had four sons.

Read more about Early Life And Career Of Abraham Lincoln:  Illinois Legislature (1834–1842), Lincoln The Inventor, Courtships, Marriage, and Family

Famous quotes containing the words early life, abraham lincoln, early, life, career, abraham and/or lincoln:

    ... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.
    Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)

    Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    she bit the towel and called on God
    and I saw her life stretch out . . .
    I saw her torn in childbirth,
    and I saw her, at that moment,
    in her own death and I knew that she
    knew.
    Anne Sexton (1928–1974)

    I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.
    Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)

    What makes the United States government, on the whole, more tolerable—I mean for us lucky white men—is the fact that there is so much less of government with us.... But in Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the Champs de Mars and exhibits itself and toots.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    I affect no contempt for the high eminence he [Senator Stephen Douglas] has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.
    —Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)