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 abraham lincoln, early, life, career, abraham and/or lincoln:

    As Labor is the common burthen of our race, so the effort of some to shift their share of the burthen on to the shoulders of others, is the great, durable, curse of the race.
    Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)

    When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
    And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
    I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
    Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
    Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
    And thought of him I love.
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.
    Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)

    A good word is as a good tree—
    its roots are firm,
    and its branches are in heaven;
    it gives its produce every season
    by the leave of its Lord.
    —Qur’An. Abraham 14:29-30, ed. Arthur J. Arberry (1955)

    As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?
    —Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)