Early life and career of Abraham Lincoln

This article is part of a series about Abraham Lincoln
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Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a one-room log cabin on the Sinking Spring farm, south of Hodgenville in Hardin County, Kentucky. His siblings were Sarah Lincoln Grigsby and Thomas Lincoln, Jr. After a land title dispute forced the family to leave in 1811, they relocated to Knob Creek farm, eight miles to the north. By 1814, Thomas Lincoln, Abraham's father, had lost most of his land in Kentucky in legal disputes over land titles. In 1816, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, their nine-year-old daughter Sarah, and seven-year-old Abraham moved to what became Indiana, where they settled in Hurricane Township, Perry County, Indiana. (Their land became part of Spencer County, Indiana, when it was formed in 1818.)

Lincoln spent his formative years, from the age of 7 to 21, on the family farm in the 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 March 1830, 21-year-old Lincoln joined his extended family in a move to Illinois. After helping his father establish a farm in Macon County, Illinois, Lincoln set out on his own in the spring of 1831. Lincoln settled in the village of New Salem where he worked as a boatman, store clerk, surveyor, and militia soldier during the Black Hawk War, and became a lawyer in Illinois. He was elected to the Illinois Legislature in 1834 and was reelected in 1836, 1838, 1840, and 1844. In November 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd; the couple had four sons. In addition to his law career, Lincoln continued his involvement in politics, serving in the United States House of Representatives from Illinois in 1846. He was elected president of the United States on November 6, 1860.