Abraham Lincoln's Indiana Boyhood, 1816–1830: The Frontier That Shaped a President

In the new state of Indiana, on the western frontier, Abraham Lincoln spent 14 of the most formative years of his life, from 1816 to 1830 — from age 7 to 21. Here, on a rural farm, he learned to laugh with his father, grieved his mother, read the books that opened his mind, and got through the hardships of frontier life.

Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial preserves the site of that farm. It includes a memorial visitor center built by the state in the 1940s, a cabin site memorial, the cemetery where his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, is buried, and a re-created living history farm.

Why the Lincolns went to Indiana

After the War of 1812, settlers poured into the Old Northwest — the future Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. With American Indians, who had sided with the British, defeated and removed, vast lands opened to settlement, and people came especially from Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky to clear the forests and farm. One was Thomas Lincoln, who settled with his family in what is now Spencer County.

The Lincolns had been moving west for generations: between 1637 and 1816 they lived in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and then Indiana, drawn by land and opportunity.

The Lincoln family's migration. Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, NPS.

Indiana and its surroundings in 1816; the northern part of the state was not yet organized. Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, NPS.

Growing up on Little Pigeon Creek

In the fall of 1816, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln left Kentucky with their children Sarah, 9, and Abraham, 7. They reached their 160-acre claim near Little Pigeon Creek in December, and Thomas built a cabin, cleared fields and used his carpentry skills to make a place in the community. At least 40 families lived within five miles in 1820, most from Kentucky — some, like the Carters and Gordons, their old neighbors.

The Little Pigeon Creek community around 1820, mapped by the park. Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, NPS.

Abraham worked beside his father, growing skilled with the plow and above all the axe. He later wrote that he "was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument" against the "trees and bogs and grubs" of an "unbroken wilderness."

Frontier work left little time for school; his education, he said, came "by littles" and "did not amount to one year." But his parents encouraged him, and he became an eager reader. At 11 he read Parson Weems's Life of Washington, then Franklin's Autobiography, Robinson Crusoe and The Arabian Nights, and he was often seen carrying a book as well as his axe.

A page of Lincoln's sum book, made of folded, stitched paper; historians believe he worked these problems in 1824, at 15. In the lower left corner: "Abraham Lincoln / his hand and pen / he will be good but / God knows when." Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, NPS.

Another page, where Lincoln set himself to multiply 342,435 by 342 and checked the answer with a method the lesson calls the "Rules of Nines." Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, NPS.

Loss

In October 1818, when Abraham was nine, his mother died of milk sickness at 35. The frontier's curse came from drinking milk of cows that had eaten white snakeroot; Nancy caught it nursing sick neighbors. Thomas and Abraham sawed planks and pegged them into her coffin, and she was buried on a wooded hill south of the cabin.

In 1819 Thomas went back to Kentucky and married Sarah Bush Johnston, a widow with three children, who proved a kind stepmother and raised Sarah and Abraham as her own. The death of his sister Sarah in 1828 was another deep loss.

The grave of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. NPS.

Growing into a man

By 19, Abraham stood six foot four; neighbors remembered he could lift more and drive an axe deeper than any man around. In 1828 the richest man in the community, James Gentry, hired him to take a flatboat of produce to New Orleans with his son Allen. There Lincoln saw a slave auction on the docks, and it disturbed him deeply. Years later he wrote: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel."

At Gentry's store, a gathering place, he listened to debates on internal improvements, tariffs and presidential candidates, and began to form and voice his own opinions, influenced by his father's support of Henry Clay.

He also ran a ferry at the mouth of the Anderson River, and built a boat to take passengers out to steamers on the Ohio. When two men each tossed him a silver half-dollar, he could scarcely believe that "a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day" — though until he was 21, by law, his earnings belonged to his father. Two brothers who held the Ohio ferry rights took him to court for cutting into their business; because he carried passengers only to the steamboats, not across the river, the judge dismissed the charge.

In 1830 Thomas moved the family to Illinois, where relatives promised rich soil and no milk sickness. Thomas settled in Coles County; Abraham struck out on his own to New Salem.

Frontier life

The first need was shelter — a hasty log cabin the first winter, then a permanent one, furnished from the trees cleared for fields. At first hunting fed families — deer, bear, and pigeons in flocks that darkened the sky — but as settlement grew they relied on farming, which meant clearing the forest: the axe mattered as much as the rifle.

Corn was the main crop; by 1824 Thomas had 10 acres of corn, about 5 of wheat and 2 of oats, plus a garden and a few animals. Clothes were first deerskin, later linsey-woolsey woven from wool and flax, and combing, carding and spinning wool never stopped. Fevers, cholera, milk sickness and accidents were constant dangers, and settlers made their own medicines from the plants around them.

A reconstructed pioneer cabin at the Lincoln Living Historical Farm, which depicts a farm of the period; none of the original buildings survive. NPS.

Carding wool: raw wool, matted and dirty, is pulled apart and cleaned between two wire brushes before spinning. NPS.

Spinning wool. Pioneers used a small, foot-driven Saxony wheel, or a large "walking" wheel. NPS.

From Indiana to the White House

In Illinois Lincoln became a lawyer, served three terms in the Illinois House from 1834, was elected to Congress in 1846, and ran for the Senate in 1858, losing but gaining national prominence. The boy from Indiana carried his youth into the presidency:

• Learning. His stepmother recalled him repeating things until they stuck; as president he read military strategy and listened hard to his generals. "In this country, one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably."
• Work. Frontier survival taught him that hard work was necessary; as president he sometimes spent whole nights at the telegraph office. "Labor is the true standard of value."
• Honesty. Neighbors called his father "a sturdy, honest . . . man," and Abraham earned the name "Honest Abe" — as a boy he worked off the cost of a borrowed book about George Washington that got damaged.
• Compassion. At eight he killed a wild turkey and was so upset he resolved never to hunt again; as president he pardoned deserters and wrote to grieving families. "With malice toward none; with charity for all . . . to bind up the nation's wounds."
• The Union. The biographies of Washington and Franklin he read in Indiana left him with a lasting reverence for what the founders built. Faced with secession, he did not hesitate: "the Union of these States is perpetual."

The memorial

A marker went up on Nancy Hanks Lincoln's grave in 1874, and in 1907 a state commission took over the 16-acre park around it. In 1917, for Indiana's centennial, twenty older residents pointed out the likely site of the Lincoln cabin, where architect Thomas Hibben designed a bronze casting of the cabin's sill and hearth inside a stone wall. In 1962 Congress created Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, Indiana's first national park.

The cabin site memorial. NPS.

Visitors can tour the museum and memorial halls, see the Memorial Building's sculptured panels of Lincoln's life, watch pioneer skills at the living history farm, and walk the Trail of Twelve Stones from the cabin site to the Pioneer Cemetery. Visit the park's website.

Sources

Based on "Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial: Forging Greatness during Lincoln's Youth," Teaching with Historic Places, National Park Service, written by Mike Capps of the park from its National Register nomination and the park staff's Lincoln Notebook; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Lincoln's words are quoted from his autobiography for John Scripps (1860), his letter to Albert G. Hodges (1864), his eulogy on Henry Clay (1852), his Pittsburgh speech (1861), and his first and second inaugural addresses; the ferry remark is from Josiah Gilbert Holland's biography. The lesson's questions and activities are left out.