The Oxford Companion to American Literature | Lincoln, Abraham
Lincoln, Abraham( 1809–65), 16th President of the U.S. (1861–65), was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, of a typically illiterate and shiftless frontier family. They soon migrated to another place in Kentucky, then to the Indiana woods, where the boy labored on the homestead, garnered a little learning in frontier schools, avoided church membership, and pursued his bent for reading in what books he could obtain. In 1830 the Lincolns moved to Illinois, where Abraham temporarily helped to build the new cabin, split fence rails, and otherwise assist in the tasks of homesteading. After navigating a flatboat to New Orleans, he returned to New Salem, Ill., where he spent six formative years (1831–37) working at odd jobs, studying, reading law, making a wide personal acquaintance, and serving as surveyor, postmaster, captain of volunteers in the Black Hawk War, and in the state legislature (1834–41). As a Clay Whig, he supported the Bank of the...
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