Abraham Lincoln Case

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, or later know as Honest Abe, was born on February 12, 1809, in Kentucky as the second child of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Lincoln. Thomas could not read and could barely sign his name. He was a stern man whom young Abe never liked very much. They lived in a 360-square foot one bedroom cabin on Sinking Spring Farm that his father built. . The family attended a Separate Baptists church, which had restrictive moral standards and opposed alcohol, dancing, and slavery. The family then moved North across the Ohio River, to free territory and made a new start. Abe later realized that the move was due to slavery. In Indiana, at the age of 9, his mother died because of milk sickness, so his sister then took care of him until his father re-married. His sister Sarah then dies at the age of 20 giving birth to a stillborn.

At the age of 22 Lincoln felt that he was old enough to provide for himself. Canoeing down the Sangamon River, Lincoln ended up in the village of New Salem in Sangamon County; there in the spring of 1831 he was hired to take goods by flatboat from New Salem to New Orleans along the Sangamon, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers. After arriving in New Orleans and when he saw slavery for the first time, he walked home. Selling the boat for its timber, he then walked home on the Natchez Trace. When he got home he gave his full earnings to his father.

Lincoln stood out from the crowd, tall and lanky at six-foot four-inches, when he was just a young man. Lincoln started to make a name for his self when he got a job as a clerk at a general store in the town of New Salem. Amazing most of his neighbors with his strength and ability to split rails and fell trees; (a skill that he developed as a child of the American frontier), He quickly became a popular member of the town, endearing himself to the locals as a good-natured and "bookish" young man. And for the less literate citizens in the community, Abe was a life saver, because with his ability to read and write helped them out a lot.

Six months after his arrival in town, Abe let his ambitions get the best of him. He announced that he would be running in candidacy for a seat in the Illinois state legislature, declaring himself as an independent candidate. A few weeks after, he stepped out of the race. The Black Hawk War broke out, and Lincoln volunteered to fight Indians. His fellow volunteers elected him the temporary captain of their company, an honor that he valued more than his nomination for the presidency, and off they marched to war.

As a soldier, Lincoln saw no action in the war, but his tour of duty prevented him from campaigning for office. So for the second time around he ran again and was victorious, becoming a fixture of the Whig party in the General Assembly for the next eight