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CHAPTER III. EARLY YEARS. The year 1809 was fruitful in the birth of great men in the Anglo-Saxon race. In that year were born Charles Darwin, scientist, Alfred Tennyson, poet, William E. Gladstone, statesman, and, not least, Abraham Lincoln, liberator. Thomas Lincoln was left fatherless in early boyhood, and grew up without any schooling or any definite work. For the most part he did odd jobs as they were offered. He called himself a carpenter. But in a day when the outfit of tools numbered only about a half dozen, and when every man was mainly his own carpenter, this trade could not amount to much. Employment was unsteady and pay was small. Thomas Lincoln, after his marriage to Nancy Hanks, lived in Elizabethtown, Ky., where the first child, Sarah, was born. Shortly after this event he decided to combine farming with his trade of carpentering, and so removed to a farm fourteen miles out, situated in what is now LaRue County, where his wife, on the twelfth day of February, 1809, gave birth to the son whom he named Abraham after his father's father. The child was born in a log cabin of a kind very common in that day and for many years later. Lincoln's Boyhood Home in Kentucky. It was built four-square and comprised only one room, one window, and a door. Here they lived fqr a little more than four years, when the father removed to another farm about fifteen miles further to the northeast. The occasion of this removal and of the subsequent one, two or three years later, was undoubtedly the uncertainty of land titles in Kentucky in that day. This " roving disposition " cannot fairly be charged to shiftlessness. In spite of the extraordinary disadvantages of Thomas Lincoln's earlylife, he lived as well as his neighbors, though that was humble enough, and accum...
