President Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, was born on February 12, 1809, near Hodgenville, Kentucky. In the harsh Kentucky wilderness where he and his family lived, settlers struggled to eke out a living on hardscrabble farms. Endless legal wrangling over land ownership and the family's opposition to slavery persuaded the Lincolns to move to the backwoods of southern Indiana in 1816. Years later, Lincoln recalled that they reached their new home about the time the state entered the Union, and that it was a wild region filled with bears and other wild animals, where he grew up. On this frontier arose many of the Lincoln legends known to generations of American schoolchildren: learning to read by firelight, walking miles to return a borrowed book, and working as a rail-splitter on the family farm. By 1830, when the Lincolns relocated to Illinois, he had become a studious yet amiable young man. Gregarious and affable, he sought a life beyond farm labor, an ambition that would carry him to the White House at the time of the nation's greatest peril.

Indianapolis city (balance), Indiana · United States