| Notes |
- Abraham Lincoln -- born 1809, near Hodgenville (Hardin County), Kentucky; died 1865, Washington, D.C.
United States representative, sixteenth president of the United States
Everyone knows that Abraham Lincoln went to very little school and self-educated by reading many books borrowed from neighbors. Lincoln described his family background in an autobiographical sketch prepared for the 1860 presidential campaign, which I have in a 1922 edition of his writings published by Scott Foresman and Company, Selections from the Writings of Abraham Lincoln, a book originally belonging to my paternal grandmother.
Thomas, the youngest son [of the future president's paternal grandfather], and father of the present subject, by the very early death of his father, and very narrow circumstances of his mother, even in childhood was a wandering laboring-boy, and grew up literally without education. He never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly write his own name. . . . The present subject has no brother or sister of the whole or half blood. He had a sister, older than himself, who was grown and married, but died many years ago, leaving no child; also a brother, younger than himself, who died in infancy. Before leaving Kentucky, he and his sister were sent, for short periods, to A B C schools, the first kept by Zachariah Riney, and the second by Caleb Hazel. . . . From [Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln's father] removed to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in the autumn of 1816, Abraham then being in his eighth year. This removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky. He settled in an unbroken forest, and the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task ahead. Abraham, though very young, was large of his age, and had an ax put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twenty-third year he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument-- less, of course, in plowing and harvesting seasons. . . . In the autumn of 1818 his mother died; and a year afterwards his father married Mrs. Sally Johnston, at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, a widow with three children of her first marriage. She proved a good and kindly mother to Abraham, and is still living in Coles County, Illinois. There were no children of this second marriage. His father's residence continued at the same place in Indiana till 1830. While here Abraham went to A B C schools by littles, kept successively by Andrew Crawford, ------ Sweeney, and Azel W. Dorsey. He does not remember any other. The family of Mr. Dorsey now resides in Schuyler County, Illinois. Abraham now thinks that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year. He was never in a college or academy as a student, and never inside a college or academy building till since he had a law license. What he has in the way of education he has picked up. After he was twenty-three and separated from his father, he studied English grammar-- imperfectly, of course, but so as to speak and to write as well as he now does. He studied and nearly mastered the six books of Euclid since he was a member of Congress. He regrets his want of education, and does what he can to supply the want.
He studied law in his spare time from age twenty-two to twenty-eight, after being elected to the Illinois Legislature and encouraged to study law by a lawyer elected the same year.
Lawrence Cremin's history American Education: The Colonial Experience 1607-1783 (1970) makes clear that most colonial inhabitants read extensively, and learned to read from their own family members or neighbors. Children knew how to read before they entered school, and school was vocational training that a lot of people happily did without. The enormous sales figures for Thomas Paine's book Common Sense show that most colonial inhabitants were politically aware and inclined to spend money on books related to politics. The comparable sales figures for H. Ross Perot's and Albert Gore's books during the 1992 presidential campaign suggest a decline in political interest among the current public-school-educated generation.
FROM:http://learninfreedom.org/Founders_free.html
Lincoln's Knob Creek recollections were of working in what he called "the big held," of seven acres, where is father planted corn and the son followed, dropping two pumpkin seeds in every hill on every other row. Once, as he remembered, there was a big rain in the hills, though not a drop fell in the valley, and "the water coming down through the gorges washed ground, corn, pumpkin seed and all clear off the field." He also remembered going for two brief periods to an "A.B.C. school," some two miles from the Lincolns' cabin, where he was sent, according to a relative, "more as company for his sister that with the expectation that he would learn much." It was first taught by one Zachariah Riney, about whom little is know except that he was a Catholic, and then by Caleb Hazel, who according to a contemporary, "could perhaps teach spelling, reading and indifferent writing and perhaps could cipher to the rule of three, but had no other qualifications of a teacher, except large size and bodily strength to thrash any boy or youth that came to his school." Abraham probably mastered the alphabet, but he did not yet know how to write when the family left Kentucky
FROM:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/lincoln.htm
This is what the Marriage Return (See scrapbook) says:
"I do hereby Certify that Caleb Hazel & Elizabeth Hall Relic of James Hall Dec'd were this Day Lawfully Married Given Under My hand The 14th February 1785
Joseph Barnet _DM"
FROM:http://www.bluemarble.net/~julian/calmar.html
HAZEL CALEB W (SR.) 17560000-17850214-18220000
Parents believed to be Richard Hazel and Monica Turley of Fairfax Co., Virginia. Richard Hazel died rather young in 1772, his tiny estate confiscated for debts. The family dispersed and Caleb entered the Virginia Militia in 1775 and the Revolution the next year. He left the military in 1779 and remained in the area living with cousins. Caleb arrived in Nelson Co., Kentucky before 1785 from the Northern Neck region of Virginia. Nelson soon split off Hardin Co., so he lived most of his life in southern Hardin Co., today Larue Co. He did move to close-by Green Co., (near his cousins) during the first decade of the 19th century. He returned to his old farm in southern Hardin Co. after the death of his first wife in 1809. He appears in the 1820 census in Hart Co. and disappears there from the tax lists by 1822.
WIFE: HALL (WIDOW-"Hanks" surname unproven) ELIZABETH HAZEL 1761-17850214-18090000
Caleb married again a Mary Stevens in 1816 with Thomas Lincoln as bondsman. Caleb moved to Hart County shortly after the marriage and Thomas Lincoln (Abe's father) left the area with his family. There are children for the second marriage of Caleb, but they are not shown
FROM:http://www.bluemarble.net/~julian/lev2/hazca2.html
|
1756 - 1833 (77 years)
[1, 3] 
