Who Were Abraham Lincoln's Siblings?

Think of Abraham Lincoln's family, and Tad or Mary is likely to come to mind. So don't blame yourself if the names Sarah or Thomas Lincoln don't exactly ring a bell. But though they're much less known, both of Lincoln's siblings helped make him the man—and president—he eventually became.

Portrait of Nancy Hanks Lincoln

Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln had three children: Sarah, Abraham, and Thomas (Tommy). (Yes, Lincoln was a middle child, a fact that makes his future rise to fame even more noteworthy.) Sarah was born in 1807, two years earlier than Abraham. In 1812 (some accounts say 1813), tragedy struck the Lincolns when their third child, Tommy, died at just three days of age. It is not certain why Tommy died, but infant mortality was high in that era, especially on the frontier. Lincoln only mentioned Tommy a single time during his public career, but his death must have deeply grieved the family.

Before leaving Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln and his older sister Sarah (1807-1828) were sent for short periods, to ABC schools (also known as 'Blab' schools). Together, Abraham and Sarah attended what was known as Blab or ABC schools, a kind of early primary school common in frontier states like Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. Instead of featuring age-separated classrooms or expensive books or pencils, such schools used a strictly oral curriculum. The "blab" part came from teachers who recited rote lessons to the kids, who in turn blabbed them back. That back-and-forth didn't necessarily provide a great education (and given that the school charged tuition, it probably cost the Lincolns dearly to send them there), but it was enough to instill the basics in both Lincoln kids.

But more grief was on its way for the Lincolns. Just two years after making the rough journey to Little Pigeon Creek and building a cabin there, Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy, contracted "milk sickness" after drinking milk from a cow that had been poisoned by White Snakeroot or Milkweed, and died on October 5, 1818.

Abraham and Sarah were devastated. Though she was only two years older than her brother, Sarah tried to be a mother to Abraham. She also inherited the chores expected of the woman of the house, caring for her brother, father, and a cousin who lived with them.

Just a year later, their father left his brother, sister, and 18-year-old cousin at home as he hunted for another wife. When he returned with a new wife, Sarah Bush Johnston, both brother and sister were so dirty and unkempt that she scrubbed them clean. Johnston had three children of her own, and with the help of a new mother and in a house with three stepsiblings, the Lincoln children went back to a life of hard work.

Sarah Bush Johnston

Sarah thought in some respects like her brother. She lacked Abraham's stature was thick-set, had dark-brown hair, deep gray eyes, and an even disposition. In contact with others, she was kind and considerate. Her nature was one of amiability, and God had endowed her with that invincible combination—modesty and good sense. Sarah was known in the community as gentle, intelligent, and kind. 

Sarah married Aaron Grigsby, a member of the leading family of Gentryville, Indiana, in August of 1826, whose family were neighbors of the Lincolns. At the wedding, the Lincoln family sang a song, "Adam and Eve's Wedding Song," composed in honor of the event by Abraham himself. It was a tiresome doggerel (comic verse composed in an irregular rhythm) full of painful rhymes. Sarah became pregnant. But during her delivery, she died at age 21, on January 20, 1828. 

The joint wedding celebration of Aaron's brothers Reuben, who married Betsy Ray, and  Charles who married Matilda Hawkins, or 'Tilda' as her mother called her, on the same day. 

When the invitations to the festivities were issued Abraham was left out, and the slight led him to furnish an appreciative circle in Gentryville with what he was pleased to term "The First Chronicles of Reuben." The incident created a rift between Lincoln and the Grigsbys.

The following day they with their brides returned to the Grigsby mansion, where the elder Reuben Grigsby gave them a cordial welcome. Here an old-fashioned affair, with feasting and dancing, and the still older fashion of putting the bridal party to bed, took place. 

In revenge, Lincoln had shrewdly persuaded a friend who was on the inside at the affair to slip upstairs while the feasting was at its height and change the beds of Betsy with that of Matilda, which Mamma Grigsby had carefully arranged in advance. The transposition of beds produced a comedy of errors that gave Lincoln as much satisfaction and joy as the Grigsby household embarrassment and chagrin. On this occasion some sense of mischief afoot disturbed the heart of the elder Mrs. Grigaby, and, hastening up-stairs, just after the attendants had returned downstairs, she cried out in a loud voice and to the great consternation of all concerned, "WHY RUEBEN, YOU'RE IN BED WITH THE WRONG WIFE!" 

Lincoln then wrote a description of the incident known as "The First Chronicles of Reuben" as payback, composed in what purports to be the style of the Scripture, the prose narrative was followed by a poem about Billy Grigsby, another of Aaron's brothers. The coarse poem ridicules their failed attempts of Billy to woo girls. The original text of "The First Chronicles of Reuben" does not survive [1].

 

Though Sarah is thought to have affected Abraham deeply with her intelligence and commitment, he seems to have been less impressed by his stepsiblings. In 1851, he wrote his stepbrother John Daniel Johnston a scathing letter denying him a loan of $80 and observing that "I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day's work, in any one day."

The letter was tinged with humor amidst the bitterness, like many of Lincoln's missives, but it suggests that his non-Lincoln siblings never stole his heart the way his big sister did. Though Sarah never lived to see his accomplishments, she helped him mature into the person he eventually became—one who met life's challenges with perseverance and, when needed, a bit of sarcastic wit.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

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[1] The original chapter in Lincoln's handwriting came to light in a singular manner after having been hidden or lost for years. Shortly before my trip to Indiana in 1865 a carpenter in Gentryville was rebuilding a house belonging to one of the Grigsbys. While so engaged his son and assistant had climbed through the ceiling to the inner side of the roof to tear away some of the timbers, and there found, tucked away under the end of a rafter, a bundle of yellow and dust-covered papers. Carefully withdrawing them from their hiding-place he opened and was slowly deciphering them, when his father, struck by the boy's silence, and hearing no evidence of work, enquired of him what he was doing. "Reading a portion of the Scriptures that haven't been revealed yet," was the response. He had found "The First Chronicles of Reuben." 

Abraham Lincoln's Boyhood; Raised in the Poorest of Circumstances.

Abraham Lincoln passed his boyhood in three places and in three states, he was born at Nolan's Creek in Kentucky and lived there till he was eight years old. 

An illustration of the Kentucky log cabin that Abraham Lincoln was born in on February 12, 1809.

Then his father Thomas, moved to Pidgeon Creek, near Gentryville, in Southwestern Indiana in 1816. Here young Lincoln lived till he was twenty-one, a grown man.

The Lincoln family log home in Indiana.

The family moved once more to Sangamon Creek, in Illinois. 

Twenty-one-year-old Abraham Lincoln moved to Illinois with his family in March 1830.
Digital image from an 1865 b&w film negative.

All his homes were log structures, and he was to all intents and purposes a pioneer boy.

No boy ever began life under less promising auspices than young Abraham Lincoln. The family was very poor! His father was a shiftless man, who never succeeded in getting ahead in life. Their home was a mere log cabin of the roughest and poorest sort known to backwoods people. The rude chimney was built on the outside, and the only floor was the hardened earth. It was not so good and comfortable as some Indian wigwams. Of course, the food and clothes and beds of a family living in this way were of the miserable kind.

The family lived as did most pioneer families in the backwoods of Indiana. Their bread was made of cornmeal. Their meat was chiefly the flesh of wild game shot or trapped in the woods. Pewter plates and wooden trenchers were used on the table. 

A hand-hewn wooden trencher (a serving bowl or plate).

The drinking cups were of tin. There was no stove, and all the cooking was done over the fire of the big fireplace. Abraham's bed was simply a couch of leaves freshly gathered every two or three weeks.

At that time Indiana was still part of the wilderness. It had just been admitted to the Union as a state. Primeval woods grew up close to the settlement at Pidgeon Creek, and not far away were roving bands of Indians, and also wild animals—bears, wildcats, and panthers. These animals the settlers hunted and made use of for food and clothing. Young Abraham spent the larger part of his time out of doors. They hunted and fished and learned the habits of the wild creatures, and explored the far recesses of the woods. The forest lore Abraham never forgot, and the life and training made him vigorous and tough and able to endure in days after the troubles and trials that would have broken down many a weaker man.

Lincoln was fortunate in his mothers. His own mother died when he was nine years old, but she had done her best to start her boy in the world. Once she said to him: "Abraham, learn all you can, and grow up to be of some account. You've got just as good Virginian blood in you as George Washington had." Abraham never forgot this. Years afterward he said, "All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my blessed mother." His stepmother, Sarah Bush, was a kind-hearted, excellent woman, and did all she could to make the poor, ragged barefooted boy happy. She was always ready to listen when he read, to help him with his lessons, to encourage him. After he had grown up and become famous, she said of him: "Abraham never gave me a crossword or look, and never refused to do anything I asked of him. Abraham was the best boy I ever knew." 

There was a backwoods schoolhouse quite a distance away, which Abraham attended for a short time. Abraham Lincoln's first and second school teachers were Zachariah Riney and Caleb Hazel Sr.

These log schoolhouses in Lincoln's day had large fireplaces, in which there was a great blazing fire in the winter. The boys of the school had to chop and bring in the wood for the fire. The floor of such a schoolhouse was of rough boards hewn out with axes. The schoolmasters were generally harsh, rough men, who did not know very much themselves. Abraham soon learned to read and write, however, and after a while, he found a new teacher, and that was himself. When the rest of the family had gone to bed he would sit up and write and cipher by the light of the great blazing logs heaped upon the open fireplace. So poor were this pioneer family that they had no means of procuring paper or pencil for the struggling student. Abraham used to take the back of the broad wooden fire shovel to write on, and a piece of charcoal for a pencil. When he had covered the shovel with words or with sums in arithmetic, he would shave it off clean and begin over again. If his father complained that the shovel was getting thin, the boy would go out into the woods and make a new one. As long as the woods lasted, fire shovels and furniture were cheap.

There were few books to read in that frontier cabin. Poor Abraham had not more than a dozen in all. These were Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, Aesop's Fables, the Bible, and a small history of the United States. The boy read these books over and over till he knew a great deal of them by heart, and could repeat whole pages from them.

One book that made a great impression upon him was "The Life of George Washington, by M. L. Weems, [pub:1800]." This book he borrowed from a neighbor, who loaned it to him on the condition of his returning it in as good a condition as he received it. And this the young student intended to do. But one night there was a great storm, and it rained down in the cabin and seriously injured the precious volume. Lincoln was very much troubled and informed the neighbor of what had happened. The surly old man told him that he must give him three days' work shucking corn and that then he might keep the book for his own. It was the first book that Lincoln ever owned. No one knows how many times he read it through. Washington was his ideal hero, the one great man whom he admired above all others. How little he could have dreamed that in the years to come his own name would be coupled with that of the Father of his Country by admiring countrymen. 

By the time the lad was seventeen, he could write a good hand, do hard examples in arithmetic, and spell better than anyone else in the country. Once in a while, he would write a little piece of his own about something which interested him. Sometimes he would read what he had written to the neighbors when they would clap their hands and exclaim: "It beats the world what Abe writes!"

So Lincoln was all the time learning something and trying to make use of what he did know. Perhaps the great success of his life lay in the fact that in whatever position he was placed he always did his best. The time when the boy could no longer stay in the small surroundings of Pidgeon Creek came. He tried life on one of the river steamboats, then he served as a clerk- in a store at New Salem, where he began at odd moments to study law. In a short time he was practicing his profession, and people in the West were talking of the tall, lank young lawyer and of what a future he had before him. 

Such was the humble boyhood of Abraham Lincoln, but its very simplicity and the hardships he endured and overcame made him a strong man, a successful man. Later, when he came to be President and the leader of a Nation through a great civil war, we find that it was these same qualities of perseverance and courage, and fidelity that enabled him to triumph over difficulties and become the savior of a Great Republic. His life is a lesson and an inspiration to all aspiring boys.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The first Fallout Shelter signs are installed in Chicago's Loop on November 11, 1962.

The public information officer of the Chicago District of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, Thomas Hicks, says that signs have been posted in 13 Loop buildings that have been designated as fallout shelters.  

The Chicago Loop Buildings Include:

• 13 West Wacker Drive.
• 160 North Franklin Street.
• 162 North Franklin Street. 
• 174 Randolph Street. 
• 177 West Lake Street. 
• 190 North Wells Street. 
• 236 West Lake Street. 
• 30 North Wells Street. 
• 310 North Michigan Avenue. 
• 314 West Washington Street.
• 316 West Randolph Street.
• 417 South Dearborn Street.
• 78 East Washington Street, Main Chicago Public Library.

The buildings will provide enough space for 6,200 people with “basement and upper floor shelter space to reduce radiation effects within the shelter to one-one hundredth of that outside,” according to Hicks. 

A 1962 Orginal Tin Fallout Shelter sign from my personal collection.
TEXT AT BOTTOM OF SIGN: DOD FS NO 1 - Not to be reproduced or used without Department of Defense Permission.

These buildings are the first of 495 Loop buildings and 2,500 buildings in the city that have been selected as fallout shelters. Most Chicago Public Schools will serve as Fallout Shelters. Loop shelters will provide space for 2.3 million people while 4.7 million people could be handled in shelters in the rest of the city.  It is expected that the posting of signs on the shelters will be completed within four months.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.