help from the fort.

It was doubtless this misfortune which rapidly changed the circumstances
of the family.[1] Kentucky was yet a wild, new country. As compared with
later periods of emigration, settlement was slow and pioneer life a hard
struggle. So it was probably under the stress of poverty, as well as by
the marriage of the older children, that the home was gradually broken
up, and Thomas Lincoln became "even in childhood ... a wandering
laboring boy, and grew up literally without education.... Before he was
grown he passed one year as a hired hand with his uncle Isaac on
Watauga, a branch of the Holston River." Later, he seems to have
undertaken to learn the trade of carpenter in the shop of Joseph Hanks
in Elizabethtown.

[Footnote 1: By the law of primogeniture, which at that date was
still unrepealed in Virginia, the family estate went to Mordecai,
the eldest son.]

When Thomas Lincoln was about twenty-eight years old he married Nancy
Hanks, a niece of his employer, near Beechland, in Washington County.
She was a good-looking young woman of twenty-three, also from Virginia,
and so far superior to her husband in education that she could read and
write, and taught him how to sign his name. Neither one of the young
couple had any money or property; but in those days living was not
expensive, and they doubtless considered his trade a sufficient
provision for the future. He brought her to a little house in
Elizabethtown, where a daughter was born to them the following year.

During the next twelvemonth Thomas Lincoln either grew tired of his
carpenter work, or found the wages he was able to earn insufficient to