This Year in History:
1809
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
On January 19, 1809, poet, author and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe is born in Boston, Massachusetts. By the time he was three years old, his father had abandoned the family and his mother had died, leaving him in the care of his godfather John Allan, a wealthy tobacco merchant. After attending school in England, […]
Future U.S. president Abraham Lincoln is born in Hodgenville, Kentucky on February 12, 1809. Lincoln, one of America’s most admired presidents, grew up a member of a poor family in Kentucky and Indiana. He attended school for only one year, but thereafter read on his own in a continual effort to improve his mind. As an adult, […]
On April 19, 1809, former President Thomas Jefferson writes up a contract for the sale of an indentured servant named John Freeman to newly sworn-in President James Madison. Slavery and indentured servitude were major components of the early American economy. Enslaved workers performed most of the manual and domestic labor on the large plantations owned […]
On October 11, 1809, the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis dies under mysterious circumstances in the early hours of the morning after stopping for the night at Grinder’s Tavern along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Three years earlier, Lewis and his co-commander, William Clark, had completed their exploration of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory and the […]
