I
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He was born with a thirst for learning but had no teacher.
Lincoln never met his paternal grandfather, Abraham. Twenty-eight years before he was born, his namesake, then only forty-one, was killed by a Native American, while his three sons, including the younger Abraham’s father, Thomas, watched in horror.1 Abe’s uncle Mordecai, aged fifteen, shot the native, giving rise to a story the family embellished over the years. Lincoln himself told and retold the story throughout his life, never missing the chance to imbue it with the character of a legend that underscored the harshness of the frontier, where he was born in a one-room cabin on February 9, 1809.
The realities of childhood are difficult to reconstruct, even more so when the man was a child in the early 1800s and later grows up to become president. In Lincoln’s case, contemporaneous records of his childhood are hard to come by; most people who interacted with him were illiterate, and most who wrote about his youth did so later with the knowledge of what he became almost certainly shaping their memories. Even so, we can separate some clues of the boy who became Lincoln from the legends of his origins.
Neighbors recalled young Abe’s mother, Nancy, as “superior”2 to her husband because she knew how to read. To young Abe’s delight, she regularly read aloud to him from the King James Bible. At seven, he was sent, with his sister, Sarah, to a one-room school a mile away from their home in Kentucky, where he learned the fundamentals of reading and ciphering. When Abe was nine, Nancy died after consuming tainted milk, writhing in excruciating agony in front of him and the rest of her family.
Dennis Hanks, who was ten years older than Abe, was an illegitimate cousin who had lived with Nancy’s family and later with the Lincolns after she died. Dennis claimed to have given young Abe “his first lesson in spelling—reading and writing,”3 explaining that he had “taught Abe to write with a buzzards [sic] quill, which I killed with a rifle and having made a pen—put Abes [sic] hand in mine and moving his fingers by my hand to give him the idea of how to write.”4 It is possible there is some truth to his recollections, for he was reputed to be “the best-educated” member of the Hanks family, though what passed for best might not have been all that good. It is equally if not more possible that his recollections were hyperbole, given that they were recorded later, after Lincoln’s death, and Dennis may have surrendered to the temptation to overstate his importance, as many later did, in the education of a man who became president.
A more likely story, historian David Herbert Donald suggested, was that “Dilworth’s Spelling-Book,” which Abe and Sarah had begun to use in school in Kentucky, provided Abe’s first serious introduction to the basics of grammar and spelling. He more likely credited his stepmother rather than his biological mother with the other essential help he received in learning how to read and write, declaring in the 1850s, “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”
Beginning with the alphabet and Arabic and Roman numerals, Dilworth’s
proceeded to words of two letters, then three letters, and finally four letters. From these, students learned to construct sentences, like the one Abe constructed in school, “No man may put off the law of God.” Dilworth’s then went on to more advanced subjects, and the final section included the prose and verse selections, which were accompanied by crude woodcuts, which may have been the first pictures [Abe] had ever seen.5
Other texts used in school, “like The Columbian Class Book and The Kentucky Preceptor, expanded and reinforced what [Abe] learned from Dilworth’s.”6 Most contemporaries, particularly after Lincoln died, remembered him as a prodigy, while John Hanks, another cousin who lived with the Lincolns for a short while, remembered young Abe as “somewhat dull, not a brilliant boy—but worked his way by toil: to learn was hard for him, but he worked slowly, but surely.”7
When Abe was ten, his father, Thomas, abandoned both him and his sister, Sarah, for several months. He left the children with Dennis Hanks while he searched for a new wife. Thomas found her in Kentucky, where they married in late 1819. He returned with his new wife, Sarah, along with her two children, to Indiana. She found Abe, Sarah, and Dennis not just emaciated and “wild,” but Abe, she thought, was “the ugliest chap that ever obstructed her view.”8 No matter her initial apprehension, she came to love and be beloved by Lincoln, partly due to her unrelenting efforts to nurture the boy and support his dreams. Though not literate herself, she had brought with her a few books. One was Robinson Crusoe, the stirring story of a castaway who survived because of his courage and self-reliance. Another was The Arabian Tales, a collection of folk tales mostly told in prose but some in riddles and verse, which Lincoln read, reread, and used to entertain his friends.9 (Dennis Hanks told a story, which may be more legend than fact, of Thomas berating Abe for the book, which he thought was nothing but “a pack of lies.” “Mighty fine lies,” Abe answered, “mighty fine lies.”) Yet another book was Webster’s Speller, one of many such guides Abe had on hand in school and at home. It is unclear how much they helped him. He made spelling mistakes all his life, such as writing “appologies,” “opertunity,” “immancipation,” “Anapolis,” “apparant,” “inaugeral” . . . the list goes on. Some scholars believe these mistakes show that Lincoln was dyslexic, others, that he sometimes wrote in haste, but, at least as important, they showed that Lincoln cared less about how to write them correctly than about how the words sounded when spoken aloud.
Though these books might not have helped Lincoln to fully master written English, they pulled him out of the depression caused by his mother’s death. They “reignited Abraham’s love of learning,”10 his stepmother said. Books were scarce on the frontier, so he read carefully rather than extensively. He memorized a good deal of what he read: “When he came across a passage that Struck him,” his stepmother recalled, “he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there till he did get paper—then he would re-write it—look at it [and] repeat it” to himself until “it was fixed in his mind to suit him he . . . never lost that fact or his understanding of it.”11 Sarah stressed, too, that Abe was not just interested in reading but in writing, and in his writing, clarity of expression was all important. She said that Abe “seemed pestered to give Expression to his ideas and got mad almost at [any] one who couldn’t Explain plainly what he wanted to convey.” Lincoln had the same recollection that as a boy he was never satisfied “until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.” (His interest in writing and speaking plainly intensified with age.)
“Abe was getting hungry for book[s], reading everything he got his hands on,” Dennis Hanks recalled, as did other friends and schoolmates of Lincoln.12 “I never seen Abe after he was twelve ’at he didn’t have a book some’ers ’round,” he explained. Abe’s stepmother agreed: “He read all day the books he could lay his hands on. He read diligently—studied in the day time—went to bed early—got up Early and then read.”13 “He’d put a book inside his shirt an’ fill his pants pockets with corn dodgers,” Dennis Hanks remembered,
an’ go off to plow or hoe. When noon come he’d set down under a tree, an’ read an’ eat. In the house at night, he’d tilt a cheer by the chimbly, an’ set on his backbone an’ read. I’ve seen a feller come in an’ look at him, Abe not knowin’ anybody was round, an’ sneak out again like a cat, an’ say, “Well, I’ll be darned.” It didn’t seem natural, nohow, to see a feller read like that.14
Abe read so much that he allegedly once told a friend that “he had read through every book he had ever heard of in that county, for a circuit of 50 miles.”15
First cousin John Hanks remembered that when Lincoln returned home after work, he “would go to the cup-board, snatch a piece of corn bread, take down a book, sit down in a chair, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read.”16 Abe’s contemporaries, David Herbert Donald wrote, “attributed prodigies of reading to him.” Lincoln supposedly told his cousin Dennis Hanks, �
�The things I want to know are in books,” adding, according to biographer Carl Sandburg, “My best friend is the man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.”17 Books were, for him, “the main thing” in life.
Looking back in 1859, as he was mounting his presidential campaign, Lincoln wrote a letter to Jesse Fell, a close friend of David Davis, who was in charge of his campaign and a fellow lawyer. Fell had written Lincoln to inquire about whether the two might be related, and Lincoln wrote back that, while he doubted they were, “when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three.”18 In a campaign biography, which he ghostwrote in 1860, Lincoln declared, “All told, the aggregate of his schooling did not amount to one year.”19 If Lincoln was underselling his formal education, it was not by much.
Abe’s stepmother, Sarah, was careful not to blame Lincoln’s father, Thomas, for ending Abe’s formal education, recalling, “As a usual thing, Mr. Lincoln never made Abe quit reading to do anything if he could avoid it. He would do it himself first.”20 That was not how Dennis Hanks remembered it. He said Thomas thought his son wasted too much time on books, “having sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading.”21 That is how Lincoln remembered it, too.
When neighbors complained to Thomas about Abe’s propensity to tell jokes and stories rather than to do the fieldwork they were paying him for, additional beatings might follow. Though Thomas was over average height, he was burly, and Dennis Hanks remembered that Lincoln’s “father would sometimes knock him a rod.”22 It was unsurprising that when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, Lincoln said, “NOT a carpenter or a farmer like my father.” It was little surprise that he yearned for “emancipation” from his father.
II
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Several of the books in Lincoln’s home were not unusual for a frontier working family of the 1820s. Indeed, because of the lessons, examples, virtues, and religious fidelity that they instilled, they were among the most popular of the time, especially among young families.
The first, of course, was the King James Bible, which Abe’s mother, Nancy, had introduced him to. It was said that by the age of ten, Lincoln recited Bible verses and sermons for his friends and family. His stepsister, Matilda Johnson, said, “When father & mother woud go to church, . . . Abe would take down the Bible, read a verse—give out a hymn—and we would sing. . . . he would preach & we would do the Crying—sometimes he would join in the Chorus of Tears.”23 She further recalled, “One day my bro John Johnston caught a land terrapin—brought it to the place where Abe was preaching—threw it against the tree—crushed the shell and it Suffered much—quivered all over—Abe preached against Cruelty to animals, Contending that an ant’s life was to it, as sweet as ours to us. . . .”24
While his siblings and friends were impressed when he quoted or satirized biblical passages or verses, it is unclear how much of the Bible Lincoln actually read. He may have simply been well versed in the sections he liked best. Dennis Hanks said that Abe “didn’t read the Bible half as much as [is] said.” Hanks thought the Bible “puzzled” Lincoln, “especially the miracles. He often asked me in the timber or sittin’ around the fireplace nights, to explain scripture.”25 Lincoln’s stepmother agreed: “Abe read the bible some, though not as much as [is] said: he sought more congenial books—suitable for his age.”26 He certainly didn’t seem to engage with the scriptures in total solemnity. Once she asked him to entertain guests by reading aloud from the Bible. Unhappy to do this, the boy began reading through passages as quickly as he could; the more she admonished him, the faster he read. Finally, as Michael Burlingame notes, “In exasperation, she grabbed a broom and chased him out of the cabin, much to his relief. Another time, he read aloud from the Book of Isaiah, playfully interpolating passages from Shakespeare.”27
Such incidents are early signs of the skepticism Lincoln had about the Bible as fact, yet he never doubted the powers of its language and stories. “In regard to this Great Book,” he reputedly wrote in response to several former slaves who had given him a copy of the Bible in 1864, “I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man’s welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it.”28 Though he often questioned the scriptures as fact and ridiculed organized religion, he recognized its words and lessons as profound and enduring, not just for him but also for the townspeople and country folk who became his public.
While the Bible was apparently the first book Abe had tried to read, the second, Aesop’s Fables, was equally if not more influential. The collection of 725 morality tales was written in Greek by a former slave in the sixth century BCE. As one of Abe’s friends recalled, “He kept the Bible and Aesop’s always within reach, and read them over and over again.”29 Abe read the book so often, he memorized much of it. (Decades later, he would make powerful use of Aesop’s fable about the Lion and the Four Bulls: “A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.”)
A childhood friend, James Ewing, recalled,
I doubt if he ever told a story just because it was a story. If he told an anecdote it was to illustrate or make clear some point he wanted to impress. He had a marvelous aptitude for that—to illustrate the idea he wanted to convey. He was a wonderful observer, and he had the rare ability to remember what he had seen and heard and read, so as to apply such information to the point of anything that struck him as ludicrous. . . . He applied this wonderful gift of observation and appreciation of humor to a situation or to something which somebody had said.30
Judge Owen Reeves, a friend from Lincoln’s law-practicing days, agreed: “I heard Lincoln tell hundreds of anecdotes and stories, but never one that was not told to illustrate or give point to some subject or question that had been the theme of conversation, or that was not suggested by an anecdote or story told by someone else.”31
In addition to the Bible and Aesop, Lincoln loved reading about the lives of the American Founders and their struggles to break free from British tyranny and to establish the United States. He had little taste for novels. He reputedly tried to read Ivanhoe but never finished. There are records of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels in Lincoln’s possession when he was a boy, but even as an adult he owned books by none of the great novelists of his time, such as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Instead, it was the history of politics that captured his imagination at an early age. He discovered “during my earliest days of being able to read Parson Weems’ popular biography of George Washington, A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington.”
Weems’s biography, first published in 1800, was more sermon than actual history. It aimed to popularize the view of Washington as leading the colonists to victory in the Revolution because his military tactics were distinctly “American” in their ingenuity, courage, and independence, and his fight was for “American” ideals. By 1809, the year of Lincoln’s birth, the book was in its fortieth edition, and Weems had added more anecdotes and myths to further promote the impression that Washington was wiser and, in a way that could only be American, more virtuous. (For instance, Weems created the purely fictional tale of young George chopping down a cherry tree and then declining to lie about what he had done.) The book effectively deified Washington as “the hero,” the “Demigod,” and “the ‘Jupiter Conservator,’ the friend and benefactor of men.”32 Weems went so far as to not only depict Washington as smarter, braver, and more ingenious than anyone else at the time, but also as more successful with the ladies.
The book perpetrated myths about the martial potency of superior American rectitude. For example, Weems declared that Washington at the 1753 Battle of Monongahela was immune to “[s]howers of bullets” from Native Americans and had “that TRUE HEROIC VALOUR which combats malignant passions—conquers unreasonable self—rejects the hell of hatred, and in
vites the love into our own bosoms, and into those of our brethren with whom we may have had a falling out.”33 It is unlikely that Lincoln, at fifteen, would have realized the book was filled with “effectual truths” (Niccolo Machiavelli’s terms for myths serving political purposes) that Weems hoped would define American values. At fourteen or fifteen, Abe discovered that a neighbor had another, well-regarded biography of Washington written by David Ramsay, a physician and one of America’s first self-proclaimed historians. Yet Abe never tired of recalling how he had walked two miles to a neighbor’s house to first borrow Weems’s book and spent months working off the cost of the book after it had been damaged in the rain.
Weems had been a friend of Thomas Jefferson, and his story of Washington constructed an inspiring vision of a new nation founded on the values of charity, modesty, and bravery. In contrast, Ramsay was one of the first Americans who aspired to do genuine historiography, researching primary documents, correspondence, diaries, and other authentic texts from the founding era. However, Ramsay was not without his own political agenda. He had fought in the Revolutionary War, and he hoped to validate republicanism’s elevation of public service as a means to inculcate appropriate virtues, such as duty, mercy, loyalty, justice, and selflessness, in the governed as well as in the governors—as well as to reinforce national unity. Ramsay believed that Washington’s story, more than any other, could inspire the values indispensable for a good life and a good society. Whereas Weems depicted Washington as a near-deity, Ramsay emphasized that he was a man, albeit a remarkable one with extraordinary qualities, including humility and courage. In addition, Ramsay depicted the new nation as bent on reform and determination to improve on English governance.
Lincoln's Mentors Page 2