by Rich Lowry
Lincoln found the beginning of his deliverance in words. Books lifted Lincoln’s sights beyond the constraints of his immediate environs and gave him the skills to transcend his upbringing. It fell to him to discover and master them mostly on his own. As Lincoln said later of his frontier surroundings, “If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to so-journ in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizzard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.” Famously, Lincoln had little in the way of formal schooling, less than a year total by his estimate. In a brief biographical sketch that he wrote as a congressman, he captured the matter in two words: “Education defective.” In another autobiographical account, he noted, “What he has in the way of education, he has picked up. . . . He regrets his lack of education, and does what he can to supply the want.”
As a child, he went to a tiny schoolhouse briefly in Kentucky, about two or three miles from his cabin, and not for the last time made an impression with his inappropriate attire. He came home crying the first day after the other kids made fun of him for wearing a sunbonnet. Subsequently, a man named Caleb Hazel became his instructor. A friend of the Lincoln family at the time wrote Herndon a letter noting how “Abraham Commenced trugging his way to school to Caleb Hezle—with whom I was well-acquainted & could perhaps teach spelling reading & indifferent writing & perhaps could Cipher to the rule of three—but had no other qualifications of a teacher except large size & bodily Strength to thrash any boy or youth that came to his School, and as Caleb lived in hazel nut switch country, no doubt but that young Abraham received due allowances.”
Once in Indiana, Lincoln attended “ABC schools” on and off. Reading, writing, and very basic math—the so-called ciphering to the rule of three—made up the curriculum in these schools. Teachers might beat the hell out of offending students. The equivalent of a gold star to reward a student might be a plug of tobacco or draft of whiskey. Teachers emphasized reading aloud (hence the term “blab” schools) and rote memorization.
Lincoln captured the pedagogical atmosphere with a story he told in the White House. A little boy named Bud was behind in his reading and had the misfortune to be selected to read aloud the story of Nebuchadnezzar and the Golden Image from the book of Daniel. The poor child mangled the names Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The instructor cuffed the lad in the head and he dissolved into tears. After the rest of the class had read, his turn again approached and he began to blubber. The teacher asked him what was wrong. He pointed at the impending verse and cried: “Look there marster, there comes them same damn three fellers again.”
Spelling was an obsession and even a public entertainment, with Fridays devoted to contests. Lincoln bested his classmates in spelling, but he hardly mastered it. He never stopped writing the possessive of “it” as “it’s.” Well into his adulthood he spelled very “verry.” He lacked all self-consciousness about his deficiency, even in the White House. He once asked a group of visitors how to spell “missile” and told Supreme Court justice David Davis at a reception in 1865 that he had only just learned the correct spelling of maintenance.
Altogether, Lincoln proved a diligent and impressive student. In his raccoon cap and too-short buckskin pants—one fellow student recalled how “there was bare & naked 6 or more inches of Abe Lincoln shin bone”—he outpaced his teachers by some accounts. According to John Hanks, another first cousin of Lincoln’s mother who lived in the Lincoln household, he “worked his way by toil: to learn was hard for him, but he walked Slowly, but Surely.” Lincoln explained to other students things he had read, in the kind of simple, illustrative terms that became his signature as a public communicator.
His education, though, had fundamentally to be self-directed, “picked up.” He worked out sums on a wooden shovel, scraping and wiping it off and repeating. He practiced writing letters on whatever surface happened to be at hand. Above all, he read. Into spare moments as a boy and young adult he poured his appetite for books. He read aloud walking to and from school. He read during lunch breaks while working. He read during meals. He read during his free time on Sundays. He read, by one account, at the end of each plow furrow while allowing his horse to “breathe.”
John Hanks called Lincoln “a Constant and voracious reader.” When he got home from work, according to Hanks, “he would go to the Cupboard—Snatch a piece of Corn bread—take down a book—Sit down on a chair—Cock his legs up as high as his head and read.” The popular image of him reading by firelight is irresistible, although false according to his stepmother. She said he “studied in the day time,” and “got up Early and then read.”
His stepmother describes his self-devised and -enforced program: “Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on—and when he came across a passage that Struck him 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 repeat it—He had a copy book—a kind of scrap book in which he put down all things and this preserved them. He ciphered on boards when he had no paper or no slate and when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again: When he had paper he put his sums down on it.”
He read the Bible (the family copy had been published in 1799 and its original price was twenty-seven shillings), from which his mother had told him stories even before he could read. He recalled hearing the sound of her voice when he later came across certain verses. He read, among other books, Aesop’s Fables, the Arabian Nights, Pilgrim’s Progress, and biographies of George Washington and Henry Clay. He borrowed a biography of Washington from a farmer named Josiah Crawford. When it was damaged by rain, Crawford made Lincoln work it off. He had to “pull fodder”—stripping the leaves off corn for cattle fodder—in Crawford’s field as recompense.
Lincoln’s fare also included schoolbooks and anthologies that could be extraordinarily rich. They contained literary excerpts and exhortations to upright behavior. Lincoln insisted that Lindley Murray’s English Reader—featuring readings from Cicero, St. Paul, Lord Mansfield, and much more—was “the greatest and most useful book that could be put in the hands of a child at school.” His stepmother is reported to have brought to Indiana with her Lessons in Elocution; its excerpts from Shakespeare may have given Lincoln his first introduction to the Bard. Dennis Hanks claimed that “Abe was so attached to reading we had to buy him . . . the Columbian Orator or American Preceptor” (the subtitle of the Orator was, in part, “Rules Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence”).
Lincoln began consuming newspapers by the late 1820s. His stepmother recalled, “I think newspapers were had in Indiana as Early as 1824 & up to 1830 when we moved to Ills—Abe was a Constant reader of them.” They provided a ready window into national affairs, and presumably an early education in politics. Lincoln neighbor William Wood told Herndon: “I took news papers—some from Ohio—Cincinnatie—the names of which I have now forgotten—One of these papers was a temperance paper. Abe used to borrow it—take it home and read it & talk it over with me.”
Another neighbor, John Romine, remembered a similar experience: “Abe borrowed a newspaper from me which contained a long editorial about Thomas Jefferson, and read the entire paper by firelight. The next morning he returned the paper, and it seemed to me that he could repeat every word in that editorial, and not only that. [H]e could recount all the news items, as well as tell all about the advertisements.” Romine said that “while but a boy [he] had the best memory of any person I ever knew.”
If Lincoln’s studiousness entered lore as evidence of his determined striving, it didn’t strike all of those around him as particularly admirable—certainly not compared to what was considered honest labor. A neighbor in Illinois remembered they “uset to think he would n’t amount to much. You see, it war n’t book-readin’ then, it war work, that count
ed.” An acquaintance from Illinois commented later, “Lincoln was a mighty lazy man. Why, I’ve seen him under a tree with a book in his hand and too mortal lazy to move around when the sun came around.” A former employer recalled in a similar vein that “Abe was awful lazy: he worked for me—was always reading & thinking—used to get mad at him.” Another neighbor noted, “He was no hand to pitch in at work like killing Snakes.”
Despite the assurance of Lincoln’s stepmother, his father may well have shared this estimate of his son’s bookishness. Dennis Hanks told Herndon that Lincoln “was a Constant and I m[a]y Say Stubborn reader, his father having Sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading.” According to Hanks, Lincoln’s father said that when it came to his son’s reading he initially had “to pull the old sow up to the trough,” but “then and now he had to pull her away.” After Abraham left home, Thomas Lincoln remarked, if one account is to be believed, “I suppose that Abe is still fooling hisself with eddication. I tried to stop it, but he has got that fool idea in his head, and it can’t be got out.”
As Abraham got older and Thomas became more frail, his father relied on him more for physical tasks. Thomas still had a large household to support, and when a friend defaulted on a loan he had endorsed, it added to the finacial strain. He began to hire Lincoln out, which was his legal right until his son reached age twenty-one. Abraham worked; Thomas took his wages for the family.
Abraham was enlisted in every kind of job imaginable, from cutting corn to digging wells. Long afterward he recalled that he had “fought until his twentieth year . . . with the trees and logs and grubs.” Lincoln worked for as little as ten cents a day, and at least once was paid in corn. At one point, he got thirty-one cents a day butchering hogs, a brutal and nasty business even prior to the horrors of the age of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. When it came to all this toil, Lincoln’s flesh was strong but his spirit wasn’t so willing. He said that “his father taught him to work but never learned him to love it.”
Lincoln labored under a sense of injustice. He worked hard, stealing time from pursuits he found more congenial and productive, yet he couldn’t keep the proceeds for himself. “I used to be a slave,” he said in a speech in 1856, a rank exaggeration tinged with not a little self-pity. But the statement spoke to how deeply he felt a principle that would come to define his antislavery advocacy at its core: A person, as a basic matter of justice, deserved to keep what he earned. A friend from Illinois who heard the 1856 speech remembered him arguing that “we were all slaves one time or another.” The difference was “that white men could make themselves free and the [N]egroes could not.”
As an avenue of freedom, the water beckoned. If books were an intellectual escape, the rivers were a physical one. They were the interstate highways of the time. The roads themselves were atrocious. It’s a symptom of their general state that an Ohio law set the maximum height for a stump in the road at one foot. And bridges hardly existed. Because shipping by land was too time-consuming and expensive, rivers provided the avenue to markets.
It was one thing to get downriver, with the current carrying rafts or flatboats and their cargo to their destinations. It was quite another to get back upriver. According to George Rogers Taylor, you could get to New Orleans from western Pennsylvania in about a month, but it would take four times as long to get back up—with keel-boats or barges that were poled, pulled, rowed, or sailed back upriver. Often men who took flatboats down to New Orleans had to walk back to where they started. A. H. Chapman said that Thomas Lincoln walked back to Kentucky after two trips to New Orleans.
The advent of the steamboat changed everything. “By 1830,” Taylor writes, “it dominated American river transportation and for two decades thereafter was the most important agency of internal transportation in the country.” It was not only faster and could carry more than primitive boats; it also could power its way back upriver. It took roughly three months to get from New Orleans to above Louisville by keelboat; by the 1850s, a steamboat could do it in about a week. The steamboat was especially important in the Mississippi River valley. “No section of the country,” he explains, “was so completely dependent upon steam for effective transportation, and in no other part of the world were so many steamboats built and operated.”
Lincoln got caught up in the riverine commercial current. One summer, he and Dennis Hanks chopped wood on the bank of the Ohio River to sell for fuel to passing steamboats. They ended up trading nine cords of firewood for nine yards of white domestic cloth. According to Hanks, “Abe had a shirt made, and it was positively the first white shirt which . . . he had ever owned or worn.” Subsequently, and close to the spot where he and Hanks had tried to sell their wood, Lincoln worked for a farmer named James Taylor, who ran a packinghouse and ferry across the Anderson River. Among other tasks, Lincoln operated the ferry. One customer recalled that at low tide he could power the boat across the river “with one sweep of the oars.”
Nearby was the town of Troy, where Lincoln surely spent time and which, compared to his home, might as well have been Paris. “Steamboat traffic brought a cosmopolitan touch to the river towns,” Lincoln biographer Louis Warren writes. “Arrivals and departures provided never-ending excitement. On board were prospective settlers and immigrants with their families and curious travelers from the East and Europe, as well as merchants and boatmen.”
In 1828, he took a flatboat down to New Orleans on behalf of the merchant James Gentry, together with Gentry’s son. The owner of a store in what was still basically a barter economy, Gentry accumulated produce and then found a market for it farther south. Lincoln and Gentry floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, on a trip of twelve hundred miles that would take about two months all told. They traded with the plantations on the banks as they went, before reaching New Orleans. It was one of the biggest cities in the country, a bustling outlet for the products of the lower South and Ohio River valley and the second-largest exporter in the country after New York. “Everybody makes money here,” one observer wrote of the city. “Raw materials are all cheap and labor of every kind dear. The whole western world must come here and they do come and leave their money.”
Shortly after he got back—in all likelihood, via steamboat—Lincoln asked a neighbor for help escaping from his family, to work on a steamboat even though he was still a minor legally obligated to his father. William Wood told Herndon that “Abe came to my house one day and stood around about timid & Shy. I Knew he wanted Something. I said to him—Abe what is your Case. Abe replied—‘Uncle I want you to go to the River—(the Ohio) and give me Some recommendation to some boat.’ I remarked—‘Abe—your age is against you—you are not 21 yet.’ ‘I Know that, but I want a start’ said Abe. I concluded not to go for the boys good.”
Lincoln accompanied his family on another move, this time to Macon County, Illinois, near Decatur. Two yoke of oxen drew the family wagon, which had been put together with wooden pins and had rawhide tires. (According to one account, they stopped in a town where Lincoln saw his first printing press.) After a miserable winter, Lincoln’s father proposed to move again, and Lincoln instead struck out on his own with a bundle of his belongings. He departed a “friendless, uneducated, penniless boy,” in his oft-quoted words, sure of nothing, perhaps, except that he wasn’t going to be a farmer or carpenter, or do anything that entailed working with his hands if he could help it. He had left his family, and he was well and truly gone.
“He never once,” Michael Burlingame writes, “invited Thomas or his wife to Springfield during the entire twenty-four-year span Lincoln lived there.” He didn’t visit his father in 1851 when the latter was dying. In a letter to his stepbrother, he pleaded the press of business and Mary’s illness. However, he added that his stepbrother should tell his father “that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.”
When Lincoln left ho
me, he got his “start” with a figure, the merchant Denton Offutt, who was the opposite of his father in every important respect, for good and mostly ill. Unlike Thomas Lincoln, Offutt was a hard-drinking, unreliable, and improvident huckster. Unlike Thomas Lincoln, he always had an eye on the main chance and lurched from one get-rich-quick scheme to another. Unlike Thomas Lincoln, he saw only limitless possibilities in the young Lincoln and bootstrapped him into his business ventures.
Offutt hired Lincoln, along with two others, to take a flatboat with produce down to New Orleans with him. John Hanks, part of the entourage, described the journey to Herndon and painted a picture of the multifaceted ardors of such a trip at the time. First, “I and Abe went down the Sangamon River from Decatur to Springfield in a canoe.” (Lincoln explained in his own account that melting snows made the roads impassable.) They found a spot where they “cut & cared—& hewed timber to frame a flat boat—80 feet long & 18 feet wide.” They floated the timbers down to Sangamon town in a raft and built the boat while they camped out—“done our own Cooking—mending & washing.” Then the completed boat was “loaded with bacon—pork—Corn & live hogs,” and on its way.
On the return trip, according to Hanks (although Lincoln remembered him not making it all the way to New Orleans), he and Lincoln got back to St. Louis together, and from there they walked. They got “out to Edwards afoot and there the Roads parted, he taking the Charleston–Coles Co Road & I the Decatur Road—both afoot all the way.”