His contemporaries attributed prodigies of reading to him, but books were scarce on the frontier and he had to read carefully rather than extensively. He memorized a great deal of what he read. “When he came across a passage that struck him,” his stepmother remembered, “he would write it down on boards if he had no paper and keep it there till he did get paper—then he would re-write it—look at it [and] repeat it.”
Other than classroom texts, his first books were the few that Sarah Bush Lincoln had brought with her from Kentucky. One was her family Bible. Abraham read it at times, she remembered, “though not as much as said: he sought more congenial books—suitable for his age.” The Pilgrim’s Progress was one of them, and the biblical cadences of Lincoln’s later speeches owed much to John Bunyan. Another of Sarah Bush Lincoln’s books was Aesop’s Fables, which it was said Abraham read so many times that he could write it out from memory. The morals of some of the stories became deeply ingrained in his mind, like the lesson drawn from the fable of the lion and the four bulls: “A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.” In his stepmother’s copy of Lessons in Elocution, by William Scott, he studied basic lessons on elocution, and the selections in this book were probably his introduction to Shakespeare. Among the set pieces it included was King Claudius’s soliloquy on his murder of Hamlet’s father, “O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven.” It remained one of Lincoln’s favorite passages.
History also fascinated him. He probably read William Grimshaw’s History of the United States, which began with the discovery of America and ended with the annexation of Florida. With a sharp denunciation of slavery as “a climax of human cupidity and turpitude,” Grimshaw stressed the importance of the American Revolution and exhorted students: “Let us not only declare by words, but demonstrate by our actions, that ‘all men are created equal.’” Even more than history, biography interested young Lincoln. He enjoyed the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, but it was Parson Mason Weems’s Life of George Washington that stirred his imagination. Many years later, when he was on his way to Washington and his first inaugural, he told the New Jersey Senate that Weems’s account of Washington’s heroic struggles at Trenton—“the crossing of the river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships endured at that time”—had made an indelible mark on his mind. “I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was,” he said, “that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.”
The pioneer schools of Indiana also gave Lincoln a good grounding in elementary mathematics. His teachers probably never used an arithmetic textbook but drew their problems from two handbooks, Thomas Dilworth’s Schoolmaster’s Assistant and Zachariah Jess’s American Tutor’s Assistant. Because paper was scarce, he often had to cipher on boards, and, his stepmother recalled, “when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again.” Then from somewhere he found a few sheets of paper, which he sewed together to form a little notebook in which to write down the problems and his answers. In it he recorded complicated calculations involving multiplication (like 34,567,834 × 23,423) and division (such as 4,375,702 divided by 2,432), which he completed with exceptional accuracy, and he also solved problems concerning weights and measures, and figured discounts and simple interest. Apparently ratio and proportion taxed his instructors to their limits, but he was able to work out simple problems such as: “If 3 oz of silver cost 17s[hillings] what will 48 oz Cost.” Neither the student nor the teachers seemed quite to get the idea of “casting out nines,” a cumbersome and inaccurate method of verifying long division. Nevertheless, he liked the logic and the precision of mathematics, and years later, after serving a term in Congress, he went back to the subject and worked his way through most of a geometry textbook.
What Lincoln learned from school was not all in books. Here for the first time he had a chance to see children from other families and to pit his wits against theirs. Taller than most of the other students, he wore a coonskin cap and buckskin pants that were always too short, so that, a classmate remembered, “there was bare and naked six or more inches of Abe Lincoln’s shin bone.” Unconscious of his peculiar appearance, he would rapidly gather the other students around him, cracking jokes, telling stories, making plans. Almost from the beginning he took his place as a leader. His classmates admired his ability to tell stories and make rhymes, and they enjoyed his first efforts at public speaking. In their eyes he was clearly exceptional, and he carried away from his brief schooling the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal.
VI
These happy years of Lincoln’s boyhood were short, for his relationship with his father began to deteriorate. Thomas was perceptibly aging. After an exceptional burst of energy at the time of his second marriage, he began to slow down. He was probably not in good health, for one neighbor remembered that he became blind in one eye and lost sight in the other. He was not a lazy man, another settler reported, but “a tinker—a piddler—always doing but doing nothing great.”
He was under considerable financial pressure after his marriage because he had to support a household of eight people. For a time he could rely on Dennis Hanks to help provide for his large family, but in 1821 Dennis married Elizabeth Johnston, Sarah Bush Lincoln’s daughter, and moved to his own homestead a half mile or so away. As Abraham became an adolescent, his father grew more and more to depend on him for the “farming, grubbing, hoeing, making fences” necessary to keep the family afloat. He also regularly hired his son out to work for other farmers in the vicinity, and by law he was entitled to everything the boy earned until he came of age.
Generally an easygoing man, who, according to Dennis Hanks, “could beat his son telling a story—cracking a joke,” Thomas Lincoln was not a harsh father or a brutal disciplinarian. He encouraged Abraham to go to school, though he had a somewhat limited idea of what an education consisted of, and he rarely interrupted his son’s studies. “As a usual thing,” Sarah Bush Lincoln remembered, “Mr Lincoln never made Abe quit reading to do any thing if he could avoid it. He would do it himself first.” But Dennis Hanks said that Thomas thought his son spent too much time on his books, “having sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading.” The father would not tolerate impudence. When Abraham as a little boy thrust himself into adult conversations, Thomas sometimes struck him. Then, as Hanks recalled, young Abraham “never balked, but dropt a kind of silent unwelcome tear, as evidence of his sensations.”
As Abraham became a teenager, he began to distance himself from his father. His sense of alienation may have originated at the time of his mother’s death, when he needed more support and compassion than his stolid father was able to give. It increased as the boy got older. Perhaps he felt that his place in the household had been usurped by the second family Thomas Lincoln acquired when he remarried; contemporaries noted that Thomas seemed to favor the stepson, John D. Johnston, more than he did his own son. He disagreed with his father over religion. In 1823, Thomas Lincoln and his wife joined the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church, as did his daughter Sarah soon afterward; but Abraham made no move toward membership. Indeed, as his stepmother said, “Abe had no particular religion—didn’t think of these question[s] at that time, if he ever did.” That difference appears to have led to the sharpest words he ever received from his father. Though Abraham did not belong to the church, he attended the sermons, and afterward, climbing on a tree stump, he would rally the other children around him and repeat—or sometimes parody—the minister’s words. Offended, Thomas, as one of the children recalled, “would come and make him quit—send him to work.”
The heavy chores he had to perform contributed to his dissatisfaction. The boy had limited energy because at about the age of twelve he began growing so rapidly. By the time he was sixteen he had shot up to six feet, two inches tall, though he weighed only about one hundred and sixty pounds. One contemporary remembered he was so skinny that he had a spidery look.
He grew so fast that he was tired all the time, and he showed a notable lack of enthusiasm for physical labor. “Lincoln was lazy—a very lazy man,” Dennis Hanks concluded. “He was always reading—scribbling—writing—ciphering—writing Poetry.” The neighbors for whom he worked agreed that he was “awful lazy,” and, as one remarked, “he was no hand to pitch in at work like killing snakes.” Their dissatisfaction doubtless contributed to the friction between father and son.
But Abraham’s pulling away from his father was something more significant than a teenage rebellion. Abraham had made a quiet reassessment of the life that Thomas lived. He kept his judgment to himself, but years later it crept into his scornful statements that his father “grew up, litterally without education,” that he “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name,” and that he chose to settle in a region where “there was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.” To Abraham Lincoln that was a damning verdict. In all of his published writings, and, indeed, even in reports of hundreds of stories and conversations, he had not one favorable word to say about his father.
VII
By the time Abraham Lincoln was in his late teens, he was itching to get away from Little Pigeon Creek. One after another, his ties to home and to the community were snapped. When he was seventeen, his sister, Sarah, married a neighbor, Aaron Grigsby, and the couple set up housekeeping several miles from the Lincoln cabin. Then Matilda, Sarah Bush Lincoln’s youngest daughter, who had been very fond of Abraham, married Squire Hall and also moved away. A year and a half later Sarah Lincoln Grigsby died in childbirth. Abraham blamed the death of his sister on the negligence of the Grigsbys in sending for a doctor, and the ensuing quarrel further alienated him from his Little Pigeon Creek neighbors.
Increasingly he began to go farther afield from his father’s cabin. A contemporary remembered that he went all over the county attending “house raisings, log rolling corn shucking and workings of all kinds.” To be sure, he got bored easily and on many of these occasions, as Dennis Hanks remembered, “would Commence his pranks—tricks—jokes stories, and ... all would stop—gather around Abe and listen.” At the age of seventeen he, together with Dennis Hanks and Squire Hall, got the idea of making money by selling firewood to the steamers plying the Ohio River, and they set to work sawing logs at Posey’s Landing, only to find that demand was slack and money was scarce. They were finally able to swap nine cords of firewood for nine yards of white domestic cloth, out of which, Hanks reported, “Abe had a shirt made, and it was positively the first white shirt which ... he had ever owned or worn.” Next he hired out to James Taylor, who ran a ferry along the Anderson River in the same vicinity; when he was not helping on the river, he plowed, killed hogs, and made fences, doing what he remembered as “the roughest work a young man could be made to do.” He earned $6 a month, with 314 extra on days when he slaughtered hogs. In what spare time he had, he built a little flatboat, or rowboat. When two men asked him to row them out into the river so that they could take passage on a steamer that was coming downstream, he sculled them out, helped them aboard, and lifted their heavy trunks onto the deck. As they left, each of them tossed a silver half-dollar on the floor of his boat in payment. “I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money,” Lincoln recalled nearly forty years later. “I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day The world seemed wider and fairer before me.”
The lure of the river was irresistible, promising escape from the constricted world of Little Pigeon Creek. In 1828, when James Gentry, who owned the local store, decided to send a cargo of meat, corn, and flour down the rivers for sale in New Orleans, Lincoln accepted the offer to accompany his son, Allen, on the flatboat, at a wage of $8 a month. They made a leisurely trip, stopping frequently to trade at the sugar plantations along the river in Louisiana, until the dreamlike quality of their journey was rudely interrupted. “One night,” as Lincoln remembered, “they were attacked by seven negroes with intent to kill and rob them. They were hurt some in the melee, but succeeded in driving the negroes from the boat, and then ‘cut cable’ ‘weighed anchor’ and left.” New Orleans was by far the largest city the two country boys had ever seen, with imposing buildings, busy shops, and incessant traffic. Here they heard French spoken as readily as English. In New Orleans, Lincoln for the first time encountered large numbers of slaves. But neither boy made any record of their visit to the Crescent City; perhaps it was too overwhelming.
Returning to Indiana, Lincoln dutifully handed over his earnings to his father, but he began to spend more and more time away from home. He liked to go to the village of Gentryville, about a mile and a half away, where he occasionally helped out at James Gentry’s store, and he worked sometimes with John Baldwin, the local blacksmith. As always, he was full of talk and plans and jokes and tricks, and he gathered about him all the young men who were about to come of age and were restless in the narrow society of southern Indiana.
In the spring of 1829, Lincoln and his little gang pulled off the most imaginative, and longest remembered, of their pranks when two sons of Reuben Grigsby—Reuben, Jr., and Charles—were married. The Lincolns had been carrying on something of a feud with the Grigsby family since Sarah’s death, and when Abraham was not invited to the wedding celebration, he “felt miffed—insulted.” Through a confederate he arranged that when the party was over and the bridegrooms were brought upstairs to their waiting brides, they would be led to the wrong beds. The mix-up was, of course, immediately discovered, but it became the cause of great gossip and much laughter in the Gentryville community. Its fame grew because Lincoln wrote out a scurrilous description of the affair, which he entitled “The Chronicles of Reuben.” In language supposed to be reminiscent of the Scriptures, he recounted the story and then went on in verse to tell of another Grigsby brother, Billy, who was turned down by the girl he wooed:
You cursed baldhead,
My suitor you never can be;
Besides, your low crotch proclaims you a botch
And that never can answer for me.
Rejected, Billy turned to a male lover, Natty:
... he is married to Natty.
So Billy and Natty agreed very well;
And mamma’s well pleased at the match.
Years afterward the doggerel was still remembered in southern Indiana. According to one settler, parts of it were known “better than the Bible—better than Watts hymns.”
If the whole episode had any significance, it indicated that Lincoln needed to break away from home. He realized this as well as anyone. He longed to become a steamboat man and asked a neighbor, William Wood, to go with him to the Ohio River and give him a recommendation to a ship’s captain. “Abe,” Wood said, “your age is against you—you are not 21 yet.” “I know that,” the young man replied, “but I want a start.” Unwilling to break the law or to offend his neighbor, Thomas Lincoln, Wood did make some discreet, though unsuccessful, inquiries in Abraham’s behalf in Rockport.
But Abraham still legally owed Thomas Lincoln another year of labor, and he remained with his father out of obligation and with his stepmother out of affection. Early in 1830 he helped them move from Spencer County, Indiana, into Macon County, Illinois. John Hanks had already settled there and sent back glowing reports of the fertility of the Illinois lands, and Dennis Hanks was eager to move with his family. A rumor of a new outbreak of the milk sickness in southern Indiana triggered the Lincolns’ decision to go with them. Selling his land, his hogs, and his corn, Thomas Lincoln gathered up his household, and in March started off in a wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen.
Abraham did his best to keep the company cheerful, making jokes as he goaded on the oxen. Such roads as there were proved almost impassable; the ground was still frozen from winter, and it melted a little each day only to freeze back at night. When the party crossed the Wabash River at Vincennes, the river was so high that the road was covered with water for half a mile
at a stretch. Everywhere the streams were swollen, and usually there were no bridges. At one crossing Lincoln’s favorite little fice dog jumped from the wagon, broke through the ice, and began struggling for his life. “I could not bear to lose my dog,” Lincoln recalled many years later, “and I jumped out of the waggon and waded waist deep in the ice and water[,] got hold of him and helped out and saved him.”
After passing through the village of Decatur, which consisted of fewer than a dozen log cabins, the Lincolns went on about ten miles to a tract of land on the north bank of the Sangamon River, which John Hanks had staked out for them. That summer they broke up fifteen acres of land, and Abraham and John Hanks split the rails to fence them in. Abraham already felt so much at home in Illinois that he signed a petition, along with forty-four other “qualified voters,” asking for a change of polling place for elections—even though he had not lived in the state the six months required to qualify as an elector.
That summer, too, he made his first political speech, addressing a campaign meeting in front of Renshaw’s store in Decatur. Two established politicians, candidates for the state legislature, made addresses, and when they failed to follow custom and offer the crowd something to drink, the boys about the store urged Lincoln to reply, expecting him to ridicule the candidates’ stinginess. It was a small affair, but a notable step in Abraham’s continuing effort to distance himself from his father. To put himself forward and make a public speech was something that Thomas Lincoln would never have dreamed of doing. But Abraham had for several years been reading anti-Jackson National Republican newspapers, like the Louisville Journal, and he ardently favored Henry Clay’s “American System,” which called for internal improvements, a protective tariff, and a national bank. He surprised his audience at Decatur, which had been expecting some rude political humor, with a plea for improving the Sangamon River for transportation. Showing no evidence of stage fright except for frequently shifting his position to ease his feet, he ended with an eloquent picture of the future of Illinois.
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