Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

  Schooling options were extremely limited on the Kentucky frontier, especially for children of the poor. Lincoln’s earliest education took place in what was known as an A.B.C. school—a school that taught the alphabet, but not much more. Most teachers in these schools were only minimally qualified for the job. They offered basic reading and penmanship, and possibly simple arithmetic.

  Young Abraham attended an A.B.C. school near his house for a short time when he was seven years old. Many years later, one of Lincoln’s childhood neighbors recalled the teacher in unflattering terms. In the neighbor’s memory, this young man could “perhaps teach spelling, reading and indifferent writing and perhaps could cipher to the rule of three (a way of calculating proportions), but had no other qualifications of a teacher except large size and bodily strength to thrash any boy or youth that came to his school.”35 In a small, poorly heated room where students of all ages spent long hours sitting uncomfortably together on backless benches, such a talent probably came in handy.

  After Thomas Lincoln lost his title claims, he decided to move his family to southern Indiana. He staked out a parcel of remote forestland in what is now Spencer County, and the family came to live there at the end of 1816, just as Indiana became a state. The Lincolns’ new home was even less settled than Kentucky. Bear and other wild animals still filled the forests. Dense stands of trees and underbrush had to be backbreakingly cleared before any planting could take place. Abraham became skilled with an axe while still a child, leading to his later nickname, “Rail Splitter.” During the presidential campaign of 1860, both sides referred to him this way. To his supporters, the name was an indication of his strength and grit, but to his detractors, it was a reminder of his lowly background.

  Lincoln’s next bout of schooling took place in the winter of 1820 when he was eleven years old. A little over a year earlier, his mother had died. His father had recently remarried a widow named Sarah Bush who had three small children. Lincoln, his older sister, Sarah, and his three stepsiblings were all sent to a fee-charging school about a mile from their farm. It was a common type of frontier school known as a “blab” school. Because books and writing implements were scarce, classes at blab schools were mostly oral. Teachers recited the lesson to the students, who would repeat it back in unison until they had it memorized. Individual students would then recite what they’d learned. Sometimes the children would also take turns reading aloud from whatever schoolbooks were available. All ages and both sexes went to these one-room schools.

  As an adult, Lincoln was contemptuous of the “schools, so called” that he attended as a child, saying, “No qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond ‘readin, writin, and cipherin’.” Expectations for education were so low that if anyone in the neighborhood was rumored to understand Latin, “he was looked upon as a wizard.”36 Lincoln attended his first blab school for only one winter term. When the weather warmed up, he was needed around the farm. He later attended similar schools sporadically, ending his formal education when he was about fifteen. Skimpy as the subject offerings were at these schools, they gave the young man the foundation he needed to keep learning on his own.

  Lincoln started his self-education in the same way as so many other people of the time—with spellers, readers, and grammar books. His familiarity with spellers started in childhood when he and his sister studied Dilworth’s spelling book. In the early nineteenth century, Dilworth was still ubiquitous, even on the Kentucky frontier. It was probably one of the few books found at the A.B.C. school. Lincoln later obtained Webster’s speller and several readers, including Murray’s. He once commented that Murray’s reader was “the best schoolbook ever placed in the hands of a child.”37 Another favorite reader was a collection of literary excerpts titled The Kentucky Preceptor. He committed several of the Kentucky Preceptor’s selections to memory.

  After the move to Indiana, Lincoln graduated to books other than texts. His stepmother owned several books, including Aesop’s Fables, the popular Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution. Morally improving books such as these were the most commonly owned volumes, after textbooks and the Bible. Lincoln read and reread them. He also got hold of an etymological dictionary from one of his mother’s relatives.

  Scott’s elocution book, a collection of excerpts from well-known authors, is designed to turn students into polished readers, writers, and speakers. It includes prose, poetry, speeches, sermons, and passages from famous plays such as Hamlet. For completeness, the author provides an introduction to English grammar in an appendix. Here are the familiar rules, beginning with definitions of the parts of speech. The appendix ends with a discussion of common grammar errors—between you and I, who did you give it to, this is them, more wiser. These notes were probably Lincoln’s first introduction to standard grammar rules.

  Scott encourages his readers to learn chunks of the text by heart and practice reciting them while standing. Lincoln may have done this, as he was a strong memorizer. His stepmother recalled that whenever he lit on a passage in a book that appealed to him, he scribbled it down—on boards if no paper was at hand—and repeated it until he learned it. No doubt his capacity for memorization helped him when he began to study grammar, and more complicated subjects like the law.

  When Lincoln exhausted his stepmother’s small supply of books, he borrowed whatever he could get from neighbors. The Lincoln family was always in dire need of money, so Lincoln’s father often hired out his adolescent son to do rough jobs like clearing brush and mending fences. While working at the neighbors’ homesteads, Lincoln took advantage of their libraries. He told an acquaintance that as a young man he had borrowed and read every book he could hear of for fifty miles around. He read biographies of Franklin and Washington. He also enjoyed the poetry of Robert Burns and Shakespeare’s plays, and memorized long passages of both.

  The Lincoln family moved yet again to central Illinois in 1830, when Lincoln was twenty-one. By late 1832, he was living on his own in New Salem, a village along the Sangamon River. He was earning an uncertain living as the co-owner of a New Salem general store, but his ambitions reached much further. He took a lively interest in local politics and had already run unsuccessfully for the state legislature. He was also contemplating the possibility of studying for a law degree. He decided that he needed to know more about grammar.

  Lincoln’s interest in serious grammar study came at a time in his life when he was struggling financially and had not yet settled on his ultimate life’s work. Like many other adult learners, he realized that a knowledge of standard grammar would give him an advantage, no matter which direction he chose to take. Sharper writing and speaking skills were always valuable.

  He learned that a farmer in the area owned a copy of Kirkham’s English Grammar in Familiar Lectures. By the 1830s Kirkham was seriously challenging the dominance of Murray’s English Grammar and Lincoln apparently decided that it was worth walking several miles to borrow the farmer’s copy. He then set about mastering the book in the traditional way. He systematically committed large portions of it to memory. He also asked for help from his friends, including the local schoolmaster. With the book as a guide, they would ask the young man questions—“What is a noun?” He would respond with the memorized phrase—“A noun is the name of any person, place, or thing.”

  The store was seldom busy, so Lincoln had plenty of time to spare for his studies. He completed his study of the book in only a few weeks, helped by Lynn M. Greene, a fellow New Salem resident who was attending Illinois College. Before entering college, Greene may have had to pass a grammar exam. He definitely would have worked his way through several grammar books, so he would have been able to tutor Lincoln in the fine points. Lincoln also borrowed a copy of Murray from another friend and spent time working through that volume as well. Lincoln was proud of his proficiency in standard grammar. When writing a sketch of his life for his campaign biographer, he noted that he had “s
tudied English grammar, imperfectly of course, but so as to speak and write as well as he now does.”38 Lincoln later went on to educate himself in the law and passed his bar exam in 1836.

  Lincoln’s opponents brutally criticized his grammatical skills during the 1860 presidential contest. The nomination of Lincoln as the Republican candidate for the presidency caught many people by surprise. Having only served one term in Congress before losing reelection, he was not as well known or experienced as the other three contenders. However, he had impressed Republicans with his performance in a series of debates against Democrat Stephen Douglas during the 1858 Illinois senate race. He had also delivered a masterful speech at Manhattan’s Cooper Union several months before the nominating convention. In the Cooper Union speech he argued against expanding slavery into the territories.

  Democrats, angered by Lincoln’s antislavery stance, reacted to his nomination with furious disgust. Democratic newspapers attacked him in the most personal and insulting terms. His modest family background, his ungainly appearance, his youthful work as a rail splitter—all were fodder for hostile editors. One major source of criticism was his supposed ignorance of proper grammar.

  After the nomination was announced, the New York Herald expressed its outrage that the Republican Party, in “a remarkable instance of small intellect growing smaller,” had selected a “third-rate western lawyer.” The newspaper fulminates, “They pass over Seward, Chase, and Banks, who are statesmen and able men, and they take up a fourth-rate lecturer who cannot speak good grammar.” The editor then reveals the main cause of his complaint—Lincoln’s recent public speeches. He reminds readers that Lincoln has been in New York during the past few months, delivering “his hackneyed, illiterate compositions at two hundred dollars apiece.… when in return for the most unmitigated trash, interlaced with coarse and clumsy jokes, he filled his empty pockets with dollars coined out of Republican fanaticism.”39

  Other newspapers jumped on the same bandwagon. The Albany Atlas and Argus declares, “He … is not known except as a slang-whanging stump speaker.” The Philadelphia Evening Journal compares his style unfavorably with that of his main rival for the nomination, Sen. William Seward: “His coarse language, his illiterate style, and his vulgar and vituperative personalities in debate contrast very strongly with the elegant and classical oratory of the eminent Senator from New York.”40

  The newspapers’ criticisms of Lincoln’s grammar were probably not meant to be taken literally. As the New York Herald editor’s remarks indicate, Lincoln was a popular and respected public speaker, which suggests some skill in putting sentences together. “Bad grammar” was really a code phrase. Saying that Lincoln didn’t know how to use language correctly was an indirect way of saying that he was from the lower classes and therefore unworthy to be president. Ignorance of standard grammar implied a whole range of other social deficits. The newspapers’ readers would have gotten the message. In contrast Senator Seward, the son of a prosperous businessman and a graduate of Union College in Schenectady, New York, was credited with superior linguistic abilities.

  Many people in Lincoln’s contemporary audiences thought his unadorned prose style was too simple and unpolished. Mid-nineteenth-century listeners expected heavily ornamented speeches full of extended metaphors and classical allusions. Lincoln’s approach was more straightforward. Like Andrew Jackson, David Crockett, and other frontier politicians, he often made use of the colloquial style. In his daily life, he used regionalisms like reckon and howdy. He also had a habit of telling humorous backwoods tales that struck some of his associates as undignified. Yet Lincoln’s speeches have come down to us as among the most moving and memorable ever heard in this country. Contrary to what his enemies claimed, his speeches were carefully constructed. Lincoln was adept at the familiar style, but made effective use of the elevated style when the occasion called for it.41

  Lincoln’s well-known speeches show, among other things, that he had a sophisticated understanding of standard grammar. For example, the speech that he gave at Cooper Union on February 27, 1860, demonstrates correct use of several common grammar rules. He uses nominative case after the verb to be (“It was not we, but you, who discarded the old policy of the fathers”); uses the present subjunctive unless you be rather than unless you are (“Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please”); and correctly keeps the preposition among with its object whom (“I give [the Democrats] … all other living men … among whom to search”).

  The Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863, includes the specialized use of shall with third person to promise or express determination (“We here highly resolve … that government of the people, for the people, by the people shall not perish from the earth”). As early as the 1780s, Noah Webster had complained that few people knew the proper uses of will and shall. By the early nineteenth century, these specialized uses would have been even less common outside of grammar books. Yet Lincoln obviously understood them.

  None of the formal grammar rules that Lincoln applies in his speeches would have been acquired naturally while growing up on the Indiana frontier. He could only have learned them by studying Kirkham, Murray, and other grammarians. Grammar books promised to set their users on the path to scholarly and social achievement. In this case at least, those promises were fulfilled.

  4.

  Rational Grammar

  In spite of Lindley Murray’s overwhelming popularity during the 1820s, linguistic reform was far from dead. While Noah Webster was laboring on his landmark dictionary, other grammarians took up the banner of natural American speech. Like him, they called for a more realistic approach to grammar, often using the same arguments as Webster—that grammar should be based on how people really speak and that common usages should be acceptable. They rejected Latin-based rules, just as he did.

  The “rational” grammarians were like Webster in another way, too. They had fallen under the compelling influence of John Horne Tooke. Their fascination with his theory of word origins would prove to be a fatal diversion. Sensible grammar reforms were lost in the welter of long-winded arguments that prepositions, adjectives, and other parts of speech had originated as nouns or verbs. As a result, their books suffered the same failure as Webster’s Philosophical and Practical Grammar. Reviewers, teachers, and the few members of the general public who were aware of these alternative grammar books preferred to cling to their trusty copies of Murray or Kirkham.

  The most prominent of the reforming grammarians was a Bostonian educator and textbook writer named William Bentley Fowle. At around the same time that Andrew Jackson was preparing for his first inauguration, Fowle was writing to argue for an English grammar uncluttered by artificially imposed rules. “It is to be regretted,” he writes in his 1827 book The True English Grammar, “that a grammar of our language was not formed at a period when our ancestors were free from any servile deference to Latin.”

  Fowle notes that Lowth modeled his grammar on Latin partly as a way to familiarize students with Latin terminology before they went on to study that language. For most students, however, learning Latin grammatical categories is a waste of time. “Not more than one child in a thousand studies Latin after having studied English grammar,” argues Fowle. Since Latin is reserved for the privileged few, “is it not wiser to have a grammar which we can call our own?” In the true Jacksonian spirit, he calls on Americans to adopt the vernacular of “the common people.” Although their nonstandard usages often “bring upon them the sneer of grammarians,” these speakers are adhering to a more natural form of the language.1

  Fowle’s early experiences with grammar influenced his later attitudes. He was born in 1795, the third son of highly educated, though poor, parents. His father, Henry, had originally planned to pursue a literary career, but money troubles and a fast-growing family forced him into the trade of pump and block making. He nonetheless managed t
o keep up his interest in books and scholarship and owned a large, carefully chosen library. He sent his son to school at the unusually early age of three.

  Young William first attended a “dame school”—a school for small children run by a woman rather than a schoolmaster. There he started his mental training by memorizing the Westminster Assembly’s “Shorter Catechism.” He learned it so thoroughly that he could repeat the whole thing “backwards as well as forwards,” much to the delight of his teacher. She often called on him to perform this feat in front of school visitors. Fowle recalled, however, that he didn’t understand much of the meaning in either direction.2 This experience contributed to his later belief that memorization was a poor way to learn.

  William’s talent for rote learning stood him in good stead when he began studying grammar a few years later. By the age of six he had memorized Caleb Bingham’s popular grammar book for young children, The Young Ladies’ Accidence. Next he tackled an abridged version of Lindley Murray’s grammar and soon had that committed to memory as well. At the age of ten he won a medal for grammar knowledge.

  In spite of these achievements, Fowle hated grammar. He describes his early grammar classes in The Teacher’s Institute, an advice book for young teachers that he wrote after twenty years as a schoolmaster. He recalls that pupils sat on twelve long benches, with six or eight boys to a bench. Each bench represented a different “form,” or level of scholarly achievement. The boys took turns reciting grammar lessons at the rate of one bench a day, progressing from the more advanced pupils on the front benches to the less skilled at the back. A grammar lesson typically consisted of a boy spelling a few words and then reciting at least six lines memorized from the grammar book.