Lincoln was also friendly with his two stepsisters, Elizabeth and Matilda, who were, respectively, 10 and 8 years old when they came to Indiana. The stepsiblings of the blended Johnston-Lincoln family got along so well, in fact, that two of them, Elizabeth Johnston and Dennis Hanks, became husband and wife. When their daughter Harriet reached school age, Lincoln invited her to live with his family in Springfield and pursue her education there, which she did.
Education
Lincoln’s own education continued fitfully in Indiana, where he attended ABC schools for brief stretches. Later in life he laconically referred to his education as “defective” and estimated the aggregate of his time spent in school was less than a year.49 In 1852, he said the career of his political hero Henry Clay demonstrated that “in this country, one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.”50 Lincoln may well have been speaking of himself. Even though there “was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education” in frontier Indiana, by the age of 21, he said, “somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three; but that was all.”51 In an 1860 autobiographical sketch written in the third person, he expressed regret at “his want of education,” but added that he “does what he can to supply the want.”52
Lincoln’s earliest surviving composition is a bit of doggerel scribbled in an arithmetic notebook:
Abraham Lincoln
his hand and pen
he will be good
god knows When.53
The Indiana school available to young Abe was a low-ceilinged, flea-infested cabin with a floor of split logs, a chimney of poles and clay, and a window of greased paper. Pupils sat on uncomfortable benches without backs but with splinters aplenty. The young scholars usually studied aloud so that the teacher could tell that they were not daydreaming. In such a “blab school,” the nineteenth-century Indiana novelist Edward Eggleston “found it impossible to determine in his own mind whether the letters ‘b-a-k-e-r’ in his spelling book spelled ‘lady’ or ‘shady.’ ” Eggleston “simply could not force attention upon his mind in the midst of such a din.”54 One Hoosier child “repeated the one word ‘heptorpy’ from morning to noon and from noon till night in order to make the teacher believe that he was studying his lesson.”55 (Such schooling probably accounts for Lincoln’s tendency to read aloud, which irritated his law partner William Herndon. To justify that annoying habit, Lincoln explained: “I catch the idea by 2 senses, for when I read aloud I hear what is read and I see it; and hence 2 senses get it and I remember it better, if I do not understand it better.”)56
Frontier teachers, whose ability to administer physical discipline was as important as their scholastic skills, boarded with families in the neighborhood. Preoccupied with enforcing order, making quill pens, and other chores, they hardly had time, even if they had the inclination, to encourage independent thought and understanding. Because instructional technique involved rote memorization, fast learners stagnated while waiting for slower schoolmates to master a lesson. The punishments these teachers dealt out could be harsh, not only for outright misbehavior but also for simply misspelling a word or miscalculating a sum. A wooden switch was always at hand and used liberally, sometimes to the point of inflicting injury or causing the child to vomit from the pain. Lincoln recalled a teacher who slapped a classmate for mispronouncing the names of the biblical figures Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Far from protesting, some parents encouraged the whipping of their children. Perhaps it was well that the school year was short, extending from the close of the fall harvest to the planting season.
Along Little Pigeon Creek, Lincoln’s teachers were Andrew Crawford, James Swaney, and Azel Dorsey. Only Dorsey left reminiscences of Lincoln, recalling that the boy came to school in buckskins and a raccoon cap, clutching an old arithmetic book, and was remarkable for his “diligence and eagerness.”57 Lincoln’s first Indiana teacher, Crawford, went beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic and tried to instill manners into his backwoods charges. He would have one pupil leave the room and then return, to be formally introduced by another pupil to all the others.
Lincoln, too, tried to civilize his contemporaries by denouncing their mistreatment of animals. On the Midwestern frontier, cruelty to animals was common. At log rollings, men would “round up a chip-munk, a rabbit, or a snake, and make him take refuge in a burning log-heap and watch him squirm and fry.”58 In one of his early bouts of schooling, Lincoln wrote an essay on that subject. As an adolescent, he upbraided John Johnston for smashing the shell of a land turtle against a tree, leaving the suffering animal quivering and defenseless. When his mother urged him to kill a snake, Abe replied: “No, it enjoys living just the same as we do.”59 His stepsister Matilda remembered Abe saying that “an ant[’]s life was to it, as sweet as ours to us.”60
Lincoln’s concern for animals persisted into adulthood. One day while traveling in Illinois, dressed more formally than usual, he saw a pig mired down. Reluctant to soil his clothes, he determined to pass the creature by, but his conscience would not allow him to do so. The imploring look in the porcine eyes seemed to say, “There now! My last hope is gone.” Moved to pity, Lincoln turned back to rescue the unfortunate beast.61 He similarly extricated a mud-bound lamb. When he observed a sow attempting to eat one of her piglets, he declared, “By jings! the unnatural old brute shall not devour her own progeny,” and clubbed her vigorously.62 On another occasion he restored two small birds to their nest. When friends derided him for wasting his time, he responded: “Gentlemen, you may laugh, but I could not have slept well to-night, if I had not saved those birds. Their cries would have rung in my ears.”63 In Pontiac, Illinois, where he was abed one stormy night, Lincoln heard a cat mewing outside in the rain. Moved to pity, he was unable to sleep until he opened the door and let the poor feline enter.
Lincoln also chastised his playmates for cruelty to other youngsters. When they tormented James Grigsby, who stuttered badly, Lincoln stepped in. “Abe took me in charge,” Grigsby recalled, when “rough boys teased me and made fun of me for stuttering. Abe soon showed them how wrong it was and most of them quit.”64
Lincoln composed essays on subjects other than cruelty to animals. He showed a piece he wrote on temperance to his neighbor William Wood, who thought it superior to anything he had read in the press. Lincoln’s enthusiasm for temperance did not keep him from aiding a poor drunkard sleeping along the roadside one bitterly cold evening. To prevent the fellow from freezing to death, Lincoln carried him to the cabin of Dennis Hanks and stayed the night with him. (Most young Hoosiers showed less compassion. According to Edward Eggleston, Indiana boys who found a drunk would often place a large crate over him and weigh it down with logs “that would make escape difficult when the poor wretch should come to himself. It was a sort of rude punishment for inebriety, and it afforded a frog-killing delight to those who executed justice.”)65 Lincoln’s youthful hostility to drink and his kindness to drunks were reflected in a temperance address he delivered many years later. Another lost Lincoln essay, written in 1827 or 1828, dealt with national politics. Wood admired that one, too, and said that it was published. In his twenties, Lincoln often read his first composition, written when he was about 14, to William G. Greene. Lincoln thought highly of that witty piece.
Though his command of spelling was imperfect, Lincoln was far ahead of his schoolmates, whom he often helped out with their spelling. That subject enjoyed pride of place in the frontier curriculum. An Indiana teacher recalled that the “public mind seems impressed with the difficulties of English orthography, and there is a solemn conviction that the chief end of man is to learn to spell.” Edward Eggleston noted that often “the pupil does not know the meaning of a single word in the lesson.” But that mattered little, for the pioneers believed that words “were made to be spelled, and men were probably created that they might spell them. Hence the necessity for sending a pupil through the spelling-book five
times before you allow him to begin to read, or indeed to do anything else.” Each school session, morning and afternoon, typically ended with a long spelling class, and Friday afternoons were entirely devoted to spelling matches, viewed as a kind of spectator sport on the frontier. One day, Andrew Crawford asked his charges to spell “defied” and declared that he would keep them in school until they spelled it properly. None of the pupils could meet the challenge until Anna Roby noticed Lincoln at the window with his finger pointing to his eye. She took the hint, changed her guess from “defyed” to “defied,” and Crawford finally dismissed the class. Lincoln also assisted his chums with their handwriting.
Spelling became a lifetime preoccupation for Lincoln. Even as president he would unhesitatingly admit when he did not know how to spell a word and ask for guidance. Once when he publicly asked a roomful of visitors how to spell “missile,” a government official marveled, “Is there another man in this whole Union who, being President, would have done that? It shows his perfect honesty and simplicity.”66 At a reception in February 1865, Lincoln told Supreme Court Justice David Davis, “I never knew until the other day how to spell the word ‘maintenance.’ … I always thought it was ‘m-a-i-n, main, t-a-i-n, tain, a-n-c-e, ance—maintainance,’ but I find that it is ‘m-a-i-n, main, t-e, te, n-a-n-c-e, nance—maintenance.’ ” An observer called this scene “a spectacle! The President of a great nation at a formal reception, surrounded by many eminent people, statesmen, ministers, scholars, critics and ultrafashionable people—by all sorts—who honestly and unconcernedly, in the most unconventional way, speaks before all, as it were, of a personal thing illustrative of his own deficiency.”67 In 1864, Lincoln again confessed his weakness as a speller: “When I write an official letter I want to be sure it is correct, and I find I am sometimes puzzled to know how to spell the most common word.… I found, about twenty years ago, that I had been spelling one word wrong all my life up to that time.… It is very. I used always to spell it with two r’s—v-e-r-r-y. And then there was another word which I found I had been spelling wrong until I came here to the White House.… It is opportunity. I had always spelled it, op-per-tu-ni-ty.”68 Some fretted that Lincoln’s public confessions of lapses in his learning were “a spectacle” coming from an important man, but Joshua Speed marveled that Lincoln “was never ashamed … to admit his ignorance upon any subject, or the meaning of any word no matter how ridiculous it might make him appear.”69 Leonard Swett, his close friend on the Illinois legal circuit, admiringly observed that Lincoln “was the only man I have ever known who bridged back from middle age to youth and learned to spell well.”70
Lincoln’s schoolmates did not always appreciate his efforts to enlighten them. Anna Roby remembered one evening remarking that the moon was sinking. “That[’]s not so,” he replied; “it don’t really go down; it Seems So. The Earth turns from west to East and the revolution of the Earth Carries us under, as it were; we do the sinking as you call it. The moon as to us is Comparatively still. The moon[’]s sinking is only an Appearance.” The skeptical Miss Roby retorted, “Abe—what a fool you are.”71 Astronomy would remain a lifelong interest of Lincoln’s, as would mathematics. His passion for math, which led him in his forties to master the first six books of Euclid, was initially stimulated by his teachers, by several textbooks, and by a neighbor, James Blair. His math education enabled Lincoln in his early twenties to master surveying speedily; it also helped him develop a keenly analytical mind.
In contests and games with his schoolmates—broad jumping, footracing, putting the shot, hop-step-and-jumping, slapjack, towel ball, stink base, wrestling, I spy, catapult, bull-pen, and horseshoes—Lincoln shone when he could use his exceptional strength to advantage. He was able to sink an axe deeper into a tree and strike a heavier blow with a maul than anyone in the neighborhood. He could easily carry what three other men would have a hard time lifting. In his early twenties, with the aid of a harness, Lincoln hoisted over a thousand pounds. “How he could chop!” Dennis Hanks exclaimed. “His ax would flash and bite into a sugar tree or sycamore, and down it would come. If you heard him fallin’ trees in a clearin’ you would say there was three men at work by the way trees fell.”72
A form of recreation that Lincoln enjoyed little was his father’s favorite, hunting. One of his rare hunting expeditions led Lincoln to kill his father’s dog. One night Abe and John D. Johnston slipped out to join their friends in search of raccoons, only to have the barking of “Joe,” Thomas’s house dog, threaten to disclose their nocturnal escapade. To silence the cur, Lincoln and his comrades took it along on their hunt. After they had caught a coon, they sewed its skin around Joe, who promptly ran toward home. En route the dog was attacked and killed by larger canines. Lincoln recounted this odd tale later in life: “Father was much incensed at his death, but as John and I, scantily protected from the morning wind, stood shivering in the doorway, we felt assured little yellow Joe would never be able again to sound the call for another coon hunt.”73 Such a cruel act by a young man so solicitous of animals suggests that Lincoln’s hostility toward his father ran deep. This uncharacteristic deed may have been Lincoln’s way of retaliating, perhaps unconsciously, against Thomas for having slaughtered young Abe’s beloved pet pig.
For all his enjoyment of sports and games, Lincoln possessed a streak of introversion and a fondness for solitude. He disliked crowds and often preferred to be alone. After Nancy Hanks died in 1818, her son matured quickly and had less time for playmates. As one Indiana neighbor recalled, “he seemed to change in appearance and action.” He “began to exhibit deep thoughtfulness, and was so often lost in studied reflection we could not help noticing the strange turn in his actions. He disclosed rare timidity and sensitiveness, especially in the presence of men and women, and although cheerful enough in the presence of boys, he did not appear to seek our company as earnestly as before.” Another neighbor thought, “Abe was always a man though a boy.” He “would say to his play fellows and other boys—Leave off your boyish ways and be more like men.”74
Lincoln outshone his schoolmates. He arrived at school early, paid close attention to his studies, read and reread his assignments, never wasted time, made swift progress, and always stood at the head of his class. As John Hanks observed, he “worked his way by toil; to learn was hard for him, but he worked Slowly, but Surely.”75 To Anna Roby, Nathaniel Grigsby, and other fellow pupils he often summarized what he had read, using stories and maxims to explain things clearly and simply. He retained that didactic impulse as an adult. It was common for him to read aloud, commenting on a book to a companion. He once discussed Euclid’s geometry with a stableman.
Lincoln devoted most of his leisure, such as it was, to study. He quickly got ahead of his classmates and even his instructors. His stepmother recalled: “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”76 While John D. Johnston attended dances, Abe sat reading by the fire. When working at Josiah Crawford’s farm, he read during lunchtime while other hands sat around chatting, smoking, and chewing tobacco. Crawford’s wife recollected that “while other boys were out hooking water melons & trifling away their time, he was studying his books … he read all our books.… We had a broad wooden shovel on which Abe would work out his sums—wipe off and repeat till it got too black for more: then he would scrape and wash off and repeat again and again.”77 On other jobs, too, he always carried a book to peruse during breaks. Sundays he devoted his free time to reading. Walking to and from school, he read aloud at such a decibel level that his voice could be heard for a gre
at distance. In 1828, Lincoln spent a few weeks at the Rockport home of Daniel Grass, whose books he enjoyed. In the evenings he would lie before the fireplace so that he could read, sometimes until midnight or later. When he worked with John Hanks, Lincoln would return to the house at day’s end, grab a piece of cornbread, and con a book.
Lincoln allegedly told a friend that “he had got hold of and read through every book he ever heard of in that country for a circuit of about fifty miles,” but Elizabeth Crawford recalled that he was more selective. If he picked up a book he thought was not worth his time, “he would close it up and Smile and Say I don[’]t think this would pay to read it.”78 Henry C. Whitney agreed that Lincoln was selective and that he would skim parts of the longer books, or skip around through the chapters. Still, Lincoln always liked to have a book at hand for meals (or at least be with someone who could hold an intelligent conversation) and would diligently jot down passages from his reading that particularly struck him.
Reading helped liberate Lincoln from his backwoods environment. In middle age he said that before Johann Gutenberg’s great invention, “the great mass of men, at that time, were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were capable of improvement. They not only looked upon the educated few as superior beings; but they supposed themselves to be naturally incapable of rising to equality. To immanci-pate the mind from this false and under estimate of itself, is the great task which printing came into the world to perform.”79 Print performed exactly that task for Lincoln, emancipating his mind and firing his ambition.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 7
