t an early age, Lincoln set off on a quest for meaning. His stepmother stated that as a boy he “must understand Every thing—even to the smallest thing—Minutely & Exactly—he would then repeat it over to himself again & again.”1 Lincoln, when asked in 1860 by the Connecticut minister John P. Gulliver how he achieved his clear, powerful way of speaking, explained that ever since childhood he had sought ceaselessly for clarity. He recalled that the one thing that made him angry as a child was when he could not fully understand the conversations of neighbors who visited the cabin. He described to Gulliver going to his loft and “spending no small part of the night . . . trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings. . . . I was not satisfied until I had repeated over and over, until I put it in language that was plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.”2
Lincoln’s faith in language developed during a cultural journey that began with the books he read in his youth. William Herndon once remarked that Lincoln read deeply but not widely. In this respect, Lincoln was equidistant from two of his famous predecessors: John Quincy Adams, an omnivorous reader who knew six languages, and Andrew Jackson, about whom it was said that the only book, other than the Bible, that he ever read through was Oliver Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield. In childhood, Lincoln read the small number of books that were available to him on the frontier. He read them closely and remembered them later on. When we look at his reading, at school and at home, we see that it planted the seeds for many of his adult traits.
FRONTIER SCHOOLS AND FORMATIVE BOOKS
The schools on the Kentucky-Indiana frontier were single-room log structures, usually windowless and dirt-floored—or, if adapted to the angle of a hillside, floored with rough planks, beneath which hogs gathered, emitting into the schoolroom swarms of fleas that students fended off by laying pokeweed on the planks.3 Also annoying were the plentiful splinters on the logs on which students sat. Because paper was scarce, answers were frequently scratched with charcoal on slate or wood. Much of the school day was devoted to individual and group recitation. The idea behind these “blab” or “vocal” schools was that information could be best imprinted on the memory if spoken aloud—a habit that stuck with Lincoln, who later irritated colleagues in his Springfield law office by constantly reading aloud from newspapers or books.
A school term customarily lasted two or three months and was scheduled not to conflict with the planting and harvesting seasons, when children were needed for farmwork. Because of the unpredictable terms and the sporadic appearance of teachers, schooling for most frontier children was often brief.
Lincoln’s experience was typical. His total time in school, as he reported, was less than one year. He attended five schools for short terms, two in Kentucky before he turned seven and three in Indiana at the ages of eleven, thirteen, and seventeen. His first teacher was Zachariah Riney, whose schoolhouse was located about three miles north of the Lincolns’ Knob Creek home. A Maryland-born Catholic who had moved to Kentucky in 1795, Riney mainly taught Abe spelling, using Thomas Dilworth’s popular Dilworth’s Spelling-Book: A New Guide to the English Tongue. Abe’s next teacher, Caleb Hazel, lived close to the Lincolns and attended the same Baptist church. The son of a tavern keeper, Hazel was briefly trying his hand at teaching. He was a large man who severely punished naughty students. Four years later, after the Lincolns moved to Indiana, Abe attended a school run by Andrew Crawford, a former justice of the peace in Spencer County who taught his students good etiquette along with the three Rs. Next came the school of James Swaney (aka Sweeney), which was four and a half miles away from the Lincolns’ Pigeon Creek home. The distance precluded Abe’s regular attendance at this short-lived school, but Swaney is credited with teaching from Lindley Murray’s English Reader, among the best literary anthologies of the time. Abe’s last teacher, Azel W. Dorsey, was a former election clerk, coroner, and local politician. A man of wide interests, Dorsey was Abe’s best teacher and is especially credited with training the seventeen-year-old Lincoln in basic algebra.
When recalling his frontier education for an 1860 campaign biographer, Lincoln had little positive to say. “There were some schools, so called,” he wrote, “but no qualification was ever required of a teacher, beyond ‘readin, writin, and cipherin,’ to the Rule of Three [that is, basic algebra]. If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizzard [sic]. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.”4 Showing his customary tendency to underplay his background, Lincoln made it seem as if he had little education—an image he also projected in a short autobiography he wrote for a congressional directory in June 1858, where he stated, “Education defective.”5
However, as shown by the experiences of Frederick Douglass, who had no formal schooling yet became one of the century’s most eloquent communicators, or Walt Whitman, a great poet despite having left school at eleven, in nineteenth-century America, as today, a sound education could be found outside the classroom. This was the case with Lincoln. He absorbed the cultural energies of the frontier, and he read books that helped shape his character.
When we survey these eclectic influences—to which can be added newspapers, which he began reading in Indiana in the 1820s—we see that his mind was fed early on by all kinds of sources, high and low, sacred and secular. Absorbing the new religious style of preachers at the same time as crude frontier humor, he was integrating culture in an extraordinarily wide-ranging manner.
His openness to his cultural surroundings laid the basis for his character, which was described by the Illinois attorney John W. Scott:
When you come to analize [sic] his character, the elements that entered into it, you will find that he possessed no one element of character in any higher degree than many of his co[n]temporaries. His greatness sprang from a strange combination of all the essentials of character entering into and forming a grand and heroic character, independent of any one great essential—And such a character is always Self-reliant—6
Scott recognized what Emerson and Whitman stated eloquently—in democratic America, the highest individualism lay in the greatest representativeness: the ability, in Whitman’s phrase, to “contain multitudes.”7
He was an attentive reader, and little was lost on him, especially because he repeated passages aloud and wrote them down whenever he could. The books the young Lincoln read broadened him immeasurably.
In the 1860 campaign biography by John Locke Scripps, authorized by Lincoln, seven books from Lincoln’s early years are highlighted as having been especially formative: Thomas Dilworth’s Spelling-Book, the Bible, Aesop’s Fables, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Mason Locke Weems’s The Life of Washington, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, and James Riley’s Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce. Other books important to the young Lincoln included William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, The Kentucky Preceptor, Noah Webster’s The American Speller, The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Lindley Murray’s The English Reader.8
One of the earliest books he read, Thomas Dilworth’s Spelling-Book, was heavily didactic; it taught reading and spelling through preachy poems, biblical passages, and fables followed by interpretations. Each virtue points humans in a definite direction (lying and atheism lead toward hell, honesty toward heaven, and so on). But its didacticism sometimes contains seeds of radicalism. The first lesson in the book reads: “No man may put off the laws of God; / My joy is in his law all the day”9—a seemingly tame statement, yet one that presaged what for Lincoln and many other Americans would become one of the most controversial concepts of the pre–Civil War decade: the higher law, by which disobedience to human laws was deemed justified or even required if these laws were found to be in violation of God’s law.
Other textbooks Lincoln read were more far-reaching than Dilworth’s. For example, William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution included literary passages such as the soliloquy of Hamlet’s uncle on the murder of his brother (“Oh! My offense is rank; it smells to heaven”), which Lincoln would spontaneously recite during his presidency. Another source of memorable passages was Lindley Murray’s English Reader, which Lincoln later called “the best school-book ever put into the hands of an American youth.”10 This encyclopedic volume contained a range of poetry and prose selections as well as speeches by Cicero, Saint Paul, and others.
Aesop’s Fables proved a fertile source for him. The story about the strength of bundled sticks prompted Lincoln to use the image later in a political circular when encouraging his fellow Whigs to act in unison rather than separately.11 The fable about the lion who surrenders his teeth in order to win the woodman’s daughter and then is beaten to death by the woodman was cited by Lincoln when he refused to make concessions to the Confederacy that he knew would weaken the North.12 Aesop’s tale about two whites who futilely tried to rub away a black man’s skin color reminded Lincoln of Northerners who coldly de-emphasized the African American as a consideration in the war.13
Lincoln’s early reading exposed him to the core values of American democracy.
Take one of his favorite books, James Riley’s Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce. First published in 1817, Riley’s book went through twenty-four editions and enjoyed a lively sale. It was one of the last—and among the most famous—of the so-called Barbary captive narratives that had been written regularly since 1680.14 These narratives, some fictional and others, like Riley’s, based on fact, involved American or British sailors who were captured off the Barbary Coast in northern Africa, taken captive, and held in slavery by their Muslim captors.
Riley makes strong statements against American slavery. Although he portrays the Barbary masters as frequently harsh toward their white slaves, whom they call “Christian dogs,” he points out the inconsistency of America, supposedly the land of equality, holding more than a million black people in slavery. While Riley expresses appreciation for “the blessings of my native land, where political and moral institutions are in themselves the very best of any that prevail in the civilized portion of the globe,” he adds, “and yet, strange as it must appear to the philanthropist, my proud spirited and free countrymen still hold a million of the human species in the most cruel bonds of slavery, who are kept at hard labor and smarting under the savage lash of inhuman mercenary drivers,” and enduring “the miseries of hunger, thirst, imprisonment, cold, nakedness, and even tortures.”15
Riley’s dual message—America has the world’s finest political system, but its democratic ideals are betrayed by the worst form of oppression—came to be shared by Lincoln, who would famously hail his nation as “the last best hope of earth” and yet loathed slavery so much that he chose civil war over tolerating its spread.16
Lincoln also encountered antislavery passages in other books he read in his youth. The Kentucky Preceptor contains a grim story, “The Desperate Negro,” about an enslaved man who slashes his own throat to avoid being whipped by his master. William Grimshaw’s History of the United States indicts slavery as “the climax of human cupidity and turpitude” and cites the pronouncement of human equality in the Declaration of Independence—later to become Lincoln’s favorite text—to predict confidently that slavery would someday be abolished in America.17
It is likely that the young Lincoln, weaned in an antislavery Baptist sect, already had intimations of his later antislavery interpretation of the nation’s founding documents, which he appears to have read in his midteens. The Statutes of Indiana (1824), a law book he borrowed from his friend David Turnham, included as prefaces the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. One of Lincoln’s main achievements as a politician would be to combine the spirit of these three founding texts in a way that convincingly positioned the antislavery argument within the boundaries of the American system. Crystallizing the arguments of other antislavery politicians, he merged the concept behind the Northwest Ordinance—which forbade the extension of slavery in the Western territories north of the Ohio River—with the Declaration’s pronouncement of human equality and the Constitution’s protection of human rights. This antislavery constitutionalism, which he presented most persuasively in the Cooper Union Address in 1860, was grounded in his meditations on the Founders and their ideals as a teenager in Indiana.
DISCOVERING THE FOUNDERS
His interest in the Founders was fanned by The Life of George Washington by the Maryland-born preacher and bookseller Mason Locke Weems. In February 1861, when addressing the New Jersey Senate on a stop on his trip east to assume the presidency, he recalled that “a way back in my childhood the earliest days of my life being able to read, I got hold of a small book, . . . ‘Weems’s Life of Washington.’ I remember all the accounts there given of the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country, especially ‘the crossing the river’ and the contest with the Hessians”18 First published in 1800, Weems’s Washington appeared in expanded form in 1806, containing some new “very curious anecdotes,” including the apocryphal story about the cherry tree. This revised book went through many editions before Weems’s death in 1825. Lincoln read the 1809 edition, with its “curious anecdotes” and its illustrative woodcuts. Lincoln could not know that Weems had made up the story about the young George confessing to his father that he was responsible for cutting down the cherry tree.
But patriotism and candor were not the only virtues Lincoln found in Weems’s book; another was the kind of toughness and athletic prowess that were prized greatly in Lincoln’s frontier region. Weems’s Washington, tall and sturdy, is superlative at sports and fighting. He can throw a stone across the Rappahannock River below Fredericksburg—a feat rarely equaled, Weems informs us. And he is known locally as an athletic champion: “George, like a young Greek training for the Olympic Games, used to turn out with his sturdy young companions ‘to see,’ as they termed it, ‘which was the best man,’ at running, jumping, and wrestling”—activities they pursued into the night.19 Lincoln, too, was known for his strength and sports skills. He could lift heavier weights, throw objects farther, and jump longer than any of his companions. He once mused about who would be the victor if he wrestled with Washington. When reminded that a descendant of Washington’s had reported that the first president “was perhaps the strongest man of his day. . . . And that in his youth he was a frontier wrestler, having never been thrown,” Lincoln remarked, “I can outlift any man. . . . When I was young, I never was thrown.” He added wryly: “If George was loafing around here now, I should be glad to have a tussle with him, and I rather believe that one of the plain people of Illinois would be able to manage the old aristocrat of old Virginia.”20
