Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
If Lincoln’s developing self-confidence was fostered initially by his mother’s love and approval, it was later sustained by his stepmother, who came to love him as if he were her own child. Early on, Sarah Bush Lincoln recognized that Abraham was “a Boy of uncommon natural Talents.” Though uneducated herself, she did all she could to encourage him to read, learn, and grow. “His mind & mine—what little I had seemed to run together—move in the same channel,” she later said. “Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused in fact, or Even in appearance, to do any thing I requested him. I never gave him a cross word in all my life. He was Kind to Every body and Every thing and always accommodate[d] others if he could—would do so willingly if he could.” Young Lincoln’s self-assurance was enhanced by his physical size and strength, qualities that were valued highly on the frontier. “He was a strong, athletic boy,” one friend related, “good-natured, and ready to out-run, out-jump and outwrestle or out-lift anybody in the neighborhood.”
In their early years, each of his rivals shared a similar awareness of unusual talents, but Lincoln faced much longer odds to realize his ambitions. His voyage would require a Herculean feat of self-creation. Perhaps the best evidence of his exceptional nature, as well as the genesis of his great gift for storytelling, is manifest in the eagerness with which, even at six or seven, he listened to the stories the adults exchanged as they sat by his father’s fireplace at night. Knob Creek farm, where Lincoln lived from the age of two until seven, stood along the old Cumberland Trail that stretched from Louisville to Nashville. Caravans of pioneers passed by each day heading toward the Northwest—farmers, peddlers, preachers, each with a tale to tell.
Night after night, Thomas Lincoln would swap tales with visitors and neighbors while his young son sat transfixed in the corner. In these sociable settings, Thomas was in his element. A born storyteller, he possessed a quick wit, a talent for mimicry, and an uncanny memory for exceptional stories. These qualities would prove his greatest bequest to his son. Young Abe listened so intently to these stories, crafted from experiences of everyday life, that the words became embedded in his memory. Nothing was more upsetting to him, he recalled decades later, nothing made him angrier, than his inability to comprehend everything that was told.
After listening to adults chatter through the evening, he would spend, he said, “no small part of the night walking up and down, and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings.” Unable to sleep, he would reformulate the conversations until, as he recalled, “I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.” The following day, having translated the stories into words and ideas that his friends could grasp, he would climb onto the tree stump or log that served as an impromptu stage and mesmerize his own circle of young listeners. He had discovered the pride and pleasure an attentive audience could bestow. This great storytelling talent and oratorical skill would eventually constitute his stock-in-trade throughout both his legal and political careers. The passion for rendering experience into powerful language remained with Lincoln throughout his life.
The only schools in rural Kentucky and Indiana were subscription schools, requiring families to pay a tuition. Even when frontier families could afford the expense, their children did not always receive much education. “No qualification was ever required of a teacher,” Lincoln recalled, “beyond
‘readin, writin, and cipherin,’
to the Rule of Three. If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizzard.” Allowed to attend school only “by littles” between stints of farmwork, “the aggregate of all his schooling,” Lincoln admitted years later, “did not amount to one year.” He had never even set foot “inside of a college or academy building” until he acquired his license to practice law. What he had in the way of education, he lamented, he had to pick up on his own.
Books became his academy, his college. The printed word united his mind with the great minds of generations past. Relatives and neighbors recalled that he scoured the countryside for books and read every volume “he could lay his hands on.” At a time when ownership of books remained “a luxury for those Americans living outside the purview of the middle class,” gaining access to reading material proved difficult. When Lincoln obtained copies of the King James Bible, John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables,
and William Scott’s
Lessons in Elocution,
he could not contain his excitement. Holding
Pilgrim’s Progress
in his hands, “his eyes sparkled, and that day he could not eat, and that night he could not sleep.”
When printing was first invented, Lincoln would later write, “the great mass of men…were utterly unconscious, that their
conditions,
or their
minds
were capable of improvement.” To liberate “the mind from this false and under estimate of itself, is the great task which printing came into the world to perform.” He was, of course, also speaking of himself, of the transforming liberation of a young boy unlocking the miraculous mysteries of language, discovering a world of possibilities in the small log cabin on the frontier that he later called “as unpoetical as any spot of the earth.”
“There is no Frigate like a Book,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “to take us Lands away.” Though the young Lincoln never left the frontier, would never leave America, he traveled with Byron’s
Childe Harold
to Spain and Portugal, the Middle East and Italy; accompanied Robert Burns to Edinburgh; and followed the English kings into battle with Shakespeare. As he explored the wonders of literature and the history of the country, the young Lincoln, already conscious of his own power, developed ambitions far beyond the expectations of his family and neighbors. It was through literature that he was able to transcend his surroundings.
He read and reread the Bible and
Aesop’s Fables
so many times that years later he could recite whole passages and entire stories from memory. Through Scott’s
Lessons in Elocution,
he first encountered selections from Shakespeare’s plays, inspiring a love for the great dramatist’s writings long before he ever saw a play. He borrowed a volume of the
Revised Statutes of Indiana
from the local constable, a work that contained the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787—documents that would become foundation stones of his philosophical and political thought.
Everywhere he went, Lincoln carried a book with him. He thumbed through page after page while his horse rested at the end of a long row of planting. Whenever he could escape work, he would lie with his head against a tree and read. Though he acquired only a handful of volumes, they were seminal works of the English language. Reading the Bible and Shakespeare over and over implanted rhythms and poetry that would come to fruition in those works of his maturity that made Abraham Lincoln our only poet-president. With remarkable energy and tenacity he quarried the thoughts and ideas that he wanted to remember. “When he came across a passage that Struck him,” his stepmother recalled, “he would write it down on boards if he had no paper,” and “when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again.” Then once he obtained paper, he would rewrite it and keep it in a scrapbook so that it could be memorized. Words thus became precious to him, never, as with Seward, to be lightly or indiscriminately used.
The volumes to feed Lincoln’s intellectual hunger did not come cheaply. The story is often recounted of the time he borrowed Parson Weems’s
Life of George Washington
from Josiah Crawford, a well-to-do farmer who lived sixteen miles away. Thrilled by this celebrated account of the first president’s life, he took the book to his loft at night, where, by the light of a tallow candle, or if tallow was scarce, by a grease lamp made from hickory bark gathered in the woods, he read as long as he could stay awake, placing the book on a makeshift shelf between the cabin logs so he could retrieve it at daybreak. During a severe rainstorm one night, the book was badly soiled and the covers warped. Lincoln went to Crawford’s house, explained what had happened, and offered to work off the value of the book. Crawford calculated the value of two full days’ work pulling corn, which Lincoln considered an unfair reimbursement. Nevertheless, he straightway set to work and kept on until “there was not a corn blade left on a stalk.” Then, having paid his debt, Lincoln wrote poems and songs lampooning “Josiah blowing his bugle”—Crawford’s large nose. Thus Crawford, in return for loaning Lincoln a book and then exorbitantly penalizing him, won a permanent, if unflattering, place in American history.
A lucid, inquisitive, and extraordinarily dogged mind was Lincoln’s native endowment. Already he possessed a vivid sensibility for the beauty of the English language. Often reading aloud, he was attracted to the sound of language along with its meaning—its music and rhythms. He found this in poetry, and to the end of his life would recite poems, often lengthy passages, from memory. He seemed especially drawn to poetry that spoke of our doomed mortality and the transience of earthly achievements. For clearly Lincoln, this acolyte of pure reason and remorseless logic, was also a romantic. All three of Lincoln’s rivals shared his early love of books, but none had as difficult a task securing them or finding the leisure to read. In the household of his classically educated father, Seward had only to pick a book from well-stocked shelves, while both local academies he attended and Union College maintained substantial collections of books on history, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, chemistry, grammar, and geography. Chase, likewise, had access to libraries, at his uncle’s boys’ school in Worthington and at Dartmouth College. And while books were not plentiful where Bates grew up, he had the luxury of his scholarly relative’s home, where he could peruse at will an extensive collection.
The distance between the educational advantages Lincoln’s rivals enjoyed and the hardships he endured was rendered even greater by the cultural resistance Lincoln faced once his penchant for reading became known. In the pioneer world of rural Kentucky and Indiana, where physical labor was essential for survival and mental exertion was rarely considered a legitimate form of work, Lincoln’s book hunger was regarded as odd and indolent. Nor would his community understand the thoughts and emotions stirred by his reading; there were few to talk to about the most important and deeply experienced activities of his mind.
While Lincoln’s stepmother took “particular Care not to disturb him—would let him read on and on till [he] quit of his own accord,” his father needed help with the tiresome chores of felling trees, digging up stumps, splitting rails, plowing, weeding, and planting. When he found his son in the field reading a book or, worse still, distracting fellow workers with tales or passages from one of his books, he would angrily halt the activity so work could continue. The boy’s endeavors to better himself often incurred the resentment of his father, who occasionally destroyed his books and may have physically abused him.
Lincoln’s relationship with his father grew strained, particularly when his last chance for schooling was foreclosed by his father’s decision to hire him out. He labored for various neighbors butchering hogs, digging wells, and clearing land in order to satisfy a debt the family had incurred. Such conflict between father and son was played out in thousands of homes as the “self-made” men in Lincoln’s generation sought to pursue ambitions beyond the cramped lives of their fathers.
The same “longing to rise” that carried Seward away from the Hudson Valley brought Chase to the infant state of Ohio, and sent Bates to the Missouri Territory propelled Lincoln from Indiana to New Salem, Illinois. At twenty-two, he departed his family home with all his meager possessions bundled on his shoulder. New Salem was a budding town, with twenty-five families, three general stores, a tavern, a blacksmith shop, a cooper shop, and a tannery. Working simply to “keep body and soul together” as a flatboatman, clerk, merchant, postmaster, and surveyor, he engaged in a systematic regimen of self-improvement. He mastered the principles of English grammar at night when the store was closed. He carried Shakespeare’s plays and books of poetry when he walked along the streets. Seated in the local post office, he devoured newspapers. He studied geometry and trigonometry while learning the art of surveying. And then, at the age of twenty-five, he decided to study law.
In a time when young men were apprenticed to practicing lawyers while they read the law, Lincoln, by his own account, “studied with nobody.” Borrowing law books from a friend, he set about on his own to gain the requisite knowledge and skills. He buried himself in the dog-eared pages of Blackstone’s
Commentaries;
he unearthed the thoughts in Chitty’s
Pleadings;
he analyzed precepts in Greenleaf’s
Evidence
and Story’s
Equity Jurisprudence.
After a long day at one of his various jobs, he would read far into the night. A steadfast purpose sustained him.
Few of his colleagues experienced so solitary or steep a climb to professional proficiency. The years Seward and Chase spent in college eased the transition into legal study by exposing them to history, classical languages, and scientific reasoning. What is more, Lincoln had no outlet for discourse, no mentor such as Seward found in the distinguished author of
The Practice.
Nor did Lincoln have the social advantages Chase enjoyed by reading law with the celebrated William Wirt or the connections Bates derived from Rufus Easton.
What Lincoln lacked in preparation and guidance, he made up for with his daunting concentration, phenomenal memory, acute reasoning faculties, and interpretive penetration. Though untutored in the sciences and the classics, he was able to read and reread his books until he understood them fully. “Get the books, and read and study them,” he told a law student seeking advice in 1855. It did not matter, he continued, whether the reading be done in a small town or a large city, by oneself or in the company of others. “The
books,
and your
capacity
for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”