ABRAHAM LINCOLN.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
After a photograph in the collection of Mr. J. C. Browne of Philadelphia.
MISSISSIPPI RIVER FLATBOAT.
CHAPTER IV.
EARLY EDUCATION.—BOOKS ABRAHAM READ.—THE JONES GROCERY STORE.—LIFE ON THE RIVER.
With all his hard living and hard work, Lincoln was getting, in this period, a desultory kind of education. Not that he received much schooling. He went to school “by littles,” he says; “in all it did not amount to more than a year.” And, if we accept his own description of the teachers, it was, perhaps, just as well that it was only “by littles.” “No qualification was ever required of a teacher 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 wizard.” But more or less of the schoolroom is a matter of small importance if a boy has learned to read, and to think of what he reads. And that, this boy had learned. His stock of books was small, but he knew them thoroughly, and they were good books to know: the Bible, “Æsop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a “History of the United States,” Weems’s “Life of Washington,” and the “Statutes of Indiana.” These are the chief ones we know about. He did not own them all, but sometimes had to borrow them from the neighbors: a practice which resulted in at least one casualty, for Weems’s “Life of Washington” he allowed to get wet, and to make good the loss he had to pull fodder three days. No matter. The book became his then, and he could read it as he would. Fortunately he took this curious work in profound seriousness, which a wide-awake boy would hardly be expected to do to-day. Washington became an exalted figure in his imagination; and he always contended later, when the question of the real character of the first President was brought up, that it was wiser to regard him as a godlike being, heroic in nature and deeds, as Weems did, than to contend that he was only a man who, if wise and good, still made mistakes and indulged in follies, like other men.
In 1861, addressing the Senate of the State of New Jersey, he said:
“May I be pardoned if, upon this occasion, I mention that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen—Weems’s ‘Life of Washington.’ I remember all the accounts there given of the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single Revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that these men struggled for.”
Besides these books he borrowed many. He once told a friend that he “read through every book he had ever heard of in that country, for a circuit of fifty miles.” From everything he read he made long extracts, using a turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. When he had no paper he would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copy-book. The wooden fire-shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he ciphered with a charred stick, shaving it off when covered. The logs and boards in his vicinity he filled with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in his loft, to have it at hand at peep of day. When acting as ferryman, in his nineteenth year, anxious, no doubt, to get through the books of the house where he boarded, before he left the place, he read every night “till midnight.”[[7]]
