"He had known Maltby during the period of the Black Hawk War. No one was ever treated more kindly than he was by them. He had risen in the world and they were poor, and Captain Maltby wanted some place which would give him a living. 'In fact,' said he, 'Maltby wants to be Superintendent of the Mint at San Francisco, but he is hardly equal to that. I want to find some place for him, and into which he will fit, and I know nothing about these things.' I said, 'There is a place—Superintendent of Indian Affairs in California—where the incumbent should be superseded for cause, and the place is simply a great farm, where the government supplies the means of carrying it on; there is an abundance of Indian labor, and making it produce and accounting for the products are the duties principally.' He replied, 'Maltby is the man for this place,' and he was made entirely happy by being able to serve an old and good man."
[II]
THE LEADER OF THE SPRINGFIELD BAR
Abraham Lincoln inherited his love of learning from his mother, who was superior in intelligence and refinement to the women of her class and time. His ambition to become a lawyer was inspired by a copy of the Revised Statutes of Indiana which accidentally fell into his hands when he was a mere boy in the swampy forests of the southern section of that State. In the brief autobiography already referred to, which he prepared for the newspapers to gratify public curiosity when he was nominated as a candidate for President, he says that he "went to school by littles; in all, it did not amount to more than a year," and he afterwards told a friend that he "read through every book he ever heard of in that country for a circuit of fifty miles." These included Weems's "Life of Washington," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," Æsop's "Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," a History of the United States whose author is not named, the Bible, and the Statutes of Indiana.
This is the catalogue he gave of the books he knew in his youth. His biographer included Plutarch's "Lives," and when the advanced sheets of the campaign sketch reached Lincoln he gave a curious exhibition of his habitual accuracy by calling attention to the fact that this was not exact when it was written, "for, up to that moment in my life, I had never seen that early contribution to human history; but I want your book, even if it is nothing more than a mere campaign sketch, to be faithful to the facts, and, in order that the statement might be literally true, I secured the book (Plutarch's 'Lives') a few weeks ago and have sent for you to tell you that I have just read it through."
It is quite remarkable that a country lad, almost illiterate, should have found a volume of statutes interesting reading, but Lincoln read and reread it until he had almost committed its contents to memory, and in after-years, when any one cited an Indiana law, he could usually repeat the exact text and often give the numbers of the page, chapter, and paragraph. The book belonged to David Turnham, who seems to have been a constable or magistrate in that part of Indiana, and this volume constituted his professional library. The actual copy is now preserved in the library of the New York Law Institute. The binding is worn and the title-page and a few leaves at the end are missing. Besides the statutes as enacted up to 1824, it contains the Declaration of Independence, the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Indiana, and the Act of Virginia, passed in 1783, by which "The territory North Westward of the river Ohio" was conveyed to the United States, and the ordinance of 1787 for governing that territory, of which Article VI. reads:
"There shall neither be slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall be duly convicted; provided always, that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed, in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed, and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid."
It is an interesting coincidence that Abraham Lincoln should not only have received the impressions which guided him in the choice of his career from this volume, but also his first knowledge of the legal side of slavery. Before he finished that book he knew the principles upon which the government of the United States was founded and how they were applied in the States. Its contents were fastened upon his memory by copying long extracts with a quill of a turkey-buzzard and ink home-made from the juice of the brier root. When he had no paper he wrote upon a shingle, and, after he had committed to memory the paragraphs so preserved, he would shave off the shingle with his knife and write others. When he was in the field ploughing or cultivating he took a book with him, and when he stopped to rest would pull it from his pocket and read until it was time to resume work again. In after-life, even when he came to the White House, he used to speak of the impressions made upon his mind by the "Life of Washington," and always contended that it was better for the young men of the country to regard Washington in the light of a demigod, as Parson Weems describes him, than to shake their faith in the greatest hero of American history by narrating his mistakes and follies as if he were a common man.
He never lost his love for "Pilgrim's Progress" or "Robinson Crusoe." The characters in both were real to him, and to the end of his days he could repeat Æsop's "Fables" verbatim.