SCHOOL DAYS NOW AND THEN
Lincoln once wrote, in a letter to a friend, about his early teachers in
Indiana:
"He (father) removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer County,
Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home about the time the
State came into the Union. It was a wild region with many bears and
other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some
schools, so-called; but no qualification was ever required of a teacher
beside readin', writin', and cipherin' to the Rule of Three (simple
proportion). If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to
sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was
absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education."
Abe's first teacher in Indiana, however, was Hazel Dorsey. The school
house was built of rough, round logs. The chimney was made of poles well
covered with clay. The windows were spaces cut in the logs, and covered
with greased paper. But Abe was determined to learn. He and his sister
thought nothing of walking four miles a day through snow, rain and mud.
"Nat" Grigsby, who afterward married the sister, spoke in glowing terms
of Abe's few school days:
"He was always at school early, and attended to his studies. He lost no
time at home, and when not at work was at his books. He kept up his
studies on Sunday, and carried his books with him to work, so that he
might read when he rested from labor."
Thomas Lincoln had no use for "eddication," as he called it. "It will
spile the boy," he kept saying. He--the father--had got along better
without going to school, and why should Abe have a better education than
his father? He thought Abe's studious habits were due to "pure laziness,
jest to git shet o' workin'." So, whenever there was the slightest
excuse, he took Abe out of school and set him to work at home or for one
of the neighbors, while he himself went hunting or loafed about the
house.
This must have been very trying to a boy as hungry to learn as Abe
Lincoln was. His new mother saw and sympathized with him, and in her
quiet way, managed to get the boy started to school, for a few weeks at
most. For some reason Hazel Dorsey stopped "keeping" the school, and
there was a long "vacation" for all the children. But a new man, Andrew
Crawford, came and settled near Gentryville. Having nothing better to do
at first, he was urged to reopen the school.
One evening Abe came in from his work and his stepmother greeted him
with:
"Another chance for you to go to school."
"Where?"
"That man Crawford that moved in a while ago is to begin school next
week, and two miles and back every day will be just about enough for you
to walk to keep your legs limber."
The tactful wife accomplished it somehow and Abe started off to school
with Nancy, and a light heart. A neighbor described him as he appeared
in Crawford's school, as "long, wiry and strong, while his big feet and
hands, and the length of his legs and arms, were out of all proportion
to his small trunk and head. His complexion was swarthy, and his skin
shriveled and yellow even then. He wore low shoes, buckskin breeches,
linsey-woolsey shirt, and a coonskin cap. The breeches hung close to his
legs, but were far from meeting the tops of his shoes, exposing 'twelve
inches of shinbone, sharp, blue and narrow.'"
"Yet," said Nat Grigsby, "he was always in good health, never sick, and
had an excellent constitution."
HELPING KATE ROBY SPELL
Andrew Crawford must have been an unusual man, for he tried to teach
"manners" in his backwoods school! Spelling was considered a great
accomplishment. Abe shone as a speller in school and at the
spelling-matches. One day, evidently during a period when young Lincoln
was kept from school to do some outside work for his father, he appeared
at the window when the class in spelling was on the floor. The word
"defied" was given out and several pupils had misspelled it. Kate Roby,
the pretty girl of the village, was stammering over it. "D-e-f," said
Kate, then she hesitated over the next letter. Abe pointed to his eye
and winked significantly. The girl took the hint and went on glibly
"i-e-d," and "went up head."
"I DID IT!"
There was a buck's head nailed over the school house door. It proved a
temptation to young Lincoln, who was tall enough to reach it easily. One
day the schoolmaster discovered that one horn was broken and he demanded
to know who had done the damage. There was silence and a general denial
till Abe spoke up sturdily:
"I did it. I did not mean to do it, but I hung on it--and it broke!"
The other boys thought Abe was foolish to "own up" till he had to--but
that was his way.
It is doubtful if Abe Lincoln owned an arithmetic. He had a copybook,
made by himself, in which he entered tables of weights and measures and
"sums" he had to do. Among these was a specimen of schoolboy doggerel:
"Abraham Lincoln,
His hand and pen,
He will be good--
But God knows when!"
In another place he wrote some solemn reflections on the value of time:
"Time, what an empty vapor 'tis,
And days, how swift they are!
Swift as an Indian arrow--
Fly on like a shooting star.
The present moment, just, is here,
Then slides away in haste,
That we can never say they're ours,
But only say they're past."
As he grew older his handwriting improved and he was often asked to "set
copies" for other boys to follow. In the book of a boy named
Richardson, he wrote this prophetic couplet:
"Good boys who to their books apply
Will all be great men by and by."
A "MOTHER'S BOY"--HIS FOOD AND CLOTHING
Dennis Hanks related of his young companion: "As far as food and
clothing were concerned, the boy had plenty--such as it
was--'corndodgers,' bacon and game, some fish and wild fruits. We had
very little wheat flour. The nearest mill was eighteen miles. A hoss
mill it was, with a plug (old horse) pullin' a beam around; and Abe used
to say his dog could stand and eat the flour as fast as it was made,
_and then be ready for supper_!
"For clothing he had jeans. He was grown before he wore all-wool pants.
It was a new country, and he was a raw boy, rather a bright and likely
lad; but the big world seemed far ahead of him. We were all slow-goin'
folks. But he had the stuff of greatness in him. He got his rare sense
and sterling principles from both parents. But Abe's kindliness, humor,
love of humanity, hatred of slavery, all came from his mother. I am
free to say Abe was a 'mother's boy.'"
Dennis used to like to tell of Abe's earliest ventures in the fields of
literature: "His first readin' book was Webster's speller. Then he got
hold of a book--I can't rickilect the name. It told about a feller, a
nigger or suthin', that sailed a flatboat up to a rock, and the rock was
magnetized and drawed the nails out of his boat, an' he got a duckin',
or drownded, or suthin', I forget now. (This book, of course, was 'The
Arabian Nights.') Abe would lay on the floor with a chair under his
head, and laugh over them stories by the hour. I told him they was
likely lies from end to end; but he learned to read right well in them."
His stock of books was small, but they were the right kind--the Bible,
"The Pilgrim's Progress," AEsop's Fables, "Robinson Crusoe," a history of
the United States, and the Statutes of Indiana. This last was a strange
book for a boy to read, but Abe pored over it as eagerly as a lad to-day
might read "The Three Guardsmen," or "The Hound of the Baskervilles." He
made notes of what he read with his turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root
ink. If he did not have these handy, he would write with a piece of
charcoal or the charred end of a stick, on a board, or on the under side
of a chair or bench. He used the wooden fire shovel for a slate, shaving
it off clean when both sides were full of figures. When he got hold of
paper enough to make a copy-book he would go about transferring his
notes from boards, beams, under sides of the chairs and the table, and
from all the queer places he had put them down, on the spur of the
moment.
Besides the books he had at hand, he borrowed all he could get, often
walking many miles for a book, until, as he once told a friend, he "read
through every book he had ever heard of in that country, for a circuit
of fifty miles"--quite a circulating library!
"THE BEGINNING OF LOVE"
"The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." It must have been about
this time that the lad had the following experience, which he himself
related to a legal friend, with his chair tilted back and his knees
"cocked up" in the manner described by Cousin John Hanks:
"Did you ever write out a story in your mind? I did when I was little
codger. One day a wagon with a lady and two girls and a man broke down
near us, and while they were fixing up, they cooked in our kitchen. The
woman had books and read us stories, and they were the first of the kind
I ever heard. I took a great fancy to one of the girls; and when they
were gone I thought of her a good deal, and one day, when I was sitting
out in the sun by the house, I wrote out a story in my mind.
"I thought I took my father's horse and followed the wagon, and finally
I found it, and they were surprised to see me.
"I talked with the girl and persuaded her to elope with me; and that
night I put her on my horse and we started off across the prairie. After
several hours we came to a camp; and when we rode up we found it was one
we had left a few hours before and went in.
"The next night we tried again, and the same thing happened--the horse
came back to the same place; and then we concluded we ought not to
elope. I stayed until I had persuaded her father that he ought to give
her to me.
"I always meant to write that story out and publish it, and I began
once; but I concluded it was not much of a story.
"But I think that was the beginning of love with me."
HOW ABE CAME TO OWN WEEMS'S "LIFE OF WASHINGTON"
Abe's chief delight, if permitted to do so, was to lie in the shade of
some inviting tree and read. He liked to lie on his stomach before the
fire at night, and often read as long as this flickering light lasted.
He sometimes took a book to bed to read as soon as the morning light
began to come through the chinks between the logs beside his bed. He
once placed a book between the logs to have it handy in the morning, and
a storm came up and soaked it with dirty water from the "mud-daubed"
mortar, plastered between the logs of the cabin.
The book happened to be Weems's "Life of Washington." Abe was in a sad
dilemma. What could he say to the owner of the book, which he had
borrowed from the meanest man in the neighborhood, Josiah Crawford, who
was so unpopular that he went by the nickname of "Old Blue Nose"?
The only course was to show the angry owner his precious volume, warped
and stained as it was, and offer to do anything he could to repay him.
"Abe," said "Old Blue Nose," with bloodcurdling friendliness, "bein' as
it's you, Abe, I won't be hard on you. You jest come over and pull
fodder for me, and the book is yours."
"All right," said Abe, his deep-set eyes twinkling in spite of himself
at the thought of owning the story of the life of the greatest of
heroes, "how much fodder?"
"Wal," said old Josiah, "that book's worth seventy-five cents, at least.
You kin earn twenty-five cents a day--that will make three days. You
come and pull all you can in three days and you may have the book."
That was an exorbitant price, even if the book were new, but Abe was at
the old man's mercy. He realized this, and made the best of a bad
bargain. He cheerfully did the work for a man who was mean enough to
take advantage of his misfortune. He comforted himself with the thought
that he would be the owner of the precious "Life of Washington." Long
afterward, in a speech before the New Jersey Legislature, on his way to
Washington to be inaugurated, like Washington, as President of the
United States, he referred to this strange book.
"THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH"
One morning, on his way to work, with an ax on his shoulder, his
stepsister, Matilda Johnston, though forbidden by her mother to follow
Abe, crept after him, and with a cat-like spring landed between his
shoulders and pressed her sharp knees into the small of his back.
Taken unawares, Abe staggered backward and ax and girl fell to the
ground together. The sharp implement cut her ankle badly, and
mischievous Matilda shrieked with fright and pain when she saw the blood
gushing from the wound. Young Lincoln tore a sleeve from his shirt to
bandage the gash and bound up the ankle as well as he could. Then he
tried to teach the still sobbing girl a lesson.
"'Tilda," he said gently, "I'm surprised. Why did you disobey mother?"
Matilda only wept silently, and the lad went on, "What are you going to
tell mother about it?"
"Tell her I did it with the ax," sobbed the young girl. "That will be
the truth, too."
"Yes," said Abe severely, "that's the truth, but not _all_ the truth.
You just tell the whole truth, 'Tilda, and trust mother for the rest."
Matilda went limping home and told her mother the whole story, and the
good woman was so sorry for her that, as the girl told Abe that evening,
"she didn't even scold me."
"BOUNDING A THOUGHT--NORTH, SOUTH, EAST AND WEST"
Abe sometimes heard things in the simple conversation of friends that
disturbed him because they seemed beyond his comprehension. He said of
this:
"I remember how, when a child, I used to get irritated when any one
talked to me in a way I couldn't understand.
"I do not think I ever got angry with anything else in my life; but that
always disturbed my temper--and has ever since.
"I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors
talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the
night walking up and down, trying to make out what was the exact
meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings.
"I could not sleep, although I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for
an idea; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I
had repeated it over and over, and had put in language plain enough, as
I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.
"This was a kind of a passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am
never easy now when I am bounding a thought, till I have bounded it
east, and bounded it west, and bounded it north, and bounded it south."
HIGH PRAISE FROM HIS STEPMOTHER
Not long before her death, Mr. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, called
upon Mrs. Sarah Lincoln to collect material for a "Life of Lincoln" he
was preparing to write. This was the best of all the things she related
of her illustrious stepson:
"I can say what scarcely one mother in a thousand can say, Abe never
gave me a cross word or look, and never refused, in fact or appearance,
to do anything I asked him. His mind and mine seemed to run together.
"I had a son, John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys, but I
must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw or
expect to see."
"Charity begins at home"--and so do truth and honesty. Abraham Lincoln
could not have become so popular all over the world on account of his
honest kindheartedness if he had not been loyal, obedient and loving
toward those at home. Popularity, also, "begins at home." A mean,
disagreeable, dishonest boy may become a king, because he was "to the
manner born." But only a good, kind, honest man, considerate of others,
can be elected President of the United States.