Let me pause here to consider the surprise often expressed when a
citizen of limited schooling is chosen to fill, or is presented for
one of the highest civil trusts. Has that argument any foundation in
reason, any justification in history?
Of our country's great men, beginning with Ben Franklin, I estimate
that a majority had little if anything more than a common-school
education, while many had less. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had
rather more; Clay and Jackson somewhat less; Van Buren perhaps a
little more; Lincoln decidedly less. How great was his consequent
loss? I raise the question; let others decide it. Having seen much of
Henry Clay, I confidently assert that not one in ten of those who knew
him late in life would have suspected, from aught in his conversation
or bearing, that his education had been inferior to that of the
college graduates by whom he was surrounded. His knowledge was
different from theirs; and the same is true of Lincoln's as well. Had
the latter lived to be seventy years old, I judge that whatever of
hesitation or rawness was observable in his manner would have
vanished, and he would have met and mingled with educated gentlemen
and statesmen on the same easy footing of equality with Henry Clay in
his later prime of life. How far his two flatboat voyages to New
Orleans are to be classed as educational exercise above or below a
freshman's year in college, I will not say; doubtless some freshmen
learn more, others less, than those journeys taught him. Reared under
the shadow of the primitive woods, which on every side hemmed in the
petty clearings of the generally poor, and rarely energetic or
diligent, pioneers of the Southern Indiana wilderness, his first
introduction to the outside world from the deck of a "broad-horn" must
have been wonderfully interesting and suggestive. To one whose utmost
experience of civilization had been a county town, consisting of a
dozen to twenty houses, mainly log, with a shabby little court-house,
including jail, and a shabbier, ruder little church, that must have
been a marvelous spectacle which glowed in his face from the banks of
the Ohio and the lower Mississippi. Though Cairo was then but a
desolate swamp, Memphis a wood-landing, and Vicksburg a timbered ridge
with a few stores at its base, even these were in striking contrast to
the sombre monotony of the great woods. The rivers were enlivened by
countless swift-speeding steamboats, dispensing smoke by day and flame
by night; while New Orleans, though scarcely one fourth the city she
now is, was the focus of a vast commerce, and of a civilization which
(for America) might be deemed antique. I doubt not that our tall and
green young backwoodsman needed only a piece of well-tanned sheepskin
suitably (that is, learnedly) inscribed to have rendered those two
boat trips memorable as his degrees in capacity to act well his part
on that stage which has mankind for its audience.
[1] _By permission of Mr. Joel Benton._