Lincoln (5 page)

The next year may have been the hardest in Abraham Lincoln’s life. With the help of Dennis Hanks, who moved in with the Lincolns after the Sparrows died, Thomas was able to put food on the table. “We still kept up hunting and farming,” Dennis remembered. “We always hunted[;] it made no difference what came, for we more or less depended on it for a living—nay for life.” Sarah, who had her twelfth birthday in February 1819, tried to cook and keep house, but at times she felt so lonesome that she would sit by the fire and cry. To cheer her up, Dennis recalled, “me ‘n’ Abe got ‘er a baby coon an’ a turtle, an’ tried to get a fawn but we couldn’t ketch any.”

Abe—as Dennis and the other children insisted on calling the boy, even
though he always disliked the nickname—left no words describing his sense of loss. His wound was too sensitive to touch. But many years later he wrote a letter of condolence to a bereaved child: “In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.... I have had experience enough to know what I say.”

Deeper consequences of the loss of his mother before he was ten years old can only be a matter of speculation. It is tempting to trace his subsequent moodiness, his melancholy, and his occasional bouts of depression to this cause, but the connections are not clear and these patterns of behavior appear in persons who have never experienced such loss. Perhaps his mother’s death had something to do with his growing aversion to cruelty and bloodshed. Now he began to reprove other children in the neighborhood for senseless cruelty to animals. He scolded them when they caught terrapins and heaped hot coals on their shells, to force the defenseless animals out of their shells, reminding them “that an ant’s life was to it as sweet as ours to us.” Certainly the death of his mother, coming so soon after the deaths of other friends and neighbors, gave a gloomy cast to his memories of his Indiana home. In the 1840s, revisiting his old neighborhood, he recorded his thoughts in verse:

Within a year of Nancy’s death, Thomas Lincoln recognized that he and his family could not go on alone, and he went back to Kentucky to seek a bride. In Elizabethtown he found Sarah Bush Johnston, whom he had perhaps unsuccessfully courted before he wed Nancy. She was the widow of the Hardin County jailer and mother of three small children. There was no time for a romantic engagement; he needed a wife and she needed a husband. They made a quick, businesslike arrangement for him to pay her debts and for her to pack up her belongings and move with him to Indiana.

The arrival of Sarah Lincoln marked a turning point in Abraham Lincoln’s life. She brought with her, first, her collection of domestic possessions—comfortable bedding, a walnut bureau that had cost her forty-five dollars, a
table and chairs, a spinning wheel, knives, forks, and spoons—so that the Lincoln children felt they were joining a world of unbelievable luxury. Her children—Elizabeth, John D., and Matilda, who ranged from thirteen to eight years in age—brought life and excitement to the depressed Lincoln family. But most of all she brought with her the gift of love. Sarah Bush Lincoln must have been touched to see the dirty, ill-clad, hungry Lincoln children, and she set to work at once, as she said, to make them look “more human.” “She soaped—rubbed and washed the children clean,” Dennis Hanks remembered, “so that they look[ed] pretty neat—well and clean.”

At her suggestion, the whole household was reorganized. Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks had to give up hunting for a while to split logs and make a floor for the cabin, and they finished the roof, constructed a proper door, and cut a hole for a window, which they covered with greased paper. The cabin was high enough to install a loft, reached by climbing pegs driven into the wall, and here she installed beds for the three boys—Dennis Hanks, Abraham, and John D. Downstairs she had the whole cabin cleaned, a decent bedstead was built, and Thomas used his skill as a carpenter to make another table and stools. Remarkably, these reforms were brought about with a minimum of friction.

What was even more extraordinary, Sarah Bush Lincoln was able to blend the two families harmoniously and without jealousy. She treated her own children and the Lincoln children with absolute impartiality. She grew especially fond of Abraham. “Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused in fact, or even in appearance, to do anything I requested him,” she remembered. “I never gave him a cross word in all my life. . . . His mind and mine—what little I had[—]seemed to move together—move in the same channel.” Many years later, attempting to compare her son and her stepson, she told an interviewer: “Both were good boys, but I must say—both now being dead that Abe was the best boy I ever saw or ever expect to see.”

Starved for affection, Abraham returned her love. He called her “Mama,” and he never spoke of her except in the most affectionate terms. After he had been elected President, he recalled the sorry condition of Thomas Lincoln’s household before Sarah Bush Johnston arrived and told of the encouragement she had given him as a boy. “She had been his best friend in this world,” a relative reported him as saying, “and... no man could love a mother more than he loved her.”

The years after Sarah Bush Lincoln came to Indiana were happy ones for young Abraham. Afterward, when he spoke of this time, it was as “a joyous, happy boyhood,” which he described “with mirth and glee,” and in his recollections “there was nothing sad nor pinched, and nothing of want.” His parents enrolled him, along with the other four children in the household, in the school that Andrew Crawford had opened in a cabin about a mile
from the Lincoln house. Though Sarah Bush Lincoln was illiterate, she had a sense that education was important, and Thomas wanted his son to learn how to read and cipher.

Possibly young Lincoln knew how to read a little before he entered Crawford’s school, but Dennis Hanks, who was only marginally literate himself, claimed credit for giving Abraham “his first lesson in spelling—reading and writing.” “I taught Abe to write with a buzzards quill which I killed with a rifle and having made a pen—put Abes hand in mind [sic] and moving his fingers by my hand to give him the idea of how to write.” Abraham learned these basic skills slowly. John Hanks, another cousin who lived with the Lincolns for a time, thought he was “somewhat dull... not a brilliant boy—but
worked
his way by toil: to learn was hard for him, but he worked slowly, but surely.” But Abraham’s stepmother understood him better, recognized his need fully to master what he read or heard. “He must understand every thing—even to the smallest thing—minutely and exactly,” she remembered; “he would then repeat it over to himself again and again—some times in one form and then in an other and when it was fixed in his mind to suit him he ... never lost that fact or his understanding of it.”

Abraham attended Crawford’s school for one term, of perhaps three months. Crawford, a justice of the peace and man of some importance in the area, ran a subscription school, where parents paid their children’s tuition in cash or in commodities. Ungraded, it was a “blab” school, where students recited their lessons aloud, and the schoolmaster listened through the din for errors. He was long remembered because, according to one student, “he tried to learn us manners” by having the pupils practice introducing each other, as though they were strangers. After one term Crawford gave up teaching, and the Lincoln children had no school for a year, until James Swaney opened one about four miles from the Lincoln house. The distance was so great that Abraham, who had farm chores to perform, could attend only sporadically. The next year, for about six months, he went to a school taught by Azel W. Dorsey in the same cabin that Crawford had used. With that term, at the age of fifteen, his formal education ended. All told, he summarized, “the agregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year.”

In later years Lincoln was scornful of these “schools, so called,” which he attended: “No qualification was ever required of a teacher, beyond
‘readin, writin, and cipherin,’
to the Rule of Three [i.e., ratio and proportions]. If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizzard.”

Though his censure was largely deserved, a school system that produced Abraham Lincoln could not have been wholly without merit. Indeed, his teachers, transient and untrained as they were, helped him master the basic tools so that in the future he could educate himself.
Dilworth’s Spelling-Book,
which he and Sarah had begun to use in Kentucky, provided his introduction to grammar and spelling. Beginning with the alphabet and Arabic and Roman numerals, it proceeded to words of two letters, then three
letters, and finally four letters. From these the student began to construct sentences, like: “No man may put off the law of God.”
Dilworth’s
then went on to more advanced subjects, and the final sections included prose and verse selections, some accompanied by crude woodcuts—which may have been the first pictures that Abraham had ever seen. Other readers, like
The Columbian Class Book
and
The Kentucky Preceptor,
expanded and reinforced what he learned from
Dilworth’s.

Through constant repetition and drill the boy learned how to spell. Indeed, he became so proficient that it was hard to stump him in the school spelling bees. He was generous with his knowledge. Many years later a girl in his class told how he helped her when the teacher gave her a difficult word, “defied,” which she was about to misspell “defyed.” When she came to the fourth letter, she happened to look at Abraham, who pointed to his eye, and, taking the hint, she spelled the word correctly.

He also learned to write, in a clear, round hand. The handwriting of a bit of doggerel in his sum book is recognizably that of the future President:

So adept did he become that unlettered neighbors in the Pigeon Creek community often asked him to write letters for them.

Even more important was the ability to read. Once he got the hang of it, he could never get enough. “Abe was getting hungry for book[s],” Dennis Hanks recalled, “reading every thing he could lay his hands on.” He would carry a book with him when he went out to work, and read when he rested. John Hanks remembered that when Abraham returned to the house from work, “he would go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn bread, take down a book, sit down in a chair, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read.”

His contemporaries attributed prodigies of reading to him, but books were scarce on the frontier and he had to read carefully rather than extensively. He memorized a great deal of what he read. “When he came across a passage that struck him,” his stepmother remembered, “he would write it down on boards if he had no paper and keep it there till he did get paper—then he would re-write it—look at it [and] repeat it.”

Other than classroom texts, his first books were the few that Sarah Bush Lincoln had brought with her from Kentucky. One was her family Bible. Abraham read it at times, she remembered, “though not as much as said: he sought more congenial books—suitable for his age.”
The Pilgrim’s Progress
was one of them, and the biblical cadences of Lincoln’s later speeches owed much to John Bunyan. Another of Sarah Bush Lincoln’s books was
Aesop’s Fables,
which it was said Abraham read so many times that he could write it
out from memory. The morals of some of the stories became deeply ingrained in his mind, like the lesson drawn from the fable of the lion and the four bulls: “A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.” In his stepmother’s copy of
Lessons in Elocution,
by William Scott, he studied basic lessons on elocution, and the selections in this book were probably his introduction to Shakespeare. Among the set pieces it included was King Claudius’s soliloquy on his murder of Hamlet’s father, “O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven.” It remained one of Lincoln’s favorite passages.

History also fascinated him. He probably read William Grimshaw’s
History of the United States,
which began with the discovery of America and ended with the annexation of Florida. With a sharp denunciation of slavery as “a climax of human cupidity and turpitude,” Grimshaw stressed the importance of the American Revolution and exhorted students: “Let us not only declare by words, but demonstrate by our actions, that ‘all men are created equal.’” Even more than history, biography interested young Lincoln. He enjoyed the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, but it was Parson Mason Weems’s
Life of George Washington
that stirred his imagination. Many years later, when he was on his way to Washington and his first inaugural, he told the New Jersey Senate that Weems’s account of Washington’s heroic struggles at Trenton—“the crossing of the river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships endured at that time”—had made an indelible mark on his mind. “I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was,” he said, “that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.”