The Boys Life of Abraham Lincoln | Page 6

She came of a better station in
life than Thomas, and was a woman with an excellent mind as well as a
warm and generous heart. The household goods that she brought with
her to the Lincoln home filled a four-horse wagon, and not only were
her own children well clothed and cared for, but she was able at once to

provide little Abraham and Sarah with comforts to which they had been
strangers during the whole of their young lives. Under her wise
management all jealousy was avoided between the two sets of children;
urged on by her stirring example, Thomas Lincoln supplied the yet
unfinished cabin with floor, door, and windows, and life became more
comfortable for all its inmates, contentment if not happiness reigning in
the little home.
The new stepmother quickly became very fond of Abraham, and
encouraged him in every way in her power to study and improve
himself. The chances for this were few enough. Mr. Lincoln has left us
a vivid picture of the situation. "It was," he once wrote, "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 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."
The school-house was a low cabin of round logs, with split logs or
"puncheons" for a floor, split logs roughly leveled with an ax and set up
on legs for benches, and holes cut out in the logs and the space filled in
with squares of greased paper for window-panes. The main light came
in through the open door. Very often Webster's "Elementary
Spelling-book" was the only text-book. This was the kind of school
most common in the middle West during Mr. Lincoln's boyhood,
though already in some places there were schools of a more pretentious
character. Indeed, back in Kentucky, at the very time that Abraham, a
child of six, was learning his letters from Zachariah Riney, a boy only a
year older was attending a Catholic seminary in the very next county. It
is doubtful if they ever met, but the destinies of the two were strangely
interwoven, for the older boy was Jefferson Davis, who became head of
the Confederate government shortly after Lincoln was elected President
of the United States.
As Abraham had been only seven years old when he left Kentucky, the
little beginnings he learned in the schools kept by Riney and Hazel in
that State must have been very slight, probably only his alphabet, or at
most only three or four pages of Webster's "Elementary
Spelling-book." The multiplication-table was still a mystery to him, and
he could read or write only the words he spelled. His first two years in

Indiana seem to have passed without schooling of any sort, and the
school he attended shortly after coming under the care of his
stepmother was of the simplest kind, for the Pigeon Creek settlement
numbered only eight or ten poor families, and they lived deep in the
forest, where, even if they had had the money for such luxuries, it
would have been impossible to buy books, slates, pens, ink, or paper. It
is worthy of note, however, that in our western country, even under
such difficulties, a school-house was one of the first buildings to rise in
every frontier settlement. Abraham's second school in Indiana was held
when he was fourteen years old, and the third in his seventeenth year.
By that time he had more books and better teachers, but he had to walk
four or five miles to reach them. We know that he learned to write, and
was provided with pen, ink, and a copy-book, and a very small supply
of writing-paper, for copies have been printed of several scraps on
which he carefully wrote down tables of long measure, land measure,
and dry measure, as well as examples in multiplication and compound
division, from his arithmetic. He was never able to go to school again
after this time, and though the instruction he received from his five
teachers--two in Kentucky and three in Indiana--extended over a period
of nine years, it must be remembered that it made up in all less than one
twelve-month; "that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount
to one year." The fact that he received this instruction, as he himself
said, "by littles," was doubtless an advantage. A lazy or indifferent boy
would of course have forgotten what was taught him at one time before
he had opportunity at another; but Abraham was neither indifferent nor
lazy, and these widely separated fragments of instruction