LINCOLN'S EDUCATION.. blah blah blah blah...

The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln
By DOUGLAS L. WILSON
Alfred A. Knopf



RIGHT. HE WANTED TO BE A LAWYER OR WRITER. BACK THEN, THAT WAS A LOT HARDER TO DO. WHY IS ALL THIS WRITTEN DOWN. WHAT A WASTE OF TIME. IT ALWAYS BOILS DOWN. BACK THEN A BRILLIANT POOR BOY PROBABLY HAD NO WAY TO BE NOTICED. NOW THING ARE BETTER.

A FIFTEEN WORD BOOK. I HATE THIS SHIT.

Abraham Lincoln's childhood education, conducted almost entirely by himself, with only a modicum of schooling, is one of the most familiar stories in American history. According to the legend, the young backwoods farm boy educated himself by a determined program of nightly reading after the day's work was done, systematically consuming all the books in the sparsely inhabited neighborhood where he grew up. His determination and youthful quest for enlightenment, the distinctive inner qualities that set him apart, have long been symbolized by the indelible image of the boy reading alone by firelight.

Legends, by their nature, are not so much factual accounts as symbolic embodiments or expressions of what the facts represent. America's attraction to the image of the boy reading alone by firelight is thus the tribute paid to the humble origins and noble attributes of a great national hero, but the Lincoln of history, insofar as can be determined from the testimony of those who knew him, proves in many respects worthy of the legend. Most of his Indiana friends and neighbors who were questioned by William H. Herndon, and William M. Thayer before him, remembered the young Lincoln as an ardent reader. His cousin John Hanks, who lived for a time with the Lincolns, called him "a Constant and voracious reader." His near neighbor and close friend David Turnham told Herndon, "We had but few books at that time and our opportunities were poor," but "what [Lincoln] read he read well and thoroughly -- Never forgetting what he read." These same witnesses confirmed Lincoln's own testimony that he attended the primitive schools of the period only briefly and intermittently, and they further suggested that he eventually outstripped his teachers. "The Schools we went to taught Spelling -- reading -- writing and Ciphering to single rule of 3 -- no further," reported one of his schoolmates. "Lincoln got ahead of his masters -- Could do him no further good: he went to school no more."

His stepmother, who came into his life when he was ten years old and to whom he remained devoted, described for Herndon the young man's unusual commitment to his studies: "Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on -- and when he came across a passage that Struck him he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there till he did get paper -- then he would re-write it -- look at it -- repeat it -- He had a copy book -- a kind of scrap book in which he put down all things and this preserved them." His stepmother's evident pride in Lincoln's educational efforts contrasted with his father's attitude, which was apparently less than approving. Herndon may have asked about a scene in William M. Thayer's The Pioneer Boy and How He Became President (1863), which depicted the young Lincoln resisting his father's command that he quit reading and go back to work. Sarah Bush Lincoln spoke protectively of her husband's behavior, which she tried to put in a positive light, telling Herndon: "As a usual thing Mr Lincoln never made Abe quit reading to do anything if he could avoid it. He would do it himself first. Mr. Lincoln could read a little & could scarcely write his name: hence he wanted, as he himself felt the uses & necessities of Education his boy Abraham to learn & he Encouraged him to do it in all ways he could." But one senses a defensiveness in her description, particularly when she says that her husband never made the boy quit reading "if he could avoid it."

Lincoln's cousin Dennis Hanks, who lived with them, spotlighted the tension between Lincoln and his father in characterizing the boy's reading habits: "He was a Constant and I m[a]y Say Stubborn reader, his father having Sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading." That this was a continuing problem rather than an isolated incident is further suggested by a saying of Thomas Lincoln that Dennis remembered in this connection. "Mr Lincoln -- Abs father -- often said [I] had to pull the old sow up to the trough -- when speaking of Abes reading & how he got to it, then and now he had to pull her away." In other words, he had to force his son to take up reading, but once the boy became a reader, only force could get him stopped.

Sarah Bush Lincoln's testimony laid great stress on her stepson's devotion to reading and study, but she also told things that are at odds with the picture presented by the time- honored legend. "He read diligently -- studied in the day time -- didn't after night much -- went to bed Early -- got up Early and then read -- Eat his breakfast -- go to work in the field with the men." If he didn't read at night, what about the boy reading by firelight? Implicit in this image of nighttime reading is an understanding that daytime had to be given to farm work or other chores, but his stepmother's testimony that he rarely read at night suggests otherwise.

Reading during the day raises the specter of the boy shirking his chores and stealing time from work for reading, something that is confirmed by Thayer's anecdote and by Dennis Hanks's recollection of Lincoln's father "slashing" him for neglecting his work by reading. There was difficulty between Lincoln and his father that, while probably quite important in his development, is hard to get at, for there are many clues but few concrete details.

Thomas Lincoln is reported to have told William G. Greene a few years after Lincoln left home, "I suppose that Abe is still fooling hisself with eddication. I tried to stop it, but he has got that fool idea in his head, and it can't be got out." If Thomas Lincoln was as antagonistic to education as this suggests, we can be sure that the difficulty between them was serious. The symbolic boy reading by firelight has done his part and is at peace with his father; the actual boy was probably something of a rebel.

Not part of the popular image, for obvious reasons, is that Lincoln's studiousness, which he apparently indulged at the expense of his duties, was roundly judged by his contemporaries as an indication of his laziness. A neighbor and former employer, John Romine, told Herndon: "Abe was awful lazy: he worked for me -- was always reading & thinking -- used to get mad at him." Dennis Hanks admitted, "Lincoln was lazy -- a very lazy man -- He was always reading -- scribbling -- writing -- Ciphering -- writing Poetry &c. &c." That Lincoln did not like physical labor was apparently never disputed, for even his adoring stepmother admitted it. In this sense, judged by the standards of his contemporaries, he clearly was lazy, where laziness was regarded as something between a character fault and a cardinal sin.

But Sarah Bush Lincoln saw in the situation, at least retrospectively, something that the neighbors and even Dennis Hanks did not: that the young Lincoln, while lazy about farm work, had been industrious in another direction. She told Herndon that "he didn't like physical labor -- was diligent for Knowledge -- wished to Know & if pains & Labor would get it he was sure to get it." Her daughter, Lincoln's stepsister, gave the situation another positive spin: "Abe was not Energetic Except in one thing -- he was active & persistant in learning -- read Everything he Could." With historical hindsight, we have little trouble rationalizing Lincoln's youthful reading as a form of striving, as it surely was, but we miss an element in the equation if we fail to take into account the construction his father and most others put on his dislike of farm work and his appetite for reading. For them it was avoiding work; for him it was a way of asserting his individuality and his aspirations.

While growing up in Indiana, the young Abraham Lincoln was, by all indications, an inveterate reader or, as Dennis Hanks put it, "a Constant and I may Say Stubborn reader." The more one looks at the evidence behind the familiar legend, the more meaning Hanks's carefully chosen word "stubborn" seems to have. For Lincoln paid a price for being a habitual reader as a boy in Indiana. Not only was he occasionally "slashed" by his father, but he was judged "lazy" by his friends and neighbors. His persistence in these circumstances was, indeed, an act of youthful stubbornness; it was carried on in defiance of the opinions of family and community. Looking back on these events in the light of what happened subsequently, we can see that Lincoln was a reader in his youthful days in Indiana, in part as a way of escaping farm work, but more important, he was reading because he had decided very early that he didn't want to be a farmer.




e think we know him. But what do we really know, especially about the private man whom we all suspect to be somehow crucially tied to the public one? ''Historians are forever doomed to ignorance about the early life of Abraham Lincoln,'' began ''The Last Best Hope of Earth'' (1993), a brief volume that summed up more than 20 years of learning about Lincoln by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark E. Neely Jr. Now comes Douglas L. Wilson with ''Honor's Voice,'' a solid new portrait of the private Lincoln between the ages of 22 and 33, during the years 1831-42, that puts him in a strikingly fresh light.

The book starts not from the President's legendary greatness but from his actual beginnings. Wilson, the Saunders Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, focuses with careful intensity on otherwise antiquarian oral reminiscences that help illuminate Lincoln's rise. Wilson tells a story about a search for identity and self-definition, and follows Lincoln's very exacting road of self-education, his finding of a vocation in law and politics, and the partial resolution of his painfully difficult relations with women.

The evolution of his religious outlook might illustrate his education. Raised a Baptist, Lincoln never outgrew a sense of fatalism, even ''a nameless sense of . . . doom.'' But he had the strength to go against the grain, and he quickly found the skeptics. He read in Thomas Paine about ''a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost'': it is the story of the Virgin Mary.

The law student, while teaching himself the rules of evidence, wrote two manuscripts of religious skepticism, long lost but also long remembered by his contemporaries. According to John T. Stuart, his first law partner, Lincoln ''went further against Christian beliefs . . . than any man I ever heard.'' As he advanced in politics, Lincoln muted his heathenish talk, but even during this early period he learned to present himself, when necessary, ''as an unfortunate victim of unbelief.'' A hypocrite? Wilson's readers can decide; but Lincoln was certainly someone with a sense of self-preservation. And someone at this time a very long way from the Second Inaugural.

In politics and law Lincoln rose from successful frontier fighter to peacemaker who fought with words. At times the words were not honest, and relied on smear and innuendo. Yet Lincoln carried a ''compulsion'' to help the helpless, and learned, to quote the Shakespeare he had come to love, that the best of men ''have pow'r to hurt and will do none.''

His most troublesome problem was women. The young man who had lost his mother at the age of 9 always felt awkward around them -- except for older women. He loved Ann Rutledge, she died and he fell apart. Friends and, in time, work helped Lincoln back from a perhaps suicidal mental breakdown. The depth of his grief suggests to Wilson that Ann's death challenged the core of his being. His central goal in life, his wish to rise, ''to shape and even to control events,'' now seemed ''nothing but foolish vanity.''

Ambivalence characterized his later courtships and various marriage proposals. A possible reason for this, at least for a period of time, may have been a fear of syphilis -- not an unknown disease in his world. Wilson does not credit stories of Lincoln's possible love children but notes two episodes with prostitutes. If once or twice, why not more often? His longtime law partner, William H. Herndon, thought that ''Lincoln had a strong if not a terrible passion for women: he could hardly keep his hands off.'' Nor would he get married until he was 33.

As Lincoln the outsider learned to be an insider, deep anxieties beset him about his ability to make a living, about success in law, about polite society. His journey led him from country to village to town, where he found the exciting, highborn Mary Todd. A superficial courtship was followed by a commitment to marry. In a brief diversion, he became smitten by another woman, but Mary did not let go. As his brother-in-law put it, ''Lincoln in his conflicts of duty-honor and his love went as crazy as a Loon.'' In time he recovered the ability to rule himself, strengthening his self-respect by getting married. Love, Wilson suggests, seems to have had ''very little to do with it.''

Lincoln's road, therefore, was both harder and ''swampier'' than legend -- or scholars -- have allowed: the difficulties and temptations wider, the fears and depressions deeper. By 34 he appeared to have overcome his troubles, but not many signs of future greatness had yet turned up.

After 130-some years of Lincoln appraisals, how can a scholar, especially one as extraordinarily careful and fair as Wilson, create a startlingly new Lincoln? Wilson's achievement stems in part from the respect the culture has acquired for oral history (which often gives voice to the voiceless) and from his having put together, with his colleague Rodney O. Davis, the Szold Professor of History at Knox College, the definitive edition of the reminiscences of about 250 people who knew Lincoln: ''Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln'' (1998). The two men have also been assembling, but have not yet published, the similarly massive recollections of Herndon himself -- the person who knew Lincoln better than anyone but Mary Todd. Historians have long used these oft-conflicting, difficult-to-read manuscripts, but Wilson's familiarity with them is unsurpassed.

The bulk of the reminiscences collected by Herndon were from 1865-66 and, as Wilson explains, emphasize the ''honorable, or at least unobjectionable.'' But ''Honor's voice,'' as Wilson calls them, ''can tell us a great deal, and sometimes tells us much more than it intended.''

This book establishes Wilson as the leading historian of the young and private Lincoln. Still, others sifting through the same sources may reach somewhat different conclusions, or take matters further. Consider the story about Lincoln's visiting a prostitute and, after undressing, realizing that he is $2 short of the needed $5 fee. He is offered credit but he departs, leaving the woman astonished at his integrity. Wilson knows that this sounds like ''a deliberate parody of the Honest Abe Lincoln legend,'' yet he accepts it. But might not a less cautious biographer venture an additional step, teasing out of this story and other evidence the possibility of a homosexual young man, even if observers and participants failed to speak of such?

Focusing on the private Lincoln while mostly ignoring the public one can obscure the private, too. For example, to prevent a quorum at a session of the Illinois State Legislature in 1840, Representative Lincoln jumped out of a window of the building where the members were meeting. Wilson sees this as a sign of private distress. That the leap was intended to influence important financial legislation during a debilitating economic depression is largely lost. Biographers, then, will have to use ''Honor's Voice'' with both admiration and a critical eye.

IT is profitable to divide the Lincoln literature roughly into two schools: ''Lincoln the man'' and ''Lincoln the god.'' Both have their uses. Wilson's book, with its understated, even prose, falls plainly into the first camp, and it makes a fine counterpoint to Garry Wills's ''Lincoln at Gettysburg,'' with its portrait of a President who ''remade America'' with a brief speech. Had Wilson claimed to be showing all of Lincoln, he might be criticized for missing some of the elements that make his subject great. As it is, he makes a very important start toward a new understanding of the greatest of Americans.



BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH


Writing about Lincoln is not something to be brushed off as simply a scholarly exercise. In our multicultural age, he remains a man of world-historic significance, the very symbol of what is best about the United States. During the Iranian revolution, a reporter saw a big painted slogan in Teheran: ''Government of the people, by the people, for the people.'' During Jiang Zemin's recent visit to the United States, the Chinese President conjured up Lincoln's memory. So has Pope John Paul II. When Colin Powell announced his refusal to run for the Presidency, he held up but one name. The Lincoln scholar's responsibilities are large. ''Honor's Voice'' gives Americans reason to be grateful that the field continues to attract students of ability and integrity.