Anxious to Learn

The Way it Was for Abraham Lincoln Many great men began life in humbleness and poverty, but none ever came from such depths or rose to such a height as Abraham Lincoln. His birthplace, in Hardin County, Kentucky, was but a wilderness, and Spencer County, Indiana, to which the Lincoln family moved when Abraham was in his eighth year, was even wilder, more remote and more uncivilized. There were no schoolhouses at regular intervals, but a few scattered log schoolhouses did dot the primitive landscape. Abraham Lincoln got the rudiments of an education in such places, but he never really finished his education and was always seeking knowledge. Some of Lincoln's schoolboy records are available to be seen. One is a book that he bound himself and in which he recorded the table of weights and measures, and the sums to be worked out from them. This was his arithmetic. Abraham was much too poor to own a printed copy. Lincoln wrote: "Abraham Lincoln, His Hand and Pen, He Will be Good, But God knows when." These four lines of schoolboy doggerel are often quoted as an example of his poetry. Here is one less known: "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." He also wrote two lines for his friend, Joseph C. Richardson: "Good boys who to their books apply, Will all be great men by and by." All of Lincoln's education or 'schooling' did not amount to a year's time, but he was a constant student outside of the schoolhouse. He read all of the books he could borrow, and it was his chief delight during the day to lie under the shade of some tree, or at night in front of the fire, reading and studying. His favorite books were the Bible and Aesop's Fables, which he kept within reach and read time and again. Abraham's first employer was Denton Offut. During his clerking days in Offut's store, Lincoln continued to read and study. He made considerable progress in grammar and mathematics. More information about Abraham Lincoln is available in: Herndon's Informants, Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis. Copyright 1998 by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis. University of Illinois Press. Photographs from National Archives and Records Administration.