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Abraham Lincoln inherited his love of learning from his mother, who was superior in intelligence and refinement to the women of her class and time. His ambition to become a lawyer was inspired by a copy of the Revised Statutes of Indiana which accidentally fell into his hands when he was a mere boy in the swampy forests of the southern section of that State. In the brief autobiography already referred to, which he prepared for the newspapers to gratify public curiosity when he was nominated as a candidate for President, he says that he "went to school by littles; in all, it did not amount to more than a year," and he afterwards told a friend that he "read through every book he ever heard of in that country for a circuit of fifty miles." These included Weems's "Life of Washington," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," Æsop's "Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," a History of the United States whose author is not named, the Bible, and the Statutes of Indiana.

This is the catalogue he gave of the books he knew in his youth. His biographer included Plutarch's "Lives," and when the advanced sheets of the campaign sketch reached Lincoln he gave a curious exhibition of his habitual accuracy by calling attention to the fact that this was not exact when it was written, "for, up to that moment in my life, I had never seen that early contribution to human history; but I want your book, even if it is nothing more than a mere campaign sketch, to be faithful to the facts, and, in order that the statement might be literally true, I secured the book (Plutarch's 'Lives') a few weeks ago and have sent for you to tell you that I have just read it through."

It is quite remarkable that a country lad, almost illiterate, should have found a volume of statutes interesting reading, but Lincoln read and reread it until he had almost committed its contents to memory, and in after-years, when any one cited an Indiana law, he could usually repeat the exact text and often give the numbers of the page, chapter, and paragraph. The book belonged to David Turnham, who seems to have been a constable or magistrate in that part of Indiana, and this volume constituted his professional library. The actual copy is now preserved in the library of the New York Law Institute. The binding is worn and the title-page and a few leaves at the end are missing. Besides the statutes as enacted up to 1824, it contains the Declaration of Independence, the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Indiana, and the Act of Virginia, passed in 1783, by which "The territory North Westward of the river Ohio" was conveyed to the United States, and the ordinance of 1787 for governing that territory, of which Article VI. reads:

"There shall neither be slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall be duly convicted; provided always, that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed, in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed, and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid."

It is an interesting coincidence that Abraham Lincoln should not only have received the impressions which guided him in the choice of his career from this volume, but also his first knowledge of the legal side of slavery. Before he finished that book he knew the principles upon which the government of the United States was founded and how they were applied in the States. Its contents were fastened upon his memory by copying long extracts with a quill of a turkey-buzzard and ink home-made from the juice of the brier root. When he had no paper he wrote upon a shingle, and, after he had committed to memory the paragraphs so preserved, he would shave off the shingle with his knife and write others. When he was in the field ploughing or cultivating he took a book with him, and when he stopped to rest would pull it from his pocket and read until it was time to resume work again. In after-life, even when he came to the White House, he used to speak of the impressions made upon his mind by the "Life of Washington," and always contended that it was better for the young men of the country to regard Washington in the light of a demigod, as Parson Weems describes him, than to shake their faith in the greatest hero of American history by narrating his mistakes and follies as if he were a common man.

He never lost his love for "Pilgrim's Progress" or "Robinson Crusoe." The characters in both were real to him, and to the end of his days he could repeat Æsop's "Fables" verbatim.

In those days schools were very scarce and poor; the teachers were usually incompetent itinerant adventurers or men too lazy or feeble to do the manual labor required of frontiersmen. They were paid a trifling fee for each scholar and "boarded 'round." Nothing was expected of them in the way of education beyond a knowledge of the three R's, and Lincoln, of all famous self-made men, owed the least of his intellectual strength and knowledge to teachers and books and the most to observation and human contact. When he was upon his eventful "speaking trip," as he called it, in New England, in the spring of 1860, a clergyman of Hartford was so impressed by the language and logic of his address that he inquired where he was educated. Mr. Lincoln replied—

"Well, as to education, the newspapers are correct. I never went to school more than six months in my life. I can say this: that among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way that I could not understand. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings.

"I could not sleep, although I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for an idea until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over again, until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, until I have bounded it north and bounded it south and bounded it east and bounded it west."

Among the papers of the late Charles Lanman there is a sketch of Mr. Lincoln, written in his own hand. Mr. Lanman was editor of the Congressional Directory at the time that Mr. Lincoln was elected to Congress, and, according to the ordinary custom, forwarded to him, as well as to all the other members-elect, a blank to be filled out with facts and dates which might be made the basis for a biographical sketch in the Directory. Lincoln's blank was returned promptly filled up in his own handwriting, with the following information:

"Born February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky.

"Education defective.

"Profession, lawyer.

"Military service, captain of volunteers in the Black Hawk War.

"Offices held: postmaster at a very small office; four times a member of the Illinois Legislature, and elected to the Lower House of the next Congress."

Mr. Leonard Swett, who was closely identified with Mr. Lincoln for many years, says—

"In the fall of 1853, as I was riding with Mr. Lincoln, I said, 'I have heard a great many curious incidents of your early life, and I would be obliged if you would begin at your earliest recollection and tell me the story of it continuously.'

"'I can remember,' he said, 'our life in Kentucky: the cabin, the stinted living, the sale of our possessions, and the journey with my father and mother to Southern Indiana.' I think he said he was then about six years old. Shortly after his arrival in Indiana his mother died. 'It was pretty pinching times at first in Indiana, getting the cabin built, and the clearing for the crops, but presently we got reasonably comfortable, and my father married again.'

"He had very faint recollections of his own mother, he was so young when she died; but he spoke most kindly of her and of his step-mother, and her cares for him in providing for his wants.

"'My father,' he said, 'had suffered greatly for the want of an education, and he determined at an early day that I should be well educated. And what do you think his ideas of a good education were? We had a dog-eared arithmetic in our house, and father determined that somehow, or somehow else, I should cipher clear through that book.'

"With this standard of an education, he started to a school in a log-house in the neighborhood, and began his educational career. He had attended this school but about six weeks, however, when a calamity befell his father. He had endorsed a man's note in the neighborhood for a considerable amount, and the prospect was he would have it to pay, and that would sweep away all their little possessions. His father, therefore, explained to him that he wanted to hire him out and receive the fruits of his labor and his aid in averting this calamity. Accordingly, at the expiration of six weeks, he left school and never returned to it again."