About Abraham Lincolns School Days In Indiana
Lincoln once wrote, in a letter to a friend, about his early teachers in Indiana:
"He (father) removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home about the time
the State came into the Union. It was 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 beside readin', writin', and cipherin' to the Rule of Three (simple proportion). If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education."
Abe's first teacher in Indiana, however, was Hazel Dorsey. The school house was built of rough, round logs. The chimney was made of poles well covered with clay. The windows were spaces cut in the logs, and covered with greased paper. But Abe was determined to learn. He and his sister thought nothing of walking four miles a day through snow, rain and mud. "Nat" Grigsby, who afterward married the sister, spoke in glowing terms of Abe's few school days:
"He was always at school early, and attended to his studies. He lost no time at home, and when not at work was at his books. He kept up his studies on Sunday, and carried his books
with him to work, so that he might read when he rested from labor."
Thomas Lincoln had no use for "eddication," as he called it. "It will spile the boy," he kept saying. He—the father—had got along better without going to school, and why should Abe have a better education than his father? He thought Abe's studious habits were due to "pure laziness, jest to git shet o' workin'." So, whenever there was the slightest excuse, he took Abe out of school and set him to work at home or for one of the neighbors, while he himself went hunting or loafed about the house.
This must have been very trying to a boy as hungry to learn as Abe Lincoln was. His new mother saw and sympathized with him, and in her quiet way, managed to get the boy started to school, for a few weeks at most. For some reason Hazel Dorsey stopped "keeping" the school, and there was a long "vacation" for all the children. But a new man, Andrew Crawford, came and settled near Gentryville. Having nothing better to do at first, he was urged to reopen the school.
One evening Abe came in from his work and his stepmother greeted him with:
"Another chance for you to go to school."
"Where?"
"That man Crawford that moved in a while ago is to begin school next week, and two miles and back every day will be just about enough for you to walk to keep your legs limber."
The tactful wife accomplished it somehow and Abe started off to school with Nancy, and a light heart. A neighbor described him as he appeared in Crawford's school, as "long, wiry and strong, while his big feet and hands, and the length of his legs and arms, were out of all proportion to his small trunk and head. His complexion was swarthy, and his skin shriveled and yellow even then. He wore low shoes, buckskin breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, and a coonskin cap. The breeches hung close to his legs, but were far from meeting the tops of his shoes, exposing 'twelve inches of shinbone, sharp, blue and narrow.'"
"Yet," said Nat Grigsby, "he was always in good health, never sick, and had an excellent constitution."
HELPING KATE ROBY SPELL
Andrew Crawford must have been an unusual
man, for he tried to teach "manners" in his backwoods school! Spelling was considered a great accomplishment. Abe shone as a speller in school and at the spelling-matches. One day, evidently during a period when young Lincoln was kept from school to do some outside work for his father, he appeared at the window when the class in spelling was on the floor. The word "defied" was given out and several pupils had misspelled it. Kate Roby, the pretty girl of the village, was stammering over it. "D-e-f," said Kate, then she hesitated over the next letter. Abe pointed to his eye and winked significantly. The girl took the hint and went on glibly "i-e-d," and "went up head."
"I DID IT!"
There was a buck's head nailed over the school house door. It proved a temptation to young Lincoln, who was tall enough to reach it easily. One day the schoolmaster discovered that one horn was broken and he demanded to know who had done the damage. There was silence and a general denial till Abe spoke up sturdily:
"I did it. I did not mean to do it, but I hung
on it—and it broke!" The other boys thought Abe was foolish to "own up" till he had to—but that was his way.
It is doubtful if Abe Lincoln owned an arithmetic. He had a copybook, made by himself, in which he entered tables of weights and measures and "sums" he had to do. Among these was a specimen of schoolboy doggerel:
"Abraham Lincoln,
His hand and pen,
He will be good—
But God knows when!"
In another place he wrote some solemn reflections on the value of time:
"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."
As he grew older his handwriting improved and he was often asked to "set copies" for other]
boys to follow. In the book of a boy named Richardson, he wrote this prophetic couplet:
"Good boys who to their books apply
Will all be great men by and by."
