About Abraham Lincolns School Days In Indiana

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."

Lincoln's Boyhood Teacher

The Boy Lincoln's Best Teacher

At Knob Creek the boy began to go to an "A B C" school. His first teacher was Zachariah Riney. Of course, there were no regular schools in the backwoods then. When a man who "knew enough" happened to come along, especially if he had nothing else to do, he tried to teach the children of the pioneers in a poor log schoolhouse. It is not likely that little Abe went to school more than a few weeks at this time, for he never had a year's schooling in his life. There was another teacher afterward at Knob Creek—a man named Caleb Hazel. Little is known of either of these teachers except that he taught little Abe Lincoln. If their pupil had not become famous the men and their schools would never have been mentioned in history.

An old man, named Austin Gollaher, used to like to tell of the days when he and little Abe went to school together. He said:

"Abe was an unusually bright boy at school,
 and made splendid progress in his studies. Indeed, he learned faster than any of his schoolmates. Though so young, he studied very hard."

Although Nancy Lincoln insisted on sending the children to school, when there was any, she had a large share in Abe's early education, just as she had taught his father to write his own name. She told them Bible stories and such others as she had picked up in her barren, backwoods life. She and her husband were too religious to believe in telling their children fairy tales.

The best thing of all was the reading of "The Pilgrim's Progress" during the long Winter evenings, after the wood was brought in and Father Tom had set his traps and done his other work for the night. Nancy's voice was low, with soft, southern tones and accents. Tom and the children enjoyed the story of Christian's pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City the more because of her love for the story she was reading to them, as they lay on bearskin rugs before the blazing fire.

Abe was only six, but he was a thoughtful boy. He tried to think of some way to show his[ gratitude to his mother for giving them so much pleasure. While out gathering sticks and cutting wood for the big fireplace, a happy thought came to him—he would cut off some spicewood branches, hack them up on a log, and secrete them behind the cabin. Then, when the mother was ready to read again, and Sarah and the father were sitting and lying before the fire, he brought in the hidden branches and threw them on, a few twigs at a time, to the surprise of the others. It worked like a charm; the spicewood boughs not only added to the brightness of the scene but filled the whole house with the "sweet smelling savour" of a little boy's love and gratitude.

No one can fathom the pleasure of that precious memory throughout those four lives, as the story of Great Heart and Christiana followed Christian along the path that "shineth more and more unto the perfect day." While the father and sister were delighted with the crackle, sparkle and pleasant aroma of the bits of spicewood, as Abe tossed them upon the fire, no one could appreciate the thoughtful act of the boy so much as his mother. It would be strange if her eyes did not fill, as she read to her fascinated family,
 but that was not the sort of thing the fondest mother could speak of.

Little did Nancy dream that, in reading to her son of the devotion of Great Heart to his charges, she was fostering a spirit in her little son that would help him make the noble pilgrimage from their hovel to the highest home in the land, where another President of the United States would refer to him as "the Great Heart of the White House." If any one could have looked ahead fifty years to see all this, and could have told Nancy Hanks Lincoln, she would not have believed it. After her own life of toil and hardship it would have seemed to her "too good to be true." But in the centuries following the humble yet beautiful career of "the Backwoods Boy" from the hut to the White House, history keeps the whole world saying with bated breath, "the half was never told!"