Lincoln's father was illiterate, and had no sympathy with his son's efforts to educate himself. Fortunately for him, however, his stepmother helped and encouraged him in every way possible. Shortly before her death she said to a biographer of Lincoln: "I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home, as well as at school. At first he was not easily reconciled to it, but finally he too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent. Abe was a dutiful son to me always, and we took particular care when he was reading not to disturb him,—would let him read on and on till he quit of his own accord."
Lincoln fully appreciated his stepmother's sympathy and love for him, and returned them in equal measure. It added greatly to his enjoyment of his reading and studies to have some one to whom he could talk about them, and in after life he always gratefully remembered what his second mother did for him in those early days of toil and effort.
If there was a book to be borrowed anywhere in his neighborhood, he was sure to hear about it and borrow it if possible. He said himself that he "read through every book he had ever heard of in that county for a circuit of fifty miles."
And how he read! Boys who have books and magazines and papers in abundance in their homes, besides having thousands of volumes to choose from in great city libraries, can have no idea of what a book meant to this boy in the wilderness. He devoured every one that came into his hands as a man famishing from hunger devours a crust of bread. He read and re-read it until he had made the contents his own.
"From everything he read," says Miss Tarbell, "he made long extracts, with his turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. When he had no paper he would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copybook. The wooden fire shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he ciphered with a charred stick, shaving it off when it had become too grimy for use. The logs and boards in his vicinity he covered with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in his loft to have it at hand at peep of day. When acting as ferryman on the Ohio in his nineteenth year, anxious, no doubt, to get through the books of the house where he boarded before he left the place, he read every night until midnight."
His stepmother said: "He read everything 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, and keep it by him until he could get paper. Then he would copy it, look at it, commit it to memory, and repeat it."
His thoroughness in mastering everything he undertook to study was a habit acquired in childhood. How he acquired this habit he tells himself. "Among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child," he says, "I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I do not think I ever got angry at anything else in my life; but that always disturbed my temper, and has ever since. 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 walking up and down and 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; 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, till I have bounded it north and bounded it south and bounded it east and bounded it west."
With all his hard study, reading, and thinking, Lincoln was not a bookworm, nor a dull companion to the humble, unschooled people among whom his youth was spent. On the contrary, although he was looked up to as one whose acquirements in "book learning" had raised him far above every one in his neighborhood, he was the most popular youth in all the country round. No "husking bee," or "house raising" or merry-making of any kind was complete if Abraham was not present. He was witty, ready of speech, a good story-teller, and had stored his memory with a fund of humorous anecdotes, which he always used to good purpose and with great effect. He had committed to memory, and could recite all the poetry in the various school readers used at that time in the log-cabin schoolhouse. He could make rhymes himself, and even make impromptu speeches that excited the admiration of his hearers. He was the best wrestler, jumper, runner, and the strongest of all his young companions. Even when a mere youth he could lift as much as three full-grown men; and, "if you heard him fellin' trees in a clearin'," said his cousin, Dennis Hanks, "you would say there was three men at work by the way the trees fell. His ax would flash and bite into a sugar tree or sycamore, and down it would come."
His kindness and tenderness of heart were as great as his strength and agility. He loved all God's creatures, and cruelty to any of them always aroused his indignation. Only once did he ever attempt to kill any of the game in the woods, which the family considered necessary for their subsistence. He refers to this occasion in an autobiography, written by him in the third person, in the year 1860.
"A few days before the completion of his eighth year," he says, "in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log cabin; and Abraham, with a rifle gun, standing inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has never since pulled the trigger on any larger game."
Any suffering thing, whether it was animal, man, woman, or child, was sure of his sympathy and aid. Although he never touched intoxicating drinks himself, he pitied those who lost manhood by their use. One night on his way home from a husking bee or house raising, he found an unfortunate man lying on the roadside overcome with drink. If the man were allowed to remain there, he would freeze to death. Lincoln raised him from the ground and carried him a long distance to the nearest house, where he remained with him during the night. The man was his firm friend ever after.
Women admired him for his courtesy and rough gallantry, as well as for his strength and kindness of heart; and he, in his turn, reverenced women, as every noble, strong man does. This big, bony, tall, awkward young fellow, who at eighteen measured six feet four, was as ready to care for a baby in the absence of its mother as he was to tell a good story or to fell a tree. Was it any wonder that he was popular with all kinds of people?
His stepmother says of him: "Abe was a good boy, and I can say what scarcely one woman—a mother—can say in a thousand; Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused in fact or appearance to do anything I requested him. I never gave him a cross word in all my life. His mind and mine—what little I had—seemed to run together. He was here after he was elected president. He was a dutiful son to me always. I think he loved me truly. I had a son, John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys; but I must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw or expect to see."
Wherever he went, or whatever he did, he studied men and things, and gathered knowledge as much by observation as from books and whatever news-papers or other publications he could get hold of. He used to go regularly to the leading store in Gentryville, to read a Louisville paper, taken by the proprietor of the store, Mr. Jones. He discussed its contents, and exchanged views with the farmers who made the store their place of meeting. His love of oratory was great. When the courts were in session in Boonville, a town fifteen miles distant from his home, whenever he could spare a day, he used to walk there in the morning and back at night, to hear the lawyers argue cases and make speeches. By this time Abraham himself could make an impromptu speech on any subject with which he was at all familiar, good enough to win the applause of the Indiana farmers.
So, his boyhood