Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [35]
Books became his academy, his college. The printed word united his mind with the great minds of generations past. Relatives and neighbors recalled that he scoured the countryside for books and read every volume “he could lay his hands on.” At a time when ownership of books remained “a luxury for those Americans living outside the purview of the middle class,” gaining access to reading material proved difficult. When Lincoln obtained copies of the King James Bible, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables, and William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, he could not contain his excitement. Holding Pilgrim’s Progress in his hands, “his eyes sparkled, and that day he could not eat, and that night he could not sleep.”
When printing was first invented, Lincoln would later write, “the great mass of men…were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were capable of improvement.” To liberate “the mind from this false and under estimate of itself, is the great task which printing came into the world to perform.” He was, of course, also speaking of himself, of the transforming liberation of a young boy unlocking the miraculous mysteries of language, discovering a world of possibilities in the small log cabin on the frontier that he later called “as unpoetical as any spot of the earth.”
“There is no Frigate like a Book,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “to take us Lands away.” Though the young Lincoln never left the frontier, would never leave America, he traveled with Byron’s Childe Harold to Spain and Portugal, the Middle East and Italy; accompanied Robert Burns to Edinburgh; and followed the English kings into battle with Shakespeare. As he explored the wonders of literature and the history of the country, the young Lincoln, already conscious of his own power, developed ambitions far beyond the expectations of his family and neighbors. It was through literature that he was able to transcend his surroundings.
He read and reread the Bible and Aesop’s Fables so many times that years later he could recite whole passages and entire stories from memory. Through Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, he first encountered selections from Shakespeare’s plays, inspiring a love for the great dramatist’s writings long before he ever saw a play. He borrowed a volume of the Revised Statutes of Indiana from the local constable, a work that contained the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787—documents that would become foundation stones of his philosophical and political thought.
Everywhere he went, Lincoln carried a book with him. He thumbed through page after page while his horse rested at the end of a long row of planting. Whenever he could escape work, he would lie with his head against a tree and read. Though he acquired only a handful of volumes, they were seminal works of the English language. Reading the Bible and Shakespeare over and over implanted rhythms and poetry that would come to fruition in those works of his maturity that made Abraham Lincoln our only poet-president. With remarkable energy and tenacity he quarried the thoughts and ideas that he wanted to remember. “When he came across a passage that Struck him,” his stepmother recalled, “he would write it down on boards if he had no paper,” and “when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again.” Then once he obtained paper, he would rewrite it and keep it in a scrapbook so that it could be memorized. Words thus became precious to him, never, as with Seward, to be lightly or indiscriminately used.
The volumes to feed Lincoln’s intellectual hunger did not come cheaply. The story is often recounted of the time he borrowed Parson Weems’s Life of George Washington from Josiah Crawford, a well-to-do farmer who lived