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Updated: May 15, 2025
Beginning with Weems's "Life of Washington" when a mere lad, he perseveringly read, through all his fortunes, all manner of books, not only during leisure hours by day, when tending mill or store, but for long months by the light of pine shavings from the cooper's shop at night, and in later times when traversing the country in his various callings.
This is Weems's narrative, a little colored with his full brush, but true enough as to detail. The improvement which he works up from the plain potato presented as a dinner to the officer, is equally sound as a moral, though we will not vouch for the exact expression of the sentiment.
We know of the simplicity, of the penury, of the family life in the little one-roomed log hut that formed the home for the first ten years of Abraham's life. We know of his little group of books collected with toil and self-sacrifice. The series, after some years of strenuous labour, comprised the Bible, Aesop's Fables, a tattered copy of Euclid's Geometry, and Weems's Life of Washington.
The books which he saw were few, but a little later he laid hands upon them all and read and re-read them till he must have absorbed all their strong juice into his own nature. Nicolay and Hay give the list: The Bible; "Aesop's Fables;" "Robinson Crusoe;" "The Pilgrim's Progress;" a history of the United States; Weems's "Washington."
For he dried the copy of Weems's "Life of Washington" and put it in his "library." But what boy or girl of today would like to buy books at such a price? This was the boy-life of Abraham Lincoln. It was a life of poverty, privation, hard work, little play, and less money. The boy did not love work. But he worked.
In the meantime he had read Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," Æsop's "Fables," The Bible, and Weems's "Life of Washington." In 1824 his father, in need of his assistance as a bread-winner, began to instruct him in the carpenter trade. In 1825 he was employed at $6 a month to manage a ferry across the Ohio River at Gentry's Landing, near the mouth of Anderson Creek.
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