Reading With Lincoln

Notes

231 Notes 1. The Sometime Schoolboy 1. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews , and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 36 (hereafter cited as Herndon’s Informants); Lowell H. Harrison, Lincoln of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 18; Louis A. Warren, Lincoln’s Youth: Indiana Years, Seven to Twenty-one, 1816–1830 (New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1959), 10. 2. Harrison, Lincoln of Kentucky, 25. 3. Herndon’s Informants, 28. 4. Ibid., 66. 5. Ibid., 28, 38. 6. Thomas Dilworth, A New Guide to the English Tongue (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1977), 85. For further discussion of the moralizing aphorisms and poetic sentiments Lincoln would have encountered in Dilworth, see Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: Biography of a Writer (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), 7–12. 7. Noah Webster, The American Spelling Book (Albany, N.Y.: Websters and Skinners, 1821), 4. Hereafter cited as Webster’s Speller. 8. Webster’s Speller, 43, 159. 9. Ibid., 159; Dilworth, New Guide to the English Tongue, 51. 10. Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 4:62. Hereafter cited as Collected Works. 11. Herndon’s Informants, 93–94. 12. Collected Works, 3:511. “Ciphering to the rule of three” is a problem in elementary proportional mathematics: with three known quantities of a four-term ratio (e.g., 3/4 : 9/x), to solve for the fourth. 13. William E. Barton, Abraham Lincoln and His Books (Chicago: Marshall Field & Co., 1920), 9–11. Barton retells the story from Adlai E. Stevenson’s Something of Men I Have Known (1909), who had it from Henderson. Henry C. Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln (Boston, 1892; Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1940) offers an inferior variant of this story in the context of military contract-seekers pestering the president to adopt their invention (177–78). 14. Warren, Lincoln’s Youth, 167. 15. List compiled from ibid., 290. 16. Charles Monaghan, “Lindley Murray and the Enlightenment,” Paradigm 19 (May 1996), www.ed.uiuc.edu/faculty/westbury/Paradigm/monaghan2.html. 17. Warren, Lincoln’s Youth, 103; Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, Herndon’s Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 36. 18. Lindley Murray, The English Reader (Philadelphia: J. Ormrod, 1800), 3–4. 19. Hugh Blair, Abridgment of Lectures on Rhetoric (1832; Philadelphia: Kay and Troutman , 1849), 61. 20. Monaghan, “Lindley Murray,” 11. 21. Murray, The English Reader, 86–87. 22. Ibid., 226–27. 23. The table of contents of The English Reader may be found on pp. 29–36. %UD\1RWHVLQGG $0 232 Notes to Pages 7–17 24. William Cowper, The Task (London: John Sharpe, 1825), 31–33; Murray, The English Reader. 25. Murray, The English Reader, 7. 26. Murray acknowledges his debt to Blair for parts of his introduction (ibid.); he borrows freely from pp. 147–53 of the Abridgment of Lectures on Rhetoric. 27. Collected Works, 1:100. 28. Lincoln is decrying Adams’s having procured affidavits from persons who are far from “disinterested” parties in the disagreement: his son and “some black or mulatto boy, from his being kept in the Kitchen” (ibid., 1:99–100). 29. Murray, The English Reader, 19. 30. Herndon’s Informants, 146–47 and 147 n. 1. 31. The American Speaker (Philadelphia: Birch and Small, 1811), v–vi. 32. Herndon’s Informants, 105 and 105 n. 8. 33. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; New York: Penguin, 2003), 116. 34. Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator (Boston, 1797), 242. 35. Abraham T. Lowe, ed., The Columbian Class Book, Consisting of Geographical, Historical and Biographical Extracts . . . (Worcester, Mass.: Dorr & Howland, 1824), 169–74. 36. Ibid., 351. 37. Preface, The Kentucky Preceptor, 3rd ed. (Lexington, Ky.: Maccoun, Til[ford], 1812), n.p. Louis Warren asserts that the Kentucky imprint is “primarily, a new edition of Caleb Bingham’s The American Preceptor (1794), published in Boston” (Lincoln’s Youth, 167). In this he is mistaken. The American Preceptor might have served as a model for The Kentucky Preceptor (both are designed as schoolbooks; both contain “select sentences” for stylistic emulation), but the two books have completely different contents (including their prefaces). 38. Herndon’s Lincoln, 16. Scott’s Elocution contains the stanza from the poem which includes the well-known line, but the entire text is printed in The Kentucky Preceptor , 216–18. See chap. 3 below for a fuller discussion of...