May 23, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, when Abraham Lincoln was asked on a questionnaire to describe his education, he wrote just one word: "defective." But that didn’t stop him from becoming one of the premier thinkers of his time—and the only U.S. President to ever hold a patent. David J. Kent, author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius, shares the story.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. In February twelfth,
eighteen o nine, two men were born who would end
up being considered among the top thinkers of their time.
Both men valued science and technology, were controversial among many
of their contemporaries, and both fundamentally change the course of history.
(00:32):
But that's where the comparisons stop. One of these men
was English scientist Charles Darwin. The other was President of
the United States. Here to tell the story is David J. Kent,
author of Lincoln The Fire of Genius. But first a
reading of Lincoln's own words, let's get into the story.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
All creation is a mine, in every man a miner,
the whole earth, and all within it, upon it and
around it, including himself in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature,
and his susceptibilities are the infinitely various leads from which man,
from the first was to dig out his destiny. In
(01:25):
the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miners stood
naked in knowledgeless. Upon it fishes, birds, beast and creeping
things are not miners, but feeders and lodgers. Merely Beavers
build houses, but they build them in no wise differently
or better now than they did five thousand years ago.
Ants and honey bees provide food for winter. Man is
(01:46):
not the only animal who labors, but he is the
only one who improves this workmanship. This improvement he affects
by discoveries and inventions. His first important discovery was the
fact that he was naked in His first invention was
the figley vapron. Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Lincoln and Darwin were born in the same day, literally
the same day, but under very different circumstances. You know,
Darwin was born into a wealthy family privilege, and he
married into a wealthy family privilege. And Lincoln was born
on a small subsistence farm in northern Kentucky on the frontier.
He was just his father, his mother, him, an older sister.
(02:35):
There was a younger brother, Thomas, who only lived for
a couple of months. I mean, very limited as far
as how many acres that they could clear for planting crops,
because there just wasn't the people to do it. There
weren't a lot of schools, there weren't a lot of
even other people. There wasn't even a town there. So
(02:57):
they left that when Lincoln was seven and moved across
the border into Indiana and Indiana is important for a
couple of reasons. One because in Kentucky there was slavery,
and Indiana literally when they moved there was just becoming
(03:20):
a state within a few weeks, and it was a
free state, so that was part of the reason. The
more important reason was because Thomas Lincoln, his father, had
lost his farm and he went through two or three
farms in Kentucky because other people would come and say,
you don't own that land, or the person that you
(03:41):
bought the land from didn't own it. There was a
lot of land title problems in Kentucky. There wasn't in Indiana.
It had been planned out much better. He ended up
on a farm then stayed there for the next fourteen years,
so it was much more stable, and there were other people.
There was a small village where they could get help,
(04:03):
they could plant crops, but it was still very small
and Lincoln was still primarily the main labor with his father,
even at seven years old. He says at seven and
he was very tall and strong for his age. He
says that he was handed an axe and very rarely
put down that most useful instrument. For the next fifteen
(04:25):
years and where they moved to. Was an unbroken force,
a dense force with many, many, many, many different kinds
of trees, a lot of undergrowth. So he learned about
tree ecology. He learned about agronomy, he learned about weather,
he learned about hydrology. He was picking up little sciences
along the way. But when he actually became a congressman,
(04:47):
his one term in Congress, he had to fill out
like a questionnaire for the congressional record. You know about you.
When he gets to the question about what your education is,
he just writes one word defective, he says. When he's
running for president, he writes an autobiography, and he says
that the totality of his formal education was less than
(05:11):
a year. And that's over the first twenty one years
of his life. He's doing a total of less than
a year. You know, week here, one class here, maybe
a couple of months. He could only go to school
in the frontier during the winter because from the time
you start plowing the fields until the time after you
(05:33):
finish harvesting and sell off any excess in store whatever
you've grown, you don't have time to go to school.
You're basically working for survival. You know, if your crops
are wiped out, you may starve. There was very little
to inspire learning. Most of the other people his age,
his peers, weren't inspired to do more. They would go
(05:57):
along and follow their in their father's footsteps and run
the farms. They aspired to anything. It would be to
get their own acreage and plant their own farms and
raise their own families and continue the traditions. And the
standards for teachers were very different than they were in
the East. If somebody said that they could read and
(06:18):
write and cipher to the rule of three, then they
were a teacher. And if they claimed that they could
speak some Latin, they are considered a wizard. But he literally,
like my father would have say, you know, he walked
five miles to school uphill in both directions in the
snow Lincoln not so much the uphill of both directions,
(06:40):
But he did that to get the little schooling that
he got. And in this little bit of schooling here
and there, he says he learned reading, writing, and ciphering
to the rule of three, which is a very simple
math ratio, and that's basically what he says he learned.
(07:03):
So that was the formal part. But he really learned
most of what he learned on his own, so early on,
he's reading what everybody read on the frontier and pretty
much everywhere else. He read the Bible. For many people,
that was the only book they had access to. He
read things like Pilgrim's Progress and Esop's Fables, so very
(07:25):
typical things that people would read. And then he would
borrow whatever books he could find anybody who had a library,
which meant like three books he would borrow, and he
would read whatever he could do, and if he had
it for a while, he would read it over and
over and study it and memorized a lot of things,
and including poems, and he's very good memory throughout his
(07:48):
entire life. His best friend, Joshua Speed says, well, you
can read these things and you pick them up right away,
And Lincoln said, no, Speed, you're wrong. Mind is like
a piece of steel. It takes a very long time
to etch anything into it, but once you get it there,
it's very hard to remove it. So he would study
(08:12):
these things and run it over in his head over
and over, and once he did, it was very hard
to get it out of there.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
He had an.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Extremely good memory where he could remember people he met,
and there are families and the circumstances. Twenty thirty years later,
he actually learned quite a bit more than people give
him credit for. He downplayed his learning. He wanted to
be like the real splitter candidate, but on his own
(08:39):
he studied several different grammar books, different arithmetics, trigonometry, mathematics.
When it becomes a surveyor, he has to learn the
math behind surveying. So he teaches himself euclid geometry, which
is about logic as much as it is about math.
(09:00):
Wishes himself the law just by reading law books without
working with anybody. He just teaches himself all of this.
So he is learning constantly and he did that throughout
his entire life.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
And you've been listening to author David Jay Kent tell
the story of the young Abraham Lincoln who was born
go Figure on the same day that Darwin was born.
And what a story he tells about why the family
moved from Kentucky, which was originally home to Indiana. Property
rights matter and there was not stable title in Kentucky
(09:37):
and in Indiana there was, and what a world of
difference stable and secured title would mean to this family
when we come back more of the remarkable story of
the young Lincoln and how he came to be here
on our American story, and we returned to our American
(10:11):
stories and our story of Abraham Lincoln with David J. Kent,
author of Lincoln The Fire of Genius. When we last
left off, David was telling us about Lincoln's early life
and how despite being born into conditions quote unfit for learning,
those conditions being a subsistence farm in Kentucky, he was
(10:33):
able to become a learned man by borrowing books, attending
one year of formal education, and getting hands on life experience.
Let's continue with the story here again is David J.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Kent.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
As he grew up, he got a chance to get
out on his own, which you couldn't do until you
were twenty one. Up until that time, you were effectively
entured to your family, your parents. And even though his
father would hire him out, all of the money that
he earned doing that would go right back to his father.
So around the age of twenty two, he said, I'm
(11:11):
off on my own, like I'm finished with this, So
I'm gonna I don't like being on the farm, I
don't like working this hard I want to be thinking
more and doing things that involve my intelligence, not my brawn.
And he started on his own in New Salem, Illinois,
but he didn't have outside of farming very many options.
(11:34):
So he became a storekeeper because that was one of
the first options that popped up. He ended up running
a store with another guy till it went bankrupt. Winked
out in his mind, so he looked at what else
is available, Well, I can get this postmaster job, because
postmaster is not that important, especially out here. Plus, hey, postmaster,
(11:56):
all these people get newspapers, and I can read a
newspaper before I deliver it to the person. All of
those things, especially postmaster, kind of dovetailed with another career.
He had started being in politics, and it's very much
a part time thing back then, only a few months
(12:17):
a year that you were actually in session. While he
was in the state legislature, he started meeting the other
legislators and many of them were lawyers. They were telling him, well,
you know, you really need to study the law. You're
here in the legislature writing laws. You probably should study
(12:38):
the law so that you know what you're writing. And
he thought that was a good idea. So he started learning,
teaching himself the law. The first thing you've got to
keep in mind is that the Eastern and Western law
could be very different in those times. William Seward, for example,
(12:59):
who had been Governor of New York and was senator.
He had grown up in a wealthy family, gone to
formal schools, went to college, went to law school, and
he passed the bar exam. And that was fairly typical
in the East. In the West, many people did what
Lincoln did, which is you read the law. It's exactly
(13:22):
the way it sounds. You get law books and you
read them, and you learn the law that way by
looking at these past cases, what precedents there were. Out
in the West, there wasn't a lot of precedent for
a lot of the issues. Plus a lot of the
issues were very small divorces and debt collection things like that.
So it was more about can you convince a jury
(13:45):
as opposed to do you get the law exactly right?
And Lincoln was very good convincing juries. He rode the circuits.
So here ride out throughout most of the central part
of Illinois, go from courthouse to courthouse and just pick
up whatever cases were there and Usually they would just
(14:06):
sit there for six months until the lawyers get there,
and then they would do the cases. And they would
go through like twenty cases in a day, and Lincoln
would say, okay, what's your issue, and they would explain it,
and then he said, okay, let's go talk to the jury,
and then they would be done in half an hour.
And Lincoln's law career kind of progressed in tandem with
the way science and technology progressed, especially as it moved
(14:30):
more westward. He very much was aware of the growth
of technology. He didn't see it early on because he's
out there again in the frontier. He was born in
eight and oh nine. Up until eighteen o four, the
(14:51):
country stopped at the Mississippi River. It wasn't until eighteen
forty eight after the Mexican War that we got all
of the rest of that territory out to the west coast,
so Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois. This was still the frontier and
it was slowly moving its way west. With that came
the technology, so there were steamboats earlier in the Hudson River.
(15:14):
Beginnings of railroads were in the east. Everything started in
the east and worked its way west. So at first,
Lincoln never saw any of this. It was when he
when he's still living in Indiana, when he's nineteen years old,
he and a couple others took flatboat down to New Orleans.
(15:35):
So they go down the Ohio River, beat the Mississippi River,
and then all the way to New Orleans. New Orleans
was this big eye opener for him. It's a huge
city compared to anything he's seen before. It's multi cultural,
multi national, multi lingual. There are peoples of all shades
(15:57):
and all languages, and huge commerce. He would have seen
all these steamships servicing the port. He also saw slave markets,
which he hadn't really experienced. There was a road that
went past their farm in Kentucky that was the main
road for people in like Virginia, sending in slave people
(16:21):
further south into the Deep South where the cotton states.
So he had some experience with slavery, but not really
that much. And then suddenly it was like you're buying
and selling people. He realized there's a lot more to
the world. There were some other things on the second
(16:41):
flatboat trip. I'll mention he is going starting in Illinois
on the Sangamon River, which is a very small windy river,
and the flatboat gets stuck on the mill dam out
in New Salem, and he has to get over that dam.
But later on in Congress, the one term in Congress,
(17:03):
and he's coming back and he's going through the Great Lakes.
He goes up to Buffalo and goes to Niagara Falls
and sees Niagara Falls, which he writes a great piece about.
But then he works his way by steamship back to Chicago.
And before he gets to Chicago, he sees another steamship
that is stuck on the shallows, and the captain has
(17:25):
sent the crew overboard. They're sticking boards and empty barrels
and whatever they can to help make this thing float
a little bit. He remembers his own getting stuck on
the mill dam, and he realizes that there's a need
for a way to help boats get over these shoals,
and he sits down in between the two sessions of
(17:45):
Congress and devises up this patent. The patent is for
a device for getting boats over shoals and effectively uses
what we in science call the arc meets principle. You know,
the idea behind buoyancy and displacement, and that if you
can get something that's lighter than water under the hull,
(18:08):
you can raise the hull enough to get it over
any obstruction. And he did that by having these inflatable
bladders that could be lowered and inflated either by hand
pumping or by steam to raise the boat up just
enough to get it over this shoal. So when he
went back to Congress for the second session, he brought
(18:30):
this to a patent lawyer in Marshaan, d c. And
he got it submitted. And he's still to this day
is the only president with the patent. He made zero
attempt to commercialize this. Nobody else tried to commercialize it.
But the system itself is actually the system that's used
today by the Navy to help get ships and submarines,
(18:52):
you know, lifted off the ocean floor when they're sinking.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
And you've been listening to author David Kent his book
Lincoln The Fire of Genius, Well it's about one simple thing.
Lincoln was a lifelong learner, and he drove himself to
learn almost everything he learned, including science and technology. When
we come back more of this remarkable life story, the
(19:18):
story of our sixteenth president here on our American Stories
and we returned to our American stories and the final
(19:41):
portion of our story on Abraham Lincoln with David J. Kent,
author of Lincoln The Fire of Genius. When we last
left off, David was telling us about how, despite not
having much in the way of a resume, Lincoln was
able to become the owner of a shop, a postmaster,
a part time PubL politician, and eventually a lawyer. And
(20:02):
not by going to law school, mind you, but by
reading the law. Let's pick up where we last left
off with Lincoln riding the legal circuit.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
As he was riding a circuit, he saw that farming
was going from a simple you know, a wooden plow
behind a horse, to cast iron plows, to eventually steal plows.
But then you started seeing more technology, things called reapers,
these mechanical devices machinery which were used to collect wheat
(20:46):
and corn, and those were being patented. And there were
often cases where somebody would patent a reaper and somebody
else would copy it and hope that the original guy
would notice, but they usually did and they would sue
each other. So there were plenty of cases like that
that Lincoln started seeing. There's a famous one that Lincoln
(21:07):
was in called the Manny McCormick Rapert Trial, where Lincoln
actually in the end, it's a longer story than we
have time for, but you know, in the end, Lincoln
basically got caught out of it and didn't get to
argue the case. But he had researched the differences between
these two different reapers that have been developed by two
different men and determined the differences between them, and his
(21:29):
arguments eventually were the arguments that were used when it
finally got settled. There were more and more and more
of these types of things happening, and that made more
and more cases for Lincoln, and he quickly got a
reputation as being very good at being able to handle
these because he'd loved technology, loved to like pick things
apart and you take it apart and see how it worked.
(21:56):
One of the other big areas that he did was
railroad type cases. The railroads were working their way west
and getting bigger and bigger and more and more intrusive,
and he ended up put on retainer for the Illinois
Central Railroad for several years fought many cases for them,
but also worked for other railroads in Illinois, and there
(22:20):
were quite a few different private companies that were railroads,
not like Amtrak today. There were fifty different companies with
short rail lines. But he also worked for railroad workers.
He set significant precedents both for labor rights and for
corporation rights. So not only was he really big watching
(22:41):
and paying attention to all of these new developments and technology,
it became a major part of his income from his
legal career. There's a particular case called the Aften. Aften
is the name of esteem in the Mississippi River, and
(23:02):
up to this point, the steamships were the prime mechanism
for commerce. At one point, this fa Aften left Saint
Louis going north and it gets to an area called
Rock Island, just across from what's Davenport, Iowa today, and
it promptly runs into a railroad bridge that had only
(23:24):
been in service for about two weeks. This is the
very first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River. The fi
afton runs into it, catches fire, it burns down to
the hull and sinks, damages the bridge so it can't
be used for a while. And then the steamship company
sue the railroad companies and the bridge company because they
(23:45):
put an obstruction across the water, and Lincoln digs deep
into this case. He goes up there, he learns the engineering,
He calculates the speed of the river and the speed
of the steamship. By this time he had become a
steamship plot himself on the Sangamon River, and he convinces
most of the jury that it was most likely not
(24:08):
the bridge was an obstruction, but it was either negligence
or intentional to try to block bridges from being built
across the Mississippi River. Lincoln more or less wins this case,
and it sets a precedent that allows the railroads to
build many other bridges across Mississippi River. Totally changes how
(24:32):
we do commerce in this country. Instead of going north
and south on the Mississippi on the steamships, it's now
directly east west all the way out to the West
coast from railroads. Railroads to even today are the prime
mechanism for moving long distance produce and different products around
the country. He clearly understood more than most people know.
(25:00):
Oh his colleagues, they understood that Lincoln was different. He
had a scientific mind. He understood technology better than anybody.
That mentality becomes very important in the Civil War. You know,
the North and the South just hated each other and
they were fighting a war. But Lincoln, being kind of
(25:24):
the guy in the middle, was saying, I have a
more important role. I need to resolve this so that
the Union stays together. That was his thinking, and he
was analyzing everything to determine the best steps that he
could take in order to make that happen, even things
like the Emancipation Proclamation. He couldn't just say, Okay, I'm
(25:45):
going to get rid of slavery everywhere. He had to
be very careful about how he did it so that
he didn't lose the border states. Those four slave states
that stayed with the Union. If he said, well, I'm
going to ban slavery in your states have very quickly
gone joined the Confederacy and that would have been the
end of the United States. So he was very much
(26:07):
that logical, thoughtful thinker that could work through a lot
of different issues.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
On a more.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Specific level, he very much encouraged technology development. There were
plenty of old school military people who said, just give
me a bunch of muskets. They're easy to use, we
can mass produce them quickly. We don't have to worry
about different ammunition and different supply chains for different types
of weapons. Just give me those and we'll send these
(26:35):
people out there and hope they survived the battle. Lincoln
was like, yeah, but it's got to be a better way.
So he had plenty of people coming to the White
House showing them their new guns, everything from multiple shot
repeating rifles to different types of cannons and rockets and
machine guns, I mean all sorts of things. There's a
(26:57):
Spencer repeating rifle where there's a famous story where he
goes and Spencer comes in and pitches his rifle. And
this rifle, instead of having to load it from the barrel,
you actually have a seven cartridge or seven shell cartridge
that you can jam into the butt of the stock.
(27:18):
This is the modern way of thinking as far as
guns work. So Lincoln like is intrigued by this idea,
and he takes one of these and goes out with
Spencer into the what's now the ellipse out behind the
White House, and he takes seven shots into a piece
of wood, shows that he's actually a pretty decent shot,
(27:39):
and then he goes to fight at rhetorically, fight with
the ordnance officers. The head of Ordnance is an old
school guy who does not like the idea of these
multi shot weapons, because you know, you've got a bunch
of green troops that don't have much training. Now you're
going to send them out there where they can shoot
seven shots very fast. They were going to just shoot
(28:00):
them very fast and then throw the gun down and run. Plus,
these things are much more complicated, and it's muddy out
there and raining all the time, and you know they're
going to get they're not going to work. So Lincoln
had to argue with ordnance officers to push things like
the Spencer seven shot repeating rifle. He did go to
bat for this particular one, and he ordered that it
(28:23):
be put in the service. One other thing that he
pushed that became critical is ironclads. All the ships up
until that point were wooden sailing ships. He did the
same thing with telegraph, but it was the first war
that the president of the United States could send messages
almost instantaneously, not like texting today, but you know, almost
(28:44):
instantaneously out to the front. He could tell the generals,
you know, give them advice on what to do, and
get advice and find out what the status is and
then use telegraph to get to other generals in other
parts of the battle, which was all over the eastern
United States and even in the West. I do want
(29:05):
to mention Lincoln did a lot to institutionalize science and
technology that remains true today. He began the National Academy
of Sciences. He tells Congress, agriculture is so important, and
we have some dusty desk literally a one dusky desk
(29:26):
in the back corner of some other department. We should
have its own department for the Department of Agriculture. And
Congress created it at his request so that we could
improve the yields, improve the efficiency of agriculture. And then
he and Congress, and he's working with Congress on all
of these because they have to pass the laws now.
(29:47):
They passed the Home Set Act, which provided for westward
expansion past some marill Land Grant Act to create what
we're called land Grant colleges that were required to teach
science and engineering. So he did all of that while
while in the middle of trying to keep the Contrary
from falling apart.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
And a special thanks to David J. Kent, author of
Lincoln The Fire of Genius. The story of Lincoln the
lifelong learner. Here on our American stories
And we returned to our American stories. In February twelfth,
eighteen o nine, two men were born who would end
up being considered among the top thinkers of their time.
Both men valued science and technology, were controversial among many
of their contemporaries, and both fundamentally change the course of history.
(00:32):
But that's where the comparisons stop. One of these men
was English scientist Charles Darwin. The other was President of
the United States. Here to tell the story is David J. Kent,
author of Lincoln The Fire of Genius. But first a
reading of Lincoln's own words, let's get into the story.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
All creation is a mine, in every man a miner,
the whole earth, and all within it, upon it and
around it, including himself in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature,
and his susceptibilities are the infinitely various leads from which man,
from the first was to dig out his destiny. In
(01:25):
the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miners stood
naked in knowledgeless. Upon it fishes, birds, beast and creeping
things are not miners, but feeders and lodgers. Merely Beavers
build houses, but they build them in no wise differently
or better now than they did five thousand years ago.
Ants and honey bees provide food for winter. Man is
(01:46):
not the only animal who labors, but he is the
only one who improves this workmanship. This improvement he affects
by discoveries and inventions. His first important discovery was the
fact that he was naked in His first invention was
the figley vapron. Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Lincoln and Darwin were born in the same day, literally
the same day, but under very different circumstances. You know,
Darwin was born into a wealthy family privilege, and he
married into a wealthy family privilege. And Lincoln was born
on a small subsistence farm in northern Kentucky on the frontier.
He was just his father, his mother, him, an older sister.
(02:35):
There was a younger brother, Thomas, who only lived for
a couple of months. I mean, very limited as far
as how many acres that they could clear for planting crops,
because there just wasn't the people to do it. There
weren't a lot of schools, there weren't a lot of
even other people. There wasn't even a town there. So
(02:57):
they left that when Lincoln was seven and moved across
the border into Indiana and Indiana is important for a
couple of reasons. One because in Kentucky there was slavery,
and Indiana literally when they moved there was just becoming
(03:20):
a state within a few weeks, and it was a
free state, so that was part of the reason. The
more important reason was because Thomas Lincoln, his father, had
lost his farm and he went through two or three
farms in Kentucky because other people would come and say,
you don't own that land, or the person that you
(03:41):
bought the land from didn't own it. There was a
lot of land title problems in Kentucky. There wasn't in Indiana.
It had been planned out much better. He ended up
on a farm then stayed there for the next fourteen years,
so it was much more stable, and there were other people.
There was a small village where they could get help,
(04:03):
they could plant crops, but it was still very small
and Lincoln was still primarily the main labor with his father,
even at seven years old. He says at seven and
he was very tall and strong for his age. He
says that he was handed an axe and very rarely
put down that most useful instrument. For the next fifteen
(04:25):
years and where they moved to. Was an unbroken force,
a dense force with many, many, many, many different kinds
of trees, a lot of undergrowth. So he learned about
tree ecology. He learned about agronomy, he learned about weather,
he learned about hydrology. He was picking up little sciences
along the way. But when he actually became a congressman,
(04:47):
his one term in Congress, he had to fill out
like a questionnaire for the congressional record. You know about you.
When he gets to the question about what your education is,
he just writes one word defective, he says. When he's
running for president, he writes an autobiography, and he says
that the totality of his formal education was less than
(05:11):
a year. And that's over the first twenty one years
of his life. He's doing a total of less than
a year. You know, week here, one class here, maybe
a couple of months. He could only go to school
in the frontier during the winter because from the time
you start plowing the fields until the time after you
(05:33):
finish harvesting and sell off any excess in store whatever
you've grown, you don't have time to go to school.
You're basically working for survival. You know, if your crops
are wiped out, you may starve. There was very little
to inspire learning. Most of the other people his age,
his peers, weren't inspired to do more. They would go
(05:57):
along and follow their in their father's footsteps and run
the farms. They aspired to anything. It would be to
get their own acreage and plant their own farms and
raise their own families and continue the traditions. And the
standards for teachers were very different than they were in
the East. If somebody said that they could read and
(06:18):
write and cipher to the rule of three, then they
were a teacher. And if they claimed that they could
speak some Latin, they are considered a wizard. But he literally,
like my father would have say, you know, he walked
five miles to school uphill in both directions in the
snow Lincoln not so much the uphill of both directions,
(06:40):
But he did that to get the little schooling that
he got. And in this little bit of schooling here
and there, he says he learned reading, writing, and ciphering
to the rule of three, which is a very simple
math ratio, and that's basically what he says he learned.
(07:03):
So that was the formal part. But he really learned
most of what he learned on his own, so early on,
he's reading what everybody read on the frontier and pretty
much everywhere else. He read the Bible. For many people,
that was the only book they had access to. He
read things like Pilgrim's Progress and Esop's Fables, so very
(07:25):
typical things that people would read. And then he would
borrow whatever books he could find anybody who had a library,
which meant like three books he would borrow, and he
would read whatever he could do, and if he had
it for a while, he would read it over and
over and study it and memorized a lot of things,
and including poems, and he's very good memory throughout his
(07:48):
entire life. His best friend, Joshua Speed says, well, you
can read these things and you pick them up right away,
And Lincoln said, no, Speed, you're wrong. Mind is like
a piece of steel. It takes a very long time
to etch anything into it, but once you get it there,
it's very hard to remove it. So he would study
(08:12):
these things and run it over in his head over
and over, and once he did, it was very hard
to get it out of there.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
He had an.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Extremely good memory where he could remember people he met,
and there are families and the circumstances. Twenty thirty years later,
he actually learned quite a bit more than people give
him credit for. He downplayed his learning. He wanted to
be like the real splitter candidate, but on his own
(08:39):
he studied several different grammar books, different arithmetics, trigonometry, mathematics.
When it becomes a surveyor, he has to learn the
math behind surveying. So he teaches himself euclid geometry, which
is about logic as much as it is about math.
(09:00):
Wishes himself the law just by reading law books without
working with anybody. He just teaches himself all of this.
So he is learning constantly and he did that throughout
his entire life.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
And you've been listening to author David Jay Kent tell
the story of the young Abraham Lincoln who was born
go Figure on the same day that Darwin was born.
And what a story he tells about why the family
moved from Kentucky, which was originally home to Indiana. Property
rights matter and there was not stable title in Kentucky
(09:37):
and in Indiana there was, and what a world of
difference stable and secured title would mean to this family
when we come back more of the remarkable story of
the young Lincoln and how he came to be here
on our American story, and we returned to our American
(10:11):
stories and our story of Abraham Lincoln with David J. Kent,
author of Lincoln The Fire of Genius. When we last
left off, David was telling us about Lincoln's early life
and how despite being born into conditions quote unfit for learning,
those conditions being a subsistence farm in Kentucky, he was
(10:33):
able to become a learned man by borrowing books, attending
one year of formal education, and getting hands on life experience.
Let's continue with the story here again is David J.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Kent.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
As he grew up, he got a chance to get
out on his own, which you couldn't do until you
were twenty one. Up until that time, you were effectively
entured to your family, your parents. And even though his
father would hire him out, all of the money that
he earned doing that would go right back to his father.
So around the age of twenty two, he said, I'm
(11:11):
off on my own, like I'm finished with this, So
I'm gonna I don't like being on the farm, I
don't like working this hard I want to be thinking
more and doing things that involve my intelligence, not my brawn.
And he started on his own in New Salem, Illinois,
but he didn't have outside of farming very many options.
(11:34):
So he became a storekeeper because that was one of
the first options that popped up. He ended up running
a store with another guy till it went bankrupt. Winked
out in his mind, so he looked at what else
is available, Well, I can get this postmaster job, because
postmaster is not that important, especially out here. Plus, hey, postmaster,
(11:56):
all these people get newspapers, and I can read a
newspaper before I deliver it to the person. All of
those things, especially postmaster, kind of dovetailed with another career.
He had started being in politics, and it's very much
a part time thing back then, only a few months
(12:17):
a year that you were actually in session. While he
was in the state legislature, he started meeting the other
legislators and many of them were lawyers. They were telling him, well,
you know, you really need to study the law. You're
here in the legislature writing laws. You probably should study
(12:38):
the law so that you know what you're writing. And
he thought that was a good idea. So he started learning,
teaching himself the law. The first thing you've got to
keep in mind is that the Eastern and Western law
could be very different in those times. William Seward, for example,
(12:59):
who had been Governor of New York and was senator.
He had grown up in a wealthy family, gone to
formal schools, went to college, went to law school, and
he passed the bar exam. And that was fairly typical
in the East. In the West, many people did what
Lincoln did, which is you read the law. It's exactly
(13:22):
the way it sounds. You get law books and you
read them, and you learn the law that way by
looking at these past cases, what precedents there were. Out
in the West, there wasn't a lot of precedent for
a lot of the issues. Plus a lot of the
issues were very small divorces and debt collection things like that.
So it was more about can you convince a jury
(13:45):
as opposed to do you get the law exactly right?
And Lincoln was very good convincing juries. He rode the circuits.
So here ride out throughout most of the central part
of Illinois, go from courthouse to courthouse and just pick
up whatever cases were there and Usually they would just
(14:06):
sit there for six months until the lawyers get there,
and then they would do the cases. And they would
go through like twenty cases in a day, and Lincoln
would say, okay, what's your issue, and they would explain it,
and then he said, okay, let's go talk to the jury,
and then they would be done in half an hour.
And Lincoln's law career kind of progressed in tandem with
the way science and technology progressed, especially as it moved
(14:30):
more westward. He very much was aware of the growth
of technology. He didn't see it early on because he's
out there again in the frontier. He was born in
eight and oh nine. Up until eighteen o four, the
(14:51):
country stopped at the Mississippi River. It wasn't until eighteen
forty eight after the Mexican War that we got all
of the rest of that territory out to the west coast,
so Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois. This was still the frontier and
it was slowly moving its way west. With that came
the technology, so there were steamboats earlier in the Hudson River.
(15:14):
Beginnings of railroads were in the east. Everything started in
the east and worked its way west. So at first,
Lincoln never saw any of this. It was when he
when he's still living in Indiana, when he's nineteen years old,
he and a couple others took flatboat down to New Orleans.
(15:35):
So they go down the Ohio River, beat the Mississippi River,
and then all the way to New Orleans. New Orleans
was this big eye opener for him. It's a huge
city compared to anything he's seen before. It's multi cultural,
multi national, multi lingual. There are peoples of all shades
(15:57):
and all languages, and huge commerce. He would have seen
all these steamships servicing the port. He also saw slave markets,
which he hadn't really experienced. There was a road that
went past their farm in Kentucky that was the main
road for people in like Virginia, sending in slave people
(16:21):
further south into the Deep South where the cotton states.
So he had some experience with slavery, but not really
that much. And then suddenly it was like you're buying
and selling people. He realized there's a lot more to
the world. There were some other things on the second
(16:41):
flatboat trip. I'll mention he is going starting in Illinois
on the Sangamon River, which is a very small windy river,
and the flatboat gets stuck on the mill dam out
in New Salem, and he has to get over that dam.
But later on in Congress, the one term in Congress,
(17:03):
and he's coming back and he's going through the Great Lakes.
He goes up to Buffalo and goes to Niagara Falls
and sees Niagara Falls, which he writes a great piece about.
But then he works his way by steamship back to Chicago.
And before he gets to Chicago, he sees another steamship
that is stuck on the shallows, and the captain has
(17:25):
sent the crew overboard. They're sticking boards and empty barrels
and whatever they can to help make this thing float
a little bit. He remembers his own getting stuck on
the mill dam, and he realizes that there's a need
for a way to help boats get over these shoals,
and he sits down in between the two sessions of
(17:45):
Congress and devises up this patent. The patent is for
a device for getting boats over shoals and effectively uses
what we in science call the arc meets principle. You know,
the idea behind buoyancy and displacement, and that if you
can get something that's lighter than water under the hull,
(18:08):
you can raise the hull enough to get it over
any obstruction. And he did that by having these inflatable
bladders that could be lowered and inflated either by hand
pumping or by steam to raise the boat up just
enough to get it over this shoal. So when he
went back to Congress for the second session, he brought
(18:30):
this to a patent lawyer in Marshaan, d c. And
he got it submitted. And he's still to this day
is the only president with the patent. He made zero
attempt to commercialize this. Nobody else tried to commercialize it.
But the system itself is actually the system that's used
today by the Navy to help get ships and submarines,
(18:52):
you know, lifted off the ocean floor when they're sinking.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
And you've been listening to author David Kent his book
Lincoln The Fire of Genius, Well it's about one simple thing.
Lincoln was a lifelong learner, and he drove himself to
learn almost everything he learned, including science and technology. When
we come back more of this remarkable life story, the
(19:18):
story of our sixteenth president here on our American Stories
and we returned to our American stories and the final
(19:41):
portion of our story on Abraham Lincoln with David J. Kent,
author of Lincoln The Fire of Genius. When we last
left off, David was telling us about how, despite not
having much in the way of a resume, Lincoln was
able to become the owner of a shop, a postmaster,
a part time PubL politician, and eventually a lawyer. And
(20:02):
not by going to law school, mind you, but by
reading the law. Let's pick up where we last left
off with Lincoln riding the legal circuit.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
As he was riding a circuit, he saw that farming
was going from a simple you know, a wooden plow
behind a horse, to cast iron plows, to eventually steal plows.
But then you started seeing more technology, things called reapers,
these mechanical devices machinery which were used to collect wheat
(20:46):
and corn, and those were being patented. And there were
often cases where somebody would patent a reaper and somebody
else would copy it and hope that the original guy
would notice, but they usually did and they would sue
each other. So there were plenty of cases like that
that Lincoln started seeing. There's a famous one that Lincoln
(21:07):
was in called the Manny McCormick Rapert Trial, where Lincoln
actually in the end, it's a longer story than we
have time for, but you know, in the end, Lincoln
basically got caught out of it and didn't get to
argue the case. But he had researched the differences between
these two different reapers that have been developed by two
different men and determined the differences between them, and his
(21:29):
arguments eventually were the arguments that were used when it
finally got settled. There were more and more and more
of these types of things happening, and that made more
and more cases for Lincoln, and he quickly got a
reputation as being very good at being able to handle
these because he'd loved technology, loved to like pick things
apart and you take it apart and see how it worked.
(21:56):
One of the other big areas that he did was
railroad type cases. The railroads were working their way west
and getting bigger and bigger and more and more intrusive,
and he ended up put on retainer for the Illinois
Central Railroad for several years fought many cases for them,
but also worked for other railroads in Illinois, and there
(22:20):
were quite a few different private companies that were railroads,
not like Amtrak today. There were fifty different companies with
short rail lines. But he also worked for railroad workers.
He set significant precedents both for labor rights and for
corporation rights. So not only was he really big watching
(22:41):
and paying attention to all of these new developments and technology,
it became a major part of his income from his
legal career. There's a particular case called the Aften. Aften
is the name of esteem in the Mississippi River, and
(23:02):
up to this point, the steamships were the prime mechanism
for commerce. At one point, this fa Aften left Saint
Louis going north and it gets to an area called
Rock Island, just across from what's Davenport, Iowa today, and
it promptly runs into a railroad bridge that had only
(23:24):
been in service for about two weeks. This is the
very first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River. The fi
afton runs into it, catches fire, it burns down to
the hull and sinks, damages the bridge so it can't
be used for a while. And then the steamship company
sue the railroad companies and the bridge company because they
(23:45):
put an obstruction across the water, and Lincoln digs deep
into this case. He goes up there, he learns the engineering,
He calculates the speed of the river and the speed
of the steamship. By this time he had become a
steamship plot himself on the Sangamon River, and he convinces
most of the jury that it was most likely not
(24:08):
the bridge was an obstruction, but it was either negligence
or intentional to try to block bridges from being built
across the Mississippi River. Lincoln more or less wins this case,
and it sets a precedent that allows the railroads to
build many other bridges across Mississippi River. Totally changes how
(24:32):
we do commerce in this country. Instead of going north
and south on the Mississippi on the steamships, it's now
directly east west all the way out to the West
coast from railroads. Railroads to even today are the prime
mechanism for moving long distance produce and different products around
the country. He clearly understood more than most people know.
(25:00):
Oh his colleagues, they understood that Lincoln was different. He
had a scientific mind. He understood technology better than anybody.
That mentality becomes very important in the Civil War. You know,
the North and the South just hated each other and
they were fighting a war. But Lincoln, being kind of
(25:24):
the guy in the middle, was saying, I have a
more important role. I need to resolve this so that
the Union stays together. That was his thinking, and he
was analyzing everything to determine the best steps that he
could take in order to make that happen, even things
like the Emancipation Proclamation. He couldn't just say, Okay, I'm
(25:45):
going to get rid of slavery everywhere. He had to
be very careful about how he did it so that
he didn't lose the border states. Those four slave states
that stayed with the Union. If he said, well, I'm
going to ban slavery in your states have very quickly
gone joined the Confederacy and that would have been the
end of the United States. So he was very much
(26:07):
that logical, thoughtful thinker that could work through a lot
of different issues.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
On a more.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Specific level, he very much encouraged technology development. There were
plenty of old school military people who said, just give
me a bunch of muskets. They're easy to use, we
can mass produce them quickly. We don't have to worry
about different ammunition and different supply chains for different types
of weapons. Just give me those and we'll send these
(26:35):
people out there and hope they survived the battle. Lincoln
was like, yeah, but it's got to be a better way.
So he had plenty of people coming to the White
House showing them their new guns, everything from multiple shot
repeating rifles to different types of cannons and rockets and
machine guns, I mean all sorts of things. There's a
(26:57):
Spencer repeating rifle where there's a famous story where he
goes and Spencer comes in and pitches his rifle. And
this rifle, instead of having to load it from the barrel,
you actually have a seven cartridge or seven shell cartridge
that you can jam into the butt of the stock.
(27:18):
This is the modern way of thinking as far as
guns work. So Lincoln like is intrigued by this idea,
and he takes one of these and goes out with
Spencer into the what's now the ellipse out behind the
White House, and he takes seven shots into a piece
of wood, shows that he's actually a pretty decent shot,
(27:39):
and then he goes to fight at rhetorically, fight with
the ordnance officers. The head of Ordnance is an old
school guy who does not like the idea of these
multi shot weapons, because you know, you've got a bunch
of green troops that don't have much training. Now you're
going to send them out there where they can shoot
seven shots very fast. They were going to just shoot
(28:00):
them very fast and then throw the gun down and run. Plus,
these things are much more complicated, and it's muddy out
there and raining all the time, and you know they're
going to get they're not going to work. So Lincoln
had to argue with ordnance officers to push things like
the Spencer seven shot repeating rifle. He did go to
bat for this particular one, and he ordered that it
(28:23):
be put in the service. One other thing that he
pushed that became critical is ironclads. All the ships up
until that point were wooden sailing ships. He did the
same thing with telegraph, but it was the first war
that the president of the United States could send messages
almost instantaneously, not like texting today, but you know, almost
(28:44):
instantaneously out to the front. He could tell the generals,
you know, give them advice on what to do, and
get advice and find out what the status is and
then use telegraph to get to other generals in other
parts of the battle, which was all over the eastern
United States and even in the West. I do want
(29:05):
to mention Lincoln did a lot to institutionalize science and
technology that remains true today. He began the National Academy
of Sciences. He tells Congress, agriculture is so important, and
we have some dusty desk literally a one dusky desk
(29:26):
in the back corner of some other department. We should
have its own department for the Department of Agriculture. And
Congress created it at his request so that we could
improve the yields, improve the efficiency of agriculture. And then
he and Congress, and he's working with Congress on all
of these because they have to pass the laws now.
(29:47):
They passed the Home Set Act, which provided for westward
expansion past some marill Land Grant Act to create what
we're called land Grant colleges that were required to teach
science and engineering. So he did all of that while
while in the middle of trying to keep the Contrary
from falling apart.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
And a special thanks to David J. Kent, author of
Lincoln The Fire of Genius. The story of Lincoln the
lifelong learner. Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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