July 19, 2024 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, when Lincoln was asked on a questionnaire to describe his education he only wrote one word: defective. That didn't stop him from becoming one of the premier thinkers of his time.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
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. But that's where the comparisons stopped.
(00:34):
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 3 (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 honeybees provide food for winter. Man is not
(01:47):
the only animal who labors, but he is the only
one who improves his 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 4 (02:11):
Lincoln and Darwin were born in the same day, literally
the same day, but under very different circumstances.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
You know.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Darwin was born into a wealthy family of 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. There was a younger brother, Thomas, who
only lived for a couple of months. I mean, very
(02:42):
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 they left that when Lincoln was
seven and moved across the border into Indiana. And Indiana
(03:10):
is important for a couple of reasons. One because in
Kentucky there was slavery, and Indiana literally when they moved
there was just becoming 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,
(03:31):
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 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.
(03:51):
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, 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.
(04:13):
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 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
(04:36):
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, his one term in Congress, he had
to fill out like a questionnaire for the congressional record.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
You know about you.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
When he gets to the question about what your education is,
he just writes one word. If 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
a year. And that's over the first twenty one years
(05:16):
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
finish harvesting and sell off any excess in store whatever
(05:37):
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 start. 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 their father's foodstack 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 write and
(06:19):
cipher to the rule of three, then they were a teacher.
And if they claim 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 in both directions, But he
(06:40):
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. So that
(07:03):
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 typical
(07:25):
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 his very good memory throughout his
(07:48):
entire life. His best friend, Joshua Speed says, well, you
can read these things and you'll pick them up right away,
and Lincoln said, no, Speed, you're wrong. My 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
(08:11):
would study 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. He had
an 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
(08:35):
wanted to be like the real splitter candidate. But on
his own 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):
Teaches 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 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Let's continue with the story here again is David J. Kent.
Speaker 4 (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
and entered 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,
(11:11):
I'm 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 circuit,
so he'd ride out throughout most of the central part
of Illinois, go from county courthouse to courthouse and just
pick up whatever cases were there, and usually they would
(14:05):
just 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 uh early on because
he's out there again in the frontier and he was
born in eight and oh nine. Up until eighteen o four,
(14:51):
the 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 terror 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
(15:13):
the Hudson River. 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
a flatboat down to New Orleans. So they go down
(15:36):
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 multicultural, multi national, multi lingual.
There are peoples of all shades and all languages, and
(16:00):
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 enslave people further south into the
(16:22):
Deep South where the cotton states. So he would 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 flatboat trip. I'll
(16:43):
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, and he's
(17:04):
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 Emedes 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 washing 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 2 (18:58):
And you've been listening to author David A. 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,
(19:18):
the 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 po 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 4 (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 Raper 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 cut 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, love 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 ship in the Mississippi River,
(23:02):
and 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
(23:24):
only been in service for about two weeks. This is
the very first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River. The
fa 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
companies sue the railroad companies and the bridge company because
(23:45):
they 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 pilot himself on the Sangamon River, and
he convinces most of the jury that it was most
(24:07):
likely not 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.
(24:31):
Totally changes how 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
(24:51):
products around the country. He clearly understood more than most people.
His colleagues, they understood that Lincoln was different. He had
a scientific mind. He understood technology better than anybody that
(25:13):
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
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
(25:33):
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
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
(25:55):
that stayed with the Union. If he said, well, I'm
going to ban slavery in your states would have very
quickly gone joined the Confederacy and that would have been
the end of the United States. So he was very
much that logical, thoughtful thinker that could work through a
lot of different issues. On a more specific level, he
very much encouraged technology development. There were plenty of old
(26:21):
school military people who said, just give me a bunch
of muskets. They're easy to use. We can mass produce them.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Quickly.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
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 people out there and hope
they survived the battle. Lincoln was like, yeah, but that'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
(26:52):
types of cannons and rockets and machine guns, I mean
all sorts of things. There's a 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
(27:16):
jam into the butt of the stock. 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
(27:37):
that he's actually a pretty decent shot, and then he
goes to fight 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
(27:57):
out there where they can shoot seven shots very fast.
They're going to just shoot 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
(28:20):
particular one, and he ordered that it 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.
It was the first war that the president of the
United States could send messages almost instantaneously, not like texting today,
(28:43):
but you know, almost 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 and the United States and even
in the West. I do want to mention Lincoln did
(29:07):
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 in the back corner of
(29:27):
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. They passed the Home Set Act,
(29:48):
which provided for westward expansion, passed some Morill 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.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Kent, author of Lincoln the fire of genius, The story
of Lincoln the lifelong learner.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Here on our American stories,
And we returned to our American stories.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
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. But that's where the comparisons stopped.
(00:34):
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 3 (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 honeybees provide food for winter. Man is not
(01:47):
the only animal who labors, but he is the only
one who improves his 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 4 (02:11):
Lincoln and Darwin were born in the same day, literally
the same day, but under very different circumstances.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
You know.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Darwin was born into a wealthy family of 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. There was a younger brother, Thomas, who
only lived for a couple of months. I mean, very
(02:42):
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 they left that when Lincoln was
seven and moved across the border into Indiana. And Indiana
(03:10):
is important for a couple of reasons. One because in
Kentucky there was slavery, and Indiana literally when they moved
there was just becoming 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,
(03:31):
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 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.
(03:51):
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, 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.
(04:13):
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 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
(04:36):
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, his one term in Congress, he had
to fill out like a questionnaire for the congressional record.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
You know about you.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
When he gets to the question about what your education is,
he just writes one word. If 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
a year. And that's over the first twenty one years
(05:16):
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
finish harvesting and sell off any excess in store whatever
(05:37):
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 start. 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 their father's foodstack 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 write and
(06:19):
cipher to the rule of three, then they were a teacher.
And if they claim 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 in both directions, But he
(06:40):
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. So that
(07:03):
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 typical
(07:25):
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 his very good memory throughout his
(07:48):
entire life. His best friend, Joshua Speed says, well, you
can read these things and you'll pick them up right away,
and Lincoln said, no, Speed, you're wrong. My 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
(08:11):
would study 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. He had
an 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
(08:35):
wanted to be like the real splitter candidate. But on
his own 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):
Teaches 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 2 (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.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Let's continue with the story here again is David J. Kent.
Speaker 4 (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
and entered 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,
(11:11):
I'm 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 circuit,
so he'd ride out throughout most of the central part
of Illinois, go from county courthouse to courthouse and just
pick up whatever cases were there, and usually they would
(14:05):
just 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 uh early on because
he's out there again in the frontier and he was
born in eight and oh nine. Up until eighteen o four,
(14:51):
the 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 terror 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
(15:13):
the Hudson River. 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
a flatboat down to New Orleans. So they go down
(15:36):
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 multicultural, multi national, multi lingual.
There are peoples of all shades and all languages, and
(16:00):
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 enslave people further south into the
(16:22):
Deep South where the cotton states. So he would 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 flatboat trip. I'll
(16:43):
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, and he's
(17:04):
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 Emedes 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 washing 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 2 (18:58):
And you've been listening to author David A. 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,
(19:18):
the 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 po 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 4 (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 Raper 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 cut 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, love 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 ship in the Mississippi River,
(23:02):
and 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
(23:24):
only been in service for about two weeks. This is
the very first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River. The
fa 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
companies sue the railroad companies and the bridge company because
(23:45):
they 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 pilot himself on the Sangamon River, and
he convinces most of the jury that it was most
(24:07):
likely not 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.
(24:31):
Totally changes how 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
(24:51):
products around the country. He clearly understood more than most people.
His colleagues, they understood that Lincoln was different. He had
a scientific mind. He understood technology better than anybody that
(25:13):
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
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
(25:33):
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
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
(25:55):
that stayed with the Union. If he said, well, I'm
going to ban slavery in your states would have very
quickly gone joined the Confederacy and that would have been
the end of the United States. So he was very
much that logical, thoughtful thinker that could work through a
lot of different issues. On a more specific level, he
very much encouraged technology development. There were plenty of old
(26:21):
school military people who said, just give me a bunch
of muskets. They're easy to use. We can mass produce them.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Quickly.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
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 people out there and hope
they survived the battle. Lincoln was like, yeah, but that'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
(26:52):
types of cannons and rockets and machine guns, I mean
all sorts of things. There's a 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
(27:16):
jam into the butt of the stock. 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
(27:37):
that he's actually a pretty decent shot, and then he
goes to fight 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
(27:57):
out there where they can shoot seven shots very fast.
They're going to just shoot 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
(28:20):
particular one, and he ordered that it 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.
It was the first war that the president of the
United States could send messages almost instantaneously, not like texting today,
(28:43):
but you know, almost 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 and the United States and even
in the West. I do want to mention Lincoln did
(29:07):
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 in the back corner of
(29:27):
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. They passed the Home Set Act,
(29:48):
which provided for westward expansion, passed some Morill 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.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Kent, author of Lincoln the fire of genius, The story
of Lincoln the lifelong learner.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Here on our American stories,
Host
Lee Habeeb
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