Erudite Abe

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.
--Abraham Lincoln



We all have our favorite presidents, those we despise, and those we remember most distinctly. Most of us, by some time in elementary school, have learned the names of Presidents Washington and Lincoln. Washington was the first president and Lincoln freed the slaves (we learn).

As we grow older, we discover there are more presidents; that they all enacted policies that their contemporaries both agreed and disagreed with. That even in the United States' infancy there were major disagreements on policy. The Federalist Papers, anyone?

We learn history in soundbites. Bold bits of text that we must memorize. We don't see, learn, or understand it for what it is: a story of the past. A story filled with character and plot developments, that can't simply be skimmed over only to arrive at the end for a simplistic answer to to that story's mysteries. As Mark Twain succinctly and candidly wrote, "The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice." We imbibe morsels of history that are bound with whatever bias the source delivering it wishes. Oftentimes, we don't delve deeper than the soundbites, and our view of history is narrow and warped.

If we examine our sixteenth president through the narrow scope that is a history soundbite we learn that...

-He was known for his honesty
-He was quite tall
-Not considered a handsome man
-President of the United States during the civil war
-Was assassinated while watching a play
-Was instrumental in ridding the United States of slavery

In truth, Abraham Lincoln was a deep man, with facets of personality and life that many Americans will never care to learn. He is known as a president that "pulled himself up by his bootstraps" and rose from a frontier log cabin to the White House. However, the boy who learned to read in a log cabin did not become the president who spoke the Gettysburg Address by mere chance or sheer brilliance. He did it through education, self education. Abraham Lincoln read and studied--anything he could find. He read and taught himself grammar and literature, moved on to law, and studied to become a lawyer. He continued to study and hone his knowledge of the law as a lawyer, read literature, poetry, and studied Latin and German grammar. He read voraciously, constantly and consistently. His mind was in constant motion, the motion of learning.

He became president during a tumultuous time. He gave speeches that roused a broken nation.

Modern day politicians find a dichotomy between education and true erudition. They claim to have "simple roots" ( having once seen a farm) coupled with a brilliant education (ie, Ivy League schools). They forget that that education is meaningless without invested learning. But we all forget that.



A cubiculo sine libris est sicut corpus absque anima--Cicero
(A room without books is like a body without a soul.)