For a year Thomas Lincoln was a widower.  Then he went back to Kentucky, and found there Mrs. Sally Johnston, a widow, whom, when she was the maiden Sarah Bush, he had loved and courted, and by whom he had been refused.  He now asked again, and with better success.  The marriage was a little inroad of good luck into his career; for the new wife was thrifty and industrious, with the ambition and the capacity to improve the squalid condition of her husband’s household.  She had, too, worldly possessions of bedding and furniture, enough to fill a four-horse wagon.  She made her husband put a floor, a door, and windows to his cabin.  From the day of her advent a new spirit made itself felt amid the belongings of the inefficient Thomas.  Her immediate effort was to make her new husband’s children “look a little more human,” and the youthful Abraham began to get crude notions of the simpler comforts and decencies of life.  All agree that she was a stepmother to whose credit it is to be said that she manifested an intelligent kindness towards Abraham.

The opportunities for education were scant enough in that day and place.  In his childhood in Kentucky Abraham got a few weeks with one teacher, and then a few weeks with another.  Later, in Indiana, he studied a few months, in a scattered way.  Probably he had instruction at home, for the sum of all the schooling which he had in his whole life was hardly one year;[21] a singular start upon the road to the presidency of the United States!  The books which he saw were few, but a little later he laid hands upon them all and read and re-read them till he must have absorbed all their strong juice into his own nature.  Nicolay and Hay give the list:  The Bible; “Aesop’s Fables;” “Robinson Crusoe;” “The Pilgrim’s Progress;” a history of the United States; Weems’s “Washington.”  He was doubtless much older when he devoured the Revised Statutes of Indiana in the office of the town constable.  Dr. Holland adds Lives of Henry Clay and of Franklin (probably the famous autobiography), and Ramsay’s “Washington;” and Arnold names Shakespeare and Burns.  It was a small library, but nourishing.  He used to write and to do sums in arithmetic on the wooden shovel by the fireside, and to shave off the surface in order to renew the labor.

As he passed from boyhood to youth his mental development took its characteristics from the popular demand of the neighborhood.  He scribbled verses and satirical prose, wherein the coarse wit was adapted to the taste of the comrades whom it was designed to please; and it must be admitted that, after giving due weight to all ameliorating considerations, it is impossible to avoid disappointment at the grossness of the jesting.  No thought, no word raised it above the low level of the audience made up of the laborers on the farms and the loungers in the groceries.  The biographer who has made public “The First Chronicles of Reuben” deserves to be held in detestation.[22]