How He Learned to Be Just
Let us have faith that Right makes Might, and in that Faith, let us to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Abraham Lincoln, from his speech at Cooper Institute
But it was not all work for Abe on the new farm in Indiana. He picked wild plums and pawpaws in the woods, and ate corn dodgers, fried bacon, roast wild turkey, and fish caught in the Indiana streams. He went to school when he could, which was not often, for in those days schools were few and far between, and teachers were not many.
But little Abe had the best teacher of all, his mother, Nancy Lincoln. For, though his father could scarcely write his own name, his mother could read, and she loved books. She taught her little son his letters and how to read. Often they sat together in the cabin, Abe and his sister at their mother’s knee, while she read the Bible to them.
“I would rather my son would be able to read the Bible, than to own a farm, if he can’t have but one,” she said.
She was a beautiful woman, slender, sad, and pale, with dark hair. She was more refined than most women of those hardy pioneer times, but she could use a rifle, work on the farm, spin, and do other housework. Because of her gentle and firm character, she was loved and respected not only by her husband and children, but by her neighbours.
Above all things she had a deep and tender religious spirit which she shared with Abe and his sister, Sarah. She taught Abe to love truth and justice and to revere God. In time he could repeat by heart much of the Bible, and, when he grew up, he thought and wrote in the simple, clear, and forceful language of the Bible. And he learned from it his ideas of right and his scorn of wrong, making him “Honest Abe.”