Many people looked at Abraham Lincoln and thought of him as the 16th President of the United States. In reality, he wanted people to see him, as he wrote in the opening of his letter to Jesse W. Fell, as “modest and not to go beyond the material.”1 Lincoln wasn’t interested in what people thought he was, but more about how he wanted the public to see him. He conveyed the feeling that he was not anyone special and in fact an ordinary man. In the autobiographies of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln illustrated the idea that he was one of common people and nothing more.
Lincoln tried to show that he lived a simple life, especially in his childhood. He grew up in a log cabin settling “in an unbroken forest; and the clearing away of surplus wood”2 as his job. He constantly chopped up wood as a child and also “was raised to farm”3 and continued to do so until his early twenties. When he was young, his mother died, and his father remarried another woman a year later. Lincoln also claimed, “the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year.”4 He had a fairly simple and a normal education just like most of his peers. Unknown to the world, nothing special stood out about …show more content…
It almost sounded like he had received little to no education at all because of how simple it was. Lincoln attended school, but “no qualification was ever required of a teacher, beyond ‘readin, writin, and cipherin,’ to the Rule of Three.”5 He himself even learned the Rule of Three but claims that was all he learned and didn’t go to school after that. Lincoln, here, strongly suggests that he came from the common people. He was an ordinary child who received the same education as all the other children during that time. He only furthered his education by himself and became a self-taught man. He read books and studied English grammar “imperfectly of course,”6 so he could become a
Lincoln tried to show that he lived a simple life, especially in his childhood. He grew up in a log cabin settling “in an unbroken forest; and the clearing away of surplus wood”2 as his job. He constantly chopped up wood as a child and also “was raised to farm”3 and continued to do so until his early twenties. When he was young, his mother died, and his father remarried another woman a year later. Lincoln also claimed, “the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year.”4 He had a fairly simple and a normal education just like most of his peers. Unknown to the world, nothing special stood out about …show more content…
It almost sounded like he had received little to no education at all because of how simple it was. Lincoln attended school, but “no qualification was ever required of a teacher, beyond ‘readin, writin, and cipherin,’ to the Rule of Three.”5 He himself even learned the Rule of Three but claims that was all he learned and didn’t go to school after that. Lincoln, here, strongly suggests that he came from the common people. He was an ordinary child who received the same education as all the other children during that time. He only furthered his education by himself and became a self-taught man. He read books and studied English grammar “imperfectly of course,”6 so he could become a