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handbooks, Thomas Dilworth’s Schoolmaster’s Assistant and Zachariah Jess’s American Tutor’s Assistant. Because paper was scarce, he often had to cipher on boards, and, his stepmother recalled, “when the board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on again.” Then from somewhere he found a few sheets of paper, which he sewed together to form a little notebook in which to write down the problems and his answers. In it he recorded complicated calculations involving multiplication (like 34,567,834 × 23,423) and division (such as 4,375,702 divided by 2,432), which he completed with exceptional accuracy, and he also solved problems concerning weights and measures, and figured discounts and simple interest. Apparently ratio and proportion taxed his instructors to their limits, but he was able to work out simple problems such as: “If 3 oz of silver cost 17s[hillings] what will 48 oz Cost.” Neither the student nor the teachers seemed quite to get the idea of “casting out nines,” a cumbersome and inaccurate method of verifying long division. Nevertheless, he liked the logic and the precision of mathematics, and years later, after serving a term in Congress, he went back to the subject and worked his way through most of a geometry textbook.
    What Lincoln learned from school was not all in books. Here for the first time he had a chance to see children from other families and to pit his witsagainst theirs. Taller than most of the other students, he wore a coonskin cap and buckskin pants that were always too short, so that, a classmate remembered, “there was bare and naked six or more inches of Abe Lincoln’s shin bone.” Unconscious of his peculiar appearance, he would rapidly gather the other students around him, cracking jokes, telling stories, making plans. Almost from the beginning he took his place as a leader. His classmates admired his ability to tell stories and make rhymes, and they enjoyed his first efforts at public speaking. In their eyes he was clearly exceptional, and he carried away from his brief schooling the self-confidence of a man who has never met his intellectual equal.
VI
     
    These happy years of Lincoln’s boyhood were short, for his relationship with his father began to deteriorate. Thomas was perceptibly aging. After an exceptional burst of energy at the time of his second marriage, he began to slow down. He was probably not in good health, for one neighbor remembered that he became blind in one eye and lost sight in the other. He was not a lazy man, another settler reported, but “a tinker—a piddler—always doing but doing nothing great.”
    He was under considerable financial pressure after his marriage because he had to support a household of eight people. For a time he could rely on Dennis Hanks to help provide for his large family, but in 1821 Dennis married Elizabeth Johnston, Sarah Bush Lincoln’s daughter, and moved to his own homestead a half mile or so away. As Abraham became an adolescent, his father grew more and more to depend on him for the “farming, grubbing, hoeing, making fences” necessary to keep the family afloat. He also regularly hired his son out to work for other farmers in the vicinity, and by law he was entitled to everything the boy earned until he came of age.
    Generally an easygoing man, who, according to Dennis Hanks, “could beat his son telling a story—cracking a joke,” Thomas Lincoln was not a harsh father or a brutal disciplinarian. He encouraged Abraham to go to school, though he had a somewhat limited idea of what an education consisted of, and he rarely interrupted his son’s studies. “As a usual thing,” Sarah Bush Lincoln remembered, “Mr Lincoln never made Abe quit reading to do any thing if he could avoid it. He would do it himself first.” But Dennis Hanks said that Thomas thought his son spent too much time on his books, “having sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading.” The