ew up "literally without education. He never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name."
             Lincoln also said of his father's ignorance, "Owning to my father being left an orphan at the age of six years, in poverty, and in a new country, he became a wholly uneducated man; which I suppose is the reason why I know so little of our family's history." It seemed to pain Lincoln to admit how dull his father was, which tells more about Lincoln's driving ambition than it does of Thomas' ignorance.
             His father was, however, sensitive to his own educational deficiencies and wanted Abraham to learn, and he encouraged him.
             Lincoln, when he had learned to read, absorbed all he could in the way of books and newspapers. An avid listener as well, he had a certain compulsive quality to understand all he heard in sermons and speeches. This is a quality he carried with him throughout his life and led to him being described as an adult as "persistent, fearless and tireless in thinking."
             As a young man in his twenties, Lincoln lived in New Salem, Illinois. Since there was no formal training for teachers in those days, standards of recruiting, loose at best, were crudely applied by school committees hampered by ignorance, nepotism, or charitable intent. The best were young men earning their way through academics by alternating a year or two of teaching with a year or two of learning. By sheer weight of probability, the system's teachers sometimes had a natural ability and integrity gratefully remembered by their charges after they turned into important men. Such was Mentor Graham to Abraham Lincoln.
             Lincoln arrived in New Salem in July 1831, having just taken a load of produce down the Mississippi to New Orleans on Denton Offutt's flatboat. He had left home some five months earlier and took his first job as a clerk in Offutt's s...