Posted Monday night, July 6, 2020.
Life-size diorama of young Abraham Lincoln reading by the fire late at night in his family’s cabin in Indiana, on display at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library.
Sarah Bush Lincoln recalled Abraham’s yearnings as a boy to express himself plainly and extract clear meanings from the adults around him. “Sometimes he seemed pestered to give Expression to his ideas and got mad almost at one who couldn’t Explain plainly what he wanted to convey.” When the Reverend John P. Gulliver praised him in 1860 for the clarity of his speeches, Lincoln explained: “Among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when any body talked to me in a way I could not understand.” After he clambered into bed at night in his family’s little cabin, he recalled, he listened closely to the “dark sayings” of the adults, trying to make out their meaning. “I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it; and when I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over, until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I know to comprehend.” He used that approach throughout his life. “This was a kind of passion with me,” Lincoln said.
---from “Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln” by Edward Achorn.
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