The Fire of Genius: How Lincoln Overcame Poverty and Gained an Education

And we returned to our American Stories. On February twelfth, eighteen o’ nine, two men were born who would end up being considered among the top thinkers of their time. Both men valued science and technology, were controversial among many of their contemporaries, and both fundamentally changed the course of history. But that’s where the comparisons stop. One of these men was English scientist Charles Darwin. The other was President of the United States. Here to tell the story is David J. Kent, author of ‘Lincoln: The Fire of Genius.’ But first, a reading of Lincoln’s own words. Let’s get into the story.

All creation is a mine; in every man, a miner. The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and around it, including himself in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various leads from which man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny. In the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miners stood naked and knowledgeless. Upon it, fishes, birds, beasts, and creeping things are not miners, but feeders and lodgers. Merely, Beavers build houses, but they build them in no wise differently or better now than they did five thousand years ago. Ants and honeybees provide food for winter. Man is not the only animal who labors, but he is the only one who improves this workmanship. This improvement he effects by discoveries and inventions. His first important discovery was the fact that he was naked, and his first invention was the fig-leaf apron. Abraham Lincoln.

He had an… extremely good memory, where he could remember people he met, and their families, and the circumstances, twenty, thirty years later. He actually learned quite a bit more than people give him credit for. He downplayed his learning. He wanted to be like the ‘rail-splitter’ candidate, but on his own he studied several different grammar books, different arithmetics, trigonometry, and mathematics. When he became a surveyor, he had to learn the math behind surveying. So he taught himself Euclid’s geometry, which is about logic as much as it is about math. He taught himself the law just by reading law books without working with anybody. He just taught himself all of this. So he was learning constantly, and he did that throughout his entire life.

And you’ve been listening to author David Kent. His book, ‘Lincoln: The Fire of Genius,’ well, it’s about one simple thing. Lincoln was a lifelong learner, and he drove himself to learn almost everything he learned, including science and technology. When we come back, more of this remarkable life story—the story of our sixteenth president—here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and the final portion of our story on Abraham Lincoln with David J. Kent, author of ‘Lincoln: The Fire of Genius.’ When we last left off, David was telling us about how, despite not having much in the way of a resume, Lincoln was able to become the owner of a shop, a Postmaster, a part-time public politician, and eventually a lawyer. And not by going to law school, mind you, but by reading the law. Let’s pick up where we last left off, with Lincoln riding the legal circuit.

Kent.

As he grew up, he got a chance to get out on his own, which you couldn’t do until you were twenty-one. Up until that time, you were effectively indentured to your family, your parents. And even though his father would hire him out, all of the money that he earned doing that would go right back to his father. So around the age of twenty-two, he said, ‘I’m off on my own, like I’m finished with this. So I’m gonna, I don’t like being on the farm. I don’t like working this hard. I want to be thinking more and doing things that involve my intelligence, not my brawn.’ And he started on his own in New Salem, Illinois, but he didn’t have, outside of farming, very many options. So he became a storekeeper because that was one of the first options that popped up. He ended up running a store with another guy till it went bankrupt. Winked out in his mind. So he looked at what else is available. ‘Well, I can get this Postmaster job, because Postmaster is not that important, especially out here. Plus, hey, Postmaster, all these people get newspapers, and I can read a newspaper before I deliver it to the person.’ All of those things, especially Postmaster, kind of dovetailed with another career. He had started being in politics, and it was very much a part-time thing back then, only a few months a year that you were actually in session. While he was in the state legislature, he started meeting the other legislators, and many of them were lawyers. They were telling him, ‘Well, you know, you really need to study the law. You’re here in the legislature writing laws. You probably should study the law so that you know what you’re writing.’ And he thought that was a good idea. So he started learning—teaching himself the law. The first thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that the Eastern and Western law could be very different in those times. William Seward, for example, who had been Governor of New York and was a Senator. He had grown up in a wealthy family, gone to formal schools, went to college, went to law school, and he passed the bar exam. And that was fairly typical in the East. In the West, many people did what Lincoln did, which is: you read the law. It’s exactly the way it sounds: you get law books and you read them, and you learn the law that way by looking at these past cases, what precedents there were. Out in the West, there wasn’t a lot of precedent for a lot of the issues. Plus, a lot of the issues were very small: divorces and debt collection, things like that. So it was more about, ‘Can you convince a jury?’ as opposed to, ‘Do you get the law exactly right?’ And Lincoln was very good at convincing juries. He rode the circuits. So, he would ride out throughout most of the central part of Illinois, go from courthouse to courthouse, and just pick up whatever cases were there. Usually, they would just sit there for six months until the lawyers got there, and then they would do the cases. And they would go through like twenty cases in a day, and Lincoln would say, ‘Okay, what’s your issue?’ And they would explain it, and then he said, ‘Okay, let’s go talk to the jury,’ and then they would be done in half an hour. And Lincoln’s law career kind of progressed in tandem with the way science and technology progressed, especially as it moved more westward. He very much was aware of the growth of technology. He didn’t see it early on because he was out there again in the frontier. He was born in eighteen o’ nine. Up until eighteen o’ four, the country stopped at the Mississippi River. It wasn’t until eighteen forty-eight, after the Mexican War, that we got all of the rest of that territory out to the West Coast—so Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois. This was still the frontier, and it was slowly moving its way west. With that came the technology. So, there were steamboats earlier in the Hudson River. Beginnings of railroads were in the East. Everything started in the East and worked its way west. So, at first, Lincoln never saw any of this. It was when he—when he was still living in Indiana, when he was nineteen years old—he and a couple others took a flatboat down to New Orleans. So they went down the Ohio River, met the Mississippi River, and then all the way to New Orleans. New Orleans was this big eye-opener for him. It was a huge city compared to anything he’d seen before. It was multicultural, multinational, multilingual. There were peoples of all shades and all languages, and huge commerce. He would have seen all these steamships servicing the port. He also saw slave markets, which he hadn’t really experienced. There was a road that went past their farm in Kentucky that was the main road for people, like in Virginia, sending slave people further south into the Deep South where the cotton states. So he had some experience with slavery, but not really that much. And then suddenly, it was like, ‘You’re buying and selling people!’ He realized there was a lot more to the world. There were some other things on the second flatboat trip. I’ll mention, he was going starting in Illinois on the Sangamon River, which is a very small, windy river, and the flatboat got stuck on the mill dam out in New Salem, and he had to get over that dam. But later on, in Congress—the one term in Congress—he was coming back and he was going through the Great Lakes. He went up to Buffalo and went to Niagara Falls and saw Niagara Falls, which he wrote a great piece about. But then he worked his way by steamship back to Chicago. And before he got to Chicago, he saw another steamship that was stuck on the shallows, and the captain had sent the crew overboard. They were sticking boards and empty barrels and whatever they could to help make this thing float a little bit. He remembered his own getting stuck on the mill dam, and he realized that there was a need for a way to help boats get over these shoals, and he sat down in between the two sessions of Congress and devised up this patent. The patent was for a device for getting boats over shoals and effectively uses what we in science call the Archimedes’ Principle. You know, the idea behind buoyancy and displacement is that if you can get something that’s lighter than water under the hull, you can raise the hull enough to get it over any obstruction. And he did that by having these inflatable bladders that could be lowered and inflated either by hand pumping or by steam to raise the boat up just enough to get it over this shoal. So when he went back to Congress for the second session, he brought this to a patent lawyer in Washington, D.C., and he got it submitted. And he’s still, to this day, the only president with a patent. He made zero attempt to commercialize this. Nobody else tried to commercialize it. But the system itself is actually the system that’s used today by the Navy to help get ships and submarines, you know, lifted off the ocean floor when they’re sinking.

As he was riding a circuit, he saw that farming was going from a simple, you know, a wooden plow behind a horse, to cast-iron plows, to eventually steel plows. But then you started seeing more technology: things called reapers, these mechanical devices, machinery which were used to collect wheat and corn, and those were being patented. And there were often cases where somebody would patent a reaper, and somebody else would copy it and hope that the original guy would notice, but they usually did, and they would sue each other. So there were plenty of cases like that that Lincoln started seeing. There’s a famous one that Lincoln was in called the Manny McCormick Reaper Trial, where Lincoln actually, in the end—it’s a longer story than we have time for—but, you know, in the end, Lincoln basically got caught out of it and didn’t get to argue the case. But he had researched the differences between these two different reapers that had been developed by two different men and determined the differences between them, and his arguments eventually were the arguments that were used when it finally got settled. There were more and more and more of these types of things happening, and that made more and more cases for Lincoln, and he quickly got a reputation as being very good at being able to handle these because he’d loved technology, loved to, like, pick things apart and take it apart and see how it worked. One of the other big areas that he did was railroad…