Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham, was as the spirals that
carried the precious seed where it could have free air and an unshadowed
soil to grow in.
And there the tuition of the experiences that made all men kin and so made
a natural democracy possible began. He had little teaching of the formal
sort. Six months or a year in a log schoolhouse probably measured its
duration. He had the sterner discipline of the fields, the waters, and the
trees, for their very temptations became disciplines to those who
resisted, as his father did not. He learned his parables of the fields and
of the natural instincts of his neighbors. He knew both physical and human
nature about him, and this he illustrated, expressed, in such manner as to
make him a faithful and favorite exponent of its coarseness, its
kindliness, its gallantry, its sympathies, and its heroisms.
These neighborly fellowships, not affected but genuine, equipped him not
only with a vital and never-failing sense of brotherhood but with a faith
in those whom he called the "plain people," the common man.
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