Chapter Three “Separated from His Father, He Studied English Grammar”: New Salem (1831-1834) in 1848, the Thirty-Nine-Year-O
Chapter Three “Separated from His Father, He Studied English Grammar”: New Salem (1831-1834) In 1848, the thirty-nine-year-old Lincoln offered some sage advice to his law partner, William H. Herndon, who had complained that he and other young Whigs were being discriminated against by older Whigs. In denying the allegation, Lincoln urged him to avoid thinking of himself as a victim: “The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him. Allow me to assure you, that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation. There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury. Cast about, and see if this feeling has not injured every person you have ever known to fall into it.”i By his own account, Lincoln began his emancipated life “a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy.”ii After escaping from his paternal home, he spent three years preparing himself for a way of life far different from the hardscrabble existence that he had been born into. As he groped his way toward a new identity, he improved himself every way he could. i Lincoln to Herndon, Washington, 10 July 1848, in Roy P. Basler et al., eds., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (8 vols. plus index; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55),1:497. 181 Michael Burlingame – Abraham Lincoln: A Life – Vol.
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