Abe's Visit

Quincy High Students Learn about Lincoln as Lawyer

There were no public schools in Abraham Lincoln’s day. His formal education amounted to three terms, less than a year, in Little Pigeon Creek, Indiana.

The farmhand who became the Sixteenth President, characterized by Randy Duncan of Carlinville, recently visited students working to complete their high school education at Quincy Senior High.

The visit was part of a program sponsored by the Illinois Judges and State Bar Associations celebrating Lincoln’s 25-year career in law. The Judges Association recently produced a documentary, “A. Lincoln, Attorney at Law,” tracing Lincoln’s successful law practice.

Quincy Judge Mark Schuering, president of the state judges association, hosted a screening of the documentary in U.S. history classes at the high school. Duncan as Lincoln compared the legal systems of his time and the present.

A self-taught lawyer, Lincoln became one of the most successful attorneys in Illinois history.

Lincoln was well known among Quincy’s practitioners of law both personally and professionally. He frequently teamed with or opposed them at trial. He relied on one of them, Orville Hickman Browning, for advice throughout his presidency.

Lincoln also did legal work in Quincy. He drew up the papers for George P. Floyd to lease the Quincy House hotel, for which Floyd sent him a check for $25. Lincoln sent $10 back, telling Floyd, “You must think I’m a high-priced man. You are too liberal with your money. Fifteen dollars is enough for the job.”

Abe Lincoln at School

Lincoln remembered that he was 10 years old when he started school at Azel Dorsey’s puncheon-floored log schoolhouse about a mile and a half from his father Thomas’s farm near Little Pigeon Creek, Indiana. Classmates recalled Abraham was a quiet student, even during play time, and found it notable that he was able to keep his clothes clean longer than anyone else. They remembered him as a leader who could be called on to settle disputes between boys of his age and size.

Recalling his school days, Lincoln marveled that he “could read, write and cipher to the Rule of Three.” He read the Bible, Aesop’s Fables, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, a History of the United States and Weems’s Life of Washington.

He started reading law at the suggestion of John T. Stuart, whom Lincoln met during the Black Hawk war and who took him on in his Springfield law practice in 1837.

– From Herndon’s Life of Lincoln