In the Boyhood of Lincoln

Hezekiah Butterworth built this 1892 novel around the early life of Abraham Lincoln, tracing how a poor frontier boy grew into a man whose character could command the trust of others. The central figure is Jasper, a wandering Tunker (Dunkard) schoolmaster, German-born and self-taught, who teaches in the rough settlements of Indiana where Lincoln spent his boyhood. Through him Butterworth carries the book’s guiding idea, the faith that right makes might. Around young Lincoln’s schooldays the author weaves cabin tales, pioneer hardship, and material drawn from the era of the Black Hawk War. It is history softened into fiction, aimed largely at the young readers of the 1890s. The book matters less as biography than as a record of how Victorian America chose to remember Lincoln: proof that plain virtue and patient self-teaching could shape a great citizen.