Learned About Lincoln

The following is an excerpt from Bertha Allison Tompkin’s book, Frontier Schoolteacher. The incident she describes occurred at her first teaching assignment at the Nemah School.

Among some books on my desk, I found a valuable one furnished by the State Board of Education for the use of the teacher in preparing programs for the school holidays. Within a day or two I had read it from cover to cover, and was in for a surprise. On the chapter on Lincoln’s birthday were several quotations from the great man, also many laudatory selections about him. It was the first time in my life I had ever read or heard a word in praise of Lincoln.

Instead, all the histories and books I had been allowed to read showed him up in an utterly contemptible light. Be it remembered that my schooling had been in that part of Missouri known then and now as “Little Dixie.” It was estimated at that time that 98% of the population of our county were southern people from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee, and strong sympathizers of the Confederate cause.

The school I attended from the eighth grade through three years of high school was a private academy, owned and run by a former Confederate officer, a Prof. French Strother, from Virginia. He censored all the textbooks, and very emphatically ruled out any written by a Yankee. My father was a staunch Southern sympathizer and he, too, watched my reading. I remember I came home with a copy of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” loaned to me by a schoolmate. My father made me return it unread.

However, I was so impressed by the articles I read in the State Department’s book that it dawned upon me for the first time that there were two sides to the matter of the “War between the States.” Ere long I became a great admirer of Lincoln. My father did too, long before his death.