Note i-20 — Chapter I · PINCHING TIMES

According to most of our authorities this was the book by Mason L. Weems, entitled The Life of George Washington; with curious anecdotes, equally honourable to himself and exemplary to his young countrymen. But Scripps (3), Raymond (21-22), Brockett (47), and Holland (32) are apparently accurate in stating that the work was Dr. David Ramsay’s The Life of Washington. It should be remembered that Mr. Lincoln himself, looking with uncommon care through the advance sheets of Scripps’s biography, published in 1860, made no correction as to the name Ramsay there employed in connection with the anecdote. Lincoln’s reference to Weems’s Life, moreover, in the speech at Trenton (Works, vi, 150-51), indicates that he had read that book during his early childhood—some years before he could as a “tall and long-armed” youth have “made a clean sweep” of Crawford’s fodder-corn.