The Handwriting Style of Abraham Lincoln

[Eva Elisabeth]

Some more on Lincoln and spelling from M. Burlingame's "A Life":

"In school Lincoln was especially adept at spelling, a subject that interested him throughout life. He constantly sought to improve his skills in that department. At the White House in 1862, as he sat in a roomful of visitors 'writing a note on a card held on his knee,' he 'sung out ‘How d’ye spell missill’ – meaning ‘missile’ – ‘I don’t know how to spell it.' The next day a government official who was present asked, 'Is there another man in this whole Union who, being President, would have done that? It shows his perfect honesty and simplicity, & that he is truly a great man – for he is so, and the more I see of him the more I am convinced of the fact.'
At a reception in February 1865, Lincoln told Supreme Court Justice David Davis, 'I never knew until the other day how to spell the word ‘maintenance.’ I always thought it was ‘m-a-i-n, main, t-a-i-n, tain, a-n-c-e, ance – maintainance,’ but I find that it is ‘m-a-i-n, main, t-e, te, n-a-n-c-e, nance – maintenance.' (An observer called this scene 'a spectacle! The President of a great nation at a formal reception, surrounded by many eminent people, statesman, ministers, scholars, critics and ultrafashionable people – by all sorts – who honestly and unconcernedly, in the most unconventional way, speaks before all, as it were, of a personal thing illustrative of his own deficiency.') In 1864, Lincoln again confessed his weakness as a speller: 'When I write an official letter I want to be sure it is correct, and I find I am sometimes puzzled to know how to spell the most common word. . . .I found, about twenty years ago, that I had been spelling one word wrong all my life up to that time. . . . It is very. I used always to spell it with two r’s – v-e-r-r-y. And then there was another word which I found I had been spelling wrong until I came here to the White House. . . It is opportunity. I had always spelled it, op-per-tu-ni-ty.' Similarly, one day during the Civil War, Lincoln asked three young men, 'when do you use a semicolon?' Upon receiving an answer, the president replied: 'I never use it much, but when I am in doubt what to use, I generally employ the ‘little fellow.'' (He told the journalist Noah Brooks, 'With educated people, I suppose, punctuation is a matter of rule; with me it is a matter of feeling. But I must say that I have a great respect for the semicolon; it’s a very useful little chap.') These episodes lend credence to Joshua Speed’s assertion that Lincoln 'was never ashamed . . . to admit his ignorance upon any subject, or the meaning of any word no matter how ridiculous it might make him appear.' Leonard Swett, his close friend on the Illinois legal circuit, was impressed by Lincoln’s diligence. 'He is the only man I have ever
known,' said Swett, 'who bridged back from middle age to youth and learned to spell well.'"

As for the semicolon and punctuation, his thoroughly educated wife was certainly no helpful advisor either...