In the Boyhood of Lincoln: A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk

The novel opens on the Indiana frontier, where a wandering Tunker schoolmaster named Jasper makes his way through log settlements and pioneer farms toward a rough-hewn schoolhouse. There he finds a tall, serious boy poring over his lessons, a young Abraham Lincoln, still years from Springfield or the White House, learning his letters in a world of woodsheds and spelling bees. Jasper becomes the moral compass of this narrative, a traveling teacher whose patient wisdom and strict but kind discipline shape the character of the future president. The book is saturated with the textures of early 19th-century American life: the sounds of recitation echoing in dim schoolrooms, the debates over discipline, the slow cultivation of a mind that would one day hold a nation together. This is Lincoln before the legend, a boy learning to read, to think, to become.