Possibly young Lincoln knew how to read a little before he entered Crawford's school, but Dennis Hanks, who was only marginally literate him-self, claimed credit for giving Abraham "his first lesson in spelling—reading and writing." "I taught Abe to write with a buzzards quill which I killed with a rifle and having made a pen—put Abes hand in mind [sic] and moving his fingers by my hand to give him the idea of how to write." Abraham learned these basic skills slowly. John Hanks, another cousin who lived with the Lincolns for a time, thought he was "somewhat dull . . . not a brilliant boy—but worked his way by toil: to learn was hard for him, but he worked slowly, but surely." But Abraham's stepmother understood him better, recognized his need fully to master what he read or heard. "He must understand every thing -- even to the smallest thing -- minutely and exactly," she remembered, "he would then repeat it over to himself again and again—some times in one form and then in an other and when it was fixed in his mind to suit him he . . . never lost that fact or his understanding of it."

Abraham attended Crawford's school for one term, of perhaps three months. Crawford, a justice of the peace and man of some importance in the area, ran a subscription school, where parents paid their children's tuition in cash or in commodities. Ungraded, it was a "blab" school, where students recited their lessons aloud, and the schoolmaster listened through the din for errors. He was long remembered because, according to one student, "he tried to learn us manners" by having the pupils practice introducing each other, as though they were strangers. After one term Crawford gave up teaching, and the Lincoln children had no school for a year, until James Swaney opened one about four miles from the Lincoln house. The distance was so great that Abraham, who had farm chores to perform, could attend only sporadically. The next year, for about six months, he went to a school taught by Azel W. Dorsey in the same cabin that Crawford had used. With that term, at the age of fifteen, his formal education ended. All told, he summarized, "the agregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year."