How to Acquire Manners

Though Lincoln was brought up in the simplest, rudest of homes, he possessed that innate courtesy and considerateness upon which all good manners are based. Though he may not have had good table manners when he first went out in the world, he did have that characteristic that is the basis of all good table manners —a desire not to offend those with whom he was brought in social contact. 

“Men are polished, through act and speech, each by each, 

As pebbles are smoothed on the rolling beach.” —Trowbridge

To attempt to appear well-bred when one has been brought up without breeding would be sheer affectation. Such is the opinion of some persons who regard good manners as the exclusive property of those who belong to families where social amenities are well established. And some persons go so far as to say that the person who has not been taught good manners in childhood never can appear well-bred, since good breeding is just what the word implies— good birth and good bringing up. This argument is refuted best by the many examples of men in public life in America, who have come from rude homes and have acquired almost faultless manners. 

To accuse Abraham Lincoln either of affectation or lack of loyalty for his simple childhood home would be absurd. To imagine that there was time or opportunity for “foolish manners” in that little backwoods cabin would also be a stretch of the imagination. And yet the mature Lincoln’s manners and good breeding were almost flawless; for no man could do the courteous thing more graciously than he, no man could put those with whom he associated more at ease in even the slightest transaction than he, and few men have ever been able by a word or gesture so thoroughly to bridge over a trying situation as did Lincoln. This is how it came about. 

Though Lincoln was brought up in the simplest, rudest of homes, he possessed that innate courtesy and considerateness upon which all good manners are based. Though he may not have had good table manners when he first went out in the world, he did have that characteristic that is the basis of all good table manners —a desire not to offend those with whom he was brought in social contact. 

The boorish self-made man feels that it is a matter of affectation to eat in any other manner than that to which he was accustomed in childhood. The man like Lincoln quickly notes the ways of the world and, lest the crude manners of the cabin might offend, he adopts the new. The young Lincoln might not have known the correct etiquette for introducing a man to a woman of his acquaintance, but he possessed that innate courtesy toward women that is the basis of all good manners between men and women. Because he had this, he learned quickly the world’s way of showing courtesy to women. 

Good manners are not only earmarks of good family and good rearing. We do not follow the laws of etiquette merely because we want others to think that we have been brought up with a certain amount of leisure and care that our parents have enjoyed prosperity and cultivation and that our ancestors were early colonists of the land. If that were the reason, we sought to be well bred, then it might be affectation. But etiquette is the system of conduct that has been built up, bit by bit, as the best means of carrying on social intercourse. 

The man who has been brought up among ill-mannered folk does not, on mingling with better bred persons, give up eating with his knife because he wants to delude them into thinking that he is an aristocrat, but because eating with the fork is most convenient and appropriate and if he did not do it, he would offend others and attract attention to his own peculiarities. – By Mary Marshall Duffee, 1917

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia