Be assured that all U.S. Presidents were thoroughly literate, although some were far better read than others. Jimmy Carter and Harry Truman, to name two, were said to have read jaw-droppingly astounding numbers of books; Carter has claimed to have to have completed a book a day every day of his life since childhood, and Truman was said to have read the entire collection of the library in Independence, Mo. (a fairly large town) before he ever thought of taking up politics. Truman, by the way, was the last president not to have attended college.
Until the 1950s, the number of practicing attorneys in the U.S. who had not graduated an accredited law school outnumbered the ones who had. Such attorneys, however, nevertheless had to go through an examination and licensure process.
There was a time in the long ago when solicitors in England were licensed based on their attendance at certain taverns lawyers frequented; it was presumed that they had participated in the discussions of the law which took place there over dinner.
This may seem less strange when one considers that the word “common” in the term “common law” is used in the sense of “general”, or “by consensus”; the English Common Law began with annual conventions in Westminster in the 11th Century in which Norman lords and their deputies discussed how they had handled cases in the past year.
Currently all states have a bar exam. California (and perhaps some others) permit one to sit for the exam without having graduated from an accredited law school; there are a variety of small independent law schools in the state which effectively try to teach the exam. This helps account for why California traditionally has the highest failure rate on the bar exam of every state. Wisconsin is, I believe, unique in allowing licensure without taking an exam; if one grafduates an accredited law school in the state, that is sufficient.
To get back to the subject of presidents: the Roosevelts were lawyers, and Ivy League graduates to boot. Theodore Roosevelt wrote a book on white tailed deer while he was president, and is said to have phenomenal powers of comprehen- sion, being able to scan and understand whole pages at a time when he wished.
While he was president he toured St. Louis University. Students at the time underwent an oral graduation exam in Latin. A legend which has passed into the folklore of the university tells of how he stuck his head through a door while a graduating student was being grilled. A professor asked him if he would like to participate in the questioning, and Roosevelt responded in Latin; his answer translated loosely as “not me, babe”.
Abraham Lincoln had very little formal education but was an extremely literate man who modeled his speaking style on the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Robert Burns and the King James Bible. When, early in his political career, a publicist wrote that he was the sort of intellectual who liked to read Plutarch’s Lives for pleasure, he bought a copy and began studying up.
Possibly your informant was thinking of Andrew Johnson and Andrew Jackson. Andrew Johnson had only a very limited command of reading and writing until after he married and his wife, a former school teacher, tutored him. Andrew Jackson had the same experience, and never did get a really good grasp of spelling; it is said that the expression “O.K.” derives from his way of spelling “all correct”, a notation he sometimes made on drafts of documents prepared for his review. Both were self-made men who exhibited moments of brilliance in their careers.
