When he was thirteen, his father gave him the choice of two thousand dollars to get started in business or a college education, and he enrolled in 1849 at New York University, then a tiny institution in lower Manhattan. After receiving his bachelor's degree in June 1853 he read for the law and became an apprentice at a firm founded by his two older brothers. At the same time he gained his first experience as a journalist, reporting on legal matters for a new daily, the
New York Times.
After being admitted to the bar in 1856 and marrying his second cousin Abby Frances Hamlin on 14 October 1857, Abbott became restless and began to seek a new career. He came under the influence of the nationally renowned Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, after Beecher's "great revival" of 1858. In July 1859 Abbott announced to his family that he intended to become a minister and returned to Maine to qualify himself through a self-supervised study program designed in collaboration with Beecher.
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