The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (6 page)

What Herndon’s critics have attacked is not so much his revelation of Lincoln’s love for Ann Rutledge—although some of them deny that there was ever any love between them—as his story of the terrible effect Ann’s death was supposed to have had upon Lincoln. According to Herndon, Lincoln almost went insane; his friends had to watch him lest he commit suicide; he haunted the grave in which his sweetheart
was buried and he could not tolerate the thought that the snow and the rain should beat down upon the earth covering her. Herndon claimed that she was the one great love of Lincoln’s life, and that the contrast between Ann Rutledge and the woman Lincoln finally did marry embittered him and was the root of his melancholy and his strangeness.

We shall never know the entire truth. Lincoln was singularly close-mouthed, and it is unlikely that he would even mention anything so intimate as this to anyone. Herndon’s evidence did not come from Lincoln but from New Salem people whom he interviewed after his partner’s death. An examination of his original material, which has recently been published,
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makes out a very strong case for the essential truth of his story. He may have exaggerated, but what we know about Lincoln’s character, as it later developed, seems not incompatible with the Herndon version of the Ann Rutledge affair.

Ann Rutledge, however, was not the only woman whom Lincoln considered as a possible wife during the New Salem period. The lonely, single man who had to live as best he could in other people’s houses turned desperately toward the thought of some woman to brighten his life and share his troubles. Lincoln was strongly attracted to women, always afraid of them, but always drawn to them by some inward yearning that he could never understand. His ugliness, his ungainliness and his awkwardness made him timid. He was unsure of himself, uneasy in the company of women. He knew that he had little to offer a wife, but he seems to have wanted one terribly. His uncertainty of how to act with women made him a poor ladies’ man, as the correspondence relating to the next woman in his life, Miss Mary Owens, brings out. She said about him, years later, that he was “deficient in those little links which make up the path of a woman’s happiness.”

Mary Owens arrived in New Salem on August 1, 1836, less than a year after the death of Ann Rutledge. She came from Kentucky on a visit to her married sister and there can be little doubt that she was on a tour to survey the matrimonial prospects in Illinois. The woman-hungry Lincoln immediately began to pay attention to her, although she was rather stout and a year older than he was. He proposed marriage to her, but she delayed accepting him, perhaps because she had noticed that he was inattentive and careless in his dealings with women.

Time dragged on. Lincoln went away to attend the Legislature at Vandalia. New Salem’s bright promises of growth dwindled, and the little village began to decline. In the spring of 1837, Lincoln determined to move to Springfield. He had had a hand in the effort to move the state capital there, so he could expect a warm welcome.

He rode into the public square on a borrowed horse, carrying with him everything he owned. Springfield was then only fifteen years old, but it already had a population of fifteen hundred. New houses were going up every day and there was an air of general prosperity about the place that should have encouraged the young lawyer who was going there to live. But the record we have of Lincoln’s behavior that day shows only gloom and dark foreboding.

He was entering Springfield with the best prospects that his poor life had yet shown; he was a member of the Legislature; he had already arranged to become the law partner of a man he had met during the Black Hawk War, John T. Stuart, one of the best-known lawyers in the state. It is true that Lincoln was penniless, but his name was already known, and the whole reason for his moving to Springfield was to better himself. His friends, as usual, promptly came to his aid. One of them fed him in his own home for several years without
charge; another offered to share his room with Lincoln so he would have a place to sleep. But this man, Joshua Speed, whom Lincoln came to know so well that Speed became the one person in his life to whom he ever unburdened his heart, said about his meeting with Lincoln that day: “I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life.”

Lincoln shared Speed’s room and stayed with him for nearly four years. Speed was a successful young merchant whose large and well-stocked store was the meeting-place for the young men of Springfield. There was a large fireplace at the rear of it, and around this the men would gather in the evening to discuss politics, women, literature and life. Among them was Stephen A. Douglas, then a rising young politician, a Democrat, as opposed to Lincoln who was a Whig. They first matched wits in Speed’s store, and the political discussions they had there were an embryonic form of the famous series of debates they were to engage in twenty years later.

Another of the young men who took part in these historic meetings was Speed’s clerk, William Herndon, the man who was to become Lincoln’s law partner and faithful Boswell. He had been removed from Illinois College by his father because of the abolitionist sentiments he had expressed at the time of the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, editor of the Alton
Observer
, who had been killed by a pro-slavery mob during an attempt to destroy his printing press.

Lincoln immediately made himself at home in Springfield as he had done at New Salem. People were glad to befriend him. All his life men were willing to go out of their way to do things for him. Within a week after he came to the town, he had found a place to live, a business and friends.

He wrote to Mary Owens twice after he arrived in Springfield, explaining why she shouldn’t marry him; finally the whole affair was broken off. During the next year (on April 1, 1838), he wrote a long letter to Mrs. O. H. Browning, the
wife of a friend of his, in which he described the Mary Owens affair in detail.
It is a cruel letter, ridiculing the woman he had once considered worthy of being his wife; it is also one of the most intimate and self-revelatory documents Lincoln ever wrote. It shows his indecision, his lack of ability to judge others, and, more than any other bit of Lincoln’s writing, it offers a key to the psychological puzzle of his attitude toward women and marriage.

And so began the Springfield years—the quarter-century that was to make this melancholy young politician President of the United States. He entered Springfield on April 15, 1837. He was then twenty-eight years old. He had just twenty-eight years—to the day—in which to live.

The town, which was to be the scene of his rise to power, was then an ideal location for a man seeking both political and legal advancement. For all its unpaved and unlighted streets, Springfield was an important place; it had the beginnings of a local aristocracy already established; as state capital it was sure to become a social center where useful contacts could be made. An ambitious man could hope to do well there.

The one thing in the Lincoln legend that is most untrue is the idea that Lincoln was not ambitious, that he had to be pushed over hurdles by his wife and his friends; that he was forced, almost against his will, finally to become President. It is true that he was lazy, that he was over-cautious, that he often lacked confidence in himself. The Thomas Lincoln strain was strong in him, but he overcame his inheritance; he wanted political advancement and he worked all his life to get it, bringing to the struggle one of the shrewdest and most gifted political minds in American history.

Each move in his life from this time on was based on political ambition. He made mistakes; sometimes he temporarily abandoned the struggle, appalled by its apparent hopelessness; but to say that he did not seek the career that was to be
his is as unjustified as to say that Napoleon and Hitler were accidents of history or fate. Lincoln used different methods, more humane and less selfish methods, but he, too, had the determination that enabled him to achieve his goal. He would have gotten nowhere if the course of events had not been exactly right to bring him forward and make him great, but he was never lacking in the astuteness to foresee the correct move that would put him in each successive position to advance upward toward his final high place.

Of all the influences in his life none was to be more important than the marriage he made—but for reasons different from those usually ascribed to it. It is true that Mary Todd, the Kentucky belle he was to marry, did set out to capture this young politician for herself—underneath his uncouthness she saw possibilities of growth that she was clever enough to recognize. But Lincoln, too, for all his hesitation and his doubts, did marry Mary Todd, and in doing so he could not have been entirely oblivious of the fact that he was forming an alliance with the most influential family in Springfield—the Edwards clan which was powerful in politics and society.

With Lincoln’s entry into Springfield where he met his future wife, the first of the tangled threads of his career is woven into the complicated pattern of personal life, history and drama that makes his story so interesting and so strange. That she, the high-born Southern lady who came to Springfield on the usual matrimonial tour, should link her destiny with this backwoods lawyer was remarkable enough. But still stranger was the fact that among the eligible young men in Illinois who immediately surrounded her was Stephen A. Douglas, who was to run through Lincoln’s life as a counter-foil. Douglas’s career, plotted against Lincoln’s, seems like some novelist’s invention, a device of clever and ingenious fiction. Even Douglas’s death, which occurred shortly after Lincoln
took office as President, appears almost as if it were an artfully calculated move on the part of the author to clear the stage so his chief character could dominate the story during the important war years.

And Mary Todd herself is a character out of Thackeray. She is Becky Sharp—even to her knowledge of French—and Amelia Sedley, with her aristocratic background and silly Victorian notions of female propriety, both rolled into one character, inconsistent, puzzling and forever fascinating as a human being as well as for the part she was to play in history.

She had been raised in Lexington, Kentucky, where she had been well educated. She came to Springfield some time in the autumn of 1839, just before the Legislature first met there. She probably met Lincoln at a ball held in honor of the occasion. At any rate, during the year 1840 they became engaged.

Things did not go smoothly between them. Mary Todd was high tempered, imperious, used to adulation and having her own way. Lincoln was still in a psychological muddle about women. He was drawn to them as desperately as ever, but he was at the same time afraid of becoming married to one of them. Marriage had about it a terrifying state of permanence; he had his own way to make in the world, and even a politically advantageous marriage might hold him back in some ways as much as it might advance him in others. Beyond all these practical reasons was some obscure psychological inhibition, some holdover from his past—from his attachment to his dead mother perhaps, or from his love affair with Ann Rutledge that death had also terminated. Something made him regret the step he was taking. He wrote a letter to Mary Todd, breaking off his engagement. Speed persuaded him not to send the letter, but to speak to her in person instead. He did so and he was lost. She melted in tears, and he, moved by pity, effected a reconciliation for the time being, although his own doubts were by no means stilled.

Then on January 1, 1841, something else happened.
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Just what it was we do not know. Herndon said that the unhappy couple had planned to be married on that day, and that Lincoln simply did not show up for the ceremony. He had been driven almost to the verge of insanity by his own indecision, and again he had to be watched lest he commit suicide.

Herndon’s story lacks external corroboration. No Springfield paper printed a word about an expected marriage—and a marriage with a member of the important Edwards family would surely have been in the news of the day. Something did happen on January 1, 1841, as Lincoln’s own letters testify, for he refers to this day in a letter to Speed dated more than a year later (March 27, 1842) as “the fatal first of January,” and he says that he is still troubled because “there is one still unhappy whom I have contributed to make so.”

There is no doubt, too, that what took place caused a terrible emotional upheaval in Lincoln. His correspondence at this time with his law partner, John T. Stuart, hints at it, and it runs through his letters to Speed again and again. The hypochondria he feared had returned in full force and he said that he was the most miserable man alive. Apparently he did not see Mary Todd all spring and summer; some time in August he went to Louisville to visit Speed, who had sold out his store on that same fatal first of January and had gone to Kentucky, where he also was contemplating marriage.

Joshua Speed was the one man in Lincoln’s life who was ever really close to him. Herndon, who was actively associated with Lincoln for fifteen years in his law office, came to know his partner well, but only by observing him closely. Lincoln confided much of his political interests to Herndon, but he seldom spoke to him on terms of great intimacy about his personal life. Lincoln’s friendship with Speed slowly cooled
after his marriage to Mary Todd, but during the period just preceding the marriage, Lincoln poured his heart out to Speed in a series of letters that are without parallel in all the Lincoln correspondence. He had never written like this before; he was never to do so again.

Speed was the recipient of Lincoln’s misery; to him and to him alone, Lincoln confided his next attachment to a woman, for immediately upon breaking off relations with Mary Todd he again needed a woman to whom he could turn. After Ann Rutledge’s death he had sought the company of Mary Owens; now he switched his attentions to a young girl of seventeen named Sarah Rickard. This affair lasted for more than a year, but apparently it never became serious—any more than the Mary Owens affair had.
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These were simply women sought for on the rebound, sought for in order to forget the women who had really counted.