IN NEW SALEM, Lincoln broke through his shyness to court the young Ann Rutledge. He did not need to go far to find her; he had boarded with the James and Mary Rutledge family in his first months in New Salem.
Ann was eighteen years old when Lincoln arrived in 1831. She was five feet three inches tall and pretty, with blue eyes and light, auburn hair. Bill Greene called her “a young lady … of Exquisite beauty.” Neighbors remembered her as “intelligent” and “smart.” Her brother, Robert Rutledge, said, “My sister was esteemed the brightest mind of the family.”
Lincoln was attracted to this gentle young woman but knew that Ann’s hand was being sought by several men. She became engaged to John McNeil in 1832. McNeil told Ann he had changed his name from McNamar to McNeil because his father had failed in business, and the son was determined to make enough money to return to New York, pay off his father’s debts, and restore the family name. He promised that upon his return from New York they would be married. Ann shared his story with members of her family, some of whom were dubious about its truth.
Her engagement did not discourage Lincoln, and a door opened for him to visit with Ann when McNeil left. How their friendship blossomed into romance is not known. No letters have survived from Ann Rutledge, and nothing in Abraham Lincoln’s correspondence tells us about her. How did Abraham overcome his inhibitions?
At some point in 1835, Lincoln and Ann entered into what couples at that time called an “understanding” about their relationship. Ann’s cousin, James McCrady Rutledge, about her same age, remembered that while Lincoln was boarding with his uncle, he “became deeply in love with Ann.” Lincoln, as postmaster, would be privy to the early letters and then lack of letters from McNeil. It became apparent to everyone that McNeil was not going to return, but vows were honored for a long time in that era. Lincoln and Ann may also have paused because he as yet had no profession except as a part-time legislator, and she wished to pursue more education. Rutledge said his cousin Ann “concented to wait a year for their Marriage after their Engagement until Abraham Lincoln was admitted to the bar.” Rutledge firmly believed, “Had she lived till spring they were to be married.”
In the long, hot, rainy summer of 1835, Ann fell ill with what people called “brain fever,” probably typhoid fever, perhaps caused by the flooding of the Rutledge well. She died on August 25, 1835. Her uncle, John M. Cameron, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, preached her funeral sermon.
Lincoln was devastated by Ann’s death. He had lost his mother and his sister to early deaths, and now he had lost the first woman he had loved. He had perhaps surprised himself in reaching out to young Ann Rutledge, and now she had been taken from him prematurely.
Lincoln was staying with Elizabeth and Bennett Abell at the time. Elizabeth Abell said later, “It was a great shock to him and I never seen a man mourn for a companion more than he did for her[.] He made a remark one day when it was raining that he could not bare the idea of its raining on her Grave.” Robert Rutledge remarked, “The effect upon Mr. Lincoln’s mind was terrible; he became plunged in despair, and many of his friends feared that reason would desert her throne.” The residents of New Salem, in remembering Abraham and Ann, did not claim they knew the details of their love for each other, but, as Robert Rutledge summarized, Lincoln’s “extraordinary emotions were regarded as strong evidence of the existence of the tenderest relations between himself and the deceased.”
A LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR after Ann’s death, Lincoln entered into a relationship with a more mature, imposing woman. Mary Owens, born in Green County, Kentucky, in 1808, grew up in a wealthy family, the recipient of a fine education. Lincoln met her while she was visiting her sister, Elizabeth Abell, in New Salem in 1833. Mary, a good-looking woman with dark eyes, black hair, and a generous figure, exhibited a spirited and witty personality.
Three years later, in 1836, Elizabeth Abell prepared to travel to Kentucky to visit her sister. Elizabeth told Lincoln lightheartedly that she would bring Mary back if he would marry her. Mary, twenty-eight, was reaching the age when society would label her an old maid. Lincoln, probably in the same blithe spirit, boasted that he would marry Mary if she returned. After the death of Ann Rutledge, Abell and other women in the village had been encouraging Abraham to look for a wife.
Mary Owens returned to New Salem in November 1836, aware of Lincoln’s boast. Their relationship flowered, but from the beginning it also prickled. On one occasion, a party of men and women on horseback on their way to a gathering had to cross a stream. Mary said, “The other gentlemen were officious in seeing that their partners got over safely,” but Lincoln never looked back “to see how I got along.” When Mary rode up beside him, she remarked, “You are a nice fellow; I suppose you did not care whether my neck was broken or not.” Lincoln laughed and replied that he “knew I was plenty smart to take care of myself.”
Abraham and Mary had barely begun their courtship when Lincoln left New Salem for the opening of the new legislative session in Vandalia. They may have reached some kind of understanding, but each was already experiencing some apprehension in their relationship. Lincoln was circumspect about the exact nature of his uneasiness. Did he compare this strong, mature woman, a year older than himself, with pretty young Ann? He does not say. Mary, a woman born to privilege, may well have wondered about a man who had not yet established himself in a profession and lacked the social graces of a gentleman.
After two weeks in Vandalia, Lincoln wrote Mary expressing all kinds of discomfort. He began by telling her about his “mortification” in looking for a letter from her and not finding one. In the rest of his letter he talked mostly about himself and said almost nothing about her. Toward the end he confessed that his spirits were not well: “With other things I can not account for, have conspired and have gotten my spirits so low, that I feel I would rather be any place in the world than here.” As he was about to conclude, perhaps having reread the letter, Lincoln blurted out, “This letter is so dry and [stupid] that I am ashamed to send it, but with my pres [ent] feelings I can not do any better.” The letter revealed Lincoln’s deep insecurities within himself in relation to women.
Lincoln began to court Mary Owens, daughter of a well-to-do Kentucky family, about a year after Ann Rutledges death. They differed in educational background and temperament, and their relationship struggled and then ended.
Within a month after moving to Springfield in 1837, Lincoln wrote to Mary, who had returned to Kentucky. By now Lincoln seemed to be looking for a way out of their relationship. He told Mary that she would not enjoy living in Springfield. “This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business after all, at least it is so to me.” He confided, “I am quite as lonesome here as [I] ever was anywhere in my life. I have been spoken to by but one woman since I’ve been here, and should not have been by her, if she could have avoided it”—an unusual comment to tell another woman. In Lincoln’s courtship of Mary Owens, he atypically went out of his way to emphasize the negative. This may have been his obverse way of speaking of his own lack of self-assurance. He wrote, “I am afraid you would not be satisfied” living in Springfield. Women ride about “flourishing” in carriages, but “it would be your doom to see without shareing in it.” Owens “would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty.” Lincoln finally got around to speaking of his own commitments. “Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented.”
In August 1837, Lincoln traveled to New Salem to see Mary, who had returned from Kentucky. On the day they parted he wrote her an earnest but painful letter. “I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women.” He pleaded “ignorance” about her true feelings for him. “What I do wish is, that our further acquaintance shall depend upon yourself.” Lincoln then poured out his heart, but in a sentence filled with qualifications. “If you feel yourself in any degree bound to me, I am now w
illing to release you, provided you wish it; while, on the other hand, I am willing and even anxious to bind you faster, if I can be convinced that it will in any considerable degree, add to your happiness.” Finally, he told her, “If it suits you best to not answer this—farewell—a long life and a merry one attend you.” He hoped she would write back and “speak as plainly as I do.”
She never replied.
Lincolns letter to Mary Owens on August 16, 1837, reflects his conflicted feelings about their relationship. He writes mostly about himself and his feelings, and little about her.
Lincoln found himself deeply hurt—again. Was he blindsided by her silence? Lincoln’s letters to Owens revealed him, again and again, conflicted about what to do. It seemed as if his mind told him he should ask her to marry him, but his heart wasn’t in it.
That the wound did not heal quickly became apparent by a letter Lincoln wrote nearly eight months later—to another woman. This time he wrote to Eliza Caldwell Browning, the wife of his lawyer friend Orville Browning, and poured out the story of his relationship with Mary Owens in astonishing detail. By now he was not so complimentary of Mary, writing, a bit cruelly, “for her skin was too full of fat, to permit its contracting in to wrinkles; but from her want to teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general.” But the burden of his letter was his own deeply wounded self. He confessed, “I was mortified, it seemed to me, in a hundred different ways. My vanity was deeply wounded by the reflection that I had so long been too stupid to discover her intentions, and at the same time never doubting that I understood them perfectly.” It is telling that Lincoln did not write to a male friend. Somehow he felt the freedom to admit to Eliza Browning his lack of social intelligence about women. He admitted something more. Mary Owens “had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness.”
Years later, Mary Owens said that she found Lincoln “deficient in those little links which make up the chain of a woman’s happiness, at least it was so in my case.” She quickly added, “Not that it proceeded from a lack of goodness of heart.” Why did their relationship not work? Mary Owens surmised, “His training had been different from mine, hence there was not that congeniality which would have otherwise existed.”
Lincoln, who had lost his first love to death, had now reached a murky parting of the ways with a woman he never really loved.
WHEN THE CAPITAL MOVED to Springfield in 1839, Lincoln began to socialize more than ever before. With the legislature scheduled to meet in Springfield for the first time in December, Lincoln’s sense of self-assurance became more secure. He now felt freer to meet young women in the new capital city. He was about to meet the woman who would change his life.
Mary Elizabeth Todd was born on December 13, 1818, in Lexington, Kentucky. Her grandfathers, Levi Todd and Robert Parker, had helped settle Lexington. Her father, Robert Smith Todd, grew up in the family home, Ellerslie, a twenty-room mansion. The Todd family counted as a neighbor Henry Clay, rising Kentucky politician. Six feet tall with brown hair and large brown eyes, Robert Todd became a prominent second-generation leader of Lexington, which fancied itself a civilized town that had moved beyond the frontier.
At twenty-one, Todd married the teenage Eliza Parker, a distant cousin, in 1812. Mary, their fourth child, grew up in a two-story, nine-room, Georgian brick home on Short Street in the center of Lexington. A child of privilege, she knew herself to be part of one of Kentucky’s leading political families.
Mary’s mother, Eliza, died in the summer of 1825 after the birth of her seventh child, probably from a post-birth bacterial infection, at the age of thirty-one. Mary was six years old. When Mary was eight, her father married Elizabeth Humphreys, a wealthy young woman whose family had strong political connections with the Todds. “Betsy” Humphreys, from Frankfort, nine years younger than her husband, would bear nine children in the following fifteen years. Mary would now grow up in the vortex of an absentee father, often away on business or politics, and a stepmother who many said favored her own children.
Robert Todd was an uncommon father who encouraged the education of his daughters as well as his sons. In the fall of 1827, Mary entered the Shelby Female Academy, housed in a two-story brick house at the corner of Second and Market. Dr. John Ward, an eccentric Episcopal minister, led the school, which was later known as Dr. Ward’s Academy.
One of Mary’s cousins, Elizabeth Humphreys, remembered her as an aspiring scholar. “Mary was far in advance over girls of her age in education.” Dr. Ward believed in beginning class at 5 a.m. on summer mornings and in leading early morning recitations throughout the year. Mary flowered in this disciplined academic atmosphere. Her cousin said, “She had a retentive memory and a mind that enabled her to grasp and thoroughly understand the lessons she was required to learn.”
Much of Sunday was spent at the McChord Presbyterian Church. Her father had been one of the founding members of the church. In 1823, when Mary turned five, the church organized the first Sunday school in Lexington. Here Mary participated in the standard Presbyte rian education of children and youth by catechizing, a method used by Presbyterians, as well as Congregationalists and many Baptists, in America. Young people were expected to memorize the 107 questions and answers of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, beginning with the well-known first question.
Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
In 1832, at age fourteen, Mary entered Madame Mentelle’s Boarding School. As a rule, Mary would have ended her education after her five years at Dr. Ward’s, as only a few thousand girls in America received more than four years of education. Augustus and Charlotte Mentelle, the aristocratic directors of the school, had fled France in 1792 during the French Revolution. Mary received a fine classical education, including French, which set her apart from many of the women she would come to know as an adult.
That year Mary’s family moved into a new and even more impressive home on Main Street, with fourteen rooms, both a single and a double parlor, six bedrooms, and formal gardens. The Todds valued both education and fine living.
When Henry Clay visited Lexington in the summer of 1832 while campaigning for the presidency, Mary had already developed a remarkable knowledge of politics. Four years before, at age ten, she had refused on principle to attend a Lexington event honoring presidential candidate Andrew Jackson and had argued with a pro-Jackson neighbor. Now a passionate Whig, she spoke up at a dinner honoring Clay to promise him her support. She quickly added, in everyone’s hearing, that she, too, expected to live in Washington some day.
While growing up in Lexington, Mary encountered slavery everywhere. The production of hemp on the bluegrass plantations in the surrounding countryside depended on slave labor. White families used slaves for work inside and outside their homes. By the time Mary was twelve, her father had one slave for every member of his family. The female slaves cooked the meals, washed and sewed the clothes, and looked after the children. The male slaves did everything outside the house, including taking care of the horses.
Lexington was a major slave market. Traders drove groups of slaves—men, women, and children—right past Mary’s home on their way to the Deep South. She saw the slaves, young and old, shackled together two by two. As Mary walked to and from school, she frequently observed the slave auctions held at Cheapside, Lexington’s public meeting place adjacent to the Fayette County Courthouse on the town square. On another corner of the square stood the black locust whipping post, erected in 1826. As a slave master whipped a slave, a cry would pierce the air of this self-proclaimed civilized town.
BY THE TIME MARY was eighteen, she was considered by her friends, female and male, a pretty young woman. Five feet two inches tall, with soft brown hair, she had a broad forehead, a small upturned nose, blue eyes, and a rosy complexion. Mary exhibited a strong-minded determination to get her way, and the inner circle of her family knew “her temper and tongue.” A prominent chin gave the impression
of a resolute personality. Her hands darted impulsively in gestures as she spoke.
In the spring of 1837, Mary decided to follow a Todd family pattern and visit Springfield, Illinois. Mary’s older sister Elizabeth had married Ninian Edwards, son of the governor of Illinois, and moved with him to Springfield. After the death of their mother, Elizabeth had been as much a mother as a sister to Mary. Their sister Frances also lived in Springfield, as did an uncle, Dr. John Todd, and three cousins, John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s law partner; Stephen T. Logan, his future law partner; and John J. Hardin. The Todds and the Stuarts—Kentuckians, Scottish, and Presbyterian—were forming a veritable clan in Springfield.
In early May, Mary boarded the train for Frankfort, Kentucky, to begin a journey by train, boat, and stagecoach to Springfield. If all connections were made, it would take her two weeks to arrive at Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards’s impressive new home on Second Street in the southern part of the city. She may have learned from John Todd Stuart that he had invited a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln to join him as a partner, but it is doubtful she met Lincoln on this visit. She returned to Lexington in the fall of 1837; they would not meet for another two years.
In the summer of 1839, Mary returned to Springfield, intent on staying this time for more than a visit. She quickly became part of a clique of young women and men calling themselves “the Coterie” who often gathered at the Edwardses’ two-story brick home at the top of “Aristocracy Hill.” James C. Conkling, a lawyer who had moved to Springfield in 1838 and a member of the Coterie, described Mary as “the very creature of excitement,” and said she “never enjoys herself more than when in society and surrounded by a company of merry friends.” When one day Mary mimicked the mannerisms of some of her suitors, Ninian Edwards exclaimed, “Mary could make a bishop forget his prayers.”
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