Lincoln, the unknown

by Tom Clancy

  While Lincoln was putting on his best clothes that evening at Butler's house, and blacking his boots, Butler's little boy rushed in and asked him where he was going.

  Lincoln replied: "To hell, I suppose."

  In despair, Mary Todd had given away the trousseau that she had had made for the first wedding date, so that now she had to be married in a simple white muslin dress.

  All arrangements were carried through with nervous haste.

  Mrs. Edwards says she had only two hours' notice of the marriage and that the frosting on the wedding-cake which she hurriedly baked for the occasion was too warm to cut well when it was served.

  As the Rev. Charles Dresser, clad in his clerical vestments, read the impressive Episcopal service, Lincoln seemed far from cheerful and happy. His best man testified that he "looked and acted as if he were going to the slaughter."

  The only comment that Lincoln ever made in writing about his marriage was a postscript to a business letter that he wrote to Samuel Marshall about a week after the event. This letter is now in the possession of the Chicago Historical Society.

  "Nothing new here," writes Lincoln, "except my marriage which to me is a matter of profound wonder."

  PART TWO

  W„

  hile I was writing this book, out in New Salem, Illinois, my good friend Henry Pond, a local attorney, said to me a number of times:

  "You ought to go and see Uncle Jimmy Miles, for one of his uncles, Herndon, was Lincoln's law partner, and one of his aunts ran a boarding-house where Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln lived for a while."

  That sounded like an interesting lead; so Mr. Pond and I climbed into his car one Sunday afternoon in July, and drove out to the Miles farm near New Salem—a farm where Lincoln used to stop and swap stories for a drink of cider while walking to Springfield to borrow law-books.

  When we arrived, Uncle Jimmy dragged a trio of rocking-chairs out into the shade of a huge maple tree in the front yard; and there, while young turkeys and little ducks ran noisily through the grass about us, we talked for hours; and Uncle Jimmy related an illuminating and pathetic incident about Lincoln that has never been put into print heretofore. The story is this:

  Mr. Miles's Aunt Catherine married a physician named Jacob M. Early. About a year after Lincoln arrived in Springfield— during the night of March 11, 1838, to be exact—an unknown man on horseback rode up to Dr. Early's house, knocked, called the physician to the door, emptied both barrels of a shot-gun into his body, then leaped upon a horse and dashed away.

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  Small as Springfield was at the time, no one was ever charged with the murder, and the killing remains a mystery to this day.

  Dr. Early left a very small estate; so his widow was obliged to take in boarders to support herself; and, shortly after their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln came to Mrs. Early's home to live.

  Uncle Jimmy Miles told me that he had often heard his aunt, Dr. Early's widow, relate the following incident: One morning Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln were having breakfast when Lincoln did something that aroused the fiery temper of his wife. What, no one remembers now. But Mrs. Lincoln, in a rage, dashed a cup of hot coffee into her husband's face. And she did it in front of the other boarders.

  Saying nothing, Lincoln sat there in humiliation and silence while Mrs. Early came with a wet towel and wiped off his face and clothes. That incident was probably typical of the married life of the Lincolns for the next quarter of a century.

  Springfield had eleven attorneys, and they couldn't all make a living there; so they used to ride horseback from one county-seat to another, following Judge David Davis while he was holding court in the various places throughout the Eighth Judicial District. The other attorneys always managed to get back to Springfield each Saturday and spend the week-end with their families.

  But Lincoln didn't. He dreaded to go home, and for three months in the spring, and again for three months in the autumn, he remained out on the circuit and never went near Springfield.

  He kept this up year after year. Living conditions in the country hotels were often wretched; but wretched as they were, he preferred them to his own home and Mrs. Lincoln's constant nagging and wild outbursts of temper. "She vexed and harassed the soul out of him"—that was what the neighbors said; and the neighbors knew, for they saw her, and they couldn't help hearing her.

  Mrs. Lincoln's "loud shrill voice," says Senator Beveridge, "could be heard across the street, and her incessant outbursts of wrath were audible to all who lived near the house. Frequently her anger was displayed by other means than words, and accounts of her violence are numerous and unimpeachable."

  "She led her husband a wild and merry dance," says Herndon.

  And Herndon felt he knew why "she unchained the bitterness of a disappointed and outraged nature."

  It was her desire for vengeance. "He had crushed her proud womanly spirit," suggests Herndon, and "she felt degraded in the eyes of the world: Love fled at the approach of revenge."

  She was always complaining, always criticizing her husband; nothing about him was ever right: He was stoopshouldered, he walked awkwardly and lifted his feet straight up and down like an Indian. She complained that there was no spring to his step, no grace to his movements; and she mimicked his gait and nagged at him to walk with his toes pointed down, as she had been taught at Madame Mentelle's.

  She didn't like the way his huge ears stood out at right angles from his head. She even told him that his nose wasn't straight, that his lower lip stuck out, that he looked consumptive, that his feet and hands were too large, his head too small.

  His shocking indifference to his personal appearance grated on her sensitive nature, and made her woefully unhappy. "Mrs. Lincoln," says Herndon, "was not a wildcat without cause." Sometimes her husband walked down the street with one trouser leg stuffed inside his boot-top and the other dangling on the outside. His boots were seldom blackened or greased. His collar often needed changing, his coat frequently needed brushing.

  James Gourly, who lived next door to the Lincolns for years, wrote: "Mr. Lincoln used to come to our house, his feet encased in a pair of loose slippers, and with an old faded pair of trousers fastened with one suspender"—or "gallis" as Lincoln himself called it.

  In warm weather he made extended trips "wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat, on the back of which the perspiration had splotched wide stains that resembled a map of the continent."

  A young lawyer who once saw Lincoln in a country hotel, getting ready for bed, and clad "in a home made yellow flannel night shirt" that reached "halfway between his knees and his ankles," exclaimed, "He was the ungodliest figure I ever saw."

  He never owned a razor in his life, and he didn't visit a barber as frequently as Mrs. Lincoln thought he should.

  He neglected to groom his coarse, bushy hair, that stood out all over his head like horsehair. That irritated Mary Todd beyond words, and when she combed it, it was soon mussed again, by his bank-book, letters, and legal papers, which he carried in the top of his hat.

  One day he was having his picture taken in Chicago, and the

  photographer urged him to "slick up" a bit. He replied that "a portrait of a slicked-up Lincoln wouldn't be recognized down in Springfield."

  His table manners were large and free. He didn't hold his knife right, and he didn't even lay it on his plate right. He had no skill whatever in the art of eating fish with a fork and a crust of bread. Sometimes he tilted the meat platter and raked or slid a pork chop off onto his plate. Mrs. Lincoln raised "merry war" with him because he persisted in using his own knife for the butter; and once when he put chicken bones on the side dish on which his lettuce had been served, she almost fainted.

  She complained and scolded because he didn't stand up when ladies came into the room; because he didn't jump around to take their wraps, and didn't see callers to the door when they left.

  He loved to read lying down. As soon as he came home from the office, he took off his coat an
d shoes and collar and dropped his one "gallis" from his shoulder, turned a chair upside down in the hallway, padded its sloping back with a pillow, propped his head and shoulders against it, and stretched out on the floor.

  In that position he would lie and read for hours—usually the newspapers. Sometimes he read what he considered a very humorous story about an earthquake, from a book entitled "Flush Times in Alabama." Often, very often, he read poetry. And whatever he read, he read aloud. He had gotten the habit from the "blab" schools back in Indiana. He also felt that by reading aloud he could impress a thing on his sense of hearing as well as his sense of sight, and so remember it longer.

  Sometimes he would lie on the floor and close his eyes and quote Shakspere or Byron or Poe; for example:

  "For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee, And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee."

  A lady—a relative—who lived with the Lincolns two years says that one evening Lincoln was lying down in the hall, reading, when company came. Without waiting for the servant to answer the door, he got up in his shirtsleeves, ushered the callers into the parlor, and said he would "trot the women folks out."

  Mrs. Lincoln from an adjoining room witnessed the ladies' entrance, and overheard her husband's jocose expression. Her indignation was so instantaneous she made the situation exceedingly interesting for him, and he was glad to retreat from the mansion. He did not return until very late at night, and then slipped quietly in at a rear door.

  Mrs. Lincoln was violently jealous, and she had little use for Joshua Speed. He had been her husband's intimate friend, and she suspected that he might have influenced Lincoln to run away from his wedding. Before his marriage, Lincoln had been in the habit of ending his letters to Speed with "Love to Fanny." But, after the marriage, Mrs. Lincoln demanded that that greeting be tempered down to "Regards to Mrs. Speed."

  Lincoln never forgot a favor. That was one of his outstanding characteristics; so, as a little gesture of appreciation, he had promised that the first boy would be named Joshua Speed Lincoln. But when Mary Todd heard it she burst out in a storm. It was her child, and she was going to name it! And, what was more, the name was not going to be Joshua Speed! It was going to be Robert Todd, after her own father . . . and so on and so on.

  It is hardly necessary to add that the boy was named Robert Todd. He was the only one of the four Lincoln children to reach maturity. Eddie died in 1850 at Springfield —age 4. Willie died in the White House—age 12. Tad died in Chicago in 1871—age 18. Robert Todd Lincoln died in Manchester, Vermont, July 26, 1926—age 83.

  Mrs. Lincoln complained because the yard was without flowers, shrubs, or color. So Lincoln set out a few roses, but he took no interest in them and they soon perished of neglect. She urged him to plant a garden, and one spring he did, but the weeds overran it.

  Though he was not much given to physical exertion, he did feed and curry "Old Buck"; he also "fed and milked his own cow and sawed his own wood." And he continued to do this, even after he was elected President, until he left Springfield.

  However, John Hanks, Lincoln's second cousin, once remarked that "Abe was not good at any kind of work except dreamin'." And Mary Lincoln agreed with him.

  Lincoln was absent-minded, often sank into curious spells of abstraction, and appeared to be entirely oblivious of the earth and everything that was on it. On Sundays, he would put one of his babies into a little wagon and haul the child up and down the rough sidewalk in front of his house. Sometimes the little chap happened to roll overboard. But Lincoln pulled steadily ahead, his eyes fixed on the ground, unconscious of the loud lamentations behind him. He never knew what had happened until Mrs. Lincoln thrust her head out at the door and yelled at him in a shrill, angry voice.

  Sometimes he came into the house after a day at the office and looked at her and apparently didn't see her and didn't even speak. He was seldom interested in food; after she had prepared a meal, she frequently had hard work to get him into the dining-room. She called, but he seemed not to hear. He would sit down at the table and stare off dreamily into space, and forget to eat until she reminded him of it.

  After dinner he sometimes stared into the fireplace for half an hour at a time, saying nothing. The boys literally crawled all over him and pulled his hair and talked to him, but he seemed unconscious of their existence. Then suddenly he would come to and tell a joke or recite one of his favorite verses:

  "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, He passes from life to his rest in the grave."

  Mrs. Lincoln criticized him for never correcting the children. But he so adored them that "he was blind and deaf to their faults." "He never neglected to praise them for any of their good acts," said Mrs. Lincoln, "and declared: Tt is my pleasure that my children are free and happy, and unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to bind a child to its parents.' "

  The liberties he allowed his children at times appear extraordinary. For example, once when he was playing chess with a judge of the Supreme Court, Robert came and told his father it was time to go to dinner. Lincoln replied, "Yes, yes." But, being very fond of the game, he quite forgot that he had been called, and played on.

  Again the boy appeared, with another urgent message from Mrs. Lincoln. Again Lincoln promised to come, again he forgot.

  A third time Robert arrived with a summons, a third time Lincoln promised, and a third time he played on. Then, suddenly, the boy drew back and violently kicked the chess-board higher than the players' heads, scattering the chessmen in every direction.

  "Well, Judge," Lincoln said with a smile, "I reckon we'll have to finish this game some other time."

  Lincoln apparently never even thought of correcting his son.

  The Lincoln boys used to hide behind a hedge in the evening and stick a lath through the fence. As there were no street lights, passers-by would run into the lath and their hats would be knocked off. Once, in the darkness, the boys knocked off their father's hat by mistake. He didn't censure them, but merely told them that they ought to be careful, for they might make somebody mad.

  Lincoln did not belong to any church, and avoided religious discussions even with his best friends. However, he once told Herndon that his religious code was like that of an old man named Glenn, in Indiana, whom he had heard speak at a church meeting, and who said: "When I do good, I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that's my religion."

  On Sunday mornings, as the children grew older, he usually took them out for a stroll, but once he left them at home and went to the First Presbyterian Church with Mrs. Lincoln. Half an hour later Tad came into the house and, missing his father, ran down the street and dashed into the church during the sermon. His hair was awry, his shoes unbuttoned, his stockings sagging down, and his face and hands were grimy with the black soil of Illinois. Mrs. Lincoln, herself elegantly attired, was shocked and embarrassed; but Lincoln calmly stretched out one of his long arms and lovingly drew Tad to him and held the boy's head close against his breast.

  Sometimes on Sunday morning, Lincoln took the boys downtown to his office. There they were permitted to run wild. "They soon gutted the shelves of books," says Herndon, "rifled the drawers and riddled boxes, battered the point of my gold pen . . . threw the pencils into the spittoon, turned over the inkstands on the papers, scattered letters over the office and danced on them."

  And Lincoln "never reproved them or gave them a fatherly frown. He was the most indulgent parent I have ever known," Herndon concludes.

  Mrs. Lincoln seldom went to the office; but when she did, she was shocked. She had reason to be: the place had no order, no system, things were piled about everywhere. Lincoln tied up one bundle of papers and labeled it thus: "When you can't find it anywhere else, look in here."

  As speed said, Lincoln's habits were "regularly irregular."

&n
bsp; On one wall loomed a huge black stain, marking the place where one law student had hurled an inkstand at another one's head—and missed.

  The office was seldom swept and almost never scrubbed. Some garden seeds that were lying on top of the bookcase had started to sprout and grow there, in the dust and dirt.

  I

  n most respects, there wasn't a more economical housewife in all Springfield than Mary Lincoln. She was extravagant chiefly in matters having to do with showing off. She bought a carriage when the Lincolns could ill afford it and paid a neighbor's boy twenty-five cents an afternoon for driving her about town to make social calls. The place was a mere village, and she could have walked or hired a vehicle. But no, that would have been beneath her. And no matter how poor they were, she could always find money for clothes costing more than she could afford.

  In 1844, the Lincolns paid fifteen hundred dollars for the home of the Rev. Charles Dresser who, two years before, had performed their marriage ceremony. The house had a living-room, kitchen, parlor, bedrooms; and, in the back yard, there was a woodpile, an outhouse, and a barn where Lincoln kept his cow and Old Buck.

  At first the place seemed to Mary Lincoln an earthly paradise; and it was, in comparison with the bleak, bare rooms of the boarding-house she had just left. Besides, she had the new-found joy and pride of ownership. But its perfections soon began to fade, and she was forever finding fault with the home. Her sister lived in a huge two-story house, and this one was only a story and a half high. She once told Lincoln that no man who ever amounted to much lived in a story-and-a-half house.

  Usually, when she asked him for anything, he never inquired

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  whether it was necessary. "You know what you want," he would say, "so go and get it." But in this instance, he rebelled: the family was small, and the house was entirely adequate. Besides, he was a poor man: he had only five hundred dollars when they were married, and he had not added much to it since. He knew that they couldn't afford to enlarge the house; and she knew it also; but she kept on urging and complaining. Finally, in order to quiet her, he had a contractor estimate the cost, and Lincoln told him to make it high. He did, and Lincoln showed her the figures. She gasped, and he imagined that settled the matter.