The Abolitionists were in high dudgeon. They had nothing to lose in Illinois. They would have been happy to turn our villages into arsenals, drown Legislators in the Sangamon River, march on the capitol, and torch it into the ground. “Friends, neighbors, Illinois is a rotten sink that doesn’t deserve to survive.” But they didn’t help themselves or the blacks in that hall.
A mob hammered its way in with pipes and cudgels and bargemen’s poles. There was a preacher among these ruffians with the same brimstone as the Abolitionists and the same black hat. “Ye godless men and all your Jezebels,” he spat, “you’ve beshit yourselves. You walk among the black devils and give them succor. Shame on you.”
He jabbed one Abolitionist after the other in the chest with his bargeman’s pole, while his ruffians attacked the rest of us with their cudgels. They were out to blind every black man in the hall and smash his skull. The sheriff arrived with a brace of pepper-pot pistols under his belt—each one with multiple blue barrels and a golden trigger—but he just stood there and wouldn’t involve himself in a farrago that was turning into a slaughterhouse. Women clutched their bonnets and shrieked as I watched a poor soul with his own bloody eyeball in his hand, staring at it like a crazed jeweler. Another colored man had a hole in his head fat as a fist. And the sheriff looked on like some little Napoleon of the West.
“Lincoln, I’m not paid to protect niggers and Abolitionists.”
I grabbed a pepper-pot from under his belt, pulled that golden trigger, and shot a chandelier—the fracas ended in an instant. People stood frozen under the shower of glass and a socking sound that was like a thunderclap. Shards spilled through the air; and it amazed me, more than a little, to watch the patterns of spinning glass, as if I had created a new world in under a minute. And then there was a musical noise, like the hiss of a harp, as the glass spun and spun.
We all stood under that shower, the best and the worst of us. I aimed my pepper-pot at the renegade preacher and cocked the hammer again. He and his ruffians disappeared, and the New Englanders clapped their hands and danced a jig in their Abolitionist boots.
“Brothers and sisters,” I said, “go on out of here whilst you still can, and the next time you talk about firing up a building, make sure you’re not in it.”
Much as I tried, I couldn’t stop the burning and the bloodshed, since Illinois was a State with a Southern soul. Abolitionists often found themselves stuck inside a coat of tar and feathers. There had been little uprisings and insurrections in Illinois and in Missouri, across the Mississip; most of the uprisings had been spurred on by the Abolitionists or a mob of slavers, with colored men and women caught in the middle.
In St. Louis, last year, a mulatto cook named McIntosh—a freeman—who worked on a steamboat, tried to rescue a couple of black crew members; these boatmen had been apprehended for fighting near the docks; and when he interfered in their arrest, McIntosh was arrested, too. One of the deputy sheriffs mocked McIntosh and told him he would have to sit in jail for five years. McIntosh pulled out a knife and stabbed him to death. The report of this stabbing spread like wildfire that April. An angry mob plucked McIntosh right out of jail and dragged him across town. The mob chained McIntosh to a chestnut tree, set him on fire, and watched him burn. The next morning his charred body was still chained to the tree. His skull had become a plaything for the children of St. Louis. They shot peas and tossed rocks at the holes where his eyes had once been. And there weren’t a lot of folks who were really astonished.
I couldn’t bring McIntosh back with words scratched on a page, but at least I could remember him. And when the Young Men’s Lyceum, that society of social lions, asked me to deliver a speech, I decided to talk about McIntosh and the mob rule that had descended upon the United States in the spring of ’36. I didn’t hobnob with most of the lions, though I might have, since Joshua Speed was part of their company when he wasn’t gallivanting with Sybil Weg. But I wouldn’t have been comfortable in a ruffled shirt, and I lacked the funds to buy one. So I appeared in my usual garb of dusty gabardine at the Second Presbyterian Church one Saturday night in January, nine or ten months after I’d removed to Springfield—the wind was howling fierce.
I stood up at the pulpit in front of these fine men, several of whom served with me in the Legislature—others were bankers and shopkeepers—and delivered a talk entitled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions.” I’d labored long and hard on that address. The written hand wasn’t natural to me. I had to polish and re-polish the speech, deliver it in front of a mirror in Joshua’s bedroom, with a few of the store’s clerks as my audience. Joshua might have helped the novice lecturer, but I wouldn’t ruin it for him. I wanted him to hear the shock of my delivery for the first time at the Young Men’s Lyceum.
I’d babbled in front of the Legislature, I’d electioneered, but I wasn’t a fire-breather like the Abolitionists—I couldn’t electrify an audience, have women swoon at my feet. There were no ladies at the Lyceum. And many of these social lions weren’t used to the timbre of my voice, that sudden squeak.
I warned the lions. “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. . . . If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
I talked about a certain madness—the madness of mob rule—that threatened a land where negroes and whites supposed to be leagued with them were chased into every corner, “till dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in numbers almost sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery of the forest.”
I mentioned McIntosh, how he had suffered an inglorious death, “all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman attending to his own business and at peace with the world.” I didn’t condone the stabbing he did—the death of that deputy. But no justice was served by chaining McIntosh to a tree. The mob of tomorrow will burn and hang the innocent and the guilty at will, and make a jubilee of it, I said. The spit was flying. The screech in my voice was gone. Suddenly I was a baritone, in full force.
Thus I spoke to the Lyceum. My lips were dry. My throat was parched. My voice had fled into the roof. I didn’t belong with these young lions. I could have been the monster at a monster show I’d seen as a child. There were two or three tents. The monster might have been a bearded lady or a man with a shark’s skin. I never had much faith in these unnatural beings, assuming with a boy’s cunning and bewilderment that both the beard and the fish skin had been painted on. But still I looked and looked. I couldn’t take my eyes off the monster. And I must have haunted these young men the way the bearded lady had haunted me, as someone only half authentic. The bearded lady couldn’t sing out her lament. She had no voice beyond her deformity, real or unreal. And I, Abraham Lincoln, with my wild hair and look of a gigantic scarecrow, must have amused them, even frightened them a little with my harangue about mobs and political institutions.
I talked of the Founding Fathers and their wild experiment that folks might make their own destiny without a tyrant to guide or govern them. “If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties, and cities, and rivers, and mountains; and to be revered and sung, toasted through all time. If they failed, they were to be called knaves, and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten. They succeeded.”
The Revolution had created a living history, with scars and wounds. But the histories found in every family were now gone. “They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but what invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time has done—the leveling of its walls.�
�� And we had to fight against that silent quarry with sober reason. “Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. . . .”
I had been wrong about these social lions, including Ninian Edwards and other members of the Long Nine. They clapped and clapped in their silk and satin for the monster on the pulpit. And then I thought of McIntosh, his skull and bones clinging to a tree.
11.
King Richard & the Lexington Lioness
UNTIL MY SPEECH at the Lyceum, Ninian and his wife, Elizabeth, had never invited me to their house on the Hill. Elizabeth Edwards was a busybody and the biggest matchmaker in town. She had a long nose, like a bird of prey, and piercing silver eyes. She took it upon herself to summon up suitable brides for Springfield’s most eligible bachelors. And since it was hard to find belles of good breeding, she had to import them from Louisville or Lexington, where she had grown up. She herself was a Todd, one of Kentucky’s superior families.
When I showed up at Elizabeth’s Saturday-night soirees, wearing white gloves, she was polite enough, but she never glanced at me with her eagle eyes. Elizabeth wasn’t going to waste her time on a no-account like Abe Lincoln. She could chatter on and on about my exquisite lecture at the Lyceum—it had been published in the Sangamo Journal. But she didn’t believe for a minute that I belonged on Quality Hill.
I kind of felt the same way. I couldn’t dance up a storm even with some of the second-rate belles who were allotted to me. I shuffled around, with the skirts of my coat flaring up like a rooster’s crippled wings. I didn’t know any of the latest steps. I’d never been to dancing college. So the boundaries were crisp and clean. I was at war with Elizabeth Todd Edwards, but it was a war of whispers. She was always whispering when I was around, as if I were a tall skeleton in white gloves, and it wasn’t worth her while to match me up with one of her belles.
I drank her punch, I politicked, and avoided her cotillions as much I could. Still, I was included in the Coterie, that inner circle of lions and young lionesses around Mr. and Mrs. Edwards, who must have calculated some, since I was a lawyer and Legislator to be reckoned with. The social lions might have had their fancy cuffs, but their tongues failed them in front of a jury, whereas I could clown and be the jackanapes. I could move a jury of farmers by telling a barnyard tale. Lawyer Lincoln was soon sought after in the near and far counties of Illinois.
I was a bit startled when Mrs. Elizabeth called me into one of her husband’s closets on Quality Hill. She’d never spoken to me in private before. She poured coffee from a silver pot. We had little cream cakes. This was serious business. I was wondering when she would skin me alive.
“Lincoln,” she said with a lilt in her voice, “you’re not getting any younger, you know.” And I figured I was in mortal danger, or she wouldn’t have squandered all that music on me.
“You must be forty!”
I wasn’t a day older than thirty, but I wouldn’t contradict Mrs. Elizabeth when she was in one of her moods. She must have caught the deep blush on my leather face. I’d never had a pretty lady, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with one.
“It’s time you were married,” she said. “You won’t get far without a good wife.”
“I’m not sure I’m the marrying kind.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “Mr. Edwards and I have picked a bride for you.”
I had to keep my mouth from twitching. That’s how mortified I was. But I wouldn’t turn my back on Mrs. Elizabeth and climb down Quality Hill.
“Dear Lincoln,” she said, “I do believe our Miss Angelina Snell is a perfect matrimonial fit for you.”
Angelina Snell was one of the family’s poor Lexington relations. And Mrs. Elizabeth had appropriated her as a glorified servant and secretary. Miss Angelina took part in the cotillions, but then she disappeared and had to supervise the other servants in the back rooms of the mansion. She was a walleyed maiden of twenty-nine or so and had the flattest chest in Illinois. I wouldn’t have married her if Mrs. Elizabeth had given me all the gold her husband had and offered me my own mansion on Quality Hill.
“I appreciate your concern, ma’am, but I reckon I’ll remain a bachelor for the time being.”
I didn’t realize the cunning behind that proposal until another few months passed. Mrs. Elizabeth’s own sister, Mary Todd, arrived from Lexington to stay with her and Ninian. Miss Todd I discovered was escaping her stepmother, who had her own brood of children now—nine or ten, I believe—and didn’t need such a constant reminder of her husband’s first marriage. Elizabeth had also fled the same household and married Ninian when she was sixteen. And Mary Todd, already twenty-one, was considered just about ripe for a Kentucky gal. She wasn’t walleyed, like Miss Angelina, nor was she a mouse. She had a whopping temper and liked to talk politics. I saw her throw a book at one of the maids and cuss a man out for uttering an unkind remark about her hero, Henry Clay. She flirted with every young lion, and with some of the older ones. She had six or seven marriage proposals a month after she arrived in Springfield, some folks said. All these swains began to tire her, and soon she had an altogether different crop. She tired of them, too. She wasn’t very tall—she stood a touch under five feet—and had handsome shoulders, light brown hair, and blue eyes that seemed to have an oceanic pull.
I wouldn’t have called her beautiful; she had a tiny, turned-up nose, a broad forehead, and wide jaws, but she liked to wear gowns with a low neckline that revealed the startling curve of her bodice. And her intelligence was as fierce as any lion on the Hill, though she had all the wiles and flirtatious charm of a Lexington lioness.
Now it was perfectly clear why Mrs. Elizabeth was so eager to capture a bride for me. A matchmaker of her stripe couldn’t afford a major catastrophe—a Todd like Miss Mary, who had studied French at the finest schools and had had her own body servant, had to be kept away from a rough boy who had never outgrown the forest and a dirt floor.
It’s diabolical how Elizabeth’s own disregard dragged me toward her sister—Little Miss Todd. I kept dreaming of what lay under all that fine silk, and couldn’t get her fat little tail out of my mind, even while I was addressing a jury. I ought to have been locked up, an officer of the court who was so damn lascivious. I’d imagine her dancing without a stitch, and pull on my root half the night. Still, I was the shiest of suitors, and if Mrs. Elizabeth hadn’t been so spiteful with her tricks, I might have waited a while before I approached Mary Todd. But at the very first cotillion, I edged in front of all her other suitors, and said, “Miss Todd, I want to dance with you in the worst way.”
She didn’t decline my invitation. She scrutinized me with her own fierce eyes that shimmered a lot and were flecked with gold. I was the tall one—that giant out of New Salem—and she was the Lexington mite. Had to stoop and stoop again to hold on to Mary. And with her little pink hands caught in the cage of my white gloves, we whirled about the polished floor to the rhythm of a Viennese waltz, while I prayed that my prick wouldn’t brush against her gown. I couldn’t help myself and my own horse’s pole inside my pantaloons. Mary wasn’t embarrassed none. She was wearing velvet ballroom slippers that seemed to glide along. And I had to knock about in my boots, careful not to lunge too far and become the spectacle of Quality Hill. Mrs. Elizabeth would have harrumphed like hell if I had landed on my ass. But I went right to the end of that Viennese, while Mary put one of her little hands behind my ear and caressed the flap with a tenderness that touched me to the quick and ate into my own raw hide. Here I had been dreaming of cocks and hair pie, drowning in my own jelly, when she showed me a kindness I didn’t deserve. I was enraptured by that little Lexington lady, caught in the spell of her Parisian perfume, as I climbed down Quality Hill.
WE WERE NEVER ALONE. There were horse rides into the woods, garden parties, cotillions, lectures at the Second Presbyterian Church, but I couldn’t fondle he
r, even hold her hand. There was always Mrs. Elizabeth looking down my shirt, and sending Mary off on some picnic with one of her other beaux. Even if our lovemaking was mostly chatter, we still discovered things in common, like Henry Clay. Mary had known him ever since she was a child, had visited his manor house in Lexington, had even gone for rides on the great man’s pony.
She called him Uncle Henry, and I felt a kind of ravenous rage. I envied nothing but the time she’d spent with Clay of Kentucky.
“Why, Mr. Lincoln,” she said in that lovely voice of Lexington’s gentle class, “I might as well have been his niece—I was at Ashland all the time.”
And once, Mary said with just a little bit of swagger, she had happened upon the Senator during a dinner party, and she was invited to join the table. “If I’m ever elected President,” he said, “I’ll be damned if Miss Mary Todd isn’t my first guest.”
She answered him like some actress in a minstrel show. “Senator, I would adore living at the White House.” And she couldn’t have been more than thirteen at the time.
She’d turn quiet while twisting a flower into her hair—she liked to decorate herself with flowers. And then she’d grow volatile, as if a wild wind had visited her. “Mr. Lincoln, don’t you hate your stepmama!”
I didn’t hate Sarah Bush Johnston, who was a genuine mother to me after Ma died. Pa had brought her to our cabin with her quilts, her spinning wheel, and her own three children. But she never once favored them. And she shielded me from Pa and his blind wrath. Sometimes I’d read to her at night—about Sinbad the Sailor or one of Æsop’s dishonest foxes. She loved tales of villainy.
Mary Todd was also fond of villains. She couldn’t have survived without Shakespeare’s villains, she said. Richard III had comforted her while she boarded with her Pa and his new family.
“Lord alive, what I wouldn’t have given to lock them in a tower!”
I Am Abraham Page 9