Abraham Lincoln

by Thomas Keneally

  Among the friends Abe made with whom he renewed contact on his return to New Salem was the daughter of the Rutledges of Rutledge’s Tavern, Ann. Lincoln had been at various times a boarder at the Tavern. Ann was young—nineteen when Lincoln first met her—well educated by the standards of New Salem, an appealing young woman. There was an understanding between her and a young man from back East, who suddenly confessed that he must travel to attend to his late father’s business and said he would ultimately return to New Salem to marry her. Billy Herndon would later claim that Ann Rutledge was the only woman Lincoln ever really loved, and the longer Ann Rutledge’s fiancé remained away from New Salem, the higher Abraham Lincoln’s hopes were said to rise. Some friends would later claim that Ann was merely a friend, but legend has her as his truest love.

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  IN 1832 ABRAHAM formed a partnership with William F. Berry, a preacher’s son, to buy Offut’s store. Soon after, another New Salem store became available, and Lincoln and Berry took it over too—there was some talk that its owner had been driven out by the Clary Grove Boys. The entire purchase was made possible through the acceptance of promissory notes, by which Lincoln and Berry assumed a considerable debt payable to sundry genial New Salemites who believed in them. Billy Herndon asserted that no more unfortunate partner than Berry could have been found. “For while Lincoln was at one end of the store dispensing political information, Berry at the other was disposing of the firm’s liquors. . . . Lincoln’s application to Shakespeare and Burns was only equaled by Berry’s attention to Spiggott and Barrel.” The business struggled. By the following spring, two brothers purchased the store from Lincoln and Berry, but before their notes fell due, they in turn had gone broke and fled without paying a cent. Lincoln could have sought refuge in bankruptcy. But there was a rectitude in him, a seriousness about capital, that compelled him to assume and pay off, over the better part of the next few decades, the entire debt. Apart from the impact on his honor, a failure to do so would have destroyed his only political base, though it was an increasingly dwindling one, at New Salem.

  In 1833, probably through the good offices of influential friends, the Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, was persuaded to appoint Lincoln postmaster at New Salem. The wages were thirty dollars per annum, not enough to make a dent in his financial burden, which with typical irony he named the “national debt.” The post office, however, did not occupy him continuously, despite the fact that his frontier scrupulousness had him pursuing for miles a customer who had overpaid for postage, and taking time-consuming pains to hunt down the addressees of letters. The rest of the time he cut rails, worked at the mill or sawmill, and helped out with harvests and in New Salem’s surviving stores.

  The surveyor of Sangamon also offered to depute to Lincoln any surveying work within his part of the county, and so Abraham procured a compass and chain, studied surveying books “a little,” and went at it. In this task, which took him to many parts of the county, his amiability impressed the citizenry. The people of Coles County became used to the sight of the gangling postmaster-surveyor hauling his instruments across a complicated and heavily wooded landscape, with letters stuck into his hatband for delivery to farms along the way.

  Some notes he had signed to avoid bankruptcy became due for payment in 1834. Creditors sued, and the sheriff took possession of his horse, bridle, and surveying instruments. But a friend, a farmer named Jimmy Short, bought them at auction and returned them to him. Lincoln’s partner died soon after—Herndon says because of the ruin alcoholism had wrought on his constitution. Since the “national debt” included Berry’s share, it reached a total of eleven hundred dollars. It is a credit to people’s belief in him that from then on there were few further prosecutions over the debt—most waited for Lincoln to pay it off because they believed he would, and in full. This assumption of his honesty was reflected in the voting for the legislature in 1834. He depended purely on the range of voters he had gotten to know through his service in the Black Hawk War, and through his work as postmaster and surveyor. In an era of multiple representation for each county, Lincoln came in a close second in a field of thirteen candidates, and so found himself a state assemblyman, soon to go off to represent Henry Clay’s Whigs in the state capital at Vandalia. Among the other successful candidates was his lawyer friend John Todd Stuart, whom Lincoln had outpolled but who might, even at the risk of his own chances, have directed some votes that would have gone to him to the talented Abraham. Stuart believed in Lincoln as a man with political gifts, although one senior man in the party asked on first sighting Lincoln, “Can’t the party raise any better material than that?”

  In icy weather, with eight fellow politicians—six representatives and two senators—Lincoln caught the stagecoach to Vandalia. Assemblyman Lincoln was twenty-five years old, six feet four inches tall in his stockings, stoop-shouldered, long-legged, large-footed. One witness said that he had longer arms than any human he’d ever seen, “and letting his arms fall down his Sides, the points of his fingers would touch a point lower on his legs by nearly three inches than was usual with other persons.” The same witness described how when some “mirth-inspiring Story” came to his mind, his countenance would light up, “several wrinkles would diverge from the inner corner of his eyes, and extending down and diagonally across his nose, his eyes would Sparkle, all terminating in an unrestrained Laugh in which everyone present, willing or unwilling, were compelled to take part.” Yet his fellow travelers noticed that he did not stoke his powers of narration with liquor. Whiskey, he said, left him “flabby and undone.” For the journey to the state capital, Lincoln wore “a very respectable looking suit of jeans,” not the highest level of fashion but in accordance with the spirit of Henry Clay’s party—to wear jean cloth was a statement of support for American manufacturers.

  Vandalia was a town of eight hundred souls around a muddy square with an already decrepit brick statehouse. It stood in a prairie landscape through which covered wagons regularly passed. For accommodation, legislators were crammed into taverns and boardinghouses, cheek by jowl, and got to know each other very well. Here, for the first term, Lincoln shared a room across from the capitol with his mentor, Stuart. In Vandalia for the first time he sighted a newly arrived Democrat from Vermont, a heavy-drinking cock sparrow of a man, short and dumpy, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln and Douglas would be locked together in discourse over slavery and other matters for the better part of three decades. But Douglas, already a lawyer, would for most of that time far outstrip his rival in repute and standing.

  So it became increasingly clear to the eloquent bumpkin from New Salem that to become a lawyer was to enter a doorway to power. Lincoln had been studying Blackstone’s Commentaries and other legal texts since the Black Hawk War, and Vandalia reinforced his determination to pursue that path.

  Although there were party structures in the politics of Illinois, they were not as fixed as in modern times, and Stuart later said that he was not above trading off Lincoln’s vote on local matters. Stuart told the story of a case in which this happened— a legislator who roomed across the hall from him and Lincoln was promoting a railroad to be built on the credit of the state of Illinois. “Lincoln and I made a trade with Breeze [the legislator in question] to the effect that we would help pass his railroad bill if he would help us secure the appointment of the Canal Commissioners by the Governor.” Thus Stuart was able to get three Whigs—men who believed in public improvements—appointed as commissioners.

  In his first session Lincoln was industrious, serving on twelve special committees and as a secretary to the leading Whigs, including Stuart. Stuart used Lincoln as a handy Whig orator on the chamber floor, and persuaded him to take on the job of being legislative correspondent for the Sangamo Journal, writing hundreds of unsigned anti-Democratic editorials. In the spirit of Henry Clay he supported a bill for a state-chartered bank in Springfield, and the Illinois and Michigan Canal. He introduced an internal improvements bill of his own, for
a toll bridge across Salt Creek in Sangamon County, but he could not get it to its first reading.

  The session earned him a welcome $258, and after returning along the freezing road to New Salem, he resumed his law studies. He still did local surveying jobs, and performed the tasks of postmaster, but there were indications that he was overworking himself.

  When Lincoln returned to Vandalia in December for the next session, Stuart was running for the U.S. Congress, which left some room for Lincoln to expand in importance as a Whig leader. He was the chief spokesman for the interests of Sangamon County, for the dream that it would be connected by river and other transportation improvements to the wider world. It was interesting that he had no assets of his own to protect—his support for the “American System” was purely ideological. Never did such an impoverished man speak so well for the interests of American capital. His notable initiative was the introduction of a bill for a Beardstown and Sangamon canal company. His activism during this session would help assuage the extreme melancholy produced by the death of Ann Rutledge.

  As her brother later told Billy Herndon, Ann consented in the end to renounce the absentee suitor and to take Abe’s hand, with the one proviso that he give her time to write to her betrothed in the East. It was also arranged that she would give Lincoln time to build his fortune before marrying him. But in the high summer of 1835, with Abe’s fortune not yet achieved, and no reply from her former suitor, she died of an unspecified fever—probably typhoid brought on by the flooding and pollution of the water supply.

  After the death, said a witness, Abraham seemed quite changed, depressed and given to solitude. “But various opinions obtained as to the cause of his change, some thought it was an increased application to his Law studies, others that it was deep anguish of Soul (as he was all soul) over the Loss of Miss R.”

  Whether he loved her or not, he did mourn her death profoundly—the sudden obliteration of this fine young woman. A number of witnesses talk about his depression and melancholy becoming more and more apparent. He called his recurrent and severe melancholia the “hypo”; it would be his abiding companion.

  But he was involved with another woman as well—Mary Owens, a Kentucky woman whom he had earlier met and corresponded with, and whose New Salem aunt had now brought her up to Sangamon County with the clear intention of clinching a betrothal. Lincoln was shocked to see how Mary had aged, and how her skin had coarsened; yet he felt honor bound to court her, since he had earlier shown enthusiasm. He did harbor at the time sincere doubts about his capacity to support a wife or indeed to be a decent husband, and so out of both self-interest and self-doubt he dithered. Mary remained a hopeful friend and soul mate.

  Lincoln announced his candidacy for reelection in 1836 with another apparently casual letter in the Sangamo Journal. “Whether elected or not, I go for distributing the proceeds of the sales of the public lands to the several states. . . .” If he was alive on the first Monday in November, he said, he would vote for the Whig candidate for the presidency, Hugh L. White. One of Lincoln’s fellow Whig candidates in this campaign was his future brother-in-law, Ninian W. Edwards, an elegant Kentuckian who knew he was socially Abraham’s superior. The Whig Party was far more a party of the well-educated gentry and bourgeois townfolk than of such unfashionable frontier yokels-on-the-rise as Abe Lincoln.

  The campaign was ferocious. Lincoln once drew a pistol on a Democrat opponent during a debate in Springfield, but at another meeting he stopped a brawl between Democrats and Whigs (including Edwards). In fact, a number of witnesses remarked on his ability as a pacifier. He spoke, said one witness, in a “tenor intonation of voice that ultimately settled down into that clear, shrill, monotone Style of Speaking, that enabled his audience, however large, to hear distinctly the lowest Sound in his voice.”

  When Lincoln went to Vandalia this time, he was a prominent member of the Long Nine, nine lanky and mainly young legislators from the Sangamon area. Abe was the longest of the Long Nine, and Stuart’s departure left him “the acknowledged leader of the Whigs in the House. Stuart had gone out and left him a clear field.” The Long Nine had resolved among themselves to trade their votes in such a way as to ensure that the state capital should be moved to Springfield, the chief city of Sangamon County. Abe also supported what would prove in time to be a disastrous series of measures for the building of roads, canals, and railroads in Illinois, to be financed by state bonds to the value of ten million dollars. A man who was still struggling to repay a debt of eleven hundred dollars nonetheless supported with passion what was, for its day, a massive scheme.

  Even as a notable speaker on the floor, Abe still carried the marks of his origins. “He made a good many speeches in the Legislature,” noted one witness, “mostly on local subjects. A close observer, however, could not fail to see that the tall six footer, with his homely logic, clothed in the language of the humbler classes, had the stuff in him to make a man of mark.”

  Significantly Lincoln and another Sangamon County colleague, Dan Stone, had voted in January 1837 against a resolution that attacked abolition societies “and the doctrines promulgated by them.” They made a statement, however, designed to keep the antiabolitionists of their district happy, that their vote against the earlier measure was based on a difference over wording. “They [Stone and Lincoln] believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.” There was no doubt that Lincoln believed both propositions on slavery: that it was morally offensive yet constitutionally guaranteed. Because the abolitionists would not face that fact, it remained important to him politically to show that he had no truck with abolitionists.

  The Long Nine went home again in late winter, proclaiming to their constituency the glorious fact that henceforth, through their good efforts, Springfield would be the state capital. Lincoln traveled home with some other legislators on horseback, and, stopping overnight in a village, they slept on the floor of a private house. One of his companions noticed that Lincoln was depressed. When his friend asked about it, Abe said that all the rest of them had something to look forward to. “But it isn’t so with me. I am going home . . . without a thing in the world. I have drawn all my pay I got at Vandalia and have spent it all. I am in debt. . . . I don’t know what to do.”

  Lincoln had had the same feelings in Vandalia, where things “I cannot account for, have conspired and gotten my spirit so low, that I feel I would rather be any place in the world than here.” His depression might have been a failure of self-confidence, for he did have a future now. John T. Stuart, having just lost the partner in his practice, had suggested Lincoln come up to Springfield and join his law practice as a junior partner. Lincoln, having applied for and received a law license to practice in Sangamon County, was formally enrolled and permitted to charge fees on March 1, 1837. But since he had to show little more than a basic grasp of the law to get his license, he felt dubious about his capacity to succeed and was frightened by the prospect of Springfield.

  So here is Lincoln in the spring of 1837: tortured in equal and abundant measure by self-doubt and ambition, ill-clothed, rough-mannered, hard up, possessed of his peculiarly American powers of articulation and charm, burdened by what now would be considered clinical depression, plagued by exultant vision, yearning for and terrified by women, raucous in joke telling, gifted in speech, abstinent in drink, profligate in dreams. No man ever entered Springfield, a town that would become his shrine, as tentative, odd-seeming, and daunted as Abraham Lincoln.

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  THE NEW STATE CAPITAL, when Lincoln arrived, was a town of two thousand people, possessing many fine homes and business enterprises, owned generally by immigrants from Kentucky, often the children of slave-owning families. It had a debating and thespian society, and attracted visits by many leading political figures on their sweeps through the countryside. At first Lincoln felt uncomfortably excluded from all this ur
ban activity, and wrote in a letter to the Kentuckian Mary Owens, “I am quite as lonesome here as I ever was anywhere in my life.”

  Lincoln’s “hypo,” brought out by the muddy streets of Springfield as by New Salem and Vandalia, and likely to incapacitate him at any time, has been hard for psychiatrists to diagnose. One famous study speaks of his mother fixation and his fear of the father, of narcissistic tendencies (not extending, of course, to his physical appearance) and a depressive temperament. Fortunately, in this case, the condition would be alleviated (though never cured) by his making friends in town, beginning to make real money, and maneuvering Mary Owens, after she visited him for a time in Springfield, into deciding that she could not trust his contradictory impulses toward marriage.

  His best friend in Springfield was Joshua F. Speed, a young man of a Kentucky slaveholding family who owned what he described as “a large country store . . . everything that the country needed.” Into Speed’s store came the gangling Lincoln, and he priced bed furnishings. Finding that they would cost seventeen dollars, he confessed that he did not think he would earn enough to repay Speed (together with his other debts) in a reasonable time. Speed, admitting that “I never saw so gloomy, and melancholy a face,” offered Lincoln accommodation in his own double bed above the store. In the nineteenth century it was not uncommon for men to share the same bed, even—in some boardinghouses—with males they did not know. Lincoln also stayed for a time with one William Butler and his wife. Fortunately, though so tall, he had a waiflike quality, and attracted many kindhearted friends, whom he always afterward honored and mentioned.

  His hulking bedfellow, Speed, was quite a womanizer, “and kept a pretty woman in the city.” One day Lincoln asked Speed, “Do you know where I can get some?” According to Speed, he sent Lincoln with a note to this woman, who appears to have been something of a prostitute. Lincoln and the girl stripped and were in bed before Lincoln remembered to ask about the price. The girl told him five dollars. Lincoln declared he could afford to pay her only three dollars, and the girl said she would trust him for the rest, but Lincoln declared he had other debts to meet, and rose and clothed himself again. As he left, according to Speed’s secondhand telling of the encounter, the girl said, “You are the most conscientious man I ever saw.” Speed would say generally that Lincoln’s characteristic mood was one of sadness, but his face could suddenly brighten, and he would become radiant and glowing.