Abraham Lincoln

by Thomas Keneally

  Congressman Stuart was frequently absent from the law office on national affairs, so that Lincoln was able to get practical experience and make a reasonable living—much of it out of trespass, nonpayment, slander, divorce, and property matters. His earnings were generally about eight hundred dollars per year, and, having earlier spent his savings as a legislator in Vandalia on two town lots in Springfield, he was now able to buy two more, and continued to reduce his debt.

  The Sangamon County Circuit Court sat in Springfield only two weeks of the year, and so Lincoln and even Stuart himself were forced out on the road to follow the judges of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, and to take cases in the rustic courts on the circuit’s sittings. Between the society of other young men at the back of Speed’s store, in the Young Men’s Lyceum, and elsewhere, and the company of other lawyers on circuit, Lincoln all at once had a rich social life and once more attracted loyal friends. It was the men he met as a lawyer on circuit who would one day help guarantee his ascent to the fabulously remote presidency. One of these was his future partner Stephen T. Logan. Another, Judge David Davis, claimed that Lincoln was at his happiest on the circuit, in the company of other lawyers, arguing with “sledgehammer logic” and pursuing his economical, logical arguments. He showed an extraordinary capacity for memory, for people’s names, for the history of places, for dates.

  Lincoln also had some of the talents that have been associated with less seemly areas of American law. Involved in a case on behalf of a widow and her son against another lawyer who had, in Lincoln’s view, improperly acquired title to the family’s land, Lincoln helped his client along by publishing a series of letters on the matter, attacking the other attorney and signing himself “Sampson’s Ghost.” Lincoln brought a youthful excess to these supposedly anonymous letters. The tactics were not uncommon in the legal or political profession—they had been used against Lincoln himself—but in this case the letters achieved nothing. When the other lawyer died, the matter was still unresolved, and the land passed to his heirs.

  Despite Abraham’s growing reputation, one Springfield lawyer declared, “In the light of subsequent events it sounds queer enough, but the fact is we considered ourselves a ‘tony’ crowd, and that Lincoln, although an extremely clever and well-liked fellow, was hardly up to our standard of gentility.” And one of the motives Lincoln had offered Mary Owens not to marry him was, “[T]here is a great deal [of ] flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without sharing in it.”

  A number of young women found Lincoln clumsy. One said, “L. could not hold a lengthy Conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently Educated & intelligent in the female line to do so.” Calling on a girl named Anna Rodney, he knocked on her door, and outraged the member of the family who opened it by asking, “Is Miss Rodney handy?” This was considered a déclassé inquiry.

  In 1837 there was a run on American banks, caused by a collapse of British markets. The Jacksonian Democrats blamed it on the very nature of banks, and the way the American economy was following the pernicious example of the European market system. A collapse certainly seemed to threaten Lincoln’s “American System” ideology. The economic anxieties of the year heightened tensions between pro- and antiabolitionists. North Carolina and Georgia offered a reward of five thousand dollars for the head of the famous Massachusetts abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. There were race riots in a number of Northern cities, and in Illinois an abolitionist editor, the Reverend Elijah Lovejoy, who would become in time a hearty supporter of Lincoln, was attacked by a mob who shot him and dumped his printing press in the Mississippi. Lincoln registered his outrage in a speech before the Young Men’s Lyceum. He saw the danger of great internal fury arising from the issue. He feared that the pressures would cause people to lose their attachment to government, and if that happened, said Abraham prophetically, “men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric, which for the last half century has been the fondest hope for the lovers of freedom throughout the world.”

  In that spirit Lincoln ran again for the state legislature in 1838, and his former mentor Stuart ran yet again for Congress, his opponent being the five-foot-four, thunderously eloquent and powerful Stephen Douglas, the Little Giant. Douglas had worked to transform the Democratic Party in the northwest into a modern political machine that got out the vote and knew how to use patronage. He had by now served in the statehouse and been registrar of the Springfield land office. Four years younger than Lincoln, he was considered by his party a fit candidate for Congress.

  But Lincoln was reelected for Sangamon County, and Stuart won the savage fight, which frequently came to blows, with Douglas.

  In the economic crisis the Whigs of Springfield stuck to the scheme of internal improvements, even though the ten million dollars raised to pay for them was generating a crippling interest bill. As leader of the Whigs, Lincoln suggested that the Federal government sell all the public land in Illinois to the government of Illinois for a cost of twenty-five cents per acre. The state government would then resell it at a minimum of $1.25, and thus obliterate its debts. The plan got nowhere, however, and by 1839 the governor called a special session of the assembly to deal with the crisis.

  The leading wealthy Whigs of Springfield were called the Junto. John T. Stuart was certainly a member, and so was his cousin from Kentucky, Ninian Edwards, and his wife, Elizabeth. Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards lived on a hill in one of Springfield’s grandest homes, and under his friend Stuart’s aegis, Lincoln began attending social events there. Ninian found his fellow Whig a “mighty rough man,” but tolerated him for his political usefulness. It was at the Edwardses’ in late 1839 that Lincoln met Elizabeth Edwards’s younger sister, a small, pert, intense, lively young woman named Mary Todd, of whom her brother-in-law said, “Mary could make a bishop forget his prayers.” Mary certainly gave Abraham pause.

  Mary was twenty-one, and her father was a Kentucky grandee, Robert Todd, plantation owner and slaveholder. Her mother had died in childbirth when Mary was seven, and Mary Todd would always have an orphan’s questing edginess and insecurity. Things were made worse when her father remarried—to a woman Mary found cold and judgmental—and so in the summer of 1839 she had been delighted to move to Springfield, Illinois, taking up permanent abode in the Edwards household. She had been well educated, could speak French, and seems to have attracted a number of interested males. “Speed’s grey suit, Harrison’s blues, Lincoln’s Lincoln green have gone to dust,” she wrote to a friend, indicating how she played men off against one another. The Little Giant, the Democrat, Stephen Douglas, also very nearly proposed to Mary Todd, though Mary would say later that she liked him merely “well enough,” and would rhapsodize about Lincoln’s superiority to Douglas—that intellectually he towered over Douglas “just as he does physically.” A widower, lawyer, and state legislator named Edwin Webb was a suitor, too.

  In the Springfield courthouse on a cold day in November 1839, Mary Todd attended an event at which both Lincoln and Douglas were to speak “on the Politics of the Time and the Condition of the Country.” Lincoln of course spoke of the validity of the state bank, which had recently had such a shake, and on methods to fund ongoing improvements. He was disappointed with his performance, and Stephen Douglas, he believed, had outshone him politically and perhaps as a suitor. But Elizabeth Edwards began to notice that her sister particularly liked Lincoln. “I have happened in a room where they were sitting often enough, and Mary led the conversation.”

  There was a political excitement to their odd courtship. The Whig candidate for the presidency in 1840 was William Henry Harrison, who had been chosen over the founding genius of the Whigs, Henry Clay. The Democratic candidate was the incumbent president, Martin Van Buren. Lincoln stumped the county and even went to Missouri to speak for Harrison, and he also saw fashionable young Mary and her best friend, Mercy Levering, crowding into the offices of the
Sangamo Journal to get the latest news of the campaign and to pick up on the furious political atmosphere. Lincoln, of course, campaigned for himself for the state legislature while campaigning for the Whig presidential candidate, and on one occasion tied Stephen A. Douglas in knots over Van Buren’s attitude toward Negro suffrage, to the point that the Little Giant snatched the evidence out of Lincoln’s hand and hurled it into the crowd.

  One Democrat provoked him by painting him as a representative of the aristocracy of the Whigs. Lincoln said that while his accuser was riding in a fine carriage, wearing his kid gloves, he himself “was a poor boy hired on a flatboat at $8 a month, and had only one pair of breeches . . . if you know the nature of buckskin when wet and dried by the sun, they would shrink and mine kept shrinking until they left for several inches my legs bare between my Socks and the lower part of my breeches. . . . If you call this aristocracy, I plead guilty to the charge.”

  Mary Todd and Abraham both hesitated at the idea of marriage. He was now making between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars a year, with an additional one hundred to three hundred as a legislator. But if he lost clients, or lost the election, his income could suddenly fall. The fear of having caught syphilis from a prostitute and passing it on to a respectable wife, and fathering defective children, was still strong, if unfounded in his case. This was at the time not an unjustifiable fear, since it is claimed that more than 50 percent of nineteenth-century men contracted a form of venereal disease at one stage or another of their sexual history.

  For her part Mary Todd realized that she would sacrifice many civil and legal rights when she married, and she had been so relishing her freedom in her sister’s household that she wondered if she should surrender it. Elizabeth warned her too that “she and Mr. Lincoln were not suitable . . . they had no feelings alike.” Mary Todd was well polished, whereas he still shocked polite Springfield society by wearing rough Conestoga boots into parlors, and on one occasion when entering a party cried, “Oh boys, how clean these girls look!”

  According to Speed, too, Lincoln wasn’t happy with his engagement, “not entirely satisfied that his heart was going with his hand.” Some people say that Lincoln “fell desperately in love” with another Edwards relative, Matilda Edwards. There is evidence that he might have confessed this love to Mary and asked for and received her release. Friends now saw that his conscience troubled him dreadfully, and Speed felt bound to remove all razors from his room, along with knives and other sharp objects. By the end of January 1841, Lincoln confessed himself “the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed in the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” One friend described Lincoln as “having two catfits and a Duck fit.” Lincoln was also distracted at the time because his old friend Speed had sold his store and was about to move back to Kentucky, while Stuart, reelected to Congress, had suggested an end to his law partnership with Lincoln.

  Mary was tormented herself but not so fundamentally as Lincoln. Her suitors still fluttered around her. She was not socially incapacitated, and was now relieved of any premarriage anxieties. She found the summer slow and dreary, however, since many of her friends had left town. In letters to them she maintained a generous attitude to Lincoln, and hoped he would get over his melancholia. It says something about her that she was convinced of Lincoln’s potential, even as many of her associates shook their heads over his apparently bumpkin qualities.

  In the spring he signed a new partnership, with Stephen Logan, a small man with wiry red hair and an alto voice, who, like Lincoln, put little emphasis on the way he dressed. Logan was also a compulsive whittler, and would sometimes, if not provided quickly with wood, start in on people’s furniture. The partnership was a bright point in a dismal spring, during which Lincoln’s service as a state assemblyman was drawing to an end. The Whigs did not nominate him for reelection, nor did he particularly want them to. The public works program, for which he had stood all these years, had been much reduced in scope, the state had defaulted on its debts, and the state bank of Illinois, supposed engine of the state’s wealth, had been dissolved.

  Having sold up and gone back to Kentucky, Speed insisted that Lincoln visit the family’s plantation in Kentucky that summer. It was Lincoln’s first experience of a plantation house, of the opulence based upon the peculiar institution of slavery. In his languid recuperation from the “hypo,” he was tended by the Speeds’ slaves. On the way back up the Ohio with Speed on a steamboat, Lincoln encountered a coffle, a chained line of twelve slaves, “like so many fish upon a trot-line.” These men had been taken from their families in Kentucky, Lincoln had learned on inquiry, and were being shipped for sale elsewhere. Lincoln would later claim that the memory of this line of flesh-as-property “was a continual torment to me.”

  Down in Kentucky, Joshua Speed married, and Lincoln began to interrogate him on how marriage suited him. The questions Lincoln asked in letters were curiously and obsessively framed: “Are you now, in feeling as well as in judgement, glad you are married as you are?” Speed shared these questions with his young wife, who found them impudent. But they serve as an index to Lincoln’s neurotic bewilderment.

  At last, in 1842, a mutual friend brought Abraham and Mary together again, asking them to be, at least, friends to each other. Dr. Anselm Henry, the notable Springfield physician to whom Lincoln had taken the problem of his “hypo” the year before, also acted as go-between. At some stage Lincoln asked Mary whether she believed he had incurred any obligation to marry her, and Mary—or Molly, as he called her—did not miss the opportunity to let him know she believed he had.

  5

  ALL AT ONCE it was another election year, and Lincoln campaigned for the Whigs. As part of his service, he took up the issue of a colorful little Irishman named James Shields, Democratic auditor for Illinois, who was trying to undermine further the tottering state bank. To the Irish in America, Shields was a national hero and a defiant refugee from British oppression. Shields announced that the state would no longer accept paper currency as payment for debts, and only gold and silver coin would be accepted for tax payments. Lincoln rightly considered that these decisions would reduce the economy of Illinois to a primitive condition, and so he began to plant in the Sangamo Journal a series of letters supposedly written by a naive widow named Rebecca, and designed to satirize Shields.

  Out of both political passion and passion for Lincoln, Mary and a friend took over the writing of the series. In their joint amusement at Shield’s embarrassment, Abraham and Mary Todd grew closer. Mary managed to compose a Rebecca letter that particularly stung Shields. When Shields challenged whoever the writer of the Rebecca letters was, Lincoln accepted responsibility for all of them, and Shields proposed a duel. One morning that autumn the two contestants and their supporters slipped over the river into Missouri, where dueling was still legal. Perhaps satirically, Lincoln had proposed broadswords as the weapons, but it seems that their seconds and friends talked both of them out of the potentially bloody fight anyhow. Lincoln was afterward embarrassed by the incident, but Mary, from dueling Kentucky, was impressed at the risk he had taken for her.

  During that year’s electoral struggle, Lincoln, to whom politics was still life’s chief sport, gave Mary a curious present—a list of election returns in the last three legislative races! She took it in the spirit in which it was offered, and wrapped it in a pink ribbon. Six weeks after the contest with Shields, on a day of freezing rain, Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln were married in the parlor of the Edwards home. Mary was now twenty-three years old, a small but fetching firebrand. Many friends, nonetheless, doubted the sincerity of this wedding. John Todd Stuart, Mary’s cousin, feared that “the marriage of Lincoln to Miss Todd was a policy match all round,” giving Lincoln an entrée into the centers of Whig power. Lincoln’s best man recalled that he “looked and acted as if he was going to a slaughter.” Indeed, the lawyer Billy Herndon claimed that “Lincoln self-sacrificed hims
elf rather than be charged with dishonor.” Interestingly, like other poor boys marrying above themselves, he invited no one from his family to attend the event.

  By now the bridegroom had his eye on representing the Seventh District in Congress. The bride never wavered from a determined belief in her husband’s talent and a profound though jealous respect for him. And, although they began their marriage in rented rooms in the Globe Tavern, Lincoln’s new partnership with Logan did well, helped along by the numbers of bankruptcies that needed to be processed. Joshua Speed bought up many foreclosed houses and lots, which were processed through Lincoln’s practice.

  After their first winter of married life, Lincoln went back on the road, traveling around the circuit with other lawyers, accepting cases as they went. Mary was bored—having to eat at a communal table in a boardinghouse was a comedown for her. By then it was apparent that she was pregnant as well, and so she suffered a large part of the malaise of pregnancy with Lincoln away in his preferred environment, chatting in rural inns with fellow Whig lawyers about the tragedy that, after they had worked so hard to get President Harrison elected, he had gone and died, leaving his Democratic vice president, John Tyler, in the seat of power, where he pursued all the old cramped, anti-tariff, antibank, and pro-Southern policies Lincoln disliked.