Mary Todd came to live with the Edwardses in June of 1839. She was a striking young woman at twenty-one years of age (and thus nine years younger than Lincoln) and the scion of another distinguished and slave-owning Kentucky family. Her earliest photograph from seven years later shows an attractive woman gazing expectantly at the camera. Full cheeks accentuate the softness of her face. Light brown hair pulled back from a high forehead frames wide eyes and a petite nose. The mouth is a straight line over a rounded chin. A long graceful neck plunges into folds of obscuring Victorian fabric. Short arms are propped uneasily, one against a chair, as she waits through the long exposure. Her long-fingered hands rest in her lap.
Mary Todd was never seen as beautiful, but one childhood friend accurately described her as “certainly very pretty with her clear blue eyes, lovely complexion,” a bright and intelligent face, and a “perfect arm and hand.” Ruth Painter Randall describes her as a “bright-faced, eager girl, impulsive, quick-tongued, warmhearted, affectionate, mercurial, interested in everything, joyous with life.” James Conkling said Mary was the “very creature of excitement you know and never enjoys herself more than when in society and surrounded by a company of merry friends.” Even Herndon, who despised Mary (and the feeling was mutual), described her as vivacious, infectiously enthusiastic, and delightfully witty. Ninian Edwards said she could “make a Bishop forget his prayers.”
It is imaginable, though not documented, that Lincoln met Mary the summer of 1837 when she briefly visited her sister in Springfield, but he certainly became acquainted with her after she arrived in 1839. Interestingly, it was Speed who was the intermediary. “Through the influence of Joshua F. Speed, who was a warm friend of the Edwardses,” Herndon wrote in his biography based on his personal knowledge of both Lincoln and Speed at the time, “Lincoln was led to call on Miss Todd.” Elizabeth Edwards emphasized that once Lincoln was “led to call” on Mary he quickly became enthralled: “He was charmed with Mary’s wit and fascinated with her quick sagacity—her will, her nature—and Culture—I have happened in the room where they were sitting often and often, and Mary led the conversation. Lincoln would listen and gaze on her as if drawn by some Superior power, irresistibly So.”
It seems that within months Lincoln and Mary began to talk about marriage. Elizabeth Edwards, who with Ninian encouraged the courtship, says Lincoln “Commenced Seeing Mary” in the winter of 1839–1840. What does that mean? What it was not was a declaration to the world of their engagement. There was definitely not an exchange of a ring, as there might be today, and no announcement that would have attracted a lot of attention. But to have “Commenced seeing” each other, in the words of Mary’s sister and confidante, means their relationship was in some state of courtship, and possibly an advanced one, by the early months of 1840. Whatever understanding existed between Lincoln and Mary, however, was relatively private, and few—other than Elizabeth Edwards and Joshua Speed—knew the details. Things actually progressed to the point that in the fall they planned their wedding for January 1, 1841.
Then, suddenly, in a move that has baffled historians ever since, Lincoln broke off his engagement with Mary sometime in late December 1840. Various explanations have been offered. One of the oldest is that Lincoln was intimidated by the social status of the Todds. Lincoln, however, was not one to be easily intimidated and, if anything, bore an air of natural superiority, even arrogance; he once quipped that God only needs one “d” but the Todds require two. Others have noted that Mary got fat in the summer and fall of 1840 and Lincoln turned from her in disgust. This blinkered interpretation rests on a misread of two contemporary letters. On September 21 James C. Conkling reports to his fiancée, Mercy Levering, that “if she [Mary] should visit Missouri [again] she will soon grow out of our recollection.” The other source is Mary’s letter in December, also to Mercy Levering, in which she mocks herself as a “ruddy pineknot” with an “exuberance of flesh.” But Conkling’s letter is hardly definitive and could be simply a joke about Mary, who was a dear friend and whom he knew Mercy loved. To read it as decisive proof that Mary had gotten so fat as to disgust Lincoln stretches its potential meaning. Furthermore, Mary’s letter actually indicates, if anything, that she has lost weight, if one reads the whole passage. She is indeed the “same ruddy pineknot,” she says, but now not with an “exuberance of flesh, as it once was my lot to contend with.” Lincoln had long since fallen in love with a short woman who tended to be plump and who worried about her weight. That would not seem to have changed in the fall of 1840.
Of much greater importance, many have argued, was the presence of Matilda Edwards. This beautiful eighteen-year-old cousin of Ninian Edwards’s left her father’s home in Alton to go visit Springfield in November, just in time for the swirl of parties associated with the meeting of the legislature in special session in early December and in regular session in January. The adorable Matilda, with long, golden locks, even pinned up as a respectable woman would have worn them, turned the heads of many men and she reputedly received twenty-two offers of marriage. Matilda has come to occupy the central role in the reinterpretation of the broken engagement in recent years. The argument is forceful in its simplicity: Lincoln fell in love with Matilda soon after her arrival in Springfield, and that precipitated the break with Mary. The evidence, however, is highly contradictory, though the main problem with the Matilda theory is the fact that she herself categorically refuted it. Elizabeth Edwards specifically says she asked Matilda after all the drama surrounding the broken engagement unfolded, “if Mr. Lincoln Ever Mentioned the subject of his love to her.” Matilda’s answer was, “On my word he never mentioned Such a Subject to me: he never even Stooped to pay me a Compliment.” Unfortunately, Matilda died at twenty-nine in 1850, so Herndon could not track her down for an interview, but her statement to Elizabeth, a reliable witness present through all the drama and in direct contact with all the players, is without qualification. Furthermore, Matilda continued to live with Mary for almost another full year, and the two were friends. Mary, who held grudges, would never have tolerated a friendship with the attractive young Matilda in the very house in which both lived if she had felt that Lincoln had broken his engagement over his infatuation with her.
Lincoln’s odd behavior in the late fall of 1840 actually only begins to make sense if we bring Joshua Speed into the narrative.
Lincoln was not fully conscious of any of the psychological subtext of the events surrounding his broken engagement with Mary Todd. Desire lurked in forbidden realms. He reached out to find love, but those efforts were thwarted by his much deeper connections to Joshua Speed. That tie had long given solace. He felt a safe haven in the confidence, trust, and security of friendship with Speed. It was a balm that banished the terrors of depression, and washed out the self-doubts he felt about love, sex, and intimacy. Lincoln wore his confusions on his sleeve. But Speed shared the same doubts. Despite how he portrayed himself to people like the Edwardses or Orville Browning or any number of others in town, Speed was candid with Herndon about his own engagement the summer after Lincoln’s broken one: “Strange to say something of the same feeling which I regarded as so foolish in him—took possession of me—and kept me very unhappy from the time of my ingagement until I was married—”
Joshua Speed had a reputation as a handsome young man who was something of a flirt. Lincoln in a letter alluded to his friend’s many courtships (“Ann Todd [Mary’s sister, later married to Charles M. Smith], and at least twenty others of whom you can think”). Mary Todd talked about his “ever changing heart.” Unlike his socially awkward and introspective friend, there was nothing “peculiar” (Elizabeth Edwards’s characterization of Lincoln) about Speed, whose even features and handsome face, modesty, intelligence, and solid business sense drew people to him. Speed, raised in luxury on a Southern plantation and having enjoyed the benefits of some formal boarding-school education, was at ease in social situations, able to mingle, make small talk, dance, and enjoy good comp
any. Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards were both fond of him (he was their “warm friend,” as Herndon puts it), and, as Ninian told Herndon, he was especially eager for Speed to marry Matilda Edwards after her arrival in November 1840.
Matilda could not have been unaware of Speed’s advances (and Ninian’s wishes for her to marry him), just as word of Lincoln’s seeming love for Matilda, communicated to everybody except Matilda herself, must have reached her ears. These overlapping courtships, sexually unconsummated and full of ambiguity, had one very important meaning missed by all observers: they indirectly joined Lincoln and Speed. Both men, it seems, were heterosexual, but at this moment in their lives their most intense and meaningful emotional connection was with each other. That grounded them and bound them tightly together. They spent much of their time with each other and most nights tumbled side by side into that creaking bed. Each knew the other’s deepest feelings, feelings otherwise kept private and apart from others. Each found reflection of self in the other, a kind of mirroring that silenced doubt and confusion. Even Herndon, who idealized Lincoln, liked Speed, and slept in the same room (but in a different bed) for two years, could only guess at the depth of their friendship and the intensity of their connection.
This context of courtship confusion also explains much about Lincoln’s break with Mary. There is no reason to doubt he loved her as best he could at this stage of his life, which is to say he loved with great ambivalence. But at some point Lincoln and Mary were engaged, with their wedding planned for January 1, 1841. He broke it off—when, exactly, is not clear—without a good explanation, something that confused her and compounded her hurt. She retaliated with anger, sputtering about how the deceiver shall be deceived, whatever that meant to her in the moment, and he tried to convince himself that he had broken the engagement because he loved Matilda. At the time, he probably thought that was true, or he may simply have been allowing Mary to have this explanation, which at least lent the broken engagement a measure of rationality least wounding to sensitive Mary’s self-esteem.
The event behind the events in the fall of 1840, however, was that Speed had decided in that late summer, probably around August, that he was going to leave Springfield and return to Louisville. His father had died the year before and all the members of the family were imploring him to return and help run the plantation and take care of other issues in the extended clan of which he was the recognized leader. The issue for Lincoln was not Mary Todd or Matilda Edwards, even though the noise of his confusion played out on a stage of courtship and broken engagement. What mattered to Lincoln was the imminent departure of Joshua Speed. That threatened the ground of his being. Lincoln went a little crazy in this winter of his discontent.
Lincoln and Speed had long found a recognition of self in the other and established the kind of empathic bond that gives meaning to life and wards off despair. Lincoln, about whom we know more, was especially vulnerable at this stage of his life. He met Speed when he was just coming off his suicidal depression after the death of Ann Rutledge and was still finding his way in his new professional identity. At first, it seems, he was cautious with his new friend. But in time and within the frame of their constant interactions Lincoln came to experience a deep trust in Speed, a trust that calmed Lincoln. He seemed to experience his friend as soothing, engaging, warm, supportive, and unchallenging.
Speed’s imminent departure threw Lincoln into a panic. Speed began winding up his complicated finances in the late summer of 1840, calling in debts (in part by putting ads in the local paper) and making arrangements to sell his store and the goods within it to his clerk, Charles Hurst, who took possession on January 1, 1841 (the notice appeared in the paper on that day). Lincoln separated from his shared bed with Speed on the same day and moved into the Butler home. The intensity of his suicidal depression in January 1841 was truly surprising, both for him and for those who cared about him. Lincoln’s friend Orville Browning, who happened then to be staying with the Butlers, where Lincoln moved on the first of January (because the legislature was in session), reported later in an interview with John Hay that Lincoln’s “aberration of mind” and “derange[ment]” lasted a week or so. He was so affected, however, “as to talk incoherently, and to be dilirious to the extent of not knowing what he was doing.” Browning in turn told Herndon that Lincoln that month was “Crazy as a loon.” Jane D. Bell said in a contemporary letter that Lincoln “came within an inch of being a perfect lunatic for life.”
Speed was one of only two people allowed to tend to Lincoln (though Elizabeth Butler, who had long darned his socks and made his meals, hovered nearby and reportedly urged Lincoln to recover). A. Y. Ellis, in business with Speed and close to Lincoln, wrote Herndon later that after Lincoln took to his bed, “no one was allowed to see him but his friend Josh Speed & his friend the doctor I think Henry.” Speed said Lincoln went “Crazy,” adding important details about Lincoln’s suicidality. They “had to remove razors from his room—take away all Knives and other such dangerous things—&c—it was terrible.” Speed wrote, “In the winter of 1841 a gloom came over him till his friends were alarmed for his life.”
Nor was Lincoln unaware how mad he had become. In two revealing letters, written on January 20 and January 23 to his law partner John Stuart, then serving in Washington as a congressman, Lincoln acknowledged the shame he felt at his collapse (“I have, within the last few days, been making a most discreditable exhibition of myself in the way of hypochondriaism”) and three days later bemoaned his “deplorable state” of mind, expressing what is best described as the negative grandiosity so typical of clinical depression: “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”
Lincoln gradually returned to his practice and his duties in the legislature, though always under the watchful eye of Speed and his other friends. Though no longer living together, it seems he and Speed remained nearly inseparable that spring, ate their meals with the Butlers, and resumed their close interactions. By late May or early June 1841, however, Speed could no longer delay his return home to Louisville—but only after extracting a promise that Lincoln would come visit him soon. In fact, that visit came in August. Lincoln was unsteady emotionally when he arrived in Kentucky on August 18, 1841. He was “moody and hypochondriac,” as Speed later wrote Herndon, and “at times very melancholy,” clearly manifesting a “deep depression” that especially pained Speed’s mother, Lucy, a kindly and nurturing figure. But his sadness, his regret over hurting Mary, and his continuing despair over whether he would ever resolve the issues of intimacy in his life continued to lurk in his soul. Perhaps the relaxed atmosphere in the loving Speed family helped, as did the freedom from his law practice, which had been intense that spring and early summer. Most of all, however, Lincoln was now reunited with Joshua himself. Ninian Edwards later said that Lincoln “was taken to Kentucky—by Speed—or went to Speed’s—was Kept there till he recovered finally.” Having pressured his friend to visit for some months, Speed now created the safety in which Lincoln could honor his melancholy feelings. He was able to shed his mask.
Lincoln and Speed hung out together, took long walks, and generally relaxed. Then, somewhat surprisingly, and suddenly, Fanny Henning captured the heart of Joshua Speed, who quickly developed the same sense of confusion and hesitations over intimacy that Lincoln had experienced a year earlier. Lincoln himself described Fanny as “one of the sweetest girls in the world.” There was nothing about her, he continued, “that I would have otherwise than as it is.” His only concern is her “tendency to melancholy,” though he adds immediately, “This, let it be observed, is a misfortune not a fault.” So Fanny joined the magic circle of depressed friends. It was hardly something Lincoln held against her. He is clearly fond of Fanny and feels she is wonde
rful for his best friend. Her melancholy, which he must have immediately spotted, is her misfortune. The mistake, he advises Speed, would be to blame her for her depression. In contemporary terms, the advice is not to confuse the girl for the symptom.
The overlap of courtships and friendship now turned Lincoln into the strong one encouraging Speed onward in love. That seemed to be why Speed could not let his friend leave him alone in Kentucky, and so boarded the boat with Lincoln to return to Springfield on September 17. That fall the two friends were again inseparable, though we lack evidence where they stayed. The suspicion is they in fact returned to their bed above the store (which Hurst still was paying off to Speed), but certainly they were sharing their deepest feelings with each other. Speed was terrified whether he could go through with his marriage to Fanny, now scheduled for February 15, 1842. Lincoln took it upon himself to identify with Speed, his feelings and confusions, and vicariously to make his friend his stalking horse in the move to intimacy.
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