Lincoln: A Photobiography

by Russell Freedman

  Lincoln as a flatboatman on the Mississippi River. From an old engraving by H. Brown.

  New Orleans was the first real city they had ever seen. Their eyes must have popped as the great harbor came into view, jammed with the masts of sailing ships from distant ports all over the world. The city's cobblestone streets teemed with sailors, traders, and adventurers speaking strange languages. And there were gangs of slaves everywhere. Lincoln would never forget the sight of black men, women, and children being driven along in chains and auctioned off like cattle. In those days, New Orleans had more than two hundred slave dealers.

  The boys sold their cargo and their flatboat and returned upriver by steamboat. Abraham earned twenty-four dollars—a good bit of money at the time—for the three-month trip. He handed the money over to his father, according to law and custom.

  Thomas Lincoln was thinking about moving on again. Lately he had heard glowing reports about Illinois, where instead of forests there were endless prairies with plenty of rich black soil. Early in 1830, Thomas sold his Indiana farm. The Lincolns piled everything they owned into two ox-drawn wagons and set out over muddy roads, with Abraham, just turned twenty-one, driving one of the wagons himself. They traveled west to their new homesite in central Illinois, not far from Decatur. Once again, Abraham helped his father build a cabin and start a new farm.

  He stayed with his family through their first prairie winter, but he was getting restless. He had met an enterprising fellow named Denton Offutt, who wanted him to take another boatload of cargo down the river to New Orleans. Abraham agreed to make the trip with his stepbrother, John Johnston, and a cousin, John Hanks.

  When he returned to Illinois three months later, he paid a quick farewell visit to his father and stepmother. Abraham was twenty-two now, of legal age, free to do what he wanted. His parents were settled and could get along without him. Denton Offutt was planning to open a general store in the flourishing village of New Salem, Illinois, and he had promised Lincoln a steady job.

  Lincoln arrived in New Salem in July 1831 wearing a faded cotton shirt and blue jeans too short for his long legs—a "friendless, uneducated, penniless boy," as he later described himself. He tended the counter at Denton Offutt's store and slept in a room at the back.

  The village stood in a wooded grove on a bluff above the Sangamon River. Founded just two years earlier, it had about one hundred people living in one- and two-room log houses. Cattle grazed behind split-rail fences, hogs snuffled along dusty lanes, and chickens and geese flapped about underfoot. New Salem was still a small place, but it was growing. The settlers expected it to become a frontier boom town.

  The reconstructed village of New Salem as it appears today. In the foreground is a split-rail fence.

  This New Salem general store was the center of village life.

  With his gifts for swapping stories and making friends, Lincoln fit easily into the life of the village. He showed off his skill with an ax, competed in footraces, and got along with everyone from Mentor Graham, the schoolmaster, to lack Armstrong, the leader of a rowdy gang called the Clary's Grove boys. Armstrong was the wrestling champion of New Salem. He quickly challenged Lincoln to a match.

  On the appointed day, an excited crowd gathered down by the river, placing bets as the wrestlers stripped to the waist for combat. They circled each other, then came to grips, twisting and tugging until they crashed to the ground with Lincoln on top. As he pinned Armstrong's shoulders to the ground, the other Clary's Grove boys dived in to join the scuffle. Lincoln broke away, backed against a cliff, and defiantly offered to take them all on—one at a time. Impressed, Armstrong jumped to his feet and offered Lincoln his hand, declaring the match a draw. After that, they were fast friends.

  Lincoln also found a place among the town's intellectuals. He joined the New Salem Debating Society, which met once a week in James Rutledge's tavern. The first time he debated, he seemed nervous. But as he began to speak in his high, reedy voice, he surprised everyone with the force and logic of his argument. "He was already a fine speaker," one debater recalled. "All he lacked was culture."

  Jack Armstrong, leader of the "Clary's Grove boys.

  Mentor Graham, the New Salem schoolmaster.

  Lincoln was self-conscious about his meagre education, and ambitious to improve himself. Mentor Graham, the schoolmaster and a fellow debater, took a liking to the young man, lent him books, and offered to coach him in the fine points of English grammar. Lincoln had plenty of time to study. There wasn't much business at Offutt's store, so he could spend long hours reading as he sat behind the counter.

  When the store failed in 1832, Offutt moved on to other schemes. Lincoln had to find something else to do. At the age of twenty-three, he decided to run for the Illinois state legislature. Why not? He knew everyone in town, people liked him, and he was rapidly gaining confidence as a public speaker. His friends urged him to run, saying that a bright young man could go far in politics. So Lincoln announced his candidacy and his political platform. He was in favor of local improvements, like better roads and canals. He had made a study of the Sangamon River, and he proposed that it be dredged and cleared so steamboats could call at New Salem—insuring a glorious future for the town.

  Before he could start his campaign, an Indian war flared up in northern Illinois. Chief Black Hawk of the Sauk and Fox tribes had crossed the Mississippi, intending, he said, to raise corn on land that had been taken from his people thirty years earlier. The white settlers were alarmed, and the governor called for volunteers to stop the invasion. Lincoln enlisted in a militia company made up of his friends and neighbors. He was surprised and pleased when the men elected him as their captain, with Jack Armstrong as first sergeant. His troops drilled and marched, but they never did sight any hostile Indians. Years later, Lincoln would joke about his three-month stint as a military man, telling how he survived "a good many bloody battles with mosquitoes."

  By the time he returned to New Salem, election day was just two weeks off. He jumped into the campaign—pitching horseshoes with voters, speaking at barbecues, chatting with farmers in the fields, joking with customers at country stores. He lost, finishing eighth in a field of thirteen. But in his own precinct, where folks knew him, he received 227 votes out of 300 cast.

  Interior of the general store owned by Lincoln and his partner, William Berry.

  Defeated as a politician, he decided to try his luck as a frontier merchant. With a fellow named William Berry as his partner, Lincoln operated a general store that sold everything from axes to beeswax. But the two men showed little aptitude for business, and their store finally "winked out/' as Lincoln put it. Then Berry died, leaving Lincoln saddled with a $1,100 debt—a gigantic amount for someone who had never earned more than a few dollars a month. Lincoln called it "the National Debt," but he vowed to repay every cent. He spent the next fifteen years doing so.

  To support himself, he worked at all sorts of odd jobs. He split fence rails, hired himself out as a farmhand, helped at the local gristmill. With the help of friends, he was appointed postmaster of New Salem, a part-time job that paid about fifty dollars a year. Then he was offered a chance to become deputy to the local surveyor. He knew nothing about surveying, so he bought a compass, a chain, and a couple of textbooks on the subject. Within six weeks, he had taught himself enough to start work—laying out roads and townsites, and marking off property boundaries.

  As he traveled about the county, making surveys and delivering mail to faraway farms, people came to know him as an honest and dependable fellow. Lincoln could be counted on to witness a contract, settle a boundary dispute, or compose a letter for folks who couldn't write much themselves. For the first time, his neighbors began to call him "Abe."

  In 1834, Lincoln ran for the state legislature again. This time he placed second in a field of thirteen candidates, and was one of four men elected to the Illinois House of Representatives from Sangamon County. In November, wearing a sixty-dollar tailor-made suit he
had bought on credit, the first suit he had ever owned, the twenty-five-year-old legislator climbed into a stagecoach and set out for the state capital in Vandalia.

  In those days, Illinois lawmakers were paid three dollars a day to cover their expenses, but only while the legislature was in session. Lincoln still had to earn a living. One of his fellow representatives, a rising young attorney named John Todd Stuart, urged Lincoln to take up the study of law. As Stuart pointed out, it was an ideal profession for anyone with political ambitions.

  Lincoln the Rail Splitter. Painting by J. L. G. Ferris.

  And in fact, Lincoln had been toying with the idea of becoming a lawyer. For years he had hung around frontier courthouses, watching country lawyers bluster and strut as they cross-examined witnesses and delivered impassioned speeches before juries. He had sat on juries himself, appeared as a witness, drawn up legal documents for his neighbors. He had even argued a few cases before the local justice of the peace.

  Yes, the law intrigued him. It would give him a chance to rise in the world, to earn a respected place in the community, to live by his wits instead of by hard physical labor.

  Yet Lincoln hesitated, unsure of himself because he had so little formal education. That was no great obstacle, his friend Stuart kept telling him. In the 1830s, few American lawyers had ever seen the inside of a law school. Instead, they "read law" in the office of a practicing attorney until they knew enough to pass their exams.

  Lincoln decided to study entirely on his own. He borrowed some law books from Stuart, bought others at an auction, and began to read and memorize legal codes and precedents. Back in New Salem, folks would see him walking down the road, reciting aloud from one of his law books, or lying under a tree as he read, his long legs stretched up the trunk. He studied for nearly three years before passing his exams and being admitted to practice on March 1, 1837.

  By then, the state legislature was planning to move from Vandalia to Springfield, which had been named the new capital of Illinois. Lincoln had been elected to a second term in the legislature. And he had accepted a job as junior partner in John Todd Stuart's Springfield law office.

  In April, he went back to New Salem for the last time to pack his belongings and say good-bye to his friends. The little village was declining now. Its hopes for growth and prosperity had vanished when the Sangamon River proved too treacherous for steamboat travel. Settlers were moving away, seeking brighter prospects elsewhere.

  By 1840, New Salem was a ghost town. It would have been forgotten completely if Abraham Lincoln hadn't gone there to live when he was young, penniless, and ambitious.

  Lincoln as a thirty-seven-year-old prairie lawyer in 1846. This daguerreotype is the earliest known camera portrait of Lincoln.

  Mary Lincoln as a twenty-eight-year-old wife and mother in 1846. The Lincolns had been married for four years and had two sons when they sat for these companion portraits. "They are very precious to me," Mary said later, "taken when we were young and so desperately in love."

  THREE

  Law and Politics

  "I had studied law, and removed to Springfield to practice it."

  Lincoln was twenty-eight years old when he rode into Springfield on a borrowed horse with seven dollars in his pocket. At first he slept on a couch in his partner's law office. Then he met Joshua Speed, a genial young merchant who owned a general store in the center of town.

  Speed thought that Lincoln was one of the saddest-looking fellows he had ever laid eyes on. "I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life," he declared. But he liked the strapping backwoods attorney and invited him to share his room above the store. Lincoln collected his saddlebags, climbed the stairs to Speed's room, tossed the bags on the floor, and said with a grin, "Well Speed, I'm moved!"

  Speed's store was a meeting place for a group of bachelors who gathered around a big fireplace several evenings a week to swap stories and argue politics. One of them was a scrappy little attorney named Stephen A. Douglas. From their first meeting, Lincoln and Douglas had plenty to argue about. The leading political parties at the time were the Whigs, who favored a strong government in Washington to guide the nation's future, and the Democrats, who said that the states should control their own affairs, without interference from Washington. Douglas was a Democrat, Lincoln a Whig. They became instant rivals.

  Lincoln was ambitious to get ahead. His partner coached him in the fine points of courtroom law, and together they built one of the busiest practices in Springfield. Meanwhile, Lincoln rose rapidly as a Whig party leader. He won reelection to the legislature in 1838 and again in 1840—serving four terms altogether. He was appointed to the party's State Central Committee, which picked candidates for statewide office. And he became an influential member of the Young Whigs, who carried on a running debate with the Young Democrats, led by Stephen Douglas.

  He also fell in love—apparently for the first time in his life. Legend tells us that Lincoln once had a tragic love affair with Ann Rutledge, daughter of the New Salem tavern owner, who died at the age of twenty-two. While this story has become part of American folklore, there isn't a shred of evidence that Lincoln ever had a romantic attachment with Ann. Historians believe that they were just good friends.

  While Lincoln was still living in New Salem, he carried on a half-hearted courtship with Mary Owens, but that came to nothing. As far as we know, Lincoln never really lost his head over a woman until he met Mary Ann Todd, the pampered and temperamental daughter of a wealthy Kentucky banker.

  Lincoln was thirty when they met, Mary almost twenty-one. She had come to Springfield to live with her sister and brother-in-law, Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards, and to find a suitable match among the town's eligible bachelors. The Edwards's elegant hilltop mansion was a popular meeting place for Springfield's political leaders and social elite. Lincoln visited the house with his law partner, a cousin of Elizabeth's.

  Downtown Springfield, where Lincoln practiced law, as it appeared in the 1850s. The street is paved with split logs laid flat side up, and the sidewalk is built of wooden planks.

  He met Mary in the winter of 1839. She was witty, vivacious, and stylish, "the very creature of excitement," as a friend described her. She spoke fluent French, recited poetry, knew all the latest dances, was fascinated by politics, and had outspoken views on just about everything. Lincoln was dazzled by the popular Kentucky belle, and Mary was drawn to him.

  To many, it seemed an unlikely match. Lincoln knew his way around the brawling political circles of Springfield, but he was still an unpolished fellow from the backwoods, ill at ease in the sophisticated drawing rooms of Springfield high society. Ninian Edwards considered him "a mighty rough man." But Mary saw great promise in Lincoln. She admired his ambition, and beneath his awkward shyness, she found an appealing intensity. He had "the most congenial mind" she had ever met.

  As for Lincoln, he had never met anyone like Mary. In her company, he forgot his uncertain manners and felt at ease. He could talk to her as to no one else. By the summer of 1840, they were courting in earnest, Lincoln standing tall and lean beside Mary's short, fashionably plump figure in drawing rooms all over town. By Christmas, they were engaged.

  Mary's sister and brother-in-law did not approve. Lincoln was a useful political ally, perhaps, but he was hardly a suitable husband for a member of the eminent Todd family. Elizabeth didn't like him at all. "He never scarcely said a word," she complained, because he "could not hold a lengthy conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently educated and intelligent in the female line to do so." The Edwardses looked down on Lincoln as a social climber—a gangly country bumpkin who never spoke about his origins. He lived in a room above a store. He was deeply in debt. Mary could do better than that. Lincoln was no longer welcome in the Edwards home. And back in Kentucky, Mary's father objected vigorously to the match.

  Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards, Lincoln's influential in-laws. They tried to prevent the marriage.

  Mary was defiant. She woul
d not be told whom to marry! But Lincoln was wounded by the Todd family's rejection. "One d is enough for God," he told a friend, "but the Todds need two."

  Early in 1841 Lincoln broke off the engagement. He had known bouts of depression before, but now he plunged into the worst emotional crisis of his life. For a week, he refused to leave his room. People around town said that he had thrown "two cat fits and a duck fit." He had gone "crazy for a week or two." To his law partner Stuart, who was serving a term in Congress, Lincoln wrote: "I am 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 earth."

  Fifteen months passed before friends arranged a secret meeting between Lincoln and Mary. When they saw each other again, they knew that they wanted to resume their courtship. On November 4, 1842, they told Elizabeth and Ninian that they intended to be married.

  The wedding took place that evening in the Edwards parlor before a few close friends. Afterwards, the newlyweds climbed into a carriage and rode off through the rain to their first home—a furnished room in the Globe Tavern, where they paid four dollars a month for board and lodging. It was the best Lincoln could afford. A few days later he wrote to a friend: "Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder."

  As was the custom in those proper Victorian days, Lincoln called his bride Mary, while she addressed him as Mr. Lincoln. But this soon changed to Mother and Father. Their first child, named Robert Todd after Mary's father, was born at the Globe Tavern nine months after their wedding. A few months later, with financial help from Mary's father, the Lincolns bought a comfortable house where they would live for the next seventeen years. Three more sons were born in that house—Eddie in 1846, Willie in 1850, and Thomas or Tad in 1853.