Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  6

  “It Would Just Kill Me

  to Marry Mary Todd”

  Courtship and Marriage

  (1840–1842)

  In 1842, Lincoln wed Mary Todd, a woman who was to make his domestic life “a burning, scorching hell,” as “terrible as death and as gloomy as the grave,” according to one who knew him very well.1

  Courting Mary Owens

  Lincoln’s courtship of Mary Todd is poorly documented, but indirect light is shed on it by his earlier, well-recorded romance with Mary S. Owens. Born in Kentucky a few months before Lincoln, Mary Owens received a good education at the home of her wealthy father, a planter in Green County. She was older, bigger, and better-educated than Ann Rutledge. Raised in a relatively sophisticated society, she dressed more elegantly than women in and about New Salem. Her clothes may have been more attractive than Ann Rutledge’s, but her features and figure were not. Standing 5 feet, 5 inches tall, she was plump, weighing between 150 and 180 pounds, and considered “not pretty,” “matronly,” “strong nervous & muscular,” with a “massive, angular, square, prominent, and broad” forehead, “fair skin, deep blue eyes,” and “dark curling hair.” Though emphatically less comely than Ann Rutledge, Mary Owens was more intellectually gifted and accomplished. Caleb Carman remembered her as “Sharp—Shrewd and intellectual,” and brighter than Ann. Others deemed her “verry Talented,” “smart, sharp,” “quick & strong minded,” “very intellectual,” a “good conversationalist,” as well as “a splendid reader.” She reportedly “loved wit & humor,” had an “Excellent disposition,” was “jovial,” “social,” “good natured,” “gay and lively,” “light-hearted and cheery,” as well as “kind and considerate.” In her dealings with men, she showed “a little dash of coquetry.”2

  She was also spunky and unconventional, as her 1835 correspondence with Thomas J. Nance reveals: “You are well aware Thomas, that in writing you this letter, I am transgressing the circumscribed limits, laid down by tyrannical custom, for our sex.” Social disapproval did not intimidate her: “if I am condemned by the cold, unfeeling and fastidious of either Sex, I care not, for I trust, my Heart, has learned to rise superior to those groveling feelings, dictated by bosoms, that are callous to every refined emotion.”3

  In the fall of 1833, Mary Owens spent a month in New Salem with her sister, Mrs. Bennett Abell, who was eager to have Lincoln as a brother-in-law. Lincoln found Mary Owens intelligent and “agreeable.”4 She in turn recalled that they “were congenial spirits” who saw “eye to eye” on political matters. Three years later, Lincoln accepted Betsy Abell’s startling proposition that she bring her sister Mary back from Kentucky for him to wed.5 (Mrs. Abell, according to a friend, “was a great talker, and sometimes said more than she ought.”)6 Lincoln agreed, and Mary returned to New Salem for a year and a half, to be courted by Lincoln.

  After the relationship ended, Lincoln wryly told his close friend Eliza Browning, wife of fellow Whig legislator Orville H. Browning, that he had seen “no good objection to plodding life through hand in hand with her.” But the courtship did not go well. When Mary returned to New Salem in 1836, Lincoln found her less attractive than he had remembered. “I knew she was over-size,” he confided to Mrs. Browning, “but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff.” In addition, she looked old: “when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat, to permit its contracting in to wrinkles; but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head, that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than thirtyfive or forty years; and, in short, I was not [at] all pleased with her.” He tried to convince himself “that the mind was much more to be valued than the person.” Despite his reservations, Lincoln felt honor-bound to follow through on his pledge: “I had told her sister that I would take her for better or for worse; and I made a point of honor and conscience in all things, to stick to my word, especially if others had been induced to act on it, which in this case, I doubted not they had, for I was now fairly convinced, that no other man on earth would have her.” Understandably he hesitated before marrying such a woman. “Through life I have been in no bondage, either real or immaginary from the thraldom of which I so much desired to be free,” he told Mrs. Browning. He “really dreaded” the prospect of wedding Mary Owens.

  After procrastinating as long as possible, he finally proposed. To his surprise, she turned him down. “I verry unexpectedly found myself mortified.… in a hundred different ways,” he wrote. “My vanity was deeply wounded by the reflection, that I had so long been too stupid to discover her intentions, and at the same time never doubting that I understood them perfectly; and also, that she whom I had taught myself to believe no body else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness.” Ruefully he conceded that other men “have been made fools of by the girls; but this can never be with truth said of me. I most emphatically, in this instance, made a fool of myself.” He resolved “never again to think of marrying,” for “I can never be satisfied with any one who would be block-head enough to have me.”7

  This account of the courtship is misleading, for Lincoln’s correspondence with Mary Owens indicates that he had become quite fond of her and backed away only after she wounded him repeatedly. A letter he wrote her in December 1836 from Vandalia suggests he really was in love. In this missive, Lincoln complained of “the mortification of looking in the Post Office for your letter and not finding it.” He scolded her: “You see, I am mad about that old letter yet. I don[’]t like verry well to risk you again. I’ll try you once more any how.” The prospect of spending ten weeks with the legislature in Vandalia was intolerable, he lamented, for he missed her. “Write back as soon as you get this, and if possible say something that will please me, for really I have not [been] pleased since I left you.”8 Such language, hardly that of an indifferent suitor, tends to confirm Parthena Hill’s statement that “Lincoln thought a great deal” of Mary Owens.9

  The romance ended largely because of the couple’s incompatibility. With good reason she thought his manners oafish. As she explained, “Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the great chain of woman[’]s happiness, at least it was so in my case; not that I believed it proceeded from a lack of goodness of heart, but his training had been different from mine, hence there was not that congeniality which would have otherwise existed.”10 Lincoln had behaved in ways that she understandably considered thoughtless and insensitive. One day while riding with other New Salem young women and their swains, they came to a creek, which all the men save Lincoln gallantly helped their companions cross. Mary Owens chided her escort: “You are a nice fellow! I suppose you did not care whether my neck was broken or not.” With a laugh, Lincoln replied that he reckoned she was plenty smart “enough to care for herself.”11

  A similar incident provoked her to tell Lincoln that she thought he was not promising husband material. One day he accompanied her and Mrs. Bowling Green on a walk. As they climbed a steep hill, he offered no help to Nancy Green, who was struggling to carry her youngster, “a great big fat child—heavy & crossly disposed.” After reaching their destination, “Miss Owens Said to Lincoln—laughingly—You would not make a good husband Abe.” She chided Lincoln: “You’ve walked for more than a mile with us—a great, strong fellow like you, and let that woman carry a baby that weighs nearly forty pounds, and never so much as lifted your finger to help her.” Lincoln replied: “Why, she never asked me.”

  “Oh, she didn’t! And you hadn’t politeness enough to offer to help her, but must wait to be asked.”

  “Why, I never thought of it. I always supposed she would be afraid to let a fellow like me touch the baby for fear he might break it or something. I’d carry a bushel of them for you, Mary.”

  “Yes, now.”

  “Any time.”


  “If I asked you?”

  “Well, I reckon you could ask me if you wanted them carried.”

  “I just tell you what it is, Abe Lincoln, any man fit to be a husband would have offered to carry that child when he could see its mother was nearly tired to death.”

  “And I didn’t offer?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “And so I’m not fit to be a husband?”

  “That’s just the fact.”

  Lincoln laughed the incident off, but it was a turning point in their relationship, which thereafter began to cool.12

  Soon after this contretemps, Lincoln spent a few weeks on a surveying expedition; when he returned to New Salem, he asked one of the Abells’ sons if Mary Owens was at their home. When the lad said she was, Lincoln asked him to tell her that he would visit later that day. But she had made plans to dine with her cousin, Mentor Graham. When she heard that Lincoln would call, she regarded the occasion as an opportunity to test his devotion: “She thought a moment and Said to herself if I can draw Lincoln up there to Grahams it will all be right.… She wanted to make L bend.” (She reportedly was a strong-minded woman who “loved Power & conquest.”)13 When Lincoln dropped by the Abells’ home to see Mary Owens, Betsy Abell informed him that she was at Mentor Graham’s, a mile and a half distant. Lincoln asked if Mary had known he was coming to call. When Mrs. Abell said no, one of her children corrected her, insisting that young Samuel had informed her. His feelings hurt, Lincoln returned to New Salem without stopping at Graham’s.

  According to one of Mary’s relatives, Lincoln “thought that as he was Extremely poor and Miss Owens very rich that it was a fling on him on that account. This was at that time Abe[’]s tender spot.”14 His hypersensitivity regarding the differences in their social class appeared in a letter he wrote to Mary in May 1837, shortly after he had moved to Springfield. They had considered the possibility of her joining him there, evidently as Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. He discouraged her, saying “I am afraid you would not be satisfied. There is a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without shareing in it. You would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty.” For this reason he believed that they should not wed. “Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented; and there is nothing I can immagine, that would make me more unhappy than to fail in the effort. I know I should be much happier with you than the way I am, provided I saw no signs of discontent in you.” He urged her to consider the prospect carefully before deciding. “My opinion is that you had better not do it. You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may be more severe than you now immagine.” But, he hastened to add, “I am willing to abide [by] your decision.”15

  Three months later, in his final surviving letter to Mary Owens, Lincoln discussed the prospect of marriage lukewarmly: “I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women. I want … more than any thing else, to do right with you, and if I knew it would be doing right, as I rather suspect it would, to let you alone, I would do it. And for the purpose of making the matter as plain as possible, I now say, that you can now drop the subject, dismiss your thoughts (if you ever had any) from me forever, and leave this letter unanswered, without calling forth one accusing murmur from me. And I will even go further, and say, that if it will add any thing to your comfort, or peace of mind, to do so, it is my sincere wish that you should. Do not understand by this, that I wish to cut your acquaintance. I mean no such thing. What I do wish is, that our further acquaintance shall depend upon yourself. If such further acquaintance would contribute nothing to your happiness, I am sure it would not to mine. If you feel yourself in any degree bound to me, I am now willing to release you, provided you wish it; while, on the other hand, I am willing, and even anxious to bind you faster, if I can be convinced that it will, in any considerable degree, add to your happiness.”16

  Unsurprisingly she rejected his proposal, returned to Kentucky, and eventually married her brother-in-law. A few months after her departure, Lincoln remarked to Betsy Abell: “Tell your Sister, that I think she was a great fool, because she did not stay here and marry me.”17

  The Mary Owens courtship reveals an aspect of Lincoln’s character that helps explain his intense political ambition, namely a deep-seated inferiority complex. Some political psychologists maintain that such ambition is often rooted in “an intense and ungratified craving for deference.” Many aspiring politicos like Lincoln expect power “to overcome low estimates of the self.”18 The compensatory psychological benefits of political power and fame strongly appeal to those with damaged self-esteem, especially “the ‘provincial’ or the ‘small-town boy’ or the ‘country boy’ ” who wants “to succeed against the stigma of rusticity.”19 Lincoln is a good example of such a “provincial.” As noted earlier, in his 1860 conversations with John Locke Scripps, he “seemed to be painfully impressed with the extreme poverty of his early surroundings—the utter absence of all romantic and heroic elements.”20 In the autobiography he prepared for Scripps, he virtually apologized for his humble origins, calling Thomas Lincoln “a wandering laboring boy” who “grew up litterally without education.” In that sketch, Lincoln said of his meager schooling: “He regrets his want of education, and does what he can to supply the want.”21 For the Dictionary of Congress, Lincoln described his education as “defective.”22 As an attorney, he felt inferior to his better-educated colleagues. His second law partner, Stephen T. Logan, recalled “an occasion when he had got very much discouraged.” In a Danville court, Edward D. Baker “had got very much the advantage of him,” and he “came and complained to me that Baker had got so much the start of him that he despaired of getting even with him in acquirements and skill.”23 In 1861, Lincoln told an alumnus of Rutgers College that he “always regretted the want of a college education. Those who have it should thank God for it.”24 The positive reception his speeches received in the East in early 1860 astonished him. To a Connecticut minister who praised his address in Norwich, Lincoln said: “Certainly, I have had a most wonderful success, for a man of my limited education.” He was especially struck by the lavish praise of a Yale professor of rhetoric.25

  Lincoln’s ancestry also embarrassed him. In 1859, he wrote that his parents were both born in Virginia of “undistinguished families—second families, perhaps I should say.”26 When leading citizens of Logan County, Illinois, proposed to name their county seat after him, Lincoln replied: “I don’t believe I’d do that; I never knew anything named Lincoln that amounted to anything.”27 While he expressed some reservations about the Lincoln side of the family, he was especially ashamed of his mother’s family. As he told voters during his first political campaign: “I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life.” A decade later he referred to himself at 22 as “a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy.”28

  Psychologist G. Stanley Hall speculated that Lincoln’s ambition was rooted in his feelings about his appearance: “His height, long limbs, rough exterior, and frequent feeling of awkwardness must have very early made him realize that to succeed in life he must cultivate intrinsic mental and moral traits, which it is so hard for a handsome man or women to excel in. Hence he compensated by trying to develop intellectual distinction.”29 In his initial political campaign, Lincoln declared candidly: “I have no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow citizens.”30 That thirst for admiration lasted a lifetime; only political success would slake it and permit relief from a nagging, deep-seated sense of inferiority.

  Emotional as well as material and educational poverty seems to have plagued the young Lincoln. Neither parent met his most basic psychological needs. Nancy Hanks Lincoln may have provided her young son with love and support during his first nine years, but he evidently viewed her death as an act of abandonment. In later life, he seldom mentioned her; one of th
e few times he did so, in his letter to Eliza Browning about his love life, it was in unflattering terms. His father offered little nurturance. Perhaps the best thing Thomas Lincoln ever did for his son was to marry Sarah Bush Johnston, but by the time she arrived in Indiana, the boy’s psyche had endured many assaults. Suffering from emotional malnutrition, Lincoln thought himself unloved and unlovable. To compensate, he sought in public life a surrogate form of the love and acceptance he had not known at home; by winning elections he would prove to himself that he was lovable.31

  Lincoln’s conduct toward Mary Owens may have been affected by his distrust of women, stemming from the death of his mother. The “bitter agony” that Lincoln experienced as a 9-year-old in Indiana seems to have crippled his capacity for trusting and loving women lest they abandon him as his mother had done. Throughout life he harbored irrational fears of abandonment. When Joshua Speed married, Lincoln plaintively told the newlyweds, “I feel som[e]what jealous of both of you now; you will be so exclusively concerned for one another, that I shall be forgotten entirely.”32 In 1858, after his defeat by Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln remarked to a friend: “I expect everybody to desert me.”33 In 1839, as already noted, he concluded a speech on banking with a strange peroration, envisioning himself abandoned in his defense of the right, alone, boldly hurling defiance at his country’s enemies. In politics, his greatest anger was directed at former allies who had abandoned his party.