The duties of his new job were not onerous. Carried on horseback, the mails were supposed to arrive twice a week—when they were not delayed by snow, rain, floods, and other accidents. The recipient of a letter, rather than the sender, usually paid the postage, and it was the postmaster’s job not merely to deliver the mail but to collect the fee. The charge varied with the weight of the letter and the distance it had traveled; for instance, it cost 6¢ to receive a letter consisting of a single sheet that had traveled thirty miles, and double that amount for a two-page letter. Newspapers paid a lower rate. The postmaster received a percentage of all receipts, but in New Salem the amount was small. In 1834–1835, the only full year of Lincoln’s tenure for which records have been preserved, he received $55.70. The best estimate is that his compensation for the three years he served as postmaster was between $150 and $175.
Lincoln seems to have had the unusual notion that a public servant’s first duty is to help people, rather than to follow bureaucratic regulations. If residents did not pick up their mail at the post office in Samuel Hill’s store, he would often put the letters in his hat and deliver them in person, sometimes walking several miles to do so. He liberally interpreted the Post Office Department’s rule that he could send and receive personal mail without charge but would be subject to a fine if he franked anyone else’s letters. In a letter dated September 17, 1835, Mathew S. Marsh described the way Lincoln conducted the post office: “The Post Master (Mr. Lincoln) is very careless about leaving his office open and unlocked during the day—half the time I go in and get my papers, etc., without anyone being there as was the case yesterday. The letter was only marked twenty-five [cents] and even if he had been there and known it was double, he would not have charged me any more—luckily he is a clever fellow and a particular friend of mine. If he is there when I carry this to the office—I will get him to ‘Frank’ it.” Risking a $10 fine, Lincoln wrote on the back: “Free, A. Lincoln, P.M., New Salem, 111, Sept. 22.”
At the same time, he was scrupulous in keeping financial records, and he fiercely resented any imputation of irregularity. When George C. Spears requested a receipt for the postage he had paid on his newspaper, Lincoln responded sharply: “I am some what surprised at your request. I will however comply with it. The law requires News paper postage to be paid in advance and now that I have waited a full year you choose to wound my feelings by insinuating that unless you get a receipt I will probably make you pay it again.” More than a year after the New Salem office had been discontinued and after he moved to Springfield, he turned over to the Post Office Department the precise balance of his receipts, $248.63.
Though appointment as postmaster gave Lincoln a position in the community, an occasion to talk and visit with the residents of the town, and an opportunity to read all newspapers that came into the office, it did not provide a livelihood, and his friends looked for ways for him to supplement his income. One of them learned that John Calhoun, recently appointed county surveyor, was looking for an assistant and strongly recommended Lincoln. Before accepting, Lincoln hesitated because Calhoun was a very active Democratic politician, but he was assured that he would not be expected to compromise his principles. Knowing nothing of surveying, he secured copies of Abel Flint’s System of Geometry and Trigonometry with a Treatise on Surveying and Robert Gibson’s Treatise on Practical Surveying, scraped together enough money to procure a compass and chain, and, as he said, “went at it.” Setting himself to learn the principles of trigonometry and their practical application to surveying, he studied very hard, and he was soon able to take to the field.
Surveying was difficult work. On a typical survey Lincoln, accompanied by two chainmen, had to push into briar patches, slog through swamps, and cut through wilderness undergrowth in order to set their markers and measure their angles. At the end of a day’s work he would often come in with his clothes torn and his legs scratched up from the briars. When friends tried to commiserate with him, he would just laugh and say “that was a poore [sic] man’s lot.” But after one of his early surveys, for a farmer named Russell Godbey who lived six miles north of New Salem, he accepted as payment two buckskins, which Hannah Armstrong, Jack Armstrong’s wife, used to “fox” his pants to protect him from briars. Ordinarily, however, he received payment in cash, according to a scale set up by the state, which allowed him $2.50 for each quarter section surveyed.
As Lincoln gained experience, he undertook increasingly complicated surveys. He was the principal surveyor in locating a road from the Sangamon River, through New Salem, and on in the direction of Jacksonville. New Boston, Bath, Petersburg, and Huron were among the towns that he laid out. All his work was careful and meticulously accurate. As a resident of Athens, Illinois, recalled: “Mr Lincoln had the monopoly of finding the lines, and when any dispute arose among the Settlers Mr Lincolns Compass and chain always settled the matter satisfactorily.”
When his surveying fees were added to his post office commission, he began to have enough to live on. Then the notes that he had so freely signed to finance the Berry & Lincoln store began to come due.
IV
This financial pressure gave special urgency to Lincoln’s second race for the state legislature in 1834. Apart from all other reasons, he wanted to be elected because of the salary. Though party lines were by this time more sharply defined, with Democrats strongly backing their hero, Andrew Jackson, in his decision to kill the Bank of the United States, and their opponents, now known as Whigs, as fiercely loyal to Jackson’s archenemy, Henry Clay, Lincoln made no mention of his support for Clay’s American System. Indeed, he issued no statement of principles and published no speeches. Instead, he conducted a handshaking campaign, stopping to greet and talk with voters in every part of the county where his work as deputy surveyor brought him. Reaching Rowan Herndon’s house near Island Grove, he went out into the field where some thirty men were at work harvesting grain. When some of them grumbled that they would never vote for a man who could not hold his own in the field, he responded, “Boys if that is all I am shure [sic] of your votes.” Taking hold of the cradle with perfect ease, he led the harvesters on one full round of the field. “The Boys was satisfied,” Herndon recalled, “and I don’t think he Lost a vote in the Croud.”
Behind Lincoln’s silence on the issues lay political calculation. The village of New Salem was as strongly in favor of Whig policies as Lincoln himself; it needed the roads, commerce, and economic expansion that the Whig party promised. But the self-subsisting farmers in the countryside were Democrats, ardent supporters of President Jackson. Many of these, like the Clary’s Grove boys, favored Lincoln on purely personal grounds and, according to Stephen T. Logan, his future law partner, “they told their democratic brethren in the other parts of the county that they must help elect Lincoln, or else they wouldn’t support the other democratic candidates.” As a result, Democratic leaders approached Lincoln with a deal. There were, again, thirteen candidates for the state legislature, only four of whom would be elected. Democrats especially feared John Todd Stuart, who was not only a leader of the Whig party but a likely candidate for the next United States Congress. They offered to drop their support of two Democratic candidates and to concentrate their votes on Lincoln, in the hope of electing him rather than Stuart.
Lincoln immediately put their proposition before Stuart, who was so confident of his own strength that he urged him to accept the Democrats’ support. The election returns on August 4 justified Stuart’s course. Lincoln received 1,376 votes—the second-highest number of any candidate—and was elected. So was Stuart, who narrowly edged out the strongest Democratic contender.
Elated, Lincoln began to prepare for his new job by beginning to study law. A year earlier he had thought about this possibility but had rejected it as being beyond his scope. But since that time he had had several opportunities to observe the proceedings in the Sangamon County Circuit Court in Springfield, where he was called as a witness in two cases and was impane
led as a juror in three small cases. Observing the highly informal procedures of the court and learning that most of the leading lawyers were self-educated doubtless led him to believe that this was a forum in which he could successfully compete. During the 1834 canvass Stuart encouraged him to reconsider his decision and offered to help him. After the election he often rode, or sometimes walked, into Springfield to borrow Stuart’s law books. When he first showed up at the office, he was timid and quiet, and Henry E. Dummer, Stuart’s law partner, thought him “the most uncouth looking young man I ever saw.” On one of these trips to Springfield, he attended an auction, where he picked up a copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries and then, as he wrote later, he “went at it in good earnest.”
In other ways, too, Lincoln began readying himself for his first appearance at Vandalia, the state capital. Shortly after the election, he approached Coleman Smoot, one of the richest men in the New Salem area, asking to borrow some money to carry him over until he began to receive his legislator’s salary. Of the $200 Smoot loaned him, Lincoln spent $60 on the first suit of clothes he ever owned. It was, for the time, a large amount—more than half a month’s salary of the governor of the state—but Lincoln was determined, as he told Smoot, “to make a decent appearance in the legislature.”
Lincoln’s first session as an Illinois state legislator (December 1, 1834, to February 13, 1835) was not a memorable one. For the most part, he was a silent observer of the proceedings, exceptionally faithful in his attendance, and generally following the lead of more experienced legislators like Stuart, with whom he roomed. He found it easy enough to get around in Vandalia, which, though the state capital, was only a village of some 800 or 900 inhabitants. Like most of the eighty other legislators, he stayed at one of the boarding taverns, which bore names like the Vandalia Inn and the Sign of the Green Tree. Though he was the next-to-the-youngest member of the legislature, he quickly learned that he was no more inexperienced than most of his colleagues. All but nineteen of the fifty-five House members were, like himself, serving their first term.
The statehouse, where the legislators met, was a badly built, two-story brick building, hastily erected after fire had destroyed an earlier capitol. By 1834 it was already dilapidated, for the walls bulged ominously at points and falling chunks of plaster occasionally imperiled speakers. The House of Representatives met in a large, bare room on the ground floor, where members sat three to a table. Furnishings were spare: a pail and two or three tin cups for water; boxes containing sand for tobacco chewers; candles for night work; and a stove. Most of the business of the legislature, like that of any lawmaking assembly, was of a routine nature, like appropriating $2.50 to Marmaduke Vickery “for fixing the stoves for [the] State House,” passing a bill to encourage the killing of wolves, and granting permission to Clayborn Bell to change his name to Clayborn Elder Bell.
As the session wore on, Lincoln grew more at home in the legislature. His skill in drawing up legislation, hesitant at first, steadily improved, and his colleagues, impressed by his mastery of the technical language of the law, began asking him to draft bills for them in his firm, legible handwriting. He participated more freely in the debates and apparently convulsed the house in brief remarks on the naming of a surveyor of Schuyler County. In the belief that the incumbent was dead, a new surveyor had been named, who discovered that his predecessor was very much alive. (He “persisted not to die,” as Lincoln expressed it.) Legislators were in a quandary until Lincoln urged them to do nothing. If in the future “the old surveyor should hereafter conclude to die, there would be a new one ready made without troubling the legislature.” Legislative wit is so rare that, however feeble, it elicits laughs.
V
At the end of the session Lincoln drew his salary warrant for $158—he had already received $100 in December—and returned to New Salem with more money than he had ever had before. He needed it all. Just before he left for Vandalia, the Sangamon County Circuit Court issued a judgment against him and Berry for overdue notes. When they were unable to pay, the sheriff attached their personal possessions, including Lincoln’s horse, saddle, bridle, surveying compass, and other equipment. The action deprived Lincoln of his means of livelihood. Then, in January 1835, while Lincoln was still in Vandalia, Berry died, leaving practically no estate. Legally, Lincoln was responsible for only half their debts, but he insisted he would pay them all when he was able. That obligation, which Lincoln and his friends jokingly referred to as his “national debt,” weighed heavily on him when he returned from the state capital. Indeed, it would be several years before he could pay it off.
With little else to do during the spring and summer of 1835 except deliver the mail twice a week, he could spend all his time on his law books. To judge from the advice that he later gave other law students, he read Blackstone through twice. As usual, he did not merely memorize the arguments but rephrased them two or three times in his own language until he had mastered them. R. B. Rutledge, whose father owned the inn at New Salem, recalled that “his practice was, when he wished to indelibly fix anything he was reading or studying on his mind, to write it down, [I] have known him to write whole pages of books he was reading.” Soon he branched out to study the other standard texts of the era: Chitty’s Pleadings, Greenleaf’s Evidence, and Joseph Story’s Equity Jurisprudence. In an 1860 autobiography one four-word sentence summarized how he mastered these difficult works: “He studied with nobody.”
Much of the time as he read, he sat, barefoot, propped against a tree, and then, for variety, he would lie on his back and rest his long legs on the tree trunk. One friend noted with amusement that he moved as the sun moved, grinding around the trunk to keep in the shade. Even when he walked, he carried a book with him, and, though he pleasantly responded to interruptions, he promptly went back to reading. “He read so much—was so studious—too[k] so little physical exercise—was so laborious in his studies,” Henry McHenry remembered, “that he became emaciated and his best friends were afraid that he would craze himself.”
After a month or so, life began to get a little easier for him. In March, when the sheriff put up his belongings for auction, his horse was for some unexplained reason exempt. “Uncle” James Short, one of Lincoln’s greatest admirers, bid in the surveying equipment for $120 and immediately returned it to him. By the end of the month he was again in the field, making surveys and earning fees. But, as he noted in an autobiographical statement, he only “mixed in the surveying to pay board and clothing bills.”
Behind Lincoln’s urgency to become a lawyer there was now a new force: he was romantically involved. From almost the day of his arrival in New Salem, the good women of the village had matrimonial plans for him. They found his awkward clumsiness touching, and they noted how tender he was with small children and how affectionate he was to kittens and other pets. He needed someone to cook for him and feed him, so as to fill out that hollow frame, someone to clean and repair his clothing, which—except for that expensive legislative suit—seemed never to fit and always to be in tatters. In short, he needed a wife.
But he was extremely awkward around women. With the wives of old friends, like Mrs. Hannah Armstrong, he could be courtly, even affectionate, but he froze in the presence of eligible girls. At his store he had been reluctant to wait on them, and at Rutledge Tavern he was unwilling to sit at the table when a well-dressed Virginia woman and her three daughters were guests. Efforts of New Salem matrons to match him with a Miss Short and a Miss Berry failed completely.
But one young woman in the village did interest him greatly. She was Ann Rutledge, the daughter of one of the founders of the village and the owner of the tavern, where he roomed and boarded some of the time. She was a very pretty girl, with fair skin, blue eyes, and auburn hair. Only five feet and three inches tall, she weighed between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and thirty pounds. “Heavy set,” Mrs. Samuel Hill called her—but in Lincoln’s eyes this was no disadvantage, for all of the women he loved wer
e plump. In addition, a villager recalled, she was “good—kind, social—goodhearted.” Another rhapsodized that she had “as pure and kind a heart as an angel, full of love—kindness—sympathy.”
When Lincoln first came to New Salem, Ann was only a schoolgirl in Mentor Graham’s school, and, as always, he found it easy to talk with someone younger than himself. Later he saw more of her when she took over the management of her father’s tavern, the largest building in New Salem, a log house with two large rooms on the ground floor and two more upstairs for guests. Pretty, quick, and domestic, she naturally attracted the attention of eligible bachelors, like Samuel Hill, the ugly, crude, but well-to-do storekeeper, whose advances she did not encourage. Hill’s partner, John McNeil, a New Yorker, who boarded at Rutledge Tavern, met a warmer reception. Presently it became known throughout the village that they were to be married. Then, toward the fall of 1833, McNeil made a confession to Ann. His real name was John McNamar. (Lincoln already knew this, because he had witnessed land transactions where the man signed his proper name.) His father had fallen on hard times in New York, and he had come West to redeem the family’s fortune. He had changed his name because, as Herndon put it, he feared “that if the family in New York had known where he was they would have settled down on him, and before he could have accumulated any property would have sunk him beyond recovery.” But now he had saved up, from his store and his farm, some $10,000 or $12,000, a sizable sum, and he was going to return to New York and bring his family back to New Salem with him. Then he and Ann would be married.
After McNamar left, Ann told his story to other members of her family, who received it with skepticism. There was, they thought, something wrong in McNamar’s story about deserting his family in order to save them. A man who changed his name must have a lurid past. Probably he had jilted Ann and would never return to New Salem. Such fears, however, were kept very quiet, for in Victorian America, a spurned woman was suspected of having some moral blight.
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