In all such matters what he feared was uncontrolled emotion. Passion, he remarked in the conclusion of his lyceum lecture, “will in future be our enemy.” In its stead the nation must rely on “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.” Only then, he told the Washingtonians, would come the “happy day, when, all appetites controled, all passions subdued,... mind, all conquering mind, shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!”
VII
The earnestness of Lincoln’s efforts to impose rationality on public life reflected his intense internal struggle to bring coherence to his own, still unshaped personality. He was not yet sure who he was or how he wished to be perceived. He liked to associate with the “aristocratic” element of Springfield, who gathered around the wealthy and snobbish Ninian W. Edwardses, but he also wanted, as he said, to be “one of the boys,” the young and active workingmen and clerks who time after time supported his election to the state legislature. In his role of courteous gentleman he could write a gallant letter to Mrs. Browning, urging her to accompany her husband to the meeting of the legislature in Springfield, where he promised to “render unto your Honoress due attention and faithful obedience”; but he knew that many in the house of representatives joined Ewing in thinking him a “coarse and vulgar fellow.” He wanted to be regarded as a generous opponent, unwilling to hurt the feelings of a colleague; yet, with his high temper still not under control, he was capable of flaring up in debate and truculently announcing that if his opponents wanted to settle a dispute “at another tribunal” he “was always ready, and never shrunk from responsibility.” He thought of himself as a speaker who advanced strong, logical arguments, yet he learned from the Democratic Illinois State Register that many deplored his habit in his public appearances of putting on “a sort of assumed clownishness in his manner which does not become him, and which does not truly belong to him.”
Even Lincoln’s style betrayed his inner uncertainty. In most of his public speeches and legal papers, he kept to simple, pithy statements, notably devoid of ornamentation or rhetorical flourish. But on occasion, as in the lyceum address, he adopted the florid style so common in nineteenth-century oratory. America need have no fear of foreign invasion, he boasted: “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth... in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.” Or, in the unlikely context of defending the national bank, he announced: “If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before High Heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause ... of the land of my life, my liberty and my love.”
Similarly conflicted and contradictory were his attitudes toward women. Lincoln liked women and he wanted to know them. A month after he moved to Springfield in 1837, he lamented, “I have been spoken to by but one woman since I’ve been here, and should not have been by her, if she could have avoided it.” But he was awkward and uncomfortable when he was around them. He did not know how to behave. Sometimes he turned up for evening affairs wearing his rough Conestoga boots, and he once disrupted a party by commenting, “Oh boys, how clean these girls look.”
He met eligible young women primarily at the Sunday soirees that Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards held at their luxurious mansion. Edwards was a snob who found Lincoln “a mighty rough man,” but this ambitious son of a former Illinois governor thought the young lawyer might be politically useful. Elizabeth Todd Edwards’s ambitions were matrimonial; she seemed always to have as a guest an unmarried friend or relative who was looking for a husband. She had just married off one sister, Frances, to a local physician, William Wallace, and was ready to welcome others from her Kentucky home.
Around the Edwardses gathered the brightest and best of Springfield society. The handsome and soldierly John J. Hardin, a relative of Mrs. Edwards and likely candidate for Congress, attended most of their parties. So did Edward D. Baker, the enormously popular young Whig orator, who might one day have aspired to the presidency but for his British birth. O. H. Browning represented the conservative, better-educated element of the Whig party. Though the Edwardses were staunch Whigs, their soirees were nonpartisan, and they welcomed Stephen A. Douglas, now the leading Democrat in the state, already known as the “Little Giant” because his power belied his size. Democrat James Shields, the handsome Irish-born state auditor, was often a guest.
The Edwards entourage included the most attractive young women in Springfield. From time to time, Ninian Edwards welcomed a relative, such as his niece, the beautiful and pious Matilda Edwards. Julia Jayne, daughter of a Springfield doctor, nearly always attended the Edwards parties, as did Mercy Ann Levering when she was visiting from Baltimore. But nobody in the Edwards circle attracted more interest than Mrs. Edwards’s younger sister, Mary Todd.
The daughter of Robert S. Todd, a prosperous merchant and banker of Lexington, Kentucky, Mary had grown up in luxury, attended by family slaves and educated in the best private schools. Unable to get along with her stepmother, she decided, after a preliminary jaunt in 1837, to pay her sister an extended visit in 1839. Immediately this small, pretty young woman of twenty-two years, with beautiful fair skin, light chestnut hair, and remarkably vivid blue eyes, enchanted the other members of the group. Even Herndon, who came to hate her, described Mary as “young, dashing, handsome—witty... cultured—graceful and dignified,” though he also noted that she could be “sarcastic—haughty—aristocratic.” “She was an excellent conversationalist,” Herndon continued, “and she soon became the belle of the town, leading the young men of the town a merry dance.”
Abraham Lincoln was one of those who danced in attendance—literally so, since he first met Mary Todd at one of the Edwards’ parties and told her he wanted to dance with her “in the worst way.” And, Mary laughed, he did. Lincoln was enchanted by this vivacious, intelligent young woman, and soon he was one of her regular attendants at parties, on horseback rides, on jaunts to neighboring towns. Mary was entirely different from anyone he had ever known. He did not even feel awkward when talking to her, for she made up for his deficiencies as a conversationalist. Mrs. Edwards recalled that when they were together “Mary led the conversation—Lincoln would listen and gaze on her as if drawn by some superior power, irresistably [sic] so; he listened—never scarcely said a word.” Lincoln, she added, “could not hold a lengthy conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently educated and intelligent in the female line to do so. He was charmed with Mary’s wit and fascinated with her quick sagacity—her will—her nature—and culture.”
In receiving Lincoln’s attentions, Mary had to think of him, as she did of the other young men who gathered around her, as a potential husband. Marriage was now very much on her mind. She was just short of becoming an old maid, and, except for schoolteaching, no other career was open to women of her class. There were not many eligible bachelors. She very much liked Douglas, with whom she flirted outrageously, to their mutual amusement, but both quickly recognized that his mind was on his career and he was not seriously interested in matrimony. She found Speed handsome and charming, but he seemed attracted to the devout Matilda Edwards. The widower Edwin B. Webb, another Springfield attorney, was an earnest suitor, but he suffered from the disadvantages of being considerably older than Mary and of having what she called “two sweet little objections,” the children of his first marriage. She was realistic enough to recognize that, despite all the attentions she received, “my beaux have always been hard bargains.”
By comparison, Lincoln looked increasingly attractive. He lacked social graces, but his honesty, his
courtesy, and his considerateness compensated for the deficiency. They shared many interests. Both were Kentuckians. Both loved poetry and had memorized many of the same poems, especially those by Robert Burns. Like him, she was a Whig. At a time when women were not supposed to profess an interest in politics, she openly supported Harrison for President in 1840, though, like Lincoln, she would have preferred Henry Clay, a friend of her family and a neighbor in Lexington. She was pleased by Lincoln’s ambition; in Kentucky she had often said jokingly that she intended to marry a man who would some day become President of the United States.
By the fall of 1840 she and Lincoln were edging toward a closer relationship, and that prospect may have contributed to his sometimes boisterous conduct toward his fellow legislators and even to his much publicized leap from the statehouse window. The Edwardses favored the match. Ninian Edwards said he desired it “for policy.” He did not explain his meaning, but doubtless he had in mind linking to his already influential family a promising young lawyer and politician. Mrs. Edwards also encouraged it, recognizing that Lincoln was “a rising man.” Sometime around Christmas, Abraham and Mary became engaged.
Once Lincoln had made a commitment, he began to have second thoughts—much as he had done in his engagement to Mary Owens. It was as if he was reluctant to marry anyone who was willing to accept him. He began to suspect that the Edwardses had planned the match and had maneuvered him into proposing. Belatedly, though with some reason, he worried about his ability to support a wife. He had now an income of more than $1,000 a year from his legal practice, plus his salary as a state legislator, but neither source was certain. His law partnership was about to be dissolved. Stuart, who had been in Washington for most of the past two years, had contributed little to the practice, and, now that his reelection to a second term in the House of Representatives was virtually conceded, it made no sense to continue his empty partnership with Lincoln. Lincoln was not even assured of his income from the state legislature. With the collapse of the internal improvements system and the resulting bankruptcy of the state, he and his associates had come under increasingly bitter, and sometimes personal, attack. His political popularity was declining; in the 1840 election he was no longer the candidate who received the most votes, and in the rural precincts there was a movement to reject him and the other members of what was termed “the Springfield junto.” He resolved not to stand for reelection when his present term in the legislature expired. Thus in 1840 he was a man without reliable income, who had no savings and owned no house but probably still owed something on his “National Debt” from his New Salem days. He knew he could not give Mary the life of wealth and luxury to which she was accustomed.
These anxieties covered his deeper uncertainties about marriage. Like Speed, with whom he shared his most intimate thoughts, he was probably still sexually inexperienced. Both young men had grown up in a rough frontier society where, except in family arrangements, men and women kept largely to themselves and where, in all-male gatherings, there was much big talk and rough humor about sex—and usually much less experience. Both young men had highly romantic notions about women and marriage; as Lincoln wrote his friend later, “It is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me, to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realize.” At the same time, they shared “forebodings” about marriage, which evoked fears of “something indescribably horrible and alarming.” Probably they were anxious about their own, as yet untested, sexual adequacy; in addition, they must have worried about how to go about transforming the adored object of chaste passion into a bed partner. Both Lincoln and Speed rationalized their fears as apprehension that they did not love their fiancées as they should.
In Lincoln’s case all these anxieties were heightened by Speed’s decision to sell his interest in his store on January 1, in preparation for a return to Kentucky in the spring. Lincoln had to move out of the upstairs room they shared and find lodgings with William Butler. A very private person, Lincoln was about to lose his best and closest friend, at just the moment when he was being rushed into a new, potentially very dangerous kind of intimacy with Mary. The man who wanted to live in a universe governed by cold reason found himself awash on a sea of turbulent emotions.
His nerve snapped. He decided he had to break the engagement, and he wrote Mary a letter saying that he did not love her. Speed tried to persuade him to burn it. “If you think you have will and manhood enough to go and see her and speak to her what you say in that letter,” he told him, “you may do that. Words are forgotten ... but once put your words in writing and they stand as a living and eternal monument against you.”
Reluctantly Lincoln accepted his friend’s advice and went to the Edwards mansion. When he told Mary he did not love her, she burst into tears. At first she blamed herself; remembering a young man in Kentucky whose attentions she had deliberately encouraged only to spurn him, she exclaimed, “The deciever shall be decieved wo is me.” Deeply moved, Lincoln “drew her down on his knee kissed her—and parted.”
When he told Speed what had happened, his friend said, “The last thing is a bad lick, but it cannot now be helped,” and he assumed the engagement still stood. But after Lincoln left, Mary brooded over “the reason of his change of mind—heart and soul” and concluded—without any real justification—that he was in love with Matilda Edwards. She wrote Lincoln a letter releasing him from his engagement, yet letting him know “that she would hold the question an open one—that is that she had not changed her mind, but felt as always.”
Instead of feeling relieved, Lincoln was devastated. Just as Mary Owens’s refusal had caused him to suspect that he really loved her, so Mary’s letter made him realize what he had lost. He became deeply depressed. During the first week in January he was able to go about his business, in a more or less perfunctory way, and to answer roll calls in the house of representatives. But then the burden of guilt and unhappiness became too great, and he took to his bed for about a week, unwilling to see anybody except Speed and Dr. Henry.
During this period some of his friends feared he might commit suicide. Years later Speed said he had felt obliged “to remove razors from his room—take any all knives and other such dangerous things,” but a fellow legislator, who boarded with Lincoln at Butler’s house, recalled: “His most intimate friends had no fears of his injuring himself. He was very sad and melancholy, but being subject to these spells, nothing serious was apprehended.” His mind was in turmoil as he reflected on what he had done and how he had acted. Bitterly he reproached himself for inconstancy. “My own ability to keep my resolves when they are made,” he told Speed, was once the source of pride “as the only, or at least the chief, gem of my character.” Now that was lost. He was haunted by “the never-absent idea” that he had made Mary unhappy. “That still kills my soul,” he wrote his best friend. “I can not but reproach myself, for even wishing to be happy while she is otherwise.”
By the end of January he was able to resume his routine work, but in a listless, sporadic fashion. “I have, within the last few days, been making a most discreditable exhibition of myself in the way of hypochondriaism,” he told Stuart on January 20, but he could not control his emotions even long enough to offer an explanation. “I have not sufficient composure to write a long letter,” he informed his partner. Three days later his condition had not improved. “I am now the most miserable man living,” he informed Stuart. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”
Lincoln’s collapse became the subject of public comment and gossip. Some of his acquaintances, not aware of the seriousness of his illness, were lighthearted about Lincoln’s having had “two Cat fits, and a Duck fit.” Better informed, James C. Conkling wrote Mercy Levering that after a week in the sickroom Lincoln “is reduced and emaciated in appearance and seems scarcely to possess strength enough to speak above a whisper. His case at present is truly deplorable.” The Edward
ses said flatly that he was crazy. Presently there were rumors about the causes of his depression. Springfield concluded that Lincoln was grieving because Mary Todd had broken their engagement. In this scenario Lincoln appeared, as Conkling wrote, a “poor hapless simple swain who loved most true but was not loved again.”
VIII
During the following months Lincoln tried to bring his life back under control. Dropping out of the Edwards social circle, he no longer saw much of his friends, and, as Conkling rightly suspected, he tried “to drown his cares among the intricacies and perplexities of the law.” In April he took a major step toward solving his financial uncertainties by entering into law partnership with Stephen T. Logan. From the outset Logan & Lincoln, with an office on the east side of North Fifth Street, had many clients, but Lincoln, who probably received a third, rather than one-half, of the fees, did not make a great deal of money.
He was still unhappy and far from well. In August he decided to visit Speed, who had returned to Kentucky, and for nearly a month he stayed at Farmington, the Speed home near Louisville. In that spacious mansion, built by skilled Philadelphia artisans around 1809, he experienced a life of leisure that he had never known before. Everything was arranged for his comfort. One of the house slaves was even assigned to be his personal servant. Lincoln took long walks in the fields with Joshua. He made friends with Mary, Joshua Speed’s half sister, and on trips into Louisville he met his brother, James Speed, who lent him books from his law library. The devout Mrs. Speed, observing that he was still very melancholy, had long, motherly talks with him and presented him with a Bible, urging him “to read it—to adopt its precepts and pray for its promises.” “I intend to read it regularly when I return home,” he promised, adding equivocally, “I doubt not that it is really... the best cure for the ‘Blues’ could one but take it according to the truth.”
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