Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  All in all, it was a most successful vacation, and Lincoln was so charmed by his Kentucky experiences that he did not even wince when, on the steamboat returning home, he encountered twelve chained slaves, “strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line.” A “gentleman” was taking them from their Kentucky homes to the Deep South, where, Lincoln recognized, “the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where.” Years later he would remember the brutality of the scene, but now, absorbed in his own unhappiness, he noted only that the slaves were “the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board.”

  In Kentucky he came to realize that Speed was facing a psychological crisis much like his own. His friend was engaged to Fanny Henning, a vivacious girl with what Lincoln called “heavenly black eyes,” but as the time for marriage neared, he began to have second thoughts. He worried that he did not love Fanny as he should. Back in Springfield, Lincoln watched the development of the affair with almost painful interest, and he sent a stream of letters designed to keep his friend’s spirits up and to encourage him to marry. In effect, Lincoln and Speed were acting out a game of doctor and patient; in the winter of 1840–1841 Lincoln had been the sufferer and Speed had offered encouraging advice; now it was Speed who was at risk and Lincoln was trying to save his health and sanity.

  In arguing with Speed, Lincoln was also arguing with himself. Did his friend fear he did not love his fiancée enough? “What nonsense!” Lincoln exclaimed. Speed had not courted Fanny for her wealth, because she had none, and he had not wooed her because she was “moral, aimiable, sensible, or even of good character.” He had asked her to marry him because he had fallen head over heels in love with her. After Speed confessed to “excessively bad feeling” when Fanny became seriously ill, Lincoln took this as “indubitable evidence of your undying affection for her.” “Why Speed,” he reasoned, “if you did not love her, although you might not wish her death, you would most calmly be resigned to it.” As the date for Speed’s marriage approached, Lincoln warned that it was “probable, that your nerves will fail you occasionally for a while,” but he predicted that all would be well if his friend avoided exposure to bad weather—which, he noted, “my experience clearly proves to be verry severe on defective nerves”—and did not allow himself to be idle. “In two or three months, to say the most,” he predicted, you “will be the happiest of men.”

  Once the wedding took place, a different note entered Lincoln’s letters. He awaited “with intense anxiety and trepidation” Speed’s report on his marriage. When Speed reported that he was far happier than he ever expected to be, Lincoln was overjoyed. “I am not going beyond the truth, when I tell you, that the short space it took me to read your last letter, gave me more pleasure, than the total sum of all I have enjoyed since that fatal first of Jany. ’41.” He might have left it at that, but he needed to make sure that Speed, after all his doubts and suffering, was happy. Eight months after the wedding he asked bluntly: “Are you now, in feeling as well as judgment, glad you are married as you are?” “From any body but me,” he realized, “this would be an impudent question not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me.”

  IX

  He had a reason for asking Speed to reply quickly, for he was once more approaching marriage with Mary Todd. After their rupture the two had tried to avoid each other, but in a small town like Springfield each was always conscious of what the other was doing. Then Mrs. Simeon Francis, wife of Lincoln’s good friend, the editor of the Sangamo Journal, decided to intervene. Inviting both Lincoln and Mary to a social affair, she brought them face-to-face and enjoined, “Be friends again.”

  Presently they began meeting at the Francis house, keeping the secret from everyone except Dr. Henry, who was carefully monitoring Lincoln’s physical and emotional health, and Julia Jayne, Mary’s most intimate friend. They took special care not to let the Edwardses know, because after the engagement was broken, they had bluntly told Mary that she and Lincoln “had better not ever marry—that their natures, mind—education—raising etc. were so different they could not live happily as husband and wife.”

  In these private meetings the couple rediscovered that they had many interests in common, and their growing intimacy was given a special boost by a political contretemps. In February 1842 the State Bank of Illinois, which Lincoln had so often defended in the state legislature, had been forced to close, and its notes became worthless. As commerce virtually ceased throughout Illinois, state auditor Shields quite properly issued a directive that the bank’s notes would not be accepted in payment of taxes. Immediately Whigs tried to take advantage of the crisis to attack the Democratic administration of the state and especially Shields, who, next to Douglas, was the most prominent young Democrat in Illinois, almost certainly slated for higher office.

  No one took a more active part in this assault than Lincoln, who always had access to the columns of the Sangamo Journal. Picking up the pseudonym of someone who had written several amusing letters to the editor from “Lost Townships,” he used the persona of “Rebecca,” a rough, uneducated, but shrewd countrywoman, to attack Democratic policies and to make fun of Shields. Effectively imitating the rural idiom, he reported “Aunt Becca’s” conversation with “neighbor S——,” who claimed that the financial crisis was invented by the politicians and that Shields’s proclamation was “a lie, and not a well told one at that. It grins out like a copper dollar. Shields is a fool as well as a liar. With him truth is out of the question.”

  Then, allowing his sense of humor free rein, Lincoln had “Aunt Becca” report her neighbor’s description of Shields at a charitable fair the previous winter attended by all the eligible young women of Springfield: “He was paying his money to this one and that one, and tother one ...; and the sweet distress he seemed to be in,—his very features, in the exstatic agony of his soul, spoke audibly and distinctly—’Dear girls, it is distressing, but I cannot marry you all. Too well I know how much you suffer; but do, do, remember, it is not my fault that I am so handsome and so interesting.’”

  Obviously Lincoln had fun writing his “Lost Townships” letter, and when he proudly showed his manuscript to Mary Todd and Julia Jayne, they helped him sharpen its barbs before it appeared in the Sangamo Journal on September 2. Carried away by the excitement, the two young women decided to write their own letter, a rather clumsy effort that capitalized on the rumor that Shields was going to demand personal satisfaction for the insults he had received; they had Aunt Rebecca offer: “Let him only come here, and he may squeeze my hand If that ain’t personal satisfaction, I can only say that he is the fust man that was not satisfied with squeezin my hand.” They followed this up with a doggerel, signed “Cathleen,” announcing Shields’s approaching marriage to “Rebecca, the widow.”

  In selecting Shields as the object of their ridicule, the three were playing a dangerous game. They had attacked the state auditor at his most vulnerable points, for, though a man of good sense and excellent character, he had ornate and affected manners and fancied himself irresistible to women. Moreover he had no sense of humor. Hot-tempered and excitable, Shields demanded that Simeon Francis reveal the name of his anonymous assailant. In order to protect the women, Lincoln authorized Francis to say he was responsible for all the “Lost Townships” letters. On September 17, 1842, Shields wrote Lincoln “requiring a full, positive and absolute retraction of all offensive allusions used by you in these communications.” The consequences of a refusal he did not specify, but they did not need spelling out. Shields, an expert shot, was a military man, familiar with the protocol of the code duello.

  Shields’s letter, borne by his designated friend, General John D. Whiteside, the state fund commissioner, reached Lincoln in Tremont, where he was attending the Tazewell County Circuit Court, and his initial reaction was that he was “wholly opposed to duelling, and would do anything to avoid it that might not degrade him in the estimation of himself and friend
s.” Left to himself, he probably would have made peace with Shields, denying any intention to reflect on his character. But Lincoln made the mistake of consulting a hot-blooded young Springfield physician, Dr. Elias H. Merryman, who clearly wanted a duel to take place. Under Merryman’s coaching he refused to apologize, because Shields’s letter had contained “so much assumption of facts, and so much of menace.” He would, he told Merryman, fight before submitting to “such degradation.”

  After that, Whiteside brought Shields’s challenge to a duel, and Lincoln named Merryman his second. As the party challenged, Lincoln had the right to name the weapons, and he chose broadswords. He had had some experience with cavalry swords during the Black Hawk War, and, under instruction from another young Springfield lawyer, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, he had probably been exercising with them for some weeks. Anyway, he realized that, with his height and long arms, broadswords would give him a considerable advantage over Shields, who was only five feet nine inches tall. Lincoln took the proposed encounter with great seriousness. “I did not intend to hurt Shields unless I did so clearly in self-defense,” he said later. “If it had been necessary I could have split him from the crown of his head to the end of his backbone.”

  Because dueling was outlawed by the Illinois state constitution, with a penitentiary sentence of one to five years for those convicted of the offense, any encounter between Shields and Lincoln had to take place out of the state, and the parties agreed on a spot in Missouri, across the Mississippi River from Alton. Haste was necessary, for news of the impending duel had spread through Springfield, and arrests for all the participants were threatened.

  Accompanied by Merryman, Bledsoe, and William Butler, Lincoln arrived at Alton on September 22 and crossed the river to the dueling ground, where they met Shields’s party. Just as the encounter was about to begin, John J. Hardin, Lincoln’s political associate and a relative of Mary Todd, and Dr. R. W. English intervened to try to stop the fight. As friends of both parties, they persuaded Shields to withdraw his insulting note, so that Lincoln could disavow any intention of injuring the auditor’s “personal or private character or standing ... as a man or a gentleman” and claim that he wrote the “Lost Townships” correspondence “solely for political effect.”

  With that, the parties shook hands and returned to Illinois. The episode remained one of Lincoln’s most painful memories. He was so ashamed of it that he and Mary “mutually agreed—never to speak, of it.” Years later during the Civil War, when an impertinent army officer referred to the affair, Lincoln, with a flushed face, replied, “I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship, you will never mention it again.” Of course, he was humiliated to remember that he had acted foolishly, and he was embarrassed that, as a lawyer and officer of the court, he had deliberately violated the law. But what really hurt was the realization that he had allowed himself to be ruled by his turbulent emotions. With anguish he remembered how he had so recently urged his fellow citizens to be guided by “reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason.”

  But the Shields affair also had some unanticipated benefits. For one thing, it taught Lincoln a lesson about publishing anonymous letters. This practice, which probably dated back to his days as a freshman legislator in Vandalia, had led to the acrimonious exchanges with Adams in the “Sampson’s Ghost” correspondence and now to the dangerous encounter with Shields in the “Lost Townships” letters. Thereafter Lincoln wrote no more such letters. It also helped him understand how painful the unintended effects of his undisciplined sense of humor could be. Rarely in the future did he use comedy to castigate and destroy; he had learned that his wit was most effective when directed against himself.

  But the greatest positive result of the Shields encounter was the renewal of his engagement to Mary Todd, who was touched by his chivalry in covering her contributions to the “Lost Townships” letters. Encouraged by Speed’s assurances that he was very happy with Fanny, Lincoln renewed his offer of marriage and was accepted. At the last possible moment they informed the Edwardses, for, as she told her sister, “the world—woman, and man were uncertain and slippery and... it was best to keep the secret courtship from all eyes and ears.” Elizabeth Edwards, who delighted in giving grand parties, had only a few hours to prepare for the wedding on November 4.

  Lincoln was equally secretive, and he did not ask James H. Matheny, his close friend who worked in the circuit court office, to act as his best man until late afternoon of the wedding day. As he prepared for the ceremony, Lincoln, like many another bridegroom, began to get cold feet, and Matheny recalled that he “looked and acted as if he were going to the slaughter.” While he was dressing and blacking his boots, Speed Butler, the son of his landlord, asked where he was going, and Lincoln replied, “To hell, I suppose.”

  Despite the haste and the forebodings, the wedding ceremony, presided over by Episcopal minister Charles Dresser, went off without incident, and Lincoln placed on his wife’s finger a ring engraved “Love is eternal.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Always a Whig

  “Nothing new here,” Lincoln wrote a friend on November 11, 1842, “except my marrying, which to me, is matter of profound wonder.” In the years ahead he was to have many occasions to wonder, for his marriage marked a change in the direction of his career. After 1842 his turbulent mood swings, which alternated between grandiosity and depression, were greatly moderated. He put himself on the steady course of a proper, aspiring member of the bourgeoisie. He became a parent and a householder. He assiduously cultivated his profession and business as a lawyer. And he became what he had belittled in his lyceum speech, one of those “great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake..., whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair.”

  I

  The newlyweds took up residence in the Globe Tavern, a simple, two-story wooden structure on the north side of Adams Street, between Third and Fourth streets. It had about thirty rooms, mostly for transients, but in addition, according to its advertisement, it offered “eight pleasant and comfortable rooms for boarders.” There, for $4 a week, the Lincolns occupied an eight-by-fourteen-foot room on the second floor and took their meals in the common dining room. This was not an unusual arrangement for a young married couple. John Todd Stuart had taken his wife to the Globe for a time after their marriage. Indeed, Mary Lincoln’s sister Frances and her husband, Dr. William Wallace, had stayed for three years in the very room that the Lincolns occupied. Though the Globe was a respectable hotel, its accommodations were inferior to those of its principal competitor, the American House, and it was often noisy.

  Lincoln, who was away at his law office most of the days when he was not out traveling the judicial circuit, was happy enough with the Globe Tavern; indeed, it was probably the most comfortable place he had ever resided. For Mary, the hotel was a comedown after her father’s spacious house in Lexington and the Edwards’s luxurious mansion; for the first time in her life she had no personal servants or slaves, no place to store or display her possessions, no private room where she could receive callers. To add to her discomfort, the proprietor of the Globe was stingy, scanting his guests on food and begrudging them candles.

  But she voiced no dissatisfaction with her lot. Nor did she complain when her sisters, who had warned her against an unsuitable marriage, largely dropped her from their social circle. She was so much in love with her husband that she was willing to live a very quiet, almost secluded life, and the name of this formerly lively, sociable young woman virtually disappeared from Springfield letters and gossip.

  Pregnancy helped account for the remarkable transformation. The sexual fears Lincoln had voiced before marriage proved groundless, and very soon Mary knew she was expecting a baby. She may not have told her husband right away, for in March, Lincoln, in response to a jovial inquiry from Speed, wrote, “About the prospect of your having a namesake at our house cant say, exactly yet.” But b
y May, Springfield was buzzing about “coming events” in the Lincoln family, and William Butler wrote Speed the news. When Speed made further inquiry, Lincoln responded jokingly: “I had not heard one word before I got your letter; but I have so much confidence in the judgement of a Butler on such a subject, that I incline to think there may be some reality in it. What day does Butler appoint?” On August 1, 1843, just three days short of nine months after the wedding, the Lincolns’ first child was born. They named him Robert Todd Lincoln, after Mary’s father.

  In this trying period Lincoln did his best to be supportive, and after Robert’s birth Mary awoke to see her “darling husband,... bending over me, with such love and tenderness.” But such displays of affection were rare. As Mary said years later, Lincoln “was not a demonstrative man, when he felt most deeply, he expressed the least.” The relationship between husband and wife was never an equal one. She always addressed him, in formal Victorian style, as “Mr. Lincoln.” Before they were married, he sometimes called her “Molly,” but now in his letters he referred to her as “Mary.” In private, he called her “Puss” and, more significantly, “little woman” or “child-wife.” After Robert’s birth, he always addressed her as “Mother.”