Final Resting Place
Page 28
The family Lincoln and Martha shared smiles, while I turned back to the road and drove on. It had been a busy week in Springfield, one filled with departures. On Monday, Henry Truett, eager for his new Oregon posting, had ridden out of town. He planned to winter in Des Moines before pressing west with the melting snows.
On Wednesday, Sarah Butler had departed with the tents and platform of the camp meeting for parts unknown. Along with some of the other female exhorters, Miss Butler vowed to carry on the work of Preacher Crews, who had not been seen or heard from since that fateful Sunday in August. The faithful had concluded that the preacher had been called away for a personal audience with the Almighty, an event that only redoubled their fervor to spread the Word up and down the frontier.
The unnamed dueling island in the middle of the Sangamon River already harbored many secrets. One more would not tip the balance.
On Thursday, Lincoln’s law partner John Todd Stuart had left for Washington, where he was to assume the U.S. congressional seat for the Illinois Third District. The local Whigs threw a great party in the shadows of the capitol walls—now rising to a second story—to send him off. In the final, official tally, Stuart had defeated Douglas by a mere thirty-six votes out of 37,000 cast. George Weber published a new article in every edition of the Illinois Democrat decrying the supposed fraud that had stolen the seat from Douglas and the Democrats, but the complaints were in vain. Somehow, someway, Stuart had won.
If his ally in the press was still fighting the last war, Stephen Douglas was assuredly preparing for the next one. Douglas was well on to his next scheme for gaining power at Lincoln’s expense. There was talk that he had set his sights on the Illinois Supreme Court, where he would have supervisory powers over Lincoln and all the other lawyers in the state. The one thing I could say with complete confidence was that we hadn’t heard the last of Douglas.
Consumed with these thoughts, it took me a few moments to realize we had reached our destination: New Salem. I drove toward the mill on the edge of the river.
“There she is,” said Lincoln to his father and stepbrother. He pointed at the mill as it came into sight. “Like I told you, that’s the very mill that snagged me the first time I ever floated down these waters. It’s been abandoned for a couple of years now, but I wager the two of you can get the wheel working in no time. And while I can’t promise there’re too many folks in the environs, I do know there’ll be a consistent demand for a working mill right in the middle of town.”
Thomas Lincoln stood up and gazed at the mill and wheel longingly. I pulled the reins to slow up our two horses lest the old man pitch over.
“Lookee there, Johnnie,” said Thomas, a trembling hand pointing toward the mill. “Lookee there! Just what we’ve been hoping for.”
“Could be, Papa,” said Johnston.
“Why don’t you take a closer look,” said Lincoln. I pulled up in front of the mill and Johnston jumped out, and he and Lincoln together helped Thomas Lincoln step down slowly from the carriage. “Take a look and talk to the folks hereabouts. We’ll be back to pick you up in about an hour, unless you decide you want to stay and make a go of it.”
When the two men were safely clear of the carriage, I gave a shake of the reins and we lurched into motion again.
“That worked out well,” I said. “It was a brilliant idea on your part, Lincoln. Gets them gainfully employed and keeps them out of your path for good.”
“I think that’s most unlikely,” said Lincoln, watching his father and stepbrother as they faded into the distance.
A few minutes later we reached our other destination: the burying grounds on Concord Ridge. I pulled up the horses at the top of the ridge beneath a clear blue sky. Spread out before us was the sweeping hillside and beyond that the receding prairie, now flecked with the reds and browns of the coming fall.
A cool breeze blew through. Instinctively, I touched the right arm of my coat, but I found it bare. There had been one more departure as well this week. The mourning period for our sister Ann had finally passed. I had taken my black band off my sleeve for good and placed it carefully at the bottom of my trunk. Our youngest sister was gone, but she would never be forgotten.
Lincoln, Martha, and I sat in the still carriage and gazed out wordlessly at the decaying prairie, nature’s timeless cycle of birth, death, and renewal playing out before our eyes. Then Lincoln sighed, grasped the package by his side with both hands, and climbed out.
He helped Martha down, and she led him over to the headboard for James Rutledge and the simple white cross next to it. Lincoln carefully placed his package on the ground a few feet away and unwrapped it. It was a slab of marble, engraved:
Ann Rutledge
1813–1835
Beloved
Lincoln knelt on the earth next to the white cross. He took a small spade from his pocket, and he started to dig.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Those who think the current political moment is beset by unique coarseness and animosity would do well to study the American political environment of the nineteenth century, especially in the Western states such as Illinois. By comparison to that historical record, the current political class is—to adapt the famous dictum—playing beanbags.
Final Resting Place is a work of imaginative fiction, but it is based directly on the life and times of the young Abraham Lincoln and his roommate and lifelong close friend, Joshua Speed. Lincoln and Speed shared a bed in the room above Speed’s general store in Springfield from 1837 until 1841. The only time during that period when Speed returned home to his native Louisville was to attend the funeral of his youngest sister, Ann Speed, who died suddenly in early 1838. For the rest of his life, Speed would recall the vivid dream about Ann he had one night during his return journey to Springfield.
Each of the principal political events of 1838 Springfield depicted in the novel actually did occur that year in Springfield in something very close to the form portrayed. In real life, Jacob Early, an aspirant to the position of federal land office registrar, was shot and killed after a dispute with Henry Truett, the holder of the land office job, in the gentlemen’s smoking lounge of Colonel Spotswood’s Rural Hotel in central Springfield.
Truett was accused of the crime and hired Lincoln to defend him. After the regular prosecutor was recused from the case, Stephen Douglas was appointed by Judge Jesse B. Thomas Jr. to handle the prosecution. So, just as in the novel, Lincoln and Douglas tried the People vs. Truett murder case against each other in what was the highest-profile trial of the year in Springfield.
Since Springfield’s old courthouse had been torn down and the new one was under construction (as part of the new capitol building), the actual trial was held in an office at Hoffman’s Row, directly underneath Lincoln and Stuart’s law offices. The sessions of the Sangamon County Circuit Court were to take place at Hoffman’s Row for several years as the capitol construction slowly progressed, and many contemporaneous accounts report on Lincoln opening the trapdoor in his floor and leaning down precariously into the courtroom below.
Lincoln and Douglas would appear together in the same legal case dozens of times during their largely coextensive legal careers. As depicted in the novel, they were also principal political rivals in Illinois beginning in the 1830s, a contest that would span more than two decades. Speed later recalled that the “two great rivals, Lincoln and Douglas … seemed to have been pitted against each other from 1836 till Lincoln reached the Presidency.” Their most famous political clash would come much later, of course, when they faced each other in the 1858 campaign for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois, the campaign featuring the landmark Lincoln–Douglas Debates.
But that’s getting ahead of the story. In the most important political races of 1838, again as in the novel, Lincoln ran for reelection to the state legislature while his law partner John T. Stuart faced Douglas in the race for U.S. Congress. The entire political season was nasty and violent, highlighted by a raucous debate at the Spri
ngfield market house at which a prominent Whig (in reality it was Stuart, not Speed), enraged by the provocative speechmaking of the diminutive Douglas, picked up the Little Giant and paraded him around the market house to widespread ridicule. In response, Douglas bit Stuart’s thumb so hard it became infected, and Stuart was forced to miss the final debate of the campaign. Stuart was said to bear the scar of Douglas’s bite for the rest of his life.
As in the book, the actual election took place on August 6, 1838. Lincoln won reelection to his seat in the state legislature easily, capturing the most votes among all seventeen candidates, but the U.S. Congress race was very close and highly contested. The early returns had Douglas ahead decisively. “Douglas is elected,” conceded Simeon Francis’s Whig organ the Sangamo Journal on August 11, 1838. But then additional votes for Stuart continued to trickle in, many from highly suspect sources. Both sides alleged fraud as the votes were counted and recounted. In the end, Stuart was adjudged the winner by thirty-six votes out of 36,472 cast. Douglas and the Democrats protested loudly but to no avail, and it was Stuart who took the seat in Washington.
Unbowed by his loss, the Little Giant continued his meteoric rise in Illinois politics. Douglas was named secretary of state in 1840 and became a justice on the Illinois Supreme Court at the age of twenty-seven in 1841. He was elected U.S. senator in 1846, a position he held until his death in 1861. He was several times a presidential candidate, including in 1860 against Lincoln. As a politician, he was a vocal proponent of “popular sovereignty,” which advocated letting the people of each state decide important issues for themselves. In the highly charged politics of the time, this equated to supporting the right of the southern states to maintain slavery.
Throughout his political career, Douglas also continued to practice law. He was a man of great talents and many peculiarities. One in particular, noted by many contemporaries, was his habit of sitting upon the laps of other, larger men in court while he was simultaneously engaged as counsel or even as a judge in the case.
Roving self-styled preachers who set up camp meetings of revival were a common feature of the American frontier in the 1830s, part of the Second Great Awakening of religious fervor that swept the country in the first half of the nineteenth century. Shut out of nearly every other aspect of public life, women often played a large role in these revivals. A controversial tent meeting headed by a Preacher Crews was established near Springfield in the late 1830s, which produced many saved souls and just as many non-believers.
Numerous books have been written on the question of Lincoln’s religious beliefs, which is one of the most hotly contested areas of Lincoln scholarship. Speed later wrote that, “in early life, [Lincoln] was a skeptic. He had tried hard to be a believer, but his reason could not grasp and solve the great problem of redemption as taught.” It is probably fair to say that Lincoln believed deeply in a God but that his beliefs did not easily align with those of any major religious denomination.
The political wars of the 1830s prominently featured anonymous letters to the editors of local newspapers. Such letters often contained baseless charges that the authors were not comfortable airing over their actual name. In one notable series of letters from 1837, Lincoln, writing as “Sampson’s Ghost,” criticized the position of a legal and political opponent, one James Adams. Lincoln’s efforts to tarnish Adams were largely unsuccessful, and the litigation in question dragged out inconclusively for many years.
It was the mischief caused by another series of anonymous letters that provoked the only duel challenge of Lincoln’s public career. In an episode in 1842 that later caused Lincoln much embarrassment, letters signed only “Rebecca” appeared in the Sangamo Journal, criticizing the official behavior of state auditor James Shields. Historians generally believe Mary Todd (whom Lincoln was courting at the time) was chiefly responsible for writing the Rebecca letters, but Lincoln gallantly took sole responsibility.
Shields challenged Lincoln to a duel, a challenge Lincoln felt obligated to accept. But, as the challenged party, Lincoln got to choose the duelists’ weapons. He famously specified “cavalry broadswords of the largest size,” which were much less likely to prove fatal than were pistols. (One imagines Lincoln also hoped to benefit from his much longer reach when employing broadswords against the five-foot-nine-inch Shields.) The two combatants met on Bloody Island, but—happily for the future course of U.S. history—the seconds were able to work out a last-minute compromise and the broadswords were never unsheathed.
Other figures of note in Springfield also had frequent scrapes with dueling. Indeed, according to one source, Jacob Early, the very man whose murder sparked the trial of Henry Truett, “earned the epithet ‘the fighting parson’ for his habit of resigning his pastorate in order to fight duels that never quite came off.” In a perfectly symmetrical ending to the story, Truett himself left Springfield shortly after his trial and headed for the Pacific coast. In San Francisco, he got into an argument with a business associate, challenged him to a duel, and shot and killed him.
Lincoln had strained relations throughout his life with his largely uneducated father Thomas and his stepbrother John Johnston, whom Lincoln condemned for living off of Thomas’s meager resources. Thomas and Johnston lived an itinerant life, moving from place to place together in search of money-making schemes. They frequently asked Lincoln for loans (which, invariably, were not repaid), and on at least one occasion Lincoln paid off a large debt the two men had incurred.
In one episode, Johnston wrote to Lincoln that he needed to return home urgently because Thomas Lincoln was on his deathbed. Lincoln abandoned an ongoing legal case and raced home, only to find Thomas in good health and in need of money. Several years later, Johnston again wrote to Lincoln to say that Thomas was on his deathbed. Though Lincoln was only one day’s ride away, this time he ignored the plea and did not come to visit. Thomas Lincoln passed away a few weeks later, never seeing his son again. Lincoln did not attend his father’s funeral and refused to pay for a gravestone.
Lincoln’s early relationships with women were nearly as tumultuous. He fell in love with Ann Rutledge in New Salem, a woman already engaged to another man who alternately went by the names John McNamar and John McNeil. After a long, fitful courtship with Lincoln, Ann agreed to break off her engagement with the missing McNamar and marry Lincoln. But she died suddenly of “brain fever” (probably meningitis) in August 1835. As in the novel, McNamar returned to New Salem shortly thereafter to find out that his intended had forsaken him for Lincoln and then passed away.
The character of Margaret Owens is based on Mary Owens, whom Lincoln courted in Springfield after the death of Ann Rutledge. By some accounts, Lincoln successfully proposed to Miss Owens and later tried to back out of the engagement; by others, Lincoln proposed to her and was rebuffed. In any event, later in life Lincoln referred with much embarrassment to his haphazard conduct. “Others have been made fools of by the girls,” he wrote, “but this can never with truth be said of me. I most emphatically, in this instance, made a fool of myself.”
ALSO AVAILABLE BY JONATHAN F. PUTNAM
Lincoln and Speed Mysteries
Perish from the Earth
These Honored Dead
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jonathan F. Putnam is a writer and attorney. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he is a nationally renowned trial lawyer and avid amateur Lincoln scholar. He currently lives with his family in London, England. This is his third Lincoln and Speed mystery.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan F. Putnam.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-598-8
ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-599-5
ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-600-8
Cover design by Melanie Sun.
Book design by Jennifer Canzone.
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
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New York, NY 10001
First Edition: July 2018
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