Lincoln, the unknown Page 5

  On a quiet summer evening this old lady sat in a rocking-chair on her porch and told the author: "I have often heard Pa say that after Ann's death Mr. Lincoln would walk five miles out to Ann's grave and stay there so long that Pa would get worried and fear something would happen to him, and go and bring him home. . . . Yes, Pa was with the undertaker when Ann's grave was opened, and I have often heard him tell that the only trace they could find of Ann's body was four pearl buttons from her dress."

  So the undertaker scooped up the four pearl buttons, and some dirt and interred them in his new Oakland Cemetery at Petersburg—and then advertised that Ann Rutledge was buried there.

  And now, in the summer months, thousands of pilgrims motor there to dream over what purports to be her grave; I have seen them stand with bowed heads and shed tears above the four pearl buttons. Over those four buttons there stands a beautiful granite monument bearing this verse from Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology":

  Out of me unworthy and unknown

  The vibrations of deathless music:

  "With malice toward none, with charity for all."

  Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

  And the beneficent face of a nation

  Shining with justice and truth.

  I am Ann Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

  Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

  Wedded to him, not through union,

  But through separation.

  Bloom forever, O Republic,

  From the dust of my bosom!

  But Ann's sacred dust remains in the old Concord Cemetery. The rapacious undertaker could not carry it away—she and her memories are still there. Where the bob-white calls and the wild rose blows, there is the spot that Abraham Lincoln hallowed with his tears, there is the spot where he said his heart lay buried, there would Ann Rutledge wish to be.

  I

  n March, 1837, two years after Ann's death, Lincoln turned his back on New Salem and rode into Springfield on a borrowed horse, to begin what he called his "experiment as a lawyer."

  He carried in his saddle-bag all his earthly possessions. The only things he owned were several law-books and some extra shirts and some underwear. He also carried an old blue sock stuffed with six-and-a-quarter-cent and twelve-and-a-half-cent pieces—money that he had collected for postage before the post-office "winked out" back in New Salem. During this first year in Springfield, Lincoln needed cash often, and he needed it badly. He could have spent this money and paid the Government out of his own pocket, but he would have felt that that was dishonest. So when the post-office auditor finally came around for a settlement, Lincoln turned over to him not only the exact amount, but the exact coins he had taken in as post-master during the preceding year or two.

  The morning that Lincoln rode into Springfield, he not only had no cash reserves of his own; but, to make matters worse, he was eleven hundred dollars in debt. He and Berry had lost that amount in their ill-fated grocery venture back in New Salem. Then Berry had drunk himself to death and left Lincoln to shoulder the obligations alone.

  To be sure, Lincoln didn't have to pay; he could have pleaded divided responsibility and the failure of the business and have found a legal loophole of escape.

  48

  But that wasn't Lincoln's way. Instead, he went to his creditors and promised to pay them every dollar with interest, if they would only give him time. They all agreed, except one, Peter Van Bergen. He brought suit immediately, obtained a judgment, and had Lincoln's horse and surveying instruments sold at public auction. The others waited, however, and Lincoln scraped and saved and denied himself for fourteen years in order to keep faith with them. Even as late as 1848, when he was a member of Congress, he sent part of his salary home to pay off the last remnant of this old grocery debt.

  The morning that Lincoln arrived in Springfield, he tied his horse in front of Joshua F. Speed's general store at the northwest corner of the public square; and here is the remainder of the story told in Speed's own words:

  He had ridden into town on a borrowed horse, and engaged from the only cabinet-maker in the village a single bedstead. He came into my store, set his saddle-bags on the counter, and enquired what the furniture for a single bedstead would cost. I took slate and pencil, made a calculation, and found the sum for furniture complete would amount to seventeen dollars in all. Said he: "It is probably cheap enough; but I want to say that, cheap as it is, I have not the money to pay. But if you will credit me until Christmas and my experiment here as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail in that I will probably never pay you at all." The tone of his voice was so melancholy that I felt for him. I looked up at him and I thought then, as I think now, that I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life. I said to him, "So small a debt seems to affect you so deeply, I think I can suggest a plan by which you will be able to attain your end without incurring any debt. I have a very large room and a very large double bed in it, which you are perfectly welcome to share with me if you choose." "Where is your room?" he asked. "Upstairs," said I, pointing to the stairs leading from the store to my room. Without saying a word he took his saddle-bags on his arm, went upstairs, set them down on the floor, came down again, and with a face beaming with pleasure and smiles, exclaimed, "Well, Speed, I'm moved."

  And so, for the next five and a half years, Lincoln slept in the bed with Speed, over the store, without paying any rent at all.

  Another friend, William Butler, took Lincoln into his home and not only boarded him for five years, but bought many of his clothes for him.

  Lincoln probably paid Butler a little something when, as, and if he could; but there was no specific charge. The whole thing was a haphazard arrangement between friends.

  And Lincoln thanked God that it was, for if it hadn't been for the help of Butler and Speed, he could never have made a go of the law.

  He went into partnership with another attorney, named Stuart. Stuart devoted most of his time to politics, and saddled the office routine on Lincoln. But there wasn't much routine to saddle, and there wasn't much of an office. The furnishings consisted of "a small, dirty bed, a buffalo robe, a chair, a bench" and a sort of bookcase containing a few legal volumes.

  The office records show that during the first six months the firm took in only five fees: one was for two dollars and a half, two were for five dollars each, one was a ten-dollar fee, and they had to take an overcoat as part payment in another case.

  Lincoln became so discouraged that he stopped one day at Page Eaton's carpenter shop in Springfield and confessed that he had a notion to abandon law and go to work as a carpenter. A few years before that, while studying law back in New Salem, Lincoln had seriously thought of giving up his books and becoming a blacksmith.

  That first year in Springfield was a lonely one for Lincoln. About the only people he met were the men who forgathered of an evening, in the back of Speed's store, to argue politics and kill time. Lincoln wouldn't go to church on Sundays, because, as he said, he wouldn't know how to act in fine churches like those in Springfield.

  Only one woman spoke to him during that first year, and he wrote to a friend that she wouldn't have spoken "if she could have avoided it."

  But in 1839 a woman came to town who not only spoke to him, but courted him and determined to marry him. Her name was Mary Todd.

  Somebody asked Lincoln once why the Todds spelled their name as they did, and he replied that he reckoned that one "d"

  was good enough for God, but that the Todds had to have two.

  The Todds boasted of a genealogical chart extending back to the sixth century. Mary Todd's grandfathers and greatgrandfathers and great-uncles had been generals and governors, and one had been Secretary of the Navy. She, herself, had been educated in a snobbish French school in Lexington, Kentucky, conducted by Madame Victorie Charlotte Le Clere Mentelle and her husband—two French aristocrats who had fled from Paris during the Revolution in order to save their n
ecks from the guillotine. They had drilled Mary to speak French with a Parisian accent, and had taught her to dance the cotillion and the Circassian Circle as the silken courtiers had danced them at Versailles.

  Mary was possessed of a high and haughty manner, an exalted opinion of her own superiority, and an abiding conviction that she would one day marry a man who would become President of the United States. Incredible as it seems, she not only believed that, but she openly boasted of it. It sounded silly, and people laughed and said things; but nothing could shake her conviction and nothing could stop her boasting.

  Her own sister, speaking of Mary, said she "loved glitter, show, pomp and power," and was "the most ambitious woman I ever knew."

  Unfortunately, Mary had a temper that was frequently out of control; so one day in 1839, she quarreled with her stepmother, slammed the front door, and walked out of her father's home in a rage and came to live with her married sister in Springfield.

  If she was determined to marry a future President, she had certainly chosen the right place, for there wasn't another spot in all the world where her prospects would have been brighter than there in Springfield, Illinois. At that time it was a dirty little frontier village, sprawling out over the treeless prairie, with no pavements, no lights, no sidewalks, no sewers. Cattle roamed about the town at will, hogs wallowed in the mud-holes of the principal streets, and piles of rotton manure filled the air with a stench. The total population of the town was only fifteen hundred; but two young men who were destined to be candidates for the Presidency in 1860 lived there in Springfield in 1839—Stephen A. Douglas, candidate for the Northern wing of the Democratic party, and Abraham Lincoln for the Republicans.

  Both of them met Mary Todd, both courted her at the same time, both held her in their arms, and she once stated that both of them had proposed.

  When asked which suitor she intended to marry, Mary always answered, according to her sister's report, "Him who has the best prospects of being President."

  And that was tantamount to saying Douglas, for, just then, Douglas's political prospects seemed a hundred times brighter than Lincoln's. Although Douglas was only twenty-six, he had already been nicknamed "the Little Giant," and he was already Secretary of the State, while Lincoln was only a struggling lawyer living in an attic over Speed's store and hardly able to pay a board bill.

  Douglas was destined to become one of the mightiest political forces in the United States years and years before Abe Lincoln was even heard of outside his own State. In fact, two years before Lincoln became President, about the only thing that the average American knew about him was that he had once debated with the brilliant and powerful Stephen A. Douglas.

  Mary's relatives all thought she cared more for Douglas than she did for Lincoln, and she probably did. Douglas was far more of a ladies' man; he had more personal charm, better prospects, better manners, and better social standing.

  Besides, he had a deep golden voice, a wavy black pompadour, he waltzed superbly, and he paid Mary Todd lovely little compliments.

  He was her beau-ideal of a man; and she looked in her mirror, whispering to herself, "Mary Todd Douglas." It sounded beautiful, and she dreamed dreams and saw herself waltzing with him in the White House. . . .

  While Douglas was courting her he had a fight one day, right in the public square in Springfield, with a newspaper editor— the husband of one of Mary's dearest friends.

  Probably she told him what she thought of that.

  And probably she told him also what she thought of his getting drunk at a public banquet, climbing on top of a table and waltzing back and forth, shouting, singing, and kicking wineglasses and roast turkey, whisky bottles and gravy dishes onto the floor.

  And if he took another girl to a dance while he was paying her attention, she made a disagreeable scene.

  The courtship came to nothing. Senator Beveridge says:

  Although it was afterwards given out that Douglas had proposed to Mary and was refused because of his bad "morals," that statement was obviously protective propaganda usual in such cases; for the shrewd, alert and, even then, worldly-wise Douglas never asked Miss Todd to marry him.

  Immeasurably disappointed, she tried to arouse Douglas's jealousy by giving her ardent attention to one of his bitter political opponents, Abraham Lincoln. But that didn't bring back Douglas, and she laid her plans to capture Lincoln.

  Mrs. Edwards, Mary Todd's sister, afterward described the courtship in this fashion:

  I have often happened in the room where they were sitting, and Mary invariably led the conversation. Mr. Lincoln would sit at her side and listen. He scarcely said a word, but gazed on her as if irresistibly drawn toward her by some superior and unseen power. He was charmed with her wit, and fascinated by her quick sagacity. But he could not maintain himself in a continued conversation with a lady reared as Mary was.

  In July of that year the great gathering of Whigs which had been talked of for months swarmed down upon Springfield and overwhelmed the town. They came from hundreds of miles around, with banners waving and bands playing. The Chicago delegation dragged half-way across the State a government yawl rigged as a two-masted ship. Music was playing on the ship, girls dancing, cannon belching into the air.

  The Democrats had spoken of the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, as an old woman who lived in a log cabin and drank hard cider. So the Whigs mounted a log cabin on wheels and drew it through the streets of Springfield, behind thirty yoke of oxen. A hickory tree swayed beside the cabin; coons were playing in the tree; a barrel of hard cider was on tap by the door.

  At night, under the light of flaming torches, Lincoln made a political speech.

  At one meeting his party, the Whigs, had been accused of being aristocratic and wearing fine clothes while pleading for the votes of the plain people, Lincoln replied:

  "I came to Illinois as a poor, strange, friendless, uneducated boy, and started working on a flatboat for eight dollars a month, and I had only one pair of breeches to my back, and they were buckskin. When buckskin gets wet and dried by the sun, it shrinks; and my breeches kept shrinking until they left several inches of my legs bare between the lower part of my breeches and the top of my socks. And while I was growing taller, the breeches were getting wet and becoming shorter and tighter until they left a blue streak around my legs that can be seen to this day. Now, if you call that being a fancily dressed aristocrat, I must plead guilty to the charge."

  The audience whistled and shouted and shrieked its approval.

  When Lincoln and Mary reached the Edwards house, she told him how proud she was of him, that he was a great speaker, and that some day he would be President.

  He looked down at her, standing beside him in the moonlight, and her manner told him everything. Reaching over, he took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly. . . .

  The wedding-day was set for the first of January, 1841.

  That was only six months away, but many a storm was to brew and blow before then.

  M

  ary Todd and Abraham Lincoln hadn't been engaged very long before she wanted to make him over. She didn't like the way he dressed. She often contrasted him with her father. Almost every morning for a dozen years she had seen Robert Todd walking down the streets of Lexington, carrying a gold-headed cane, clad in a blue broadcloth coat, and wearing white linen trousers strapped under his boots. But Lincoln in hot weather didn't wear a coat at all; and what was worse, sometimes he didn't wear even a collar. Usually he had only one gallus holding up his trousers, and when a button came off he whittled a peg and pinned things together with that.

  Such crudeness irritated Mary Todd, and she told him so. But, unfortunately, she didn't use any tact or diplomacy or sweetness in her telling.

  Though at Madame Victorie Charlotte Le Clere Mentelle's school back in Lexington she had been taught to dance the cotillion, she had been taught nothing about the fine art of handling people. So she took the surest way, the quickest way to annihila
te a man's love: she nagged. She made Lincoln so uncomfortable that he wanted to avoid her. Instead of coming to see her two or three nights a week now, as he had formerly done, he sometimes let ten days drift by without calling; and she wrote him complaining letters, censuring him for his neglect.

  Presently Matilda Edwards came to town. Matilda was a tall, stately, charming blonde, a cousin of Ninian W. Edwards, Mary

  Todd's brother-in-law. She too took up her residence in the spacious Edwards mansion. And when Lincoln called to see Mary, Matilda contrived to be very much in evidence. She couldn't speak French with a Parisian accent or dance the Circassian Circle, but she knew how to handle men, and Lincoln grew very fond of her. When she swept into the room, Lincoln was so interested in watching her that he sometimes ceased to listen to what Mary Todd was saying. That made Mary indignant. Once he took Mary to a ball; but he didn't care for dancing, so he let her dance with other men while he sat in a corner talking to Matilda.

  Mary accused him of being in love with Matilda, and he didn't deny it; she broke down and wept, and demanded that he cease even looking at Matilda.

  What had once been a promising love-affair had now degenerated into a thing of strife and dissension and fault-finding.

  Lincoln now saw that he and Mary were opposites in every way: in training, in background, in temperament, in tastes, in mental outlook. They irritated each other constantly, and Lincoln realized that their engagement ought to be broken, that their marriage would be disastrous.

  Mary's sister and brother-in-law both arrived at a similar conclusion. They urged Mary to abandon all thought of marrying Lincoln, warning her over and over that they were strikingly unfit for each other, and that they could never be happy.