MARRIAGE
The foregoing letter brings us to the consideration of a remarkable
passage in Lincoln's life. It has been the cause of much profane and
idle discussion among those who were constitutionally incapacitated
from appreciating ideal sufferings, and we would be tempted to refrain
from adding a word to what has already been said if it were possible
to omit all reference to an experience so important in the development
of his character.
In the year 1840 he became engaged to be married to Miss Mary Todd, of
Lexington, Kentucky, a young lady of good education and excellent
connections, who was visiting her sister, Mrs. Ninian W. Edwards, at
Springfield. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote relocated to
chapter end.] The engagement was not in all respects a happy one, as
both parties doubted their compatibility, and a heart so affectionate
and a conscience so sensitive as Lincoln's found material for
exquisite self-torment in these conditions. His affection for his
betrothed, which he thought was not strong enough to make happiness
with her secure; his doubts, which yet were not convincing enough to
induce him to break off all relations with her; his sense of honor,
which was wounded in his own eyes by his own act; his sense of duty,
which condemned him in one course and did not sustain him in the
opposite one--all combined to make him profoundly and passionately
miserable. To his friends and acquaintances, who were unused to such
finely wrought and even fantastic sorrows, his trouble seemed so
exaggerated that they could only account for it on the ground of
insanity. But there is no necessity of accepting this crude
hypothesis; the coolest and most judicious of his friends deny that
his depression ever went to such an extremity. Orville H. Browning,
who was constantly in his company, says that his worst attack lasted
only about a week; that during this time he was incoherent and
distraught; but that in the course of a few days it all passed off,
leaving no trace whatever. "I think," says Mr. Browning, "it was only
an intensification of his constitutional melancholy; his trials and
embarrassments pressed him down to a lower point than usual."
[Illustration: FAC-SIMILE OF THE MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE OF ABRAHAM
LINCOLN. From the original in the Keyes Lincoln Memorial Collection,
Chicago.]
[Sidenote: "Western Characters," p. 134.]
This taint of constitutional sadness was not peculiar to Lincoln; it
may be said to have been endemic among the early settlers of the West.
It had its origin partly in the circumstances of their lives, the
severe and dismal loneliness in which their struggle for existence for
the most part went on. Their summers were passed in the solitude of
the woods; in the winter they were often snowed up for months in the
more desolate isolation of their own poor cabins. Their subjects of
conversation were limited, their range of thoughts and ideas narrow
and barren. There was as little cheerfulness in their manners as there
was incentive to it in their lives. They occasionally burst out into
wild frolic, which easily assumed the form of comic outrage, but of
the sustained cheerfulness of social civilized life they knew very
little. One of the few pioneers who have written their observations of
their own people, John L. McConnell, says, "They are at the best not a
cheerful race; though they sometimes join in festivities, it is but
seldom, and the wildness of their dissipation is too often in
proportion to its infrequency. There is none of that serene
contentment which distinguishes the tillers of the ground in other
lands.... Acquainted with the character [of the pioneer], you do not
expect him to smile much, but now and then he laughs."
Besides this generic tendency to melancholy, very many of the pioneers
were subject in early life to malarial influences, the effect of which
remained with them all their days. Hewing out their plantations in the
primeval woods amid the undisturbed shadow of centuries, breaking a
soil thick with ages of vegetable decomposition, sleeping in half-
faced camps, where the heavy air of the rank woods was in their lungs
all night, or in the fouler atmosphere of overcrowded cabins, they
were especially subject to miasmatic fevers. Many died, and of those
who survived, a great number, after they had outgrown the more
immediate manifestations of disease, retained in nervous disorders of
all kinds the distressing traces of the maladies which afflicted their
childhood. In the early life of Lincoln these unwholesome physical
conditions were especially prevalent. The country about Pigeon Creek
was literally devastated by the terrible malady called "milk-
sickness," which carried away his mother and half her family. His
father left his home in Macon County, also, on account of the
frequency and severity of the attacks of fever and ague which were
suffered there; and, in general, Abraham was exposed through all the
earlier part of his life to those malarial influences which made,
during the first half of this century, the various preparations of
Peruvian bark a part of the daily food of the people of Indiana and
Illinois. In many instances this miasmatic poison did not destroy the
strength or materially shorten the lives of those who absorbed it in
their youth; but the effects remained in periodical attacks of gloom
and depression of spirits which would seem incomprehensible to
thoroughly healthy organizations, and which gradually lessened in
middle life, often to disappear entirely in old age.
[Sidenote: "Western Characters" p. 126.]
Upon a temperament thus predisposed to look at things in their darker
aspect, it might naturally be expected that a love-affair which was
not perfectly happy would be productive of great misery. But Lincoln
seemed especially chosen to the keenest suffering in such a
conjuncture. The pioneer, as a rule, was comparatively free from any
troubles of the imagination. To quote Mr. McConnell again: "There was
no romance in his [the pioneer's] composition. He had no dreaminess;
meditation was no part of his mental habit; a poetical fancy would, in
him, have been an indication of insanity. If he reclined at the foot
of a tree, on a still summer day, it was to sleep; if he gazed out
over the waving prairie, it was to search for the column of smoke
which told of his enemies' approach; if he turned his eyes towards the
blue heaven, it was to prognosticate tomorrow's rain or sunshine. If
he bent his gaze towards the green earth, it was to look for 'Indian
sign' or buffalo trail. His wife was only a helpmate; he never thought
of making a divinity of her." But Lincoln could never have claimed
this happy immunity from ideal trials. His published speeches show how
much the poet in him was constantly kept in check; and at this time of
his life his imagination was sufficiently alert to inflict upon him
the sharpest anguish. His reverence for women was so deep and tender
that he thought an injury to one of them was a sin too heinous to be
expiated. No Hamlet, dreaming amid the turrets of Elsinore, no Sidney
creating a chivalrous Arcadia, was fuller of mystic and shadowy
fancies of the worth and dignity of woman than this backwoods
politician. Few men ever lived more sensitively and delicately tender
towards the sex.
Besides his step-mother, who was a plain, God-fearing woman, he had
not known many others until he came to live in New Salem. There he had
made the acquaintance of the best people the settlement contained, and
among them had become much attached to a young girl named Ann
Rutledge, the daughter of one of the proprietors of the place. She
died in her girlhood, and though there does not seem to have been any
engagement between them, he was profoundly affected by her death. But
the next year a young woman from Kentucky appeared in the village, to
whom he paid such attentions as in his opinion fully committed him as
a suitor for her hand. He admired her, and she seems to have merited
the admiration of all the manhood there was in New Salem. She was
handsome and intelligent and of an admirable temper and disposition.
While they were together he was constant in his attentions, and when
he was at Vandalia or at Springfield he continued his assiduities in
some of the most singular love-letters ever written. They are filled
mostly with remarks about current politics, and with arguments going
to show that she had better not marry him! At the same time he clearly
intimates that he is at her disposition if she is so inclined. At
last, feeling that his honor and duty were involved, he made a direct
proposal to her, and received an equally direct, kind, and courteous
refusal. Not knowing but that this indicated merely a magnanimous
desire to give him a chance for escape, he persisted in his offer, and
she in her refusal. When the matter had ended in this perfectly
satisfactory manner to both of them, he sat down and wrote, by way of
epilogue to the play, a grotesquely comic account of the whole affair
to Mrs. O. H. Browning, one of his intimate Vandalia acquaintances.
[Illustration: JOSHUA SPEED AND WIFE.]
This letter has been published and severely criticised as showing a
lack of gentlemanlike feeling. But those who take this view forget
that he was writing to an intimate friend of a matter which had
greatly occupied his own mind for a year; that he mentioned no names,
and that he threw such an air of humorous unreality about the whole
story that the person who received it never dreamed that it recorded
an actual occurrence until twenty-five years afterwards, when, having
been asked to furnish it to a biographer, she was warned against doing
so by the President himself, who said there was too much truth in it
for print. The only significance the episode possesses is in showing
this almost abnormal development of conscience in the young man who
was perfectly ready to enter into a marriage which he dreaded simply
because he thought he had given a young woman reason to think that he
had such intentions. While we admit that this would have been an
irremediable error, we cannot but wonder at the nobleness of the
character to which it was possible.
In this vastly more serious matter, which was, we may say at once, the
crucial ordeal of his life, the same invincible truthfulness, the same
innate goodness, the same horror of doing a wrong, are combined with
an exquisite sensibility and a capacity for suffering which mark him
as a man "picked out among ten thousand." His habit of relentless
self-searching reveals to him a state of feeling which strikes him
with dismay; his simple and inflexible veracity communicates his
trouble and his misery to the woman whom he loves; his freedom, when
he has gained it, yields him nothing but an agony of remorse and
humiliation. He could not shake off his pain, like men of cooler heads
and shallower hearts. It took fast hold of him and dragged him into
awful depths of darkness and torture. The letter to Stuart, which we
have given, shows him emerging from the blackest period of that time
of gloom. Immediately after this, he accompanied his close friend and
confidant, Joshua F. Speed, to Kentucky, where, in a way so singular
that no writer of fiction would dare to employ the incident, he became
almost cured of his melancholy, and came back to Illinois and his work
again.
Mr. Speed was a Kentuckian, carrying on a general mercantile business
in Springfield--a brother of the distinguished lawyer, James Speed, of
Louisville, who afterwards became Attorney-General of the United
States. He was one of those men who seem to have to a greater extent
than others the genius of friendship, the Pythias, the Pylades, the
Horatios of the world. It is hardly too much to say that he was the
only--as he was certainly the last--intimate friend that Lincoln ever
had. He was his closest companion in Springfield, and in the evil days
when the letter to Stuart was written he took him with brotherly love
and authority under his special care. He closed up his affairs in
Springfield, and went with Lincoln to Kentucky, and, introducing him
to his own cordial and hospitable family circle, strove to soothe his
perturbed spirit by every means which unaffected friendliness could
suggest. That Lincoln found much comfort and edification in that
genial companionship is shown by the fact that after he became
President he sent to Mr. Speed's mother a photograph of himself,
inscribed, "For Mrs. Lucy G. Speed, from whose pious hand I accepted
the present of an Oxford Bible twenty years ago."
But the principal means by which the current of his thoughts was
changed was never dreamed of by himself or by his friend when they
left Illinois. During this visit Speed himself fell in love, and
became engaged to be married; and either by a singular chance or
because the maladies of the soul may be propagated by constant
association, the feeling of despairing melancholy, which he had found
so morbid and so distressing an affliction in another, took possession
of himself, and threw him into the same slough of despondency from
which he had been laboring to rescue Lincoln. Between friends so
intimate there were no concealments, and from the moment Lincoln found
his services as nurse and consoler needed, the violence of his own
trouble seemed to diminish. The two young men were in Springfield
together in the autumn, and Lincoln seems by that time to have laid
aside his own peculiar besetments, in order to minister to his friend.
They knew the inmost thoughts of each other's hearts and each relied
upon the honesty and loyalty of the other to an extent rare among men.
When Speed returned to Kentucky, to a happiness which awaited him
there, so bright that it dazzled and blinded his moral vision, Lincoln
continued his counsels and encouragements in letters which are
remarkable for their tenderness and delicacy of thought and
expression. Like another poet, he looked into his own heart and wrote.
His own deeper nature had suffered from these same fantastic sorrows
and terrors; of his own grief he made a medicine for his comrade.
While Speed was still with him, he wrote a long letter, which he put
into his hands at parting, full of wise and affectionate reasonings,
to be read when he should feel the need of it. He predicts for him a
period of nervous depression--first, because he will be "exposed to
bad weather on his journey, and, secondly, because of the absence of
all business and conversation of friends which might divert his mind
and give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which will
sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare, and turn it to the
bitterness of death." The third cause, he says, "is the rapid and near
approach of that crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings
concentrate." If in spite of all these circumstances he should escape
without a "twinge of the soul," his friend will be most happily
deceived; but, he continues, "if you shall, as I expect you will at
some time, be agonized and distressed, let me, who have some reason to
speak with judgment on the subject, beseech you to ascribe it to the
causes I have mentioned, and not to some false and ruinous suggestion
of the devil." This forms the prelude to an ingenious and affectionate
argument in which he labors to convince Speed of the loveliness of his
betrothed and of the integrity of his own heart; a strange task, one
would say, to undertake in behalf of a young and ardent lover. But the
two men understood each other, and the service thus rendered was
gratefully received and remembered by Speed all his life.
Lincoln wrote again on the 3d of February, 1842, congratulating Speed
upon a recent severe illness of his destined bride, for the reason
that "your present distress and anxiety about her health must forever
banish those horrid doubts which you feel as to the truth of your
affection for her." As the period of Speed's marriage drew near,
Lincoln's letters betray the most intense anxiety. He cannot wait to
hear the news from his friend, but writes to him about the time of the
wedding, admitting that he is writing in the dark, that words from a
bachelor may be worthless to a Benedick, but still unable to keep
silence. He hopes he is happy with his wife, "but should I be mistaken
in this, should excessive pleasure still be accompanied with a painful
counterpart at times, still let me urge you, as I have ever done, to
remember in the depth and even agony of despondency, that very shortly
you are to feel well again." Further on he says: "If you went through
the ceremony calmly, or even with sufficient composure not to excite
alarm in any present, you are safe beyond question," seeking by every
device of subtle affection to lift up the heart of his friend.
With a solicitude apparently greater than that of the nervous
bridegroom, he awaited the announcement of the marriage, and when it
came he wrote (February 25): "I opened the letter with intense anxiety
and trepidation; so much that, although it turned out better than I
expected, I have hardly yet, at the distance of ten hours, become calm.
I tell you, Speed, our forebodings, for which you and I are peculiar,
are all the worst sort of nonsense. I fancied from the time I received
your letter of Saturday that the one of "Wednesday was never to come,"
and yet it did come, and, what is more, it is perfectly clear, both
from its tone and handwriting, that ... you had obviously improved at
the very time I had so much fancied you would have grown worse. You say
that something indescribably horrible and alarming still haunts you.
You will not say that three months from now, I will venture." The
letter goes on in the same train of sympathetic cheer, but there is one
phrase which strikes the keynote of all lives whose ideals are too high
for fulfillment: "It is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to
dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can
realize."
But before long a letter came from Speed, who had settled with his
black-eyed Kentucky wife upon a well-stocked plantation, disclaiming
any further fellowship of misery and announcing the beginnings of that
life of uneventful happiness which he led ever after. His peace of
mind has become a matter of course; he dismisses the subject in a
line, but dilates, with a new planter's rapture, upon the beauties and
attractions of his farm. Lincoln frankly answers that he cares nothing
about his farm. "I can only say that I am glad _you_ are satisfied
and pleased with it. But on that other subject, to me of the most
intense interest whether in joy or sorrow, I never had the power to
withhold my sympathy from you. It cannot be told how it now thrills me
with joy to hear you say you are 'far happier than you ever expected to
be.'.. 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 the fatal 1st of January,
1841. Since then it seems to me I should have been entirely happy, but
for the never-absent idea that there is _one_ still unhappy whom I
have contributed to make so. That still kills my soul. I cannot but
reproach myself for even wishing myself to be happy while she is
otherwise."
During the summer of 1842 the letters of the friends still discuss,
with waning intensity, however, their respective affairs of the heart.
Speed, in the ease and happiness of his home, thanks Lincoln for his
important part in his welfare, and gives him sage counsel for himself.
Lincoln replies (July 4, 1842): "I could not have done less than I
did. I always was superstitious; I believe God made me one of the
instruments of bringing your Fanny and you together, which union I
have no doubt he foreordained. Whatever he designs, he will do for me
yet." A better name than "superstition" might properly be applied to
this frame of mind. He acknowledges Speed's kindly advice, but says:
"Before I resolve to do the one thing or the other, I must gain my
confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made.
In that ability you know I once prided myself, as the only or chief
gem of my character; that gem I lost, how and where you know too well.
I have not yet regained it; and until I do I cannot trust myself in
any matter of much importance. I believe now, that had you understood
my case at the time as well as I understood yours afterwards, by the
aid you would have given me I should have sailed through clear; but
that does not afford me confidence to begin that, or the like of that,
again." Still, he was nearing the end of his doubts and self-torturing
sophistry. A last glimpse of his imperious curiosity, kept alive by
saucy hopes and fears, is seen in his letter to Speed of the 5th of
October. He ventures, with a genuine timidity, to ask a question which
we may believe has not often been asked by one civilized man of
another, with the hope of a candid answer, since marriages were
celebrated with ring and book. "I want to ask you a close question--
Are you now, in _feeling_ as well as _judgment,_ glad you are
married as you are? From anybody but me this would be an impudent
question, not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me.
Please answer it quickly, as I am impatient to know." It is probable
that Mr. Speed replied promptly in the way in which such questions
must almost of necessity be answered. On the 4th of November, 1842, a
marriage license was issued to Lincoln, and on the same day he was
married to Miss Mary Todd, the ceremony being performed by the Rev.
Charles Dresser. Four sons were the issue of this marriage: Robert
Todd, born August 1, 1843; Edward Baker, March 10, 1846; William
Wallace, December 21, 1850; Thomas, April 4, 1853. Of these only the
eldest lived to maturity.
In this way Abraham Lincoln met and passed through one of the most
important crises of his life. There was so much of idiosyncrasy in it
that it has been, and will continue to be for years to come, the
occasion of endless gossip in Sangamon County and elsewhere. Because
it was not precisely like the experience of other people, who are
married and given in marriage every day without any ado, a dozen
conflicting stories have grown up, more or less false and injurious to
both contracting parties. But it may not be fanciful to suppose that
characters like that of Lincoln, elected for great conflicts and
trials, are fashioned by different processes from those of ordinary
men, and pass their stated ordeals in a different way. By
circumstances which seem commonplace enough to commonplace people, he
was thrown for more than a year into a sea of perplexities and
sufferings beyond the reach of the common run of souls.
It is as useless as it would be indelicate to seek to penetrate in
detail the incidents and special causes which produced in his mind
this darkness as of the valley of the shadow of death. There was
probably nothing worth recording in them; we are only concerned with
their effect upon a character which was to be hereafter for all time
one of the possessions of the nation. It is enough for us to know that
a great trouble came upon him, and that he bore it nobly after his
kind. That the manner in which he confronted this crisis was strangely
different from that of most men in similar circumstances need surely
occasion no surprise. Neither in this nor in other matters was he
shaped in the average mold of his contemporaries. In many respects he
was doomed to a certain loneliness of excellence. There are few men
that have had his stern and tyrannous sense of duty, his womanly
tenderness of heart, his wakeful and inflexible conscience, which was
so easy towards others and so merciless towards himself. Therefore
when the time came for all of these qualities at once to be put to the
most strenuous proof, the whole course of his development and the
tendency of his nature made it inevitable that his suffering should be
of the keenest and his final triumph over himself should be of the
most complete and signal character. In that struggle his youth of
reveries and day-dreams passed away. Such furnace-blasts of proof,
such pangs of transformation, seem necessary for exceptional natures.
The bread eaten in tears, of which Goethe speaks, the sleepless nights
of sorrow, are required for a clear vision of the celestial powers.
Fortunately the same qualities that occasion the conflict insure the
victory also. From days of gloom and depression, such as we have been
considering, no doubt came precious results in the way of sympathy,
self-restraint, and that sober reliance on the final triumph of good
over evil peculiar to those who have been greatly tried but not
destroyed. The late but splendid maturity of Lincoln's mind and
character dates from this time, and, although he grew in strength and
knowledge to the end, from this year we observe a steadiness and
sobriety of thought and purpose, as discernible in his life as in his
style. He was like a blade forged in fire and tempered in the ice-
brook, ready for battle whenever the battle might come.
[Relocated Footnote: Mrs. Lincoln was the daughter of the Hon. Robert
S. Todd of Kentucky. Her great-uncle John Todd, and her grandfather
Levi Todd, accompanied General George Rogers Clark to Illinois, and
were present at the capture of Kaskaskia and Vincennes. In December,
1778, John Todd was appointed by Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia,
to be lieutenant of the county of Illinois, then a part of Virginia.
He was killed at the battle of the Blue Licks, in 1782. His brother
Levi was also at that battle and was one of the few survivors of it.
Colonel John Todd was one of the original proprietors of the town of
Lexington, Ky. While encamped on the site of the present city, he
heard of the opening battle of the Revolution and named his infant
settlement in its honor.--Arnold's "Life of Lincoln," p. 68.]