LINCOLN'S EARLY CAREER
1. _Life at New Salem_.
From this talk of large political movements we have to recall ourselves
to a young labouring man with hardly any schooling, naturally and
incurably uncouth, but with a curious, quite modest, impulse to assert
a kindly ascendency over the companions whom chance threw in his way,
and with something of the gift, which odd, shy people often possess,
for using their very oddity as a weapon in their struggles. In the
conditions of real equality which still prevailed in a newly settled
country it is not wonderful that he made his way into political life
when he was twenty-five, but it was not till twenty years later that he
played an important part in events of enduring significance.
Thus the many years of public activity with which we are concerned in
this and the following chapter belong rather to his apprenticeship than
to his life's work; and this apprenticeship at first sight contrasts
more strongly with his fame afterwards than does his boyhood of poverty
and comparatively romantic hardship. For many poor boys have lived to
make a great mark on history, but as a rule they have entered early on
a life either of learning or of adventure or of large business. But
the affairs in which Lincoln early became immersed have an air of
pettiness, and from the point of view of most educated men and women in
the Eastern States or in Europe, many of the associates and competitors
of his early manhood, to whom he had to look up as his superiors in
knowledge, would certainly have seemed crude people with a narrow
horizon. Indeed, till he was called upon to take supreme control of
very great matters, Lincoln must have had singularly little intercourse
either with men versed in great affairs or with men of approved
intellectual distinction. But a mind too original to be subdued to its
surroundings found much that was stimulating in this time when Illinois
was beginning rapidly to fill up. There were plenty of men with shrewd
wits and robust character to be met with, and the mental atmosphere
which surrounded him was one of keen interest in life. Lincoln
eventually stands out as a surprising figure from among the other
lawyers and little politicians of Illinois, as any great man does from
any crowd, but some tribute is due to the undistinguished and
historically uninteresting men whose generous appreciation gave rapid
way to the poor, queer youth, and ultimately pushed him into a greater
arena as their selected champion.
In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, Lincoln, returning from his New
Orleans voyage, settled in New Salem to await the arrival of his
patron, Denton Offutt, with the goods for a new store in which Lincoln
was to be his assistant. The village itself was three years old. It
never got much beyond a population of one hundred, and like many
similar little towns of the West it has long since perished off the
earth. But it was a busy place for a while, and, contrary to what its
name might suggest, it aspired to be rather fast. It was a
cock-fighting and whisky-drinking society into which Lincoln was
launched. He managed to combine strict abstinence from liquor with
keen participation in all its other diversions. One departure from
total abstinence stands alleged among the feats of strength for which
he became noted. He hoisted a whisky barrel, of unspecified but
evidently considerable content, on to his knees in a squatting posture
and drank from the bunghole. But this very arduous potation stood
alone. Offutt was some time before he arrived with his goods, and
Lincoln lived by odd jobs. At the very beginning one Mentor Graham, a
schoolmaster officiating in some election, employed him as a clerk, and
the clerk seized the occasion to make himself well known to New Salem
as a story-teller. Then there was a heavy job at rail-splitting, and
another job in navigating the Sangamon River. Offutt's store was at
last set up, and for about a year the assistant in this important
establishment had valuable opportunities of conversation with all New
Salem. He had also leisure for study. He had mentioned to the
aforesaid Mentor Graham his "notion to study English grammar," and had
been introduced to a work called "Kirkham's Grammar," which by a walk
of some miles he could borrow from a neighbour. This he would read,
lying full length on the counter with his head on a parcel of calico.
At other odd times he would work away at arithmetic. Offutt's kindly
interest procured him distinction in another field. At Clary's Grove,
near New Salem, lived a formidable set of young ruffians, over whose
somewhat disguised chivalry of temper the staid historian of Lincoln's
youth becomes rapturous. They were given to wrecking the store of any
New Salem tradesman who offended them; so it shows some spirit in Mr.
Denton Offutt that he backed his Abraham Lincoln to beat their Jack
Armstrong in a wrestling match. He did beat him; moreover, some charm
in the way he bore himself made him thenceforth not hated but beloved
of Clary's Grove in general, and the Armstrongs in particular. Hannah
Armstrong, Jack's wife, thereafter mended and patched his clothes for
him, and, years later, he had the satisfaction, as their unfeed
advocate, of securing the acquittal of their son from a charge of
murder, of which there is some reason to hope he may not have been
guilty. It is, by the way, a relief to tell that there once was a
noted wrestling match in which Lincoln was beaten; it is characteristic
of the country that his friends were sure there was foul play, and
characteristic of him that he indignantly denied it.
Within a year Offutt's store, in the phrase of the time, "petered out,"
leaving Lincoln shiftless. But the victor of Clary's Grove, with his
added mastery of "Kirkham's Grammar," was now ripe for public life.
Moreover, his experience as a waterman gave him ideas on the question,
which then agitated his neighbours, whether the Sangamon River could be
made navigable. He had a scheme of his own for doing this; and in the
spring of 1832 he wrote to the local paper a boyish but modest and
sensible statement of his views and ambitions, announcing that he would
be a candidate in the autumn elections for the State Legislature.
Meanwhile he had his one experience of soldiering. The Indian chief,
Black Hawk, who had agreed to abide west of the Mississippi, broke the
treaty and led his warriors back into their former haunts in Northern
Illinois. The Governor of the State called for volunteers, and Lincoln
became one. He obtained the elective rank of captain of his company,
and contrived to maintain some sort of order in that, doubtless brave,
but undisciplined body. He saw no fighting, but he could earn his
living for some months, and stored up material for effective chaff in
Congress long afterwards about the military glory which General Cass's
supporters for the Presidency wished to attach to their candidate. His
most glorious exploit consisted in saving from his own men a poor old
friendly Indian who had fallen among them. A letter of credentials,
which the helpless creature produced, was pronounced a forgery and he
was about to be hanged as a spy, when Lincoln appeared on the scene,
"swarthy with resolution and rage," and somehow terrified his
disorderly company into dropping their prey.
The war ended in time for a brief candidature, and a supporter of his
at the time preserved a record of one of his speeches. His last
important speech will hereafter be given in full for other reasons;
this may be so given too, for it is not a hundred words long: "Fellow
Citizens, I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham
Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate
for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet like the old
woman's dance. I am in favour of a national bank. I am in favour of
the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These
are my sentiments and political principles. If elected, I shall be
thankful; if not, it will be all the same."
To this succinct declaration of policy may be added from his earlier
letter that he advocated a law against usury, and laws for the
improvement of education. The principles of the speech are those which
the new Whig party was upholding against the Democrats under Jackson
(the President) and Van Buren. Lincoln's neighbours, like the people
of Illinois generally, were almost entirely on the side of the
Democrats. It is interesting that however he came by his views, they
were early and permanently fixed on the side then unpopular in
Illinois; and it is interesting that though, naturally, not elected, he
secured very nearly the whole of the votes of his immediate
neighbourhood.
The penniless Lincoln was now hankering to become a lawyer, though with
some thoughts of the more practicable career of a blacksmith.
Unexpectedly, however, he was tempted into his one venture, singularly
unsuccessful, in business. Two gentlemen named Herndon, cousins of a
biographer of Lincoln's, started a store in New Salem and got tired of
it. One sold his share to a Mr. Berry, the other sold his to Lincoln.
The latter sale was entirely on credit--no money passed at the time,
because there was no money. The vendor explained afterwards that he
relied solely on Lincoln's honesty. He had to wait a long while for
full payment, but what is known of storekeeping in New Salem shows that
he did very well for himself in getting out of his venture as he did.
Messrs. Berry and Lincoln next acquired, likewise for credit, the stock
and goodwill of two other storekeepers, one of them the victim of a
raid from Clary's Grove. The senior partner then applied himself
diligently to personal consumption of the firm's liquid goods; the
junior member of the firm was devoted in part to intellectual and
humorous converse with the male customers, but a fatal shyness
prevented him from talking to the ladles. For the rest, he walked long
distances to borrow books, got through Gibbon and through Rollin's
"History of the World," began his study of Blackstone, and acquired a
settled habit of reading novels. So business languished. Early in
1833 Berry and Lincoln sold out to another adventurer. This also was a
credit transaction. The purchaser without avoidable delay failed and
disappeared. Berry then died of drink, leaving to Lincoln the sole
responsibility for the debts of the partnership. Lincoln could with no
difficulty and not much reproach have freed himself by bankruptcy. As
a matter of fact, he ultimately paid everything, but it took him about
fifteen years of striving and pinching himself.
Lincoln is one of the many public characters to whom the standing
epithet "honest" became attached; in his case the claim to this rested
originally on the only conclusive authority, that of his creditors.
But there is equally good authority, that of his biographer, William
Herndon, for many years his partner as a lawyer, that "he had no money
sense." This must be understood with the large qualification that he
meant to pay his way and, unlike the great statesmen of the eighteenth
century in England, did pay it. But, though with much experience of
poverty in his early career, he never developed even a reasonable
desire to be rich. Wealth remained in his view "a superfluity of the
things one does not want." He was always interested in mathematics,
but mainly as a discipline in thinking, and partly, perhaps, in
association with mechanical problems of which he was fond enough to
have once in his life patented an invention. The interest never led
him to take to accounts or to long-sighted financial provisions. In
later days, when he received a payment for his fees, his partner's
share would be paid then and there; and perhaps the rent would be paid,
and the balance would be spent at once in groceries and other goods
likely to be soon wanted, including at long intervals, when the need
was very urgent, a new hat.
These are amiable personal traits, but they mark the limitations of his
capacity as a statesman. The chief questions which agitated the
Illinois Legislature were economic, and so at first were the issues
between Whigs and Democrats in Federal policy. Lincoln, though he
threw himself into these affairs with youthful fervour, would appear
never to have had much grasp of such matters. "In this respect alone,"
writes an admirer, "I have always considered Mr. Lincoln a weak man."
It is only when (rarely, at first) constitutional or moral issues
emerge that his politics become interesting. We can guess the causes
which attached him to the Whigs. As the party out of power, and in
Illinois quite out of favour, they had doubtless some advantage in
character. As we have seen, the greatest minds among American
statesmen of that day, Webster and Clay, were Whigs. Lincoln's simple
and quite reasonable, if inconclusive, argument for Protection, can be
found among his speeches of some years later. And schemes of internal
development certainly fired his imagination.
After his failure in business Lincoln subsisted for a while on odd jobs
for farmers, but was soon employed as assistant surveyor by John
Calhoun, then surveyor of the county. This gentleman, who had been
educated as a lawyer but "taught school in preference," was a keen
Democrat, and had to assure Lincoln that office as his assistant would
not necessitate his desertion of his principles. He was a clever man,
and Lincoln remembered him long after as the most formidable antagonist
he ever met in debate. With the help, again, of Mentor Graham, Lincoln
soon learned the surveyor's business. He continued at this work till
he was able to start as a lawyer, and there is evidence that his
surveys of property were done with extreme accuracy. Soon he further
obtained the local Postmastership. This, the only position except the
Presidency itself which he ever held in the Federal Government, was not
onerous, for the mails were infrequent; he "carried the office around
in his hat"; we are glad to be told that "his administration gave
satisfaction." Once calamity threatened him; a creditor distrained on
the horse and the instruments necessary to his surveyorship; but
Lincoln was reputed to be a helpful fellow, and friends were ready to
help him; they bought the horse and instruments back for him. To this
time belongs his first acquaintance with some writers of unsettling
tendency, Tom Paine, Voltaire, and Volney, who was then recognised as
one of the dangerous authors. Cock-fights, strange feats of strength,
or of usefulness with axe or hammer or scythe, and a passion for
mimicry continue. In 1834 he became a candidate again. "Can't the
party raise any better material than that?" asked a bystander before a
speech of his; after it, he exclaimed that the speaker knew more than
all the other candidates put together. This time he was elected, being
then twenty-five, and thereafter he was returned for three further
terms of two years. Shortly before his second election in 1836 the
State capital was removed to Springfield, in his own county. There in
1837 Lincoln fixed his home. He had long been reading law in his
curious, spasmodically concentrated way, and he had practised a little
as a "pettifogger," that is, an unlicensed practitioner in the inferior
courts. He had now obtained his license and was very shortly taken
into partnership by an old friend in Springfield.
2. _In the Illinois Legislature_.
Here his youth may be said to end. Springfield was a different place
from New Salem. There were carriages in it, and ladles who studied
poetry and the fashions. There were families from Virginia and
Kentucky who were conscious of ancestry, while graver, possibly more
pushing, people from the North-eastern States, soon to outnumber them,
were a little inclined to ridicule what they called their "illusory
ascendency." There was a brisk competition of churches, and mutual
improvement societies such as the "Young Men's Lyceum" had a rival
claim to attention with races and cock-fights.
And it was an altered Abraham Lincoln that came to inhabit Springfield.
Arriving a day or two before his first law partnership was settled he
came into the shop of a thriving young tradesman, Mr. Joshua Speed, to
ask about the price of the cheapest bedding and other necessary
articles. The sum for which Lincoln, who had not one cent, would have
had to ask, and would have been readily allowed, credit, was only
seventeen dollars. But this huge prospect of debt so visibly depressed
him that Speed instantly proposed an arrangement which involved no
money debt. He took him upstairs and installed him--Western domestic
arrangements were and are still simple--as the joint occupant of his
own large bed. "Well, Speed, I'm moved," was the terse acknowledgment.
Speed was to move him later by more precious charity. We are concerned
for the moment with what moved Speed. "I looked up at him," said he,
long after, "and I thought then, as I think now, that I never saw so
gloomy and melancholy a face in my life." The struggle of ambition and
poverty may well have been telling on Lincoln; but besides that a
tragical love story (shortly to be told) had left a deep and permanent
mark; but these influences worked, we may suppose, upon a disposition
quite as prone to sadness as to mirth. His exceedingly gregarious
habit, drawing him to almost any assembly of his own sex, continued all
his life; but it alternated from the first with a habit of solitude or
abstraction, the abstraction of a man who, when he does wish to read,
will read intently in the midst of crowd or noise, or walking along the
street. He was what might unkindly be called almost a professional
humorist, the master of a thousand startling stories, delightful to the
hearer, but possibly tiresome in written reminiscences, but we know too
well that gifts of this kind are as compatible with sadness as they
certainly are with deadly seriousness.
The Legislature of Illinois in the eight years from 1834 to 1842, in
which Lincoln belonged to it, was, though not a wise, a vigorous body.
In the conditions which then existed it was not likely to have been
captured as the Legislatures of wilder and more thinly-peopled States
have sometimes been by a disreputable element in the community, nor to
have subsided into the hands of the dull mechanical class of
professional politicians with which, rightly or wrongly, we have now
been led to associate American State Government. The fact of Lincoln's
own election suggests that dishonest adventurers might easily have got
there, but equally suggests that a very different type of men
prevailed. "The Legislature," we are told, "contained the youth and
blood and fire of the frontier." Among the Democrats in the
Legislature was Stephen Douglas, who was to become one of the most
powerful men in the United States while Lincoln was still unknown; and
several of Lincoln's Whig colleagues were afterwards to play
distinguished or honourable parts in politics or war. We need not
linger over them, but what we know of those with whom he had any
special intimacy makes it entirely pleasant to associate him with them.
After a short time in which, like any sensible young member of an
assembly, he watched and hardly ever spoke, Lincoln soon made his way
among these men, and in 1838 and 1840 the Whig members--though, being
in a minority, they could not elect him--gave him their unanimous votes
for the Speakership of the Assembly. The business which engrossed the
Legislature, at least up to 1838, was the development of the natural
resources of the State. These were great. It was natural that
railways, canals and other public works to develop them should be
pushed forward at the public cost. Other new countries since, with
less excuse because with greater warning from experience, have plunged
in this matter, and, though the Governor protested, the Illinois
Legislature, Whigs and Democrats, Lincoln and every one else, plunged
gaily, so that, during the collapse which followed, Illinois, though,
like Lincoln himself, it paid its debts in the end, was driven in 1840
to suspend interest payments for several years.
Very little is recorded of Lincoln's legislative doings. What is
related chiefly exhibits his delight in the game of negotiation and
combination by which he and the other members for his county, together
known as "the Long Nine," advanced the particular projects which
pleased their constituents or struck their own fancy. Thus he early
had a hand in the removal of the capital from Vandalia to Springfield
in his own county. The map of Illinois suggests that Springfield was a
better site for the purpose than Vandalia and at least as good as
Jacksonville or Peoria or any of its other competitors. Of his few
recorded speeches one concerns a proposed inquiry into some alleged
impropriety in the allotment of shares in the State Bank. It is
certainly the speech of a bold man; it argues with remarkable
directness that whereas a committee of prominent citizens which had
already inquired into this matter consisted of men of known honesty,
the proposed committee of the Legislators, whom he was addressing,
would consist of men who, for all he knew, might be honest, and, for
all he knew, might not.
The Federal politics of this time, though Lincoln played an active
local part in the campaigns of the Whig party, concern us little. The
Whigs, to whom he did subordinate service, were, as has been said, an
unlucky party. In 1840, in the reaction which extreme commercial
depression created against the previously omnipotent Democrats, the
Whig candidate for the Presidency was successful. This was General
Harrison, a respected soldier of the last war, who was glorified as a
sort of Cincinnatus and elected after an outburst of enthusiastic
tomfoolery such as never before or since rejoiced the American people.
But President Harrison had hardly been in office a month when he died.
Some say he was worried to death by office seekers, but a more prosaic
cause, pneumonia, can also be alleged. It is satisfactory that this
good man's grandson worthily filled his office forty-eight years after,
but his immediate successor was of course the Vice-President, Tyler,
chosen as an influential opponent of the last Democrat Presidents, but
not because he agreed with the Whigs. Cultivated but narrow-minded,
highly independent and wholly perverse, he satisfied no aspiration of
the Whigs and paved the way effectually for the Democrat who succeeded
him.
Throughout these years Lincoln was of course working at law, which
became, with the development of the country, a more arduous and a more
learned profession. Sessions of the Legislature did not last long, and
political canvasses were only occasional. If Lincoln was active in
these matters he was in many other directions, too, a keen participator
in the keen life of the society round him. Nevertheless politics as
such, and apart from any large purpose to be achieved through them, had
for many years a special fascination for him. For one thing he was
argumentative in the best sense, with a passion for what the Greeks
sometimes called "dialectic"; his rare capacity for solitary thought,
the most marked and the greatest of his powers, went absolutely hand in
hand with the desire to reduce his thoughts to a form which would carry
logical conviction to others. Further, there can be no doubt--and such
a combination of tastes, though it seems to be uncommon, is quite
intelligible--that the somewhat unholy business of party management was
at first attractive to him. To the end he showed no intuitive
comprehension of individual men. His sincere friendly intention, the
unanswerable force of an argument, the convincing analogy veiled in an
unseemly story, must take their chance of suiting the particular taste
of Senator Sherman or General McClellan; but any question of managing
men in the mass--will a given candidate's influence with this section
of people count for more than his unpopularity with that section? and
so on--involved an element of subtle and long-sighted calculation which
was vastly congenial to him. We are to see him hereafter applying this
sort of science on a grand scale and for a great end. His early
discipline in it is a dull subject, interesting only where it displays,
as it sometimes does, the perfect fairness with which this ambitious
man could treat his own claims as against those of a colleague and
competitor.
In forming any judgment of Lincoln's career it must, further, be
realised that, while he was growing up as a statesman, the prevailing
conception of popular government was all the time becoming more
unfavourable to leadership and to robust individuality. The new party
machinery adopted by the Democrats under Jackson, as the proper mode of
securing government by the people, induced a deadly uniformity of
utterance; breach of that uniformity was not only rash, but improper.
Once in early days it was demanded in a newspaper that "all candidates
should show their hands." "Agreed," writes Lincoln, "here's mine"; and
then follows a young man's avowal of advanced opinions; he would give
the suffrage to "all whites who pay taxes or bear arms, by no means
excluding females." Disraeli, who was Lincoln's contemporary, throve
by exuberances quite as startling as this, nor has any English
politician found it damaging to be bold. On this occasion indeed (in
1836) Lincoln was far from damaging himself; the Whigs had not till a
few years later been induced, for self-preservation, to copy the
Democratic machine. But it is striking that the admiring friend who
reports this declaration, "too audacious and emphatic for the statesmen
of a later day," must carefully explain how it could possibly suit the
temper of a time which in a few years passed away. Very soon the
question whether a proposal or even a sentiment was timely or premature
came to bulk too large in the deliberations of Lincoln's friends. The
reader will perhaps wonder later whether such considerations did not
bulk too largely in Lincoln's own mind. Was there in his
statesmanship, even in later days when he had great work to do, an
element of that opportunism which, if not actually base, is at least
cheap? Or did he come as near as a man with many human weaknesses
could come to the wise and nobly calculated opportunism which is not
merely the most beneficent statesmanship, but demands a heroic
self-mastery?
The main interest of his doings in Illinois politics and in Congress is
the help they may give in penetrating his later mind. On the one hand,
it is certain that Lincoln trained himself to be a great student of the
fitting opportunity. He evidently paid very serious attention to the
counsels of friends who would check his rasher impulses. One of his
closest associates insists that his impulsive judgment was bad, and he
probably thought so himself. It will be seen later that the most
momentous utterance he ever made was kept back through the whole space
of two years of crisis at the instance of timid friends. It required
not less courage and was certainly more effective when at last it did
come out. The same great capacity for waiting marks any steps that he
took for his own advancement. Indeed it was a happy thing for him and
for his country that his character and the whole cast of his ideas and
sympathies were of a kind to which the restraint imposed on an American
politician was most congenial and to which therefore it could do least
harm. He was to prove himself a patient man in other ways as well as
this. On many things, perhaps on most, the thoughts he worked out in
his own mind diverged very widely from those of his neighbours, but he
was not in the least anxious either to conceal or to obtrude them. His
social philosophy as he expressed it to his friends in these days was
one which contemplated great future reforms--abolition of slavery and a
strict temperance policy were among them. But he looked for them with
a sort of fatalistic confidence in the ultimate victory of reason, and
saw no use and a good deal of harm in premature political agitation for
them. "All such questions," he is reported to have said, "must find
lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their
approval. In God's own time they will be organised into law and thus
woven into the fabric of our institutions." This seems a little
cold-blooded, but perhaps we can already begin to recognise the man
who, when the time had fully come, would be on the right side, and in
whom the evil which he had deeply but restrainedly hated would find an
appallingly wary foe.
But there were crucial instances which test sufficiently whether this
wary politician was a true man or not. The soil of Illinois was free
soil by the Ordinance of 1787, and Congress would only admit it to the
Union as a free State. But it had been largely peopled from the South.
There had been much agitation against this restriction; prevailing
sentiment to a late date strongly approved of slavery; it was at Alton
in Illinois that, in 1836, Elijah Lovejoy, an Abolitionist publisher,
had been martyred by the mob which had failed to intimidate him. In
1837, when the bold agitation of the Abolitionists was exciting much
disapproval, the Illinois Legislature passed resolutions condemning
that agitation and declaring in soothing tones the constitutional
powerlessness of Congress to interfere with slavery in the Southern
States. Now Lincoln himself--whether for good reasons or bad must be
considered later--thoroughly disapproved of the actual agitation of the
Abolitionists; and the resolutions in question, but for one merely
theoretical point of law and for an unctuous misuse of the adjective
"sacred," contained nothing which he could not literally have accepted.
The objection to them lay in the motive which made it worth while to
pass them. Lincoln drew up and placed on the records of the House a
protest against these resolutions. He defines in it his own quite
conservative opinions; he deprecates the promulgation of Abolition
doctrines; but he does so because it "tends rather to increase than
abate the evils" of slavery; and he lays down "that the institution of
slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy." One man alone
could he induce to sign this protest with him, and that man was not
seeking re-election.
By 1842 Lincoln had grown sensibly older, and a little less ready, we
may take it, to provoke unnecessary antagonism. Probably very old
members of Free Churches are the people best able to appreciate the
daring of the following utterance. Speaking on Washington's birthday
in a Presbyterian church to a temperance society formed among the
rougher people of the town and including former drunkards who desired
to reform themselves, he broke out in protest against the doctrine that
respectable persons should shun the company of people tempted to
intemperance. "If," he said, "they believe as they profess that
Omnipotence condescended to take upon Himself the form of sinful man,
and as such die an ignominious death, surely they will not refuse
submission to the infinitely lesser condescension, for the temporal and
perhaps eternal salvation of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of
their fellow creatures! Nor is the condescension very great. In my
judgment such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more
from the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority
over those who have. Indeed, I believe, if we take habitual drunkards
as a class, that their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous
comparison with those of any other class." It proved, at a later day,
very lucky for America that the virtuous Lincoln, who did not drink
strong drink--nor, it is sad to say, smoke, nor, which is all to the
good, chew--did feel like that about drunkenness; But there was great
and loud wrath. "It's a shame," said one, "that he should be permitted
to abuse us so in the house of the Lord." It is certain that in this
sort of way he did himself a good deal of injury as an aspiring
politician. It is also the fact that he continued none the less
persistently in a missionary work conceived in a spirit none the less
Christian because it shocked many pious people.
3. _Marriage_.
The private life of Lincoln continued, and for many years increasingly,
to be equally marked by indiscriminate sociability and brooding
loneliness. Comfort and the various influences which may be associated
with the old-fashioned American word "elegance" seem never to enter
into it. What is more, little can be discerned of positive happiness
in the background of his life, as the freakish elasticity of his youth
disappeared and, after a certain measure of marked success, the further
objects of his ambition though not dropped became unlikely of
attainment and seemed, we may guess, of doubtful value. All along he
was being moulded for endurance rather than for enjoyment.
Nor, though his children evidently brought him happiness, does what we
know of his domesticities and dearest affections weaken this general
impression. When he married he had gone through a saddening
experience. He started on manhood with a sound and chivalrous outlook
on women in general, and a nervous terror of actual women when he met
them. In New Salem days he absented himself from meals for the whole
time that some ladies were staying at his boarding house. His clothes
and his lack of upbringing must have weighed with him, besides his
natural disposition. None the less, of course he fell in love. Miss
Ann Rutledge, the daughter of a store and tavern keeper from Kentucky
with whom Lincoln was boarding in 1833, has been described as of
exquisite beauty; some say this is over-stated, but speak strongly of
her grace and charm. A lady who knew her gives these curiously
collocated particulars: "Miss Rutledge had auburn hair, blue eyes, fair
complexion. She was pretty, slightly slender, but in everything a
good-hearted young woman. She was about five feet two inches high, and
weighed in the neighbourhood of a hundred and twenty pounds. She was
beloved by all who knew her. She died as it were of grief. In
speaking of her death and her grave Lincoln once said to me, 'My heart
lies buried there.'" The poor girl, when Lincoln first came courting
to her, had passed through a grievous agitation. She had been engaged
to a young man, who suddenly returned to his home in the Eastern
States, after revealing to her, with some explanation which was more
convincing to her than to her friends, that he had been passing under
an assumed name. It seems that his absence was strangely prolonged,
that for a long time she did not hear from him, that his letters when
they did come puzzled her, that she clung to him long, but yielded at
last to her friends, who urged their very natural suspicions upon her.
It is further suggested that there was some good explanation of his
conduct all the while, and that she learnt this too late when actually
engaged to Lincoln. However that may be, shortly after her engagement
to Lincoln she fell seriously ill, insisted, as she lay ill, on a long
interview with Lincoln alone, and a day or two later died. This was in
1835, when he was twenty-six. It is perhaps right to say that one
biographer throws doubt on the significance of this story in Lincoln's
life. The details as to Ann Rutledge's earlier lover are vague and
uncertain. The main facts of Lincoln's first engagement and almost
immediate loss of his betrothed are quite certain; the blow would have
been staggering enough to any ordinary young lover and we know nothing
of Lincoln which would discredit Mr. Herndon's judgment that its effect
on him was both acute and permanent. There can be no real doubt that
his spells of melancholy were ever afterwards more intense, and politer
biographers should not have suppressed the testimony that for a time
that melancholy seemed to his friends to verge upon insanity. He
always found good friends, and, as was to happen again later, one of
them, Mr. Bowline Greene, carried him off to his own secluded home and
watched him carefully. He said "the thought that the snows and rains
fell upon her grave filled him with indescribable grief." Two years
later he told a fellow-legislator that "although he seemed to others to
enjoy life rapturously, yet when alone he was so overcome by mental
depression, he never dared to carry a pocket-knife." Later still
Greene, who had helped him, died, and Lincoln was to speak over his
grave. For once in his life he broke down entirely; "the tears ran
down his yellow and shrivelled cheeks. . . . After repeated efforts he
found it impossible to speak and strode away sobbing."
The man whom a grief of this kind has affected not only intensely, but
morbidly, is almost sure, before its influence has faded, to make love
again, and is very likely to do so foolishly. Miss Mary Owens was
slightly older than Lincoln. She was a handsome woman; commanding, but
comfortable. In the tales of Lincoln's love stories, much else is
doubtfully related, but the lady's weight is in each case stated with
assurance, and when she visited her sister in New Salem in 1836 Mary
Owens weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. There is nothing sad in
her story; she was before long happily married--not to Lincoln--and she
long outlived him. But Lincoln, who had seen her on a previous visit
and partly remembered her, had been asked, perhaps in jest, by her
sister to marry her if she returned, and had rashly announced half in
jest that he would. Her sister promptly fetched her, and he lingered
for some time in a half-engaged condition, writing her reasonable,
conscientious, feeble letters, in which he put before her
dispassionately the question whether she could patiently bear "to see
without sharing . . . a lot of flourishing about in carriages, . . . to
be poor without the means of hiding your poverty," and assuring her
that "I should be much happier with you than the way I am, provided I
saw no signs of discontent in you." Whether he rather wished to marry
her but felt bound to hold her free, or distinctly wished not to marry
her but felt bound not to hold himself free, he probably was never
sure. The lady very wisely decided that he could not make her happy,
and returned to Kentucky. She said he was deficient in the little
courteous attentions which a woman's happiness requires of her husband.
She gave instances long after to prove her point; but she always spoke
of him with friendship and respect as "a man with a heart full of human
kindness and a head full of common sense."
Rather unluckily, Lincoln, upon his rejection or release, relieved his
feelings in a letter about Miss Owens to one of the somewhat older
married ladies who were kind to him, the wife of one of his colleagues.
She ought to have burnt his letter, but she preserved it to kindle mild
gossip after his death. It is a burlesque account of his whole
adventure, describing, with touches of very bad taste, his
disillusionment with the now maturer charms of Miss Owens when her
sister brought her back to New Salem, and making comedy of his own
honest bewilderment and his mingled relief and mortification when she
at last refused him. We may take it as evidence of the natural want of
perception and right instinctive judgment in minor matters which some
who knew and loved him attribute to him. But, besides that, the man
who found relief in this ill-conceived exercise of humour was one in
whom the prospect of marriage caused some strange and pitiful
perturbation of mind.
This was in 1838, and a year later Mary Todd came from Kentucky to stay
at Springfield with her brother-in-law Ninian Edwards, a legislator of
Illinois and a close ally of Lincoln's. She was aged twenty-one, and
her weight was one hundred and thirty pounds. She was well educated,
and had family connections which were highly esteemed. She was
pleasant in company, but somewhat imperious, and she was a vivacious
talker. When among the young men who now became attentive in calling
on the Edwards's Lincoln came and sat awkwardly gazing on Miss Todd,
Mrs. Edwards appears to have remarked that the two were not suited to
each other. But an engagement took place all the same. As to the
details of what followed, whether he or she was the first to have
doubts, and whether, as some say, the great Stephen Douglas appeared on
the scene as a rival and withdrew rather generously but too late, is
uncertain. But Lincoln composed a letter to break off his engagement.
He showed it to Joshua Speed, who told him that if he had the courage
of a man he would not write to her, but see her and speak. He did so.
She cried. He kissed and tried to comfort her. After this Speed had
to point out to him that he had really renewed his engagement. Again
there may be some uncertainty whether on January 1, 1841, the bridal
party had actually assembled and the bridegroom after long search was
found by his friends wandering about in a state which made them watch
day and night and keep knives from him. But it is quite certain from
his letters that in some such way on "the fatal 1st of January, 1841,"
he broke down terribly. Some weeks later he wrote to his partner:
"Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I
shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better,
as it appears to me." After a while Speed was able to remove him to
his own parents' home in Kentucky, where he and his mother nursed him
back to mental life.
Then in the course of 1841 Speed himself began to contemplate marriage,
and Speed himself had painful searchings of heart, and Lincoln's turn
came to show a sureness of perception in his friend's case that he
wholly lacked in his own. "I know," he writes, "what the painful point
with you is . . . it is an apprehension that you do not love her as you
should. What nonsense! How came you to court her? But you say you
reasoned yourself into it. What do you mean by that? Was it not that
you found yourself unable to reason yourself out of it? Did you not
think, and partly form the purpose, of courting her the first time you
ever saw or heard of her? What had reason to do with it at that early
stage?" A little later the lady of Speed's love falls ill. Lincoln
writes: "I hope and believe that your present anxiety about her health
and her life must and will for ever banish those horrid doubts which I
know you sometimes felt as to the truth of your affection for
her. . . . Perhaps this point is no longer a question with you, and my
pertinacious dwelling upon it is a rude intrusion upon your feelings.
If so, you must pardon me. You know the hell I have suffered upon that
point, and how tender I am upon it." When he writes thus it is no
surprise to hear from him that he has lost his hypochondria, but it may
be that the keen recollection of it gives him excessive anxieties for
Speed. On the eve of the wedding he writes: "You will always hereafter
be on ground that I have never occupied, and consequently, if advice
were needed, I might advise wrong. I do fondly hope, however, that you
will never need comfort from abroad. I incline to think it probable
that your nerves will occasionally fail you for a while; but once you
get them firmly graded now, that trouble is over for ever. If you went
through the ceremony calmly or even with sufficient composure not to
excite alarm in any present, you are safe beyond question, and in two
or three months, to say the most, will be the happiest of men." Soon
he is reassured and can "feel somewhat jealous of both of you now. You
will be so exclusively concerned with one another that I shall be
forgotten entirely. I shall feel very lonesome without you." And a
little later: "It cannot be told how it thrills me with joy to hear you
say you are far happier than you ever expected to be. I know you too
well to suppose your expectations were not at least sometimes
extravagant, and if the reality exceeds them all, I say, 'Enough, dear
Lord.'" And here follows what might perhaps have been foreseen: "Your
last letter gave me more pleasure than the total sum of all that I have
received 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 still one unhappy whom I have contributed to make so. That
kills my soul. I cannot but reproach myself for even wishing to be
happy while she is otherwise." Very significantly he has inquired of
friends how that one enjoyed a trip on the new railway cars to
Jacksonville, and--not being like Falkland in "The Rivals"--praises God
that she has enjoyed it exceedingly.
This was in the spring of 1842. Some three months later he writes
again to Speed: "I must gain confidence in my own ability to keep my
resolves when they are made. In that ability I once prided myself as
the only chief gem of my character. That gem I lost how and where you
know too well. I have not 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. . . . I always was superstitious. I believe God made
me one of the instruments of bringing Fanny and you together, which
union I have no doubt He had fore-ordained. Whatever He designs for me
He will do. 'Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord,' is my
text just now. If, as you say, you have told Fanny all, I should have
no objection to her seeing this letter. I do not think I can come to
Kentucky this season. I am so poor and make so little headway in the
world that I drop back in a month of idleness as much as I gain in a
year's sowing." At last in the autumn of that year Lincoln addresses
to Speed a question at once so shrewd and so daringly intimate as
perhaps no other man ever asked of his friend. "The immense sufferings
you endured from the first days of September till the middle of
February" (the date of Speed's wedding) "you never tried to conceal
from me, and I well understood. You have now been the husband of a
lovely woman nearly eight months. That you are happier now than the
day you married her I well know. . . . But I want to ask a close
question! 'Are you in _feeling_ as well as in _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."
Speed remained in Kentucky; Lincoln was too poor for visits of
pleasure; and Speed was not a man who cared for political life; but the
memorials, from which the above quotations have been taken, of
Lincoln's lasting friendship with Speed and his kind mother, who gave
Lincoln a treasured Bible, and his kind young wife, who made her
husband's friend her own, and whose violet, dropped into her husband's
letter to him just as he was sealing it, was among the few flowers that
Lincoln ever appreciated, throw the clearest light that we can anywhere
obtain on the inner mind of Lincoln.
As may have been foreseen, Mary Todd and he had met again on a friendly
footing. A managing lady is credited with having brought about a
meeting between them, but evidently she did not do it till Lincoln was
at least getting desirous to be managed. He was much absorbed at this
time in law business, to which since his breakdown he had applied
himself more seriously. It was at this period too that his notable
address on temperance was given. Soon after his meetings with Miss
Todd began again he involved himself in a complication of a different
kind. He had written, partly, it seems, for the young lady's
amusement, some innocent if uninteresting political skits relating to
some question about taxes. This brought on him an unexpected challenge
from a fiery but diminutive revenue official, one Colonel Shields, a
prominent Democratic politician. Lincoln availed himself of the right
of the challenged to impose ridiculous conditions of combat, partly no
doubt in fun, but with the sensible object also of making sure that he
could disarm his antagonist with no risk of harm to the little man.
The tangled controversy which ensued as to how and by whose fault the
duel eventually fell through has nothing in it now, but the whole
undignified business seems to have given Lincoln lasting chagrin, and
worried him greatly at a time when it would have been well that he
should be cheerful. At last on November 4, 1842, when Lincoln was
nearly thirty-three, he was safely married. The wedding, held,
according to the prevailing custom, in a private house, was an
important function, for it was the first Episcopalian wedding that good
society in Springfield had witnessed. Malicious fortune brought in a
ludicrous incident at the last moment, for when in the lawyerlike
verbiage of the then American Prayer-Book the bridegroom said, "With
this ring I thee endow with all my goods, chattels, lands and
tenements," old Judge Brown of the Illinois Supreme Court, who had
never heard the like, impatiently broke in, "God Almighty, Lincoln!
The statute fixes all that."
There is more than the conventional reason for apology for pressing the
subject a little further. Nothing very illuminating can be said as to
the course of Lincoln's married life, but much has already been made
public about it which, though it cannot be taken as reaching to the
heart of the matter, is not properly to be dismissed as mere gossip.
Mrs. Lincoln, it is clear, had a high temper--the fact that, poor
woman! after her husband had been murdered by her side, she developed
clear symptoms of insanity, may or may not, for all we are entitled to
know, be relevant in this regard. She was much younger than her
husband, and had gone through a cruel experience for him. Moreover,
she had proper ambitions and was accustomed to proper conventional
refinements; so her husband's exterior roughness tried her sorely, not
the less we may be sure because of her real pride in him. Wife and
tailor combined could not, with any amount of money, have dressed him
well. Once, though they kept a servant then, Lincoln thought it
friendly to open the door himself in his shirt sleeves when two most
elegant ladies came to call. On such occasions, and doubtless on other
occasions of less provocation, Mrs. Lincoln's high temper was let
loose. It seems pretty certain, too, that he met her with mere
forbearance, sad patience, and avoidance of conflict. His fellow
lawyers came to notice that he stayed away from home on circuit when
all the rest of them could go home for a day or two. Fifteen years
after his wedding he himself confessed to his trouble, not disloyally,
but in a rather moving remonstrance with some one who had felt
intolerably provoked by Mrs. Lincoln. There are slight indications
that occasions of difficulty and pain to Lincoln happened up to the end
of his life. On the other hand, there are slight indications that
common love for their children helped to make the two happier, and
there are no indications at all of any approach to a serious quarrel.
All that is told us may be perfectly true and not by any means have
justified the pity that some of Lincoln's friends were ready to feel
for him. It is difficult to avoid suspecting that Lincoln's wife did
not duly like his partner and biographer, Mr. Herndon, who felt it his
duty to record so many painful facts and his own possibly too painful
impression from them. On the other side, Mr. Herndon makes it clear
that in some respects Mrs. Lincoln was an admirable wife for her
husband. She faced the difficulties of their poverty with spirit and
resolution. Testimony from other sources to her graceful hospitality
abounds. More than this, from the very first she believed in his
powers. It seems she had the discernment to know, when few others can
have done so, how far greater he was than his rival Douglas. It was
Herndon's belief, in days when he and Mrs. Lincoln were the two persons
who saw most of him, that she sustained his just ambition, and that at
the most critical moment of his personal career she had the courage to
make him refuse an attractive appointment which must have ruined it.
The worst that we are told with any certainty amounts to this, that
like the very happily married writer of "Virginibus Puerisque," Lincoln
discovered that marriage is "a field of battle and not a bed of
roses"--a battle in which we are forced to suspect that he did not play
his full part.
We should perhaps be right in associating his curious record, of right
and high regard for women and inefficiency where a particular woman's
happiness depended on him, with the belief in Woman Suffrage, which he
early adopted and probably retained. Be that as it may, this part of
his story points to something which runs through his whole character,
something which perhaps may be expressed by saying that the natural
bias of his qualities was towards the negative side. We hear, no
doubt, of occasions when his vigour was instant and terrible--like that
of Hamlet on the ship for England; but these were occasions when the
right or the necessity of the case was obvious. We have seen him also
firm and absolutely independent where his conviction had already been
thought out. Where there was room for further reflection, for
patiently waiting on events, or for taking counsel of wise friends,
manly decision had not come easily to him. He had let a third person
almost engage him to Miss Owens. Once in this relation to her, he had
let it be the woman's part and not the man's to have decision enough
for the two. Speed had to tell him that he must face Miss Todd and
speak to her, and Speed again had to make clear to him what the effect
of his speaking had been. In time he decided what he thought his own
feelings were, but it was by inference from the feelings of Speed.
Lastly, it seems, the troubles of his married life were met by mere
patience and avoidance. All this, of course, concerned a side of
life's affairs in regard to which his mind had suffered painful shocks;
but it shows the direction of his possible weakness and his possible
strength in other things. It falls in with a trait which he himself
noted in one of the letters to Speed: "I have no doubt," he writes, "it
is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of
Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realise." All such
men have to go through deep waters; but they do not necessarily miss
either success or happiness in the end. Lincoln's life may be said to
have tested him by the test which Mr. Kipling states in his lines about
Washington:--
"If you can dream--and not make dreams your master;
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim."
He was to prove that he could do this; it is for the following pages to
show in how high a degree. Meanwhile one thing should already be clear
about him. No shrewd judge of men could read his letters to Speed with
care and not feel that, whatever mistakes this man might commit,
fundamentally he was worthy of entire trust. That, as a matter of
fact, is what, to the end of his life, Speed and all the men who knew
him and an ever widening circle of men who had to judge by more casual
impressions did feel about Lincoln. Whatever was questionable in his
private or public acts, his own explanation, if he happened to give
one, would be taken by them as the full and naked truth, and, if there
was no known explanation, it remained to them an irrebuttable
presumption that his main intention was right.