And now came the first great romance of Lincoln’s life. He fell in love
with pretty, auburn-haired Anne Rutledge, daughter of the owner of the
tavern in which he lived. His passion seemed hopeless, for the slender
maid of seventeen was pledged to a young man from New York. Yet Lincoln
loved and waited and hoped. His studies had worn him to emaciation. His
ill-fitting clothes hung loose on his ungainly figure. His face was
thin and his eyes sunken. He was poor, and a mere clodhopper. Still he
loved sweet little Anne Rutledge, even though all the village knew she
was another’s, and that love burned in him always.
When her lover went away, promising to return, Lincoln was her watchful
knight, serving and hoping. But the New Yorker did not come back. Anne
Rutledge grew pale with waiting. It was evident that she was deserted.
All New Salem knew it.
Then Lincoln offered her his heart and she consented, asking only time
enough to write to her lost lover. No answer to the letter came. Week
after week passed. And then Lincoln was accepted. But, alas, the strain
had been too great, and the abandoned young beauty grew mortally ill.
On her deathbed she called for Lincoln continually, and when he came
they left him alone with her for farewell. Afterwards he went to her
grave and wept like a child. “My heart lies buried there,” he said.
[Illustration: Lincoln in 1857]
Poor, honest, ugly Lincoln! That tragedy saddened his life, and years
afterwards he could not refer to Anne Rutledge without tears. So
terrible was the effect of her death upon him that for a time his
friends feared for his reason. He would wander in the woods a victim to
despair. To a companion who urged him to forget his loss he groaned,
“I cannot; the thought of the snow and rain on her grave fills me with
indescribable grief.” Finally, he was taken to a friend’s house and
there watched and comforted through days of deep torment, bordering on
madness, till he could bear to go out again among men.
Lincoln went to the Legislature at Vandalia in a coarse suit of jeans,
but most of the Illinois lawmakers wore jeans and coonskin caps. It
cannot be honestly said that he was a brilliant or important lawmaker,
although his great height, immense strength, quaint, sharp wit and
never-failing stories made him a popular figure at the State capital.
His mind was too much occupied with the study of the law. He had
resumed an acquaintance, formed during the Black Hawk war, with Major
John T. Stuart, who encouraged him to become a lawyer, and loaned him
books. Curiously enough he seemed to desire no teacher, but followed
his course of studies alone. Self-reliance was his strongest trait,
self-reliance and endless work.
Those who attempt to account for Lincoln’s remarkable rise in life are
apt to overlook the terrific mental grind to which he subjected himself
for so many years; and, as we value most that which we get through
stress and sacrifice and pain, so the things which Lincoln dug out of
his books were never forgotten.
Perhaps, in these easy days, when education is pressed upon all,
there is a lesson to be found in the story of this man who laid firm
foundations for his after life of greatness by taking upon himself the
whole responsibility for searching after sound knowledge and principles.
Lincoln became Major Stuart’s law-partner, and for many years he
alternated between petty lawsuits and his more profitable work as a
surveyor. His sincerity, shrewd humor, fairness and hearty hand-shaking
qualities drew friends to him wherever he went. His long, almost
ludicrous figure, with its trousers short of the shoetops by several
inches; his stooping shoulders and shriveled, sunken, melancholy face,
were not associated with the distinction, romance and tragic dignity
which history has given to all that belongs to him. But his very
spraddling awkwardness, the picturesque vernacular in which he told his
countryside parables, coarse and satirical though they sometimes were;
the humble spirit in which the lawyer-surveyor-politician would do odd
jobs or chores to help a neighbor or earn a dollar, gave him added
political strength with a frontier people who loved plain men.
He does not understand Lincoln who thinks of him as a guileless,
innocent frontiersman, raised by accident from a log-cabin to direct
a mighty war and shape the policy of a nation. He was a sagacious,
observant, natural politician, ambitious but honest. His law-partner,
Mr. Herndon, has made that plain. Horace White, who knew Lincoln in
his days of political campaigning, has written of him:
“He was as ambitious of earthly honors as any man of his time.
Furthermore, he was an adept at log-rolling or any political game that
did not involve falsity.... Nobody knew better how to turn things to
advantage politically, and nobody was readier to take such advantage,
provided it did not involve dishonorable means. He could not cheat the
people out of their votes any more than out of their money. The Abraham
Lincoln that some people have pictured to themselves, sitting in his
dingy law office, working over his cases till the voice of duty roused
him, never existed. If this had been his type he never would have been
called at all.”
It helps one to realize the man who afterwards roused the soul of the
Republic to resist the degradation of slavery and the shock of war to
read what he wrote from Washington to Mr. Herndon in 1848:
“Now, as to the young men, you must not wait to be brought forward by
the older men. For instance, do you suppose that I should ever have
got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by
older men? You young men get together and form a Rough and Ready club,
and have regular meetings and speeches. Take in everybody that you can
get.... As you go along, gather up the shrewd, wild boys about town,
whether just of age or just a little under. Let every one play the part
he can play best--some speak, some sing, and all halloo.”
And in 1836 we catch sight of Lincoln, again a candidate for the
Legislature, leaping forward, with flashing eyes to answer a taunt
of a Mr. Forquer, who had a lightning rod on his new house, and had
just left the Whig party for a place in the Land Office: “I desire to
live, and I desire place and distinction; but I would rather die now
than, like the gentleman, live to see the day that I would change my
politics for an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then
feel compelled to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty conscience
from an offended God.”
Yes, Lincoln was a politician who could seize your attention by the
very witchery of his grotesque personality, twist his opponent into
helplessness by the stinging shrewdness of a humorous story, make you
laugh or cry alternately, reach down into your humanity by some frank
confession of his poverty and rough beginnings, and then suddenly stir
the highest instincts of your nature by a sublime moral appeal.
It is true that in his second term in the Legislature he voted for
all manner of extravagant and preposterous schemes of “internal
improvements.” But that was a day of inflated hope, and Illinois was
delirious with land gambling. Lincoln, like the other politicians of
the State, was swept along by the current of popular enthusiasm. He
swaggered, dreamed, bragged and voted with the rest. The voters wanted
railways, canals and river improvements. So the Legislature authorized
thirteen hundred miles of railways, a canal between the Illinois River
and Lake Michigan, and endless improvements of rivers and streams;
and to carry out this staggering programme of improvements in a poor,
half-settled frontier State, a loan of twelve million dollars was voted.
Not only did Lincoln in his early life vote for this audacious and
spendthrift scheme, in response to a harebrained popular demand, but
he advocated woman suffrage; proposed a usury rate, with the naive
suggestion that “in cases of extreme necessity there could always be
found means to cheat the law”; wrote foolish love letters to blue-eyed
Mary Owens, offering to keep his supposed marriage engagement to her,
but advising her for her own sake not to hold him to it; and developed
into a more or less ranting, downright country politician, ready to
make a stump speech, tell a story, shake hands with a crowd or thrash a
ruffian on the slightest provocation.
And when the capital of Illinois was changed to Springfield, he rode
into that town on a borrowed horse, with “two saddlebags, containing
two or three law books and a few pieces of clothing,” and, not
having seventeen dollars with which to buy a bed and furnishings,
accepted a free room over the store of his friend, Mr. Speed, dropped
his saddlebags on the floor and smilingly said, “Well, Speed, I’m
moved.” That was his entrance into the town which saw his rise to the
Presidency.
Around the fireplace in Speed’s store Lincoln used to sit with Douglas,
Baker, Calhoun, Browning, Lamborn and other rising politicians and
orators of the West. Here every question under heaven was debated,
stories were told, jokes cracked, poems recited; and it would take the
pen of a Balzac to describe the scenes of merriment, or serious, sharp
contest, that happened before those blazing logs, with an attentive
ring of friends listening to the never-ceasing flow of wit and wisdom.
Again and again Lincoln was elected to the Illinois Legislature, always
as a Whig. Yet he remained humble in spirit. In answer to the taunt
that the Whigs were aristocrats, he made a speech showing that he
understood how the political sympathies of the West were to be won:
“I was a poor boy, hired on a flatboat at eight dollars a month, and
had only one pair of breeches to my back, and they were buckskin. Now,
if you know the nature of buckskin when wet, and dried by the sun, it
will shrink; and my breeches kept shrinking until they left several
inches of my legs bare between the tops of my socks and the lower part
of my breeches; and whilst I was growing taller, they were becoming
shorter, and so much tighter that they left a blue streak around my
legs that can be seen to this day. If you call this aristocracy I plead
guilty to the charge.”
He could outwrestle, outrun and out-talk any man in his section. He
was recognized as the most skillful and hard-headed politician in his
State. His courage and shrewdness in ordinary affairs were notable, and
his honesty and earnestness, sweetened by a sure sense of humor, lent
distinction and dignity to a ridiculous figure and sometimes theatrical
manner of address.
Yet there was a strange, gloomy self-distrust in Lincoln which showed
itself in his love affairs; an imaginative melancholy that wrung his
heart and tortured his mind with baseless, shadowy misgivings. He
engaged himself to marry Mary Todd and, doubting his own love, broke
the engagement. It has been even charged that he deserted her when she
was attired for the wedding. Lincoln described his parting to Mr. Speed:
“When I told Mary I did not love her,” he said, “she burst into tears
and almost springing from her chair and wringing her hands as if in
agony, said something about the deceiver being himself deceived. To
tell you the truth, Speed, it was too much for me. I found the tears
trickling down my own cheeks. I caught her in my arms and kissed her.”
So great was Lincoln’s agony and depression after this that he was
watched by his friends lest he might commit suicide. “I am now the most
miserable man living,” he wrote to Major Stuart. “If what I feel were
distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful
face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell; I awfully
forbode I shall not.”
The shadow of threatened insanity passed, and within two years Mary
Todd became his wife. It was a singular jest of fate that he should
have won her away from Stephen A. Douglas, who was yet to be his rival
in the great anti-slavery struggle that was ended only by millions of
armed men.
Poor heart-torn, shrewd, foolish, humble, sublime Lincoln!
[Illustration: Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s great rival]
Then there was the duel with James Shields. That hot-headed Irishman
had challenged Lincoln to fight because the tall politician had written
certain anonymous letters for the _Springfield Journal_. Lincoln
accepted and named “cavalry broadswords of the largest size.” The
duelists went to the place appointed by the river, and sat on logs on
opposite sides of the field. Here is a description of the scene by an
onlooker, from Miss Tarbell’s “Life of Abraham Lincoln”:
“I watched Lincoln closely while he set on his log awaiting the signal
to fight. His face was grave and serious. I could discern nothing
suggestive of ‘old Abe,’ as we knew him. I never knew him to go so
long without making a joke, and I began to believe he was getting
frightened. But presently he reached over and picked up one of the
swords, which he drew from its scabbard. Then he felt along the edge
of the weapon with his thumb, like a barber feels of the edge of his
razor, raised himself to his full height, stretched out his long arms
and clipped a twig from above his head with the sword. There wasn’t
another man of us who could have reached anywhere near that twig, and
the absurdity of that long-reaching fellow fighting with cavalry sabres
with Shields, who could walk under his arm, came pretty near making me
howl with laughter. After Lincoln had cut off the twig he returned the
sword to the scabbard.”
Before the combat could begin, friends arrived in a canoe, Shields was
induced to make a concession, and presently Lincoln and his opponent
returned to town fast friends.