Lincoln (11 page)

After McNamar left, Ann told his story to other members of her family, who received it with skepticism. There was, they thought, something wrong in McNamar’s story about deserting his family in order to save them. A man who changed his name must have a lurid past. Probably he had jilted Ann and would never return to New Salem. Such fears, however, were kept very quiet, for in Victorian America, a spurned woman was suspected of having some moral blight.

Lincoln, of course, knew of the engagement and of McNamar’s departure for the East. As postmaster, he was necessarily aware of the letters the engaged couple exchanged—fairly frequently at first, and then more and more rarely, until correspondence from McNamar ceased. But he, like everybody else, thought the couple was still betrothed, and, as Dr. Duncan, one of the two physicians in New Salem, said, he regarded Ann’s engagement to McNamar as “an insurmountable bar[r]ier.” These circumstances may have fostered rather than blighted his own interest in Ann. Had she remained free, he might well have remained distant and formal, as he was with other unmarried women, because he was always afraid of intimacy. But since Ann was committed to another, he was able to keep up a joking, affectionate relationship with her.

How that friendship developed into a romance cannot be reconstructed
from the record. No letter from Ann Rutledge is known to exist, and in the thousands of pages of Lincoln’s correspondence, there is not one mention of her name. Apart from one highly dubious anecdote about a quilting bee, there are no stories about the courtship, which, because of Ann’s ambiguous relationship to McNamar, was intentionally kept very quiet. Lincoln’s long, uninterrupted absence in Vandalia, from November through February, suggests an affectionate, rather than a passionate, affair.

Sometime in 1835, Lincoln and Ann came to an understanding. In later years old-time New Salem residents differed as to whether there was a formal engagement, and whether it was “conditional” or “unconditional.” Both parties had good reason to hesitate. Lincoln, who had no profession and little money, doubted his ability to support a wife. Ann strongly felt “the propriety of seeing McNamar, [to] inform him of the change in her feelings and seek an honorable releas[e] before consum[m]ating the engagement with Mr. L. by Marriage.” According to Ann’s cousin, James McCrady Rutledge, they agreed “to wait a year for their marriage after their engagement until Abraham Lincoln was Admitted to the bar.” Understandably, Ann hesitated before agreeing to such an indeterminate arrangement, telling her cousin “that engagements made too far a hed
[sic],
sometimes failed, that one had failed, (meaning her engagement with McNamar).”

That terrible summer of 1835, one of the hottest in Illinois history, when it rained every day, was desperately hard on these young people. When Lincoln was not slogging through the water that covered the whole country, completing his surveys, he worked so unceasingly on his law books that friends feared for his health. They had more reason to worry about Ann’s, for in August she fell ill with “brain fever”—probably typhoid, caused when the flood contaminated the Rutledge well—and was put to bed. Though her doctor prescribed absolute quiet, she insisted on seeing Lincoln. A few days afterward she became unconscious, and on August 25 she died.

Lincoln was devastated. This terrible blow must have brought to his mind memories of earlier losses: his brother Thomas, his sister Sarah, and, above all, his mother. His nerves, already frayed by overwork and too much study, began to give way, and he fell into a profound depression. He managed to hold himself together for a time, but after the funeral it began to rain again and his melancholy deepened. He told Mrs. Bennett Abell, with whom he was staying, “that he could not bare
[sic]
the idea of its raining on her Grave.” So distraught was he that his friends persuaded him to visit his old friend Bowling Green, who lived about a mile south of New Salem. There he found rest and comfort.

By September 24 he was back making surveys, but the memory of Ann Rutledge did not quickly fade. Many years later, after his first election as President, he began talking with an old friend, Isaac Cogdal, about early days in New Salem, asking the present whereabouts of many of the early settlers. When the name of Rutledge came up, Cogdal ventured to ask whether it was true that Lincoln had fallen in love with Ann. “It is true—true indeed I did,”
Lincoln replied, if Cogdal’s memory can be trusted. “I loved the woman dearly and soundly: she was a handsome girl—would have made a good loving wife.... I did honestly and truly love the girl and think often—often of her now.”

The death of Ann Rutledge may have symbolized for Lincoln the approaching death of New Salem. After an auspicious beginning the village, lacking roads and river transportation for marketing its produce, began to decline. Property values dropped; the lot on which the Berry & Lincoln store stood, once valued at $100, now went at auction for $10. More and more residents moved away, mostly to nearby Petersburg, which Lincoln finished surveying in February 1836. It was clear that he, too, would soon have to leave.

The special session of the legislature, called for the winter of 1835–1836, did much to shape his future course, but Lincoln was not a leader in any of the three major changes it produced. At this session, for the first time, national politics intruded sharply into the proceedings of the legislature. A presidential election was approaching, and Democrats, aware of considerable hostility toward Andrew Jackson’s choice of a successor, Martin Van Buren, sought to unite the party by convening a statewide political convention in Vandalia on the first day of the legislative session. In addition to endorsing Van Buren, the convention vigorously condemned all who were “striving by means of false representations, to create divisions and dissentions
[sic]
among the Democratic party.” The action infuriated the Whigs, the minority party, who had hitherto been successful in statewide elections only by encouraging factionalism among the Democrats. Angrily Whig legislators, including Lincoln, condemned the convention system as a device of political manipulators to kill off candidates opposed to them, which “ought not to be tolerated in a republican government,” because it was “dangerous to the liberties of the people.” It took some years for the Whigs to learn that they, too, could benefit from just this same system, and in the future Lincoln’s political career would be shaped in party conventions.

More immediately important was the reapportionment legislation of this session. The population of Illinois had been growing rapidly, mainly in the northern and central parts of the state, and the southern counties, which had been settled first, were heavily overrepresented. Lincoln was in favor of only a moderate reallocation of seats and consequently opposed the more drastic measure approved by the legislature, which gave Sangamon County the largest delegation in the House of Representatives—seven, rather than four, members. The change had major consequences for Lincoln’s future political success.

In a third major initiative Lincoln was again a follower, not a leader. One of the main purposes for which Governor Joseph Duncan had called the
special session was to enact legislation to support the building of a canal that, by connecting the Illinois and Chicago rivers, would link Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. This project held for Illinois an importance comparable with that of the Erie Canal for New York, but hitherto the state had been willing only to authorize and encourage the construction of the canal, rather than to assist the enterprise financially. Now, finally, it was clear that more was needed, and Duncan asked the state to give “the most liberal support” to the project. The legislature obliged by authorizing a loan of $500,000 to support the bonds of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. On a crucial vote (28 to 27) Lincoln supported the measure, which opened the way to subsequent state subsidies for the building of roads and canals.

The vote marked a shift in Lincoln’s position on internal improvements. He had long been a supporter of improved river transportation, of canals, of better roads, and, eventually, of railroads, all of which were part of his vision of a prosperous society, linked together by a network of commerce and communication. For a time he hoped that the federal government would distribute “the proceeds of the sales of the public lands to the several states, to enable our state, in common with others, to dig canals and construct rail roads, without borrowing money and paying interest on it.” But, failing that, he had felt that such improvements should be completed by private capital. Now, however, he was convinced that unless Illinois was to fall far behind other states, it must support internal improvements with the state’s credit.

The impact these three changes had on Lincoln’s course would not be evident until the 1836 session of the legislature, and before that he had to run for reelection. Announcing his candidacy in June, he explained his position on the suffrage issue, which was currently a subject of controversy. Illinois extended the ballot to all white male citizens who had resided in the state for six months; foreign-born immigrants did not have the franchise until they were naturalized. Large numbers of these were Irish-born workers on the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Democrats favored giving them the vote, but most Whigs did not. Lincoln, who shared the standard Whig belief that property holding ought to be a prerequisite for voting, favored “all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burthens.” That meant, he explained, “admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms”—and then he obfuscated his message by adding “by no means excluding females.” Far from being an early advocate of women’s suffrage, Lincoln was apparently making a tongue-in-cheek joke, because everybody knew that under Illinois law women neither paid taxes (husbands or guardians paid them for women who owned property) nor served in the militia. Lincoln’s announcement revealed incidentally that he, like virtually every other Illinois politician, did not think African-Americans were entitled to the ballot.

The campaign was a strenuous one. Lincoln, along with the sixteen other candidates, traveled by horseback from one village to another, addressing public meetings at hamlets like Salisbury, Allenton, and Cotton Hill. Speaking
began in the morning and often continued until well into the afternoon, and, as party lines were coming to be more clearly defined, candidates gave their views not merely on local issues but on national ones as well. At times tempers flared. Ninian W. Edwards, the aristocratic and wealthy son of a former governor, was so offended by the remarks of one of his competitors that he drew a pistol on him. Even Lincoln, usually genial, lashed back angrily when “Truth Teller” falsely charged he had opposed paying a state loan, branding the author “a
liar
and a
scoundrel”
and promising “to give his proboscis a good wringing.” Mostly, though, he managed criticism with more finesse. At a Springfield rally, when a rival named George Forquer, a well-to-do lawyer who had recently changed his allegiance to the Democratic party and had received a lucrative appointment in return, attacked Lincoln in a sarcastic speech, saying that it was time for this presumptuous young man to be taken down, Lincoln calmly waited his turn. Then, remembering that Forquer had recently installed a lightning rod on his house—the first Lincoln had ever seen, and an object of some curiosity—he lashed back: “The gentleman commenced... by saying that this young man will have to be taken down I am not so young in years as I am in the trick and trades of a politician; but... I would rather die now, than, like the gentleman, change my politics and simultaneous with the change receive an office worth $3,000 per year, and then have to erect a lightning-rod over my house to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God.”

In the election on August 1, Lincoln received more votes than any other candidate. He continued to have the strong support of his neighbors in New Salem, who were Whigs like himself. But the more rural neighborhoods, like Clary’s Grove, were Democratic, and even Jack Armstrong, who continued to be a warm personal friend, failed to vote for him. In the minds of some who had previously been his most loyal followers, Lincoln was distancing himself from his rural origins and was already less a part of New Salem than of Springfield.

The Sangamon delegation to the 1836–1837 session of the legislature became known as the “Long Nine,” because the two senators and the seven representatives were all unusually tall in an age when six-foot men were rare; some, like Lincoln, were veritable giants. Their collective height, it was said, totaled fifty-four feet. But they were distinguished even more by their enthusiastic support of two objectives: promotion of Springfield, and state support for internal improvements. The delegation looked to Lincoln, now an experienced legislator though the next-to-youngest member of the group, as their floor leader.

They came to Vandalia instructed by a recent county convention to promote internal improvements. At the capital a statewide convention further agitated the question, demanding a comprehensive program backed by $10,000,000 in state bonds. In the House of Representatives the initiative was
taken by Stephen A. Douglas, the newly elected member from Morgan County (Jacksonville), who instantly assumed leadership of the Democrats. Only five feet four inches tall but with a massive head and a deep baritone voice, Douglas at the age of twenty-three had already mastered the arts of legislative politics, and he was eager to pass laws that would hasten the economic development of the state. Promptly he introduced a plan for the construction of a central railroad, running north and south through the state, connected with two major east-west lines, all underwritten by the state. Connected with this would be the speedy completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal.