Lincoln (17 page)

By comparison, Lincoln looked increasingly attractive. He lacked social graces, but his honesty, his courtesy, and his considerateness compensated for the deficiency. They shared many interests. Both were Kentuckians. Both loved poetry and had memorized many of the same poems, especially those by Robert Burns. Like him, she was a Whig. At a time when women were not supposed to profess an interest in politics, she openly supported Harrison for President in 1840, though, like Lincoln, she would have preferred Henry Clay, a friend of her family and a neighbor in Lexington. She was pleased by Lincoln’s ambition; in Kentucky she had often said jokingly that she intended to marry a man who would some day become President of the United States.

By the fall of 1840 she and Lincoln were edging toward a closer relationship, and that prospect may have contributed to his sometimes boisterous conduct toward his fellow legislators and even to his much publicized leap from the statehouse window. The Edwardses favored the match. Ninian Edwards said he desired it “for policy.” He did not explain his meaning, but doubtless he had in mind linking to his already influential family a promising
young lawyer and politician. Mrs. Edwards also encouraged it, recognizing that Lincoln was “a rising man.” Sometime around Christmas, Abraham and Mary became engaged.

Once Lincoln had made a commitment, he began to have second thoughts—much as he had done in his engagement to Mary Owens. It was as if he was reluctant to marry anyone who was willing to accept him. He began to suspect that the Edwardses had planned the match and had maneuvered him into proposing. Belatedly, though with some reason, he worried about his ability to support a wife. He had now an income of more than $1,000 a year from his legal practice, plus his salary as a state legislator, but neither source was certain. His law partnership was about to be dissolved. Stuart, who had been in Washington for most of the past two years, had contributed little to the practice, and, now that his reelection to a second term in the House of Representatives was virtually conceded, it made no sense to continue his empty partnership with Lincoln. Lincoln was not even assured of his income from the state legislature. With the collapse of the internal improvements system and the resulting bankruptcy of the state, he and his associates had come under increasingly bitter, and sometimes personal, attack. His political popularity was declining; in the 1840 election he was no longer the candidate who received the most votes, and in the rural precincts there was a movement to reject him and the other members of what was termed “the Springfield junto.” He resolved not to stand for reelection when his present term in the legislature expired. Thus in 1840 he was a man without reliable income, who had no savings and owned no house but probably still owed something on his “National Debt” from his New Salem days. He knew he could not give Mary the life of wealth and luxury to which she was accustomed.

These anxieties covered his deeper uncertainties about marriage. Like Speed, with whom he shared his most intimate thoughts, he was probably still sexually inexperienced. Both young men had grown up in a rough frontier society where, except in family arrangements, men and women kept largely to themselves and where, in all-male gatherings, there was much big talk and rough humor about sex—and usually much less experience. Both young men had highly romantic notions about women and marriage; as Lincoln wrote his friend later, “It is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me, to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realize.” At the same time, they shared
“forebodings”
about marriage, which evoked fears of “something indescribably horrible and alarming.” Probably they were anxious about their own, as yet untested, sexual adequacy; in addition, they must have worried about how to go about transforming the adored object of chaste passion into a bed partner. Both Lincoln and Speed rationalized their fears as apprehension that they did not love their fiancées as they should.

In Lincoln’s case all these anxieties were heightened by Speed’s decision to sell his interest in his store on January 1, in preparation for a return to
Kentucky in the spring. Lincoln had to move out of the upstairs room they shared and find lodgings with William Butler. A very private person, Lincoln was about to lose his best and closest friend, at just the moment when he was being rushed into a new, potentially very dangerous kind of intimacy with Mary. The man who wanted to live in a universe governed by cold reason found himself awash on a sea of turbulent emotions.

His nerve snapped. He decided he had to break the engagement, and he wrote Mary a letter saying that he did not love her. Speed tried to persuade him to burn it. “If you think you have
will
and manhood enough to go and see her and speak to her what you say in that letter,” he told him, “you may do that. Words are forgotten ... but once put your words in writing and they stand as a living and eternal monument against you.”

Reluctantly Lincoln accepted his friend’s advice and went to the Edwards mansion. When he told Mary he did not love her, she burst into tears. At first she blamed herself; remembering a young man in Kentucky whose attentions she had deliberately encouraged only to spurn him, she exclaimed, “The deciever shall be decieved wo is me.” Deeply moved, Lincoln “drew her down on his knee kissed her—and parted.”

When he told Speed what had happened, his friend said, “The last thing is a bad lick, but it cannot now be helped,” and he assumed the engagement still stood. But after Lincoln left, Mary brooded over “the reason of his change of mind—heart and soul” and concluded—without any real justification—that he was in love with Matilda Edwards. She wrote Lincoln a letter releasing him from his engagement, yet letting him know “that she would hold the question an open one—that is that she had not changed her mind, but felt as always.”

Instead of feeling relieved, Lincoln was devastated. Just as Mary Owens’s refusal had caused him to suspect that he really loved her, so Mary’s letter made him realize what he had lost. He became deeply depressed. During the first week in January he was able to go about his business, in a more or less perfunctory way, and to answer roll calls in the house of representatives. But then the burden of guilt and unhappiness became too great, and he took to his bed for about a week, unwilling to see anybody except Speed and Dr. Henry.

During this period some of his friends feared he might commit suicide. Years later Speed said he had felt obliged “to remove razors from his room—take any all knives and other such dangerous things,” but a fellow legislator, who boarded with Lincoln at Butler’s house, recalled: “His most intimate friends had no fears of his injuring himself. He was very sad and melancholy, but being subject to these spells, nothing serious was apprehended.” His mind was in turmoil as he reflected on what he had done and how he had acted. Bitterly he reproached himself for inconstancy. “My own ability to keep my resolves when they are made,” he told Speed, was once the source of pride “as the only, or at least the chief, gem of my character.” Now that was lost. He was haunted by “the never-absent idea” that he had made Mary
unhappy. “That still kills my soul,” he wrote his best friend. “I can not but reproach myself, for even wishing to be happy while she is otherwise.”

By the end of January he was able to resume his routine work, but in a listless, sporadic fashion. “I have, within the last few days, been making a most discreditable exhibition of myself in the way of hypochondriaism,” he told Stuart on January 20, but he could not control his emotions even long enough to offer an explanation. “I have not sufficient composure to write a long letter,” he informed his partner. Three days later his condition had not improved. “I am now the most miserable man living,” he informed Stuart. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”

Lincoln’s collapse became the subject of public comment and gossip. Some of his acquaintances, not aware of the seriousness of his illness, were lighthearted about Lincoln’s having had “two Cat fits, and a Duck fit.” Better informed, James C. Conkling wrote Mercy Levering that after a week in the sickroom Lincoln “is reduced and emaciated in appearance and seems scarcely to possess strength enough to speak above a whisper. His case at present is truly deplorable.” The Edwardses said flatly that he was crazy. Presently there were rumors about the causes of his depression. Springfield concluded that Lincoln was grieving because Mary Todd had broken their engagement. In this scenario Lincoln appeared, as Conkling wrote, a “poor hapless simple swain who loved most true but was not loved again.”

During the following months Lincoln tried to bring his life back under control. Dropping out of the Edwards social circle, he no longer saw much of his friends, and, as Conkling rightly suspected, he tried “to drown his cares among the intricacies and perplexities of the law.” In April he took a major step toward solving his financial uncertainties by entering into law partnership with Stephen T. Logan. From the outset Logan & Lincoln, with an office on the east side of North Fifth Street, had many clients, but Lincoln, who probably received a third, rather than one-half, of the fees, did not make a great deal of money.

He was still unhappy and far from well. In August he decided to visit Speed, who had returned to Kentucky, and for nearly a month he stayed at Farmington, the Speed home near Louisville. In that spacious mansion, built by skilled Philadelphia artisans around 1809, he experienced a life of leisure that he had never known before. Everything was arranged for his comfort. One of the house slaves was even assigned to be his personal servant. Lincoln took long walks in the fields with Joshua. He made friends with Mary, Joshua Speed’s half sister, and on trips into Louisville he met his brother, James Speed, who lent him books from his law library. The devout Mrs. Speed, observing that he was still very melancholy, had long, motherly talks with him and presented him with a Bible, urging him “to read it—to
adopt its precepts and pray for its promises.” “I intend to read it regularly when I return home,” he promised, adding equivocally, “I doubt not that it is really... the best cure for the ‘Blues’ could one but take it according to the truth.”

All in all, it was a most successful vacation, and Lincoln was so charmed by his Kentucky experiences that he did not even wince when, on the steamboat returning home, he encountered twelve chained slaves, “strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line.” A “gentleman” was taking them from their Kentucky homes to the Deep South, where, Lincoln recognized, “the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where.” Years later he would remember the brutality of the scene, but now, absorbed in his own unhappiness, he noted only that the slaves were “the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board.”

In Kentucky he came to realize that Speed was facing a psychological crisis much like his own. His friend was engaged to Fanny Henning, a vivacious girl with what Lincoln called “heavenly
black eyes,
” but as the time for marriage neared, he began to have second thoughts. He worried that he did not love Fanny as he should. Back in Springfield, Lincoln watched the development of the affair with almost painful interest, and he sent a stream of letters designed to keep his friend’s spirits up and to encourage him to marry. In effect, Lincoln and Speed were acting out a game of doctor and patient; in the winter of 1840–1841 Lincoln had been the sufferer and Speed had offered encouraging advice; now it was Speed who was at risk and Lincoln was trying to save his health and sanity.

In arguing with Speed, Lincoln was also arguing with himself. Did his friend fear he did not love his fiancée enough? “What nonsense!” Lincoln exclaimed. Speed had not courted Fanny for her wealth, because she had none, and he had not wooed her because she was “moral, aimiable, sensible, or even of good character.” He had asked her to marry him because he had fallen head over heels in love with her. After Speed confessed to “excessively bad feeling” when Fanny became seriously ill, Lincoln took this as “indubitable evidence of your undying affection for her.” “Why Speed,” he reasoned, “if you did not love her, although you might not wish her death, you would most calmly be resigned to it.” As the date for Speed’s marriage approached, Lincoln warned that it was “probable, that your nerves will fail you occasionally for a while,” but he predicted that all would be well if his friend avoided exposure to bad weather—which, he noted, “my experience clearly proves to be verry severe on defective nerves”—and did not allow himself to be idle. “In two or three months, to say the most,” he predicted, you “will be the happiest of men.”

Once the wedding took place, a different note entered Lincoln’s letters. He awaited “with intense anxiety and trepidation” Speed’s report on his marriage. When Speed reported that he was far happier than he ever expected to be, Lincoln was overjoyed. “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 that fatal first of Jany. ’41.” He might have left it at that, but he needed to make sure that Speed, after all his doubts and suffering, was happy. Eight months after the wedding he asked bluntly: “Are you now, in
feeling
as well
as judgment,
glad you are married as you are?” “From any body but me,” he realized, “this would be an impudent question not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me.”

He had a reason for asking Speed to reply quickly, for he was once more approaching marriage with Mary Todd. After their rupture the two had tried to avoid each other, but in a small town like Springfield each was always conscious of what the other was doing. Then Mrs. Simeon Francis, wife of Lincoln’s good friend, the editor of the
Sangamo Journal,
decided to intervene. Inviting both Lincoln and Mary to a social affair, she brought them face-to-face and enjoined, “Be friends again.”