LINCOLN LIKENED his politics to an “old womans dance”—“Short & Sweet.” He stood for three simple ideas: a national bank, a protective tariff, and a system for internal improvements. A state legislator could do little to promote a national bank or raise tariffs, but internal improvements, which then usually meant the improvement of roads, rivers, harbors, and railways, were largely a local matter. Many Whigs, Seward and Bates among them, spoke of improving waterways, but Lincoln had actually worked on a flatboat to bring meat and grain down the Mississippi to New Orleans; he had a flatboatman’s knowledge of the hazards posed by debris and logs while navigating the Sangamon River. Nor would he ever forget the thrill of receiving his first dollar for transporting two gentlemen on his flatboat from the riverbank to their steamer, which was anchored “in the middle of the river.” The experience of earning two half dollars in a single day made the world seem “wider and fairer,” giving him confidence in the future.
Lincoln knew firsthand the deprivations, the marginal livelihood of the subsistence farmer unable to bring produce to market without dependable roads. He had been paid the meager wages of the hired hand. Primitive roads, clogged waterways, lack of rail connections, inadequate schools—such were not merely issues to Lincoln, but hurdles he had worked all his life to overcome in order to earn an ampler share of freedom. These “improvements” to the infrastructure would enable thousands of farming families to emerge from the kind of poverty in which the Lincoln family had been trapped, and would permit new cities and towns to flourish.
Lincoln’s dedication to internal improvements and economic development was given strength, nourishment, and power, so the historian Gabor Boritt persuasively argues, by his passionate commitment “to the ideal that all men should receive a full, good, and ever increasing reward for their labors so they might have the opportunity to rise in life.” Economic development provided the basis, Lincoln said much later, that would allow every American “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” To Lincoln’s mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to “elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.” A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.
Young Lincoln’s great ambition in the 1830s, he told Joshua Speed, was to be the “DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.” The pioneering New York governor had opened opportunities for all New Yorkers and left a permanent imprint on his state when he persuaded the legislature to support the Erie Canal project. In the Illinois legislature, Lincoln hoped to leave a similar imprint by way of an ambitious program of internal improvements.
During these same years, the young state legislator made his first public statement on slavery. The rise of abolitionism in the North and the actions of governors, such as Seward, who refused to fully respect fugitive slave provisions in the Constitution, led legislatures in both South and North to pass resolutions that censured abolitionism and confirmed the constitutional right to slavery. In conservative Illinois, populated by many citizens of Southern birth, the general assembly fell in line. By the lopsided vote of 77–6, the assembly resolved that “we highly disapprove of the formation of abolition societies,” hold “sacred” the “right of property in slaves,” and believe that “the General Government cannot abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, against the consent of the citizens.”
Lincoln was among the six dissenting voices. With one other colleague who had also voted against the resolution, he issued a formal protest. This protest did not endorse abolitionism, for Lincoln believed then, as later, that the Constitution did not give Congress the power to interfere with slavery in the states where it was already established. Instead, resisting the tide of public opinion in Illinois, Lincoln proclaimed that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy,” and affirmed the constitutional power of Congress to abolish slavery in areas under federal control, such as the District of Columbia, though he recommended “that that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District.”
Lincoln always believed, he later said, that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” and he could not remember when he did not “so think, and feel.” Though he was born in the slave state of Kentucky, his parents had been antislavery. Their opposition had led them to change religious congregations, and eventually, they had moved to the free state of Indiana “partly on account of slavery.” Decades later, in his short autobiography written for the 1860 presidential campaign, Lincoln would describe his protest in the Illinois legislature as one that “briefly defined his position on the slavery question; and so far as it goes, it was then the same that it is now.”
In these early years, however, Lincoln paid the slavery issue less attention than Seward or Chase, believing that so long as slavery could be restricted to places where it already existed, it would gradually become extinct. He did not share Chase’s professional and personal aversion to slaveowners and did not hesitate to take whatever clients came his way. In the course of his practice, Lincoln defended both slaveowners and fugitive slaves. While he hated to see fugitive slaves hunted down, he publicly criticized the governor of Maine when he, like Seward, refused to give up two men who had aided a fugitive slave from Georgia. For Lincoln, the constitutional requirements for the return of fugitive slaves could not be evaded.
Lincoln’s dreams of becoming the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois collapsed when a sustained recession hit the state in 1837. Public sentiment turned against the costly and still-unfinished internal improvements system. For months, Lincoln fervently defended the system against the rising tide of criticism, likening the abandonment of the canal to “stopping a skift in the middle of a river—if it was not going up, it would go down.” Although his arguments fell on deaf ears, he refused to give ground, abiding by his father’s old maxim: “If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.” His unwillingness to abandon the policies he had championed became self-destructive stubbornness. By 1840, the fourth year of recession, the mood in the legislature was set against continuing these projects. With funds no longer forthcoming, the improvements system collapsed. The state bank was forced to liquidate. Land values fell precipitously, and new pioneers were deterred from emigrating to Illinois.
As a vocal proponent of the system that had aggravated the state’s fiscal catastrophe, Lincoln received a significant share of the blame. Though he managed to win a fourth term in 1840, he polled the least number of votes among the victorious candidates, his poorest showing since his first election. Belief in himself and his progressive agenda shaken, he resolved to retire from the legislature after his term was completed.
THIS FAILURE of Lincoln’s political ambition coincided with a series of crises in his personal life. Despite his humor, intellectual passion, and oratorical eloquence, he had always been awkward and self-conscious in the presence of women. “He was not very fond of girls,” his stepmother remembered. His gangly appearance and uncouth behavior did little to recommend him to the ladies. “He would burst into a ball,” recalled a friend, “with his big heavy Conestoga boots on, and exclaim aloud—‘Oh—boys, how clean those girls look.’” This was undoubtedly not the compliment the girls were looking for. Lincoln’s friend Henry Whitney provides a comic recollection of leaving Lincoln alone with some women at a social gathering and returning to discover him “as demoralized and ill at ease as a bashful country boy. He would put his arms behind him, and bring them to the front again, as if trying to hide them, and he tried apparently but in vain to get his long legs out of sight.” His female friendships were confined mostly to older, safely married women.
Never at ease talking with women, Lincoln found writing to them equally awkward, “a business which I do not understand.” In Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem John Brown’s Body, Lincoln expresses his difficulties with the fairer
sex.
…when the genius of the water moves,
And that’s the woman’s genius, I’m at sea
In every sense and meaning of the word,
With nothing but old patience for my chart,
And patience doesn’t always please a woman.
His awkwardness did not imply a lack of sexual desire. “Lincoln had terribly strong passions for women—could scarcely keep his hands off them,” said his law partner, William Herndon, who added that his “honor and a strong will…enabled him to put out the fires of his terrible passion.” Judge David Davis, Lincoln’s companion on the circuit, agreed with this assessment, noting that “his Conscience Kept him from seduction—this saved many—many a woman.” Before his marriage Lincoln enjoyed close relations with young women and almost certainly found outlets for his sexual urges among the prostitutes who were readily available on the frontier.
A year after Ann Rutledge’s death, Lincoln courted Mary Owens, the sister of his friend Mrs. Elizabeth Abell. Mary Owens was said to be “handsome,” with dark blue eyes and “much vivacity.” Well educated, she hailed from a comfortably affluent family in Kentucky and was noted as “a good conversationalist and a splendid reader.”
Lincoln had met Miss Owens several years earlier when she visited her sister for a month in New Salem. In the aftermath of Ann Rutledge’s death, Elizabeth Abell told Lincoln she thought the young pair would make a good match and proposed going to Kentucky to bring her sister back. Lincoln was “confoundedly well pleased” with the idea. He remembered that she was likable, smart, and a good companion, although somewhat “oversize.”
When the twenty-eight-year-old Mary Owens returned to Illinois, however, a disturbing transformation had taken place. “She now appeared,” he later wrote, with perhaps some exaggeration, “a fair match for Falstaff,” with a “want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance,” and a size unattainable in “less than thirtyfive or forty years.” He tried in vain to persuade himself “that the mind was much more to be valued than the person.” He attempted “to imagine she was handsome, which, but for her unfortunate corpulency, was actually true.” He conjured up ways he “might procrastinate the evil day” when he had to make good on his promise of marriage, but finally felt honor-bound to keep his word.
His proposal, written on May 7, 1837, may well be one of the most curiously unappealing ever penned. “This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business after all,” he observed of the dismal life she might share. “I am afraid you would not be satisfied. There is a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without shareing in it. You would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty. Do you believe you could bear that patiently?…What I have said I will most positively abide by, provided you wish it. My opinion is that you had better not do it. You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may be more severe than you now immagine. Yours, &c.—Lincoln.”
Not surprisingly, Mary Owens turned him down. Her rejection prompted Lincoln to write a humorous, self-deprecating letter to his friend Eliza Browning, Orville Browning’s wife. He acknowledged that he was “mortified almost beyond endurance” to think that “she whom I had taught myself to believe no body else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness; and to cap the whole, I then, for the first time, began to suspect that I was really a little in love with her.” He resolved “never again to think of marrying; and for this reason; I can never be satisfied with any one who would be block-head enough to have me.”
Despite his disclaimer, eighteen months later, the thirty-one-year-old Lincoln became engaged to the lively and intelligent Mary Todd. The Edwards mansion on the hill, where Mary had come to stay with her sister, Elizabeth, was the center of Springfield society. Lincoln was among the many young men who gathered in the Edwards parlor, where the girls, dressed in the latest fashion, shared food, drink, and merry conversation.
To their friends and relatives, Mary and Abe seemed “the exact reverse” of each other—“physically, temperamentally, emotionally.” She was short and voluptuous, her ample bosom accentuated by stays; he was uncommonly tall and cadaverous. While Mary possessed an open, passionate, and impulsive nature, “her face an index to every passing emotion,” he was, even Mary admitted, a self-controlled man. What “he felt most deeply,” Mary observed, “he expressed, the least.” She was in her element at social gatherings, “the very creature of excitement.” Vivacious and talkative, she was capable of making “a Bishop forget his prayers.” While Lincoln’s good nature made him “a welcome guest everywhere,” one Springfield woman recalled, “he rarely danced,” much preferring a position amid the men he could entertain effortlessly with his amusing stories.
For all their differences, the couple had much in common. Lincoln had always been attracted to intelligent women, and Mary was a woman of intellectual gifts who had earned “the highest marks” in school and taken home “the biggest prizes.” Endowed with an excellent memory, a quick wit, and a voracious appetite for learning, she shared Lincoln’s love for discussing books and poetry. Like Lincoln, she could recite substantial passages of poetry from memory, and they shared a love of Robert Burns. Indeed, four years after Lincoln’s death, Mary journeyed to the poet’s birthplace in Scotland, where, recalling one of her favorite poems about a lost love, she “sighed over poor ‘Highland Mary’s’ grave.”
Also, like Lincoln, she was fascinated by politics, having grown up in a political household. Among her happiest childhood memories were the sparkling dinner parties at her elegant brick house in Lexington, hosted by her father, Robert Todd, a Whig loyalist who had served in both the Kentucky House and Senate. At these sumptuous feasts, Lincoln’s idol Henry Clay was a frequent guest, along with members of Congress, cabinet members, governors, and foreign ministers. Mesmerized by their discussions, Mary became, her sisters recalled, “a violent little Whig,” convinced that she was “destined to be the wife of some future President.”
Undoubtedly, Mary told Lincoln of her many personal contacts with Clay, including how she once proudly rode her new pony to the statesman’s house. And she shared with him a vital interest in the political struggles of the day. “I suppose like the rest of us Whigs,” she wrote a close friend in 1840, “you have been rejoicing in the recent election of Gen [William Henry] Harrison, a cause that has excited such deep interest in the nation and one of such vital importance to our prosperity—This fall I became quite a politician, rather an unladylike profession, yet at such a crisis, whose heart could remain untouched while the energies of all were called in question?” Lincoln was deeply engaged at the same time in “the great cause” of electing the “Old hero.”
Beyond their love of poetry and politics, Mary and Abraham had both lost their mothers at an early age. Mary was only six when her thirty-one-year-old mother, Eliza Parker Todd, died giving birth to her seventh child. Eliza’s death, unlike the death of Nancy Hanks, did not disrupt the physical stability of the household. The Todd slaves continued to cook the meals, care for the children, fetch the wood, bank the fires, and drive the carriages as they had always done. If Lincoln was fortunate in his father’s choice of a second wife, however, Mary’s loss was aggravated by her father’s remarriage. Elizabeth Humphreys, a severe stepmother with cold blue eyes, gave birth to nine additional children, openly preferring her brood of Todds to the original clan. From the moment her stepmother moved in, Mary later recalled, her childhood turned “desolate.” Henceforth, she lamented, her only real home was the boarding school to which she was exiled at the age of fourteen.
This estrangement, combined with a family history of mental instability and a tendency toward severe migraines, produced in Mary what one friend described as “an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though her heart would break.” She could be affectionate, generous, and optimistic one day; vengeful, depressed, and irritable the ne
xt. In the colloquial language of her friends, she was “either in the garret or cellar.” In either mood, she needed attention, something the self-contained Lincoln was not always able to provide.
As their courtship proceeded, the very qualities that had first attracted the couple to each other may have become sources of conflict. Initially drawn to Mary by her ability to command any gathering with her intense energy, Lincoln may well have determined that this reflected a tiresome and compulsive need. Mary may have come to define Lincoln’s patience and objectivity as aloofness and inconsiderateness. We know only that at some point in the winter of 1840–41, as they approached marriage, a break occurred in their relationship.
While the inner lives of men and women living long ago are never easy to recover, the difficulty is compounded here by the absence of intimate letters between Mary and Abraham. Seward, Chase, and Bates disclosed their deepest feelings in their diaries and letters, but not a single letter survives from the days of the Lincolns’ courtship, and only a precious few remain from the years of their marriage. While the emotional lives of Lincoln’s rivals still seem alive to us more than a century and a half after their deaths, the truth about Lincoln’s courtship is harder to recapture. Inevitably, in the vacuum created by the absence of documents, gossip and speculation flourish.