The same “longing to rise” that carried Seward away from the Hudson Valley brought Chase to the infant state of Ohio, and sent Bates to the Missouri Territory propelled Lincoln from Indiana to New Salem, Illinois. At twenty-two, he departed his family home with all his meager possessions bundled on his shoulder. New Salem was a budding town, with twenty-five families, three general stores, a tavern, a blacksmith shop, a cooper shop, and a tannery. Working simply to “keep body and soul together” as a flatboatman, clerk, merchant, postmaster, and surveyor, he engaged in a systematic regimen of self-improvement. He mastered the principles of English grammar at night when the store was closed. He carried Shakespeare’s plays and books of poetry when he walked along the streets. Seated in the local post office, he devoured newspapers. He studied geometry and trigonometry while learning the art of surveying. And then, at the age of twenty-five, he decided to study law.
In a time when young men were apprenticed to practicing lawyers while they read the law, Lincoln, by his own account, “studied with nobody.” Borrowing law books from a friend, he set about on his own to gain the requisite knowledge and skills. He buried himself in the dog-eared pages of Blackstone’s Commentaries; he unearthed the thoughts in Chitty’s Pleadings; he analyzed precepts in Greenleaf’s Evidence and Story’s Equity Jurisprudence. After a long day at one of his various jobs, he would read far into the night. A steadfast purpose sustained him.
Few of his colleagues experienced so solitary or steep a climb to professional proficiency. The years Seward and Chase spent in college eased the transition into legal study by exposing them to history, classical languages, and scientific reasoning. What is more, Lincoln had no outlet for discourse, no mentor such as Seward found in the distinguished author of The Practice. Nor did Lincoln have the social advantages Chase enjoyed by reading law with the celebrated William Wirt or the connections Bates derived from Rufus Easton.
What Lincoln lacked in preparation and guidance, he made up for with his daunting concentration, phenomenal memory, acute reasoning faculties, and interpretive penetration. Though untutored in the sciences and the classics, he was able to read and reread his books until he understood them fully. “Get the books, and read and study them,” he told a law student seeking advice in 1855. It did not matter, he continued, whether the reading be done in a small town or a large city, by oneself or in the company of others. “The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!
—Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
At New Salem, Lincoln would take his law books into the woods and stretch out on a “wooded knoll” to read. On these forays he was likely accompanied by Ann Rutledge, whose father owned Rutledge’s Tavern, where Lincoln boarded from time to time.
Ann Rutledge was, to our knowledge, Lincoln’s first and perhaps most passionate love. Years after her death, he reportedly divulged his feelings for her to an old friend, Isaac Cogdal. When Cogdal asked whether he had been in love, Lincoln replied, “it is true—true indeed…she was a handsome girl—would have made a good loving wife…I did honestly—& truly love the girl & think often—often of her now.”
Not a single piece of correspondence has been uncovered to document the particulars of their relationship. It must be pieced together from the recollections of neighbors and friends in the small, closely knit community of New Salem. Ann was a few years younger than Lincoln, had “Eyes blue large, & Expressive,” auburn hair, and a beautiful face. “She was beloved by Every body.” Her intellect was said to be “quick—Sharp—deep & philosophic as well as brilliant.” New Salem resident William Greene believed “she was a woman worthy of Lincoln’s love.” What began as a friendship between Ann and Abraham turned at some point into romance. They shared an understanding, according to friends, that they would marry after Ann completed her studies at the Female Academy at Jacksonville.
Ann was only twenty-two in the summer of 1835. While New Salem sweltered through one of the hottest summers in the history of the state, a deadly fever, possibly typhoid, spread through the town. Ann, as well as several of Lincoln’s friends, perished in the epidemic. After Ann’s death, Abraham seemed “indifferent, to transpiring Events,” one neighbor recalled, “had but Little to say, but would take his gun and wander off in the woods by him self.” Elizabeth Abell, a New Salem neighbor who had become a surrogate mother to Lincoln, claimed she had “never seen a man mourn for a companion more than he did.” His melancholy deepened on dark and gloomy days, for he could never “be reconcile[d],” he said, “to have the snow—rains and storms to beat on her grave.” Acquaintances feared he had become “temporarily deranged,” and that unless he pulled himself together, “reason would desert her throne.”
Lincoln himself admitted that he ran “off the track” a little after Ann’s death. He had now lost the three women to whom he was closest—his mother, his sister, and Ann. Reflecting on a visit to his childhood home in Indiana some years later, he wrote a mournful poem.
I hear the loved survivors tell
How naught from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
He “was not crazy,” maintained Elizabeth Abell. He was simply very sad. “Only people who are capable of loving strongly,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them.”
Had Lincoln, like Chase, lived in a large city when Ann died, he might have concealed his grief behind closed doors. In the small community of New Salem, there was no place to hide—except perhaps the woods toward which he gravitated. Moreover, as he brooded over Ann’s death, he could find no consolation in the prospect of a reunion in the hereafter. When his New Salem friend and neighbor Mrs. Samuel Hill asked him whether he believed in a future realm, he answered no. “I’m afraid there isn’t,” he replied sorrowfully. “It isn’t a pleasant thing to think that when we die that is the last of us.” Though later statements make reference to an omnipotent God or supreme power, there is no mention in any published document, the historian Robert Bruce observes—except in one ambiguous letter to his dying father—of any “faith in life after death.” To the end of his life, he was haunted by the finality of death and the evanescence of earthly accomplishments.
Lincoln’s inability to take refuge in the concept of a Christian heaven sets him apart from Chase and Bates. While Chase admitted that his “heart was broken” when he buried his second wife, Eliza Smith, he was convinced that “all is not dark. The cloud is fringed with light.” Unlike his first wife, Kitty, Eliza had died “trusting in Jesus.” He could therefore picture her in heaven, waiting for him to join her in eternal companionship.
Sharing the faith that gave solace to Chase, Bates was certain when his nine-year-old daughter, Edwa, died that she had been called by God “to a higher world & to higher enjoyment.” In the child’s last hours, he related, she “talked with calmness, and apparently without alarm, of her approaching death. She did not fear to die, still the only reason she gave for not wishing to die, was that she would rather stay with her mother.”
Seward shared Lincoln’s doubt that any posthumous reunion beckoned. When his wife and precious twenty-one-year-old daughter, Fanny, died within sixteen months of each other, he was devastated. “I ought to be able to rejoice that [Fanny] was withdrawn from me to be reunited with [her mother] the pure and blessed spirit that formed her own,” he told a friend. “But, unfortunately I am not spiritual enough to find support in these reflections.”
If Lincoln, like Seward, confronted th
e loss of loved ones without prospect of finding them in the afterlife to assuage the loss, one begins to comprehend the weight of his sorrow when Ann died. Nonetheless, he completed his study of law and received his law license and the offer to become a partner with John Stuart, the friend whose law books he had borrowed.
IN APRIL 1837, twenty months after Ann Rutledge’s death, Lincoln left New Salem for Springfield, Illinois, then a community of about fifteen hundred people. There he planned to embark upon what he termed his “experiment” in law. With no place to stay and no money to buy provisions, he wandered into the general store in the town square. He asked the young proprietor, Joshua Speed, how much it would cost to buy “the furniture for a single bed. The mattress, blankets, sheets, coverlid, and pillow.” Speed estimated the cost at seventeen dollars, which Lincoln agreed was “perhaps cheap enough,” though he lacked the funds to cover that amount. He asked if Speed might advance him credit until Christmastime, when, if his venture with law worked out, he would pay in full. “If I fail in this,” added Lincoln abjectly, “I do not know that I can ever pay you.”
Speed surveyed the tall, discomfited figure before him. “I never saw a sadder face,” he recalled thinking at the time. Though the two men had never met, Speed had heard Lincoln speak a year earlier and came away deeply impressed. Decades later, he could still recite Lincoln’s concluding words. Turning to Lincoln, Speed said: “You seem to be so much pained at contracting so small a debt, I think I can suggest a plan by which you can avoid the debt and at the same time attain your end. I have a large room with a double bed upstairs, which you are very welcome to share with me.” Lincoln reacted quickly to Speed’s unexpected offer. Racing upstairs to deposit his bags in the loft, he came clattering down again, his face entirely transformed. “Beaming with pleasure he exclaimed, ‘Well, Speed, I am moved!’”
Five years younger than Lincoln, the handsome, blue-eyed Speed had been raised in a gracious mansion on his family’s prosperous plantation, cultivated by more than seventy slaves. He had received an excellent education in the best Kentucky schools and at St. Joseph’s College at Bards-town. While he could have remained at home, enjoying a life of ease, he determined to make his way west with the tide of his restless generation. Arriving in Springfield when he was twenty-one, he had invested in real estate and become the proprietor of the town’s general store.
Lincoln and Speed shared the same room for nearly four years, sleeping in the same double bed. Over time, the two young men developed a close relationship, talking nightly of their hopes and their prospects, their mutual love of poetry and politics, their anxieties about women. They attended political meetings and forums together, went to dances and parties, relaxed with long rides in the countryside.
Emerging from a childhood and young adulthood marked by isolation and loneliness, Lincoln discovered in Joshua Speed a companion with whom he could share his inner life. They had similar dispositions, both possessing an ambitious impulse to improve themselves and rise in the world. No longer a boy but not yet an established adult, Lincoln ended years of emotional deprivation and intellectual solitude by building his first and deepest friendship with Speed. Openly acknowledging the strength of this attachment, the two pledged themselves to a lifelong bond of friendship. Those who knew Lincoln well pointed to Speed as his “most intimate friend,” the only person to whom he ever disclosed his secret thoughts. “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting,” Lincoln assured Speed, “that I will never cease, while I know how to do any thing.”
Some have suggested that there may have been a sexual relationship between Lincoln and Speed. Their intimacy, however, like the relationship between Seward and Berdan and, as we shall see, between Chase and Stanton, is more an index to an era when close male friendships, accompanied by open expressions of affection and passion, were familiar and socially acceptable. Nor can sharing a bed be considered evidence of an erotic involvement. It was common practice in an era when private quarters were a rare luxury, when males regularly slept in the same bed as children and continued to do so in academies, boardinghouses, and overcrowded hotels. The room above Speed’s store functioned as a sort of dormitory, with two other young men living there part of the time as well as Lincoln and Speed. The attorneys of the Eighth Circuit in Illinois where Lincoln would travel regularly shared beds—with the exception of Judge David Davis, whose immense girth left no room for a companion. As the historian Donald Yacovone writes in his study of the fiercely expressed love and devotion among several abolitionist leaders in the same era, the “preoccupation with elemental sex” reveals more about later centuries “than about the nineteenth.”
If it is hard to delineate the exact nature of Lincoln’s relationship with Speed, it is clear that this intimate friendship came at a critical juncture in his young life, as he struggled to define himself in a new city, away from home and family. Here in Springfield he would carry forward the twin careers that would occupy most of his life: law and politics. His accomplishments in escaping the confines of his barren, death-battered childhood and his relentless self-education required luck, a stunning audacity, and a breadth of intelligence that was only beginning to reveal itself.
CHAPTER 3
THE LURE OF POLITICS
IN THE ONLY COUNTRY founded on the principle that men should and could govern themselves, where self-government dominated every level of human association from the smallest village to the nation’s capital, it was natural that politics should be a consuming, almost universal concern.
“Scarcely have you descended on the soil of America,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in the year Lincoln was serving his first term in the state legislature, “when you find yourself in the midst of a sort of tumult; a confused clamor is raised on all sides; a thousand voices come to your ear at the same time, each of them expressing some social needs. Around you everything moves: here, the people of one neighborhood have gathered to learn if a church ought to be built; there, they are working on the choice of a representative; farther on, the deputies of a district are going to town in all haste in order to decide about some local improvements; in another place, the farmers of a village abandon their furrows to go discuss the plan of a road or a school.”
“Citizens assemble with the sole goal of declaring that they disapprove of the course of government,” Tocqueville wrote. “To meddle in the government of society and to speak about it is the greatest business and, so to speak, the only pleasure that an American knows…. An American does not know how to converse, but he discusses; he does not discourse, but he holds forth. He always speaks to you as to an assembly.”
In an illustration from Noah Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, widely read in Lincoln’s generation, a man strikes a heroic pose as he stands on a wooden barrel, speaking to a crowd of enthralled listeners. Behind him the Stars and Stripes wave proudly, while a poster bearing the image of the national eagle connotes the bravery and patriotism of the orator. “Who can wonder,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, at the lure of politics, “for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his.”
For many ambitious young men in the nineteenth century, politics proved the chosen arena for advancement. Politics attracted Bates in Missouri, Seward in upstate New York, Lincoln in Illinois, and Chase in Ohio.
THE OLDEST OF THE FOUR, Edward Bates was the first drawn into politics during the 1820 crusade for Missouri’s statehood. As the petition was debated in the U.S. Congress, an argument arose as to whether the constitutional protection for slavery in the original states applied to the newly acquired territories. An antislavery representative from New York introduced an amendment requiring Missouri first to agree to emancipate all children of slaves on their twenty-first birthday. The so-called “lawyer faction,” including Edward Bates, vehemently opposed an antislavery restriction as the price of admission to the Union. Bates argued tha
t it violated the Constitution by imposing a qualification on a state beyond providing “a republican form of government,” as guaranteed by the Constitution.
To Northerners who hoped containment in the South would lead inevitably to the end of slavery, its introduction into the new territories aroused fear that it would now infiltrate the West and, thereby, the nation’s future. For Southerners invested in slave labor, Northern opposition to Missouri’s admission as a slave state posed a serious threat to their way of life. At the height of the struggle, Southern leaders declared their intent to secede from the Union; many Northerners seemed willing to let them go. “This momentous question,” Jefferson wrote at the time, “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”
The Senate ultimately stripped the bill of the antislavery amendment, bringing Missouri into the Union as a slave state under the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820. Fashioned by Kentucky senator Henry Clay, who earned the nickname the “Great Pacificator,” the Compromise simultaneously admitted Maine as a free state and prohibited slavery in all the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory north of the latitude 36°30'. That line ran across the southern border of Missouri, making Missouri itself an exception to the new division.
Later that spring, Bates campaigned successfully for a place among the forty-one delegates chosen to write the new state’s constitution. Though younger than most of the delegates, he “emerged as one of the principal authors of the constitution.” When the time came to select candidates for state offices, the “lawyer faction” received the lion’s share. David Barton and Thomas Benton were sent to Washington as Missouri’s first senators, and Edward Bates became the state’s first attorney general; his partner, Joshua Barton, became the first secretary of state. Two years later, Bates won a seat in the Missouri House, and two years after that, Frederick Bates was elected governor of the state.