Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln described Ann as “a handsome girl,” “natural & quite intellectual, though not highly Educated,” who “would have made a good loving wife.”91 He may have been smitten with her when boarding at her father’s tavern in 1831, but she was then engaged to the successful merchant John McNamar (who used the alias McNeil), a partner of Samuel Hill. The women of New Salem considered McNamar “the catch of the village,” for he had accumulated between $10,000 and $12,000 by the time he began courting Ann.92 But Ann’s father disapproved of him, perhaps because he was twelve years Ann’s senior, unattractive, and cold. (In 1836, McNamar evicted Ann’s widowed mother from her home when she fell behind in the rent. After McNamar’s death, his widow recollected “that in all the years of their married life, though he was courteous and attentive and a good provider, there was no more poetry or sentiment in him than in the multiplication table, and that she really never became acquainted with him.”)93 Around the time that Lincoln returned from the Black Hawk War, McNamar left New Salem to fetch his family from New York; he did not return for three years. During that period he wrote to Ann so seldom that she believed he had canceled their engagement. Meanwhile, she had moved with her family to Sandridge, a few miles from New Salem. It was at this time that Lincoln began to court her, visiting Sandridge often.

  Few details of that courtship survive. Parthena Nance Hill recalled that when McNamar stopped writing to his fiancée, “some of the girls lorded it over Ann who sat at home alone while we other young people walked and visited.” Lincoln, who thought highly of Ann and “felt sorry for her,” began escorting her on evening walks.94 Mrs. Hill told a friend “that Lincoln was deeply in love with Ann.”95 When visiting her family, Lincoln would cheerfully, if awkwardly, help Ann with household chores. They also studied together, poring over a copy of Kirkham’s Grammar, which he had given her. In addition, they sang songs from an anthology called “The Missouri Harmony.” Eventually, according to Ann’s sister Nancy, “he declared his love and was accepted for she loved him with a more mature and enduring affection than she had ever felt for McNamar. No one could have seen them together and not be convinced that they loved each other truly.”96

  In early 1835 Abe and Ann evidently became engaged but decided to postpone their wedding for a year because she wished to further her education and Lincoln wanted to prepare for the bar. She also desired to wait until she could honorably break her engagement to McNamar. Ann’s brother David urged her to marry Lincoln even before the return of her whilom fiancé, but she declined so that she could personally explain to McNamar her change of heart. While awaiting his return, Ann became sick, probably with typhoid fever. She lingered for several weeks.

  Lincoln was distraught. One stormy night he braved the foul weather to walk to Sandridge. En route he stopped at the cabin of Parson John M. Berry, who invited him in. After protesting that he must get to Ann, Lincoln finally accepted Berry’s offer to spend the night. Rather than sleep, he paced the floor for hours and decamped early the next morning.

  According to her sister Sarah, Ann “had brain fever and was out of [her] head all the time till about two days before she died, when she came to herself and called for Abe.” Bowling Green fetched Lincoln. When he arrived “everybody left the room and they talked together.” Emerging from that room, Lincoln “stopped at the door and looked back. Both of them were crying.”97 Dr. John Allen, who had been attending Ann, took the devastated Lincoln to his house for the night.

  Ann’s death on August 25, 1835, crushed Lincoln, leaving him so profoundly grief-stricken that many friends worried that he might lose his mind. Henry McHenry recollected that “after that Event he seemed quite changed, he seemed Retired, & loved Solitude, he seemed wrap[p]ed in profound thought, indifferent, to transpiring Events, had but Little to say, but would take his gun and wander off in the woods by him self, away from the association of even those he most esteemed.” His “depression seemed to deepen for some time, so as to give anxiety to his friends in regard to his Mind.”98 William G. Greene testified that “after this sudden death of one whom his soul & heart dearly & lov[e]d,” Lincoln’s friends were “[c]ompelled to keep watch and ward over Mr Lincoln,” for he was “from the sudden shock somewhat temporarily deranged. We watched during storms—fogs—damp gloomy weather Mr Lincoln for fear of an accident. He said ‘I can never be reconciled to have the snow—rains & storms to beat on her grave.’ ”99 He did not quickly recover. “Long after Anne died,” Greene reported, “Abe and I would be alone perhaps in the grocery on a rainy night, and Abe would sit there, his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands, the tears dropping through his fingers.”100

  Elizabeth Abell, who witnessed the depth of Lincoln’s grief, recalled that “he was staying with us at the time of her death,” which “was a great shock to him and I never seen a man mourn for a companion more than he did for her.” The “community said he was crazy” but “he was not crazy,” though “he was very disponding a long time.”101 Another surrogate mother, Hannah Armstrong, saw “Lincoln weep like a baby over the death of Ann Rutledge.”102 Nancy Green recollected that Lincoln took Ann’s “death verry hard so much so that some thought his mind would become impa[i]red.” She reported that her husband, Bowling Green, was so afraid that Lincoln would lose his reason that he “went to Salem after Lincoln [and] brought him to his house and kept him a week or two & succeeded in cheering him up though he was quite molencoly for months.”103 At Green’s, Dr. Allen often visited him.

  In great despair, Lincoln thought of killing himself. According to John Hill, Lincoln was so “fearfully wrought up upon her death” that Samuel Hill “had to lock him up and keep guard over him for some two weeks … for fear he might Commit Suicide. The whole village engaged in trying to quiet him and reconcile him to the loss.” Hill remembered that “for a short time his mind wandered.”104 The family of Jack Armstrong was afraid that Lincoln “would go crazy.”105 Henry Sears and his wife recollected that Lincoln “strolled around the neighborhood for the next three or four weeks humming sad songs and writing them with chalk on fences and barns. It was generally feared that the death of Ann Rutledge would drive him insane.”106

  This was not the only time Lincoln considered suicide. He told Mentor Graham “that he felt like Committing Suicide often.”107 To Robert L. Wilson he confided “that although he appeared to enjoy life rapturously, Still he was the victim of terrible melancholly. He Sought company, and indulged in fun and hilarity without restraint.” Yet, “when by himself, he told me that he was so overcome with mental depression, that he never dared carry a knife in his pocket.”108 On the third anniversary of Ann’s death, an unsigned poem about suicide, perhaps by Lincoln, appeared in the newspaper for which he regularly wrote anonymous pieces.

  Decades later, when Isaac Cogdal asked him if he “ran a little wild” after Ann’s death, Lincoln replied: “I did really—I run off the track: it was my first. I loved the woman dearly & sacredly.… I did honestly—& truly love the girl & think often—often of her now.”109 The depth of Lincoln’s sorrow, and the severe depression he suffered after her demise, may have been partly a result of his unresolved grief at the death of his mother and siblings. Ann’s death unconsciously reminded him of those old wounds, which began to suppurate once again, causing him to reexperience “the bitter agony” he had endured as a youth. Such intense depression can lead to suicide, even among young and physically healthy people like Lincoln.

  While recuperating from the devastating effect of Ann’s death, Lincoln neglected his duties at the post office. He often started out for a destination but returned without having reached it; instead he would wander about, absorbed in his thoughts, recognizing no friends or neighbors. Three weeks after Ann died, a New Salem resident complained that the “Post Master (Mr. Lincoln) is very careless about leaving his office open & unlocked during the day—half the time I go in & get my papers &c without any one being there as was the case yesterday.”110

  Years later
, when his friend Joshua F. Speed suffered from depression, Lincoln suggested an antidote: “avoid being idle; I would immediately engage in some business, or go to making preparations for it.”111 In the fall of 1835, Lincoln took this cure, throwing himself into the study of law. The previous summer, he had begun to go “at it in good earnest,” and a year later he returned to it with even greater enthusiasm. Some friends regarded this ferocious absorption in study as a symptom of a disordered mind. Mentor Graham recalled that Lincoln “was studious—so much so that he somewhat injured his health and Constitution. The Continued thought & study of the man Caused—with the death of one whom he dearly & sincerely loved, a … partial & momentary derangement.”112 Lincoln studied so hard and exercised so little that he grew emaciated. Isaac Cogdal told Herndon about “the Crazy spell” following Ann’s death, but concluded that “if Mr Lincoln was craz[y] it [was] only technically so—and not radically & substantially so. We used to say—you were Crazy about Ann Rutledge. He was then reading Blackstone—read hard—day & night—terribly hard—… was terribly melancholy—moody.”113

  By December 1835, Lincoln managed to pull himself together enough to attend a special session of the legislature, which the governor had called to modify the Illinois and Michigan Canal Act and to reapportion the General Assembly. During his six weeks in Vandalia, he won approval for the incorporation of the Beardstown and Sangamon Canal Company, one of his pet projects. Lincoln bought stock in that corporation and at a public meeting urged others to do so; he even purchased land on the Sangamon a mile from the eastern terminus of the proposed canal, which was never dug. A Sangamo Journal article by “Sangamo” (perhaps Lincoln) declared that the project “must be of immense advantage to the country thro’ which it will pass, and to the great West generally.”114

  A leading promoter of that enterprise, Francis Arnez, edited the Beardstown Chronicle, whose columns in November 1834 contained a slashing attack on Peter Cart-wright, a prominent Methodist minister and Jacksonian politico. Though signed “Sam Hill,” the piece was actually written by Lincoln, who sent it to Arnez after the Sangamo Journal had rejected it. (Arnez agreed to run it only as a paid advertisement.) The irascible, vindictive Hill, known as “the rich man of the village” and “the potentate” with “a peculiar temper” so explosive that he could not drive a carriage team, had been quarreling with the belligerent Cartwright, who lived 6 miles from New Salem in Pleasant Plains. During an earlier squabble with Jack Armstrong, Hill had hired someone to thrash that leader of the Clary’s Grove boys. Now he employed Lincoln to attack Cart-wright with a pen rather than fists. Lincoln had no special fondness for Cartwright, one of the four candidates who had beaten him out for a legislative seat in 1832. Lincoln’s inflammatory 1,500-word philippic, dated September 7, 1834, accused Cartwright of being “a most abondoned hypocrite” and concluded that it was hard to tell whether he “is [a] greater fool or knave” and that “he has but few rivals in either capacity.”115 (The attack was clever but unfair, based on a misreading of Cartwright’s writings.) Thus began a pattern of anonymous and pseudonymous journalistic assaults that did Lincoln little credit. (He would quit that ugly practice in 1842, when an offended target of his ridicule challenged him to a duel, an episode discussed in chapter 6.)

  Lincoln participated actively in the special session. On December 12, he introduced a debt-relief bill that passed the House but not the senate. He also consistently voted in favor of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, whose supporters finally prevailed on Christmas Eve, when the House by a 29–26 margin authorized the establishment of a Board of Commissioners, empowered it to build the canal, and permitted the governor to borrow up to half a million dollars to fund the effort.

  The struggle over the canal pitted northern Illinois against the southern part of the state. Whereas northern Illinois had been settled by ambitious, industrious Yankees who erected mills, churches, schools, villages, and towns, southern Illinois had attracted from the South a more easygoing class of settlers who regarded the Yankees as tightfisted, dishonest, money grubbing misers lacking the spirit of generous hospitality. (Lincoln enjoyed quoting a hard-shell Baptist preacher in southern Illinois who declared that the “mercy of God reaches from the Esquimaux of the frozen North to the Hottentot of the sizzling South; from the wandering Arab of Asia to the Injuns of the Western plains; there are some who say that it even extends to the Yankees, but I wouldn’t go scarcely that far.”)116 Residents of northern Illinois, in turn, looked on their neighbors to the south as indolent, ignorant primitives, scarcely more advanced than savages.

  Legislators from southern Illinois opposed the canal because they feared it might pave the way for Yankees to flood the state. Moreover, their constituents, predominantly Southern subsistence farmers who produced little that anyone might wish to buy, could not understand why the state should undertake such a costly project. Overcoming their resistance was a formidable challenge. A leading champion of the canal, Gurdon Hubbard, doubted that the legislation could have been approved so quickly without Lincoln’s invaluable assistance.

  During the debates over reapportionment of the General Assembly, Lincoln supported a plan that would have kept the legislature relatively small. When the proposal failed, that body was expanded from fifty-five to ninety-one members. Under the new arrangement, Sangamon County had seven seats rather than four and became the largest delegation in the House of Representatives.

  Fortunately for his political career, Lincoln had the prescience to oppose a seemingly minor bill “to improve the breed of cattle,” which stipulated that “no bull over one year old shall be permitted to run at large out of an enclosure.” Violators would be fined and the proceeds distributed to the farmers with the three best cows, bulls, and heifers within the county. In the Jacksonian “Era of the Common Man,” the public regarded this statute as hopelessly elitist and voted its supporters out of office. Less than a year later the General Assembly overwhelmingly repealed the “Little Bull” law.

  During the 1835–1836 special session of the General Assembly, Lincoln answered all but 11 of the 130 roll calls. He spent three days writing the report of the Committee on Public Accounts and Expenditures. By supporting the state bank and the canal, he remained true to his Whig principles. His most important contribution was the steadfast encouragement he gave to the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which was begun in 1836 and completed twelve years later.

  Sophomore Legislator

  In June 1836, two months after the Ninth General Assembly adjourned, Lincoln announced his candidacy for reelection in a campaign statement far more breezy and succinct than the one he had issued four years earlier. He began by paying obeisance to the regnant egalitarianism of the day: “I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burthens.” But to that platitudinous opening he added a startling pendant: “Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females.)”117

  At that time, the exclusion of blacks from the franchise was hardly controversial in Illinois, a state full of Southerners devoted to white supremacy. Indeed, hostility to black voting prevailed throughout the Old Northwest. The Illinois constitution of 1818 limited voting rights to “white male inhabitants” at least 21 years of age. Membership in the militia was open to “free male ablebodied persons, negroes, mulattoes, and Indians excepted.” Between 1819 and 1846, the General Assembly outlawed interracial marriage and cohabitation, forbade blacks to testify in court against whites, and denied them the right to attend public schools. In 1848, by a margin of 60,585 to 15,903 (79% to 21%), the Illinois electorate adopted a new constitution banning black suffrage; it voted separately on an article prohibiting black immigration, which passed 50,261 to 21,297 (70% to 30%). With that, Illinois became the only Free State forbidding blacks to settle within its borders. (Oregon and Indiana soon followed its lead.)

  Sangamon County was even more negrophobic than the Illinois ave
rage (90% voted for the new constitution and 78% against black immigration.) Of the Springfielders voting on black immigration, 84 percent supported the ban, including one-third of those who voted for the Free Soil ticket in 1848. A southern Illinoisan observed that his neighbors born in slaveholding states brought with them “many of the prejudices they imbibed in infancy, and still hold negroes in the utmost contempt; not allowing them to be of the same species of themselves, but look on negers, as they call them, and Indians, as an inferior race of beings, and treat them as such.”118 (American anthropologists like Samuel George Morton, John Bachman, and Louis Agassiz argued that blacks constituted the “lowest grade” of humanity and were “an inferior variety of our species.”)119

  Lincoln’s suggestion that women be enfranchised, however, was hardly a campaign cliché. His proto-feminist endorsement of women’s suffrage may have been inspired by his participation in debating and literary societies that addressed that question. At a meeting of such an organization in Springfield, he contributed some verses about the sexual double standard:

  Whatever spiteful fools may say,

  Each jealous ranting yelper,

  No woman ever went astray

  Without a man to help her.120

  Lincoln believed that a “woman had the same right to play with her tail that a man had and no more nor less” and that neither husbands nor wives had a “moral or other right to violate the sacred marriage vow.”121

  Lincoln’s support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the sexual double standard reflected his sense of fair play, which constituted the bedrock of his political philosophy. In later years he would never publicly raise the issue of votes for women, but he would speak and act in ways that prefigured the feminist sensibility of generations then unborn. In the late 1850s, he told a youthful female suffragist: “I believe you will vote, my young friend, before you are much older than I.”122 To Herndon, he often predicted that the adoption of women’s suffrage was only a matter of time. During his presidency, Lincoln readily spared the lives of soldiers condemned to death by courts martial, but his mercy did not extend to rapists.