Lincoln (13 page)

Speed, who knew this young man by reputation and had heard him make a political speech, suggested a way he could avoid incurring a debt that clearly troubled him. “I have a large room with a double bed up-stairs, which you are very welcome to share with me,” he offered.

“Where is your room?” asked Lincoln.

When Speed pointed to the winding stairs that led from the store to the second floor, Lincoln picked up his saddlebags and went up. Shortly afterward he returned beaming with pleasure and announced, “Well, Speed, I am moved!”

Such a quick alternation from deep despair to blithe confidence was characteristic of Lincoln’s early years in the new state capital. He was trying to put together the fragmented pieces of his personality into a coherent pattern. Sometimes he felt he was the prisoner of his passions, but at other times he thought that he could master his world through reason. Often he was profoundly discouraged, and during these years he experienced his
deepest bouts of depression. But these moods alternated with periods of exuberant self-confidence and almost annoying optimism. In short, he was still a very young man.

To Eastern observers, Springfield in the 1830s was a frontier town. Though there were a few brick edifices, many of the residences were still log houses. If the roads were wide, they were unpaved; in the winter wagons struggled through axle-deep mud, and in the summer the dust was suffocating. The town had no sidewalks, and at crossings pedestrians had to leap from one chunk of wood to another. Hogs freely roamed the streets, and there was a powerful stench from manure piled outside the stables. After visiting Springfield, William Cullen Bryant came away with an impression of “dirt and discomfort.”

But this was the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated place Lincoln had ever lived. Though Springfield had been in existence only since 1821, it was now a thriving community with 1,500 residents. The Sangamon County Courthouse occupied the center of the town, which was laid out in a regular, rectangular grid. The north-south streets were numbered; those running east-west were named after American presidents. The courthouse—soon to be replaced by the new state capitol—was surrounded by nineteen dry goods stores, seven groceries, four drugstores, two clothing stores, and a bookstore. Four hotels cared for transients. In addition to schools and an “academy” (roughly equivalent to a high school), the town boasted six churches. The professions were represented by eighteen doctors and eleven lawyers. There was a Whig newspaper, the
Sangamo Journal,
edited by Simeon Francis, to whom Lincoln during the previous sessions of the legislature had frequently sent news from Vandalia; and it would shortly be joined by the Democratic organ, the
Illinois Republican,
later rechristened the
Illinois State Register.

Lincoln had every intention of becoming a part of this bustling community, but, in addition to a lack of education and money, he had a handicap: he was in a sense engaged. After the death of Ann Rutledge, the older women of New Salem urged him to find a wife, as most of the other young men his age were doing. But there were not many eligible young women in the vicinity, and, anyway, he was always awkward in their presence. He had, however, taken a liking to a sister of Mrs. Bennett Abell who visited New Salem in 1833 or 1834. The daughter of a well-to-do Kentucky family, Mary Owens was a handsome young woman with black hair, dark eyes, fair skin, and magnificent white teeth. She impressed everyone with her gay and lively disposition, and the residents of the village considered her “a very intellectual woman—well educated.” After she returned to Kentucky, Lincoln is said to have boasted to Mrs. Abell that “if ever that girl comes back to New Salem I am going to marry her.”

On her second visit—about a year after the death of Ann Rutledge—Lincoln began courting Mary Owens, and at first she reciprocated his interest. Then both began to have second thoughts. Granting Lincoln’s “goodness of heart,” Mary felt that “his training had been different from mine; hence there was not that congeniality which would otherwise have existed.” Small events pointed to future difficulties. When she and Lincoln went for a walk with Mrs. Bowling Green, who was struggling to carry a very fat baby, he made no attempt to help her. On another occasion, when several young people were riding horseback to the Greens’, she observed that all the other young women were assisted by their escorts in crossing a deep stream, while Lincoln rode ahead, paying her no attention. When she mentioned the neglect to him, he replied oafishly that he reckoned she could take care of herself. Soon she concluded that “Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman’s happiness.”

Lincoln’s doubts were even more severe. Maybe Mary had been a little too eager to return to New Salem. He feared “that her coming so readily showed that she was a trifle too willing.” He began finding defects in her appearance. From her first visit he remembered that she was pleasingly stout—weighing between 150 and 180 pounds, according to contemporaries—but now she appeared “a fair match for Falstaff.” In a burlesque account of the affair, written a few months later, he declared: “Now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat, to permit its contracting in to wrinkles, but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head, that
nothing
could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than thirtyfive or forty years.” His reservations were rationalizations. Painfully aware of his humble origins, he was not sure he could make this well-bred young woman happy, and he was too poor to support a wife in comfort. On a deeper level, the problem was that his personality was as yet so incompletely formed that he had great difficulty in reaching out to achieve intimacy with anyone else.

When Lincoln went to Vandalia in December 1836, he and Mary had not reached “any positive understanding,” but both felt their informal arrangement might lead to marriage. For the next six months he engaged in an undignified attempt to get out of the liaison without injuring the lady’s feelings or violating his sense of honor. Betraying no passion whatever and never mentioning the word “love,” his letters to her were, as he admitted, “so dry and stupid” that he was reluctant to send them. His main purpose in writing was to get Mary to take the initiative in breaking off the courtship.

After he moved to Springfield, he grew more than ever convinced that she did not fit in. She would be unhappy, he warned. “There is a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without shareing in it,” he cautioned. “You would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty.” “You have not been accustomed to
hardship,” he reminded her, “and it may be more severe than you now immagine.”

Apparently neither Lincoln’s letters nor the arguments he made when he revisited New Salem in the summer of 1837 convinced Mary that they were incompatible. He began to take a different tack, suggesting that it was for her emotional as well as her physical well-being that she should break off their relationship. “I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women,” he told her, and he was convinced that it would be best for Mary if he left her alone. “For the purpose of making the matter as plain as possible,” he wrote her, “I now say, that you can now drop the subject [of marriage], dismiss your thoughts (if you ever had any) from me forever, and leave this letter unanswered, without calling forth one accusing murmer from me.” Indeed, if so doing would add to her peace of mind, “it is my sincere wish that you should.” Then, having done his best to persuade her to break their understanding, he manfully announced: “I am willing, and even anxious to bind you faster, if I can be convinced that it will, in any considerable degree, add to your happiness.”

If Mary wrote a reply to this left-handed proposal, it has not been preserved, but Lincoln recorded that she firmly and repeatedly refused his tepid offer of marriage. To his surprise, instead of being relieved, he felt “mortified almost beyond endurance.” “My vanity was deeply wounded ... that she whom I had taught myself to believe no body else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness,” he reported some months later. Once it was certain that Mary did not return his affections, he even began to suspect that he was “really a little in love with her.” Immensely relieved that the whole affair was over, he wrote a farcical account of his failed courtship—carefully not mentioning Mary Owens by name—to amuse Mrs. O. H. Browning, which ended: “I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying; and for this reason; I can never be satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough to have me.”

“This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business after all, at least it is so to me,” Lincoln lamented to Mary Owens a month after he had moved from New Salem. “I am quite as lonesome here as [I] ever was anywhere in my life.” No doubt he did feel isolated during his first few weeks in town, but he was probably exaggerating his feelings to discourage Mary from further thinking about marriage. Indeed, he was presently surrounded by friends and welcomed in Springfield society.

From the beginning Speed was his close companion, and he became perhaps the only intimate friend that Lincoln ever had. Four years younger than Lincoln, Speed was also a Kentuckian. Unlike Lincoln, though, Speed came from a prominent family that owned a prosperous plantation, called Farmington, near Louisville, tilled by seventy slaves. Speed had attended
private schools in Kentucky and had studied for two years at St. Joseph’s College, in Bardstown. Seeking to make his fortune, he came to Springfield and became a part proprietor of Ellis’s store. With flashing blue eyes and a mane of dark curly hair, he was a handsome young man, whose vaguely Byronic air of elegance made him especially attractive to Springfield ladies.

For nearly four years Lincoln and Speed shared a double bed, and their most private thoughts, in the room above Speed’s store. No one thought that there was anything irregular or unusual about the arrangement. It was rare for a single man to have a private room, and it was customary for two or more to sleep in the same bed. Years later, when Lincoln was a well-known lawyer, he and the other attorneys traveling the judicial circuit regularly shared beds; only Judge David Davis was allowed to sleep alone, not because of his dignified position but because he weighed over three hundred pounds. Much of the time when Lincoln and Speed were sharing a bed, young William H. Herndon, who had recently been withdrawn from Illinois College in Jacksonville and was clerking in Speed’s store, slept in the same room, as did Charles R. Hurst, a clerk in another dry-goods store.

Around Lincoln and Speed gathered other young unmarried men of Springfield, like James H. Matheny, who would become the best man at Lincoln’s wedding; Milton Hay, then a law student and clerk in the Stuart & Lincoln office; and James C. Conkling, a Princeton graduate who began practicing law in Springfield in 1838. Before the great fireplace in the back room of Speed’s store, they met night after night, to talk and swap stories, and Lincoln with his endless repertoire of anecdotes was always the center of the group. Acting as an informal literary and debating society, the young men read each other’s poems and other writings, and, as Herndon recalled, they staged debates on politics, religion, and all other subjects.

Lincoln quickly made other friends in town. William Butler, clerk of the Sangamon County Court, greatly liked this unusual young man who had just moved in from the country and, knowing that he was hard up, generously gave him free board at his house. Simeon Francis welcomed Lincoln to Springfield and opened the columns of the
Sangamo Journal
for anything he might care to write. And John Todd Stuart introduced his new partner to the more exclusive social circles of Springfield.

Lincoln found easy acceptance in Springfield because he arrived not as an unknown but as the partner of Stuart, one of the most prominent and successful lawyers in town. Unlike most beginning lawyers, who had to hunt around for business or accept cases that no one else would take, Lincoln began with a very full practice, for Stuart was concentrating on winning a seat in the United States House of Representatives and turned over most of the business of the firm to his junior partner.

Their office was a single room on the second floor in a group of brick
buildings on Fifth Street known as Hoffman’s Row, just a block north of the courthouse square. As Herndon remembered, it was furnished only with “a small lounge or bed, a chair containing a buffalo robe, in which the junior member was wont to sit and study, a hard wooden bench, a feeble attempt at a book-case, and a table which answered for a desk.” Here Lincoln and Stuart received clients, heard their complaints, and advised what, if any, action was appropriate. If there was a question of legal precedents, the partners could consult their library, which consisted of a couple of volumes of
Illinois Reports
and some miscellaneous congressional documents, legislative proceedings, and law books; it was a meager resource, but at this time probably no law library in Springfield contained as many as one hundred books.

Lincoln had no difficulty in performing the routine work of the office, like drafting wills or writing deeds; he had done a certain amount of this for his neighbors in New Salem even before he was admitted to the bar. Many of the Stuart & Lincoln cases involved only an appearance before a justice of the peace, few of whom were lawyers. Thus when Joel Johnson accused John Grey of forcible detainer, Stuart & Lincoln represented him at Justice Clemment’s hearing. Lincoln was thoroughly acquainted with these procedures, since he had regularly attended Bowling Green’s court in New Salem.