Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
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.
T
HIS 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 next. 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.
Mary may have precipitated the break, influenced by the objections of her sister, Elizabeth, and her brother-in-law, Ninian Edwards, who believed she was marrying beneath her. Elizabeth warned Mary that she did not think that “Mr. L. & [she] were Suitable to Each other.” The couple considered that Mary and Abraham’s “natures, mind—Education—raising &c were So different they Could not live happy as husband & wife.” Mary had other suitors, including Edwin Webb, a well-to-do widower; Stephen Douglas, the up-and-coming Democratic politician; and, as Mary wrote her friend, Mercy Ann Levering, “an agreeable lawyer & grandson of
Patrick Henry—what an honor!”
Still, she insisted, “I love him not, & my hand will never be given, where my heart is not.” With several good men to choose from, Mary may have decided she needed time to think through her family’s pointed reservations about Lincoln.
Far more likely, Lincoln’s own misgivings prompted a retreat from this second engagement. Though physically attracted to Mary, he seemed to question the strength of his love for her as he approached a final commitment. Joshua Speed recalled that “in the winter of 40 & 41,” Lincoln “was very unhappy about his engagement to [Mary]—Not being entirely satisfied that his
heart
was going with his hand.” Speed’s choice of the same phrase that Mary used suggests that it must have been a common expression to indicate an embrace of marriage without the proper romantic feelings. “How much [Lincoln] suffered,” Speed recalled, “none Know so well as myself—He disclosed his whole heart to me.”
Recent scholarship has suggested that Lincoln’s change of heart was influenced by his affection for Ninian Edwards’s cousin Matilda Edwards, who had come to spend the winter in Springfield. “A lovelier girl I never saw,” Mary herself conceded upon first meeting Matilda. Orville Browning traced Lincoln’s “aberration of mind” to the predicament in which he found himself: “engaged to Miss Todd, and in love with Miss Edwards, and his conscience troubled him dreadfully for the supposed injustice he had done, and the supposed violation of his word.” While there is no evidence that Lincoln ever made his feelings known to Matilda, Browning’s observation is supported by an acquaintance’s letter describing the complicated situation. Though Lincoln was committed to Mary, Springfield resident Jane Bell observed, he could “never bear to leave Miss Edward’s side in company.” He thought her so perfect that if “he had it in his power he would not have one feature in her face altered.” His indiscreet behavior drew criticism from his friends, Bell claimed, who “thought he was acting very wrong and very imprudently and told him so and he went crazy on the strength of it.”