Abraham Lincoln (6 page)

In 1836, he did become engaged to a Kentucky woman named Mary Owens, but in their notes and letters there is not a single mention of love or passion or even a kiss. In truth, Lincoln's communications to her reveal a confused and insecure young man as far as intimacy with a woman was concerned. He was very lonely, he wrote Mary in 1837, but he had thought over his agreement to wed her and decided to let her out if she wanted. He was so poor that if they married she would have to live in unaccustomed poverty. He wanted Mary to be happy. He would be happier with her than without her, but he asked her to think it over before throwing in with him. If she liked, they could still get married. But his honest opinion was that she “better not do it,” because of the hardships this would impose on her.

A little later he wrote her again: “I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so, in all cases with women. I want, at this particular time, more than anything else, to do right with you.” If she wanted she could dismiss him from her thoughts, forget him. But she should not think that he wanted to cut off their “acquaintance,” because he didn't. He would leave it up to her whether to stop or keep on seeing one another. If she felt bound
to him by any promise, he now released her from all obligations—if that was what she wished. “On the other hand, 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. This, indeed, is the whole question with me. Nothing would make me more miserable than to believe you miserable—nothing more happy, than to know you were so.” But “if it suits you not to answer this,” then “farewell—a long life and a merry one attend you.”

Mary Owens never replied, later remarking that Lincoln “was deficient in those little links which make up the chains of a woman's happiness.” For three years after that, Lincoln had no romantic involvements, instead throwing himself into politics and the law. Meanwhile he found acceptance and companionship with Joshua Speed, a brooding, hefty Kentuckian who operated a general store in Springfield. When Lincoln first came there looking for a place to stay, Speed gazed at him with amazement. “I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life,” he said. Lincoln found him a warm and congenial companion: they slept together in a bed upstairs, swapped jokes, and confided in one another about their mutual troubles with women. In time, Speed became Lincoln's “most intimate friend,” the only friend to whom he ever revealed his innermost thoughts and feelings.

By the summer of 1840, Lincoln felt a little more sure of himself and began courting Mary Todd. They made a remarkable couple—he tall, thin, and self-conscious, she five feet two, fashionably plump, and the very creature of excitement, with radiant eyes and a turned-up nose. Lincoln had a hard-won reputation as a gifted young lawyer and a promising politician, and Mary considered him an excellent prospect for matrimony. She took a keen interest in his political work, noted how ambitious he was, found his “the most congenial mind she had ever met,” and felt a growing affection for this towering attorney who was unlike anybody she had ever known.

But as their relationship deepened, Lincoln had gnawing
doubts about his meager education and low-class background when compared to Mary's. After all, she came from a prominent Kentucky family—her father was a well-known banker and Whig politico in Lexington. And she had attended a stylish women's academy, where she had studied English literature and acquired a reading knowledge of French. Still, Mary fascinated him. She liked poetry and politics as much as he, and she was entirely free of snobbishness. She made it clear that she cared about him, not his family background. Encouraged, Lincoln talked with her about marriage, and in December, 1840, they became engaged.

But Mary's sister and brother-in-law—Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards—did not approve. Because Mary was living with them in their Springfield mansion, they felt responsible for her. And neither of them liked Lincoln. When he sat with Mary in the parlor, Elizabeth said, “he would listen and gaze on her as if drawn by some superior power. He never scarcely said a word,” because he “could not hold a lengthy conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently educated and intelligent in the female line to do so.” Yet here Mary was, wanting to marry this boorish man who came from “nowhere” and whose future was “nebulous.” Well, Elizabeth and Ninian would not stand for it. They tried to break up the engagement and halt the courtship.

Their hostility inflamed Lincoln's anxieties about himself. In fact, he was annihilated. Then to compound his misery, Speed sold his store—he was moving back to Kentucky—and Lincoln had to find another room alone. His most intimate friend was leaving him, a friend he loved and needed now more than ever. It shattered whatever remained of his resolve. Plunging into the worst depression of his life, he broke off his engagement with Mary—this on the “fatal first” of January, 1841—and for a week lay in his room in acute despair. “I am now, the most miserable man living,” he wrote a law associate. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” He added: “To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better.”

Speed moved to Kentucky as planned, but Lincoln visited him there, and the two friends kept up an intense and intimate correspondence about their love lives. They openly discussed their self-doubts, their fears of premature death and “nervous debility” with women. Speed went ahead and married anyway and then wrote Lincoln that their anxieties were groundless. Lincoln could barely restrain his joy. “I tell you, Speed, our forebodings, for which you and I are rather peculiar, are all the worst sort of nonsense.”

Encouraged by Speed's success, Lincoln started seeing Mary again, meeting her in secret lest the imperious Edwardses find out. Mary's continued affection for Lincoln helped restore some of his self-esteem. He wrote Speed again: “Are you now, in
feeling
as well as
judgment
, glad you are married as you are?” Speed replied that, yes, he was really glad. With that, Lincoln overcame his self-doubts enough to ask for Mary's hand a second time. He was thirty-three—a late age in those days for a first marriage. Mary was twenty-three.

Mary made it plain to her relatives that she intended to wed Lincoln whether they liked it or not, and their opposition gave way. On their wedding day, Lincoln gave her a wedding ring with the inscription “Love Is Eternal.” A few days later, he wrote an acquaintance that nothing was new “except my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder.”

Mary helped Lincoln immensely, gave him the tender support and understanding he needed, for they developed a strong physical and emotional love for one another. Yet Mary, so maligned in the Lincoln literature, has never received the credit she deserves for helping Lincoln resolve his fears of inadequacy with women.

Not that their marriage was a paragon of domestic bliss. The Lincolns had their spats and conflicts like any other married couple. Yet Mary was not the raging hellcat that Herndon and other detractors claimed. True, she was insecure, neurotic about money, given to headaches and outbursts of temper. Yet she was also a charming and graceful hostess, an affectionate mother to
her sons, and a loyal wife who shared Lincoln's love for politics and was fiercely proud of him.

Those who denigrate Mary forget that Lincoln himself was hard to live with. If Mary liked a good argument now and then to clear the air, he often withdrew at the first sign of a confrontation, for he hated quarrels and tried to avoid them. He could be temperamental, introverted, and forlorn. And some of his daily habits irritated highborn Mary: he often answered the door in his stocking feet, and liked to lie in the hallway and read newspapers aloud. Yet he was proud of their sons and spoiled them as shamelessly as Mary did. Moreover, he understood her better than anyone else and could be tender to her, extremely tender. Because of all the ways he cared for her, Lincoln was everything to Mary: “lover—husband—father,
all
.”

Still, their intimacy suffered in later years. After the birth of Tad in 1853, Mary contracted a serious gynecological disease which, in the judgment of one specialist, “probably ended sexual intercourse between the Lincolns.” After that, both became increasingly active outside their home, Mary in trips and shopping expeditions and Lincoln in politics. In 1858, the year Lincoln challenged Stephen A. Douglas for his seat in the United States Senate, he and Mary had separate bedrooms installed when they enlarged and remodeled their Springfield home.

3: A
LL
C
ONQUERING
M
IND

Even with marriage and a family, Lincoln remained a moody, melancholy man, given to long introspections about things like death and mortality. In truth, death was a lifelong obsession with
him. His poetry, speeches, and letters are studded with allusions to it. He spoke of the transitory nature of human life, spoke of how all people of this world are destined to die in the end—all are destined to die. He saw himself as only a passing moment in a rushing river of time.

In a real sense, Lincoln had grown up with death, and the loss of those close to him caused incalculable pain in one so deeply sensitive as he. He lost his mother Nancy when he was nine, his only sister when he was eighteen, and his sons Eddie in 1850 and Willie in 1862. The deaths of his cherished boys proved to a grieving Lincoln how ephemeral were human dreams of happiness and lasting life.

When troubled by such thoughts, he would sink into depression again, lost in himself as he stared out the window of his law office, or looked blankly at a fireplace in some hostelry on the circuit. His friends worried about him when he got the “hypo” like that. He would become so dispirited, his eyes so full of pain, that it hurt to look at him. Then often as not he would start muttering the lines of his favorite poem, “Mortality,” written by the Scotsman William Knox.

Preoccupied with death, Lincoln was also afraid of insanity, afraid (as he phrased it) of “the pangs that kill the mind.” In his late thirties, he wrote and rewrote a poem about a boyhood friend named Matthew Gentry, who became deranged and was locked “in mental night,” condemned to a living death, spinning out of control in some inner void. Lincoln had a morbid fascination with Gentry's condition, writing about how Gentry was more an object of dread than death itself: “A human form with reason fled, while wretched life remains.” Yes, Lincoln was fascinated with madness, troubled by it, afraid that what had happened to Matthew could also happen to him—his own reason destroyed, Lincoln spinning in mindless night without the power to know.

This also explains why Lincoln was a teetotaler. Liquor left him “flabby and undone,” he said, blurring his mind and threatening his self-control. And he dreaded and avoided anything which threatened that. In one memorable speech, he heralded some great and distant day when all passions would be subdued, when reason would triumph and “
mind
, all conquering
mind
” would rule the earth.

It is true that Lincoln told folksy anecdotes to illustrate his points. But humor was also tremendous therapy for his depression—it was a device to “whistle down sadness,” as Judge Davis put it. Said Lincoln himself: “I laugh because I must not weep—that's all, that's all.” He remarked on another occasion: “I tell you the truth when I say that a funny story, if it has the element of genuine wit, has the same effect on me that I suppose a good square drink of whiskey has on an old toper; it puts new life into me.”

An expert storyteller, Lincoln could work an audience with exquisite skill. As he related his yarns, fun danced in his eyes and grotesque expressions appeared on his face, until all his features appeared to take part in his performance. When telling a story, a friend said, mirth “seemed to diffuse itself all over him, like a spontaneous tickle.”

On the political platform, Lincoln did like to spin tales that stressed some moral about human nature. But he also honed his humor into a potent political weapon. He was a master of ironic wit, of reducing a specious argument to its absurdity. “He can rake a sophism out of its hole better than all the trained logicians of all schools,” chuckled a young admirer. Some examples: The claim that the Mexican War was not aggressive reminded Lincoln of the farmer who said, “I ain't greedy 'bout land, I only just wants what jines mine.” On state sovereignty: “Advocates of that theory always reminded [me] of the fellow who contended that the proper place for the big kettle was inside of the little one.” On the inconsistent politics of archrival Stephen A. Douglas: “Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?” No wonder Douglas complained that “every one of his stories seems like a whack upon my back.”

In his legal work, too, Lincoln found ample uses for his humor. As he and his colleagues walked around the little towns on the circuit, “he saw ludicrous elements in everything,” one said, “and could either narrate some story from his storehouse of jokes, else he could improvise one.” When some associates got to talking about constitutional construction, Lincoln said that “the strongest example of ‘rigid government' and ‘close construction' I ever knew, was that of Judge——. It was once said of him that he would
hang
a man for blowing his nose in the street, but that he would
quash
the indictment if it failed to specify which
hand
he blew it with!”

In court, Lincoln could employ humor with devastating effect. An example was the indictment of a young U.S. Army officer,
with Lincoln functioning as prosecuting attorney. Lincoln began, “This is an indictment against a soldier for assaulting an old man.”

The defendant indignantly interrupted. “Sir, I am no soldier, I am an officer!”

“I beg your pardon,” Lincoln said with a bland grin, “then gentlemen of the jury, this is an indictment against an
officer
, who is no
soldier
, for assaulting an old man.”

In his law office, when friends and apprentices were gathered around, Lincoln often laid down his pen and treated them to “a burst of spontaneous storytelling,” which left them “with their hands on their sides, their heads thrown back, their mouths open, and the tears coursing down their cheeks, laughing as if they would die.” Some of Lincoln's private jokes were mindless one-liners like the ones he told in public. His own absentmindedness, he said, reminded him of “the story of an old Englishman who was so absent-minded that when he went to bed he put his clothes carefully into the bed and threw himself over the back of the chair.”

In the company of his male friends, Lincoln did tell a Negro dialect joke from time to time. Offensive though these are, such jokes were commonplace among white men of Lincoln's generation, some of whom could boast an entire repertoire. By contrast, Lincoln is known to have related only three Negro tales. An example was the one about a black preacher named Mr. Johnson and a mathematical genius known as Pompey. Here it is in Lincoln's telling:

“‘Now, Pompey, spose dere am tree pigeons sittin' on a rail fence, and you fire a gun at 'em and shoot one, how many's left?'

“‘Two, ob coors,' replies Pompey after a little wool scratching.

“‘Ya-ya-ya,' laughs Mr. Johnson; ‘I knowed you was a fool, Pompey; dere's
none
left—one's dead, and d'udder two's flown away.'”

Other tales Lincoln told in private were pungent rib-ticklers, like the one about his hard-drinking chum Leonard Swett. Said Lincoln: “I attended court many years ago at Mt. Pulaski, the first
county seat of Logan County, and there was the jolliest set of rollicking young Lawyers there that you ever saw together. There was Bill F[ickli]n, Bill H[erndo]n, L[eonar]d S[wet]t, and a lot more, and they mixed law and Latin, water and whiskey, with equal success. It so fell out that the whiskey seemed to be possessed of the very spirit of Jonah. At any rate, S[wet]t went out to the hog-pen, and, leaning over, began to ‘throw up Jonah.' The hogs evidently thought it feed time, for they rushed forward and began to squabble over the voided matter.

“‘Don't fight (hic),' said S[wet]t: ‘there's enough (hic) for all.'”

Still other Lincoln stories were downright bawdy. His fondness for smut may not have been “akin to lunacy,” as one old friend claimed. But Lincoln did like to regale his cronies with off-color jokes. One involved a youth who copulated with a female cat, another an old Virginia gentleman who stropped his razor “on a certain
member
of a young negro's body.” Still another was the piece of foolery called “Bass-Ackwards” which Lincoln handed a bailiff in Springfield one day. “He said he was riding
bass-ackwards
on a
jass-ack
, through a
patton-cotch
, on a pair of
baddle-sags
, stuffed full of
binger gred
, when the animal
steered
at a
scump
, and the
lirrup-steather
broke, and throwed him in the
fomer
of the
kence
and broke his
pishing-fole
. He said he would not have minded it much, but he fell right in a great
tow-curd
; in fact, he said it give him a right smart
sick
of
fitness
—he had the
molera-corbus
pretty bad. He said, about
bray dake
he come to himself, ran home, seized up a
stick
of
wood
and split the
axe
to make a light, rushed into the house, and found the
door
sick abed, and his
wife
standing open. But thank goodness she is getting right
hat
and
farty
again.”

Some of Lincoln's best stories were those he told on himself. He liked to relate the time he was splitting rails with only a shirt and “breeches” on. A stranger passing by yelled at him, and Lincoln looked up. The stranger was aiming a gun his way. “What do you mean?” Lincoln sputtered. The stranger replied that he had promised to shoot the first man he met who was uglier than
he. Lincoln peered at the stranger's face and then declared, “If I am uglier than you, then blaze away.”

When he finished a joke, Lincoln would wrinkle his nose, show his front teeth with a high-pitched laugh, and fall to scratching his elbows.