Lincoln: A Photobiography (4 page)

As he traveled about the county, making surveys and delivering mail to faraway farms, people came to know him as an honest and dependable fellow. Lincoln could be counted on to witness a contract, settle a boundary dispute, or compose a letter for folks who couldn't write much themselves. For the first time, his neighbors began to call him "Abe."

In 1834, Lincoln ran for the state legislature again. This time he placed second in a field of thirteen candidates, and was one of four men elected to the Illinois House of Representatives from Sangamon County. In November, wearing a sixty-dollar tailor-made suit he had bought on credit, the first suit he had ever owned, the twenty-five-year-old legislator climbed into a stagecoach and set out for the state capital in Vandalia.

In those days, Illinois lawmakers were paid three dollars a day to cover their expenses, but only while the legislature was in session. Lincoln still had to earn a living. One of his fellow representatives, a rising young attorney named John Todd Stuart, urged
Lincoln to take up the study of law. As Stuart pointed out, it was an ideal profession for anyone with political ambitions.

Lincoln the Rail Splitter.
Painting by J. L. G. Ferris.

And in fact, Lincoln had been toying with the idea of becoming a lawyer. For years he had hung around frontier courthouses, watching country lawyers bluster and strut as they cross-examined witnesses and delivered impassioned speeches before juries. He had sat on juries himself, appeared as a witness, drawn up legal documents for his neighbors. He had even argued a few cases before the local justice of the peace.

Yes, the law intrigued him. It would give him a chance to rise in the world, to earn a respected place in the community, to live by his wits instead of by hard physical labor.

Yet Lincoln hesitated, unsure of himself because he had so little formal education. That was no great obstacle, his friend Stuart kept telling him. In the 1830s, few American lawyers had ever seen the inside of a law school. Instead, they "read law" in the office of a practicing attorney until they knew enough to pass their exams.

Lincoln decided to study entirely on his own. He borrowed some law books from Stuart, bought others at an auction, and began to read and memorize legal codes and precedents. Back in New Salem, folks would see him walking down the road, reciting aloud from one of his law books, or lying under a tree as he read, his long legs stretched up the trunk. He studied for nearly three years before passing his exams and being admitted to practice on March 1, 1837.

By then, the state legislature was planning to move from Vandalia to Springfield, which had been named the new capital of Illinois. Lincoln had been elected to a second term in the legislature. And he had accepted a job as junior partner in John Todd Stuart's Springfield law office.

In April, he went back to New Salem for the last time to pack his belongings and say good-bye to his friends. The little village was declining now. Its hopes for growth and prosperity had vanished when the Sangamon River proved too treacherous for steamboat travel. Settlers were moving away, seeking brighter prospects elsewhere.

By 1840, New Salem was a ghost town. It would have been forgotten completely if Abraham Lincoln hadn't gone there to live when he was young, penniless, and ambitious.

Lincoln as a thirty-seven-year-old prairie lawyer in 1846. This daguerreotype is the earliest known camera portrait of Lincoln.

Mary Lincoln as a twenty-eight-year-old wife and mother in 1846. The Lincolns had been married for four years and had two sons when they sat for these companion portraits. "They are very precious to me," Mary said later, "taken when we were young and so desperately in love.
"

"
I had studied law, and removed to Springfield to practice it.
"

Lincoln was twenty-eight years old when he rode into Springfield on a borrowed horse with seven dollars in his pocket. At first he slept on a couch in his partner's law office. Then he met Joshua Speed, a genial young merchant who owned a general store in the center of town.

Speed thought that Lincoln was one of the saddest-looking fellows he had ever laid eyes on. "I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life," he declared. But he liked the strapping backwoods attorney and invited him to share his room above the store. Lincoln collected his saddlebags, climbed the stairs to Speed's room, tossed the bags on the floor, and said with a grin, "Well Speed, I'm moved!"

Speed's store was a meeting place for a group of bachelors who gathered around a big fireplace several evenings a week to swap stories and argue politics. One of them was a scrappy little attorney named Stephen A. Douglas. From their first meeting, Lincoln and Douglas had plenty to argue about. The leading political parties at the time were the Whigs, who favored a strong government in Washington to guide the nation's future, and the Democrats, who said that the states should control their own affairs, without interference from Washington. Douglas was a Democrat, Lincoln a Whig. They became instant rivals.

Lincoln was ambitious to get ahead. His partner coached him in the fine points of courtroom law, and together they built one of the busiest practices in Springfield. Meanwhile, Lincoln rose rapidly as a Whig party leader. He won reelection to the legislature in 1838 and again in 1840—serving four terms altogether. He was appointed to the party's State Central Committee, which picked candidates for statewide office. And he became an influential member of the Young Whigs, who carried on a running debate with the Young Democrats, led by Stephen Douglas.

He also fell in love—apparently for the first time in his life. Legend tells us that Lincoln once had a tragic love affair with Ann Rutledge, daughter of the New Salem tavern owner, who died at the age of twenty-two. While this story has become part of American folklore, there isn't a shred of evidence that Lincoln ever had a romantic attachment with Ann. Historians believe that they were just good friends.

While Lincoln was still living in New Salem, he carried on a half-hearted courtship with Mary Owens, but that came to nothing. As far as we know, Lincoln never really lost his head over a woman until he met Mary Ann Todd, the pampered and temperamental daughter of a wealthy Kentucky banker.

Lincoln was thirty when they met, Mary almost twenty-one.
She had come to Springfield to live with her sister and brother-in-law, Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards, and to find a suitable match among the town's eligible bachelors. The Edwards's elegant hilltop mansion was a popular meeting place for Springfield's political leaders and social elite. Lincoln visited the house with his law partner, a cousin of Elizabeth's.

Downtown Springfield, where Lincoln practiced law, as it appeared in the 1850s. The street is paved with split logs laid flat side up, and the sidewalk is built of wooden planks.

He met Mary in the winter of 1839. She was witty, vivacious, and stylish, "the very creature of excitement," as a friend described her. She spoke fluent French, recited poetry, knew all the latest dances, was fascinated by politics, and had outspoken views on just about everything. Lincoln was dazzled by the popular Kentucky belle, and Mary was drawn to him.

To many, it seemed an unlikely match. Lincoln knew his way around the brawling political circles of Springfield, but he was still an unpolished fellow from the backwoods, ill at ease in the sophisticated drawing rooms of Springfield high society. Ninian Edwards considered him "a mighty rough man." But Mary saw great promise in Lincoln. She admired his ambition, and beneath his awkward shyness, she found an appealing intensity. He had "the most congenial mind" she had ever met.

As for Lincoln, he had never met anyone like Mary. In her company, he forgot his uncertain manners and felt at ease. He could talk to her as to no one else. By the summer of 1840, they were courting in earnest, Lincoln standing tall and lean beside Mary's short, fashionably plump figure in drawing rooms all over town. By Christmas, they were engaged.

Mary's sister and brother-in-law did not approve. Lincoln was a useful political ally, perhaps, but he was hardly a suitable husband for a member of the eminent Todd family. Elizabeth didn't like him at all. "He never scarcely said a word," she complained, because he "could not hold a lengthy conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently educated and intelligent in the female line to do so." The Edwardses looked down on Lincoln as a social climber—a gangly country bumpkin who never spoke about his origins. He lived in a room above a store. He was deeply in debt. Mary could do better than that. Lincoln was no longer welcome in the Edwards home. And back in Kentucky, Mary's father objected vigorously to the match.

Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards, Lincoln's influential in-laws. They tried to prevent the marriage.

Mary was defiant. She would not be told whom to marry! But Lincoln was wounded by the Todd family's rejection. "One
d
is enough for God," he told a friend, "but the Todds need two."

Early in 1841 Lincoln broke off the engagement. He had known bouts of depression before, but now he plunged into the worst emotional crisis of his life. For a week, he refused to leave his room. People around town said that he had thrown "two cat fits and a duck fit." He had gone "crazy for a week or two." To his law partner Stuart, who was serving a term in Congress, Lincoln wrote: "I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth."