The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln by Abraham Lincoln Read Free Book Online

a face in my life.”
    Lincoln shared Speed’s room and stayed with him for nearly four years. Speed was a successful young merchant whose large and well-stocked store was the meeting-place for the young men of Springfield. There was a large fireplace at the rear of it, and around this the men would gather in the evening to discuss politics, women, literature and life. Among them was Stephen A. Douglas, then a rising young politician, a Democrat, as opposed to Lincoln who was a Whig. They first matched wits in Speed’s store, and the political discussions they had there were an embryonic form of the famous series of debates they were to engage in twenty years later.
    Another of the young men who took part in these historic meetings was Speed’s clerk, William Herndon, the man who was to become Lincoln’s law partner and faithful Boswell. He had been removed from Illinois College by his father because of the abolitionist sentiments he had expressed at the time of the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, editor of the Alton
Observer
, who had been killed by a pro-slavery mob during an attempt to destroy his printing press.
    Lincoln immediately made himself at home in Springfield as he had done at New Salem. People were glad to befriend him. All his life men were willing to go out of their way to do things for him. Within a week after he came to the town, he had found a place to live, a business and friends.
    He wrote to Mary Owens twice after he arrived in Springfield, explaining why she shouldn’t marry him; finally the whole affair was broken off. During the next year (on April 1, 1838), he wrote a long letter to Mrs. O. H. Browning, thewife of a friend of his, in which he described the Mary Owens affair in detail.It is a cruel letter, ridiculing the woman he had once considered worthy of being his wife; it is also one of the most intimate and self-revelatory documents Lincoln ever wrote. It shows his indecision, his lack of ability to judge others, and, more than any other bit of Lincoln’s writing, it offers a key to the psychological puzzle of his attitude toward women and marriage.
    And so began the Springfield years—the quarter-century that was to make this melancholy young politician President of the United States. He entered Springfield on April 15, 1837. He was then twenty-eight years old. He had just twenty-eight years—to the day—in which to live.
    The town, which was to be the scene of his rise to power, was then an ideal location for a man seeking both political and legal advancement. For all its unpaved and unlighted streets, Springfield was an important place; it had the beginnings of a local aristocracy already established; as state capital it was sure to become a social center where useful contacts could be made. An ambitious man could hope to do well there.
    The one thing in the Lincoln legend that is most untrue is the idea that Lincoln was not ambitious, that he had to be pushed over hurdles by his wife and his friends; that he was forced, almost against his will, finally to become President. It is true that he was lazy, that he was over-cautious, that he often lacked confidence in himself. The Thomas Lincoln strain was strong in him, but he overcame his inheritance; he wanted political advancement and he worked all his life to get it, bringing to the struggle one of the shrewdest and most gifted political minds in American history.
    Each move in his life from this time on was based on political ambition. He made mistakes; sometimes he temporarily abandoned the struggle, appalled by its apparent hopelessness; but to say that he did not seek the career that was to behis is as unjustified as to say that Napoleon and Hitler were accidents of history or fate. Lincoln used different methods, more humane and less selfish methods, but he, too, had the determination that enabled him to achieve his goal. He would have gotten nowhere if the course of events had not been exactly right to bring him forward and make him