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

great, but he was never lacking in the astuteness to foresee the correct move that would put him in each successive position to advance upward toward his final high place.
MARY TODD
    Of all the influences in his life none was to be more important than the marriage he made—but for reasons different from those usually ascribed to it. It is true that Mary Todd, the Kentucky belle he was to marry, did set out to capture this young politician for herself—underneath his uncouthness she saw possibilities of growth that she was clever enough to recognize. But Lincoln, too, for all his hesitation and his doubts, did marry Mary Todd, and in doing so he could not have been entirely oblivious of the fact that he was forming an alliance with the most influential family in Springfield—the Edwards clan which was powerful in politics and society.
    With Lincoln’s entry into Springfield where he met his future wife, the first of the tangled threads of his career is woven into the complicated pattern of personal life, history and drama that makes his story so interesting and so strange. That she, the high-born Southern lady who came to Springfield on the usual matrimonial tour, should link her destiny with this backwoods lawyer was remarkable enough. But still stranger was the fact that among the eligible young men in Illinois who immediately surrounded her was Stephen A. Douglas, who was to run through Lincoln’s life as a counter-foil. Douglas’s career, plotted against Lincoln’s, seems like some novelist’s invention, a device of clever and ingenious fiction. Even Douglas’s death, which occurred shortly after Lincolntook office as President, appears almost as if it were an artfully calculated move on the part of the author to clear the stage so his chief character could dominate the story during the important war years.
    And Mary Todd herself is a character out of Thackeray. She is Becky Sharp—even to her knowledge of French—and Amelia Sedley, with her aristocratic background and silly Victorian notions of female propriety, both rolled into one character, inconsistent, puzzling and forever fascinating as a human being as well as for the part she was to play in history.
    She had been raised in Lexington, Kentucky, where she had been well educated. She came to Springfield some time in the autumn of 1839, just before the Legislature first met there. She probably met Lincoln at a ball held in honor of the occasion. At any rate, during the year 1840 they became engaged.
    Things did not go smoothly between them. Mary Todd was high tempered, imperious, used to adulation and having her own way. Lincoln was still in a psychological muddle about women. He was drawn to them as desperately as ever, but he was at the same time afraid of becoming married to one of them. Marriage had about it a terrifying state of permanence; he had his own way to make in the world, and even a politically advantageous marriage might hold him back in some ways as much as it might advance him in others. Beyond all these practical reasons was some obscure psychological inhibition, some holdover from his past—from his attachment to his dead mother perhaps, or from his love affair with Ann Rutledge that death had also terminated. Something made him regret the step he was taking. He wrote a letter to Mary Todd, breaking off his engagement. Speed persuaded him not to send the letter, but to speak to her in person instead. He did so and he was lost. She melted in tears, and he, moved by pity, effected a reconciliation for the time being, although his own doubts were by no means stilled.
    Then on January 1, 1841, something else happened. 3 Just what it was we do not know. Herndon said that the unhappy couple had planned to be married on that day, and that Lincoln simply did not show up for the ceremony. He had been driven almost to the verge of insanity by his own indecision, and again he had to be watched lest he commit suicide.
    Herndon’s story lacks