Lincoln's Love Story

In the sweet spring weather of 1835, Abraham Lincoln made a memorable journey. It was the beginning of his summer of love on the winding banks of the Sangamon. Only one historian has noted it as a happy interlude in a youth of struggle and unsatisfied longings, but the tender memory of Ann Rutledge, the girl who awaited him at the end of it, must have remained with him to the day of his martyrdom.

He was returning from Vandalia, Illinois, then the capital, and his first term in the state legislature, to the backwoods village of New Salem that had been his home for four years. The last twenty miles of the journey, from the town of Springfield, he made on a hired horse. The landscape through which he rode that April morning still holds its enchantment; the swift, bright river still winds in and out among the wooded hills, for the best farming lands lie back of the gravelly bluffs, on the black loam prairie. But three-quarters of a century ago central Illinois was an almost primeval world. Settlements were few and far apart. No locomotive awoke the echoes among the verdant ridges, no smoke darkened the silver ribbon of the river, no coal-mine gashed the green hillside. Here and there a wreath of blue marked the hearth-fire of a forest home, or beyond a gap in the bluff a log-cabin stood amid the warm brown furrows of a clearing; but for the most part the Sangamon River road was broken through a sylvan wilderness.

There were walnut groves then, as there are still oaks and maples. Among the darker boles the trunks of sycamores gleamed. In the bottoms the satin foliage of the cottonwood shimmered in the sun, and willows silvered in the breeze. Honey-locusts, hawthorn and wild crab-apple trees were in bloom, dogwood made pallid patches in the glades and red-bud blushed. Wild flowers of low growth carpeted every grassy slope. The earth exhaled all those mysterious fragrances with which the year renews its youth. In April the mating season would be over and the birds silent, a brooding stillness possess an efflorescent Eden.

It was a long enough ride for a young man to indulge in memories and dreams. A tall, ungainly youth of twenty-six was this rising backwoods politician. He wore a suit of blue jeans, the trousers stuffed in the tops of cowhide boots; a hat of rabbit-fur felt, with so long a nap that it looked not unlike the original pelt, was pushed back from his heavy black hair. But below primitive hat and unruly hair was a broad, high forehead, luminous gray eyes of keen intelligence, softened by sympathy and lit with humour, features of rugged strength, and a wide mouth, full and candid and sweet. His wardrobe was in his saddle-bags; his library of law books, most of them borrowed, in a portmanteau on his saddle-bow; a hundred dollars or so of his pay as a legislator in his belt, and many times that amount pledged to debtors. His present living was precarious; his only capital reputation, courage, self-confidence and a winning personality; his fortune still under his shabby hat.

But this morning he was not to be dismayed. Difficulties dissolved, under this fire of spring in his heart, as the snow had melted in the sugar groves. The sordid years fell away from him; debts no longer burdened his spirit. That sombre outlook upon life, his heritage from a wistful, ill-fated mother, was dissipated in the sun of love.

It was on such an April morning as this, four years before, that he had first seen Ann Rutledge. She was in the crowd that had come down to the mill to cheer him when he got the flat-boat he was taking to New Orleans safely over New Salem dam. Ann was eighteen then, and she stood out from the villagers gathered on the bank by reason of a certain fineness of beauty and bearing. Her crown of hair was so pale a gold as to be almost flaxen. Besides always being noted as kind and happy, her eyes are described as a dark, violet-blue, with brown brows and lashes. Her colouring was now rose, now pearl, changing like the anemones that blow along the banks of the Sangamon.1

Hero of the day, the raw youth was taken up the bluff and over the ridge into the busy town of twenty log-houses and shops. He was feasted in the eight-room tavern of hewn logs owned by her father, James Rutledge, and for an hour entertained a crowd of farmers, emigrants, and shopkeepers with droll stories – stories that, unknown to him, would be repeated before nightfall over a radius of twenty miles. He was beginning to discover that men liked to hear him talk, and to wonder if this facility for making friends could be turned to practical use. But as a young man whose fancy had fed on a few books and many dreams, it may have meant more that this beautiful girl waited on the table, laughed at his jokes – too kind of heart, too gentle of breed, to laugh at his awkwardness – and praised his wit and cleverness and strength.

When he pushed his boat off, Ann waved her kerchief from the bank. He looked back at her outlined against the green bluff, to fix it in a memory none too well-furnished with such gracious pictures. He might never see her again. Poor, obscure, indifferently self-educated, unaware of his own powers, he saw before him, at that time, only the vagabond life of a river boatman, or the narrow opportunities of a farm labourer. But he displayed such qualities on that voyage as to win his employer. In July he returned to New Salem as a clerk in Denton Offutt’s store.

It is not probable that Lincoln was conscious of a pang when he heard that Ann Rutledge was engaged to marry John McNeill, proprietor of the best store in the town and of rich farming lands. Daughter of the mill and tavern owner, descended from a family of South Carolina planters that boasted a Signer of the Declaration, a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court under President Washington, and a leader in an early Congress, she was far above the penniless, undistinguished store-clerk. In the new West ability and worth could push itself to the front as nowhere else in the world, but pioneer society was not so democratic but that birth and wealth had their claims to consideration.

Most girls, at that time, were married at eighteen, but Ann was still studying under the Scotch schoolmaster, Mentor Graham. Lincoln met her often at the “spell-downs” with which the school closed the Friday afternoon sessions. When he returned from an inglorious Indian campaign the next year, he went to the Rutledge tavern to board. He had risen rapidly in public esteem, had captained a local company in the war, made a vigorous campaign for the legislature, and betrayed a wide and curious knowledge of books and public questions. A distinguished career was already predicted for him.

He and Ann were fast friends now, and for the next year and a half he saw her daily in her most endearing aspects of elder sister and daughter. It was a big, old-fashioned family of nine children, and Ann did the sewing and much of the spinning and weaving. At meal times she waited on the long tables, bringing platters of river fish, game, and pork from the kitchen fire-place, corn and wheat bread and hominy, milk and butter, honey and maple sugar, pots of coffee, and preserves made from wild berries and honey. Amid the crowds of rough men and the occasional fine gentleman, who could not but note her beauty and sweetness, Ann held an air of being more protected and sheltered in her father’s house than was often possible in a frontier tavern.

The meal over, she vanished into the family room. One chimney corner was hers for her low chair of hickory splints, her spinning wheel, and her sewing table, with its little drawer for thread and scissors. About her work in the morning she wore a scant-skirted tight-fitting gown of blue or brown linsey. But for winter evenings the natural cream-white of flax and wool was left undyed, or it was coloured with saffron, a dull orange that glorified her blond loveliness. She had wide, cape-like collars of home-made lace, pinned with a cameo or painted brooch, and a high comb of tortoise-shell behind the shining coil of her hair, that made her look like the picture of a court lady stepped out of its frame. Not an hour of privation or sorrow had touched her since the day she was born. On the women whom Lincoln had known and loved – his mother, his stepmother, and his sister – pioneer life had laid those pitiless burdens that filled so many early, forlorn graves. Ann’s fostered youth and unclouded eyes must have seemed to him a blessed miracle; filled him with determination so to cherish his own when love should crown his manhood.

The regular boarders at the tavern were a part of that patriarchal family – Ann’s lover McNeill, Lincoln, and others. The mother was at her wheel, the little girls had their knitting or patchwork, the boys their lessons. The young men played checkers or talked politics. James Rutledge smoked his pipe, read the latest weekly paper from St. Louis or Kaskaskia, and kept a fond eye on Ann.

The beautiful girl sat there in the firelight, knitting lace or sewing, her skilful fingers never idle; but smiling, listening to the talk, making a bright comment now and then, wearing somehow, in her busiest hour, an air of leisure, with all the time in the world for others, as a lady should. In the country parlance Ann was always spoken of as “good company.” Sweet-natured and helpful, the boys could always go to her with their lessons, or the little sisters with a dropped stitch or tangled thread. With the latest baby, she was a virginal madonna. Lincoln attended the fire, held Mrs. Rutledge’s yarn, rocked the cradle, and told his inimitable stories. When he had mastered Kirkham’s Grammar he began to teach Ann the mysteries of parsing and analysis.

After the school debate one night a year before, Mentor Graham, one of those scholarly pedagogues who leavened the West with learning, had thrilled him with ambition by telling him he had a gift for public speaking, but that he needed to correct many inaccuracies and crudities of speech. Text books were scarce, but he knew of a grammar owned by a farmer who lived seven miles in the country. Lincoln got up at daylight, filled his pockets with corn dodgers, and went for that grammar. He must have bought it, paying for it in work, for he afterward gave it to Ann – his single gift to her, or at least the only one that is preserved. Her brother Robert’s descendants have to-day this little old text-book, inscribed on the title-page in Lincoln’s handwriting:

Ann M. Rutledge is now learning grammar.

How eloquent that battered, faded, yellow-leafed little old grammar is of the ambitions and attainments that set these two apart from the unrecorded lives in that backwoods community! Ann was betrothed, and her content and trust in her lover were something beautiful to see, but McNeill’s figure is vague. There is no description of him, few facts about him are remembered, except that he had prospered and won Ann Rutledge’s love. In the stories of the region, that have now taken on the legendary haze of cherished romance, Lincoln is the hero, long before he appears in the character of chivalrous suitor.

Oh, those long, intimate evenings! Twenty people were in the big, fire-lit family room, perhaps, storm outside and flames roaring merrily in the chimney. But they two, with a special candle on Ann’s little sewing-table, were outside the circle of murmurous talk and laughter, the pale gold head and the raven one close together over the hard-and-fast rules of the text book! Lincoln loved her then, unconsciously, must have loved her from the first, but he was incapable of a dishonourable thought, and Ann’s heart was all McNeill’s.

After Mr. Rutledge sold the mill and tavern in 1833 and moved to a farm, Lincoln lived much of the time at Squire Bowling Green’s, on a farm a half-mile north of the town, under the brow of the bluff. The jovial squire was a justice of the peace, a sort of local Solomon whose decisions were based on common sense and essential justice, rather than on the law or evidence. He had a copy of the Statutes of Illinois that Lincoln was going through. William G. Greene was there, too, much of the time, although he was in no way related to the Squire. This most intimate friend of Lincoln’s among the young men of New Salem was preparing to go to college. Aunt Nancy Green adored Lincoln, and said he paid his board twice over in human kindness and pure fun. Here he made his home most of the time until he went away to Springfield to practise law. It was while he was living at Squire Green’s, in the spring of 1834, that John McNeill suddenly sold his store and left for his old home, indefinitely “back East.” The event turned all Lincoln’s current of thought and purposes into new and deeper channels.

The reason McNeill gave was that he wanted to bring his old father and mother out West to care for them on his farm. When he returned he and Ann were to be married. It was a long journey, not without its perils – first across to Vincennes, Indiana, down the Wabash and up the Ohio to Pittsburg, then over the Alleghanies into New York State. It would be weeks between letters, a year at least before he could return. Many said openly that a man who was worth twelve thousand dollars, like John McNeill, could have his parents brought to him. What Ann thought no one ever knew. If she was hurt, she hid it in her loyal heart, not cherishing it against him, and James Rutledge did not object. Of a race in which honour and chivalry were traditions, it could not have occurred to him that any man lived so base as to break faith with his beloved daughter.

So Ann packed John McNeill’s saddle-bags, putting in every little comfort her loving heart could think of or her industrious fingers contrive, stepped up on the toe of her lover’s riding-boot to kiss him good-bye, then bade him God-speed and watched him ride away, not knowing that he was riding out of her life.

Lincoln was the New Salem postmaster. In his journeys about the country – surveying, working in the harvest field, electioneering – he carried the mail of such farms as he passed in his hat or his saddle-bags. The pioneer postmaster was the confidant of those he served, in the absence of ministers and doctors. People read to him the letters they received, complained of neglect, demanded of him sympathy in their private joys and sorrows. And so it was he came close to the grief of Ann Rutledge.

Weeks went by, and there was no letter from the absent McNeill. Ann wrote often herself, tying the missives in wrapping paper with stout string, sealing them securely, and giving them to Lincoln to mail. Cheerful at first, her face grew wistful, her colour fled, her singing voice fell silent. Too loyal to suspect, too proud to complain, what fears possessed the lonely watches of the night, what hope awoke with each dawn, those who loved her best could only dimly guess. Her head held high in the pride of a faith unshaken, she asked for her letter only with a look, but such a look as one could scarce endure and the heart must ache to deny. Afterward she said she thought of her lover as dead. Steamboats often blew up in those days; there were swamps along the Wabash and the Ohio where men died of malarial fever; there were treacherous places in the mountains where a stumbling horse could end, in unrecorded tragedy, the sweetest human drama. In her heart she set up a shrine to a consecrated memory. For the one blow fate held for her she was unprepared.

In early summer there was a letter. Lincoln must have leaped on the nearest saddled horse and galloped out to the farm to give it to her. He slipped it into her hand unseen, saw the happy colour flood her face, and watched her speed away to the riverbank to read it. It was evening when she crept home again, in the radiance of the harvest moon, across the stubble of the wheat, like a dazed ghost.

It was not a letter that Ann could speak of to her father and mother with confidence and pride. McNeill had been ill on the journey – not so ill, however, that he could not have written. And his name was not McNeill, but McNamar. Family misfortunes had caused him to change his name out West so dependent relatives could not find him, thus giving the lie to his excuse for going back. He said nothing about returning, showed no remorse for his neglect, did not speak of her tender letters to him. Perhaps, in the old home, he had not cared to claim them under the name by which she knew him. It was a strange letter, heartless and without a spark of honour. But Ann had loved the man for four years, plighting her troth with him at seventeen. Although he had wounded her inrooted affections and faith, apparently deserted her without a pang, placed her in an intolerable position before a censorious world, she could not put him out of her mind and heart. She wrote to him again, with no reproaches, and she kept her own counsel.

Two more letters came at long intervals. Then they ceased altogether. In every sparsely settled community there is much curiosity about the unusual event, and some malice toward misfortune. Here offensive gossip ran about. It was reported that McNamar was a fugitive from justice – a thief, a murderer, that he already had a wife in the East. The talk enraged her father, and enveloped sweet Ann Rutledge in an atmosphere of blight. The truth – that he had tired of her – was surely not so bad as these rumours of criminal acts. With that element of the maternal that underlies the love of women for men, she came to the defence of his good name. She showed her father the letters, laying the sacrifice of her rejected self on the altar of a lost, unworthy love.

But it had the opposite effect she intended. In James Rutledge’s Southern code this was the blackest thing a man could do. A thousand miles of wilderness separated him from the scoundrel who had broken the heart of his daughter! Was John McNamar to go unpunished? Not an old man, he seemed to break up physically under the blow. Public sympathy was with him and with the deserted girl. Her father was her lover now, surrounding her with every attention and tender care. It was remarked in a day and place when family affection was not demonstrative. Again, in the country parlance, it was said: “James Rutledge is just wrapped up in Ann.”

A new element was added to this absorbing drama when Lincoln began to pay open court to Ann, publishing it far and wide that he would be proud to win what McNamar had not cared to keep. A wave of enthusiastic admiration swept over the country-side. Nothing else was talked of in the town and around the mill. His chivalrous love may well have played its part in his spectacular campaign for the legislature, and his triumphant election in August.

Ann gave no encouragement to his suit. To Lincoln, who was reading Jack Kelso’s precious copy of Shakespeare’s plays at the time, his love must have seemed another Ophelia, crushed by unkindness, bewildered by a world in which men could break faith. As she shrank from the blunt perception of curious neighbours she came to lean more and more on Lincoln’s devotion. It had in it, permeating its human quality, that divine compassion which, enlarged, was afterward to free a race. He wanted to free her spirit from bonds of the past. In the early days of his wooing his personal feeling and hopes were put in the background.

He persuaded Ann to study with him again. All that long autumn, while the walnuts turned to gold, the maples flamed across the world, and the oaks poured their cascades of red wine over the bluffs, they were together. Often the two were seen under a giant sycamore, on a hill below the town and overlooking the river, Ann puzzling over conjugations, Lincoln sprawled at her feet reading Blackstone’s Commentaries. It was such an extraordinary thing in that unlettered region that it was remarked ever after by those who saw it. It was an affair of public interest, and now of publicly expressed satisfaction at the happier turn of events. The world not only loves a lover, but it loves wedding bells at the end of the story. The first frost touched the forests with a magic wand, then Indian summer lay its bloomy haze over the landscape like the diaphanous veil that parts a waiting soul from Paradise. With the gales and snows of December Lincoln rode away for his winter of lawmaking at Vandalia.

Now, indeed, letters came for Ann across the white silence that lay in the valley of the Sangamon. Dated from the state capital they were, written with the quill pens and out of the cork inkstands the commonwealth provided. Not one of these letters is in existence to-day. They could not have been love-letters in the conventional sense, but eloquent of that large comradeship love holds for men and women of rare hearts and minds. For the first time he had come into contact with the men who were shaping the destinies of his state, measuring his capacities with theirs, and finding that he did not differ from them much in kind or degree. His ambition took definite shape. He saw a future of distinction and service such as he would be proud to ask Ann to share.

What pictures of men and the times he must have drawn for her! In those pioneer days only a few of the public men were backwoods lawyers like himself. Some, indeed, and many of the best, expressed the native genius and crude force that were transforming the wilderness. But there were old-world aristocrats, to whom the English language even was exotic, from Kaskaskia and the French mission towns, more than a century old, on the Mississippi. And there were Southern planters of wealth, whose fiery code always held for Lincoln an element of the absurd. Eastern men too, were there, with traditions of generations of learning and public service, and some “Yankees” with an over-developed shrewdness that the others agreed in detesting. Chicago was only an upstart village; northern Illinois just opened up to emigration from the East; southern Illinois was of the South, in population and sentiment, with the added grace of French manners. The capital was a tiny city, but it had high-bred society into which Ann would fit so well. There would be humorous anecdotes in those letters, too, to restore the gaiety of her heart, for, much as he loved men, their foibles and failings furnished him infinite amusement.

The lonely girl could not but be cheered by these letters and have her outlook on life enlarged by them, so that her own experience dwindled somewhat in the perspective. She wrote to him – girlish, grateful letters – saying nothing of McNamar, and showing how pathetically she leaned on him. On his homeward ride in the sweet spring weather his mind dwelt on her with a tenderness no longer forbidden, no longer hopeless of its reward.

Squire Green’s farm lay to the north of New Salem, so that, on this day of his return, he must have avoided the village, its clamorous welcome, its jesting surmises. In fancy he could imagine that lovable vagabond, Jack Kelso, fishing from the pier below the dam, catching sight of him out of the tail of a mischievous Irish eye, and announcing his arrival with a tender stanza from “Annie Laurie.” The sympathy of town and country-side was with him in his wooing, and it warmed his heart; but to-day was sacred to love.

He turned from the road into the ravine toward the big cabin of hewn logs that nestled under the brow of the bluff. We know that a grove of forest trees surrounded it and a young apple orchard, in blossom in April, concealed it from the highway and river. If it was after the noon hour the men would have gone back to their ploughing, and Aunt Nancy Green, in a gown of lilac print, be sitting with her patchwork in the orchard, where she could smell the bloom, keep an eye on strolling, downy broods, and watch the honey-bees fill her hives. The Squire was there, too, very likely, tilted back in his wide chair of hickory splints, asleep. He was a well-to-do man, and as he weighed two hundred and fifty pounds he took life easy, and was never far away from the slender shadow cast by busy “mother.”

“Yes, Bill was some’ers ’round,” but lively Aunt Nancy ventured an affectionate joke, saying she “reckoned Abe wasn’t pinin’ to see Bill as much as he was someone else.” She was willing to get his dinner in the middle of the afternoon, but he had to pay for it with his best new stories. A visit with Aunt Nancy, his books arranged on the shelf he had built above his table in the chimney corner, a swim in a warm shallow pool in the Sangamon, then up the ladder-like stair to the loft chamber he often shared with the friend of his youth, to dress for Ann!