Lincoln's Love Story

Lincoln is described, about this time, by Harvey Ross, who carried the mail over the star-route of central Illinois, as having a summer suit of brown nankeen, with a white waistcoat sprigged with coloured flowers. The wide, soft collar of his white shirt rolled back over a neck-cloth made of a black silk, fringed handkerchief. His hat was of brown buckeye splints, the pioneer’s substitute for straw. It was in this fashion he must have appeared as he walked back along the river and across the fields when he went to urge his love for Ann Rutledge.

In old patch-work quilts, cherished as the work of our great-grandmothers, we may see to-day bits of cotton print – white with coloured pin-dots, indigo blue and oil red, and violet and pink grounds powdered with tiny, conventional figures and flowers in white. They remind us of old-fashioned gardens of perennials where lilacs, damask roses, and flowering almonds bloomed. A young girl like Ann would have one such pink gown to wear on warm evenings; and a quilted and ruffled sun-bonnet of sheer muslin, not to wear seriously, but to hang distractingly by the strings around her white neck. There was little self-consciousness about her, and no coquetry at all. Ann never teased; she was just simple and sincere and sweet. But it would be instinctive with her to pick up the grammar as an excuse for the stroll along the bluff with her lover.

Of an oak or a maple, no matter how dense the foliage, one has a distinct image of the individual leaf; but of the sycamore – the American plane-tree – you may see thousands, and carry away only an impression of a silvery column and an enormous dome of green gossamer – a diaphanous mesh of vernal lace, whose pattern dissolves momently in the sun, and frays and ravels in the wind. When they came to where the sycamore was weaving its old faery weft in the sunset light, she laid the bonnet on the grass, and listened to his stories and comments on the new men and things he had seen, until he made her laugh, almost like the happy girl of old tavern days; for Lincoln was a wizard who could break the spell of bad dreams and revive dead faiths. A pause, a flutter of hearts as light as the leaf-shadows, and a hasty question to cover the embarrassment. There was a puzzling point in her grammar lesson – how can adverbs modify other adverbs?

Yes, he had been puzzled by that, too, and Mentor Graham had helped him with an illustration.

I love you very dearly!

Oh yes, she understood now! A burning blush, a gasping sigh at the shock of flooding memory! She still struggled to forget this blighting thing. But could she ever again listen to such words without pain or shame? She had the courage of a proud race. If her lips trembled, she could at least lift her eyes to meet that immemorial look of brooding tenderness, and she could ask timidly if he would hear her recite the conjugation of the regular verb to see if she had forgotten.

Why is it that these sober old grammars, full of hard-and-fast rules – and bewildering exceptions – strewing the path of learning with needless thorns and obstructions of every sort, still instinctively chose the one verb ardent youth conjugates with no teaching at all? First person, singular number, present tense, declarative mood —I love, transitive, requiring an object to complete its meaning, as life itself requires one —you.

No pause! The story neither begins there, nor ends. How tireless that confession; how thrilling that mutual self-analysis; what glamour over every aspect! Past, to the beginning of things, future to Eternity; the insistent, pleading interrogative, do you love; the absurd potential, as if there ever was any may or might about it; the inevitable, continuing state, loving; the infinitive to love– all the meaning and purpose of life; and the crown of immortality to have loved. Then that strange, introspective subjunctive, wild with vain regret, that youth ponders with disbelief that Fate could ever so defraud – that a few lonely souls have had to con in the sad evening of empty lives:

If we had loved!

O, sweet Ann Rutledge, could you endure to look back across such arid years and think of this lover denied? No! No matter what life yet held for them of joy or sorrow, the conjugation is to be finished with the first person plural, future-perfect, declarative. At the very worst – and best – and last, robbing even death of its sting, at least:

We shall have loved.

And so they sat there long, in the peaceful evening light, looking out across the river with the singing name, that purls and ripples over its gravelly bars and sings the story of their love, forever!

No one who saw the two together that summer ever forgot it. Pioneer life was too often a sordid, barren thing, where men and women starved on bread alone. So Lincoln’s mother had dwindled to an early grave, lacking nourishment for the spirit. Courtship, even, was elemental, robbed of its hours of irresponsible idleness, its faery realm of romance. To see anyone rise above the hard, external facts of life touched the imagination of the dullest. In his public aspect a large part of Lincoln’s power, at this time, was that he expressed visibly community aspirations that still lay dormant and unrecognized. Now, he and Ann expressed the capacities of love of the disinherited. To the wondering, wistful eyes that regarded them, they seemed to have escaped to a fairer environment of their own making – of books, of dreams, of ambitions, of unimagined compatibilities.

He borrowed Jack Kelso’s Burns and Shakespeare again, to read with Ann. Together they read of Mary, loved and lost; of Bonnie Doon, and Flow Gently, Sweet Afton, that plea to old mother-earth for tenderness for one gone beyond loving. With no prescience of disaster they read that old love tragedy of Verona.

The young and happy can read these laments without sadness. They sound the depths of passion and the heights of consecration. They sing not only of dead loves, but of deathless love, and they contract the heart of youth with no fear of bereavement. Young love is always secure, thrice ringed around with protecting spells and enchantment; death an alien thing in some distant star. The banks of the Sangamon bloomed fresh and fair that golden summer, the meadow-lark sang unreproached, the flowing of the river accompanied only dreams of fuller life.

They knew Italy for the first time, think of the wonder of it! – as something more than a pink peninsula in the geography – felt the soft air of moon-lit nights of love throb with the strain of the nightingale. There are no nightingales in America, but when he took the flat-boat down to New Orleans – Did she remember waving her kerchief from the bank? When the boat was tied up in a quiet Louisiana bayou one night, he heard the dropping-song of the mockingbird. That was like Juliet’s plea: “Oh love, remain!”

What memories! What discoveries! What searching self-revelations by which youth leads love back through an uncompanioned past, finding there old experiences, trivial and forgotten until love touches and transforms them. Life suddenly becomes spacious and richly furnished. Lincoln’s old ties of affection were Ann’s now, dear and familiar; his old griefs. In tender retrospect she shared that tragic mystery of his childhood, his mother’s early death. And, like all the other women who ever belonged to him, she divined his greatness – had a glimpse of the path of glory already broadening from his feet.

She set her own little feet in that path, determined that he should not outdistance her if she could keep up with his strides. They could not be married until he was admitted to the bar, so she took up her old plan of going to Jacksonville Academy. Her brother David was going to college there, and then was to study law with Lincoln. What endearing ties were beginning to bind him to her family! They spent long afternoons studying, and Lincoln made rapid progress, for his mind was clear and keen, freed from its old miasma of melancholy.

But they seemed curiously to have changed characters. Ann had been the one of placid temperament, dwelling on a happy level of faith in a kind world. Lincoln had, by turns, been hilarious and sunk in gloom. Privations and loss had darkened his youth; promise lured his young manhood only to mock; powers were given him only to be baffled. But now life was fair, the course open, the goal in sight, happiness secure! For Ann had the quiet ways, the steadfast love, and the sweet, sweet look, in which a man, jaded and goaded by the world of struggle, could find rest. Surely fate had played all her malicious tricks! It was enough for him, that summer, to lie at his lady’s feet, his elbows in the grass, his shock head in his hands, absorbed in Chitty’s “Pleadings.”

Ann studied fitfully, often looking off absently across field and river, starting from deep reverie when he spoke to her. Her mother noticed her long, grave silences, but thought of them as the pensive musings of a young girl in love. This impression was increased by her absorption in her lover. When with him, talking with him, a subtle excitement burned in her eye and pulsed in her cheek; but when he was gone the inner fire of her spirit seemed to turn to ashes. She clung desperately, visibly, to this new love – so infinitely more precious and satisfying than the old. She did not doubt its reality, but happiness, in the nature of things, was to her, now, evanescent and escaping.

People remembered afterward, as the days lengthened, how fragile Ann looked, as if withered by hot, sleepless nights – how vivid and tremulous. She had spells of wild gaiety, her laughter bubbling up like water from a spring, and she grew lovelier, day by day. And there were times, when Lincoln was away in the harvest-field or on surveying trips, that she sat pale and listless and brooding for hours, with hands that had always been so busy and helpful, clasped idly in her lap.

Like Juliet, she must often have cried in her secret heart, “Oh, love, remain!” Left alone, she became the prey of torturing thoughts. Life had dealt Ann Rutledge but one blow, but that had struck to the roots of her physical and spiritual life. Her world still tottered from the shock. If she had confessed all her first vague, foolish fears, her mind might have been freed of their poison. But she came of brave blood and tried to fight her battle alone.

At last, worn out with mental and moral wrestlings, she turned to her father for help. Lincoln was working at high pressure and he had some perplexities of debts. She shrank from troubling him.

Her heart must have beat in slow, suffocating throbs when she crept to her father’s arms and confessed her fears:

What if McNamar should come back!

She need not trouble her golden head about that! The country would be too hot to hold him. Lincoln had thrashed the breath out of a man for swearing before women in his store.

But what if he still loved her, trusted her, was on his way back, confident and happy, to claim her? What if he could lift this veil of mystery and stand forth clear and manly?

McNamar would never appear in such guise, bless her innocent heart. He was a black-hearted scoundrel. In the old days, in South Carolina, men of the Rutledge breed would have killed such a hound. But he was alarmed now, surely, at this strange obsession, and questioned her. And then the whole piteous truth was out.

She was afraid he would come back – shuddering at the thought – come back to reproach her with pale face and stricken eyes. And she loved him no longer. She had been so happy this summer, and then it began to seem all wrong. Love forsaken was such pain and bewilderment. Could she endure happiness purchased at the price of another’s misery?

McNamar had come back, indeed, and love was impotent to defend this hapless innocence! She had never understood his behaviour. Incapable of such baseness herself, she had never comprehended his. Like a flower she had been blighted by the frost of his desertion, and had revived to brief, pale life in a new sun; but the blight had struck to the root.

But what beauty of soul was here revealed, adding poignancy to grief! No one had quite known her. Physically so perfect, no one had divined those exquisite subtleties of the heart that made her hold on life tenuous. Lincoln was sent for but he was not found at once, for his employments kept him roving far afield. Round and round, in constantly contracting circles, her inverted reason, goaded by an accusing conscience ran until, at last, her sick fancy pictured herself as the faithless one. The event was forgotten – she remembered only the agony of love forsaken. And so she slipped away into the delirium of brain fever.

Lincoln had one anguished hour with her in a brief return to consciousness. It was in the living-room of a pioneer log-cabin, untouched by grace or beauty; homely, useful things about them, the light on her face coming through a clapboard door open to the sun and wind of an unspoiled landscape. The houses of the wealthiest farmers were seldom more than two big rooms and a sleeping loft, and privacy the rarest, most difficult privilege. Her stricken family was in the kitchen, or out of doors, to give them this hour of parting alone. What was said between them is unrecorded. When she fell into a coma, Lincoln stumbled out of that death-chamber like a soul gone blind and groping. Two days later Ann Rutledge died.

As a pebble falling from a peak in the Alps may start an avalanche on its path of destruction, so one man’s unconsidered sin may devastate many lives. The tragedy shocked the country for twenty miles around. It had the elements and proportions of a classic tale, so that to-day, when it is three-quarters of a century gone by, the great-grandchildren of those who witnessed it speak of it with hushed voices. Lincoln’s mission and martyrdom imbued it with those fates that invest old Greek drama. James Rutledge died three months later, at the age of fifty-four, it was currently believed of a broken heart.2 The ambitious young brother David, who was to have been Lincoln’s partner, died soon after being admitted to the bar. The Rutledge farm was broken up, the family scattered. Lincoln came to the verge of madness.

A week after the funeral William G. Greene found him wandering in the woods along the river, muttering to himself. His mind was darkened, stunned by the blow. He sat for hours in a brooding melancholy that his friends feared would end in suicidal mania. Although some one always kept a watchful eye upon him, he sometimes succeeded in slipping away to the lonely country burying ground, seven miles distant. There he would be found with one arm across her grave, reading his little pocket Testament. This was the only book he opened for months.

All that long autumn he noticed nothing. He was entirely docile, pitifully like a child who waits to be told what to do. Aunt Nancy kept him busy about the house, cutting wood for her, picking apples, digging potatoes, even holding her yarn; the men took him off to the fields to shock and husk corn. All of them tried, by constant physical employment, to relieve the pressure on his clouded mind, love leading them to do instinctively what the wisest doctors do to-day. In the evenings he sat outside the family circle, sunk in a brown study from which it was difficult to rouse him. It was a long and terrible strain to those devoted friends who protected and loved him in that anxious, critical time. Not until the first storm of December was there any change.

It was such a night of wind and darkness and snow, as used to cause dwellers in pioneer cabins, isolated from neighbours at all times, but now swirled about, shut in, and cut off other from human life by the tempest, to pile the big fireplace with dry cord-wood, banking it up against the huge back-log, and draw close together around the hearth, to watch the flames roar up the chimney. There would be hot mulled cider to drink, comforting things to eat, and cheerful talk.

Lincoln was restless and uneasy in his shadowy corner. His eyes burned with excitement. When he got up and wandered about the room William followed him, fearing he might do himself harm. He went to the door, at last, threw it open and looked out into the wild night. Turning back suddenly, his hands clenched above his head, he cried out in utter desolation:

“I cannot bear to think of her out there alone, in the cold and darkness and storm.”

The ice of his frozen heart was unlocked at last, and his reason saved. But there were months of bitter grief and despair that wore him out physically. His fits of melancholy returned, a confirmed trait that he never lost. In time he went back to his old occupations, bearing himself simply, doing his duty as a man and a citizen. His intellect was keener, his humour kindlier; to his sympathy was added the element of compassion. And on his face – in his eyes and on his mouth – was fixed the expression that marks him as our man of sorrows deep and irremediable.

Until he went away to Springfield a year later to practise law, he disappeared at times. Everyone knew he was with Ann, sitting for hours by the grassy mound that covered her. Once he said to William G. Greene: “My heart is buried in the grave with that dear girl.”

The place was in a grove of forest trees on the prairie at that time, but afterward the trees were cut down or neglected, and it became choked with weeds and brambles – one of those forlorn country burying-grounds that marked the passing of many pioneer settlements. For in 1840 New Salem was abandoned. The year after Ann Rutledge died, Lincoln surveyed and platted the city of Petersburg, two miles farther north on the river. A steam mill built there drew all the country patronage. Most of the people of New Salem moved their houses and shops over to the new town, but the big tavern stood until it fell and the logs were hauled away for firewood. The dam was washed out by floods, the mill burned. To-day, the bluff on which the town stood has gone back to the wild, and the site is known as Old Salem on the Hill.

The Bowling Green farm passed into the possession of strangers. Many years ago the cabin of hewn logs was moved from under the brow of the bluff down to the bank of the river and turned into a stable. More than eighty years old now, this primitive structure that was Lincoln’s home for three years, still stands. Every spring it is threatened by freshets. You look across the flooded bottom land to where it stands among cottonwoods and willows, and think – and think – that this crumbling ruin, its squared logs worn and shrunken and parted, its clapboard roof curled, its crazy door sagging from the post, rang to that cry of desolation of our country’s hero-martyr. He lies under a towering marble monument at Springfield, twenty miles away. There is his crown of glory; here his Gethsemane.

Twenty years ago Ann Rutledge was brought in from the country burying-ground and laid in Oakland Cemetery, in Petersburg. Only a field boulder marks the mound to-day, but the young girls of the city and county, who claim her as their own, are to celebrate Lincoln’s centennial year by setting up a slender shaft of Carrara marble over the grave of Lincoln’s lost love. Around her, on that forest-clad bluff, lie Old Salem neighbours. It is a cheerful place, where gardeners mow the grass and sweep the gravelled roadways, where carriages drive in the park-like enclosure on Sunday afternoons and flowers are laid lavishly on new-made graves. Bird-haunted, robins chirp in the blue grass and woodpeckers drum on the tree-trunks; bluebirds, tanagers and orioles, those jewels of the air with souls, flash across the sunlit spaces, and the meadow-lark trills joyously from a near-by field of clover.

No longer is she far away and alone, in cold and darkness and storm, where he could not bear to think of her, but lying here among old friends, in dear familiar scenes, under enchantment of immortal youth and deathless love, on this sunny slope, asleep…

Flow gently, sweet Sangamon; disturb not her dream.