LINCOLN ROOM UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY MEMORIAL the Class of 1901 founded by HARLAN HOYT HORNER and HENRIETTA CALHOUN HORNER Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/lincolnsemotionaOOshut Lloyd G. Henbest Life Mask of Lincoln by Volk, 1860 Lincoln's Emotional Life By MILTON H. SHUTES, M. D. DORRANCE & COMPANY Philadelphia Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 57-81,82 COPYRIGHT © 1957 BY DORRANCE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES o(Vb r\-Va% . W*iU ^o^wv PREFACE Whatever of ill health disturbed Abraham Lincoln was prevailingly emotional, the origins of which are beyond complete understanding. This book, therefore, is an exploration — unavoidably candid — into the life of an extraordinary personality. Its title could be The Psychosomatic Life of Lincoln, using that now familiar term indicating the interaction of mind and body. For its development, I have tried to gather from the large reservoir of Lincoln information that which can be based (relatively speaking) on reliable authority and acceptable tradition. I have presented the biographical matter sparingly and, purposefully, in chronological order of age -growth. With it, opinions on Lincoln's feelings and behaviors are shaped, mindful that opinion is the privilege of both reader and writer. In many places, comment is omitted to avoid the obvious, and where biography is plainly not pertinent to the subject, it is added briefly for the sake of continuity. History, said to be a matter of guessing from all available facts, is made difficult because it must deal with intellectual and emotional forces. The attempt = here to describe and evaluate the emotional behaviors of historic Lincoln, is dependent upon his spoken and iii IV PREFACE written words, and on his words and actions as found in the reminiscences of his contemporaries. While sharing the gratitude of most Lincoln students to biographer William H. Herndon, I confess a notion that he too often dallied with his love for the truth in an apparent purpose to widen the gap between the early environment and the monumental greatness of Lincoln. As Herndon must often be quoted, a concise appraisal of him as a Boswellian biographer is excerpted from Paul M. Angle's Preface to his 1930 edition of Herndon's Life of Lincoln: "As a reporter of that which he himself observed at first hand, barring of course, inevitable errors of memory, he was unex- celled ... As a delineator of character — analyst — he was most fallible. ... In short when Herndon relates a fact of his own observation, it may generally be ac- cepted without question. . . . When his account is based on the observation and recollection of others, the possibility of error must be acknowledged. ..." It is my conviction that thinking of Lincoln during any moment of his life in terms of abnormality — as some have done — is untenable. The evidence indicates a depressive type of psychoneurotic within the bounds of so-called normality. He was constitutionally predis- posed to neurotic feelings and symptoms, first signs of which were visible during adolescence, becoming in- creasingly apparent with life's environmental stings. Fortunately he was equipped with a beautifully de- signed stabilizer formed of common sense, patience and good will. Most people harbor a "neurotic potential" and live more or less comfortably at the various levels PREFACE V of psychoneurosis. Much of the world's best work has been done by psychoneurotics — Lincoln tall among them. He was, however, no chronic complainer of aches and pains. His symptoms were less ostensible and far more interesting. The medical profession in general looks askance at any rigid school of analysis, preferring the more flexible, pick-and-choose method. Some day some one well grounded in medical psychology and Lincoln biography, will achieve a better understanding of Lincoln. Mean- while, the intent here is to take a careful step in that direction. # # # Because of the peculiar difficulties inherent in the subject of this writing, my warm gratitude goes out to Louis A. Warren for reading the Kentucky-Indiana years; to Illinois State Historian Harry E. Pratt and Mrs. Marion Bonzi Pratt for reading the Illinois years; to Wayne C. Temple, research associate of the late Professor James G. Randall, for reading the presi- dential years, and to those other experts, Paul M. Angle and Jay Monaghan for their over-all criticisms; to Professor E. B. Babcock, Division of Genetics, Uni- versity of California at Berkeley, and to all those cred- ited in the text or notes; to Remsen D. Bird, President Emeritus of Occidental College, Los Angeles; to Jesse F. Williams, Professor Emeritus of Health and Physical Education, Columbia University, and to Paul Johnson, Professor of Psychology of Religion, Boston University, for their interest and encouragement; and to these busy medical men: Internist Russell Williams of Monterey, VI PREFACE California, for an early-stage reading; Psychiatrist Clem- ent O. Juul of Oakland, California, for invaluable help throughout; and for the final reading and approval by Psychiatrist Karl M. Bowman, Medical Superintendent of the Langely Porter Clinic, University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco. Errors of commission and omission are, of course, my sole responsibility. Milton H. Shutes, M.D. Carmel, California CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I Child and Parent 9 II Growing up in Indiana 17 III Young Manhood 36 IV Engagement and Marriage 57 V Disciplinary Years 1843-1850 86 VI Preparatory Years — 1850's 94 VII Presidential Years 1860-1863 126 VIII Presidential Years 1863-1865 156 Supplement 191 Reference Notes 217 Index 221 CHILD AND PARENTS One hundred and fifty years ago, a sturdy young car- penter of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, brought home a June bride — secured in pioneer fashion by marriage bond and a devil-fighting minister. Before their eight- month baby came along, Tom Lincoln purchased a lot in town and built the usual log cabin for himself and his Nancy. Two years later, for reasons undis- closed, he purchased a second farm fifteen miles farther south. It was on this rocky, "Sinking Spring" farm, three miles from present Hodgensville, that a son of destiny was born to this unremarkable couple. On that birthday of February 12, 1809, ten-year-old Dennis Hanks scuffed through a new fall of snow to greet his cousin. "He won't never come to much," was the low appraisal.* Dennis himself, who shared some part of the heredity and almost all of the environment of Abraham Lincoln in Kentucky and Indiana, did not come to much. He lived, however, for 91 years and supplied from his 68-year-old memory, facts and fiction for the Herndon record of his younger companion, who amounted to so * An unreliable quotation, used with ''poetic license." 9 10 Lincoln's emotional life much as to confound understanding. This much, never- theless, is fairly well known: Lincoln came by his inborn potentials through the same hazardous processes that safely brought him through prenatal life from a nucle- ated bit of protoplasm to a crying baby. And he ob- tained from his parents and through the so-called laws of chance (or design) a fortunate, particular set of genes which gave him a body and a mind to cope with and dominate his controllable environment. A current hypothesis fluttering on the fringe of meteorology suggests the importance of conception dur- ing May and June. It holds that children conceived in those months tend to higher intelligence and longer lives than their brothers and sisters conceived in other seasons. 1 Baby Abraham was conceived in May and— possibly — his sister Sarah. Their strong, not overworked parents, knew nothing of basic animal and environ- mental rhythm; they merely sensed the warming earth of Kentucky's early springtime. Lincoln's genealogical knowledge of himself in 1860 was not a great deal more than what he quoted from Gray's Elegy, "The short and simple annals of the poor." Physicians and actuaries show little interest beyond parents, as pertinent information of clients' grandparents is usually unreliable. Geneticists, more curious of the long past, are thwarted by the same meager and inaccurate data and rely on the controlled exact- ness of animal experimentation. Genealogists, however, mostly amateur, have gone bravely forth to disprove the statement of President-elect Lincoln. The Lincoln ancestors have been traced through CHILD AND PARENT 11 direct lineage to Robert Lincoln of Hingham, Norfolk, England (1543) . From him came Samuel Lincoln (1619-1690) of Hingham who (not a first son and heir) migrated to Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1637. Here in America was a group of six known, direct ancestors; all self-reliant, respected, propertied men. The average age of the five who died of natural causes was 67.2 years. The Hanks genealogy, far less certain, is fragmentary and extremely difficult to trace and to piece together correctly — even as near to Lincoln as his mother. The subject of inherited traits was discussed one day by Lincoln and William H. Herndon, his law partner, while riding the Illinois prairie to a court case involving a question of legitimacy. For the first time, Lincoln talked to his partner of his mother and the traits he believed he inherited from her. And then, so Herndon claimed, Lincoln confided to him that she "was the illegitimate daughter of Lucy Hanks and a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter." Lincoln expressed the theory that "illegitimate children are oftentimes sturdier and brighter than those born in wedlock," and that he believed that his "better nature and finer qualities came from this broad-minded, unknown Virginian." After a silence, Lincoln added: "God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her." Lincoln remained for long time sad and absorbed in thought. 2 Herndon wrote that it was an experience which he could never forget. This quick glimpse into Lincoln's past is intended merely to suggest the innumerable, possible tributaries 12 Lincoln's emotional life to the main stream of his progenitors. Thomas and Nancy, by merging their genetic units (genes) , set up 300 trillion combinations of those units in produc- ing the particular combination present in Abraham Lincoln. Heredity still appears to be the best explana- tion of mental qualities and special aptitudes as well as physical characteristics. That the second child of these ordinary parents received so fortunate a set of genes is as mysterious as an explanation of the Bard of Avon or the Maid of Orleans. # # # When this particular individual completed his foetal span of life and expanded his lungs with Kentucky air, he became a self-centered, vociferous baby demanding food and comfort. He promptly received both: a per- fect food formula from his mother's breast, and body care and comfort from a neighbor woman — cabin style but adequate. Nothing — not even a wisp of tradition — is known of the baby as a newborn. Nor is anything known of the two or more dependent years of infancy, spent in and about the cabin on Nolin Creek, impelled by the basic animal pleasures of food, evacuation and exploration of self and surroundings, jabbering and toddling his asser- tive way to the achievement of eating and walking. Nor do we know all the inbetween, infant acts of impulsive reflex and instinct. It is obvious that he survived a dangerous time of nutritional and infectious diseases, but not how well his very young psyche survived emotional responses to parental restraints and disci- plines, and to parental behaviors. There are many CHILD AND PARENT 13 unanswerable questions. For examples: whether an overlong weaning caused too great mother dependence; or whether the father took the mother's attention away too soon, leaving an angry baby with rebellious feelings of mother privation and father jealousy. As the unconscious part of the mind (containing basic motivating drives of love, hate, anger and fear which are inaccessible to the conscious part) is used to explain behaviors, and as there is no behavorial information of the infant and only slightly more of the tremendously important first five years, it is neces- sary to offer as correct an impression of his parents as is available. The father of Lincoln was greatly underestimated by early biographers. It was not until 1926 that Louis A. Warren re-evaluated Thomas on the basis of docu- mentary evidence. Thomas Lincoln now stands forth as a strong, solidly built man of five feet ten inches and 190 pounds; round swarthy face, brown eyes, and coarse, dark brown hair. For his time and place he was a competent carpenter, cabinet maker and farmer. He loved and owned horses. He liked farming and owned three paid-for farms before leaving Kentucky. He often worked hard, and enjoyed talking, telling tales, hunt- ing and fishing. In Kentucky he was industrious, a trifle less in Indiana and, with age, increasingly less in Illinois. Although easy-going perhaps, and somewhat restless, he was respected in each community and be- holden to no man, county or state. The least that can be said of the genial, upright father of Abraham Lin- coln is that he lacked interest in the printed word and 14 Lincoln's emotional life was too content in a log cabin. The 1865 memories of all contemporaries who knew or knew of Nancy Lincoln were confused about her per- sonal appearance. But all agree that she was sad-faced, kind, gentle, friendly, very affectionate, and possessed of high intelligence and excellent memory. John Hanks (liked and respected by Lincoln) was seventeen years old when his cousin Nancy died. He wrote to Herndon that she "was a tall, slender woman, dark skinned, black hair and eyes, her face was sharp and angular, forehead big. . . . her nature was kindness, mildness, tenderness, obedience to her husband." 3 It was this mother that Lincoln in pain, love and gratefulness, remembered. In a book which contained Cowper's poem, "On Receipt of My Mother's Picture," Lincoln, with profound significance, drew a penciled finger pointing to the stanza: Oh that these lips had language! Life has passed With me but roughly since I heard thee last. Those lips are thine own sweet smile I see; The same that oft in childhood solaced me. 4 When the baby was two years old, Thomas sold the birthplace farm on Nolin Creek and purchased a smaller, richer and prettier farm ten miles away on Knob Creek. This valley farm on the highway from Louisville to Nashville provided a surer living and a playground of wooded hills and streams, small animals, and a swimming hole in a widening of the creek. There are few, meager, authentic traditions of these early, all-important years when tiny Abe came to feel and CHILD AND PARENT 15 act as a person — years full of day-by-day experiences of psycho-biological portent. What remains is that he, with his father and mother and sister, lived for two years on the pleasant Nolin Creek farm, then for five years more in a beautiful valley, surrounded by hills and gorges and "babbling brooks." They were ade- quately housed and amply nourished on such easily available foods as beans, potatoes, onions and pump- kins; fish, fowl, deer and hog meat; hominy, molasses, wild honey and berries. Abe learned the three R's in school and, less willingly, a few chores from his father. He fished and hunted, waded or swam in the creek and roamed the hills with other boys. The growing lad had a love for prankish mischief with his playmates, Austin Gallaher and John Duncan; and for the talk of strangers on the highway close by and at his own fireside. He differed from his playmates in a greater interest in learning, a more aspiring imagination, and a stronger curiosity regarding the outside world. The material for childhood frights and night terrors could have come from the tales of returning soldiers of the War of 1812, from old Indian fighters, from the silent, gloomy forest, from the death scene of his two- year-old brother, and from the dramatic death-story of his father's father, Captain Abraham Lincoln. (The Revolutionary War veteran moved his family from Virginia into the "dark and bloody ground" of Ken- tucky. While working near his cabin, the forty-two- year-old father was killed and scalped by an Indian, who, in turn, was killed by the older son Mordecai 16 Lincoln's emotional life before the Indian succeeded in capturing six-year-old Thomas.) There was also an easy indoctrination in the superstitions of the backwoods people and their fear-laden, hard-shell religion of life and death. The foregoing suggests a normal childhood much like that of other boys. Leonard Swett, friend and col- league, wrote that Lincoln's "own description of his youth was that of a joyous, happy boyhood." 5 So it was, as Lincoln chose to remember it. Experience at the psychoanalysis couch proves to listening psychia- trists, however, that there seldom is (at least among their patients) a happy, joyous, early childhood. Mother Goose stories, the doleful tales of Hans Chris- tian Anderson and the grimmer ones of the Grimm brothers seem to lend confirmation. A healthy, angry, crying baby obviously is not a happy baby during frus- trated, denied moments. These Kentucky years — almost completely lost to us — can be held suspect of the now familiar Oedipus Com- plex of the late and, perhaps, great Viennese psy- chiatrist, Sigmund Freud. Freud claimed that complex (a composite of interconnected parts) of the uncon- scious mind to be the essential part of future psycho- neuroses. But other competent psychiatric thinkers reduce this theory to resentment or rebellion against parental authority — a not uncommon feeling especially among boys. For this book, such simpler interpreta- tion places father-son relationship on firmer ground. Whatever unhappy experiences were impressed on this child's plastic mind are hidden, yet clues can be found in chapters that follow. II GROWING UP IN INDIANA During the late summer of 1816, Thomas Lincoln sold the Knob Creek farm of litigable title, poled his way down the Salt and Ohio Rivers to Troy on the Indiana side, walked 16 miles to the sparse gathering of settlers on Little Pigeon Creek, staked a squatter's claim on an inviting knoll, and started or roughly com- pleted, a "three face" shelter of sapling poles and branches against a concave hillside. He then returned to Kentucky. By late November, leaving 200 bushels of corn with schoolmaster Cabel Hazen, the family of four — father and son on one horse, mother and daughter on an- other, as a tradition pictures them — rode to the Ohio, ferried across, and made their laborious way to their claim of 160 acres of "impenetrable forest." This tem- porary fourteen-foot cabin (Herndon chose the word "hovel") had a southern exposure and a log fire day and night at its open front. By no later than Abe's eighth birthday in February (1817) , Thomas had built a stout 18 by 20 foot log cabin with a sleeping loft for Abe and visitors. He thus followed the pat- tern of the average Western pioneer, even to teaching his eight-year-old son to use an ax. 17 18 Lincoln's emotional life Of this first year in Indiana, Lincoln stated in his autobiography that though very young, he was large for his age and had an ax put in his hands at once. Visiting Gentry ville years later, he rhymed: When first my father settled here 'Twas then the frontier line. The panther's scream filled night with fear And bears preyed on the swine. Late in 1817, eighteen-year-old Dennis Hanks, his mother's cousin, and Thomas and Betsy Sparrow, his mother's foster parents (her uncle and aunt), came from Kentucky to live in the first cabin, 200 yards from the new cabin. The same fall, father Lincoln, having secured squatter rights with a substantial house and the beginnings of a clearing in the trees and brush, traveled to Vincennes 90 miles distant to enter his quarter section on the books of the land-office at $2 an acre. He paid a first quarter installment of $80 and later prudently relinquished all but 80 acres and pur- chased 20 more to give him a title-secure farm of 100 acres. Biographer Albert J. Beveredge wrote: "Thus dragged along the slow dull weeks. Another winter went by, another spring and summer." Slow and dull for whom? On raw land in a new country? Not for the children, despite chores and the ax. Not for Thomas who had an affectionate wife, a cheerful eleven-year-old daughter, an obedient young son and a stout nineteen- year-old cousin (in-law) with whom to work and hunt. GROWING UP IN INDIANA 19 A friendly, sociable man, he visited with neighbors and incoming settlers. Nor was it dull for Nancy Lincoln who knew no other life and could still cherish her mother-hope of the future. She had her two good children, her foster parents, neighbor women, and her religion. Through the winter and summer all things seemed well. The year 1818, however, was the last for this nebulous woman of whom too little is known. With the autumn coloring of the forest came the milk-sickness, an endemic scourge for the midwestem settlers. It killed cattle that fed on snakeroot and people who drank the milk of cows that had eaten the weed. Nancy Lincoln cared for her dying foster parents and possibly for the dying Mrs. Peter Brooner near by, all of whom suffered through the usual dizziness, nausea and vomiting, intense thirst, difficult breathing, prostra- tion and coma. When Nancy went to bed with the symptoms, she knew the "bright angel" was near. Before losing consciousness, she weakly placed her hand on the head of her boy and asked that the two children and father love and be good to one another, and worship God. For Abe this was the first real awakening to the in- security of life. All the epidemical deaths of animals, of neighbors, of relatives, of mother, and their stark, crude burials, could not fail to mark indelibly the sub- strata of his impressionable mind. The mother, of necessity, was laid away in a rough-hewn coffin without benefit of clergy. Later, when the father asked the Rev. David Elkin (a visiting acquaintance from Ken- tucky) to offer a memorial service at Nancy's grave, the 20 Lincoln's emotional life nine-year-old son asked the minister to read from her Bible. He would never forget these unhappiest months of his youth. Many years later, Lincoln — remember- ing — wrote these words: "In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares." The word mother has been listed by lexographer Funk as the most revered, death the most tragic, and alone the bitterest. After visiting the old home site years later, Lincoln tried to express it in verse: Oh Memory, thou midway world 'Twixt earth and paradise, Where things decayed and loved ones lost In dreamy shadows rise. By all accounts, an untrammeled, compensatory af- fection bound Abe and his sister Sarah, in close com- panionship. And there were the resiliency of youth and the diversive fun of the outdoors which age delights in consciously remembering; but scars are permanent. "Mother attachment" seems inevitable for young Abe — leaving a legacy of her image in his subconscious mind. If the quantity of "mother attachment" amounted to a harmful "mother fixation," nothing pointing thereto can be found. Nothing so pleased the boy as being sent to the grist mill, the greatest pleasure of his boyhood days. In his tenth year, while grinding a sack of corn into meal for the family, Abe was kicked unconscious by an old grey mare, resentful of the boy's impatient whip. GROWING UP IN INDIANA 21 It was an interesting episode which greatly intrigued Lincoln and his law partner Herndon, who fancied himself as something of a psychologist. The event is described and medically discussed in the supplement. During the winter following Nancy's death, Thomas Lincoln sent his two children to subscription school for a few weeks. It was said that Abe liked school better, his attendance was prompter and his clothes were cleaner than those of the other boys. It was a salutary experience for the mother-sick boy at a crucial time. The age period from six to twelve, when sex lies dormant, is looked upon as one of insecurity when a child can easily be hurt. Thus far, nothing is found that specifically indi- cates that the father injured his son's self-esteem, or that the son lost respect for his father as a protector or resented him as a taskmaster. He probably worked no more than other children and played as much as he worked. William Wood, in whose house Thomas did all the inside carpentering, said: "Abe would come to my house with his father and play and romp with my children." Yet father-resentment — the rebellious antagonism that many or most boys feel towards father authority — was present, fattening itself on the boy's inherent drive to read and learn, and on the father's increasing demands of ax and plough. Abe (if one can accept the Oedipus tenet) may long have been push- ing death-wishing for his father's passing, into the limbus of the unconscious. When the domestic environment of the family had drifted low by the fall of 1819, father Lincoln (thirteen 22 Lincoln's emotional life months a widower) journeyed to Elizabethtown, Ken- tucky, with a marriage proposal to a young, widowed friend, Sarah Bush Johnston. Thomas liquidated her small list of debts before returning home with her and her three children and a wagonload of household things. The new Mrs. Lincoln, according to all reports, was an impartially good mother to her augmented family. She filled the need of the three Lincolns in overflowing measure. A new life began in the incomplete cabin. After a thorough cleaning, she put her husband, Dennis Hanks, Abe, Sarah, and her own girls to work.* A split- log floor was laid, the fireplace improved, a door and window added, and new furniture built. Abe and his new mother "jelled." She told Herndon in 1865: "His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run to- gether . . . move in the same channel ... he was a good boy ... I can say what scarcely one woman or mother can say in a thousand . . . Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused to do anything I requested him." 1 Sarah Lincoln made a clean-cut contribution to the general welfare of her stepson. He soon learned to call her "Mama" with deep affection and appreciation. In his regrettably brief autobiography of 1860, he said of her, "She proved a good and kind mother." To August H. Chapman (her granddaughter's husband), Lincoln spoke more feelingly of "the encouragement he always had received from his Step-mother . . . that she had been his best Friend in this world and that ♦Thomas, age 43; wife, 31; Dennis, 21; Sarah, 13; Abe, 11; Elizabeth Johnston, 13; Matilda Johnston, 9; and John Johnston, 5. GROWING UP IN INDIANA 23 no son could love a Mother more than he loved her." Lincoln's love for Sally Bush Lincoln lay close and warm in his consciousness as long as he lived, but Nancy Hanks Lincoln possessed both his conscious and unconscious mind as a powerful, never-ending influ- ence. That was psycho-biologically inevitable. It was Nancy who conceived and bore him, who nursed his pleasure-pain instincts, his baby-childhood fears, and gave the all important experience of being loved, solaced and cared for through infancy and prepuberty by an adequate mother. And it was from this prepotent mother that he apparently received his psychosomatic personality, and (as he thoroughly believed) his body type, ambition, memory and intelligence. When he told Herndon in pensive mood while riding the Illinois prairies, that he owed all that he was or ever hoped to be to his angel mother, he was not (according to a general fixed impression) thinking of his second mother. That living, sympathetic, helping mother was his "best Friend in this world," but never his Mama. * # # Signs of puberty came early to "Abram" in his elev- enth year, according to Herndon, but probably nearer his twelfth. David Turnham, older friend of his youth, wrote to Herndon: "As he shot up he seemed to change in appearance and action — he began to exhibit deep thoughtfulness and was so often lost in studied reflec- tion we could not help noticing the strange turn in his actions. He disclosed rare timidity and sensitive- ness ... he did not appear to seek our company as earnestly as before." E. R. Burba, another neighbor, 24 Lincoln's emotional life remembered him as being "very quiet during play time . . [had] . . a liking for solitude." 2 The transition from puberty to the years of adolescence had begun. Physical growth, change in the endocrine (glan- dular) balance, emotional development and social rela- tions all conspire to impose a difficult task of adjustment on the adolescent. He is faced almost suddenly with the disturbing need to unlearn much that he labori- ously learned in earlier years. He is often exposed to new emotional stimulations in the conscious and un- conscious areas of the brain. Each adolescent in his own way, through expression or suppression, forms his individual pattern of developing personality. Rapidity of growth — Herndon claimed that Abe reached his full height by his seventeenth year — presents its special hazards such as dental decay, errors of eye- refraction, tuberculosis, and particularly behavior and social maladjustments. Yet this working adolescent seems to have safely by-passed the dangers except for one physical defect — a mild endocrine imbalance as evidenced by his long legs and arms, disproportionate to his trunk. Later, in Springfield, friends noted that he was taller than other men only when standing. Adolescence is known also as an age of mistakes and physical lassitude. Abe, no doubt, showed a normal portion of both — overlooked by his mother but not by his father. Daydreaming began its disturbing part-time insist- ence. Lincoln once asked T. W. S. Kidd, editor of the Springfield Morning Monitor, if he had "ever written GROWING UP IN INDIANA 25 out a story in his own mind." He then related the following whimsy: I did when I was a little codger. One day a wagon with a lady and two girls and a man broke down near us, and while they were fixing up, they cooked in our kitchen. The woman had books and read us stories, and they were the first I had ever heard. I took a fancy to one of the girls; and when they were gone, I thought about her a great deal, and one day when I was sitting out in the sun by the house, I wrote out a story in my mind. I thought I took my father's horse and followed the wagon, and finally found it, and they were surprised to see me. I talked with the girl and persuaded her to elope with me, and that night I put her on my horse, and we started off across the prairie. After several hours we came to a camp; and when we rode up we found it was the one we left a few hours before, and we went in. The next night we tried again, and the same thing happened— the horse came back to the same place; and then we con- cluded that we ought not to elope. I stayed until I had persuaded her father to give her to me. I al- ways meant to write that story out and publish it, and I once began; but I concluded it was not much of a story. But I think it was the beginning of love for me. For Lincoln it was indeed the indelible experience of puppy-love with its thrills and misery. But the story itself is far more interesting than he realized. From as much as he disclosed in the telling, there can be clearly seen the unconscious censorship of par- 26 Lincoln's emotional life ental authority, of father-fear, of sex-fear, and other inhibitory factors which always brought him and the horse back to the security of the girl's home. This day- dream of the adolescent boy is a preview of the man's future courtships. The sprouting, awkward lad showed a natural shy- ness toward girls, but he was not afraid of them. He ran neither from nor after them. He merely preferred the companionship of boys and men. Yet as he passed from early adolescence to physical maturity, he showed an increasing interest: as witness the tradition of Ann Hammond, the familiar reminiscence of Ann Roby and Caroline Meeker, and Lincoln's own story of Julia Evans. 3 He told John M. Lockwood of Princeton, Illinois: ". . . when I was a boy about eighteen years old I rode there . . . with a bunch of wool . . . While waiting for the wool carder, I strolled about the village and happened to pass on the street a very beautiful girl — the most bewitching creature it seemed to me I had ever seen. My heart was in a flutter ... I wanted to stop in Princeton forever. ... it was several years before her image was effaced from my mind and heart." 4 There is nothing in the girl-boy Lincoln history other than the interest, shyness and fear of a normal boy — no matter what the variants of his day and night dream- ings were. With girls as with fighting, there was the same lack of aggression. Abe neither sought nor shirked a fight. He fought in the William Grigsby melee; he and Allen Gentry (with clubs) fought off seven Negro GROWING UP IN INDIANA 27 thugs with intent to kill, on their flatboat trip along the Sugar Coast to New Orleans (1828) . He whipped Jack Armstrong, a pugnacious "gang" leader in Illinois and wrestled his way through the Black Hawk War, victorious until he tangled with one Lorenzo D. Thom- son, a more experienced wrestler. Lincoln escaped many fights because of his frank self-confidence and the use of his calm head, as evidenced in the affair with William Grigsby, with the angry Dill brothers (Ohio ferrymen) , with those in New Salem, and finally in the duel with James Shields of Springfield, which he converted into a ludicrous farce, amicably settled. Lincoln had unquestioned physical courage and com- petitive masculine action. His innate modesty, how- ever, never included his height and strength. He always enjoyed their display, and during his young, robust years, the thrill of bodily contact in the ancient sport of wrestling. Yet, having a reputation as a wrestler, he shrank from a fight and though in possession of stout fists, never used them. One cannot think of Lincoln as aggressive with either woman or man; and with man, not until he came to use political fists against Stephen A. Douglas and mail fists against Secession — in the Lincoln manner. Lincoln and his sister were reared in the religious atmosphere of the predominate Regular (Hard Shell) Baptist Church in Kentucky with its Calvinistic ortho- doxy, and more especially, in "laborious reading of the Bible in Kentucky and Indiana at their mother's knee." In the lonely winter after the mother's death, her Bible was the children's chief solace, it was said. The family — 28 Lincoln's emotional life father, foster mother, sister Sarah and foster sister Eliza- beth — joined the newly organized Little Pigeon Creek congregation of Baptists. Abe, ineligible until of age, could not (if he would) have joined, but he helped as janitor, and often attended church service and listened attentively to the long sermons. But his contemporaries remembered in most part his mimicry of both the sermons and the mannerisms of the pioneer preachers. The seventeen-year-old lad was not as impressed with the gospel as expounded in their little church as he was with what came out of New T Harmony, sixty miles away. There the great liberal reformer, Robert Owen, and his educators were teaching an intriguing social system, The New World, which advocated free, universal education, women's rights and gradual eman- cipation of slaves. Owen was a "free-thinker, a Deist, a challenger of orthodox creeds and dogmas. Young Lincoln hopelessly longed to attend the school at New Harmony. However, the college-educated storekeeper of Gentryville, William Jones from Vincennes, sub- scribed to newspapers and magazines which Abe regu- larly read. The Vincennes Western Sun for example, devoted columns to Owen and his convictions, and the New Harmony Gazette circulated in the neighborhood. There is no first-hand evidence that Lincoln's early religious and political thinking was shaped by New Harmony but it is an inescapable inference. Conspicuous traits of character unfolded during these important years of boyhood and youth in Indiana. One trait was his eagerness to learn and to read everything within his avid reach. Sarah Bush Lincoln brought GROWING UP IN INDIANA 29 with her, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, Sinbad the Sailor, Aesop's Fables and another Bible. A relative, Levi Hall, later brought the popular Bailey's Etymo- logical Dictionary. Abe also read Grimshaw's History of the United States (which included chapters on astron- omy, geography and navigation) , biographies of Wash- ington and Franklin, and newspapers. And he studied Scott's Lessons, the Kentucky Preceptor and the Revised Laws of Indiana. Such a list is the equivalent in learn- ing (if not credits) of a modern high school. Another trait was his kindness of heart toward ani- mals and people. Quoting from his third-person biogra- phy, he said: "... a few days before the completion of his eighth year, in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log-cabin; and Abra- ham with a rifle-gun, standing inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has never since pulled a trigger on any larger game." At school he reproved the brutality of some of the boys and wrote compositions on cruelty to animals. When he found a drunk lying in the snow, so it is said, he hauled the fellow up on his back and with his maturing strength, carried the man to his home. This dominant trait is a familiar one in all biogra- phies, best demonstrated in his rescue of trapped ani- mals — birds, dogs, pigs and sheep. Probably the best illustration is that by Charles Maltby at whose farm Lincoln stopped on his way home from Bloomington to Springfield, tired and hungry, his trouser legs caked with mud. He told Maltby that while passing Funk's Grove, he saw a mother sheep in deep distress beside 30 Lincoln's emotional life a water-hole. Riding over, he found a lamb making futile attempts to extricate itself from the thick mud. He looked at his new suit of clothes purchased in Bloomington and decided in favor of the suit. "After going some distance," Lincoln told Maltby, "I felt so bad that I turned about . . . hitched my horse to the fence . . . took some rails . . . fixed them so that I got down in the bottom of the hole and got the little fellow out safely. . . . After riding some time, with feelings much relieved, the thought occurred to me, what was the motive that induced me to return — was it to relieve the sufferer or to relieve my own feelings?" 5 The motive to return, as he suspected, was relief of tension induced by his soft, sympathetic, share-the- suffering trait. Sympathy, regarded as one of the most emotional of the virtues (with love and loyalty) , seems invariably to have won through life over the ration- alistic Lincoln. Another striking component of his developing per- sonality, emphasized by all biographers, was his "cheer- ful friendliness." In correlation was his sociability. In spite of his absorption in reading and introspective curi- osity of motives and reasons, he was unusually gregari- ous. He wanted to be where people were and this in contradiction to his desire to shun crowds. Appar- ently he preferred small groups — people from whom he could learn and to whom he could talk and display his own learning and talents for mimicry, story-telling and speechmaking. The latter he made from tree stumps as early as his fifteenth year. Yet his natural reserve or remoteness, saved him from being a bore. People liked GROWING UP IN INDIANA 31 him and his talk. He came to have many friends and one so-called bosom friend, Joshua Speed. Thus the youth established status — a prime factor in the development of a balanced, integrated personality. Presumably he had it within his home; certainly for miles around it was that of an interesting, likable, superior youth. Even his gawky unhandsome appear- ance did not hurt except possibly to extend his shyness toward girls of any age. It is difficult to find anything in his Kentucky and Indiana environment to drive him within himself; no disturbing family or personal situations except father antagonism (explained in a moment) and family deaths. Elizabeth Crawford who saw much of the Lincoln children, was the only Indiana pioneer, so far as I know, to leave a hint of the depres- sive Lincoln. She told Herndon that "Abe was some- times sad, not often." When Abe was nearly nineteen years old on rainy January 20, 1828, he underwent another painful shock. His sister, Sarah (Mrs. Aaron Grigsby) , was giv- ing birth to her first child and in urgent, terri- fying need of medical aid. Dr. Fred Lively, to whom the Lincolns objected, was brought in from two miles away, hopelessly intoxicated according to local tradi- tion. Father-in-law Grigsby hurried four miles to cross over rapidly rising Little Pigeon Creek for Dr. William Davis in Warwick County. The swollen creek could only be crossed six miles farther up at Dale. When they finally reached Sarah, she and her baby were dead. Lincoln is not known to have mentioned this tragedy. But Herndon implied neglect on the part of the Grigs- 32 Lincoln's emotional life bys, giving Abe "great offence" and strained relations "between him and them for a long time." Abe and his shy, sweet sister were "close companions." Although she was "short and plump," they were much alike in temperament and equally regarded by all, wrote Captain J. W. Lamar, a resident in the community. She was "a good, kind, amicable girl, resembling Abe," wrote Elizabeth Crawford. Her death was "a great grief" to Abe who was waiting in anxious fear in a little smokehouse when the news came to him. "He came to the door and sat down burying his face in his hands. The tears trickled through his fingers, sobs shook his frame."* 7 About two years later, Lincoln and younger Charles Maltby, hired by Denton Offut, lived and worked to- gether in a log storehouse on the Sangamon River near Springfield. Both had been reared in the same environ- ment, both lost their mothers in their "early years" and had just left their parental homes. Of an evening, their conversation often turned to their boyhood days. "Those reminiscences of Lincoln," wrote Maltby, "his love and tenderness for the memory of his mother and sister are treasured up as pleasant memories." 8 One of the many illusive facets of the Indiana story is Thomas Lincoln's alleged rough treatment of his son. The only basis for that impression is the statement of Dennis Hanks who wrote Herndon that he saw Thomas * This is all that can be gleaned of the story except that Sarah's husband died three years later and father Grigsby erected a sand- stone marker over their graves, now replaced by a marble monument. The emotional impact of Sarah's death on young Lincoln was another incalculable effect. GROWING UP IN INDIANA 33 cuff young Abe off a fence for replying to a stranger's inquiry; the too eager boy beat his slower father to the answer. Said Dennis: "Abe was then a rude and forward boy — when whipped by his father, never balked, but dropped a kind of silent tear as evidence of his . . . feelings." 9 To those who knew Thomas, he was a good-natured, easy going man and Abe "was a good boy." Yet Abe had a way of "putting in" when older people were talking, obtruding himself in a conversation when his idea of the truth was not followed or whatever he considered important was omitted. This, thought an old man who claimed to have known the Lincolns, was the boy's outstanding weakness. And he had a way of luring children and men from their work with his ora- torical, tree-stump exhibitions, to further annoy his father. Abe was too big to be "tanned" at the time of the following story, which if true, can be another clue. Dropping a calf's hide before Sam Hammond at the latter 's tanning yard, Abe grinned: "Here's my father's hide, he wants it tanned." 10 That is what the son said. Did he unawaredly mean, "I want my father tanned"? Many years later, Lincoln said that his father taught him to work but never taught him to love it — an almost impossible achievement by the father of such a son. Mrs. Lincoln said, "Abe didn't like physical labor and that was the only labor that his father knew," but her husband came to acquiesce in his son's bookish- ness and eventually was proud of his success as a lawyer and politician. The subject of father-son relationship was informally 34 Lincoln's emotional life discussed recently by three doctors. Thinking of young Lincoln and his father prompted the question: "Can a decent son be consciously ashamed of a decent father," After a silent second, a tall, fifty-five-year-old physician blurted: "Yes. I was ashamed of my father." He then briefly told the story of his hard-working farmer-father who migrated from Kentucky to Missouri to California and who, for example, shaved once a week and insisted on driving a team of mules to the great embarrassment of the son. To the question, "How long did this feeling last," the doctor said, "Until well into high school." And then? "After that I didn't give a damn." Most youngsters are highly sensitive to the personali- ties and attitudes of adults. Thomas undoubtedly failed to display the affection he must normally have felt. And Abe was certain to evaluate his father in com- parison with more ambitious and successful men such as James Gentry, William Jones, lawyer John Pitcher and others with whom he came in contact. At some time in Indiana or perhaps in Kentucky, there devel- oped an open lack of sympathy and an unconscious antagonism between father and son. Thomas could have been unconsciously jealous of his boy, and the boy, as he grew in learning and sociality, could have consciously felt superior and have slowly lost respect for his father. Each never completely loved the other. At the end of these unfolding years in Indiana, from prepuberty to maturity (by all the testimony of such folk as Mrs. Lincoln, her sons and daughters and other reliables) , one sees the picture of a leggy, strong, kindly, friendly, honest, joking, story- telling, sex-educated, in- GROWING UP IN INDIANA 35 telligent young man who worked for his father as some- thing of an obligation, and read and listened as some- thing he loved; who possessed self-reliance, self-expres- sion and community status; and who had two loving, understanding mothers. Clearly the background for physical and psychological health. Yet it seems equally clear that he passed through stages of parental revolt against his father, intellectual revolt against the doctrines of the Baptist Church, and finally against the dogmas and creeds of Christianity itself — suppressed conflicts, doubts and fears leavened by superstitions and experiences with death. As we close this most important age period, packed with psychic and somatic crises, the present writer feels a sense of regret that there is so little pertinent narrative with which to help the reader. Before — long before — the close of this chapter, Lin- coln's physical and temperamental pattern, shaped by heredity and environment, was fixed. From that basic design came his ceaseless intellectual growth and his interrupted emotional maturing. Ill YOUNG MANHOOD During February of 1830, the Lincoln clan of thir- teen moved out of Gentryville, Indiana, to a piece of land in Macon County, Illinois, selected and partly prepared by cousin John Hanks. Having turned twenty- one, Abe Lincoln was his own man, yet, for good reasons, he chose to go along. His last good-bye — an easily accepted tradition — was at the grave of his mother. On a bank of the Sangamon River five miles north- west of Decatur, he helped build his family's cabin, "made sufficient rails to fence ten acres of ground [his own words] . . . and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year." That done, he found pay-work splitting rails and harvesting crops for Sheriff William Warnick. During the following subzero winter (1830- 1*83 1) of the "very celebrated 'deep snow,' " he froze his feet t>y walking three wet miles from his home to the Warnicks. There he spent a few cozy weeks in their liig house, enjoying the palliative treatment of mother Warnick, the companionship of their sons and daughters, and the sheriff's Revised Code of Laws of Illinois — the first break-away from the family. In the spring, he and his stepbrother, John D. John- 36 YOUNG MANHOOD 37 ston, made a second river trip to New Orleans in the employ of Denton Offut. His malaria-infested family moved east from the river into Coles County. On his return to Illinois, he paid his family a visit which was punctuated by the necessity of twice subduing one Daniel Needham, "a famous wrestler." After a few weeks of handling produce for Offut, "the flood waters of the Sangamon River washed Lincoln into New Salem," wrote Herndon; "like a piece of driftwood," said Lincoln. In that sanguine, log-cabin settlement, Lincoln, in his own words, "rapidly made acquaintances and friends." He had no difficulty in establishing himself in the upper level of New Salem society which included a group of "intellectuals." On the rougher level, it was necessary for community status that he — who showed off his brawn by lifting a keg of whisky to "drink" from its bung-hole or by holding an ax horizontally out at arm's length, unhesitantly accept the challenge of the neighborhood "gang" leader, Jack Armstrong, and pin him to the ground. Again in his own words: "In less than a year . . . when the Black Hawk War of 1832 broke out [he] . . . joined a volunteer company, and [to his profound satisfaction, he said] was elected cap- tain of it." He served nearly three months, saw no battles, had minor hardships, much fun and a few rough and tumble fights (one to save an old Indian) . He returned to New Salem from the campaign with gov- ernment warrants for Iowa land and the friendship of John Todd Stuart. Encouraged by his popularity, the twenty-three-year-old veteran made an unsuccessful 38 Lincoln's emotional life try for the state legislature. He was consoled by 277 of the precinct's 300 votes. Unlike his more brilliant friend, Edward D. Baker, who had only to choose between the church and the law, Lincoln pondered things from blacksmithing to politics. He emerged as clerk and co-owner of a gen- eral store which soon ' 'winked out" and placed across his shoulders a debt ($1100) which hung there for years. It was a painful and wholesome experience. And it terminated the age period of being a young man at loose ends. Jason Duncan, M. D., in a letter to Herndon written in cultivated Spencerian style, said that he came to New Salem in August 1831, "procured an office-room in the public house of James Rutledge," where he joined Lincoln as one of the boarders. The "external ap- pearance of Lincoln was not prepossessing but on cultivating an acquaintance with him found something about the young man very attractive, but worrying over financial matters ... at times seemed rather despondent." 1 This restrained statement is the first re- corded observation of the emotional "instability" that came to be a familiar part of the Lincoln personality. However, the huge indebtedness which he called his "national debt," would influence the behavior of any conscientious man devoid of money interest or business sense. Lincoln always attracted friends to help him over rough spots. Dr. Duncan and others secured for him the job of postmaster and the more remunerative one of deputy county surveyor, both of which he held until YOUNG MANHOOD 39 the post office was moved to nearby Petersburg three years later and he himself moved on to Springfield. But before he could survey he had to learn its tech- nique. After six weeks of hard study by day and far into candlelight, he was ready. His friends feared "a mental break-down," reminisced Henry McHenry. The "excessive application [plus loss of sleep and possibly of food] showed in his face and carriage . . . hollowed cheeked, red eyed and fagged looking." He was so very different from those average, simple folk, that he seemed odd, queer-acting, on the crazy side. He read sitting, lying down or walking until late at night and early daylight. He went along country roads, in the woods and about New Salem, reading, thinking, sometimes talking to himself, often entirely unconscious of his surroundings (in manner accentu- ated years later) . He read such books as Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Rollin's Ancient History, a. book on American Military Biography, a few novels, and every available newspaper. From a local character, Jack Kelso, an expert in the art of relaxa- tion, Lincoln learned a lasting appreciation of Shakes- peare, Robert Burns and Lord Byron. The two men read and discussed Tom Paine's Age of Reason, Volney's Ruins of Empire and further heretical extracts from Voltaire. There is a legend which could have solid base, that Lincoln wrote his thoughts on the Christian religion; that the "book" was read and thrown in the fire by his friend, Sam Hill. James Short was another close friend. As he remem- bered, Lincoln read day and night in a "lounging posi 40 Lincoln's emotional life tion," read "everything thoroughly and had a most wonderful memory," and that he always finished what he started. "Whenever he walked with me, he would keep me in a trot all the time. Always put things through in a hurry. Was a fast eater, though not a very hearty one. Didn't sleep very much as he always sat up late . . . very sociable and fond of visiting. Knew every man, woman, and child for miles around. Was very fond of children. Was fond of cats, would take and turn it on its back and talk to it for half an hour at a time." He never got angry, continued Short. Once when Major Hill roughly abused him for a reported, disre- spectful remark about the Major's wife, Lincoln calmly denied it, saying that the only thing he could think of against her was the fact of being his wife. Apparently in reply to Herndon's curiosity, Short said that Lincoln "didn't go to see the girls much. . . . Wasn't apt to take liberties with them, but would sometimes." For Hern- don's benefit, Short repeated a story that Lincoln told him "with evident enjoyment," an experience on one of his surveying trips, suspiciously reminiscent of an- other sex story of later vintage in the Hidden Lincoln. 2 The year 1833 was eventful for young Lincoln. He acquired his other shadow, the "national debt"; he became postmaster and surveyor; he saw the first real circus to come West; and letters from John McNamar had become conspicuously absent to the daughter of the Rutledges, to the postmaster, and to the community. At least three men were conscious of the lovely little Ann — Sam Hill, Abe Lincoln and John McNamar, her YOUNG MANHOOD 41 betrothed. McNamar had gone East to bring back his financially troubled family. On his failure to return or to write, Ann grew disappointed in him and Abe hopefully interested in Ann. During August of 1834, friends advising, Lincoln (aged twenty-five) again tried for the legislature. Demo- crats and Whigs united this time to elect him. Otherwise his life went on as usual — working, reading, mingling with the people. Urged by his friend, John T. Stuart, to study law, he purchased Blackstone's Commentaries at a Springfield auction, borrowed more books from Stuart and from Justice of the Peace Bowling Green, of New Salem. In embryonic, no-fee fashion, he began to practice law before the judge. Henry McHenry wrote of this time: "I went to Lincoln with a case to prosecute — would not take it because he said I was not strictly in the right . . . when he began to study law ... he was so absorbed that people said he was crazy . . ." Yet he was liked by all and, to some undefined extent, by Ann Rutledge. For miles around, the name of Abe Lincoln had become something of a household word. In the fall, Lincoln borrowed $200 and used $60 for a tailor-made suit to wear in the state capital at Vandalia. There he began an exciting new state of life in the sponsoring company of the more sophisti- cated Stuart. He felt inferior and fearful, yet eager too, and unhesitant in the consciousness that public service could be his way of life. He returned from Vandalia early in 1835 with $258 in his pocket with which to 42 Lincoln's emotional life repay the above loan and with a heavier sense of cul- tural inferiority. Through the summer, hard work and study, his worrisome debt, and "the saddened face of Nancy Hanks" became more noticeably marked on his coun- tenance, which further pulled on the helpful sympathy of men and the mothering instinct of women. Paine, Volney and Voltaire helped fixate skepticism to nourish conflict between reason and conscience. He was nearing his first acute attack of psychosomatic illness precipi- tated by love, death and malaria. Splitting rails, husking corn and following the plow horse, were forever left behind. His sources of income were county, state and federal fees, sufficient for his immediate needs but not to meet a note demanded by one unsympathetic creditor. The sheriff was obliged to remove his visible assets — surveying tools and his horse. His good and true friends, "Uncle Jimmy" Short and Bill Greene, assumed the obligation which saved Lincoln from disaster and brought grateful tears to his eyes. Herndon personally knew of the notes that Lincoln rather heedlessly assumed, yet he disregarded them in his philosophic reflections on the causes of Lincoln's melancholy. He specialized in a tale of Lin- coln's first and last great love which has become an irrepressible part of American folklore. Interest here is not so much in the pathetic romance as in Lincoln's emotional responses. Most or all Lin- coln students agree that the familiar story as authored by Herndon and adorned by poets, is improbable. They also agree, as emphasized by biographer Benjamin P. YOUNG MANHOOD 43 Thomas, that its "supposed enduring influence on Lincoln" can be "rejected utterly." If Ann had survived typhoid fever in that humid-hot, fly and mosquito month of August 1835, any tentative engagement to marry State Assemblyman Lincoln would not have been consummated for these (to me) ade- quate reasons: (1) John McNamar returned to New Salem that fall with suspicions against him sufficiently, if not wholly, removed; (2) Lincoln's demanding debt scarcely allowed food and clothing for one alone; (3) His ambition to get on and Ann's ambition to attend col- lege, would have forced the grave hazards of postpone- ment; (4) The important factor of a psychological fear of marriage. That unyielding day-dream-horse of the preceding Indiana chapter would in his unaware mind again have returned them both to Ann's home. If Ann had lived on, there would have been no ground for drama. But the facts remain: Ann died and Lincoln grieved. Robert B. Rutledge, age seventeen when his sister died, wrote to Herndon thirty-one years after the event: "The effect upon Lincoln's mind was terrible; he be- came plunged in despair, and many friends feared that his reason would desert her throne." John Jones wrote to Herndon: "During her last illness he visited her sick chamber [in Sand Ridge, seven miles from New Salem] and on his return stopped at my house. It was very evident that he was much disturbed, and I was not surprised when it was rumored subsequently that his reason was in danger." And from Robert L. Wilson to Herndon: "While he lived in New Salem 44 Lincoln's emotional life he visited me often, he would stay a day or two. We generally spent the time at the stores in Athens. He was fond of company, talking or hearing stories. He was not in the habit [in Athens] of reading much — whittling pine boards and shingles, talking and laughing con- stituted the entertainment of the days and evenings. In a conversation with him about that time [of Ann's death] he told me that although he appeared to enjoy life rapturously, still he was the victim of a terrible melancholy . . . when by himself, he told me that he was so overcome with mental depression, that he never dared carry a knife in his pocket." // true, Lincoln was compelled to borrow a knife or — an im- probability — to refrain from whittling with the boys. A far more intimate friend was Mrs. Bennett Able. She wrote to Herndon that she could say very little of Abe's courtship of Miss Rutledge but she did know that he was staying at their little log cabin at the time of her death; that she never saw a man mourn for a companion more than he did; that he made a remark on a rainy day that "he could not bear the idea of its raining on her grave; that was the time the community said he was crazy." To the request for her opinion of Lincoln's sanity, she sensibly replied: "He wasn't crazy but he was disponding [sic] a long time." 3 It is believable that Lincoln loved Ann Rutledge and that whether or not she reciprocated in kind, she at least gratefully acknowledged their friendship and his love by sending for him before she died. To gauge Lincoln's love by his show of grief was reasonable to Herndon and to his first- and second-hand reporters. YOUNG MANHOOD 45 "Crazy with grief" is still a common expression imply- ing exaggeration and not insanity. Mrs. Abie's words are the best — not crazy but desponding. Lincoln again suffered the penetrating sense of per- sonal loss; and from his particular sensitivity to the tragedy of death. He was unable to conceal his despair from a few other such friends as Bill Greene, Mentor Graham and the Bowling Greens. It is more than prob- able too, that he wandered up and down the river and into the woods, and was heard to utter a rebellious cry at the sogging rain on the young girl's grave. And it can be equally as real that he saw in that grave, the body image of his mother. She and possibly his sister Sarah of Ann's age, were there to share in the funda- mentals of his grief. This emotional crisis was not entirely psychic — it was complicated by a malarial epidemic. Quoting from a doctoral dissertation on fever in the Sangamon Valley in 1836: Spring and summer of 1835 was the hottest ever known in Illinois: from the first of March to the middle of July it rained almost every day, and the whole country was literally covered with water. When the rain ceased, the weather became exces- sively hot and continued so until sometime in August. About the 10th of August, the people be- gan to get sick— lasted until October 1st— a number terminated fatally. Twelve practicing physicians in Springfield [population 1500] were continually engaged almost day and night. 4 46 Lincoln's emotional life In New Salem there were not enough well people to care for the sick, a resident wrote. Mathew S. Marsh wrote home that he escaped by using "considerable quinin." Quinine was then a new, expensive extract of cinchona; most people on the frontier had to stay with the common cinchona bark. There are two second-hand reporters of Lincoln's malarial infection. Josephine C. Chandler, a grand- daughter-in-law of Dr. Charles Chandler (who married the sister of Dr. John Allen, Lincoln's good friend and physician) , wrote from the authority of family tradi- tion: ". . . within the week of [Ann's death] he was found to be the victim of the fever he had sought to combat in others. On the advise of Dr. Allen he was taken to the home of Bowling Green near New Salem, and there the good squire and his wife Nancy nursed him through his long illness." Henry B. Rankin of Springfield wrote from the authority of his mother's old but keen memory. Rankin as a law student in and about the Lincoln-Herndon law office, knew the older Lincoln; his mother and especially his grandfather, knew the young Lincoln. Rankin states in his Personal Recollections that Dr. Allen took "professional and personal" charge of Lin- coln, physically worn out with overwork and anxiety, and relapses of chills and fever. Dr. Allen sent him to the quiet home of Judge Green where wife Nancy gave him his medicine "until he should pass three consecutive weeks free of chills." Rankin had nostalgic memories of the home of doughnuts, cookies and sweet cider. There was "no better place this side of the YOUNG MANHOOD 47 celestial country" for Lincoln during those September days of 1835 than the Bowling Green's home. Rankin adds that the summer of 1865 (after Lincoln died) was so hot and rainy as to remind surviving Sangamon settlers of the same malarial situation thirty years before. It was, he said, "... the fact of Lincoln's death which caused me to inquire into details, here recorded, of Lincoln's life in New Salem in 1835." This and other recordings of the bright-eyed, immaculately dressed gentleman (despite his next-to-Christ hero-worship) is as trustworthy as any, and more so than many of Hern- don's second-hand reporters. Twenty-seven days after Ann's death, Mathew Marsh wrote to his New England folk: "The Post master is very careless about leaving his office open . . . very clever fellow and a particular friend of mine. If he is there when I carry this to the office — I will get him to 'Frank' it." Amiable, Honest Abe complied. He once told Herndon that fortunately he was not born a woman because he could never say No. The Marsh letter is held as evidence that Lincoln was up and about before September 22, or no more than four weeks after Ann's death. The letter contains a sentence directed at his inactive brother in New Hampshire (an observation that psychologists have used thousands of words to elucidate) : "The mind must be engaged on something, or if it has not an external object to act upon, it will turn inwardly and create dullness and abstractions." Marsh doubtlessly was a member of the small New Salem group of men who met for bouts with religion, philosophy, psychology and 48 Lincoln's emotional life other abstract subjects. Did Lincoln, a member, ponder his own behaviors? He had reached the age of begin- ning to understand himself. After the Greens and Dr. Allen released Lincoln, he returned to the Rutledge tavern then kept by Henry Onstat. His objectives were preparation for profes- sional practice of law, the 1836 election to succeed himself in the legislature, and from then on, in his own words, "place and distinction as a politician." Within a year of Ann's death, Lincoln again got himself entangled. A few years back, Mary S. Owens, daughter of a well-to-do Kentucky planter living in a Georgian mansion, spent four weeks visiting her older sister, Mrs, Elizabeth Bennett Able. Abe was impressed. Three years later, she returned to New Salem with Elizabeth who had been visiting the old home. Pos- sibly she was hoping for a better impression of the man who (through her sister) had threatened her with courtship. Blue-eyed, handsome and full-rounded, Mary was an admirable lady; amiable, cultured and a good conver- sationalist with a healthy appreciation of Lincoln's wit and humor. And her fashionable silk dresses were in striking contrast to the calicos of Ann Rutledge. There was, however, too much weighing of credits and debits by both for real romance. Mary expected more ardor than Honest Abe could give. He was unready for the demands of marriage; particularly to Miss Owens who probably stirred up an inhibitory mother-image. And the Indiana dream-horse was again moving in circles. The importance here of Mary Owens lies in Lincoln's YOUNG MANHOOD 49 letters to her — each for its own implications. The first was written one week after the assemblyman had arrived in the state capital, and it concerned two sub- jects — himself and politics. He began with: "I have been sick ever since my arrival here, or I should have written sooner. ..." He continues with two hundred and ten more words on politics, and within the same paragraph, abruptly reverts to his feelings: "You recollect I mentioned in the onset of this letter that I had been unwell. That is the fact, though I believe I am about well now; but that with other things I cannot account for, have con- spired and gotten my spirits so low, that I feel I would be any place in the world but here. I really cannot endure the thought of staying here ten weeks. Write back soon as you get this, and if pos- sible, say something that will please me, for really I have not been pleased since I left you. This letter is so dry and stupid that I am ashamed to send it, but with present feelings I cannot do better. Give my respect to Mr. and Mrs. Abell and family. Your friend Lincoln. Why the parade of feelings before his new friend? Was he homesick for mothers Green and Able, alterna- tives of his childhood mother? Did he, at age twenty- seven, preternaturally sense that this older-by-one-year girl would fully sympathize? He had need for solace. Every depressive man needs a full-bosomed woman. And, was it all mixed up with fear and remorse over specific conduct (reviewed in next chapter) that Hern- don imprudently recorded and, just possibly, the same 50 Lincoln's emotional life that impelled Lincoln to conclude a letter to the editor of the Sangamon Journal with: "If alive on the first Monday in November . . ."? 5 Whatever was the cause- complex of this depressive dip, he wished no display of it before new, important friends in the capital city. There was much in this ungainly, unhandsome man, including his depressive nature, that appealed to women. But Mary Owens was sensitive to the lack of cultural niceties in back-woodsy Abe. Years later, she reluctantly admitted to Herndon's persistent questioning: "I think I did on one occasion say to my sister, who was very anxious for us to be married, that I thought Mr. Lincoln deficient in those little links which made up the chain of woman's happiness — at least it was so in my case." In the next two letters, misgiving outran desire and desire was no surging flood. And fear outdistanced his normal masculine conceit. The letters are almost funny in their dissembling seriousness. Not even the "soft melodious springtime" gave easier flow to his pen. Springfield May 7, 1837 Friend Mary: I have commenced two letters to send you before this, both displeased me before I got half done, and so I tore them up. The first I thought wasn't serious enough, and the second was on the other extreme. I shall send this, turn out as it may. This thing of living in Springfield [for the past month] is rather a dull business after all, at least it is so to me. I am quite as lonesome here, as I ever was anywhere in my life. I have been spoken to by YOUNG MANHOOD 51 but one woman since I've been here, and should not have been by her, if she could have avoided it. I've never been to church yet, nor probably shall not be soon. I stay away because I am conscious I should not know how to behave myself. I am often thinking about what we said of your coming to live at Springfield. I am afraid that you would not be satisfied. There is a great deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without sharing in it. You would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty. Do you believe you could bear that patiently? Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and con- tented; and there is nothing I can imagine, that would make me more unhappy than to fail in the effort. I know I should be much happier with you than the way I am, provided I saw no signs of dis- content in you. What you have said to me may have been in jest, or I may have misunderstood it. If so, then let it be forgotten; if otherwise, I much wish you to think seriously before you decide. For my part I have already decided. What I have said I will most positively abide by, provided you wish it. My opinion is that you had better not do it. You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may be more severe than you can imagine. I know that you are capable of thinking correctly on any subject; and if you deliberate maturely upon this, before you decide, then I am willing to abide your decision. You must write me a good long letter after you get this. ... it would be a good deal of company to me in this "busy wilderness." Tell your sister I don't want to hear any more about selling out •"■as; 0(! |i.MN