Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (7 page)

Lincoln did not stay with the river. For the rest of 1831, he clerked in Offut’s store and did odd jobs. He wrestled the local tough guy, one Jack Armstrong, who managed to throw him only by using a trick hold. That was good enough to make Lincoln accepted by Armstrong and all his pals. Like father, like son.

In 1832 Lincoln performed the only military service of his life. An old Sauk chief named Black Hawk, who had fought alongside the British during the War of 1812, led 450 warriors into northwestern Illinois in a forlorn attempt to reclaim their lost homeland (the US government had required the Indians of the Northwest to move beyond the Mississippi). To repel him Illinois called out the militia. Lincoln enlisted for three months. For the first month he served as a captain, elected by his own company, a mark of recognition that pleased him no end (Armstrong was his sergeant).

Lincoln’s war was not a very martial experience. Black Hawk was cornered and captured without the participation of Lincoln’s unit; he saw no action, and in later years would poke fun at his service. For all that he admired George Washington’s manly independence and idealism, he had no inclination to follow him into military life. The benefits he got from the Black Hawk War were of the peacetime sort: it made
him better known among his fellow militiamen, and he earned some money at a time when he was broke.

One grim memory stayed with him, of a morning when he came upon five men who had just been killed in a skirmish and scalped. “Every man had a round red spot on top of his head, about as big as a dollar,” he recalled later. Blood seemed to be everywhere. “The red sunlight seemed to paint
everything all over.” Lincoln’s unit buried the corpses. This made an impression on the grandson of the first Abraham Lincoln.

Back to New Salem, and the quest for work. Lincoln became a partner in a general store, which failed in a few months, leaving him
saddled with debt (he would refer to it as “the national debt”; it took him almost a decade to pay it off). In 1833 he managed to be appointed village postmaster—this brought him some income, not much work, and the opportunity to read everyone else’s newspapers. He learned surveying, and was also appointed deputy surveyor for the county (some of the roads he laid out are
still in use).

There were some educated men in New Salem, and Lincoln sought them out: a few college graduates, and a village ne’er-do-well who spent his time fishing and quoting Shakespeare and Burns. He kept reading, and reading in public. A New Salemite saw him one day sitting atop a wood pile with a book in his hand. “What are you studying?” he asked. “Law,” said Lincoln. “
Great God Almighty!” exclaimed the neighbor. Since there were no law schools then, novices typically learned by studying and working in the offices of established lawyers. It was possible to teach oneself and be accepted into the profession, but that was the hard way to go about it.

Lincoln argued small cases as an amateur advocate before the local justice of the peace, and he would ride, sometimes walk, to Springfield, a town a dozen miles away, to borrow books from John Stuart, a lawyer he had met in the Black Hawk War. Both the justice of the peace and the lawyer, like the neighbor at the wood pile, found him odd, even amusing at first—“he was the most uncouth looking young man
I ever
saw,” said Stuart’s partner—but when he spoke, they were impressed with his intelligence.

Lincoln impressed his friends with his grief. His woe began
with a romance. Ann Rutledge was the daughter of New Salem’s tavern-keeper, eighteen years old when Lincoln first saw her, and a beauty—“straight as an arrow, and as
quick as a flash,” is how she appeared in the mind of one neighbor thirty years later. She was engaged to a local storekeeper, but in 1832 he left town (he said) to tend to family business back East. He was gone for months, then a year, then two. Lincoln, as postmaster, could keep track of the gradual withering of the couple’s correspondence. As the fiancé’s absence lengthened, Abraham and Ann became engaged themselves.

When and how she would have broken the news to her first fiancé will never be known, for in August 1835 she got “brain fever,” presumably typhoid—the symptoms were delirium, diarrhea, and fever. When she died Lincoln was crushed. “Lincoln told me that he felt like
committing suicide often,” one friend remembered. “He was fearfully wrought up,” said the daughter of another friend. “My father had to lock him up and keep guard over him for some
two weeks I think.”

The weather seemed to give him particular pain. “One day when it was raining,” his landlady at the time recalled, “[he said] he could not bear the idea of its
raining on her grave.” A comrade from the Black Hawk War remembered him saying the same thing: “I can never be reconciled,” Lincoln told him, “to have snow, rains and storms to
beat on her grave.” Illinois had had the wettest spring and summer in the young state’s experience; it had rained continuously for four and half months. Lincoln knew the destructive power of rain from his boyhood. Dead Ann would not wash away—graves hold bodies more securely than fields hold seed. But rain dramatized her obliteration.

Ann was the third young woman in Lincoln’s life to die—mother, sister, now fiancée. Anyone in his situation would be grief-stricken. But he now showed the special grief of the depressed. Those who have never
been depressed can scarcely comprehend it. Depression is not a mood that comes and goes, but a climate, a permanent backdrop, your most faithful friend. Consider Lincoln’s sensitivity to the rain. Rain falls on everyone, just and unjust, living and dead, depressed and not depressed. But the depressed feel that it is addressed specially to them.

Lincoln’s depression would flow on throughout his life, noted by friends of long standing and by acquaintances alike. The most famous description would come from his last law partner, William Herndon: “His melancholy dripped from him
as he walked.” Work, once he settled into his adult careers, could block it from view; so could his endless flow of stories and jokes, which continued as before. Humor was his distraction, his safety valve, his protective screen (it hid his sorrow from others and from himself). But melancholy never forsook him.

About this time—the mid-1830s—he told one friend that he never carried a pocket knife. Every man carried a pocket knife in those days, to cut things, to trim things, to whittle and waste the time. But Lincoln said he “
never dare” do it. Lest he find some other use for it.

After tragedy, farce. One of the ladies of New Salem had an unmarried sister in Kentucky, Mary Owens, who came to Illinois for a long visit in 1836. She was attractive, educated, and feisty. Lincoln began a courtship that sputtered on for a year. Perhaps he felt it was too much too soon, perhaps he felt pressured into it by matchmaking friends. The letters he wrote Mary, when they were apart, were arias of hesitation. In one he threw the burden of deciding their future on her: “What I do wish is that our further acquaintance shall depend
upon yourself.” Not surprisingly, she decided to have no further acquaintance. “I thought him lacking in
smaller attentions,” was how she put it (to say nothing of larger ones).

After it was all over, Lincoln summed up his second experiment in courtship in a letter to a married woman friend. He made a series of crude jibes about Mary’s weight, her skin, and her bad teeth, as if her
looks had given him cold feet. It is a cringe-making performance; the funny man was trying to be funny, but his timing and delivery were all off. By the end of the letter, Lincoln finally put the blame for the failed relationship where it belonged. “Others have been made fools of by the girls, but this can never be with truth said of me. I most emphatically in this instance made
a fool of myself.”

Maybe he had done them both a favor; if he did not love Mary Owens, she would not die.

By the time Lincoln had lost Ann and driven off Mary, he had taken the first steps in the careers that he would pursue for the rest of his life—he had become a state legislator and the junior partner in a two-man law firm.

Lincoln made his first run for office in 1832, for the Illinois House of Representatives, the lower house of the General Assembly, or state legislature. The Black Hawk War kept him away from the hustings for most of the campaign; when he was able to appear before audiences, he was cheered by Jack Armstrong’s posse. Because he had no reputation in the county as a whole, he lost his bid, though he managed to win 277 out of 300 votes in greater New Salem. In 1834, when his service as a postmaster and a surveyor had made him more widely known, he won handily. He came into the legislature as a protégé of John Stuart, his Black Hawk War comrade and lender of law books.

In his very first races Lincoln employed a technique he would use ever after: poor-mouthing himself. “If the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background,” he said in declaring his first candidacy, “I have been too familiar with disappointments to be
very much chagrined.” This sounds like beginning a campaign with a concession speech: poor Abe! The modesty, however, was tactical; Lincoln was creating a role, a persona, the rube/boob, which served the same function in his political rhetoric as his odd appearance did in his joke-telling.
I am an unprepossessing man of humble origins
. Both the humorist and
the politician warm up the audience by softening it up.
But I will hold your attention anyway
, was the implicit offer of the humorist.
I will persuade, or lead, or inspire you
, was that of the politician. Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his strengths. The technique would not have worked, of course, if he had no strengths.

The fact that the rube/boob persona worked at all was a tribute to the democratization of American life. The founding fathers were austere republicans who rejected monarchy and aristocratic orders. But they thought of themselves as “natural” aristocrats—
the expression was Jefferson’s—proud of their talents. Almost all of them were wealthy men, or at least well off. George Washington, the first president, never learned Latin, but he was a Virginia planter; so were the third, fourth, and fifth presidents, Jefferson, Madison, and James Monroe. The other founding president, John Adams, was a Harvard-educated lawyer. Settlers in new states like Illinois were not unimpressed by such credentials, but they also liked leaders who were more like themselves.