incoln may have hailed “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” in his 1838 lyceum address, but he had harrowing encounters with the irrational, both personally and culturally. His doomed love for Ann Rutledge and his painful second thoughts when he was on the verge of marrying Mary Todd drove him at times to near-suicidal depression.
Simultaneously, dramatic cultural changes occurred in the nation. When the French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831, he noted anarchic forces that created disorder in the young American democracy.1 Popular culture exploded during that decade. Mass newspapers dropped dramatically in price, purveying news filled with crowd-pleasing sensational stories about crimes, sex scandals, duels, and the like. Emerson generalized that Americans were “reading all day murders & accidents in the newspapers,” and Thoreau spoke of the “startling and monstrous events as fill the daily papers.”2 When real-life sensations weren’t available, editors made them up, as in the famous Moon Hoax, a hugely popular newspaper story of 1835, widely accepted as true, about a powerful telescope that revealed a society on the moon with purple unicorns, brown man-bats, and golden palaces. This decade saw the rise of alleged cure-alls like Brandreth’s Pills, and of P. T. Barnum, who first earned big money when he hoodwinked the public by presenting the aged African American Joice Heth as a 161-year-old ex-nanny of George Washington.
In some respects, Lincoln fit into this sensational culture. His odd appearance and folksy speech gave him novelty appeal on the hustings. If popular culture was often sensational, so was his rhetoric, which during this period tended toward the slashing and the startling. But he refused to surrender himself to the surrounding rush toward sensation and disorder. He gained his unique talents for control through his private struggles with romantic passion and his public encounters with the turbulent culture of Illinois.
THE THROES OF ROMANCE
Lincoln’s three main romances—with Ann Rutledge, Mary Owens, and Mary Todd—are usually treated separately, with the women placed in competition with one another. Victory in the competition has been differently assigned over the years. The idea that Ann Rutledge was the great love of Lincoln’s life originated in an 1866 lecture by William Herndon, who believed that Lincoln, trapped in a marriage with the “female wild cat of the age,” was haunted by the memory of Ann Rutledge, the lovely, kind New Salem woman whose death at twenty-two in 1835 had devastated Lincoln.3 Ann Rutledge’s reputation among Lincoln commentators peaked in the 1920s and ’30s, when scholars, authors, and filmmakers invested her with saintlike qualities. She became, in the eyes of the poet Edgar Lee Masters, the virtual mother of the nation, the woman whose tragic passing inspired Lincoln’s charity. Masters has Ann’s spirit announce, “Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions, / And the beneficent face of a nation, . . . / Bloom forever, O Republic, / From the dust of my bosom!”4
Ann tumbled from her heights when the respected Lincoln scholar James G. Randall challenged the story about her relationship with Abe, pointing out that Herndon’s evidence consisted of hearsay and decades-old recollections.5 Since then, Ann Rutledge’s reputation has wavered. For example, Randall’s University of Illinois student David Herbert Donald at first rejected the story about the romance, then included it in his Lincoln biography, and eventually doubted it again. Thanks to the spadework of Douglas L. Wilson, John Y. Simon, and others, the Ann-Abe relationship has been restored to credibility, though it is now generally seen as formative rather than life defining.6 Mary Todd Lincoln’s image has improved, as scholars such as Jean Baker and Catherine Clinton have brought attention to positive qualities in her, though her neuroses and quirks have kept alive serious questions about her character.7
Mary Owens, meanwhile, has rarely been considered a key player in Lincoln’s love life. The indifference about her is understandable, because her brief relationship with Lincoln ended in their breakup. But it is useful to include Mary Owens in discussing Lincoln’s romances, which can be best understood when placed against their cultural background.
To call early-nineteenth-century American culture sexist or patriarchal is an understatement. Women could not vote, and discussing politics was considered unladylike. When a woman married, she surrendered her right to hold property separately from her husband. American law followed the era’s leading law text, William Blackstone’s Commentaries, which stated, “The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.”8 The legal disappearance of women took the form of coverture, by which married women were economically dependent and civilly dead. If a woman found herself in an unhappy or abusive marriage, gaining a divorce was extremely difficult in many states. A husband, in contrast, could respond to unorthodox or disagreeable behavior on his wife’s part by having her committed to an asylum. Job opportunities for women were limited. Middle-class society was largely controlled by the cult of true womanhood, with its emphasis on piety, passivity, and purity for women.9 In light of these restrictions, some bold women dared to defy convention, as witnessed by the emerging women’s rights movement and by female-authored novels and poems that featured a variety of sturdy, sometimes rebellious character types. Women who stepped out of conventional roles and became reformers or authors were subject to mockery, insult, or ostracism.
Lincoln was well aware of injustice against women. In a handbill from 1836, the twenty-seven-year-old Lincoln announced, “I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females).”10 He wrote this at a time when women in most states were banned not only from voting but also from many other public roles. For him to promote women’s suffrage twelve years before the famous Seneca Falls women’s rights convention—and eight decades before the Nineteenth Amendment gave the vote to all American women—was remarkable, especially because he was a political aspirant who risked losing his reputation in a state where coverture was law. Actually, he may have been more progressive on the issue than his handbill indicated. William Herndon wrote, “Seeing that Woman was denied in free America her right to the elective franchise, being the equal but the other side—the other and better half of man—he always advocated her rights—yes, rights.”11
Did these rights include the right of sexual choice? According to the prudish mores of the day, a woman who had premarital sex was regarded as “fallen” beyond redemption. One reason prostitution rates were high for women between the ages of fifteen and thirty was the common view that single women known to be sexually active had no future in polite society. Lincoln saw the hypocrisy and one-sidedness of this attitude. He vented his feelings in “Seduction,” a poem he wrote for James Matheny’s literary group in Springfield in the late 1830s. The poem argued that men were just as culpable in illicit sexual activity as women. Lincoln drove the point home in a creatively rhymed verse:
Whatever Spiteful fools may Say—
Each jealous, ranting yelper—
No woman ever played the whore
Unless She had a man to help her.12
These lines exposed the “spiteful fools” who cast sexually active single women into social hell without recognizing the complicity of their seducers. Lincoln also opposed the double standard whereby adultery was acceptable if committed by the husband but not by the wife. Lincoln held “that a woman had as much right to violate the marriage vow as the man—no more, no less.”13
The period’s free-love movement advocated free choice of romantic partners for both men and women, governed by so-called passional attraction, or desire unconstrained by social convention. Although Lincoln did not advocate free love, he did recommend freedom of romantic choice for women.
He made his attitude clear in his relationship with Mary Owens. Initially, this romance seemed the opposite of free. In 1836, Lincoln’s New Salem friend and admirer Elizabeth (“Betsy”) Abell invited her sister, Mary Owens, to travel from Kentucky to Illinois in order to marry Lincoln. As he later recalled, he had met Mary during an earlier visit to Illinois and found her “intelligent and agreeable.” He saw no objection “to plodding through life hand in hand with her.”14 When he saw her again in 1836, however, he was repelled by her looks: she was now extremely overweight—“a fair match for Falstaff,” he said—and was remarkable “for her want of teeth, and weather-beaten appearance in general.” But he was willing to go forward with the marriage. He left the decision in her hands. “What I do wish,” he wrote her, “is that our further acquaintance shall depend upon yourself.” She should do whatever made her happy. Her choice, as it turned out, was to reject him, at which point, in his words, “I . . . for the first time, began to suspect that I was really a little in love with her.”
What explains Lincoln’s willingness to marry Mary Owens, despite his reservations about her? Part of the answer surely lies in her intelligence and expressiveness. Those who knew her well called her “a very intellectual woman—well educated,” “the most intellectual woman I Ever Saw,” “quick & strong minded,” a “good conversationalist and a splendid reader.”15 She was not the retiring, submissive type of woman associated with the cult of domesticity. Nor was she averse to hearing about politics, a topic usually reserved for males. In a letter to her from Vandalia, Lincoln described at length the political deliberations of the state legislature there.
She could make bold statements, as when she initiated a correspondence with the New Salemite Thomas J. Nance by writing, “You are well aware, Thomas, that in writing you this letter, I am transgressing the circumscribed limits laid down by tyrannical custom, for our sex.”16 Perhaps her characteristic confidence led Abe to think she could handle even small things on her own. Once when she and Abe were riding in a group that came upon a creek, she was offended that Abe did not follow the example of the other men, who helped their female companions to cross it. She recalled that when she scolded him for not caring “whether my neck was broken or not,” he laughingly replied “that he knew I was plenty smart to take care of myself.”17 She also got upset when he failed to help Bowling Green’s wife carry a baby up a hill. She told Betsy Abell, “I thought Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the great chain of woman[’]s happiness.” Lincoln may have thought that attending to such “little links” was unnecessary for sturdy women like Mary Owens and Mrs. Green. At any rate, his moments of self-absorbed abstraction frequently made him disregard everyday niceties.
Although we can’t be sure how Mary might have changed if she had married Abe, one wonders if they would have been happy in the long run. Her political views turned out to be very different from his. She had been raised in a family of wealthy Kentucky slaveholders, and when the slavery crisis deepened, she became intensely pro-Southern, to the extent that she and Abe “differed as widely as the South is from the North,” in her words.18 In 1841 she married her sister’s brother-in-law, Jesse Vineyard, who moved with her to Missouri, where the couple had enslaved workers. Jesse tried to ensure that the neighboring territory, Kansas, became a slave state. He crossed over into Kansas and cast illegal votes for a proslavery legislature there. His stated goal was to “vote on all occasions” in Kansas in order to help make it “a slave State at all hazards.”19 Mary Owens’s husband did what he could to further the westward expansion of slavery—the very thing that Lincoln would devote himself to preventing.
There was no such discrepancy between Abe Lincoln and Ann Rutledge. Their backgrounds were similar. Lincoln’s paternal ancestors, as we have seen, had escaped Anglican persecution in England and fled to Massachusetts, moving over generations through Pennsylvania, Virginia, and then Kentucky, leading to the relocation of Thomas Lincoln’s family to Illinois. Ann’s grandparents were Scottish-born Presbyterians who settled in Ireland, where Anglican persecution drove them to immigrate to Pennsylvania.20 From there they moved to Virginia and then South Carolina, where James Rutledge, Ann’s father, was born in 1781. After the Revolution the Rutledges took advantage of free government land offered near Augusta, Georgia, where the family relocated and where James was raised. In the fall of 1807 the Rutledges and other Scots-Irish in the Augusta area moved north to Henderson County, Kentucky. There James Rutledge married Mary Ann Miller in 1808. Anna Rutledge (known as Ann), the third of their ten children, was born in 1813. Ann was only three months old when her parents took her and her siblings to live in Illinois. They left Kentucky because of threats from Native Americans and for reasons similar to those behind Thomas Lincoln’s departure: disputes over land titles and opposition to slavery. The Rutledges settled in White County, Illinois, before moving in 1826 to Sangamon County, where two years later James founded New Salem along with his Scots-Irish friend John M. Cameron.
James Rutledge not only opposed slavery but also had progressive views on women’s issues, stimulated, perhaps, by his witnessing the success of Sarah Porter Hillhouse, who in 1803 had become Georgia’s (and possibly America’s) first woman newspaper editor and publisher. He believed in a sound education for his children, including Ann, who by her early teens enjoyed reading Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. By eighteen, Ann was a comely, good-natured woman with light
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