auburn hair, blue eyes, and a “Mouth well Made b[e]autiful,” in the opinion of her teacher, Mentor Graham.21 She stood five feet four inches and weighed about 125 pounds. She was courted first by William Berry, a preacher’s son who later became Lincoln’s store partner. After rejecting Berry because of his heavy drinking, Ann also snubbed another suitor, the crude, homely storekeeper Samuel Hill. She was more receptive to John McNeil, an enterprising New York–born businessman who accumulated an impressive estate of some $10,000 to $12,000 while living in New Salem. He and Ann became engaged, but in 1832 he told her that before marrying her he had to return to New York to retrieve his parents and bring them back to Illinois. She learned that his real surname was McNamar; he used the name McNeil as an alias to dodge inquiries from his eastern relatives. He left for the East but soon stopped writing letters to Ann and did not come back for three years. During this time Abe pursued Ann. He had met her while boarding in James Rutledge’s tavern, and he studied grammar with her under Mentor Graham.
Evidently, Abe and Ann intended to get married, although whether there was a formal engagement is unclear. Whatever plans they had were shattered when the twenty-two-year-old Ann became gravely ill of typhoid in the summer of 1835. She died on August 25. Abe fell into depression.22 His friends kept watch over him and made sure that he didn’t carry a knife in his pocket. Having long pondered the controlling power of nature over human life, he now regarded nature as a hostile force. Obsessed by the sheer physicality of Ann’s death, he said, “I can never be reconcile[d] to have the snow—rains & storms to beat on her grave.”23 Although Lincoln’s grief over Ann’s passing is understandable, one wonders why he became so depressed that some of his friends seriously feared that he would kill himself.
The intensity of Lincoln’s despair can be attributed in part to cultural influences. His extreme reaction to Ann’s death may have been a case of life imitating art. His vulnerability to gloom in the 1830s was worsened by mournful songs and poems. Reportedly, one of his and Ann’s pastimes was singing songs from The Missouri Harmony, a compilation of nearly two hundred hymns and secular songs presented in shape notes, a simple form of notation for amateur singers.24 First published in 1820, The Missouri Harmony was among the shape-note books that the composer Virgil Thomson has called “the musical basis of almost everything we make, of Negro spirituals, of cowboy songs, of popular ballads, of blues, of hymns, of doggerel ditties, and all our operas and symphonies.”25 One of the main themes of the lyrics in the book was death, as in the lines “How feeble are our mortal frames, / What dying worms are we,” or “Death, what a solemn word to all! / . . . We just arise, and soon we fall, / To mix with earth again.”26 Besides The Missouri Harmony, among the popular songs Lincoln was known to have sung were doleful ones about doomed lovers, broken romances, and the death of loved ones.27 In “The Shoemaker’s Daughter,” a pair of lovers who become separated later find themselves together on a boat at sea whose starving passengers are forced to draw straws to see who will be cannibalized; the woman pulls the shortest straw, and her lover is chosen to kill her, a fate avoided only when a rescue ship arrives. In “Barbara Allen”—a classic folk song later recorded by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and others—a man dies of grief because he thinks he has been rejected by his lover; it turns out that he misunderstood her, and on his passing the woman dies of sorrow, too. “William Riley,” another standard folk song, depicts a man who is jailed after being wrongly accused of stealing his lover’s jewels.
Taken together, these songs form a dismal portrait of ill-fated love. We should also recall that Ann died at a moment when the twenty-four-year-old Lincoln was questioning religion and was reading dark-themed poetry. His favorite poem, William Knox’s “Mortality,” may have come to his mind in connection to Ann’s death. An early biographer ventured that in the weeks after her death “he muttered these verses as he rambled through the woods; he was heard to murmur them as he slipped into the village at nightfall; they came unbidden to his lips in all places.”28 Although this story is probably apocryphal, it points to Lincoln’s fixation on writings about the brevity of life and the physicality of death. His gloom was mirrored in Knox’s lyrics, especially in lines like these: “The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose eye, / Shone beauty and pleasure, her triumphs are by; / And the memory of those who loved her and praised, / Are alike from the minds of the living erased.”29 Culture, in the form of disturbing songs and poems, reflected Lincoln’s depression.
How would Ann Rutledge have been as a life partner for Lincoln? She combined the qualities of domesticity and firm-mindedness that he sought in women. She was, as Herndon relates, “an excellent housekeeper” and was locally known for her fine needlework.30 She was also so intelligent that the New Salemite William Greene said that “her intellect was quick—Sharp—deep & philosophic as well as brilliant.”31 Lincoln himself described her as “natural & quite intellectual, though not highly educated.” He confessed, “I loved the woman dearly & sacredly. She was a handsome girl—would have made a good wife.”
A good wife, perhaps, but a motivator to political greatness? There’s no evidence that she took an interest in public issues or sympathized with Lincoln’s ambitions.
Four years after Ann’s death, Abe met a different kind of woman, Mary Todd, whose ambition matched his. Like Ann Rutledge and Mary Owens, she was both domestic and bright, but she also possessed strong ambition. Born into a wealthy Lexington, Kentucky, family in 1818, she was the fourth child of Robert and Elizabeth Parker Todd. In girlhood Mary predicted to family members that she would someday marry a man who would be elected president. She knew Henry Clay, the eminent senator and perennial presidential candidate, who was a Lexington neighbor and a close family friend. In Lexington she attended school for nearly ten years—remarkable in a day when only a tiny fraction of American women received more than four years of formal education. At the Reverend John Ward’s Shelby Female Academy she learned many subjects and became fluent in French. She continued her education, in French and other fields, at a local boarding school run by Parisian émigrés Augustus Mentelle and his wife, Charlotte. By the time she reached adulthood, Mary Todd was a cultured, attractive woman. She moved to Springfield, Illinois, in October 1839 to live with her sister Elizabeth Todd Edwards, whose husband, Ninian Edwards Jr., was a leading politician and a member of the Whig Long Nine from Sangamon County. At parties held at the Edwards’s large home on Springfield’s “Aristocracy Hill,” the vivacious Mary Todd was wooed by a number of up-and-coming lawyers and politicians, including two who would later compete against each other for the presidency, Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Politics influenced Mary’s choice of the gangly, homely Abe over the slick, magnetic Stephen. In the late 1840s she reportedly declared that Lincoln “is to be President of the United States some day; if I had not thought so I never would have married him, for you can see he is not pretty. Mary’s ambitiousness was a key catalyst to Lincoln’s rise. Her sister Elizabeth said, “She was an Extremely Ambitious woman and in Ky often & often Contended that She was destined to be the wife of some future President—Said it in my presence in Springfield and Said it in Earnest.”33 During her marriage, she was, according to Elizabeth, “the most ambitious woman I ever saw—spurred up Mr. Lincoln, pushed him along and upward—made him struggle and seize his opportunities.” Had he married someone else, said his friend Joshua Speed, he “would have been a devoted husband and a very—very domestic man”; he “needed driving.” John T. Stuart went so far as to say, “His wife made him Presdt: She had the fire—will and ambition—Lincolns talent & his wifes ambition did the deed.” Even William Herndon, who crossed swords with Mary, credited her with putting him on the path to the presidency. “Mrs Lincoln was a stimulant to Lincoln in a good sense,” Herndon wrote; “she was always urging him to look up—struggle—conquer and go up to fame by becoming a big man: she coveted place—position—power—wanted to lead society and to be worshipt by man and woman: . . . She was like the toothake—kept one awake night and day.”34
Five feet two inches tall, Mary Todd had wide-set blue eyes, a small nose, a straight mouth, and a round face encircled by brown hair. She struggled with her weight, calling herself a “ruddy pineknot” with “periodic exuberances of flesh.”35 She had shapely shoulders that she showed off by wearing dresses that exposed them.
Like Mary Owens, Mary came from a rich slaveholding Kentucky family. But in her case, the slaveholding background did not translate into support of slavery. She was descended on both sides from Scots-Irish Covenanters, Presbyterians who had immigrated to America, escaping Anglican tyranny in search of religious freedom. In the British Isles, the Covenanters had fought against both the Cavaliers under the Stuart kings and the Congregationalist Puritans under Cromwell. In America, the Covenanters became outspoken critics of slavery, which they opposed on the basis of both natural law and the Bible.36 This antislavery sentiment took different forms, according to social context. In the North, Covenanters espoused abolitionism. Southern Covenanters began with a similarly urgent antislavery agenda but in time settled into a more moderate advocacy of colonization, which called for gradual abolition followed by the relocation of African Americans in Liberia or elsewhere.
Mary Todd’s family and its forebears reflected the evolution of Covenanter antislavery feeling in the South. Mary’s uncle, John Todd, while serving in the Virginia legislature in 1777, had called for the abolition of slavery in Kentucky County. Although his descendants did not repeat this demand, some of them, including Mary’s father, Robert Smith Todd, supported colonization, then considered radical in the South. Though a slaveholder, Robert Todd desired the eventual extinction of slavery and the shipping of emancipated blacks out of the country. To that end, he supported a colonization society in Lexington and in 1833 voted to ban the importation of additional enslaved people into the state.37
The antislavery viewpoint of Robert Todd and his first wife, Elizabeth “Eliza” Parker Todd, explains why their four daughters, including Mary, opposed slavery. By contrast, eight of the nine children that Robert had by his Episcopal second wife, Elizabeth (“Betsy”) Humphreys Todd, supported slavery. During the Civil War, four half brothers and three brothers-in-law of Mary Todd Lincoln fought for the Confederacy. She did not publicly express grief when four of them died in battle, because she wholeheartedly supported her husband and the Union cause. Mary became “a more ardent abolitionist than her husband,” a biographer notes.38
As a Southern woman with Northern principles, Mary was a living embodiment of the union of sections that would be the driving force of Lincoln’s politics. This union of cultural opposites was mirrored in a marriage between personal opposites. Herndon noted that Mary was “the exact reverse” of Abe “in figure, in physical proportions, in education, bearing, temperament, history—in everything.”39 Mary, when discussing her marriage, referred to “our opposite natures.”40
But the opposition can be overstated. Not only were Mary and Abe born Southerners who held similar views on slavery, but she had also been close to his beau ideal, Henry Clay. She was, like Abe, an excellent mimic, and she loved discussing politics and enjoyed his favorite poets, particularly Robert Burns. Their physiques, of course, were very different, but their temperaments had commonalities. If Abe shifted between entertaining storytelling and meditative abstraction, she swung between exuberant social chatter and private paranoia. It’s tempting to call both of them manic-depressive, but it’s risky to assign psychological labels in retrospect. Whatever their psychological conditions, they avoided being incapacitated for long periods by mental illness. Both had a keen eye on Abe’s advance in the public sphere.
Like many marriages, Abe and Mary’s had its turbulent times, but in their case the turbulence must be seen in context. While somewhat unusual for a woman, Mary’s biting style was consistent with the sensational culture. A relative testified that she was “quick at repartee and when the occasion seemed to require it was sarcastic and severe.”41 She had “an unusual gift of sarcasm,” according to another relative, and “now and then indulged in sarcastic, witty remarks, that cut like a Damascus blade.”42 Lincoln, too, was a master of sarcasm during the period when he met and married Mary. As a politician, he was locally famous for his “slasher gaff” rhetoric—caustic attacks on political opponents. But he worked hard at balancing the sensational and the rational in his speeches and writings, just as he struggled mightily to maintain an equilibrium between powerful emotions and reason in his personal relationships.
SENSATIONALISM AND SARCASM
The popular turn toward sensationalism that occurred during the 1830s and ’40s brought not only mob violence but also physical fights between journalists or politicians. The New York Evening Post editor William Cullen Bryant took a cow whip to a rival, who seized the whip and thrashed Bryant in front of City Hall. In 1836 the New York editor James Watson Webb, who was involved in two duels against politicians, publicly whipped James Gordon Bennett for twenty minutes as crowds cheered. Bennett, the editor of the immensely popular New York Herald, was said to invite such whippings because he knew that reports of it would sell newspapers. A foreign observer quipped that Bennett would “bend his back to the lash and thank you; for every blow is worth so many dollars.”43
Violence and sensationalism had a strong effect on the style of popular literature and oratory. Walt Whitman, then a young journalist, described a rival as “a reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes, . . . a midnight ghoul, preying on rottenness and repulsive filth.”44 The author and reformer George Lippard began his career by writing the lurid Gothic thriller The Ladye Annabel and the stinging literary satire “The Spermaceti Papers,” leading to his nightmarish, politically subversive city-mysteries novel The Quaker City, in which ruling-class types are mocked from a working-class standpoint.45 Lippard was the most famous of numerous American urban novelists who combined Gothic excess and trenchant social commentary. Lippard’s close friend Edgar Allan Poe extracted terror and perversity from popular sensational genres. Poe’s literary satires enraged his enemies so much that one of them pummeled him badly, and he spent several days in bed recovering.
The speeches of President Andrew Jackson, as Kenneth Cmiel shows, marked the transition toward sensational political expression, as in his assaults on “aristocrats” who made the “monster bank” a “Hydra of Corruption.”46 Reading Jackson’s attacks on the bank, the diarist Philip Hone remarked, “The language . . . is disgraceful to the President and humiliating to every American.” It smelled “of the kitchen” and was produced by “the scullion,” not “the gentleman.”47 Others who specialized in shocking public language were James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, Benjamin Butler, and Andrew Johnson.
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