Fanny. After that, Lincoln served as a close participant in Speed’s developing romance, which was as tortured as had been Lincoln’s courtship of Mary Todd the previous winter. This time it was Speed who drifted in and out of depression, while Lincoln acted as the rational counselor. When Speed in December 1841 confessed to having serious doubts about his forthcoming marriage, Lincoln specified three possible reasons for his anxieties: the winter weather, an inactive social life, and Speed’s underlying “nervous debility.”113 In advising Speed, Lincoln pursued the same kind of balance between reason and passion that he did in his speeches on mobs and on the temperance movement. On the one hand, he assured Speed that physical and emotional attraction, not reason, had originally guided his choice of Fanny. “What had reason to do with it, at that early stage? . . . All you then did or could know of her, was her personal appearance and / deportment; and these, if they impress at all, impress the heart and not the head.” He added, “Say candidly, were not those heavenly black eyes, the whole basis of your easily reasoning on the subject?”114
While reminding Speed of the emotional basis of his relationship with Fanny, he also bolstered the relationship rationally. Whatever fears Speed had, Lincoln argued, would soon disappear, as had his own gloom the previous year. In five long letters around the time of Speed’s marriage, he gave reason after reason why Speed should be happy with Fanny. Then in October 1842, eight months after Speed’s marriage and a month before his own, Lincoln wrote his friend, asking, “Are you now, in feeling as well as judgement, glad you are married as you are?”115 This question, along with his other interchanges with his friend, had as much to do with his own state of mind as with Speed’s.
A balance between reason and passion was what he was trying to establish in himself, a balance he projected outward onto the turbulent American culture around him. In the Washingtonian speech, as in the lyceum address four years earlier, he offered reason and calmness as the counterweights to unbridled passions. Drinking and mob action suspended reason, he pointed out, while sobriety and observing the law restored it. Both speeches described the intense emotions behind the American Revolution as necessary for their time but unwanted today. The revolution of ’76, he said, introduced liberty to the world, but “it had its evils too,” because it “breathed forth famine, swam in blood and rode on fire,” and for years “the orphan’s cry, and the widow’s wail” were heard.116 In contrast, the Washingtonian reform leaves “no orphans starving, no widows weeping.” Proclaiming the “Reign of Reason” was Lincoln’s way of asserting both social control and personal control of combating cultural chaos and private demons.
Around the time he gave his Washingtonian speech, he confirmed his mental recovery in letters to Speed in which he wrote, “I have been quite clear of the hypo since you left,—even better than I was along in the fall” and “I have been quite a man ever since you left.”117 Notably, in explaining why Speed felt anxious just before his marriage, Lincoln says that “nervous debility” was what distinguished Speed and him from most people. This trait, Lincoln writes, “though it does pertain to you, does not pertain to one in a thousand. It is out of this, that the painful difference between you and the mass of the world springs.”118 A shared anxiety during premarital wooing, in short, united them.
Lincoln soon found relief from such anxieties in his second try with Mary Todd. Direct information about the postdepression courtship that led to their marriage is sparse. Although Lincoln recovered psychologically, he did not apparently reenter the social whirl on Aristocracy Hill, as is indicated by the fact that Mary in June wrote a friend, Mercy Levering, that he “deems me unworthy of notice, as I have not met him in the gay world for months.” She added that if “‘Richard [that is, Lincoln] should be himself again,’ much, much happiness it would afford me.”119
Abe and Mary reunited after they teamed up against the Irish-born Illinois politician James Shields by writing installments of what have come to be known as the “Lost Townships” letters in the Sangamo Journal. Shields, the state auditor, issued an announcement that Illinoisans must pay all debts in gold or silver, not in the paper currency issued by the Bank of Illinois, which had failed as a result of the economic depression. Although this order sprang from economic necessity rather than personal motives, Lincoln took the opportunity to launch a very personal attack on the Democrat Shields, a self-important, highly sensitive man who was close to Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln did so in a satirical article published in the Sangamo Journal on September 2, 1842, followed a week later by a similar piece written by Mary Todd and her friend Julia Jayne.
Three previous installments of the “Lost Townships” letters, written by someone else, had appeared in earlier issues of the newspaper, but the ones written by Abe and Mary are completely different from those. Abe introduces a female narrator, Rebecca, a gossipy, brash widow who visits a recently married friend, Ned, who expresses outrage over Shields and the currency issue.
By using a female narrator, as opposed to the omniscient narrator of the former “Lost Townships” satires, Lincoln did something rare. Only a few other male writers before 1860 used female speakers effectively. In the eighteenth century, the sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin had published sketches in which he impersonated Silence Dogood, a scolding widow who commented on social issues; later, as Polly Baker, he wrote a fictional speech to a court objecting to the sexual double standard. Among male writers of the antebellum era, Poe was the only major figure who took on a female persona; he did it twice, in his literary satires “How to Write a Blackwood’s Article” and “A Predicament.” From 1847 onward, the humorist Benjamin Shillaber utilized a female speaker, Mrs. Partington, who became a popular favorite in the 1850s. Among women writers, Frances Whitcher introduced her comic female narrator, Widow Bedott, in 1846; Marietta Holley popularized her humorous speaker, Betsey Bobbet, in the 1850s.
All of these nineteenth-century women narrators avoided serious involvement with politics. The feeble-minded Mrs. Partington attacked women’s suffrage. The Widow Bedott and Betsey Bobbet were submissive types who aimed desperately to get married and enter “wimmens spear.”120
Rebecca, the female speaker that Lincoln created, and that Mary and Julia developed, was far more unconventional than these narrators. She was brazen, bawdy, witty, and politically involved. In Lincoln’s installment, she begins by making what would then be considered a dirty joke: she suggests that the child of her neighbor Jeff has been fathered by another man because the infant’s hair appears to be the wrong color. She then enters into a political discussion with Jeff, who is appalled by the fact that he cannot pay his taxes in paper money, thanks to James Shields’s proclamation. For the rest of the sketch, Lincoln does his little-big-man act, this time in the guise of a woman. Sarcastically playing the humble person, Rebecca mouths the excuse Shields gave for imposing the currency restriction, saying, “there is danger of loss to the ‘officers of State,’ and you know Jeff, we can’t get along without officers of State.”121 Jeff grumbles that Shields and other state officers thrive on their high salaries while other Illinoisans are driven into poverty. Rebecca questions Jeff, who has had dealings with Shields, who comes off as both a political turncoat and a person of amorphous gender. Jeff assumes that the preening Shields is a Whig, though the knowing Rebecca insists he is a Democrat. Jeff declares that “Shields is a fool as well as a liar. With him truth is out of the question, and as for getting a good bright passable lie out of him, you might as well try to strike fire from a cake of tallow.” Jeff tells of a fair where he saw “Shields floatin about on the air, without heft or earthly substance, just like a lock of cat-fur where cats had been fightin.” Here Lincoln suggests that Shields is an absolute nullity, politically and personally. At the fair, the vain, dandyish Shields paraded among adoring women and said that he was sorry that he could not marry them all, explaining, “Too well I know how much you suffer; but do, do remember, it is not my fault that I am so handsome and so interesting.”
The Rebecca sketch by Mary Todd and Julia Jayne, published a week after Lincoln’s, was even more daring than his. In the course of Lincoln’s piece, Jeff’s voice largely replaces Rebecca’s, so that Shields is mocked mainly from a male perspective. In the Todd-Jayne version, in contrast, Rebecca holds center stage throughout. The mockery of the proud Shields now comes wholly from a crude, rough-spoken woman who is unafraid to move well outside the limits of genteel female behavior. This defiance of gender roles is accomplished with boldness and aplomb. At the beginning of the sketch, Rebecca is in the process of making butter when she is approached by Jim Snooks, who tells her that Shields, furious at being compared to cat’s fur, demands satisfaction (that is, he wants a duel). Rebecca replies that a duel is fine with her, but there is another alternative: Shields can come to her and see what satisfaction he can get out of squeezing her hand. If satisfied, he can marry her. With ersatz bashfulness, she offers herself: “Really Mr. Printer, I can t help blushin—but—it must come out—I—but . . . well! if I must I must—wouldnt he—may-be sorter, let the old grudge drop if I was to consent to be—be—h-i-s w-i-f-e?”122 She boasts of her attractions: she is under sixty, four feet three inches tall, and about that much around the middle. If Shields doesn’t accept her marriage proposal, she is ready for a duel. As the one being challenged, she gets to choose the weapons: she suggests either a broomstick, hot water, or a shovelful of coals. She wonders if she should dress as a woman or a man for the duel, leaving the decision to him. As she says, “I’ll give him choice . . . in one thing, and that is whether, when we fight, I shall wear breeches or he petticoats; for I presume that change is sufficient to place us on an equality.”
As a follow-up to this satire, Mary and Julia wrote a poem about Shields, signed “Cathleen,” that was published a week later in the Sangamo Journal. In the poem, Cathleen announces the forthcoming marriage of Shields and Rebecca:
Ye Jew’s-harps awake! The Auditor’s won:
Rebecca the widow has gained Erin’s son;
The pride of the North from Emerald Isle
Has been wooed and won by a woman’s smile. [So on for fourteen more lines].123
In these pieces Mary and Julia broke all kinds of nineteenth-century taboos. Middle-class women did not make marriage proposals to men, especially in aggressively physical terms; nor did they offer to fight duels or to cross-dress.
Given the sharpness and unconventionality of the Rebecca satires, it is understandable that Shields was roused to action by the women’s sketch. To preserve his honor, he requested a duel. He asked Simeon Francis, the editor of the Sangamo Journal, for the identity of the author of the Rebecca letters. Learning of Shields’s inquiry, Lincoln assumed full responsibility for the satires. He refused to apologize to Shields, who sent an official challenge through his friend General John D. Whiteside. Lincoln replied that he was opposed to dueling, but when Shields pressed the issue, he accepted the duel, which was to take place on Bloody Island on September 22.
As the challenged party, Lincoln could select the weapons, and he chose large military broadswords, which he thought would give him an advantage over Shields, who was seven inches shorter than he. Abe explained, “I did not want to kill Shields, and felt sure that I could disarm him . . . ; and furthermore, I didn’t want the d—d fellow to kill me, which I rather think he would have done if we had selected pistols.”124 He bragged, “If it had been necessary I could have split him from the crown of his head to the end of his backbone.”125 The boast, however, underestimated Shields, who was an expert with both the sword and the pistol. While growing up in Ireland and England, he had taken fencing lessons from ex-soldiers of the Napoleonic wars. Shields’s biographer reports, “He learned fencing or sword exercise and became so expert in the art that few men of any size or experience could surpass him.”126 He became so proficient that when he first came to North America he was for a time a fencing instructor in Canada. It’s quite possible that Shields would have defeated Lincoln, and America would have been deprived of its greatest president.
Fortunately, when the dueling parties convened on Bloody Island, friends on both sides intervened, and the fight was called off. Shields went on to become the only person in history to be elected to the US Senate in three different states. During the Civil War he served as a brigadier general in the Union army under Lincoln.
The whole situation had brought Abe and Mary back together. Abe learned that Mary Todd was not a conventional woman like Ann Rutledge, Mary Owens, or Matilda Edwards (who eventually married a wealthy older man). He saw that Mary was ready to step outside accepted gender roles and experiment with alternative views of womanhood and manhood. If he took on feminine qualities in his Rebecca sketch, she tested out dueling, proposing marriage, and cross-dressing in the installment she wrote with Julia. Unlike other women he had known, Mary seemed to have exceptional capaciousness and flexibility.
That flexibility also related to her own family past. On this point, she differed greatly from Joshua Speed, who, like her, was from a wealthy Kentucky family of slaveholders but, unlike her, did not surrender his acceptance of slavery. He defended the institution when Lincoln confronted him about it in a letter of 1855. Although Speed remained loyal to Lincoln during the Civil War—indeed, as Lincoln’s main personal contact in Kentucky he helped keep that border state in the Union—he continued to hold black people in bondage right up to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Mary, in contrast, did an about-face on slavery, eventually rejecting it completely and giving her unconditional support to Lincoln and the Republicans.
In the end, Abe discovered that what he most sought in American culture—the unity of diverse attitudes and voices—was what Mary embodied. At a time when there was already talk of war between the North and the South, she was a Southern woman open to Northern views. At a moment when different spheres for men and women were being defined, she embraced domesticity but also ventured bravely into politics and other male realms.
UNCONVENTIONAL DOMESTICITY
They were aware that their marriage would distance them from their immediate families. Abe was increasingly alienated from his father. His rare visits to Coles County were mainly to see his stepmother. Although he occasionally sent his father money, he stayed aloof from him. When in 1849 he was notified that his father was dying of heart disease and had asked to see him, Abe went for a visit only to find that it was a false alarm. His father was recovering from lung congestion. Two years later, Abe got a similar message. He wrote a consolatory letter to his stepbrother John D. Johnston, assuring him that Thomas would soon be with loved ones in heaven but adding, “Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.
He soon learned that his father had died. He did not attend the funeral. Although he intended to install a stone and a fence at his father’s grave, he never did more than scratch the letters “T. L.” on an oak board that he stuck into the ground at the grave site; the board was later stolen by curiosity seekers.128
What explains Lincoln’s estrangement from his father? A common interpretation is that he was distanced from his father from an early age and became more so over time. But his memories of what he called his “joyous, happy boyhood” and Thomas Lincoln’s sound record in Kentucky and Illinois argue against this view.129 The real rift between the father and son came after their first year together in Illinois, when Thomas moved to Coles County, where he ended up in Goosenest Prairie, and Abe went to New Salem. Abe’s experiences there broadened him greatly and prepared the way for his social and professional rise after his move to Springfield in 1837. The surviving evidence about Thomas Lincoln suggests that he made no advance at all in Illinois. Maintaining a subsistence lifestyle, he lived hand to mouth. A neighbor described him as “an excellent spec[imen] of poor white trash,” “[a] rough man—never drank but lazy & worthless—had few sheep—poked around behind them talked an[d] walked slow.”130 John D. Johnston, who continued to live with his wife and children with Thomas Lincoln, was so indolent that Abe sharply reproved him in an 1851 letter, calling him “an idler” given to “uselessly wasting time.”131 Abe’s growing distance from his father and stepbrother reflected his core belief that humans were distinguished from other animals by their capacity to improve their lot. This belief nurtured his Whig commitment to improving infrastructure through government spending and his dedication to improving himself intellectually and professionally. Perhaps here lies the explanation of his increasing alienation from his father and John D. Johnston, who remained notably unimproved.
Mary was also separating emotionally from her family. While her resentment of her stepmother and stepsiblings in Kentucky can be overstated, there is no doubt that after her move north she felt closer to her relatives in Illinois than to the ones who remained in the South. Then tensions arose with the Illinois clan once her interest in the low-born, ungainly Abe Lincoln became known. Mary’s sister Elizabeth Todd Edwards, who reportedly tried to break up the relationship for two years, recalled, “I warned Mary that she and Mr. Lincoln were not suitable. Mr. Edwards and myself believed they were different in nature, and education and raising. They had no feelings alike. They were so different that they could not live happily as man and wife.”132
With all these family conflicts, Abe and Mary decided to have a low-key wedding. Abe did not invite his Coles County relatives; in fact, his father never met Mary because he never got an invitation to Springfield. Mary, for her part, failed to invite her father and stepmother to the wedding—a highly unusual omission for a woman in that era. On the morning of November 3, 1842, Abe asked an Episcopal priest, Charles A. Dresser, to hold a simple ceremony in his home that night. Dresser agreed, but on the street Abe met Ninian Edwards, who, on hearing the plan, insisted on holding the service at his house because he was Mary’s guardian. Abe, thirty-three, and the twenty-three-year-old Mary were married in the parlor of the Edwards home on the evening of November 4; Reverend Dresser read from the Book of Common Prayer. Abe gave Mary a ring that bore the inscription “Love is Eternal.” About thirty relatives and friends, invited at the last minute, attended. There was a light reception. A week later Abe wrote a friend, “Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me, is matter of profound wonder.”133
Surveying the span of cultural and personal events leading up to Lincoln’s wedding, we can better understand his mental collapse and his subsequent recovery. The issues he had tussled with publicly for years—internal improvements, class divisions, and the handling of social reform—may be said to have imploded in January 1841, when the state nearly went bankrupt due to the expensive improvements plan he had backed and when his prospect of marrying someone from Aristocracy Hill clashed with the little-big-man persona he had been cultivating. Devoted to improvement on every level, he could not seek solace in his backward father or stepbrother, and yet a commitment to the society woman Mary Todd frightened him. His relationship with his fellow sufferer Joshua Speed provided a much-needed balm, as did his reflections on the Washingtonian movement, which for him was a model of comradely healing and rational self-control.
One would think that after calling for restrained rhetoric in his temperance speech he would avoid the kind of vitriolic language that had characterized his skinnings, but the Rebecca letters proved otherwise. They were, in fact, far more caustic than anything he had previously produced. And yet the Rebecca episode, though it put him at risk of death in a duel, solidified his relationship with Mary. Her participation in the Rebecca gambit showed that she could venture beyond the boundaries of class and gender. If their collaborative rebellion against conventions widened the gap between them and their families, it made possible their marriage.
Shortly after the wedding, Abe and Mary moved into the Globe Tavern, a boardinghouse just west of Springfield’s public square, where Mary’s sister Frances and her husband William Wallace had recently lived. Room and board came to eight dollars a week. In the eighteen-by-fourteen-foot room, a son, Robert Todd (“Bob” or “Bobby”) Lincoln, named after Mary’s father, was born on August 1, 1843.
After spending the early winter of 1843–44 in a rented house on Springfield’s South Fourth Street, the Lincolns sought a permanent domicile. In January 1844, Abe bought a one-and-a-half-story, five-room frame house from the Reverend Charles Dresser for $1,200 plus a town lot worth $300. Located at the corner of Eighth and Jackson Streets in Springfield, the house had a sitting room, a parlor, a kitchen on the ground floor, and two cramped bedrooms upstairs. In the backyard was a latrine, a water pump, a carriage house, and a small barn for animals. A few blocks away, farms began, their broad fields stretching into the distance. This choice of a home reflected not only Abe’s modest finances at the time but also the couple’s impulse to keep a distance from Mary’s relatives, who lived several blocks away on Aristocracy Hill. The Lincolns lived in the Jackson Street house for seventeen years. On March 10, 1846, a second son, Edward (“Eddie” or “Eddy”) Baker Lincoln was born. That year the Lincolns added a bedroom and a pantry.
During their early years in the Jackson Street home, the Lincolns lived a life that outwardly fit the cult of domesticity. In line with the split-spheres custom of the day, he was away for several weeks a year, traveling the Eighth Judicial Circuit and practicing the law in small-town courthouses, while she stayed at home, tending to the children. Mary wrote, “A nice home—loving husband and precious child are the happiest stage of life,” a period when “you are a happy, loving Mama.”134 Mary got household training from books like Miss Leslie’s Cookery and Miss Leslie’s Housekeeper. She spoke of her “years of very very great domestic happiness—with my darling husband & children.
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