ANN’S ENGAGEMENT TO LINCOLN.
It was not until McNeill, or McNamar, had been gone many months, and gossip had become offensive, that Lincoln ventured to show his love for Ann, and then it was a long time before the girl would listen to his suit. Convinced at last, however, that her former lover had deserted her, she yielded to Lincoln’s wishes, and promised, in the spring of 1835, soon after Lincoln’s return from Vandalia, to become his wife. But Lincoln had nothing on which to support a family—indeed, he found it no trifling task to support himself. As for Ann, she was anxious to go to school another year. It was decided that in the autumn she should go with her brother to Jacksonville and spend the winter there in an academy. Lincoln was to devote himself to his law studies; and the next spring, when she returned from school and he was a member of the bar, they were to be married.
A happy spring and summer followed. New Salem took a cordial interest in the two lovers, and presaged a happy life for them; and all would undoubtedly have gone well if the young girl could have dismissed the haunting memory of her old lover. The possibility that she had wronged him; that he might reappear; that he loved her still, though she now loved another; that perhaps she had done wrong—a torturing conflict of memory, love, conscience, doubt, and morbidness lay like a shadow across her happiness, and wore upon her until she fell ill. Gradually her condition became hopeless; and Lincoln, who had been shut from her, was sent for. The lovers passed an hour alone in an anguished parting, and soon after, on August 25, 1835, Ann died.
LINCOLN IN 1858.
After a photograph owned by Mrs. Harriet Chapman of Charleston, Illinois. Mrs. Chapman is a granddaughter of Sarah Bush Lincoln, Lincoln’s step-mother. Her son, Mr. R. N. Chapman of Charleston, Illinois, writes us: “In 1858 Lincoln and Douglas had a series of joint debates in this State, and this city was one place of meeting. Mr. Lincoln’s step-mother was making her home with my father and mother at that time. Mr. Lincoln stopped at our house, and as he was going away my mother said to him: ‘Uncle Abe, I want a picture of you.’ He replied, ‘Well, Harriet, when I get home I will have one taken for you and send it to you.’ Soon after, mother received the photograph, which she still has, already framed, from Springfield, Illinois, with a letter from Mr. Lincoln, in which he said, ‘This is not a very good-looking picture, but it’s the best that could be produced from the poor subject.’ He also said that he had it taken solely for my mother. The photograph is still in its original frame, and I am sure is the most perfect and best picture of Lincoln in existence. We suppose it must have been taken in Springfield, Illinois.”
FACSIMILE OF A LEGAL OPINION BY LINCOLN.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From the original, in the possession of Z. A. Enos, Springfield, Illinois. In a convention of surveyors, held at Springfield in 1859, the question was much discussed whether the act of Congress of February 11, 1805, relating to surveys, was intended to control all future surveys and subdivisions of the government lands. It was decided to submit the question to a lawyer for an opinion. Mr. Lincoln was selected, for the reason not only that he was a lawyer of recognized ability, but also because he had been a practical surveyor. A committee having waited upon him, he wrote out the opinion of which a facsimile is here presented. Mr. Enos, who holds the original document, was an active participant in the convention to which this opinion was rendered.
JAMES McGRADY RUTLEDGE, A COUSIN OF ANN RUTLEDGE.
James McGrady Rutledge, son of William Rutledge, is now past eighty-one years of age, having been born in Kentucky, September 29, 1814. He is now a resident of Petersburg. He is active and remarkably free from the infirmities of age. When a boy, with a yoke of oxen, he hauled the logs for the construction of the mill and the dam at New Salem and for some of the cabins of the village. “‘Rile’ Clary and I carried chain for Lincoln many a time,” he says; “‘Rile’ going foremost and I following. We became accustomed to it and Lincoln preferred us.” Ann Rutledge and her cousin were nearly the same age, and being thoroughly congenial, she made a confidant of him. They were much in each other’s company, and Ann often talked to him of Lincoln. “Everybody was happy with Ann,” says Mr. Rutledge. “She was of a cheerful disposition, seeming to enjoy life, and helping others enjoy it.”
The death of Ann Rutledge plunged Lincoln into the deepest gloom. That abiding melancholy, that painful sense of the incompleteness of life, which had been his mother’s dowry to him, asserted itself. It filled and darkened his mind and his imagination, tortured him with its black pictures. One stormy night he was sitting beside William Greene, his head bowed on his hand, while tears trickled through his fingers; his friend begged him to control his sorrow, to try to forget. “I cannot,” moaned Lincoln; “the thought of the snow and rain on her grave fills me with indescribable grief.”
He was found walking alone by the river and through the woods, muttering strange things to himself. He seemed to his friends to be in the shadow of madness. They kept a close watch over him; and at last Bowling Green, one of the most devoted friends Lincoln then had, took him home to his little log cabin, half a mile north of New Salem, under the brow of a big bluff.
Here, under the loving care of Green and his good wife Nancy, Lincoln remained until he was once more master of himself.
But though he had regained self-control, his grief was deep and bitter. Ann Rutledge was buried in Concord cemetery, a country burying-ground seven miles northwest of New Salem. To this lonely spot Lincoln frequently journeyed to weep over her grave. “My heart is buried there,” he said to one of his friends.
When McNamar returned (for McNamar’s story was true, and, two months after Ann Rutledge died, he drove into New Salem, with his widowed mother and his brothers and sisters in the “prairie schooner” beside him) and learned of Ann’s death, he “saw Lincoln at the post-office,” as he afterward said, and “he seemed desolate and sorely distressed.” On himself, apparently, her death produced no deep impression. Within a year he married another woman; and his conduct toward Ann Rutledge is to this day a mystery.
Many years ago a sister of Ann Rutledge, Mrs. Jeane Berry, told what she knew of Ann’s love affairs; and her statement has been preserved in a diary kept by the Rev. R. D. Miller, now Superintendent of Schools of Menard County, with whom she had the conversation. She declared that Ann’s “whole soul seemed wrapped up in Lincoln,” and that they “would have been married in the fall or early winter” if Ann had lived. “After Ann died,” said Mrs. Berry, “I remember that it was common talk about how sad Lincoln was; and I remember myself how sad he looked. They told me that every time he was in the neighborhood after she died, he would go alone to her grave and sit there in silence for hours.”
In later life, when his sorrow had become a memory, he told a friend who questioned him: “I really and truly loved the girl and think often of her now.” There was a pause, and then he added: “And I have loved the name of Rutledge to this day.”
CHAPTER XIX.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN AT TWENTY-SIX YEARS OF AGE.
When the death of Ann Rutledge came upon Lincoln, for a time threatening to destroy his ambition and blast his life, he was in a most encouraging position. Master of a profession in which he had an abundance of work and earned fair wages; hopeful of being admitted in a few months to the bar; a member of the State Assembly, with every reason to believe that, if he desired it, his constituency would return him—few men are as far advanced at twenty-six as was Abraham Lincoln.
CONCORD CEMETERY.—WHERE ANN RUTLEDGE WAS BURIED.
From a photograph by C. S. McCullough, Petersburg, Illinois. Concord cemetery lies seven miles northwest of the old town of New Salem, in a secluded place, surrounded by woods and pastures, away from the world. In this lonely spot Ann Rutledge was at first laid to rest. Thither Lincoln is said often to have gone alone, and “sat in silence for hours at a time;” and it was to Ann Rutledge’s grave here that he pointed and said: “There my heart lies buried.” The old cemetery suffered the melancholy fate of New Salem. It became a neglected, deserted spot. The graves were lost in weeds, and a heavy growth of trees kept out the sun and filled the place with gloom. A dozen years ago this picture was taken. It was a blustery day in the autumn, and the weeds and trees were swaying before a furious gale. No other picture of the place, taken while Ann Rutledge was buried there, is known to be in existence. A picture of a cemetery, with the name of Ann Rutledge on a high, flat tombstone, has been published in two or three books; but it is not genuine, the “stone” being nothing more than a board improvised for the occasion. The grave of Ann Rutledge was never honored with a stone until the body was taken up in 1890 and removed to Oakland cemetery, a mile southwest of Petersburg.
Intellectually he was far better equipped than he believed himself to be, better than he has ordinarily been credited with being. True, he had had no conventional college training, but he had by his own efforts attained the chief result of all preparatory study, the ability to take hold of a subject and assimilate it. The fact that in six weeks he had acquired enough of the science of surveying to enable him to serve as deputy surveyor shows how well trained his mind was. The power to grasp a large subject quickly and fully is never an accident. The nights Lincoln spent in Gentryville, lying on the floor in front of the fire, figuring on the fire-shovel; the hours he passed in poring over the Statutes of Indiana; the days he wrestled with Kirkham’s Grammar, alone made the mastery of Flint and Gibson possible. His struggle with Flint and Gibson made easier the volumes he borrowed from Major Stuart’s law library.
JOSEPH DUNCAN, GOVERNOR OF ILLINOIS DURING LINCOLN’S FIRST TERM IN THE LEGISLATURE.
Joseph Duncan, Governor of Illinois from 1834 to 1838, was born in Kentucky in 1794. The son of an officer of the regular army, he at nineteen became a soldier in the war of 1812, and did gallant service. He removed to Illinois in 1818, and soon became prominent in the State, serving as a major-general of militia, a State Senator, and from 1826 to 1834 as a member of Congress, resigning from Congress to take the office of Governor. He was at first a Democrat, but afterwards became a Whig. He was a man of the highest character and public spirit. He died in 1844.
Lincoln had a mental trait which explains his rapid growth in mastering subjects—seeing clearly was essential to him. He was unable to put a question aside until he understood it. It pursued him, irritated him, until solved. Even in his Gentryville days his comrades noted that he was constantly searching for reasons and that he “explained so clearly.” This characteristic became stronger with years. He was unwilling to pronounce himself on any subject until he understood it, and he could not let it alone until he had reached a conclusion which satisfied him.
This seeing clearly became a splendid force in Lincoln; because when he once had reached a conclusion he had the honesty of soul to suit his actions to it. No consideration could induce him to abandon the course his reason told him was logical. Not that he was obstinate, and having taken a position, would not change it if he saw on further study that he was wrong. In his first circular to the people of Sangamon County is this characteristic passage: “Upon the subjects I have treated, I have spoken as I thought. I may be wrong in any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.”
DR. FRANCIS REGNIER.
From a painting owned by his daughter, Mrs. N. W. Branson, Petersburg, Illinois. Dr. Regnier was one of the New Salem physicians. He lived in the place until most of its inhabitants had deserted it, and then removed to Petersburg. He was for many years a leading citizen in the community. He died in 1858.
Joined to these strong mental and moral qualities was that power of immediate action which so often explains why one man succeeds in life while another of equal intelligence and uprightness fails. As soon as Lincoln saw a thing to do he did it. He wants to know; here is a book—it may be a biography, a volume of dry statutes, a collection of verse; no matter, he reads and ponders it until he has absorbed all it has for him. He is eager to see the world; a man offers him a position as a “hand” on a Mississippi flatboat; he takes it without a moment’s hesitation over the toil and exposure it demands. John Calhoun is willing to make him a deputy surveyor; he knows nothing of the science; in six weeks he has learned enough to begin his labors. Sangamon County must have representatives; why not he? And his circular goes out. Ambition alone will not explain this power of instantaneous action. It comes largely from that active imagination which, when a new relation or position opens, seizes on all its possibilities and from them creates a situation so real that one enters with confidence upon what seems to the unimaginative the rashest undertaking. Lincoln saw the possibilities in things, and immediately appropriated them.
But the position he filled in Sangamon County in 1835 was not all due to these qualities; much was due to his personal charm. By all accounts he was big, awkward, ill-clad, shy; yet his sterling honor, his unselfish nature, his heart of the true gentleman, inspired respect and confidence. Men might laugh at his first appearance, but they were not long in recognizing the real superiority of his nature.
GRAVE OF ANN RUTLEDGE IN OAKLAND CEMETERY.
From a photograph made for this work by C. S. McCullough, Petersburg, Illinois, in September, 1895. On the 15th of May, 1890, the remains of Ann Rutledge were removed from the long-neglected grave in the Concord graveyard to a new and picturesque burying-ground a mile southwest of Petersburg, called Oakland cemetery. The old grave, though marked by no stone, was easily identified from the fact that Ann was buried by the side of her younger brother, David, who died in 1842, upon the threshold of what promised to be a brilliant career as a lawyer. The removal was made by Samuel Montgomery, a prominent business man of Petersburg. He was accompanied to the grave by James McGrady Rutledge and a few others, who located the grave beyond a doubt. In the new cemetery, the grave occupies a place somewhat apart from others. A young maple tree is growing beside it, and it is marked by an unpolished granite stone bearing the simple inscription, “Ann Rutledge.”
Such was Abraham Lincoln at twenty-six, when the tragic death of Ann Rutledge made all that he had attained, all that he had planned, seem fruitless and empty. He was too sincere and just, too brave a man, to allow a great sorrow permanently to interfere with his activities. He rallied his forces and returned to his law, his surveying, his politics. He brought to his work a new power, that insight and patience which only a great sorrow can give.