Mrs. Wallace thinks "Mr. Lincoln was a domestic man by nature." He was not fond of other people's children, but was extremely fond of his own: he was patient, indulgent, and generous with them to a fault. On Sundays he often took those that were large enough, and walked with them into the country, and, giving himself up entirely to them, rambled through the green fields or the cool woods, amusing and instructing them for a whole day at a time. His method of reading is thus quaintly described. "He would read, generally aloud (couldn't read otherwise),—would read with great warmth, all funny or humorous things; read Shakspeare that way. He was a sad man, an abstracted man. He would lean back, his head against the top of a rocking-chair; sit abstracted that way for minutes,—twenty, thirty minutes,—and all at once would burst out into a joke."
Mrs. Col. Chapman, daughter of Dennis Hanks, and therefore a relative of Mr. Lincoln, made him a long visit previous to her marriage. "You ask me," says she, "how Mr. Lincoln acted at home. I can say, and that truly, he was all that a husband, father, and neighbor should be,—kind and affectionate to his wife and child ('Bob' being the only one they had when I was with them), and very pleasant to all around him. Never did I hear him utter an unkind word. For instance: one day he undertook to correct his child, and his wife was determined that he should not, and attempted to take it from him; but in this she failed. She then tried tongue-lashing, but met with the same fate; for Mr. Lincoln corrected his child as a father ought to do, in the face of his wife's anger, and that, too, without even changing his countenance or making any reply to his wife.
"His favorite way of reading, when at home, was lying down on the floor. I fancy I see him now, lying full-length in the hall of his old house reading. When not engaged reading law-books, he would read literary works, and was very fond of reading poetry, and often, when he would be, or appear to be, in deep study, commence and repeat aloud some piece that he had taken a fancy to, such as the one you already have in print, and 'The Burial of Sir John Moore,' and so on. He often told laughable jokes and stories when he thought we were looking gloomy."
Mr. Lincoln was not supremely happy in his domestic relations: the circumstances of his courtship and marriage alone made that impossible. His engagement to Miss Todd was one of the great misfortunes of his life and of hers. He realized the mistake too late; and when he was brought face to face with the lie he was about to enact, and the wrong he was about to do, both to himself and an innocent woman, he recoiled with horror and remorse. For weeks together, he was sick, deranged, and on the verge of suicide,—a heavy care to his friends, and a source of bitter mortification to the unfortunate lady, whose good fame depended, in a great part, upon his constancy. The wedding garments and the marriage feast were prepared, the very hour had come when the solemn ceremony was to be performed; and the groom failed to appear! He was no longer a free agent: he was restrained, carefully guarded, and soon after removed to a distant place, where the exciting causes of his disease would be less constant and active in their operation. He recovered slowly, and at length returned to Springfield. He spoke out his feelings frankly and truly to the one person most interested in them. But he had been, from the beginning, except in the case of Ann Rutledge, singularly inconstant and unstable in his relations with the few refined and cultivated women who had been the objects of his attention. He loved Miss Rutledge passionately, and the next year importuned Miss Owens to be his wife. Failing in his suit, he wrote an unfeeling letter about her, apparently with no earthly object but to display his levity and make them both ridiculous. He courted Miss Todd, and at the moment of success fell in love with her relative, and, between the two, went crazy, and thought of ending all his woes with a razor or a pocket-knife. It is not impossible that the feelings of such a man might have undergone another and more sudden change. Perhaps they did. At all events, he was conscientious and honorable and just. There was but one way of repairing the injury he had done Miss Todd, and he adopted it. They were married; but they understood each other, and suffered the inevitable consequences, as other people do under similar circumstances. But such troubles seldom fail to find a tongue; and it is not strange, that, in this case, neighbors and friends, and ultimately the whole country, came to know the state of things in that house. Mr. Lincoln scarcely attempted to conceal it, but talked of it with little or no reserve to his wife's relatives, as well as his own friends. Yet the gentleness and patience with which he bore this affliction from day to day, and from year to year, was enough to move the shade of Socrates. It touched his acquaintances deeply, and they gave it the widest publicity. They made no pause to inquire, to investigate, and to apportion the blame between the parties, according to their deserts. Almost ever since Mr. Lincoln's death, a portion of the press has never tired of heaping brutal reproaches upon his wife and widow; whilst a certain class of his friends thought they were honoring his memory by multiplying outrages and indignities upon her, at the very moment when she was broken by want and sorrow, defamed, defenceless, in the hands of thieves, and at the mercy of spies. If ever a woman grievously expiated an offence not her own, this woman did. In the Herndon manuscripts, there is a mass of particulars under this head; but Mr. Herndon sums them all up in a single sentence, in a letter to one of Mr. Lincoln's biographers: "All that I know ennobles both."
It would be very difficult to recite all the causes of Mr. Lincoln's melancholy disposition. That it was partly owing to physical causes there can be no doubt. Mr. Stuart says, that in some respects he was totally unlike other people, and was, in fact, a "mystery." Blue-pills were the medicinal remedy which he affected most. But whatever the history or the cause,—whether physical reasons, the absence of domestic concord, a series of painful recollections of his mother, of his father and master, of early sorrows, blows, and hardships, of Ann Rutledge and fruitless hopes, or all these combined, Mr. Lincoln was the saddest and gloomiest man of his time. "I do not think that he knew what happiness was for twenty years," says Mr. Herndon. "Terrible" is the word which all his friends use to describe him in the black mood. "It was terrible! It was terrible!" says one and another.
His mind was filled with gloomy forebodings and strong apprehensions of impending evil, mingled with extravagant visions of personal grandeur and power. His imagination painted a scene just beyond the veil of the immediate future, gilded with glory yet tarnished with blood. It was his "destiny,"—splendid but dreadful, fascinating but terrible. His case bore little resemblance to those of religious enthusiasts like Bunyan, Cowper, and others. His was more like the delusion of the fatalist, conscious of his star. At all events, he never doubted for a moment but that he was formed for "some great or miserable end." He talked about it frequently and sometimes calmly. Mr. Herndon remembers many of these conversations in their office at Springfield, and in their rides around the circuit. Mr. Lincoln said the impression had grown in him "all his life;" but Mr. Herndon thinks it was about 1840 that it took the character of a "religious conviction." He had then suffered much, and, considering his opportunities, achieved great things. He was already a leader among men, and a most brilliant career had been promised him by the prophetic enthusiasm of many friends. Thus encouraged and stimulated, and feeling himself growing gradually stronger and stronger, in the estimation of "the plain people," whose voice was more potent than all the Warwicks, his ambition painted the rainbow of glory in the sky, while his morbid melancholy supplied the clouds that were to overcast and obliterate it with the wrath and ruin of the tempest. To him it was fate, and there was no escape or defence. The presentiment never deserted him: it was as clear, as perfect, as certain, as any image conveyed by the senses. He had now entertained it so long, that it was as much a part of his nature as the consciousness of identity. All doubts had faded away, and he submitted humbly to a power which he could neither comprehend nor resist. He was to fall,—fall from a lofty place, and in the performance of a great work. The star under which he was born was at once brilliant and malignant: the horoscope was cast, fixed, irreversible; and he had no more power to alter or defeat it in the minutest particular than he had to reverse the law of gravitation.
After the election, he conceived that he would not "last" through his term of office, but had at length reached the point where the sacrifice would take place. All precautions against assassination he considered worse than useless. "If they want to kill me," said he, "there is nothing to prevent." He complained to Mr. Gillespie of the small body-guard which his counsellors had forced upon him, insisting that they were a needless encumbrance. When Mr. Gillespie urged the ease and impunity with which he might be killed, and the value of his life to the country, he said, "What is the use of putting up the gap when the fence is down all around?"
"It was just after my election in 1860," said Mr. Lincoln to his secretary, John Hay, "when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day, and there had been a great 'hurrah boys!' so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself upon a lounge in my chamber.