As may have been foreseen, Mary Todd and he had met again on a friendly footing. A managing lady is credited with having brought about a meeting between them, but evidently she did not do it till Lincoln was at least getting desirous to be managed. He was much absorbed at this time in law business, to which since his breakdown he had applied himself more seriously. It was at this period too that his notable address on temperance was given. Soon after his meetings with Miss Todd began again he involved himself in a complication of a different kind. He had written, partly, it seems, for the young lady's amusement, some innocent if uninteresting political skits relating to some question about taxes. This brought on him an unexpected challenge from a fiery but diminutive revenue official, one Colonel Shields, a prominent Democratic politician. Lincoln availed himself of the right of the challenged to impose ridiculous conditions of combat, partly no doubt in fun, but with the sensible object also of making sure that he could disarm his antagonist with no risk of harm to the little man. The tangled controversy which ensued as to how and by whose fault the duel eventually fell through has nothing in it now, but the whole undignified business seems to have given Lincoln lasting chagrin, and worried him greatly at a time when it would have been well that he should be cheerful. At last on November 4, 1842, when Lincoln was nearly thirty-three, he was safely married. The wedding, held, according to the prevailing custom, in a private house, was an important function, for it was the first Episcopalian wedding that good society in Springfield had witnessed. Malicious fortune brought in a ludicrous incident at the last moment, for when in the lawyerlike verbiage of the then American Prayer-Book the bridegroom said, "With this ring I thee endow with all my goods, chattels, lands and tenements," old Judge Brown of the Illinois Supreme Court, who had never heard the like, impatiently broke in, "God Almighty, Lincoln! The statute fixes all that."

There is more than the conventional reason for apology for pressing the subject a little further. Nothing very illuminating can be said as to the course of Lincoln's married life, but much has already been made public about it which, though it cannot be taken as reaching to the heart of the matter, is not properly to be dismissed as mere gossip. Mrs. Lincoln, it is clear, had a high temper—the fact that, poor woman! after her husband had been murdered by her side, she developed clear symptoms of insanity, may or may not, for all we are entitled to know, be relevant in this regard. She was much younger than her husband, and had gone through a cruel experience for him. Moreover, she had proper ambitions and was accustomed to proper conventional refinements; so her husband's exterior roughness tried her sorely, not the less we may be sure because of her real pride in him. Wife and tailor combined could not, with any amount of money, have dressed him well. Once, though they kept a servant then, Lincoln thought it friendly to open the door himself in his shirt sleeves when two most elegant ladies came to call. On such occasions, and doubtless on other occasions of less provocation, Mrs. Lincoln's high temper was let loose. It seems pretty certain, too, that he met her with mere forbearance, sad patience, and avoidance of conflict. His fellow lawyers came to notice that he stayed away from home on circuit when all the rest of them could go home for a day or two. Fifteen years after his wedding he himself confessed to his trouble, not disloyally, but in a rather moving remonstrance with some one who had felt intolerably provoked by Mrs. Lincoln. There are slight indications that occasions of difficulty and pain to Lincoln happened up to the end of his life. On the other hand, there are slight indications that common love for their children helped to make the two happier, and there are no indications at all of any approach to a serious quarrel. All that is told us may be perfectly true and not by any means have justified the pity that some of Lincoln's friends were ready to feel for him. It is difficult to avoid suspecting that Lincoln's wife did not duly like his partner and biographer, Mr. Herndon, who felt it his duty to record so many painful facts and his own possibly too painful impression from them. On the other side, Mr. Herndon makes it clear that in some respects Mrs. Lincoln was an admirable wife for her husband. She faced the difficulties of their poverty with spirit and resolution. Testimony from other sources to her graceful hospitality abounds. More than this, from the very first she believed in his powers. It seems she had the discernment to know, when few others can have done so, how far greater he was than his rival Douglas. It was Herndon's belief, in days when he and Mrs. Lincoln were the two persons who saw most of him, that she sustained his just ambition, and that at the most critical moment of his personal career she had the courage to make him refuse an attractive appointment which must have ruined it. The worst that we are told with any certainty amounts to this, that like the very happily married writer of "Virginibus Puerisque," Lincoln discovered that marriage is "a field of battle and not a bed of roses"—a battle in which we are forced to suspect that he did not play his full part.

We should perhaps be right in associating his curious record, of right and high regard for women and inefficiency where a particular woman's happiness depended on him, with the belief in Woman Suffrage, which he early adopted and probably retained. Be that as it may, this part of his story points to something which runs through his whole character, something which perhaps may be expressed by saying that the natural bias of his qualities was towards the negative side. We hear, no doubt, of occasions when his vigour was instant and terrible—like that of Hamlet on the ship for England; but these were occasions when the right or the necessity of the case was obvious. We have seen him also firm and absolutely independent where his conviction had already been thought out. Where there was room for further reflection, for patiently waiting on events, or for taking counsel of wise friends, manly decision had not come easily to him. He had let a third person almost engage him to Miss Owens. Once in this relation to her, he had let it be the woman's part and not the man's to have decision enough for the two. Speed had to tell him that he must face Miss Todd and speak to her, and Speed again had to make clear to him what the effect of his speaking had been. In time he decided what he thought his own feelings were, but it was by inference from the feelings of Speed. Lastly, it seems, the troubles of his married life were met by mere patience and avoidance. All this, of course, concerned a side of life's affairs in regard to which his mind had suffered painful shocks; but it shows the direction of his possible weakness and his possible strength in other things. It falls in with a trait which he himself noted in one of the letters to Speed: "I have no doubt," he writes, "it is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realise." All such men have to go through deep waters; but they do not necessarily miss either success or happiness in the end. Lincoln's life may be said to have tested him by the test which Mr. Kipling states in his lines about Washington:—

"If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim."

He was to prove that he could do this; it is for the following pages to show in how high a degree. Meanwhile one thing should already be clear about him. No shrewd judge of men could read his letters to Speed with care and not feel that, whatever mistakes this man might commit, fundamentally he was worthy of entire trust. That, as a matter of fact, is what, to the end of his life, Speed and all the men who knew him and an ever widening circle of men who had to judge by more casual impressions did feel about Lincoln. Whatever was questionable in his private or public acts, his own explanation, if he happened to give one, would be taken by them as the full and naked truth, and, if there was no known explanation, it remained to them an irrebuttable presumption that his main intention was right.

CHAPTER IV

LINCOLN IN CONGRESS AND IN RETIREMENT

1. The Mexican War and Lincoln's Work in Congress.

Lincoln had ceased before his marriage to sit in the Illinois Legislature. He had won sufficient standing for his ambition to aim higher; a former law partner of his was now in Congress, and he wished to follow. But he had to submit to a few years' delay of which the story is curious and honourable. His rivals for the representation of his own constituency were two fellow Whigs, Baker and Hardin, both of whom afterwards bore distinguished parts in the Mexican war and with both of whom he was friendly. Somewhat to his disgust at a party gathering in his own county in 1843, Baker was preferred to him. A letter of his gives a shrewd account of the manoeuvres among members of various Churches which brought this about; it is curiously careful not to overstate the effect of these influences and characteristically denies that Baker had part in them. To make the thing harder, he was sent from this meeting to a convention, for the whole constituency, with which the nomination lay, and his duty, of course, was to work for Baker. Here it became obvious that Hardin would be chosen; nothing could be done for Baker at that time, but Lincoln, being against his will there in Baker's interests, took an opportunity in the bargaining that took place to advance Baker's claim, to the detriment of his own, to be Hardin's successor two years later.

By some perverse accident notes about details of party management fill a disproportionate space among those letters of Lincoln's which have been preserved, but these reveal that, with all his business-like attention to the affairs of his very proper ambition, he was able throughout to illuminate dull matters of this order with action of singular disinterestedness. After being a second time postponed, no doubt to the advantage of his law business, he took his seat in the House of Representatives at Washington for two years in the spring of 1847. Two short sessions can hardly suffice for mastering the very complicated business of that body. He made hardly any mark. He probably learned much and was able to study at leisure the characters of his brother politicians. He earned the valuable esteem of some, and seems to have passed as a very pleasant, honest, plain specimen of the rough West. Like others of the younger Congressmen, he had the privilege of breakfasting with Webster. His brief career in the House seems to have disappointed him, and it certainly dissatisfied his constituents. The part that he played may impress us more favourably than it did them, but, slight as it was, it requires a historical explanation.