How eloquent that battered, faded, yellow-leafed little old grammar is of the ambitions and attainments that set these two apart from the unrecorded lives in that backwoods community! Ann was betrothed, and her content and trust in her lover were something beautiful to see, but McNeill’s figure is vague. There is no description of him, few facts about him are remembered, except that he had prospered and won Ann Rutledge’s love. In the stories of the region, that have now taken on the legendary haze of cherished romance, Lincoln is the hero, long before he appears in the character of chivalrous suitor.
Oh, those long, intimate evenings! Twenty people were in the big, fire-lit family room, perhaps, storm outside and flames roaring merrily in the chimney. But they two, with a special candle on Ann’s little sewing-table, were outside the circle of murmurous talk and laughter, the pale gold head and the raven one close together over the hard-and-fast rules of the text book! Lincoln loved her then, unconsciously, must have loved her from the first, but he was incapable of a dishonourable thought, and Ann’s heart was all McNeill’s.
After Mr. Rutledge sold the mill and tavern in 1833 and moved to a farm, Lincoln lived much of the time at Squire Bowling Green’s, on a farm a half-mile north of the town, under the brow of the bluff. The jovial squire was a justice of the peace, a sort of local Solomon whose decisions were based on common sense and essential justice, rather than on the law or evidence. He had a copy of the Statutes of Illinois that Lincoln was going through. William G. Greene was there, too, much of the time, although he was in no way related to the Squire. This most intimate friend of Lincoln’s among the young men of New Salem was preparing to go to college. Aunt Nancy Green adored Lincoln, and said he paid his board twice over in human kindness and pure fun. Here he made his home most of the time until he went away to Springfield to practise law. It was while he was living at Squire Green’s, in the spring of 1834, that John McNeill suddenly sold his store and left for his old home, indefinitely “back East.” The event turned all Lincoln’s current of thought and purposes into new and deeper channels.
The reason McNeill gave was that he wanted to bring his old father and mother out West to care for them on his farm. When he returned he and Ann were to be married. It was a long journey, not without its perils—first across to Vincennes, Indiana, down the Wabash and up the Ohio to Pittsburg, then over the Alleghanies into New York State. It would be weeks between letters, a year at least before he could return. Many said openly that a man who was worth twelve thousand dollars, like John McNeill, could have his parents brought to him. What Ann thought no one ever knew. If she was hurt, she hid it in her loyal heart, not cherishing it against him, and James Rutledge did not object. Of a race in which honour and chivalry were traditions, it could not have occurred to him that any man lived so base as to break faith with his beloved daughter.
So Ann packed John McNeill’s saddle-bags, putting in every little comfort her loving heart could think of or her industrious fingers contrive, stepped up on the toe of her lover’s riding-boot to kiss him good-bye, then bade him God-speed and watched him ride away, not knowing that he was riding out of her life.
From a fresco painting in the State House, Springfield, Illinois.
Main Street of New Salem, Illinois.
Where Lincoln was postmaster, store clerk, politician and law-student.
Lincoln was the New Salem postmaster. In his journeys about the country—surveying, working in the harvest field, electioneering—he carried the mail of such farms as he passed in his hat or his saddle-bags. The pioneer postmaster was the confidant of those he served, in the absence of ministers and doctors. People read to him the letters they received, complained of neglect, demanded of him sympathy in their private joys and sorrows. And so it was he came close to the grief of Ann Rutledge.