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.”