“I was a poor boy, hired on a flatboat at eight dollars a month, and had only one pair of breeches to my back, and they were buckskin. Now, if you know the nature of buckskin when wet, and dried by the sun, it will shrink; and my breeches kept shrinking until they left several inches of my legs bare between the tops of my socks and the lower part of my breeches; and whilst I was growing taller, they were becoming shorter, and so much tighter that they left a blue streak around my legs that can be seen to this day. If you call this aristocracy I plead guilty to the charge.”
He could outwrestle, outrun and out-talk any man in his section. He was recognized as the most skillful and hard-headed politician in his State. His courage and shrewdness in ordinary affairs were notable, and his honesty and earnestness, sweetened by a sure sense of humor, lent distinction and dignity to a ridiculous figure and sometimes theatrical manner of address.
Yet there was a strange, gloomy self-distrust in Lincoln which showed itself in his love affairs; an imaginative melancholy that wrung his heart and tortured his mind with baseless, shadowy misgivings. He engaged himself to marry Mary Todd and, doubting his own love, broke the engagement. It has been even charged that he deserted her when she was attired for the wedding. Lincoln described his parting to Mr. Speed:
“When I told Mary I did not love her,” he said, “she burst into tears and almost springing from her chair and wringing her hands as if in agony, said something about the deceiver being himself deceived. To tell you the truth, Speed, it was too much for me. I found the tears trickling down my own cheeks. I caught her in my arms and kissed her.”
So great was Lincoln’s agony and depression after this that he was watched by his friends lest he might commit suicide. “I am now the most miserable man living,” he wrote to Major Stuart. “If what I feel were distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell; I awfully forbode I shall not.”
The shadow of threatened insanity passed, and within two years Mary Todd became his wife. It was a singular jest of fate that he should have won her away from Stephen A. Douglas, who was yet to be his rival in the great anti-slavery struggle that was ended only by millions of armed men.
Poor heart-torn, shrewd, foolish, humble, sublime Lincoln!
Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s great rival
Then there was the duel with James Shields. That hot-headed Irishman had challenged Lincoln to fight because the tall politician had written certain anonymous letters for the Springfield Journal. Lincoln accepted and named “cavalry broadswords of the largest size.” The duelists went to the place appointed by the river, and sat on logs on opposite sides of the field. Here is a description of the scene by an onlooker, from Miss Tarbell’s “Life of Abraham Lincoln”: