Abraham Lincoln: a History — Volume 01

by John G. Nicolay; John Hay

This letter has been published and severely criticised as showing a lack of gentlemanlike feeling. But those who take this view forget that he was writing to an intimate friend of a matter which had greatly occupied his own mind for a year; that he mentioned no names, and that he threw such an air of humorous unreality about the whole story that the person who received it never dreamed that it recorded an actual occurrence until twenty-five years afterwards, when, having been asked to furnish it to a biographer, she was warned against doing so by the President himself, who said there was too much truth in it for print. The only significance the episode possesses is in showing this almost abnormal development of conscience in the young man who was perfectly ready to enter into a marriage which he dreaded simply because he thought he had given a young woman reason to think that he had such intentions. While we admit that this would have been an irremediable error, we cannot but wonder at the nobleness of the character to which it was possible.

In this vastly more serious matter, which was, we may say at once, the crucial ordeal of his life, the same invincible truthfulness, the same innate goodness, the same horror of doing a wrong, are combined with an exquisite sensibility and a capacity for suffering which mark him as a man "picked out among ten thousand." His habit of relentless self-searching reveals to him a state of feeling which strikes him with dismay; his simple and inflexible veracity communicates his trouble and his misery to the woman whom he loves; his freedom, when he has gained it, yields him nothing but an agony of remorse and humiliation. He could not shake off his pain, like men of cooler heads and shallower hearts. It took fast hold of him and dragged him into awful depths of darkness and torture. The letter to Stuart, which we have given, shows him emerging from the blackest period of that time of gloom. Immediately after this, he accompanied his close friend and confidant, Joshua F. Speed, to Kentucky, where, in a way so singular that no writer of fiction would dare to employ the incident, he became almost cured of his melancholy, and came back to Illinois and his work again.

Mr. Speed was a Kentuckian, carrying on a general mercantile business in Springfield—a brother of the distinguished lawyer, James Speed, of Louisville, who afterwards became Attorney-General of the United States. He was one of those men who seem to have to a greater extent than others the genius of friendship, the Pythias, the Pylades, the Horatios of the world. It is hardly too much to say that he was the only—as he was certainly the last—intimate friend that Lincoln ever had. He was his closest companion in Springfield, and in the evil days when the letter to Stuart was written he took him with brotherly love and authority under his special care. He closed up his affairs in Springfield, and went with Lincoln to Kentucky, and, introducing him to his own cordial and hospitable family circle, strove to soothe his perturbed spirit by every means which unaffected friendliness could suggest. That Lincoln found much comfort and edification in that genial companionship is shown by the fact that after he became President he sent to Mr. Speed's mother a photograph of himself, inscribed, "For Mrs. Lucy G. Speed, from whose pious hand I accepted the present of an Oxford Bible twenty years ago."

But the principal means by which the current of his thoughts was changed was never dreamed of by himself or by his friend when they left Illinois. During this visit Speed himself fell in love, and became engaged to be married; and either by a singular chance or because the maladies of the soul may be propagated by constant association, the feeling of despairing melancholy, which he had found so morbid and so distressing an affliction in another, took possession of himself, and threw him into the same slough of despondency from which he had been laboring to rescue Lincoln. Between friends so intimate there were no concealments, and from the moment Lincoln found his services as nurse and consoler needed, the violence of his own trouble seemed to diminish. The two young men were in Springfield together in the autumn, and Lincoln seems by that time to have laid aside his own peculiar besetments, in order to minister to his friend. They knew the inmost thoughts of each other's hearts and each relied upon the honesty and loyalty of the other to an extent rare among men. When Speed returned to Kentucky, to a happiness which awaited him there, so bright that it dazzled and blinded his moral vision, Lincoln continued his counsels and encouragements in letters which are remarkable for their tenderness and delicacy of thought and expression. Like another poet, he looked into his own heart and wrote. His own deeper nature had suffered from these same fantastic sorrows and terrors; of his own grief he made a medicine for his comrade.

While Speed was still with him, he wrote a long letter, which he put into his hands at parting, full of wise and affectionate reasonings, to be read when he should feel the need of it. He predicts for him a period of nervous depression—first, because he will be "exposed to bad weather on his journey, and, secondly, because of the absence of all business and conversation of friends which might divert his mind and give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare, and turn it to the bitterness of death." The third cause, he says, "is the rapid and near approach of that crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings concentrate." If in spite of all these circumstances he should escape without a "twinge of the soul," his friend will be most happily deceived; but, he continues, "if you shall, as I expect you will at some time, be agonized and distressed, let me, who have some reason to speak with judgment on the subject, beseech you to ascribe it to the causes I have mentioned, and not to some false and ruinous suggestion of the devil." This forms the prelude to an ingenious and affectionate argument in which he labors to convince Speed of the loveliness of his betrothed and of the integrity of his own heart; a strange task, one would say, to undertake in behalf of a young and ardent lover. But the two men understood each other, and the service thus rendered was gratefully received and remembered by Speed all his life.

Lincoln wrote again on the 3d of February, 1842, congratulating Speed upon a recent severe illness of his destined bride, for the reason that "your present distress and anxiety about her health must forever banish those horrid doubts which you feel as to the truth of your affection for her." As the period of Speed's marriage drew near, Lincoln's letters betray the most intense anxiety. He cannot wait to hear the news from his friend, but writes to him about the time of the wedding, admitting that he is writing in the dark, that words from a bachelor may be worthless to a Benedick, but still unable to keep silence. He hopes he is happy with his wife, "but should I be mistaken in this, should excessive pleasure still be accompanied with a painful counterpart at times, still let me urge you, as I have ever done, to remember in the depth and even agony of despondency, that very shortly you are to feel well again." Further on he says: "If you went through the ceremony calmly, or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in any present, you are safe beyond question," seeking by every device of subtle affection to lift up the heart of his friend.

With a solicitude apparently greater than that of the nervous bridegroom, he awaited the announcement of the marriage, and when it came he wrote (February 25): "I opened the letter with intense anxiety and trepidation; so much that, although it turned out better than I expected, I have hardly yet, at the distance of ten hours, become calm. I tell you, Speed, our forebodings, for which you and I are peculiar, are all the worst sort of nonsense. I fancied from the time I received your letter of Saturday that the one of "Wednesday was never to come," and yet it did come, and, what is more, it is perfectly clear, both from its tone and handwriting, that … you had obviously improved at the very time I had so much fancied you would have grown worse. You say that something indescribably horrible and alarming still haunts you. You will not say that three months from now, I will venture." The letter goes on in the same train of sympathetic cheer, but there is one phrase which strikes the keynote of all lives whose ideals are too high for fulfillment: "It is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize."

But before long a letter came from Speed, who had settled with his black-eyed Kentucky wife upon a well-stocked plantation, disclaiming any further fellowship of misery and announcing the beginnings of that life of uneventful happiness which he led ever after. His peace of mind has become a matter of course; he dismisses the subject in a line, but dilates, with a new planter's rapture, upon the beauties and attractions of his farm. Lincoln frankly answers that he cares nothing about his farm. "I can only say that I am glad you are satisfied and pleased with it. But on that other subject, to me of the most intense interest whether in joy or sorrow, I never had the power to withhold my sympathy from you. It cannot be told how it now thrills me with joy to hear you say you are 'far happier than you ever expected to be.'.. I am not going beyond the truth when I tell you that the short space it took me to read your last letter gave me more pleasure than the total sum of all I have enjoyed since the fatal 1st of January, 1841. Since then it seems to me I should have been entirely happy, but for the never-absent idea that there is one still unhappy whom I have contributed to make so. That still kills my soul. I cannot but reproach myself for even wishing myself to be happy while she is otherwise."

During the summer of 1842 the letters of the friends still discuss, with waning intensity, however, their respective affairs of the heart. Speed, in the ease and happiness of his home, thanks Lincoln for his important part in his welfare, and gives him sage counsel for himself. Lincoln replies (July 4, 1842): "I could not have done less than I did. I always was superstitious; I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing your Fanny and you together, which union I have no doubt he foreordained. Whatever he designs, he will do for me yet." A better name than "superstition" might properly be applied to this frame of mind. He acknowledges Speed's kindly advice, but says: "Before I resolve to do the one thing or the other, I must gain my confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made. In that ability you know I once prided myself, as the only or chief gem of my character; that gem I lost, how and where you know too well. I have not yet regained it; and until I do I cannot trust myself in any matter of much importance. I believe now, that had you understood my case at the time as well as I understood yours afterwards, by the aid you would have given me I should have sailed through clear; but that does not afford me confidence to begin that, or the like of that, again." Still, he was nearing the end of his doubts and self-torturing sophistry. A last glimpse of his imperious curiosity, kept alive by saucy hopes and fears, is seen in his letter to Speed of the 5th of October. He ventures, with a genuine timidity, to ask a question which we may believe has not often been asked by one civilized man of another, with the hope of a candid answer, since marriages were celebrated with ring and book. "I want to ask you a close question— Are you now, in feeling as well as judgment, glad you are married as you are? From anybody but me this would be an impudent question, not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me. Please answer it quickly, as I am impatient to know." It is probable that Mr. Speed replied promptly in the way in which such questions must almost of necessity be answered. On the 4th of November, 1842, a marriage license was issued to Lincoln, and on the same day he was married to Miss Mary Todd, the ceremony being performed by the Rev. Charles Dresser. Four sons were the issue of this marriage: Robert Todd, born August 1, 1843; Edward Baker, March 10, 1846; William Wallace, December 21, 1850; Thomas, April 4, 1853. Of these only the eldest lived to maturity.

In this way Abraham Lincoln met and passed through one of the most important crises of his life. There was so much of idiosyncrasy in it that it has been, and will continue to be for years to come, the occasion of endless gossip in Sangamon County and elsewhere. Because it was not precisely like the experience of other people, who are married and given in marriage every day without any ado, a dozen conflicting stories have grown up, more or less false and injurious to both contracting parties. But it may not be fanciful to suppose that characters like that of Lincoln, elected for great conflicts and trials, are fashioned by different processes from those of ordinary men, and pass their stated ordeals in a different way. By circumstances which seem commonplace enough to commonplace people, he was thrown for more than a year into a sea of perplexities and sufferings beyond the reach of the common run of souls.