"I shall do no such thing," Lincoln replied with deep feeling. "It is a poor return, at best, for all the good woman's devotion to me, and there is not going to be any half-way business about it."
The dutiful stepson did as he planned. Some years later he was obliged to write to John Johnston, his stepmother's son, appealing to him not to try to induce his mother to sell the land lest the old woman should lose the support he had provided for her in her declining years.
IN LOVE WITH A BELLE FROM LEXINGTON
Lincoln's popularity in Sangamon County, always increasing, was greatly strengthened by the part he had taken in the removal of the capital to Springfield, which was the county seat as well as the State capital. So he was returned to the Legislature, now held in Springfield, time after time, without further effort on his part. He was looked upon as a young man with a great future. While he was in the office with Major Stuart that gentleman's cousin, Miss Mary Todd, a witty, accomplished young lady from Lexington, Kentucky, came to Springfield to visit her sister, wife of Ninian W. Edwards, one of the "Long Nine" in the State Assembly.
Miss Todd was brilliant and gay, a society girl—in every way the opposite of Mr. Lincoln—and he was charmed with everything she said and did. Judge Douglas was one of her numerous admirers, and it is said that the Louisville belle was so flattered by his attentions that she was in doubt, for a time, which suitor to accept. She was an ambitious young woman, having boasted from girlhood that she would one day be mistress of the White House.
To all appearances Douglas was the more likely to fulfill Miss Todd's high ambition. He was a society man, witty in conversation, popular with women as well as with men, and had been to Congress, so he had a national reputation, while Lincoln's was only local, or at most confined to Sangamon County and the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Illinois.
But Mr. Douglas was already addicted to drink, and Miss Todd saw doubtless that he could not go on long at the rapid pace he was keeping up. It is often said that she was in favor of slavery, as some of her relatives who owned slaves, years later, entered the Confederate ranks to fight against the Union. But the remarkable fact that she finally chose Lincoln shows that her sympathies were against slavery, and she thus cut herself off from several members of her own family. With a woman's intuition she saw the true worth of Abraham Lincoln, and before long they were understood to be engaged.
But the young lawyer, after his recent experience with Mary Owens, distrusted his ability to make any woman happy—much less the belle from Louisville, so brilliant, vivacious, well educated and exacting. He seemed to grow morbidly conscious of his shortcomings, and she was high-strung. A misunderstanding arose, and, between such exceptional natures, "the course of true love never did run smooth."
Their engagement, if they were actually betrothed, was broken, and the lawyer-lover was plunged in deep melancholy. He wrote long, morbid letters to his friend Speed, who had returned to Kentucky, and had recently married there. Lincoln even went to Louisville to visit the Speeds, hoping that the change of scene and friendly sympathies and counsel would revive his health and spirits.
In one of his letters Lincoln bemoaned his sad fate and referred to "the fatal 1st of January," probably the date when his engagement or "the understanding" with Mary Todd was broken. From this expression, one of Lincoln's biographers elaborated a damaging fiction, stating that Lincoln and his affianced were to have been married that day, that the wedding supper was ready, that the bride was all dressed for the ceremony, the guests assembled—but the melancholy bridegroom failed to come to his own wedding!