Part 5 (1/2)
He ”was not crazy,” maintained Elizabeth Abell. He was simply very sad. ”Only people who are capable of loving strongly,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, ”can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them.”
Had Lincoln, like Chase, lived in a large city when Ann died, he might have concealed his grief behind closed doors. In the small community of New Salem, there was no place to hide-except perhaps the woods toward which he gravitated. Moreover, as he brooded over Ann's death, he could find no consolation in the prospect of a reunion in the hereafter. When his New Salem friend and neighbor Mrs. Samuel Hill asked him whether he believed in a future realm, he answered no. ”I'm afraid there isn't,” he replied sorrowfully. ”It isn't a pleasant thing to think that when we die that is the last of us.” Though later statements make reference to an omnipotent G.o.d or supreme power, there is no mention in any published doc.u.ment, the historian Robert Bruce observes-except in one ambiguous letter to his dying father-of any ”faith in life after death.” To the end of his life, he was haunted by the finality of death and the evanescence of earthly accomplishments.
Lincoln's inability to take refuge in the concept of a Christian heaven sets him apart from Chase and Bates. While Chase admitted that his ”heart was broken” when he buried his second wife, Eliza Smith, he was convinced that ”all is not dark. The cloud is fringed with light.” Unlike his first wife, Kitty, Eliza had died ”trusting in Jesus.” He could therefore picture her in heaven, waiting for him to join her in eternal companions.h.i.+p.
Sharing the faith that gave solace to Chase, Bates was certain when his nine-year-old daughter, Edwa, died that she had been called by G.o.d ”to a higher world & to higher enjoyment.” In the child's last hours, he related, she ”talked with calmness, and apparently without alarm, of her approaching death. She did not fear to die, still the only reason she gave for not wis.h.i.+ng to die, was that she would rather stay with her mother.”
Seward shared Lincoln's doubt that any posthumous reunion beckoned. When his wife and precious twenty-one-year-old daughter, f.a.n.n.y, died within sixteen months of each other, he was devastated. ”I ought to be able to rejoice that [f.a.n.n.y] was withdrawn from me to be reunited with [her mother] the pure and blessed spirit that formed her own,” he told a friend. ”But, unfortunately I am not spiritual enough to find support in these reflections.”
If Lincoln, like Seward, confronted the loss of loved ones without prospect of finding them in the afterlife to a.s.suage the loss, one begins to comprehend the weight of his sorrow when Ann died. Nonetheless, he completed his study of law and received his law license and the offer to become a partner with John Stuart, the friend whose law books he had borrowed.
IN APRIL 1837, twenty months after Ann Rutledge's death, Lincoln left New Salem for Springfield, Illinois, then a community of about fifteen hundred people. There he planned to embark upon what he termed his ”experiment” in law. With no place to stay and no money to buy provisions, he wandered into the general store in the town square. He asked the young proprietor, Joshua Speed, how much it would cost to buy ”the furniture for a single bed. The mattress, blankets, sheets, coverlid, and pillow.” Speed estimated the cost at seventeen dollars, which Lincoln agreed was ”perhaps cheap enough,” though he lacked the funds to cover that amount. He asked if Speed might advance him credit until Christmastime, when, if his venture with law worked out, he would pay in full. ”If I fail in this,” added Lincoln abjectly, ”I do not know that I can ever pay you.”
Speed surveyed the tall, discomfited figure before him. ”I never saw a sadder face,” he recalled thinking at the time. Though the two men had never met, Speed had heard Lincoln speak a year earlier and came away deeply impressed. Decades later, he could still recite Lincoln's concluding words. Turning to Lincoln, Speed said: ”You seem to be so much pained at contracting so small a debt, I think I can suggest a plan by which you can avoid the debt and at the same time attain your end. I have a large room with a double bed upstairs, which you are very welcome to share with me.” Lincoln reacted quickly to Speed's unexpected offer. Racing upstairs to deposit his bags in the loft, he came clattering down again, his face entirely transformed. ”Beaming with pleasure he exclaimed, 'Well, Speed, I am moved!'”
Five years younger than Lincoln, the handsome, blue-eyed Speed had been raised in a gracious mansion on his family's prosperous plantation, cultivated by more than seventy slaves. He had received an excellent education in the best Kentucky schools and at St. Joseph's College at Bards-town. While he could have remained at home, enjoying a life of ease, he determined to make his way west with the tide of his restless generation. Arriving in Springfield when he was twenty-one, he had invested in real estate and become the proprietor of the town's general store.
Lincoln and Speed shared the same room for nearly four years, sleeping in the same double bed. Over time, the two young men developed a close relations.h.i.+p, talking nightly of their hopes and their prospects, their mutual love of poetry and politics, their anxieties about women. They attended political meetings and forums together, went to dances and parties, relaxed with long rides in the countryside.
Emerging from a childhood and young adulthood marked by isolation and loneliness, Lincoln discovered in Joshua Speed a companion with whom he could share his inner life. They had similar dispositions, both possessing an ambitious impulse to improve themselves and rise in the world. No longer a boy but not yet an established adult, Lincoln ended years of emotional deprivation and intellectual solitude by building his first and deepest friends.h.i.+p with Speed. Openly acknowledging the strength of this attachment, the two pledged themselves to a lifelong bond of friends.h.i.+p. Those who knew Lincoln well pointed to Speed as his ”most intimate friend,” the only person to whom he ever disclosed his secret thoughts. ”You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting,” Lincoln a.s.sured Speed, ”that I will never cease, while I know how to do any thing.”
Some have suggested that there may have been a s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p between Lincoln and Speed. Their intimacy, however, like the relations.h.i.+p between Seward and Berdan and, as we shall see, between Chase and Stanton, is more an index to an era when close male friends.h.i.+ps, accompanied by open expressions of affection and pa.s.sion, were familiar and socially acceptable. Nor can sharing a bed be considered evidence of an erotic involvement. It was common practice in an era when private quarters were a rare luxury, when males regularly slept in the same bed as children and continued to do so in academies, boardinghouses, and overcrowded hotels. The room above Speed's store functioned as a sort of dormitory, with two other young men living there part of the time as well as Lincoln and Speed. The attorneys of the Eighth Circuit in Illinois where Lincoln would travel regularly shared beds-with the exception of Judge David Davis, whose immense girth left no room for a companion. As the historian Donald Yacovone writes in his study of the fiercely expressed love and devotion among several abolitionist leaders in the same era, the ”preoccupation with elemental s.e.x” reveals more about later centuries ”than about the nineteenth.”
If it is hard to delineate the exact nature of Lincoln's relations.h.i.+p with Speed, it is clear that this intimate friends.h.i.+p came at a critical juncture in his young life, as he struggled to define himself in a new city, away from home and family. Here in Springfield he would carry forward the twin careers that would occupy most of his life: law and politics. His accomplishments in escaping the confines of his barren, death-battered childhood and his relentless self-education required luck, a stunning audacity, and a breadth of intelligence that was only beginning to reveal itself.
CHAPTER 3
THE LURE OF POLITICS
IN THE ONLY COUNTRY founded on the principle that men should and could govern themselves, where self-government dominated every level of human a.s.sociation from the smallest village to the nation's capital, it was natural that politics should be a consuming, almost universal concern.
”Scarcely have you descended on the soil of America,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in the year Lincoln was serving his first term in the state legislature, ”when you find yourself in the midst of a sort of tumult; a confused clamor is raised on all sides; a thousand voices come to your ear at the same time, each of them expressing some social needs. Around you everything moves: here, the people of one neighborhood have gathered to learn if a church ought to be built; there, they are working on the choice of a representative; farther on, the deputies of a district are going to town in all haste in order to decide about some local improvements; in another place, the farmers of a village abandon their furrows to go discuss the plan of a road or a school.”
”Citizens a.s.semble with the sole goal of declaring that they disapprove of the course of government,” Tocqueville wrote. ”To meddle in the government of society and to speak about it is the greatest business and, so to speak, the only pleasure that an American knows.... An American does not know how to converse, but he discusses; he does not discourse, but he holds forth. He always speaks to you as to an a.s.sembly.”
In an ill.u.s.tration from Noah Webster's Elementary Spelling Book, widely read in Lincoln's generation, a man strikes a heroic pose as he stands on a wooden barrel, speaking to a crowd of enthralled listeners. Behind him the Stars and Stripes wave proudly, while a poster bearing the image of the national eagle connotes the bravery and patriotism of the orator. ”Who can wonder,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asked, at the lure of politics, ”for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his.”
For many ambitious young men in the nineteenth century, politics proved the chosen arena for advancement. Politics attracted Bates in Missouri, Seward in upstate New York, Lincoln in Illinois, and Chase in Ohio.
THE OLDEST OF THE FOUR, Edward Bates was the first drawn into politics during the 1820 crusade for Missouri's statehood. As the pet.i.tion was debated in the U.S. Congress, an argument arose as to whether the const.i.tutional protection for slavery in the original states applied to the newly acquired territories. An antislavery representative from New York introduced an amendment requiring Missouri first to agree to emanc.i.p.ate all children of slaves on their twenty-first birthday. The so-called ”lawyer faction,” including Edward Bates, vehemently opposed an antislavery restriction as the price of admission to the Union. Bates argued that it violated the Const.i.tution by imposing a qualification on a state beyond providing ”a republican form of government,” as guaranteed by the Const.i.tution.
To Northerners who hoped containment in the South would lead inevitably to the end of slavery, its introduction into the new territories aroused fear that it would now infiltrate the West and, thereby, the nation's future. For Southerners invested in slave labor, Northern opposition to Missouri's admission as a slave state posed a serious threat to their way of life. At the height of the struggle, Southern leaders declared their intent to secede from the Union; many Northerners seemed willing to let them go. ”This momentous question,” Jefferson wrote at the time, ”like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”
The Senate ultimately stripped the bill of the antislavery amendment, bringing Missouri into the Union as a slave state under the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820. Fas.h.i.+oned by Kentucky senator Henry Clay, who earned the nickname the ”Great Pacificator,” the Compromise simultaneously admitted Maine as a free state and prohibited slavery in all the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory north of the lat.i.tude 3630'. That line ran across the southern border of Missouri, making Missouri itself an exception to the new division.
Later that spring, Bates campaigned successfully for a place among the forty-one delegates chosen to write the new state's const.i.tution. Though younger than most of the delegates, he ”emerged as one of the princ.i.p.al authors of the const.i.tution.” When the time came to select candidates for state offices, the ”lawyer faction” received the lion's share. David Barton and Thomas Benton were sent to Was.h.i.+ngton as Missouri's first senators, and Edward Bates became the state's first attorney general; his partner, Joshua Barton, became the first secretary of state. Two years later, Bates won a seat in the Missouri House, and two years after that, Frederick Bates was elected governor of the state.