The Real Lincoln
Who was the man behind the myth? New research delves into Abe's early years
Later, Lincoln would be celebrated for stoically hiding his emotions in times of trouble--the man one friend described as "the most shut-mouthed" who ever lived told a client after a heartbreaking loss in a senatorial race in 1858 that he felt like "the boy who stumped his toe. I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh." But after Rutledge's death, Lincoln seems to have come apart at the seams. "He made a remark one day when it was raining that he could not bare [sic] the idea of its raining on her grave," one witness remembered. "That was the time the community said he was crazy." So racked with grief was Lincoln that many worried he would commit suicide. Herndon inferred from this that Rutledge was Lincoln's "true love" --that he mourned her death for the rest of his life. Most historians today think Lincoln's reaction to her sudden departure had more to do with his own past: "It reminded him," says Connecticut College's Burlingame, "of the death of his mother."
As Lincoln battled his personal demons, he would continue to have strained relationships with women. He ultimately courted and may have proposed to as many as four Illinois ladies during his 20s and 30s. His fumbling performances were not something he was proud of: After breaking off one engagement, he wrote cruelly to a friend about the young lady's "want of teeth [and] weatherbeaten appearance" --not to mention her girth. "A fair match to Falstaff," he joked, "nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than thirty-five or forty years."
Ambivalence. Lincoln in this period also seems to have been plagued by self-doubt. "I can never be satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough to have me," he wrote. In 1840, he won the hand of young Mary Todd, the sharp, vivacious daughter of a prosperous Kentucky banker--a woman her brother-in-law said "could make a bishop forget his prayers." They seemed a good match--both had great ambition and loved poetry and politics. But Lincoln, only a few weeks later, inexplicably called it off. Herndon's sources were sure he had fallen in love with another woman: To one, Lincoln apparently confided "that he thought he did not love [Mary Todd] as he should and that he would do her a great wrong if he married her."
Lincoln's tortured personal life took a turn for the worse when one of his few close friends, Joshua Speed, with whom he'd been living for four years, announced he was moving to Kentucky. As he had after Rutledge died, Lincoln fell into what seems to have been a near-suicidal depression. For a week, he allowed only the doctor and Speed to see him. So worried was he about his friend's safety, Speed made sure "to remove razors from his room--take away all knives and other such dangerous things."
Scholars still can't agree on what so rattled Lincoln during this period. Some believe Herndon's story--that he never got over Rutledge. Others give credence to comments Herndon said Lincoln made to him, worrying he'd gotten syphilis from a prostitute. Lincoln himself told Speed that he was not afraid to die but for the fact "that he had not done anything to make any human being remember that he had lived."
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