双语·林肯传 8

8

The search continued all through the night, and shortly after daybreak Lincoln was found sitting in his offce, talking incoherently. His friends feared he was losing his mind. Mary Todd's relatives declared that he was already insane. That was the way they explained his failure to show up at the wedding.

Dr. Henry was called immediately. Lincoln threatened to commit suicide, so the doctor ordered Speed and Butler to watch over himconstantly. His knife was taken from him now and kept from him just as it had been after the death of Ann Rutledge.

Dr. Henry, wanting to keep his mind occupied, urged Lincoln to attend the sessions of the State Legislature. As the floor leader for the Whigs, he ought to have been there constantly. But the records show that he was present but four times in three weeks—and even then only for an hour or two. On January 19 John J. Hardin announced his illness to the House.

Three weeks after he had fed from his wedding Lincoln wrote to his law partner the saddest letter of his life:

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be any better, I cannot tell. I awfully forbode that I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better, it seems to me.

As the late Dr. William E. Barton says in his well-known biography of Lincoln, this letter “can mean nothing else than that Abraham Lincoln was mentally distraught... that he had grave fears for his own sanity.”

He thought constantly of death, now, and longed for it and wrote a poem on suicide and had it published in the “Sangamo Journal.”

Speed feared that he was going to die; so Lincoln was taken to the home of Speed's mother, near Louisville. Here he was given a Bible and assigned a quiet bedroom looking out over a brook meandering through meadows to the forest a mile away. Each morning a slave brought Lincoln his coffee in bed.

Mrs. Edwards, Mary's sister, says that Mary, “to set herself right and to free Mr. Lincoln's mind, wrote a letter to Mr. Lincoln, stating that shewould release him from his engagement.”

But in releasing him, according to Mr. Edwards, “she left Lincoln the privilege of renewing it if he wished.” But that was the last thing in the world that he wished. He never wanted to see her again. Even a year after Lincoln had fed from his wedding, his good friend James Matheny “thought Lincoln would commit suicide.”

For almost two years after the “fatal frst of January,” 1841, Lincoln ignored Mary Todd completely, hoping that she would forget him, praying that she would interest herself in some other man. But she did not, for her pride was at stake, her precious self-respect. She was determined to prove to herself and to those who had scorned and pitied her that she could and would marry Abraham Lincoln.

And he was equally determined not to marry her.

In fact, he was so determined that he proposed within a year to another girl. He was thirty-two at the time, the girl he proposed to was half that age. She was Sarah Rickard, the little sister of Mrs. Butler, at whose house Lincoln had been boarding for four years.

Lincoln pleaded his case with her, arguing that since his name was Abraham and hers Sarah it was evident that they were meant for one another.

But she refused him, because, as she later confessed in writing to a friend:

I was young, only sixteen years old and I had not thought much about matrimony.... I airway liked him as a friend but you Know his peculiar manner and his General deportment would not be likely to fascinate a Young Girl just entering into the society world.... He seemed allmost like an older Brother being as it were one of my sister's family.

Lincoln frequently wrote editorials for the local Whig paper, “The Springfield Journal;” and the editor, Simeon Francis, was one of his closest friends. Francis's wife, unfortunately, had never learned the fne art of minding her own business. Childless, over forty, she was the self-appointed match-maker of Springfeld.

Early in October, 1842, she wrote Lincoln, asking him to call at her home the following afternoon. That was a strange request, and he went, wondering what it could mean. When he arrived, he was ushered into the parlor; and there, to his astonishment, he saw Mary Todd sitting before him.

What Lincoln and Mary Todd said, and how they said it, and what they did, that is not recorded. But of course the poor, tender-hearted fellow hadn't a chance to escape. If she cried—and of course she did—he probably delivered himself into her hands at once, and abjectly apologized for having gotten out of her hands.

They met often after that, but always secretly and behind closed doors in the Francis home.

At frst Mary didn't let even her sister know that Lincoln was seeing her again.

Finally, when her sister did fnd out, she asked Mary “why she was so secretive.”

And Mary replied “evasively that after all that had occurred, it was best to keep the courtship from all eyes and ears. Men and women of the world were uncertain and slippery, Mary continued, and if misfortune befell the engagement, all knowledge of it would be hidden from the world.”

In other words, to put it bluntly, having learned a little lesson, she resolved to keep even the courtship secret, this time, until she was positive that Lincoln would marry her.

What technique did Miss Todd now employ?

James Matheny declared that Lincoln often told him “that he was driven into the marriage, and that Miss Todd told him he was in honor bound to marry her.”

Herndon ought to have known if anybody did, and he said:

To me it has always seemed plain that Mr. Lincoln married Mary Todd to save his honor, and in doing that he sacrificed his domestic peace. He had searched himself subjectively, introspectively, thoroughly: he knew he did not love her, but he had promised to marry her. The hideous thought came up like a nightmare.... At last he stood face to face with the great conflict between honor and domestic peace. He chose the former, and with it years of self-torture, sacrificial pangs, and the loss forever of a happy home.

Before he was willing to proceed, he wrote Speed, who had gone back to Kentucky, asking him if he had found happiness in his marriage.

“Please answer quickly,” Lincoln urged, “as I am impatient to know.”

Speed replied that he was far happier than he had ever expected to be.

So the next afternoon, Friday, November 4, 1842, Lincoln, reluctantly and with an aching heart, asked Mary Todd to be his wife.

She wanted to have the ceremony performed that very night. He hesitated, surprised, and a little frightened at the celerity with which events were moving. Knowing she was superstitious, he pointed out that the day was Friday. But, remembering what had happened before, she feared nothing now so much as delay. She was unwilling to wait even twenty-four hours. Besides, it was her birthday, her twenty-fourth birthday, so they hurried to Chatterton's jewelry store, bought a wedding-ring, and had these words engraved inside it: “Love is eternal.”

Late that afternoon Lincoln asked James Matheny to be his best man, saying, “Jim, I shall have to marry that girl.”

While Lincoln was putting on his best clothes that evening at Butler's house, and blacking his boots, Butler's little boy rushed in and asked him where he was going.

Lincoln replied: “To hell, I suppose.”

In despair, Mary Todd had given away the trousseau that she had had made for the frst wedding date, so that now she had to be married in a simple white muslin dress. All arrangements were carried through with nervous haste.

Mrs. Edwards says she had only two hours' notice of the marriage and that the frosting on the wedding-cake which she hurriedly baked for the occasion was too warm to cut well when it was served.

As the Rev. Charles Dresser, clad in his clerical vestments, read the impressive Episcopal service, Lincoln seemed far from cheerful and happy. His best man testifed that he “looked and acted as if he were going to the slaughter.”

The only comment that Lincoln ever made in writing about his marriage was a postscript to a business letter that he wrote to Samuel Marshall about a week after the event. This letter is now in the possession of the Chicago Historical Society.

“Nothing new here,” writes Lincoln, “except my marriage which to me is a matter of profound wonder.”