双语·林肯传 12

12

If Lincoln had married Ann Rutledge, in all probability he would havebeen happy, but he would not have been President. He was slow in thought and movement, and she was not the type that would have driven him to achieve political distinction. But Mary Todd, obsessed with an undying determination to live in the White House, was no sooner married to Lincoln than she had him out running for the Whig nomination for Congress.

The battle was a ferce one; and, incredible as it seems, his political enemies accused him of being an infdel because he belonged to no church, and denounced him as a tool of wealth and aristocracy because he had affiliated himself through marriage with the haughty Todd and Edwards families. Ridiculous as the charges were, Lincoln realized that they might hurt him politically. So he answered his critics: “Only one of my relatives has ever visited me since I came to Springfeld, and that one, before he got out of town, was accused of stealing a jew's-harp. Now, if that is being a member of a proud, aristocratic family, then I am guilty of the offense.”

When the election came, Lincoln was defeated. It was the first political setback of his career.

Two years later he ran again and won. Mary Lincoln was ecstatic; believing that his political triumphs had just begun, she ordered a new evening gown and polished up her French verbs. As soon as her husband reached the capital, she addressed her letters to “The Honorable A. Lincoln.” But he put a stop to that at once.

She wanted to live in Washington, too, she longed to bask in the social prestige that she was sure awaited her. But when she came East to join him, she found things vastly different from what she had anticipated. Lincoln was so poor that he had had to borrow money from Stephen A. Douglas to pay his expenses until he got his first salary check from the Government; so Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln stopped at Mrs. Spriggs's boardinghouse in Duff Green's Row. The street in front of Mrs. Spriggs's establishment was unpaved, the sidewalk was made of ashes and gravel, the rooms were bleak, and there was no plumbing. In her back yard Mrs. Spriggs had an outhouse, a goose-pen, and a garden; and, as the neighbors' hogs were constantly breaking in to eat her vegetables, her little boy had to run out at intervals with a club to drive the animals away.

The city of Washington did not trouble in those days to collect the garbage; so Mrs. Spriggs dumped her refuse in the back alley, and depended upon the cows, pigs, and geese that wandered about the streets at will, to come and devour it.

Mrs. Lincoln found the door to the exclusive society of Washington shut tightly against her. She was ignored, and left alone to sit in her bleak boarding-house bedroom, with her spoiled children and a headache—listening to Mrs. Spriggs's boy, shouting to drive the hogs out of the cabbage-patch.

Disappointing as that was, it was nothing in comparison with the political disaster that lurked around the corner. When Lincoln entered Congress, the country had been waging a war against Mexico for twenty months—a shameful war of aggression, deliberately provoked by the slave power in Congress in order that the nation might acquire more territory where slavery would flourish and from which pro-slavery senators would be elected.

America accomplished two things in that war. Texas had once belonged to Mexico and then seceded. We forced Mexico to renounce all of her claims to Texas; and, in addition, we deliberately robbed Mexico of half of all the territory she owned and carved it up into the States of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California.

Grant said it was one of the wickedest wars in all history, and that he could never forgive himself for having fought in it. A great many of the American soldiers rebelled and went over to the enemy; one famous battalion in Santa Anna's army was composed entirely of American deserters.

Lincoln stood up in Congress and did what many other Whigs had already done: he attacked the President for having started “a war of rapine and murder, a war of robbery and dishonor,” and declared that the God of heaven had “forgotten to defend the weak and innocent, and permitted the strong band of murderers and demons from hell to kill men, women, and children and lay waste and pillage the land of the just.”

The capital paid no attention whatever to this speech, for Lincoln was unknown. But back in Springfield, it raised a hurricane. Illinois had sent six thousand men to fight, as they believed, for the holy cause of liberty; and now their representative was standing up in Congress and calling their soldiers demons from hell, and accusing them of murder. In a rage, excited partizans held public meetings and denounced Lincoln as “base...” “dastardly...” “infamous...” “a reasonable guerilla...” “a second Benedict Arnold.”

At one meeting resolutions were adopted declaring that never until then had they “known disgrace so black.” ... “Such black odium and infamy heaped upon the living brave and illustrious dead can but excite the indignation of every true Illinoisan.”

The hatred was so bitter that it smoldered for more than a decade; and when Lincoln was running for the Presidency thirteen years later these denunciations were again hurled at his head.

“I have committed political suicide,” Lincoln confessed to his law partner.

He dreaded to go back home now and face his resentful constituents; so he tried to secure a position that would keep him in Washington, and maneuvered to secure an appointment as Commissioner of the Land Office, but he failed.

Then he tried to have himself named Governor of the Territory of Oregon, with the hope that he might be one of the first senators when it came into the Union, but he failed in that too.

So he returned to Springfield and his dirty law office. Once more he hitched up Old Buck to his ramshackle buggy, and again he started driving over the circuit of the Eighth Judicial District—one of the most dejected men in all Illinois.

He was determined now to forget all about politics, and devote himself to his profession. He realized that he had no method in his work, that he lacked mental discipline; and so, to train himself to reason more closely and to demonstrate a proposition, he bought a geometry and carried it with him as he rode the circuit.

Herndon records in his biography:

At the little country inns, we usually occupied the same bed. In most cases the beds were too short for Lincoln, and his feet would hang over the footboard, thus exposing a limited expanse of shin bone. Placing a candle on a chair at the head of the bed, he would read and study for hours. I have known him to study in this position until two o'clock in the morning. Meanwhile, I and others who chanced to occupy the same room would be safely and soundly asleep. On the circuit in this way he studied Euclid until he could with ease demonstrate all the propositions in the six books.

After he had mastered geometry, he studied algebra, then astronomy, then he prepared a lecture on the origin and growth of languages. But no other study interested him as did Shakspere. The literary tastes that Jack Kelso had nurtured in New Salem still persisted.

The most striking characteristic of Abraham Lincoln, from this time on to the end of his life, was a sadness so profound, a melancholy so deep that mere words can hardly convey its depths.

When Jesse Weik was helping Herndon prepare his immortal biography, he felt that surely the reports of Lincoln's sadness must be exaggerated. So he went and discussed this point at length with the men who had been associated with Lincoln for years—men such as Stuart, Whitney, Matheny, Swett, and Judge Davis.

Then Weik was firmly convinced “that men who never saw Lincoln could scarcely realize his tendency to melancholy,” and Herndon, agreeing with him, went farther, making the statement from which I have already quoted: “If Lincoln ever had a happy day in twenty years, I never knew of it. A perpetual look of sadness was his most prominent feature. Melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”

When he was riding the circuit he would frequently sleep in the same room with two or three other attorneys. They would be awakened early in the morning by the sound of his voice and find him sitting on the edge of the bed, mumbling incoherently to himself. Getting up, he would start a fire and sit for hours, staring into the blaze. Frequently, on such occasions, he would recite “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”

Sometimes as he walked down the street, he was so deep in despair that he took no notice of those who met him and spoke to him. Occasionally he shook hands with people without knowing what he was doing.

Jonathan Birch, who all but worshiped Lincoln's memory, says:

When attending court at Bloomington, Lincoln would keep his hearers in the court room, office or on the street convulsed with laughter at one hour and the next hour be so deeply submerged in speculation that no one dared arouse him.... He would sit in a chair tilted against the wall, his feet on the lower rung, legs drawn up and knees level with his chin, hat tipped forward, hands clasped about knees, eyes infinitely sad, the very picture of dejection and gloom. Thus absorbed I have seen him sit for hours at a time, defying the interruption of even his closest friends.

Senator Beveridge, after studying Lincoln's career perhaps more exhaustively than any one else has ever done, came to the conclusion that “the dominant quality in Lincoln's life from 1849 to the end was a sadness so profound that the depths of it cannot be sounded or estimated by normal minds.”

Yet Lincoln's inexhaustible humor, his amazing capacity for telling stories, were as striking and inseparable a part of his personality as his sadness.

At times Judge Davis even stopped court to listen to his boisterous humor.

“Crowds thronged about him, crowds of two hundred and three hundred,” says Herndon, holding their sides and laughing the hours away.

One eye-witness declares that when Lincoln reached the “nub” of a good story, men “whooped” and rolled off their chairs.

Those who knew Lincoln intimately agreed that “his abysmal sadness” was caused by two things: his crushing political disappointments and his tragic marriage.

And so the poignant years of apparently permanent political oblivion dragged by—six of them—and then suddenly an event occurred that altered the whole course of Lincoln's life, and started him toward the White House.

The instigator and moving spirit behind this event was Mary Lincoln's old sweetheart, Stephen A. Douglas.