From Out of the Top Hat: A Blog from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum

Benjamin Chapin’s career as a stage performer peaked on February 12, 1909, when his four-act play Abraham Lincoln at the White House finished its six-day run in New York City.  At least 1,200 customers paid 50 cents, 75 cents, or a dollar to celebrate Lincoln’s one-hundredth birthday at the matinee show of the lavishly appointed Garden Theater on Madison Avenue.

They got to see vignettes of the president dealing with Fort Sumter in 1861, reacting to the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, and getting ready for an evening at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865.  An irascible Secretary of War Stanton and a snarly General Joseph Hooker kept putting Lincoln’s equanimity to the test.  He assuaged them with stories and jokes, and his patient forbearance also worked wonders on his cantankerous wife.  Whether in politics or domestic life, Chapin’s Lincoln put charity first.  When Stanton insisted that a traitor be hung for his crime, Lincoln found a reason to pardon him.

Part of the very large 1909 playbill

For a 34-year-old writer-impersonator who had toiled for a decade on lyceum platforms and vaudeville stages as a Lincoln look-alike, this February 12 spent behind the New York City footlights was a day to relish.  It gave him hope that his play might hit the jackpot and get picked up for a national tour.

Chapin had felt that hope once before.  In the spring of 1906, his brand-new show had appeared for three weeks at the Liberty Theater on West 42^nd Street.  But he got mixed reviews at best.  After the last performance on April 15 — the anniversary of Lincoln’s death — Chapin was forced back on the road.  His one-act “playlet” performance ran on vaudeville stages as far west as California, where his dignified show, as the Los Angeles Times remarked, was squeezed into “a hodge-podge of noisy variety.”

Only the gathering excitement for the 1909 Lincoln Centenary got Chapin his one-week revival at the Garden Theater.  In a publicity flyer chock-full of testimonials from Mark Twain and lesser lights, Chapin reproduced the most glowing lines from his 1906 notices.  Often those reviews had also expressed strong misgivings about the show.

One after another, critics judged his play to be “of very little moment,” as John Corbin said in the New York Sun.  They noted that Chapin, who’d never acted before 1906, lacked the theatrical skills to evoke a character so multi-sided as Lincoln.  And his rudimentary scripting fell short of delivering the “sterner” side of the president’s leadership, as one writer called it, along with his personal sweetness.

Yet even Chapin’s detractors agreed that he excelled at summoning Lincoln’s physical presence: his towering, ungainly frame, his shambling, awkward movements.  The performer’s meticulous make-up and fine command of Lincoln’s mannerisms transfixed many spectators.  Those who had never seen Lincoln in the flesh got a good sense from Chapin of why many in the older generation continued to dwell so insistently on the president’s appearance.

The public could easily abide the play’s flaws, said the reviewers, since Chapin’s “embodiment” of Lincoln offered such a wholesome and patriotic payoff.  People should be sure to take their children to see it.  “With Lincoln present in the flesh, walking and talking, a living man and not a silent figure in the dim pages of history,” said the Los Angeles Times, “anything but absolute respect for the vehicle [the play] is impossible.”

Chapin’s centennial run appears to have marked the end of his theatrical aspirations.  As that door closed, another opened.  By 1913, he had turned to film, and by 1917, the first four episodes of his planned Lincoln “Cycle” — an extended biographical epic — were playing at the Strand, one of Manhattan’s premier “picture palaces.”

In 1906 and 1909, the New York Times and other papers cautioned playgoers not to expect too much from Chapin’s work.  But in 1917, to the filmmaker’s delight, the paper issued a different sort of warning:

“Patrons of the Strand,” said the Times, “should be condemned to seeing trashy modern photoplays all the rest of their days if they do not flock to see the Lincoln cycle on exhibition there this week.”

Benjamin Chapin never got to finish his Lincoln Cycle.  He fell ill on Lincoln’s birthday in 1918 and died a few months later, apparently of tuberculosis, in a sanitarium in Liberty, New York.  He was only 43 years old.  But he had pioneered the impersonation of Lincoln on stage and screen alike.  “He took dead history and made it live again,” the Chicago Tribune wrote. Next to a short obituary, the paper placed a photo of Chapin taken from the side, in full Lincoln dress, looking down appreciatively at an American flag.

Most children have big plans, and Jack Lincoln, grandson of the 16th president, had at least one such plan.

The second of three children and the only son of Robert and Mary Lincoln, he saw more from an early age than most children ever get to see.  Born in Chicago in 1873, he moved at age 7 to Washington, D.C., when his father became Secretary of War under President James A. Garfield.  In 1885 the Lincolns returned to Chicago, but 4 years later they moved to London, where his father served as U.S. Minister for President Benjamin Harrison.

Yet sadness followed this family.  Jack’s grandmother Mary Lincoln died in Springfield while he lived in Washington; so did his mother’s mother, Ann Eliza Harlan, two years later.  Of course he never knew his grandfather the president, but because he was named for him — Abraham Lincoln II, always called ‘Jack’ — he had the right to sign his name exactly as his forebear did: A. Lincoln.

Jack Lincoln signed like his grandfather but, unlike the president, could also write it in Greek.

And so he did, to the amusement and confusion of his friends, in a hand very close to that of the president.  The evidence we have of this are 14 books in the Presidential Library collection that belonged to the boy.  Most of these are signed in a way that could fool the historically unsure, since all were published after 1865.

Oliver Optic’s books, including Outward Bound (1866);  Shamrock and Thistle (1867); Red Cross (1867); Dikes and Ditches (1868); Through by Daylight (1869); Going South (1879); Up the River (1881) seem to have been his main target.  He bought them new or used.  Optic was the nom de plume of William T. Adams of Boston, a highly productive and successful author in the early days of children’s series-lit.  These edu-tales took youngsters to foreign settings (Ireland and Scotland for Shamrock, e.g., Holland and Belgium for Dikes) or coastal yachting (Going South) or driving a train (Through by Daylight).  This last book even mentions baseball, one of the earliest such books.

Another pair bear a similar flavor: Capt. Mayne Reid, The Plant Hunters and Stories About Animals, both of which Jack signed in 1884.  Reid was a British military man who wrote tales about Africa and other exotic places.

Jack’s friend Dick Hatton gave him a Christmas present in 1883 in a like vein: Horatio Alger’s The Young Circus Rider (1883).  Jack, or rather his parents, saved his Model First Reader (J. R. Webb, 1873), in which he pencilled his Chicago and Washington addresses in an unsteady young hand.

More interestingly, Jack took over two books not quite his.  William M. Thayer wrote the first children’s book about President Lincoln, The Pioneer Boy (1863), whence comes much of our log-cabin-to-White House national mythos.  This was translated into Greek in 1865 and mailed to President Lincoln by the translator, arriving just after his death. Jack later claimed it from his own father’s library.  So, too, the Hawaiian translation (1869).

And those big plans?  Jack numbered most of these books, with a shelf-mark used by large collectors who need to know exactly where in their library to find each item.  The Optic books at the ALPLM are numbered a2, a11, and a13-17; the Thayer books are e13 and e14.  These marks give clues to the likelihood of at least 3 other shelves of books in Jack’s bedroom.

But the hundreds or thousands of books that world-trotting Jack Lincoln might have hoped to amass over his lifetime never reached that level.  He died in London in March 1890, age 16, of an infection that today would be cleared by a simple shot.  Robert Lincoln knew then that the surname ‘Lincoln’ would die with him (1926, it turned out).  But books and signatures live on.

Episode 15, The 13th Amendment: This month, we speak with Dr. James Cornelius about our recently restored copy of the 13th Amendment which has been signed and dated by Abraham Lincoln. You can also view our companion“Stories from the Vault” video which shows the document.

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In Lincoln’s day, “nostalgia” meant something different than it does today.  Then it was a rarely heard medical word.  Doctors used “nostalgia” to describe a debilitating, even life-threatening, form of homesickness, one afflicting soldiers most of all.  As far as we know, Lincoln, like most people, never used the term.

Only in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries did “nostalgia” evolve into the commonly used word we know today: a remembrance of earlier times that feels somewhat sorrowful, somewhat sweet.

Historians have shown that wistful longing for the bygone world of earlier generations became a defining feature of modern society.  Nostalgia for rural rhythms and the old family hearth helped modern Americans and Europeans adjust to the industrial time clock and the novel pressures of urban living.

Popular fiction and Hollywood films spread the nostalgic frame of mind with 20^th century mega-hits from The Wizard of Oz to Gone With the Wind.  “There’s no place like home” applied as much to the vanished plantation culture of Tara as to the dwindling free-labor homesteads of Kansas.

Lincoln’s generation didn’t know the word “nostalgia,” but many pined for their ever-so-humble “Home, Sweet Home,” one of the most popular songs of the Civil War.  Union prisoners detained at Libby Prison in Richmond sang it regularly.  “Auld Lang Syne” was another staple of the day: a Union band played it at Appomattox Courthouse as Grant made his way into the McLean home to accept Lee’s surrender.

The president’s own favorite nostalgic song may have been “Dixie”: “one of the best tunes I have ever heard,” he told a crowd outside the White House on April 10, 1865.  He asked a band to play it, quipping that the Confederate anthem was once again national property.  (It had been widely played in the North before the war.)

In other words, Lincoln’s cohort loved the sentimental evocation of olden times just as much as their descendants did.  The difference was that later generations gradually realized, as Lincoln and his peers did not, that the vibrant culture of small-town, pre-industrial America had come to an end.

If Lincoln didn’t know the word “nostalgia,” he still produced a remarkable poem in the mid-1840s that captured its most essential element: the joining of sorrow and satisfaction in a remembrance of the past.  Yet this aspiring poet threw overboard the pious reverence for “home” that marked the wistful songs and poems of his own day as much as it did the later culture of nostalgia.

In 1844, at age 35, Lincoln made a return visit to Spencer County, Indiana, where he’d grown from a lad of 7 to a man of 21.  The experience of returning home had put him into a “poetizing mood,” he later wrote, despite the “unpoetical” character of this Hoosier “neighborhood.”

In 1845 and 1846, he produced 24 four-line stanzas to express his sentiments — “though,” he quipped, “whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question.”  It might just be “doggerel.”

The manuscript of Lincoln's poem is in the Library of Congress, but fine printings of it have been made. This is from 1971.

His first stanza hit at the heart of nostalgia: its paradoxical blend of emotions.  (This is the original text, as given in Roy Basler’s Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, pp. 367ff.  A slightly different version appears on pp. 378 and 385ff. of Basler.)

My childhood-home I see again,
And gladden with the view;
And still, as mem’ries crowd my brain,
There’s sadness in it too.

The gladness in his memory, according to the rest of the poem, has nothing to do with remembering his family life or good times with friends or neighbors.  The 24 stanzas mainly recount some highly unpleasant facts picked up on his 1844 trip, such as the deaths of half of his childhood friends.

I hear the lone survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.

The most unpleasant fact of all was the lingering insanity of his schoolmate Matthew Gentry, who had lost his mind at age 19 (when Lincoln was 16).  Twelve of the poem’s 24 stanzas concern the madness of Matthew, son of the richest man in the region.

Poor Matthew! I have ne’er forgot
When first with maddened will,
Yourself you maimed, your father fought,
 And mother strove to kill …

And when at length, tho’ drear and long,
Time soothed your fiercer woes –
How plaintively your mournful song,
Upon the still night rose.

I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed,
Far-distant, sweet, and lone;
The funeral dirge, it ever seemed
Of reason dead and gone.

To drink it’s strains, I’ve stole away,
All silently and still,
Ere yet the rising god of day
Had streaked the Eastern hill.

Air held his breath; the trees all still
Seemed sorr’wing angels round.
Whose swelling tears in dew-drops fell
Upon the list’ning ground.

Here Lincoln remembers, in his youth, prowling the landscape in the dim light of dawn to savor Matthew’s funeral dirge for enlightenment.  Nature itself has absorbed Matthew’s suffering.  “Air held his breath,”Lincoln writes, in his single best poetic phrase.  The atmosphere is laden with Matthew’s lament, his song a melancholic “air” in its own right.

The memory of Matthew is sorrowful, but enlivening too.  Finding poetic words to voice the memory lets Lincoln capture and contain his sadness. Lincoln has realized that the act of writing provides solace and hope.  Art can help relieve his own torment over the suddenness of death, and the fragility of reason.  The poem stands as a secular prayer of sorts, an urgent appeal for the preservation of life and sanity.

At this moment in his life, poetry offered him a comfort that religion or theology could not.  “My Childhood-home I See Again” reveals a Lincoln buoyed up by a steely and stoic faith, poised to embark on his successful 1846 Congressional “canvass” against Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright.

Episode 14, The Commissioner’s Sale Document for Slaves: This month, we sit down with Dr. James Cornelius to discuss our Artifact of the Month: the broadside announcement for a slave auction in Mr. Lincoln’s home county in Kentucky.

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Episode 13, An interview with Abraham Lincoln presenter, Fritz Klein: On this episode of Stories from the Vault, we speak with Fritz Klein who has been portraying Abraham Lincoln for over 30 years. We discuss a wide variety of topics and he delivers an amazing version of Mr. Lincoln’s Farewell Address to Springfield.

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To only a handful of individuals interested in the Lincoln assassination, the name of Nathan Simms evokes quizzical looks.  Simms is one of several individuals who claimed to have held the reins of John Wilkes Booth’s horse on the night of April 14, 1865.  Dr. Edward Steers ably demonstrates the problems with Simms’s claims and credits John “Peanut” Burroughs as the rightful holder of Booth’s horse on that fateful night.  But if Simms was mistaken about his role on April 14, 1865, it might be premature to dismiss his connection to the assassination.

A letter by architect Walter F. Price to President Herbert Hoover suggests that Simms — misspelled as “Sims” throughout the letter — worked for Mary Surratt.  Beyond the new information on Simms, Mr. Price also enclosed three photographs to provide additional visual reference of this obscure individual.  The text of the February 3, 1931, letter follows:

“Some weeks ago I went to Marshalton, Chester County, Pa., to visit an old Meeting House; the aged care-taker as I was leaving pointed to a frame House in the edge of the village.  He said ‘in that house lived a colored man named Nathan Sims; when he was about seventeen he held a horse for J. Wilkes Booth while he went into the theatre to assassinate President Lincoln.’

Nathan Simms, in Pennsylvania, 1931 – Mary Surratt’s former slave?

“On the 9^th of January last I went again to Marshalton about four miles west of West Chester and called at his house.  A mulatto woman came to the door and said she was Mrs. Nathan Sims, then added that her husband was in the village getting slop.  On my inquiry as to how I should know him, she said he will be carrying two buckets.  Within five minutes I met him with his buckets; he admitted he was the Nathan Sims who held the horse for Booth.  I turned to walk back with him to his house.  He seemed shy and taciturn.  To my question as to whether he was the slave of Mrs. Surratt, he said he had been, but later in our short talk, he referred as to having been her bond servant.  Of Mrs. Surratt he said only, the soldiers came and bundled her up and took her away.  I don’t know what became of her.  Near his house I had him stand for his picture by his pump.  I took a second picture, trying to secure a little better light on his face.

“I went again on the 25^th of January and took a promised picture.  In the town I asked for an old and reliable citizen, and was referred to a Mr. Peterson, who said relative to N. Sims’ veracity, that from his knowledge of the man, he felt sure we could depend on anything he might say.  Just as I reached the house he came around the corner and I gave him the picture and asked more questions.  For example; who are his parents?  He replied they were slaves of Dr. Gunton of Maryland.  There were several boys in the family and as he was not needed, he was bound over by his master to Mrs. Surratt, and that he worked for her on her ‘big’ farm at Surrattville, where she had much property.  He finished by saying that he had lived in Marshalton thirty-six years.”

Nathan Simms may not have held Booth’s horse but he clearly seems to be connected to Mary Surratt.  To this extent, he is worth knowing more about as an historical actor.

Episode 12, “Killing Lincoln” Book Discussion: On a special podcast, a panel of historians including: James Cornelius (Lincoln Curator, ALPLM), Daniel Stowell (Director and Editor, Papers of Abraham Lincoln), Ron Keller (Assistant Professor of History and Political Science, Lincoln College, and Director, Lincoln Heritage Museum), and Matthew Holden (Wepner Distinguished Professor in Political Science, University of Illinois Springfield) discuss the Bill O’Reilly/Martin Dugard book, “Killing Lincoln”. The panel is moderated by former Chicago Tribune reporter Patrick Reardon.

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Among the oldest liberties assigned to themselves by government officials is the franking privilege.  In Europe it applied to the monarch and highest courtiers.  In the U.S. in Lincoln’s day, it allowed a President, his private secretary, a Cabinet member, First Lady, Member of Congress, and a few others to send mail for free.  The ‘frank’ is simply their signature written on the envelope where a stamp or seal would normally go.

Lincoln used this privilege often enough, for official business of course. ‘A. Lincoln / M.C.’ (for Member of Congress) appears on a few surviving envelopes from the years 1847-1849.  While president, he and his office sent out scores of franked missives each week, and some of these survive, too, though most recipients (then as now) tossed out envelopes.  Among the rarest of this type are envelopes with black mourning borders, used for a few weeks after Willie Lincoln died in 1862.

A new type came to the attention of the ALPLM this year.  In 2010 we acquired two empty envelopes, both addressed in a fine hand to Hon. John T. Stuart /Springfield/Illinois and sent by free frank “From the President of the United States/ Priv. Sec.” and the signature of John G. Nicolay.  As private secretary to the president, Nicolay signed many hundreds of these.  The postmarks confirm the privilege: ‘Washington, D.C., FREE’ and the respective dates, March 22 and May 8, 1861.

Who was sending these?  The address line is not the hand of Nicolay, nor his assistant John Hay, nor those of Abraham, Mary, Robert, nor even the precocious Willie Lincoln. (Mr. Nicolay did frank Willie’s outgoing letters.)  Should one suspect Nicolay of abusing the franking privilege for some friend?  Nothing we know of this scrupulous and tireless Bavarian-born public servant, orphaned at 14, suggests that he did anything but work hard his whole life.

Furthermore, no letter by Abraham or Mary to her cousin John was known to date from those weeks.  So, who else had this access?

The answer: Mary’s cousin, and Stuart’s cousin also, Elizabeth Todd Grimsley.  Married to a man who died young, who never quite provided for her in the manner a Todd might expect, she did need a hand.  She traveled with and moved into the Executive Mansion alongside the Lincolns on March 4, 1861.  In addition to helping the family get settled, and using her schoolgirl French — as did Mary Lincoln, one night in dinner conversation with the Danish minister to the U.S. — ‘Lizzie’ Grimsley was trying to get appointed as a postmistress.  President Lincoln alone had the power to appoint her.

Figuring out who made use of mailing privileges can tell us a little something extra about life with the Lincolns.

It was not her sex or her inside track that gave him pause; he named more than 400 women to such an office.  As Lincoln wrote to Stuart on March 30, “The question of giving her the Springfield Post-office troubles me,” because he had just given out jobs to two relatives of Illinois’s junior senator, Lyman Trumbull, and people already criticized Lincoln’s penchant for appointing his old friends as well as Mary’s relations to federal positions.  Stuart advised that Lincoln ought not “let the case of Cousin Lizzie trouble …  you.”  Mainly, cousin Lizzie was too slow: one Beecher Todd had just been named postmaster of Lexington, Ky., and one Washington newspaper jested that 100 Todds were in the city looking for jobs.

Postmasterships were by far the largest category of federal jobs before the war broke out.  Applicants and recommenders barraged Lincoln with mail (postage paid) in pursuit of these positions, and ‘Cousin Lizzie’ was after all a loyal Kentuckian, the type of person Lincoln wanted to see in office, anywhere, as war neared.  A Buchanan-era Democrat who held the Springfield job, however, kept it till mid-August, when Lincoln appointed someone else.  Cousin Lizzie had felt since May that she overstayed her welcome, but confided to cousin John that her own brother as well as Mary Lincoln “insisted” or “urged and urged” her to stay.

Yet once the Springfield job was filled, cousin Lizzie left the White House, after a six-month stay.  One of the franked letters to cousin John had indeed discussed the post-office matter, and thus vaguely counted as ‘government business.’ Whether she was qualified to be a postmistress, we will never know.  But she did demonstrate that she knew how to use the mails, and presumably did pay for many stamps — after she had left Washington.

A side note to this story for collectors: her two letters to cousin John were donated to what is now the ALPLM in 1937.  How many hands did the envelopes pass through before being now reunited with the letters?

Part two of a two-part essay.  Part one appeared on November 10th.

Herndon’s 1866 lecture on Ann Rutledge drew the scorn of many who read the newspaper excerpts.  Critics ripped him for going public with Lincoln’s alleged buried-heart comment, a statement certain to anguish the widowed Mary Lincoln.

After watching Ann’s coffin descend into the grave in 1835, Abraham supposedly declared that his “heart, sad and broken, was buried there.”  To Herndon, this meant that Lincoln had lived out the rest of his life without truly loving another woman.

In 1866, no one disputed the reliability of the buried-heart remark, supplied to Herndon, he said, by an unnamed “friend.”  They just blasted Herndon for disclosing it, and claiming that it set the future course of Lincoln’s love life.  As it turns out, they could have challenged the comment’s legitimacy too.

In their edition of Herndon’s Lincoln, his 1889 biography of his partner, Douglas Wilson and Rodney Davis assert (p. 429, n. 6) that Herndon’s lecture silently reveals William Greene, a Lincoln acquaintance since 1831, as his unnamed source.  But the quotation is nowhere to be found, they say, in Greene’s communications with Herndon.  Nor did any other person pass along the buried-heart comment to Herndon.

So where did Herndon get those words?  I suspect that he composed them himself after reading an 1862 newspaper article in the Menard County Axis, a Democratic weekly published in nearby Petersburg.  Sent to him by one of his informants, this piece gushed over the president’s phenomenal rise from New Salem dry goods clerk to Commander-in-Chief.  “What a model of ambition … for the youths of the land,” the story exclaimed.

The Democratic newspaper in which the Lincoln-Rutledge folklore began, 27 years later.

The Axis had picked up the oral tradition of Lincoln’s romance with a beautiful young New Salem woman — “the youth had wrapped his heart with hers” — and cited his desolation over her death as one of the many obstacles he’d overcome on his arduous road to national renown.

The article described him standing by her grave, so distraught “as the cold clods fell upon the coffin, he sincerely wished that he too had been enclosed within it.”  By this account, the stricken Abraham wished he could leave his entire body with Ann, not just his “heart.”  He was saying he wanted to die.  He was not saying he couldn’t love another woman.  Burying his heart was apparently Herndon’s idea, not Lincoln’s.

As if to admit that he had no informant’s testimony to back up his public withering of Mary Lincoln — a woman who, according to him, had never received her husband’s deepest affection in 23 years of marriage — Herndon made a surprising claim in the 1889 biography.

In Herndon’s Lincoln, he wrote: “speaking of [Ann’s] death and her grave Lincoln once said to me, ‘My heart lies buried there.’”  Of course, in the 1866 lecture, Herndon said the remark had come to him from a “friend.”  In 1866, he made no claim that Lincoln had ever mentioned Ann to him at all.

In his lecture, Herndon made one final statement about Ann Rutledge, and this time the New York Times decided not to publish it — the only Herndon comment on Ann that the paper didn’t quote.  This unused observation may have come from the 1862 Axis story too.

After Ann’s death, the Axis article said, Lincoln recovered from his misery by finding “active exercise” for “both mind and body” in his political career.  Herndon attributed that notion to the same “friend” who’d come up with the buried-heart remark.  Lincoln had “leaped wildly into the political arena,” according to the alleged friend, “as a refuge from his despair.”

If fate had instead allowed Abraham to settle down with “Ann Rutledge, the sweet, tender and loving girl, he would have gravitated insensibly into a purely domestic man.”  Though already a state legislator, Lincoln would supposedly have forsaken electoral ambition for the pleasures of the hearth.

Herndon suspected that, for Lincoln, embracing the storm and stress of politics had depended on Ann’s dying.  It took the jolt of her removal to launch Lincoln on his weary pilgrimage toward the supreme sacrifice: surrendering his life for the people.

In this tragic scenario, Ann’s death, like Abraham’s, could be taken as an indirect act of devotion to the Republic.  Never publicly joined in love, they could be bound together in public service.  The loss of her life in 1835 could be tethered to the loss of his life in 1865.  Lincoln’s entire three-decade public career could be seen as framed by two calamitous events, his fiancée’s death and his own martyrdom.

Looking back from the 21st century, we can only wonder what kind of love Ann and Abraham shared.  “Love” covers a spectrum of emotions, desires, and promises.  There’s no way to be sure how far their bond had progressed along the path from intimate friendship to informal betrothal.

Perhaps they themselves didn’t know.  Anyone who has ever been young and in love can imagine that the devastation Abraham felt at her death may have come, in part, from knowing that they hadn’t been given the time to figure out just where they stood.

We do know that Abraham fell in love again.  Seven years after Ann’s death, Lincoln married the mercurial and passionate Mary Todd.  He let himself feel the promise of a lasting tie with a quick-witted, attentive woman whose extensive education, loyalty to the Whig Party, and endorsement of his ambition would help him rise to whatever heights life had in store for him.

With Mary, Abraham could bring love and politics together in a life of companionship, parenting, service, and, for all their domestic discord, moments of tenderness shielded from public view — maybe a reminder to him of moments he’d shared in his youth with Ann Rutledge.