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

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.

As early as 1841, people began applying this stalwart phrase to Lincoln.  On New Year’s Day of that year, the Quincy, Illinois Whig described the 31-year-old from Springfield as “a self-made man, and one of the ablest” among all the lawyers and elected officials in the state. 

The Whig didn’t need to explain what “self-made” meant.  The paper presumed everyone knew the term.  Having entered common usage by the late 1820s, it had become a verbal staple, a handy way to praise resourceful men and the nation that had succored them.

Self-made public servants like Lincoln showed to the satisfaction of many that republican liberty really did rule in the U.S., at least in the North and West.  The chance to ascend in public responsibility and esteem wasn’t limited to the privileged few.  Aristocracy was following monarchy into the dustbin of history.

Disciplined climbers could now rise to distinction without benefit of family fortune or cronyism.  All they needed was well-engraved inner character.  The self-made man, wrote the prolific commercial author John Frost in his Self-Made Men of America (1848), was “one who has rendered himself accomplished, eminent, rich, or great by his own unaided efforts.”         

Lincoln took pride in having risen from a low rung on the social ladder, and said so repeatedly.  But he made no pretense of having accomplished that feat without help.  True, he’d done it with little material aid from his family, and like many young men of his era, he’d done it by self-consciously distancing himself from his father.  (Thomas Lincoln did pass along some vital social capital: the storytelling gift that proved integral to his son’s success.)

When 22, Lincoln strode into New Salem, Illinois, in 1831, “penniless” and “friendless,” as he later wrote.  Yet he soon attracted eager backing.  William Lee Miller, in his book Lincoln’s Virtues (pp. 24-25), gives a nice summary of all the “boosts and helps and open doors and befriendings” that launched Lincoln on his path to public renown. 

After a decade in Illinois, having just been crowned by the Quincy Whig as “one of the ablest” self-made men in the state, Lincoln gave an address in Springfield that spelled out the social underpinnings of self-making.  Speaking to the Washingtonian Society, a temperance group, on Washington’s Birthday 1842, he urged all citizens to join the Society by signing its pledge to abstain from spirits. 

Those struggling to escape the lure of liquor, said Lincoln, couldn’t be expected to make their way unassisted.  They needed the active support of a united community, including people like himself who’d never been tempted by drink.  Lincoln took no credit for his own sobriety, attributing it to luck rather than self-discipline.  “Such of us as have never fallen victims [sic] have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.” 

And he extended his point beyond the issue of alcohol.  Everyone, even the morally proficient, had learned self-control by taking their cues from “other people’s actions.”  Everybody absorbed community norms by letting the influence of respected models seep into them.  Self-making amounted to a social achievement, not just an individual one. 

True, Lincoln always held, as he told a small group of free black men whom he invited to the White House 20 years later, that “success does not as much depend on external help as on self-reliance.”  His own experience taught him that relentless resolve lay behind the push for personal advancement.   

But those starting out with limited means — whether freed slaves or penniless migrants — would likely need some “external help.”  Without self-discipline they would surely fail; yet without the moral example and material help of others, self-discipline would languish like seed on rocky ground.

When Lincoln departed from Springfield as president-elect in 1861, he uttered his famous farewell remarks.  Once again, as in the 1842 temperance speech, he underlined the social foundations of self-making.  Speaking from the rear platform of his train on the day before his 52^nd birthday, he thanked his Springfield neighbors for making him into the “old man” he’d become.

“To you, dear friends,” he said in one version of his remarks, “I owe all that I have, all that I am.”  “To this place and the kindness of these people,” he says in another version, “I owe every thing.”

A third version, which appeared in the east-coast press on February 12, 1861, has him saying “to this people I owe all that I am.”  That’s the phrasing put on this late-1860s pocket-sized card, which mistakenly gives the date of publication — his birthday — as the date of delivery.

 Of course, after his death Lincoln couldn’t offer any more correctives to the notion that he’d risen without help.  Americans preferred to cherish him post-mortem as the paragon of self-containment, the brooding genius with the generous heart and steely will.

Another famous self-made man, Frederick Douglass, left one of many testimonials to Lincoln’s unassisted mastery in constructing himself.  Writing a year after the president’s assassination, he praised Lincoln as so self-sufficient, so original, that he had reinvented even the process of self-creation.

“One great charm of his life,” wrote Douglass, “is that he was indebted to himself for himself.  He was the architect of his own fortune, a self-made man, a flat boat captain, a splitter of rails, a man of toil, one who travelled far but made the road on which he traveled — one who ascended high, but with hard hands and honest work built the ladder on which he climbed.  Flung upon the sea of life in the midnight storm, without oars or life preservers he bravely buffeted the billows — and with sinewy arms swam in safety, where other men despair and sink.”