financial resources. Emotional preparedness for marriage was simply defined: If a young man fell in love with a woman, he wanted—some day—to marry her.”¹⁷
 

And as every study of marriage in the 19th century makes clear, many engagements were disrupted as the principals stepped back from their courtship to contemplate the permanency of their future condition. As we know, this was the case with Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln. Sometime in 1840 they had reached an agreement that they might marry and then on what Lincoln called “the Fatal First” of January 1841, they broke off their engagement. A year and a half later they were courting again, and as all the world knows, they married in November of 1842.
 

Many historians have taken the disruption of their courtship as a sign that Lincoln did not love Mary Todd, and they assume without any preponderance of evidence that he was the one who ended their engagement. Then, according to this interpretation, he renewed his troth because he valued honor over breaking his word or because he worried, having been attached for debt in New Salem, that he might be charged with breach of promise. I find these explanations implausible. Isn’t it more dishonorable, especially in an age when true love is becoming the conventional practice, to marry a woman you don’t love? And as for a breach of promise suit, this judicial procedure was infrequently used in the 1840’s when a new tradition of courtship based on mutual love had replaced a previous generation’s interest in property arrangements. In a resounding statement of her own commitment to the new way of courtship and marriage, Mary Todd wrote a friend in 1840 “...my hand will never be given where my heart is not.”¹⁸
 

Besides, where is Mary Lincoln in this masculinized equation during a period in her life when she had considerable power? Well, in this misogynist rendering she is humiliated, marries Abraham Lincoln for vengeance, and spends the rest of her life succeeding in making her husband miserable, according to William Herndon in an interpretation that has influenced contemporary positions. Here we have left the commonsense world that should accompany historians and have entered the dramas of Italian opera as well as the gender wars. There is no compelling documentary evidence on why their engagement was broken or who broke it, so the field is rife for speculation.
 

The clash of contradictory opinions range from Ninian Edwards’ assertion that Mary Todd released Lincoln from his pledge to Elizabeth Edwards’ position that her sister’s flirting with Stephen Douglas disrupted the relationship to Abner Ellis, the Springfield postmaster’s opinion that Mary backed out of the engagement... . “Her refusal to comply actually made Mr. L sick.”¹⁹ And among modern historians interpretations move from Ruth Randall’s arguments that the Edwards’ family opposed the marriage and so Lincoln gave it up to my view that she was furious when he was late to a party.
 

Douglas ‘Wilson, an historian of Lincoln’s early private life, contends that the Lincoln courtship was superficial. He argues that when Lincoln got to know Mary better he found