the newspaper, or knocked her and left her a-kicking.”⁴  (These are things that, on at least one occasion, Lincoln did to various adversaries.) Certainly the pinnacle of this judgmental style of interpretation by opposing quotations emerges in the title of Michael Burlingame’s short book—Honest Abe, Dishonest Mary.
 

My response is that we have too many historians deciding that they don’t like Mary Lincoln and with extraordinary vehemence extrapolating their personal judgments onto the marriage. Donald Wilson and Michael Burlingame don’t like Mary Lincoln; that does not mean that Abraham Lincoln did not, nor more relevantly, does it mean that the compact that Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln fashioned in the nearly twenty-three years of their marriage was not a satisfying one from which both partners gained emotional support, physical satisfaction, and intellectual intimacy.
 

To be sure, an unsuccessful Lincoln marriage is historically serviceable. For the President’s daily association with a woman he supposedly loathed makes him ever more the martyr of American mythology. The President who dealt so generously with the afflicted in public affairs learned, in this understanding, to do so through his private life with a shrew. “Lincoln daily practiced tolerance of a cantankerous female who was neither his first nor his greatest love.”⁵ And those who assess marriage as unhappy have provided their hero with some alternatives.
 

First there is Ann Rutledge, a woman who is often portrayed as Lincoln’s first and only love. I must protest. Granted that Lincoln may have loved Ann Rutledge and may even have been engaged to her (she apparently was less loyal and was betrothed in her brief life of twenty-two years to two other men before becoming engaged to Lincoln), still Ann Rutledge died in 1835.⁶ Lincoln married seven years later. According to the most rabid enthusiasts of the Ann Rutledge legend, Lincoln adored her throughout his life. Perhaps the reason has something to do with the hauntingly beautiful poem by Edgar Lee Masters from his Spoon River Anthology that expresses the romantic longing of men caught in the reality of humdrum relationships with wives transformed in their imaginations, according to one proverb, “from good girls to bad wives.” “I am Ann Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds! Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln! Wedded to him not through union/but through separation.”
 

But poetry is not historical evidence, and we do not have any creditable evidence of this enduring love from its principal save an off-hand comment in 1860 that he thought of her often. Hearsay evidence is not admissible, at least in most courts, and Lincoln’s is no comment of an enduring passion. Instead it is more the testimony of his life-long obsession with death. Now mine is not the evidence of scholars, but a half-century later I remember my first love with nostalgic affection. He happened to have been killed in an automobile accident while I was in college. Still I find it absurd for me and for anyone to hold that he was an only love and that I never got over him, even though I still think of

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