marriage

Recently a new contender for Lincoln’s affection has emerged in Donald Wilson’s Honor’s Voice: The Transformation ofAbraham Lincoln. Her name is Mathilda Edwards, and she was 17 years old and living at the Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards’s home when she supposedly became Lincoln’s great love just before he, age 33, married Mary Todd. To establish this point both Burlingame and Wilson make much of two sources from the Herndon collection. Lincoln’s friends James Matheny and Joshua Speed, the latter said to be himself in love with Mathilda Edwards, reported that Lincoln fell in love with Miss Edwards.

But there is conflicting evidence that they do not consider. Elizabeth Edwards who lived in this Springfield household on Second Street twice told Herndon that there was nothing to the relationship between Mathilda and Abraham Lincoln. Interviewed in 1865 and again in 1887, Elizabeth Edwards who is the most credible witness on the matter denied that Lincoln loved Mathilda. Quoting from an interview with Elizabeth Edwards, “I asked Miss Edwards.. .if Mr. Lincoln ever mentioned the subject of love to her. Miss Edwards said ‘0 my word, he never mentioned such a subject to me. He never even stooped to pay me a compliment.’ And then Elizabeth goes on to say ‘Mr. Lincoln loved Mary.’ Asked again in 1887, Elizabeth Edwards reiterated ‘It is said that Miss Edwards had something to do in breaking Mary’s engagement with Lincoln—it is not true. Miss Edwards told me that Lincoln never condescended to pay her even a poor compliment: it was the flirtation with Douglas that did the business’.”⁷

What the promotion of other women to Lincoln’s true loves accomplishes is to undermine Mary Lincoln and to place an anecdotal vise on marriage which makes Lincoln’s wife into someone he did not want to marry and who in retaliation made his life, according to William Herndon, into a hell. Remember neither Abraham nor Mary ever left even a shred of documentary evidence that they loved anyone else. In fact after Lincoln’s assassination, Mary Lincoln wrote a friend that Lincoln had always assured her that she was his only love.⁸

Convieniently for the anyone-but-Mary-school, there is another teenager waiting in the wings who may represent the millennium’s candidate for Lincoln’s true love. Sarah Rickard was the sister-in-law of Lincoln’s friend William Butler. After the President’s death Rickard reported to Herndon that Lincoln had proposed marriage to her, and she had refused him because he seemed almost like an older brother.⁹ ‘In any case with the addition of Sarah to his list of girlfriends, Lincoln, a man universally viewed as uncomfortable with women, is transformed into a veritable Don Juan.

The reason for this controversy over marriage is our flawed understanding of the history of that institution. While we easily locate Lincoln the Republican partisan and officeholder within his political times, we do not put his marriage within the context