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
8