him. There are, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, second
acts in American love lives.
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’.”
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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.
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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.
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‘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
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