The Lincoln Story Book Part 6

STRUCK BY THE DEAD HAND.

Edwin Booth, the tragedian, brother of the regicide Wilkes, was at a friend's house. By the purest chance, dallying over the knickknacks, he picked up a plaster-cast of a hand. It was something more than a paper-weight, he was intuitively prompted, for he said, handling it reverently as Yorick's relict:

"By the way, whose is this?"

Before the cue could be given to hush or utter a subterfuge, some one blurted out:

"Abraham Lincoln's! Don't you know?"

"The murder was out!" and the distinguished guest, who suffered a long term for a crime wholly out of his ken, was silent for the evening.--(W. D. Howells.)

THIS CLINCHES IT.

A party accompanying the President to the ground to see experiments with new ordnance in the Navy Yard, in 1862, were diverted by his taking up a s.h.i.+p-carpenter's ax from its nick in a spar, and holding it out by the end of the handle; a feat that none of the group could imitate.

He said that he had enough of the Dahlgreens, Columbiads, and Raphael repeaters--and that this was an American inst.i.tution, which, "I guess, I understand better than all other weapons!"

LINCOLN'S FIRST LOVE-STORY.

In 1833, when Abraham was just over twenty, he fell in love with Anne, or Annie Rutledge, at New Salem. Her father kept the tavern where Lincoln boarded. But the girl was engaged to a dry-goods merchant, named McNeil. This man, pretending to be of a high old Irish family, likely to discountenance union to a publican's daughter, s.h.i.+lly-shallied, but finally went East to get his folks' consent.

He acknowledged that he was parading under borrowed plumes, as he was a McNamara in reality. He stayed away so long that the maid-forlorn gave him up and listened to other suitors. Lincoln proposed, but waited till the apparent jilt was heard from. Then they were espoused.

But a block to the match came in Lincoln having no position. Awaiting his efforts as a law student, the wedding was postponed; but, meanwhile, death came quick where fortune lagged. She died and left her lover broken-hearted. He seems then to have been smitten with the brown study afflicting him all his life, and by some, like Secretary Boutwell, affirmed to be independent of the surrounding grounds for depression and grief. Fears of suicide led his friends to watch him closely; and he was known to go and lie on the grave of the maid, whose name he said would dwell ever with him, while his heart was buried with her. The rival, McNamara, returned too late to redeem his vow, but lived in the same State many years, "a prosperous gentleman."

A PUT-UP JOB--OR CHANCE?

The ways of the pet.i.tioner are deep and mysterious. The Virginia (Illinois) _Enquirer_, March 1, 1879, had the following:

"John McNamer (Namara?) was buried last Sunday, near Petersburg, Menard County. He was an early settler and carried on business at New Salem. Abe Lincoln was the postmaster there and kept a store. It was here that, at the tavern, dwelt the fair Annie Rutledge, in whose grave Lincoln wrote that his heart was buried. As the story runs, the fair and gentle Annie was John's sweetheart, but Abe took 'a s.h.i.+ne' to her, and succeeded in heading off Mac, and won her affections. During the war, a Kentucky lady went to Was.h.i.+ngton with her daughter to procure her son's pardon for being a guerrilla. The daughter was a musician. Sitting at the piano while her mother was sewing, she sang 'Gentle Annie.' While it was being charmingly rendered, Abe rose from his seat, crossed the room to a window, and gazed out for several minutes with that sad, 'far-away' look noticed as one of his particularities. When he returned to his seat he wrote a note which, as he said, was the pardon besought. The scene proves that Mr. Lincoln was a man of fine feelings, and that, if the occurrence was a put-up job on the lady's part, it accomplished the purpose all the same."

LINCOLN'S MARRIAGE.

In 1839, another Kentucky belle [Footnote: Addressing Kentuckians in a speech made at Cincinnati, in 1859, Lincoln said: "We mean to marry our girls when we have a chance; and I have the honor to say I once did have a chance in that way."] arrived in Illinois to follow the steps of her sister, who had found a conquest there. This Mrs. Edwards introduced Miss Mary Todd, and she became the belle of the Sangamon bottom. Lincoln was pitted against another young lawyer, afterward the eminent Stephen A. Douglas, but, odd as it appears, Miss Todd singled out the Ugly Duckling as the more eligible of the two. Whatever the reason--strange in a man knowing how to bide his time to win--Lincoln wrote to the lady, withdrawing from the contest, allowed to be hopeless by him. His friend Speed would not bear the letter, but pressed him to have a face-to-face explanation. The rogue--who was in the toils himself, and was shortly wedded--believed the parley would remove the, perhaps, imaginary hindrance. But Miss Todd accepted the deliverance; thereupon they parted--but immediately the reconciliation took place. The nuptials were settled, but here again Lincoln displayed a waywardness utterly out of keeping with his subsequent actions. He "bolted" on the wedding-day--New-year's, 1841. Searching for him, his friends--remembering the fit after the Rutledge death-- found him in the woods like the Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim of ancient romance.

Luckily he was inspirited by them with a feeling that an irrepressible desire to live till a.s.sured that the world is "a little better for my having lived in it." Seeing what ensued, one could say then "Good _Speed_!" to his bosom friend of that name. But this friend married in the next year, and in his cold loneliness so doubled, Lincoln harked back to the flame. She ought never to have forgiven him for the slight, but it was not possible for her to repay him with poetic justice by rejoicing Stephen A. Douglas, as that gentleman had looked elsewhere for matrimonial recompense. Lincoln and Miss Todd, in 1842, renewed the old plight and never again were divided.

THE BURLESQUE DUEL.

Lincoln was plunged w.i.l.l.y-nilly into the society he shunned at home, on entering the legislature at Springfield. A newspaper there published the account--from her side--of a young lady's difference with a noted politician, General James s.h.i.+elds. He married a sister of Lincoln's wife, and there was a feud between them. s.h.i.+elds flew to the editor to demand the name of the maligner, as he called the correspondent, or the editor must meet him with dueling weapon--or his horsewhip. In the Western States the whip was snapped at literary men as the cane was flourished in England at the date, 1842.

The editor consulted with Lincoln as a lawyer and a friend. With his enmity as to s.h.i.+elds, the friend promptly advised him to say "I did it!" This was, in fact, sheer justice, for it was Lincoln's wife who uttered the articles. And, by the way, their style and rustic humor were much in the vein of the "Widow Bedott" and the "Samantha" papers of later times. Mrs. Lincoln was not the mere housekeeper the scribes accuse her of being. Lincoln knew what was her value when he read his speeches first to her for an opinion, as Moliere courted his stewardess for opinions. Sumner heeded her counsel.

Abraham championed the mysterious "Aunt 'Becca," who had characterized s.h.i.+elds as "a ballroom dandy floating around without heft or substance, just like a lot of cat-fur where cats have been fighting."

Is not this quite Lincolnian?

Thus put forward, Lincoln received a challenge.

Trial by battle-personal still ruled. The politicians coupled with the necessity of going out with weapons to maintain an a.s.sertion in speech or publication were Jefferson Davis, Jackson, the President; Henry Clay, the amiable; Sam Houston, Sergeant S. Prentiss, etc.

s.h.i.+elds naturally challenged the lady's champion. As the challenged party, Lincoln, who had cooled in the interim, not only chose broadswords (not at all "the gentleman's arm in an affair of honor"), but, what is more, descanted on the qualities of the cutlas in such a droll manner and words that the second went off laughing. He imparted his unseemly mirth to his opponent's seconds, and all the parties concerned took the cue to soften down the irritation between two persons formerly "chums," and relatives so close.

The meeting took place by the river-side out of Alton, where the leaking out of the gallantry of Lincoln in taking up the cudgels for the lady led to an explanation, although no such enlightenment ought to be permitted on the ground. Besides, all was ludicrous--the broadswords intolerably broad.

The princ.i.p.als shook hands. But the plotters were not content with this peaceful ending. They had determined that the outside spectators on the town side of the river should be "in at the (sham) death." They rigged up a log in a coat and sheet like a man wounded and reclining in the bottom of a boat, and pretended it was one of the duelists, badly stricken, whom they were escorting to town for surgical a.s.sistance. The explosion of laughter receiving the two princ.i.p.als when the hoax was revealed caused the incident to be a sore point to both Lincoln and s.h.i.+elds.

"WANTING TO DANCE THE WORST WAY."

A Miss Mary Todd had come to visit a sister married in the neighborhood of Springfield. Lincoln was there as a member of the legislature sitting. He had eschewed society, though he liked it, in favor of study, but now rewarded himself for achieving this fruit of application by joining the movements around him. He made the acquaintance of Miss Todd, vivacious, sprightly, keenly insighted so as to divine he would prove superior in fate to Stephen Douglas, also courting her. Although unsuited by nature and his means to s.h.i.+ne in the ballroom, Lincoln followed his flame thither. Using the vernacular, he asked for her hand, saying earnestly:

"Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you _the worst way._"

After he had led his partner to her seat, a friend asked how the clumsy partner had carried himself.

"He kept his word. He did dance the worst way!"

"THE STATUTE FIXES ALL THAT!"

Even Lincoln's marriage was to be accompanied by a diversion of that merry imp of incongruity always with him--as Shakespeare's most stately heroes are attended by a comic servant. He married Miss Mary Todd, of Kentucky, at Springfield, at the age of thirty-three.

It was the first wedding performed with all the ceremonial of the Episcopalian sect. This was to the awe of the Honorable Judge Tom C.

Brown, an old man, and friend and patron of our Abraham. He watched the ecclesiastical functionary to the point of Lincoln's placing the ring on his bride's finger, when the irate old stager exclaimed at the formula: "With this ring I thee endow with all my goods," etc.

"Grace to Goshen! Lincoln, the statute fixes all that!"