Read Online Abraham Lincoln by Stephen B. Oates - Free Book Online

revealed his innermost thoughts and feelings.
    By the summer of 1840, Lincoln felt a little more sure of himself and began courting Mary Todd. They made a remarkable couple—he tall, thin, and self-conscious, she five feet two, fashionably plump, and the very creature of excitement, with radiant eyes and a turned-up nose. Lincoln had a hard-won reputation as a gifted young lawyer and a promising politician, and Mary considered him an excellent prospect for matrimony. She took a keen interest in his political work, noted how ambitious he was, found his “the most congenial mind she had ever met,” and felt a growing affection for this towering attorney who was unlike anybody she had ever known.
    But as their relationship deepened, Lincoln had gnawingdoubts about his meager education and low-class background when compared to Mary’s. After all, she came from a prominent Kentucky family—her father was a well-known banker and Whig politico in Lexington. And she had attended a stylish women’s academy, where she had studied English literature and acquired a reading knowledge of French. Still, Mary fascinated him. She liked poetry and politics as much as he, and she was entirely free of snobbishness. She made it clear that she cared about him, not his family background. Encouraged, Lincoln talked with her about marriage, and in December, 1840, they became engaged.
    But Mary’s sister and brother-in-law—Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards—did not approve. Because Mary was living with them in their Springfield mansion, they felt responsible for her. And neither of them liked Lincoln. When he sat with Mary in the parlor, Elizabeth said, “he would listen and gaze on her as if drawn by some superior power. He never scarcely said a word,” because he “could not hold a lengthy conversation with a lady—was not sufficiently educated and intelligent in the female line to do so.” Yet here Mary was, wanting to marry this boorish man who came from “nowhere” and whose future was “nebulous.” Well, Elizabeth and Ninian would not stand for it. They tried to break up the engagement and halt the courtship.
    Their hostility inflamed Lincoln’s anxieties about himself. In fact, he was annihilated. Then to compound his misery, Speed sold his store—he was moving back to Kentucky—and Lincoln had to find another room alone. His most intimate friend was leaving him, a friend he loved and needed now more than ever. It shattered whatever remained of his resolve. Plunging into the worst depression of his life, he broke off his engagement with Mary—this on the “fatal first” of January, 1841—and for a week lay in his room in acute despair. “I am now, the most miserable man living,” he wrote a law associate. “If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” He added: “To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better.”
    Speed moved to Kentucky as planned, but Lincoln visited him there, and the two friends kept up an intense and intimate correspondence about their love lives. They openly discussed their self-doubts, their fears of premature death and “nervous debility” with women. Speed went ahead and married anyway and then wrote Lincoln that their anxieties were groundless. Lincoln could barely restrain his joy. “I tell you, Speed, our forebodings, for which you and I are rather peculiar, are all the worst sort of nonsense.”
    Encouraged by Speed’s success, Lincoln started seeing Mary again, meeting her in secret lest the imperious Edwardses find out. Mary’s continued affection for Lincoln helped restore some of his self-esteem. He wrote Speed again: “Are you now, in feeling as well as judgment , glad you are married as you are?” Speed replied that, yes, he was really glad. With that, Lincoln overcame his