In the summer of 1831, when Abe Lincoln was twenty-two years old, he arrived in New Salem, Illinois, at that time a frontier
village of fifteen log cabins. Shortly afterward the lanky
young man opened a general store in partnership with a
friend named Berry. Their stock included whiskey. Berry continued to tap the keg until he drank up all their liquid assets, and the store went bankrupt. Abe voluntarily assumed all the obligations for the partnership and went into debt for about fifteen hundred dollars.
At that time Abe boarded with Mentor Graham, the neighborhood schoolmaster, who began the task of teaching the young backwoodsman the rudiments of grammar. He awakened in Abe an interest in great oratory as well as a love for poetry. Graham sensed his pupil’s extreme melancholy and preoccupation with death as well as his marked disinclination to do anything which required much effort. He advised Abe to go into politics, declaring wryly that there were only two professions open to a man who had failed at everything else—schoolteaching and politics.
Abe’s opportunity came a year later while he held the job of local postmaster. A young politician, Ninian Edwards, a vigorous opponent of President Jackson, appeared at the Rutledge tavern in New Salem. He was looking for a possible candidate for the State Assembly. But Abe, who had been considering going farther west, refused. Then several circumstances arose to change his mind. Seth Gale, the friend with whom Abe had planned to make the trip, received news that his father was sick and he had to return to his native state of Maryland at once. And Ann Rutledge, daughter of the local tavernkeeper, with whom Abe had been secretly in love, received a letter from New York State to the effect that a young man named McNeil, with whom Ann had been in love, would not be able to return to New Salem. When Abe declared his devotion, Ann, disillusioned with her former lover, encouraged him. As a consequence, Abe sent word by his friend Judge Bowling Green that he would be a candidate for the State Assembly.
Fate brought about another, more disastrous, turn in Abe’s fortunes. Ann Rutledge fell suddenly ill of a fever, and nothing that the doctor or Abe did could save her. After Ann’s death, Abe became completely obsessed by a feeling of melancholia from which none of his friends could rouse him.
Knowing that something must be done to pull Abe out of his lethargy, his old political mentor, Ninian Edwards, introduced him to his ambitious sister-in-law, Mary Todd. Mary saw immediately that Lincoln was a man she could inspire to great things. Her aristocratic sister, Elizabeth, could not understand what Mary saw in this raw-boned frontiersman, but Mary saw in him the satisfaction of her own frustrated yearnings. They became engaged.
But Abe had not forgotten Ann Rutledge.
One day he encountered his old friend, Seth Gale, with whom he had once planned to go west. Seth had set out from Maryland with his wife and child, and was headed for Oregon. But his child, Jimmie, was ill, and Seth felt that if his son died neither he nor his wife would have the courage to continue the journey. In a flash of insight, Abe saw in his friend’s predicament a symbol of the plight of the country as a whole. The Dred Scott Decision had made it possible to extend slavery in the West, a circumstance that would be fatal to those who, like Seth Gale, were trying to build a new country there. That vision crystallized Abe’s purpose in life; and when he offered up a prayer to the Almighty for the life of little Jimmie, he was thinking of the country as a whole. Filled with a new purpose, he pocketed his pride and went back to Mary Todd. Still believing in him, she accepted Abe without a moment’s hesitation.
From that day on his career followed one straight line, culminating in his nomination for the presidency. But most important of all, there was his own life with Mary Todd. In the years since their marriage she had borne him four sons, one of whom had died, and through those years she had grown more tense and irritable, until the home life of the Lincolns became almost intolerable. Abe patiently endured her tirades in their own home, but when Mary began criticizing him in public, he resisted. On the night of his election she had one of her tantrums, and Abe was forced to send her home on the very eve of her triumph.
With his election to the highest office in the land, Lincoln’s troubles increased. The old melancholia returned, the old preoccupation with death. On an eventful day in 1861, standing on the rear platform of the train which was to take him from Springfield to Washington, he tried to express to his old neighbors and friends his ideals for the future of America. As the presidential train pulled out he could hear his well-wishers singing the last strains of "John Brown’s Body"—"His soul goes marching on!"