第15章 PROSPERITY(1)

How Lincoln's engagement was patched up is as delicious an uncertainty,from gossip's point of view,as how it had been broken off.Possibly,as many people have asserted,it was brought about by an event of which,in the irony of fate,Lincoln ever after felt ashamed.[1]An impulsive,not overwise politician,James Shields,a man of many peculiarities,was saucily lampooned in a Springfield paper by some jaunty girls,one of whom was Miss Todd.

Somehow,--the whole affair is very dim,--Lincoln acted as their literary adviser.Shields demanded the name of his detractor;Lincoln assumed the responsibility;a challenge followed.

Lincoln was in a ridiculous position.He extricated himself by a device which he used more than once thereafter;he gravely proposed the impossible.He demanded conditions which would have made the duel a burlesque--a butcher's match with cavalry broadswords.But Shields,who was flawlessly literal,insisted.The two met and only on the dueling ground was the quarrel at last talked into oblivion by the seconds.Whether this was the cause of the reconciliation with Miss Todd,or a consequence,or had nothing to do with it,remains for the lovers of the unimportant to decide.The only sure fact in this connection is the marriage which took place November 4,1842.[2]

Mrs.Lincoln's character has been much discussed.Gossip,though with very little to go on,has built up a tradition that the marriage was unhappy.If one were to believe the half of what has been put in print,one would have to conclude that the whole business was a wretched mistake;that Lincoln found married life intolerable because of the fussily dictatorial self-importance of his wife.But the authority for all these tales is meager.Not one is traceable to the parties themselves.Probably it will never be known till the end of time what is false in them,what true.About all that can be disengaged from this cloud of illusive witnesses is that Springfield wondered why Mary Todd married Lincoln.He was still poor;so poor that after marriage they lived at the Globe Tavern on four dollars a week.And the lady had been sought by prosperous men!The lowliness of Lincoln's origin went ill with her high notions of her family's importance.She was downright,high-tempered,dogmatic,but social;he was devious,slow to wrath,tentative,solitary;his very appearance,then as afterward,was against him.Though not the hideous man he was later made out to be--the "gorilla"of enemy caricaturists--he was rugged of feature,with a lower lip that tended to protrude.His immense frame was thin and angular;his arms were inordinately long;hands,feet and eyebrows were large;skin swarthy;hair coarse,black and generally unkempt.

Only the amazing,dreamful eyes,and a fineness in the texture of the skin,redeemed the face and gave it distinction.[3]Why did precise,complacent Miss Todd pick out so strange a man for her mate?The story that she married him for ambition,divining what he was to be--like Jane Welsh in the conventional story of Carlyle--argues too much of the gift of prophecy.Whatever her motive,it is more than likely that she was what the commercialism of to-day would call an "asset."She had certain qualities that her husband lacked.For one,she had that intuition for the main chance which shallow people confound with practical judgment.Her soul inhabited the obvious;but within the horizon of the obvious she was shrewd,courageous and stubborn.Not any danger that Mary Lincoln would go wandering after dreams,visions,presences,such as were drifting ever in a ghostly procession at the back of her husband's mind.There was a danger in him that was to grow with the years,a danger that the outer life might be swamped by the inner,that the ghosts within might carry him away with them,away from fact--seeking-seeking.That this never occurred may be fairly credited,or at least very plausibly credited,to the firm-willed,the utterly matter-of-fact little person he had married.How far he enjoyed the mode of his safe-guarding is a fruitless speculation.

Another result that may,perhaps,be due to Mary Lincoln was the improvement in his fortunes.However,this may have had no other source than a distinguished lawyer whose keen eyes had been observing him since his first appearance in politics.