Every once in a while it is nice to read something that does not pertain to history, but that is the thing, we all need just a little bit of history to help us to remember that the people back in time were also human. Often we elevate people from history, and we do not share their flaws, but that is the thing, we all have our human side, and so does Abraham Lincoln.
There have been a lot of times when I have felt like there was no connection between me and the people around me. Some of the time I believe that no one really understands what I am going through, and sometimes that is the part that gets me feeling just a bit of melancholy. But that is the thing, no one has really been in my shoes. No one has been in any one of our shoes, at least not exactly. And maybe that was the one thing that made me connect with the following story, but it might be the only thing.
It was said that during the time that Abraham Lincoln lived in the small town of New Salem that he had fallen in love. The name of the girl was Ann Rutledge, and there are a lot of times when we pass through, and we do not take the time to actually stop and listen to the story. But Ann was something special to Lincoln. It was said that Ann was, at the time, engaged to another member of the community, but that he had some legal affair that he had to go and settle. Some believe that it was a large financial debt, others say that it might have been the passing of a relative, and he had to settle the estate. Whatever it was, he had been called away and he never returned, but that the engagement between the man and Ann was still ongoing when Lincoln was around.
But it did not stop with Lincoln falling in love with the young and beautiful Ann. He had started courting her, and they got along great. It is not quite clear who it was who had introduced the two of them, but whoever it was had picked out a suitable person for the other. Anyway, Lincoln spent many an evening with the Rutledge family, probably because he was a boarder at the home. And this might be why he was able to know her in a way that no other had.
The community of New Salem was set to be shocked. But Ann came to contract Typhoid, and she became very sick. But just before that, it is said that Ann and Lincoln agree that they want to marry, but that Lincoln wanted her hand properly. He wanted her to end her engagement to the other man. But that was the thing, no one knew whether or not the man was still alive, so they decided to wait. But there was another reason that Lincoln wanted to wait, and that was he was still studying to become a lawyer, and he wanted to provide Ann with only the best of things.
But she contracted typhoid, not that it was known by that name, but rather it is what Lincoln tended to call brain fever. And Ann struggled and fought to survive, but after several days it was believed that she was not going to live. In those last moments, she wants to have Lincoln at her side. And so they sent for Lincoln. Sadly, Ann died, and the effects on Lincoln are drastic. There were some who strived to make sure Lincoln was not able to find a knife, afraid that they were going to have to fight to keep Lincoln alive.
It was through the diligent watch of his friends that Lincoln does not harm himself, but after the death of Ann, he starts to struggle with severe melancholy. So much so that Joshua Fry Speed, Lincoln’s closest friend in life, fears that once again, that he will have to do all that he can to keep Lincoln alive.
While the letter above is not about the situation that Lincoln was facing, it is a letter that was written in the hand of Joshua F. Speed. It was the friendship that Lincoln would find when he made the move to Springfield, and the two men shared an apartment about a general store in Springfield. It was this friendship that Lincoln needed.
But the question remains, was the love that Lincoln had for Ann and her subsequent death really all that important to the Lincoln story? That was one of the things that I wanted to settle for myself. There are those historians who do not necessarily believe that the Ann Rutledge story is even real, let alone that it is very important, other than to make a footnote in the life of Abraham Lincoln. But that is not what I think, and in fact I believe that the love that Lincoln had for Ann, that it was a key part of whether or not the melancholy that Lincoln often felt and expressed was almost a direct part of Lincoln’s personality.
There are many parts of Lincoln’s life that we may or may not know enough about, but that is the thing, we can kind of come to terms with some of the reasons for the melancholy he had to live with. He had lost his mother and then his sister and then he lost the love of his life. So, how the role that Ann Rutledge played needs to be understood, not for the political role, but rather it is for the psychological role that it plays in his life.
A number of years ago, I had the chance to sit in on the program “The Eyes of Lincoln” at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and what I heard while that program was going, was that all of these different things had been weighing on the mind of Lincoln, the things that he had been through, they were continuing to affect him. If this is true, that Lincoln carried all of this, why is the argument about how relevant the Ann Rutledge story brings so much in debate.
One of the things that I have always liked about the story of Ann Rutledge is that it makes Lincoln not some distant hero, who never did anything wrong, but rather it shows that Lincoln has his humanity. He like the rest of the world has felt pain, and dealt with the having to know that the world was going to be darker moving forward. The fact that there had been so much death in his young life tells us a great deal about the world that Lincoln was living in. If we only consider the losses that we want to remember, and do not count the death of Ann, then we only know part of the story.
It is not just this though, I find that there is a lot of interest in the love life of Abraham Lincoln. It is not like he just jumps right from Ann’s death to marrying Mary Todd, but rather there is one who is well known, and she is the only one that we have any proof of them actually being engaged. This other woman is named Mary Owen. What we know is that Lincoln starts courting Mary in the interim between the times that he is seeing Mary Todd.
For those who are lesser familiar with the Lincoln story, there is a period of time when Mary Todd and Lincoln break off their engagement. The story that many of us are exposed to is that they break it off because the Edwards family pressures him to end the engagement, because he is not of the same social standing as Mary Todd. But there is the side that made him doubt that he was ever going to reach a social standing that could match that of the Edwards family, as Lincoln has just become a lawyer and is trying his best to become someone, but his station had been as just a “country bumpkin” as the Edwards’ had called him. He had a great amount of self-doubt, and a very deep depression.
During the time that Lincoln was no longer engaged to Mary Todd, that is when he starts his courtship to Mary Owen, and while we have all the documentation to go along with the affair with Mary Owen, we know that in the end Lincoln ends the engagement and relationship, and then he returns to Mary Todd. During this time, we have to understand that there are a lot of things happening, and some of them are beginning to fall in place for Lincoln. We also know that during this span of time, that Lincoln writes to Mary Owen from the Speed Farm in Kentucky.
We know, that when Lincoln breaks off the engagement to Mary Todd, that he enters a period of time with major depression, and that it was fearing that Lincoln was going to harm himself that Joshua Speed asks Lincoln to come down and stay for a while. And Lincoln does so. There is a period of time while he is at the Speed residence where Joshua makes the comment that he needs to take all sharp objects away. This is the second time that this is brought to our attention, the first time is after the death of Ann Rutledge. But at the end of his time there, he pulls himself together, and once again returns to life in Illinois.
Once Lincoln returns to Illinois, he also returns to the pursuit of Mary Todd, and we all know that this time, Lincoln is able to land the relationship, and they are married not long after. But that is the thing, there are a great number of things that we still need to understand. There are those who doubt that the relationship issue with Ann Rutledge, that it is not all that important, but then there are those who are out there who say that since there is no real proof the relationship took place, that it more than likely didn’t happen at all. But this is where we have to look at some varying factors.
It has to do with the source of this story. While there is some documented cases where other historians were able to extract the story of Ann Rutledge, the sad thing is that the story has its main highlight come to the surface by one who has this bent toward making something of this. William H. Herndon is the first person to bring this story up. After Lincoln’s death, Herndon goes around, attempting to tell the story of Lincoln’s life. In fact he schedules several lectures on the subject of Lincoln. But Herndon and Mary Todd Lincoln do not like one another, and they get into a heated debate that is carried on in the newspapers of the time.
Supposedly, as Herndon had gone to gather different statements from the people who knew Lincoln in his New Salem days, and at other locations, he started to form a really good picture of the people in Lincoln’s life, the people that Herndon would interview, they had been a part of the life in the places where he had lived. He talked to the family, the stepmother of Lincoln and LIncoln’s stepbrother. And the evidence seemed to be pouring in. And in some of this material we find the beginnings of the Ann Rutledge story. But that is the thing, is that where it should have ended?
Through this heated battle between Herndon and Lincoln’s widow, that is when Herndon decides that he is not going to be able to draw the crowd that he really wants, unless he goes out of his way to tell something about Lincoln that few people had ever known. So, he advertises this last lecture on Lincoln is going to have a surprise that no one has seen coming, and tells the public that he is going to talk about the true love of Abraham Lincoln.
In the crowd of people who hear the story, one of them takes the story of Ann Rutledge back to Mary Todd, and she once again takes to the newspaper in an effort to discredit the story. She tells the American people that there had never been anyone who Lincoln love other than her. This becomes one of many stories that has become debatable in historical circles because of the information and the way that it was brought about. But the question is, that just because Herndon was wielding this story like a weapon to harm someone he knew and did not like, does that mean that all aspects of the story are not real?
One of the hardest things that historians often find with the story of Ann Rutledge is whether or not there is any modicum of truth to it at all. But when I began to search out the story, to learn whether I was going to be able to get to the bottom of the mystery, and I sat there in the middle of class, trying to think how I was going to argue the value of the Ann Rutledge story, it came to me, I needed to show that there was evidence of something there.
I began to look through the different stories, and sadly I was finding that there was this problem, much of what we know about the story comes from historians after the fact. But I had seen something else, and that was the amount of times when the information seemed to come up. Herndon had done one thing right, he had left us all of the different accounts of the Ann Rutledge story. He had gone to residents of New Salem, and had talked to them, and learned some of the story, but he had had the sense to leave all those interviews, so that there were others who could examine the evidence.
But where would all that lead us? There were a number of items in that collection of documents that historians argue over the validity of the given item. One of the biggest arguments they have is, if Herndon is specifically asking about Ann, and trying to steer people to talk about the subject, are those interviews that he conducted, actually talking about Ann in the light of it being something other than the idea of Herndon? In other words is he trying to create this love affair between Ann and Abraham, or is he getting it out of the people without provocation?
There are a couple of different things for us to consider, and they are, are all of the records of Ann Rutledge and Abraham Lincoln, intact? Did Herndon actually prove that there was a relationship between Ann and Lincoln? And what did other historians find?
For me, there is no doubt a relationship between Lincoln and Ann, and the role that it played. But that is the thing, you have to make up your own mind as to what you think. But know that there is enough evidence to provide for an interesting chapter in Lincoln’s life. It is not that I would wish this life on anyone else, the fact that Lincoln loses someone so close to him, that is the hardest part, but it is not where Lincoln’s life ends, but rather, it is something that would stick with him for the rest of his life, but is there enough evidence for you to say that this is something that truly happened?
The following document is the essay that I wrote for a college class. It will be filled with other sources that might help, if you want to learn more.
Thanks for joining me!
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