The morning that Lincoln rode into Springfield, he not only had no cash reserves of his own; but, to make matters worse, he was eleven hundred dollars in debt. He and Berry had lost that amount in their ill-fated grocery venture back in New Salem. Then Berry had drunk himself to death and left Lincoln to shoulder the obligations alone.
To be sure, Lincoln didn’t have to pay; he could have pleaded divided responsibility and the failure of the business and have found a legal loophole of escape.
But that wasn’t Lincoln’s way. Instead, he went to his creditors and promised to pay them every dollar with interest, if they would only give him time. They all agreed, except one, Peter Van Bergen. He brought suit immediately, obtained a judgment, and had Lincoln’s horse and surveying instruments sold at public auction. The others waited, however, and Lincoln scraped and saved and denied himself for fourteen years in order to keep faith with them. Even as late as 1848, when he was a member of Congress, he sent part of his salary home to pay off the last remnant of this old grocery debt.
The morning that Lincoln arrived in Springfield, he tied his horse in front of Joshua F. Speed’s general store at the northwest corner of the public square; and here is the remainder of the story told in Speed’s own words:
He had ridden into town on a borrowed horse, and engaged from the only cabinet-maker in the village a single bedstead. He came into my store, set his saddle-bags on the counter, and enquired what the furniture for a single bedstead would cost. I took slate and pencil, made a calculation, and found the sum for furniture complete would amount to seventeen dollars in all. Said he: “It is probably cheap enough; but I want to say that, cheap as it is, I have not the money to pay. But if you will credit me until Christmas and my experiment here as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail in that I will probably never pay you at all.” The tone of his voice was so melancholy that I felt for him. I looked up at him and I thought then, as I think now, that I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life. I said to him, “So small a debt seems to affect you so deeply, I think I can suggest a plan by which you will be able to attain your end without incurring any debt. I have a very large room and a very large double bed in it, which you are perfectly welcome to share with me if you choose.” “Where is your room?” he asked. “Upstairs,” said I, pointing to the stairs leading from the store to my room. Without saying a word he took his saddle-bags on his arm, went upstairs, set them down on the floor, came down again, and with a face beaming with pleasure and smiles, exclaimed, “Well, Speed, I’m moved.”
And so, for the next five and a half years, Lincoln slept in the bed with Speed, over the store, without paying any rent at all.
Another friend, William Butler, took Lincoln into his home and not only boarded him for five years, but bought many of his clothes for him.
Lincoln probably paid Butler a little something when, as, and if he could; but there was no specific charge. The whole thing was a haphazard arrangement between friends.
And Lincoln thanked God that it was, for if it hadn’t been for the help of Butler and Speed, he could never have made a go of the law.
He went into partnership with another attorney, named Stuart. Stuart devoted most of his time to politics, and saddled the office routine on Lincoln. But there wasn’t much routine to saddle, and there wasn’t much of an office. The furnishings consisted of “a small, dirty bed, a buffalo robe, a chair, a bench” and a sort of bookcase containing a few legal volumes.
The office records show that during the first six months the firm took in only five fees: one was for two dollars and a half, two were for five dollars each, one was a ten-dollar fee, and they had to take an overcoat as part payment in another case.
Lincoln became so discouraged that he stopped one day at Page Eaton’s carpenter shop in Springfield and confessed that he had a notion to abandon law and go to work as a carpenter. A few years before that, while studying law back in New Salem, Lincoln had seriously thought of giving up his books and becoming a blacksmith.
That first year in Springfield was a lonely one for Lincoln. About the only people he met were the men who forgathered of an evening, in the back of Speed’s store, to argue politics and kill time. Lincoln wouldn’t go to church on Sundays, because, as he said, he wouldn’t know how to act in fine churches like those in Springfield.
Only one woman spoke to him during that first year, and he wrote to a friend that she wouldn’t have spoken “if she could have avoided it.”
But in 1839 a woman came to town who not only spoke to him, but courted him and determined to marry him. Her name was Mary Todd.
Somebody asked Lincoln once why the Todds spelled their name as they did, and he replied that he reckoned that one “d” was good enough for God, but that the Todds had to have two.
The Todds boasted of a genealogical chart extending back to the sixth century. Mary Todd’s grandfathers and greatgrandfathers and great-uncles had been generals and governors, and one had been Secretary of the Navy. She, herself, had been educated in a snobbish French school in Lexington, Kentucky, conducted by Madame Victorie Charlotte Le Clere Mentelle and her husband—two French aristocrats who had fled from Paris during the Revolution in order to save their necks from the guillotine. They had drilled Mary to speak French with a Parisian accent, and had taught her to dance the cotillion and the Circassian Circle as the silken courtiers had danced them at Versailles.
Mary was possessed of a high and haughty manner, an exalted opinion of her own superiority, and an abiding conviction that she would one day marry a man who would become President of the United States. Incredible as it seems, she not only believed that, but she openly boasted of it. It sounded silly, and people laughed and said things; but nothing could shake her conviction and nothing could stop her boasting.
Her own sister, speaking of Mary, said she “loved glitter, show, pomp and power,” and was “the most ambitious woman I ever knew.”
Unfortunately, Mary had a temper that was frequently out of control; so one day in 1839, she quarreled with her stepmother, slammed the front door, and walked out of her father’s home in a rage and came to live with her married sister in Springfield.
If she was determined to marry a future President, she had certainly chosen the right place, for there wasn’t another spot in all the world where her prospects would have been brighter than there in Springfield, Illinois. At that time it was a dirty little frontier village, sprawling out over the treeless prairie, with no pavements, no lights, no sidewalks, no sewers. Cattle roamed about the town at will, hogs wallowed in the mud-holes of the principal streets, and piles of rotton manure filled the air with a stench. The total population of the town was only fifteen hundred; but two young men who were destined to be candidates for the Presidency in 1860 lived there in Springfield in 1839—Stephen A. Douglas, candidate for the Northern wing of the Democratic party, and Abraham Lincoln for the Republicans.
Both of them met Mary Todd, both courted her at the same time, both held her in their arms, and she once stated that both of them had proposed.
When asked which suitor she intended to marry, Mary always answered, according to her sister’s report, “Him who has the best prospects of being President.”
And that was tantamount to saying Douglas, for, just then, Douglas’s political prospects seemed a hundred times brighter than Lincoln’s. Although Douglas was only twenty-six, he had already been nicknamed “the Little Giant,” and he was already Secretary of the State, while Lincoln was only a struggling lawyer living in an attic over Speed’s store and hardly able to pay a board bill.
Douglas was destined to become one of the mightiest political forces in the United States years and years before Abe Lincoln was even heard of outside his own State. In fact, two years before Lincoln became President, about the only thing that the average American knew about him was that he had once debated with the brilliant and powerful Stephen A. Douglas.
Mary’s relatives all thought she cared more for Douglas than she did for