Besides, he had a deep golden voice, a wavy black pompadour, he waltzed superbly, and he paid Mary Todd lovely little compliments.
He was her beau-ideal of a man; and she looked in her mirror, whispering to herself, “Mary Todd Douglas.” It sounded beautiful, and she dreamed dreams and saw herself waltzing with him in the White House. . . .
While Douglas was courting her he had a fight one day, right in the public square in Springfield, with a newspaper editor— the husband of one of Mary’s dearest friends.
Probably she told him what she thought of that.
And probably she told him also what she thought of his getting drunk at a public banquet, climbing on top of a table and waltzing back and forth, shouting, singing, and kicking wineglasses and roast turkey, whisky bottles and gravy dishes onto the floor.
And if he took another girl to a dance while he was paying her attention, she made a disagreeable scene.
The courtship came to nothing. Senator Beveridge says:
Although it was afterwards given out that Douglas had proposed to Mary and was refused because of his bad “morals,” that statement was obviously protective propaganda usual in such cases; for the shrewd, alert and, even then, worldly-wise Douglas never asked Miss Todd to marry him.
Immeasurably disappointed, she tried to arouse Douglas’s jealousy by giving her ardent attention to one of his bitter political opponents, Abraham Lincoln. But that didn’t bring back Douglas, and she laid her plans to capture Lincoln.
Mrs. Edwards, Mary Todd’s sister, afterward described the courtship in this fashion:
I have often happened in the room where they were sitting, and Mary invariably led the conversation. Mr. Lincoln would sit at her side and listen. He scarcely said a word, but gazed on her as if irresistibly drawn toward her by some superior and unseen power. He was charmed with her wit, and fascinated by her quick sagacity. But he could not maintain himself in a continued conversation with a lady reared as Mary was.
In July of that year the great gathering of Whigs which had been talked of for months swarmed down upon Springfield and overwhelmed the town. They came from hundreds of miles around, with banners waving and bands playing. The Chicago delegation dragged half-way across the State a government yawl rigged as a two-masted ship. Music was playing on the ship, girls dancing, cannon belching into the air.
The Democrats had spoken of the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, as an old woman who lived in a log cabin and drank hard cider. So the Whigs mounted a log cabin on wheels and drew it through the streets of Springfield, behind thirty yoke of oxen. A hickory tree swayed beside the cabin; coons were playing in the tree; a barrel of hard cider was on tap by the door.
At night, under the light of flaming torches, Lincoln made a political speech.
At one meeting his party, the Whigs, had been accused of being aristocratic and wearing fine clothes while pleading for the votes of the plain people, Lincoln replied:
“I came to Illinois as a poor, strange, friendless, uneducated boy, and started working on a flatboat for eight dollars a month, and I had only one pair of breeches to my back, and they were buckskin. When buckskin gets wet and dried by the sun, it shrinks; and my breeches kept shrinking until they left several inches of my legs bare between the lower part of my breeches and the top of my socks. And while I was growing taller, the breeches were getting wet and becoming shorter and tighter until they left a blue streak around my legs that can be seen to this day. Now, if you call that being a fancily dressed aristocrat, I must plead guilty to the charge.”
The audience whistled and shouted and shrieked its approval.
When Lincoln and Mary reached the Edwards house, she told him how proud she was of him, that he was a great speaker, and that some day he would be President.
He looked down at her, standing beside him in the moonlight, and her manner told him everything. Reaching over, he took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly. . . .
The wedding-day was set for the first of January, 1841.
That was only six months away, but many a storm was to brew and blow before then.
Chapter 7
Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln hadn’t been engaged very long before she wanted to make him over. She didn’t like the way he dressed. She often contrasted him with her father. Almost every morning for a dozen years she had seen Robert Todd walking down the streets of Lexington, carrying a goldheaded cane, clad in a blue broadcloth coat, and wearing white linen trousers strapped under his boots. But Lincoln in hot weather didn’t wear a coat at all; and what was worse, sometimes he didn’t wear even a collar. Usually he had only one gallus holding up his trousers, and when a button came off he whittled a peg and pinned things together with that.
Such crudeness irritated Mary Todd, and she told him so. But, unfortunately, she didn’t use any tact or diplomacy or sweetness in her telling.
Though at Madame Victorie Charlotte Le Clere Mentelle’s school back in Lexington she had been taught to dance the cotillion, she had been taught nothing about the fine art of handling people. So she took the surest way, the quickest way to annihilate a man’s love: she nagged. She made Lincoln so uncomfortable that he wanted to avoid her. Instead of coming to see her two or three nights a week now, as he had formerly done, he sometimes let ten days drift by without calling; and she wrote him complaining letters, censuring him for his neglect.
Presently Matilda Edwards came to town. Matilda was a tall, stately, charming blonde, a cousin of Ninian W. Edwards, Mary Todd’s brother-in-law. She too took up her residence in the spacious Edwards mansion. And when Lincoln called to see Mary, Matilda contrived to be very much in evidence. She couldn’t speak French with a Parisian accent or dance the Circassian Circle, but she knew how to handle men, and Lincoln grew very fond of her. When she swept into the room, Lincoln was so interested in watching her that he sometimes ceased to listen to what Mary Todd was saying. That made Mary indignant. Once he took Mary to a ball; but he didn’t care for dancing, so he let her dance with other men while he sat in a corner talking to Matilda.
Mary accused him of being in love with Matilda, and he didn’t deny it; she broke down and wept, and demanded that he cease even looking at Matilda.
What had once been a promising love-affair had now degenerated into a thing of strife and dissension and fault-finding.
Lincoln now saw that he and Mary were opposites in every way: in training, in background, in temperament, in tastes, in mental outlook. They irritated each other constantly, and Lincoln realized that their engagement ought to be broken, that their marriage would be disastrous.
Mary’s sister and brother-in-law both arrived at a similar conclusion. They urged Mary to abandon all thought of marrying Lincoln, warning her over and over that they were strikingly unfit for each other, and that they could never be happy.
But Mary refused to listen.
Lincoln, after weeks of trying to screw up his courage to tell her the painful truth, came into Speed’s store one night, walked back to the fireplace, drew a letter out of his pocket, and asked Speed to read it. Speed relates:
The letter was addressed to Mary Todd, and in it he made a plain statement of his feelings, telling her that he had thought the matter over calmly and with great deliberation, and now felt that he did not love her sufficiently to warrant her in marrying him. This letter he desired me to deliver. Upon my declining to do so he threatened to intrust it to some other person’s hand. I reminded him that the moment he placed the letter in Miss Todd’s hand, she would have the advantage over him. “Words are forgotten,” I said, “misunderstood, unnoticed in a private conversation, but once put your words in writing