In the autumn they drifted through the woods when the oaks were flaming with color and hickory-nuts were pattering to the ground. In the winter, after the snow had fallen, they walked through the forest, when—
Every oak and ash and walnut
Wore ermine too dear for an earl
And the poorest twig on the elm tree
Was ridged inch-deep with pearl.
For both of them, now, life had taken on a sacred tenderness, a new and strangely beautiful meaning. When Lincoln but stood and looked down into Ann’s blue eyes her heart sang within her; and at the mere touch of her hands he caught his breath and was amazed to discover that there was so much felicity in all the world. . . .
A short time before this, Lincoln had gone into business with a drunkard, a preacher’s son, named Berry. The little village of New Salem was dying, all its stores were gasping for breath. But neither Lincoln nor Berry could see what was happening, so they bought the wrecks of three of these log-cabin groceries, consolidated them, and started an establishment of their own.
One day a mover who was driving out to Iowa halted his covered wagon in front of the Lincoln & Berry store. The roads were soft, his horses were tired, and the mover decided to lighten his load. So he sold Lincoln a barrel of household plunder. Lincoln didn’t want the plunder, but he felt sorry for the horses; he paid the mover fifty cents, and without examining the barrel rolled it into the back room of the store.
A fortnight later he emptied the contents of the barrel out on the floor, idly curious to see what he had bought. There, at the bottom of the rubbish, he found a complete edition of Black-stone’s Commentaries on Law; and started to read. The farmers were busy in their fields, and customers were few and far between, so he had plenty of time. And the more he read, the more interested he became. Never before had he been so absorbed in a book. He read until he had devoured all four volumes.
Then he made a momentous decision: he would be a lawyer. He would be the kind of man Ann Rutledge would be proud to marry. She approved his plans, and they were to be married as soon as he completed his law studies and established himself in the profession.
After finishing Blackstone he set out across the prairies for Springfield, twenty miles away, to borrow other law-books from an attorney he had met in the Black Hawk War. On his way home he carried an open book in one hand, studying as he walked. When he struck a knotty passage, he shuffled to a standstill, and concentrated on it until he had mastered the sense.
He kept on studying, until he had conquered twenty or thirty pages, kept on until dusk fell and he could no longer see to read. . . . The stars came out, he was hungry, he hastened his pace.
He pored over his books now incessantly, having heart for little else. By day he lay on his back, reading in the shade of an elm that grew beside the store, his bare feet angling up against the trunk of the tree. By night he read in the cooper’s shop, kindling a light from the waste material lying about. Frequently he read aloud to himself, now and then closing the book and writing down the sense of what he had just read, revising, rephrasing it until it became clear enough for a child to comprehend.
Wherever Lincoln went now—on his rambles along the river, on his walks through the woods, on his way to labor in the fields—wherever he went, a volume of Chitty or Blackstone was under his arm. Once a farmer, who had hired him to cut firewood, came around the corner of the barn in the middle of the afternoon and found Lincoln sitting barefooted on top of the woodpile, studying law.
Mentor Graham told Lincoln that if he aspired to get ahead in politics and law he must know grammar.
“Where can I borrow one?” Lincoln asked.
Graham said that John Vance, a farmer living six miles out in the country, had a copy of Kirkham’s Grammar; and Lincoln arose immediately, put on his hat, and was off after the book.
He astonished Graham with the speed with which he mastered Kirkham’s rules. Thirty years later this schoolmaster said he had taught more than five thousand students, but that Lincoln was the “most studious, diligent, straightforward young man in the pursuit of knowledge and literature” he had ever met.
“I have known him,” said Mentor Graham, “to study for hours the best way of three to express an idea.”
Having mastered Kirkham’s Grammar, Lincoln devoured next Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Rol-lin’s “Ancient History,” a volume on American military biography, lives of Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, and Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason.”
Dressed in “blue cotton roundabout coat, stoga shoes, and pale-blue casinet pantaloons which failed to make the connection with either coat or socks, coming about three inches below the former and an inch or two above the latter,” this extraordinary young man drifted about New Salem, reading, studying, dreaming, telling stories, and making “a host of friends wherever he went.”
The late Albert J. Beveridge, the outstanding Lincoln scholar of his time, says in his monumental biography:
“Not only did his wit, kindliness and knowledge attract the people, but his strange clothes and uncouth awkwardness advertised him, the shortness of his trousers causing particular remark and amusement. Soon the name of ‘Abe Lincoln’ became a household word.”
Finally the grocery firm of Lincoln & Berry failed. This was to be expected, for, with Lincoln absorbed in his books and Berry half groggy with whisky, the end was inevitable. Without a dollar left to pay for his meals and lodging now, Lincoln had to do any kind of manual labor he could find: he cut brush, pitched hay, built fences, shucked corn, labored in a sawmill, and worked for a while as a blacksmith.
Then, with the aid of Mentor Graham, he plunged into the intricacies of trigonometry and logarithms, prepared himself to be a surveyor, bought a horse and compass on credit, cut a grape-vine to be used as a chain, and started out surveying town lots for thirty-seven and a half cents apiece.
In the meantime the Rutledge tavern also had failed, and Lincoln’s sweetheart had had to go to work as a servant in a farmer’s kitchen. Lincoln soon got a job plowing corn on the same farm. In the evening he stood in the kitchen wiping the dishes which Ann washed. He was filled with a vast happiness at the very thought of being near her. Never again was he to experience such rapture and such content. Shortly before his death he confessed to a friend that he had been happier as a barefoot farm laborer back in Illinois than lie had ever been in the White House.
But the ecstasy of the lovers was as short as it was intense. In August, 1835, Ann fell ill. At first there was no pain, nothing but great fatigue and weariness. She tried to carry on her work as usual, but one morning she was unable to get out of bed. That day the fever came, and her brother rode over to New Salem for Dr. Allen. He pronounced it typhoid. Her body seemed to be burning, but her feet were so cold that they had to be warmed with hot stones. She kept begging vainly for water. Medical science now knows that she should have been packed in ice and given all the water she could drink, but Dr. Allen didn’t know that.
Dreadful weeks dragged by. Finally Ann was so exhausted that she could no longer raise even her hands from the sheets. Dr. Allen ordered absolute rest, visitors were forbidden, and that night when Lincoln came even he was not permitted to see her. But the next day and the following day she kept murmuring his name and calling for him so pitifully that he was sent for. When he arrived, he went to her bedside immediately, the door was closed, and they were left alone. This was the last hour of the lovers together.
The next day Ann lost consciousness and remained unconscious until her death.
The weeks that followed were the most terrible period of Lincoln’s life. He couldn’t sleep. He wouldn’t eat. He repeatedly said that he didn’t want to live, and he threatened to kill himself. His friends became alarmed, took his pocket-knife away, and watched to keep him from throwing himself into the river. He avoided people, and when he met them he didn’t speak, didn’t even seem to see them, but appeared to be staring