Nancy was tired, suffering from a deep, bone-weary sort of fatigue. This in itself was not unusual. She knew weariness, knew it all too well. But this was something deeper and different. Nancy’s death began with this particular tiredness.
She was thirty-four in the fall of 1818, having lived to that point an unremarkable and weather-beaten life. She grew up in Virginia and later Kentucky, getting by as a seamstress and living with various relatives and employers. Rumors later circulated that she was of a “low character,” but these seem to have been baseless. Most people who knew her were struck by her stoicism, a sort of gentle and persistent doggedness. She was by all accounts unassuming and intelligent, “amiable and kind,” and not someone who complained much.1
She was living in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, when she met and married Thomas Lincoln, a man of equally humble origins and means. Thomas lost his father to a Shawnee bullet during a raid on the family farm in western Virginia when he was eight years old. He narrowly escaped capture himself; a Shawnee warrior grabbed Thomas and ran, only to be shot and mortally wounded by Thomas’s older brother Mordecai. The Shawnee dropped the terrified little boy (who was screaming, “Don’t kill me! Take me prisoner!”) and staggered away into the woods. He was tracked by his blood trail to a tree, within which was tangled his lifeless body, where perhaps he had been trying to scramble to hide from pursuers.2
Thomas thereafter struggled mightily to get by. He lived with his widowed mother in Kentucky in “very narrow circumstances,” according to his son, and made do with farm labor, odd jobs, and carpentry skills he learned from a relative. He was almost entirely illiterate, somewhat hapless, and although industrious, he was not one who could ever be described as “successful”—a “piddler,” remembered a neighbor, someone who was “always doing but doing nothing great.”3
They lived a hard life in a hard world, did Thomas and Nancy Lincoln. Physically, they were quite different—Thomas was stout and rock-ribbed, Nancy thin and delicately framed—but on a more subtle level, they were much the same. They were like a couple of tough trees, barely noticed by most of the people around them, their chief accomplishment in life simply remaining upright.4
Worried about shaky land titles—Kentucky was notorious for its bad record keeping—and Thomas not being enamored of slavery, they left the state in the fall of 1816 with their two children, Sarah and Abraham, and cousin Dennis Hanks; piled their belongings aboard a ferry; and made their way across the Ohio River into Indiana. They found a likely spot to settle a few miles north of the river, in Spencer County, and if Kentucky was undeveloped and rural, Indiana was utterly primitive—a “wild region,” Abraham later wrote.5
Indiana’s early settlers ran the constant risk of attack by the area’s teeming wildlife: bears, wild boar, various types of wildcats, panthers, and the like. A boar could weigh more than two hundred pounds and possessed razor-sharp teeth. They would “attack people when hard pressed,” noted an observer, and were capable of inflicting severe injuries. Panthers were the most terrifying of all. Stories made the rounds in early Indiana about people caught suddenly unarmed or unawares by one of these sleek, deadly predators. Not long before the Lincolns’ arrival, the young child of a new emigrant family from Tennessee unwisely wandered away from her family’s settlement. A search party went looking for her in the thick underbrush. They “had gone nearly a quarter of a mile before they heard the most terrible scream of a panther mingled with the outcry of the unfortunate girl. . . . [And] coming to an open space, they saw several animals which were biting and scratching at the body of the girl they killed.” These animals were a panther mother and her two young kittens. “After she had killed the girl, [the mother panther] was teaching the young ones how to attack their prey, and she would bound onto the prostrate form and bite and scratch it. The kittens would go through the same motions, and thus had torn [the little girl] to pieces.”6
This sort of death, of the flesh-rending, pitiless variety, surrounded the Lincolns from the moment they arrived in Spencer County. It is not difficult to imagine a wide-eyed Abraham Lincoln, only seven years old when he and his family arrived, overhearing tales of ugly deaths visited upon people, even children his age, by bears, panthers, “Indians,” and the very landscape itself, all blended together in the early American mind as the “frontier” and the “wilderness.” Later in life, when as an adult he tried his hand at poetry, Lincoln referenced this very thing, writing in “The Bear Hunt”:
When first my father settled here,
’Twas then the frontier line:
The panther’s scream, filled night with fear
And bears preyed on the swine.7
People brushed elbows with deadly things on the “frontier line,” and Abraham Lincoln did not forget it. He never romanticized his boyhood experiences in the Indiana wilderness, never pretended that Indiana did not have razor-sharp edges of all kinds, edges that maimed and killed.8
Food was an ongoing challenge. Thomas and his family relied on hunting, a common enough approach in a place like Indiana. “We all hunted pretty much all the time,” Dennis remembered. “The country was full of wild game, dense with vegetation [and] swampy. We could track a bear, deer, [or] wolf . . . for miles through the matted pea vines. . . . We more or less depended on it for a living.”9
The hunting that Dennis so matter-of-factly described was a messy and dangerous affair. Once shot, a wild animal—say, a bear or a deer—might well require tracking as it lurched off through Indiana’s thick underbrush, leaving a blood trail for the hunter to follow, sometimes with gory results. A hunter in Morgan County, Indiana, set his dog to following the blood drops of a deer he had wounded with his musket. Following along behind, the hunter came to an open area in the woods that was “torn to pieces and beaten flat,” according to the story’s chronicler, “and near the center lay the wounded deer, dead, and terribly torn, and near it was the old dog, covered with blood and bruised, and torn almost in pieces by the sharp hoofs and antlers of the desperate deer.”10
Bears were particularly risky prey. Two young boys stalking bear and deer in the area around Newburgh, Indiana, encountered a mother bear with her two cubs; they shot and badly wounded one of the cubs and chased off the other cub and the mother. When they laid down their muskets and tried to finish the dying cub with their knives, the mother bear reappeared, setting off a mad melee in the brush. One boy reached for his gun and shot the bear as it mauled his brother, breaking his brother’s arm, but the shot only enraged the mother bear still further, and it then turned on the shooter and chewed up his legs. “The boy with the broken arm stabbed the bear many times with his hunting knife and finally hurt it fatally.” Even so, the mother tried to follow after the cubs “but had only gone about a hundred yards when it laid down and died.”11
Anyone who hunted in the Little Pigeon Creek area—including Lincoln’s father (who loved hunting), Dennis himself, neighbors, and friends—was immersed in a violent, blood-soaked exercise. Freshly slain animals exuded copious amounts of blood and other bodily fluids, as well as strong and unpleasant smells. It is not difficult to imagine Thomas or Dennis toiling away over the bloody remains of a slain animal, partially immersed in the animal’s blood, grunting and sweating as they tried to push a knife through tough gristle or muscle or saw their way through a stubborn hunk of bone, the animal’s entrails lying in a heap nearby, steam rising from the rapidly cooling corpse of what had until recently been a living, breathing animal.
Abraham surely accompanied his father and cousin on some of these hunting excursions during their early days in Indiana. In “The Bear Hunt,” he described the killing of a bear by hunters with a vividness that suggests he was an eyewitness to such scenes:
Bang,—bang—the rifles go.
And furious now, the dogs he tears,
And crushes in his ire.
Wheels right and left, and upward rears,
With eyes of burning fire.
But leaden death is at his heart,
Vain all the strength he plies.
And, spouting blood from every part,
He reels, and sinks, and dies.12
Right after they arrived at Little Pigeon Creek, Abraham spotted a flock of turkeys nearby. Thomas and Dennis were away from camp at the time, and Abraham was too little to load and prime a gun himself, so Nancy had to do it. “Abe poked the gun through the crack of the camp and accidentally killed one,” Dennis recalled.13
But that was the extent of his direct involvement in slaying an animal for food. He later wrote that he had “never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.”14 He disliked hunting, which was an unusual trait, especially among young boys of his time and place. More generally, he did not much like killing in the boyish sense of torturing and slaying the animals that were everywhere in the Indiana woods. One neighbor recalled him writing essays “on bein cind to animals and crawling insects.” When his stepbrother captured a turtle and crushed it against a tree, Abraham “preached against cruelty to animals, contending that an ant’s life was to it as sweet as ours to us.”15
Friends and neighbors called this “tender-heartedness,” which was accurate enough. But one wonders if there was more to this than an unusual squeamishness. As a young boy, the most common way Abraham Lincoln encountered death was in this manner: the pain and death of animals, large and small, in the Indiana wilderness, something he would have seen and heard and felt on a nearly daily basis. These were forms of death that his Hoosier neighbors took as ordinary living, the white noise background of frontier life. His cousin Dennis and his father seem never to have given a second thought to putting a bullet into a deer or a bear, plunging a hunting knife into the quivering belly of a mortally wounded animal, or tearing open its innards to field dress and prepare it for a future meal. But the young Abraham Lincoln did give it a second thought. He recoiled at the idea of inflicting pain and death, and he seems to have felt the need to put it all at arm’s length.
Sometime in the early fall of 1818, his mother, Nancy, walked the short distance from the family’s little cabin to another, even smaller structure: what Dennis called a “half-face camp”—really just a glorified lean-to—which had served as the family’s first home until they constructed a better cabin nearby. But the little half-face camp had not stood empty for long; soon after the Lincolns moved, it was reoccupied by Nancy’s aunt Elizabeth and her husband, Thomas Sparrow, two important people in Nancy’s early life. She had lived with the Sparrows for a period of time while younger, and by some accounts, she felt close enough to refer to them as “mother” and “father.” They were probably following in Nancy and Thomas’s footsteps, living in the half-face camp until they could acquire a place and land of their own.16
Cows wandered about freely in the Little Pigeon Creek area, eating what they could, and at some point a cow owned by someone in the area ate a particular species of plant called by locals “snakeroot” for its propensity to grow in shaded areas where snakes lurked. It had other names as well: “deerwort,” “Indian weed,” and “squaw weed.” Usually around three feet tall, snakeroot sprouted clusters of small white flowers in the late summer or fall, releasing fluffy spores that blew into the breeze and propagated the species.17
Snakeroot did not grow in the East, so while it was familiar to the Shawnee and other Native Americans in the area—as suggested by some of its names—it was a new type of plant to most Indiana settlers, and they knew little of its properties. Nor did the science of the time afford much help; it did not tell Hoosiers that snakeroot contains the toxic compound tremetol. Tasteless and odorless, when ingested by humans, it was usually fatal.18
A cow in the Little Pigeon Creek area ate some snakeroot, attracted by its bright green and white coloring at a time of the year when most of the surrounding foliage was fading into dull brown. Soon thereafter, the tremetol began churning away inside the cow, creating in its milk an undetectable toxin. Possibly the animal was owned by the Sparrows, but it might also have been owned by Peter and Nancy Brooner, a German couple that lived nearby with their children, or by any of a number of other settlers in the Little Pigeon Creek area.19
Both the Sparrows and Nancy Brooner fell ill with what was called the “milk sickness.” Symptoms varied from person to person, but milk sickness generally caused victims to lose their energy and drive, feel a soreness and stiffness in their muscles and limbs, and suffer intense abdominal cramps. Soon the Sparrows and Nancy Brooner would have begun to vomit repeatedly, accompanied by painful constipation as the tremetol ate its way into the fatty deposits in their livers and kidneys. Visitors to their cabins would have noticed a foul smell coming from their breath.20
No one in 1818 understood disease pathology; they knew people fell ill from drinking milk, but they did not understand that the cause of their suffering was not so much the milk itself, but rather a plant and a cow’s digestive habits. Nor did they understand that dairy products derived from tainted milk, such as butter and cheese, could also prove fatal, as could the meat of animals that had consumed tremetol-laced substances. The victims who took ill from the “milk sickness” may not have actually drunk milk, and they may not have owned the cow from which the poison originated; trading food products was a common practice in an Indiana frontier community. One observer later remembered that “the Milk Sick was very prevalent among the Setlers this year (1818), nearly all that were attacked with it deid,” suggesting that the Brooners and Nancy Sparrow were part of a larger outbreak.21
On learning of her neighbors’ and her family’s misfortune, Nancy Lincoln did what she could to ease their suffering. This was no small undertaking. Nancy was busy raising two young children on a fledgling backwoods farm; she would have possessed little spare time, still less so as she trekked back and forth among her cabin, the half-face camp, and the Brooners’ place.
Maybe she was administering water-thinned milk (a recommended treatment at the time) and drank some herself. Or perhaps she ate a tainted dairy or meat product. She might have reached for a bit of bread and butter while tending to Mrs. Brooner in her cabin or eaten beef from freshly slaughtered (and tainted) cattle. If the disease followed its usual path, she would have felt tired and sore at first—nothing altogether alarming, an expected consequence of working so hard. But soon thereafter, the stomach cramps, the intestinal problems, and vomiting would have begun, along with the growing terrible realization that she would now share in the Sparrows and Nancy Brooner’s suffering—and their eventual fate.
“She struggled on day by day,” Dennis later recalled. No one who witnessed this would subsequently record any hint of emotional distress on Nancy’s part. Possibly she was visibly and openly traumatized by her impending doom, and her friends and loved ones chose for reasons of decorum and respect to avoid noting the fact. But it seems more likely that Nancy Lincoln coped with her death as she had always coped with her life: quietly and with a resigned acceptance of her lot.22
Eventually she was bedridden and laid up in the little Lincoln cabin, no longer able to help the Sparrows, Mrs. Brooner, or anyone else. At least one neighbor, a man named William Wood, remembered sitting up with Nancy all night as she lay dying. No doubt others came to her aid as well.23
“She knew she was going to die,” Dennis said, and she “called up the children to her dying side and told them to be good and kind to their father, to one another and to the world.” She then “express[ed] a hope that they might live as they had been taught by her, to love men, and [to] love, reverence and worship God.” Thus passed away, Dennis remarked, “one of the very best women of the whole race.”24
Dennis was an old man when he recalled these events. His memory of Nancy’s death was not necessarily inaccurate, but it would have been filtered by the passage of time and by the accepted cultural norms of what historian Drew Gilpin Faust termed the “Good Death,” the fixation of nineteenth-century Americans on the need to die well. This meant either expressing repentance for a wicked life as it neared its end or imparting final advice and exhortation to loved ones to follow the dying person’s example for a life well lived. “Sometimes a bad life may be attended with a good death,” wrote one clergyman, “but where a godly and gracious life hath gone before, there a good death must of necessity follow.”25
There were commonly accepted forms of the Good Death: a domestic setting (it was important that a person died at home), pious recognition of the supremacy of God’s will, and appropriate last words. The Good Death was an act of cleansing, a sanitizing of death’s more foul and revolting aspects. It was acceptance: people dying a Good Death did not rave, rant, or scream; they did not even seem to be in much pain. Perhaps most of all, the Good Death created a moral to one’s life story; it suffused death with a sense of purpose and a logic that ordered and gave grace to something as seemingly random as milk sickness.26
Dennis’s little vignette contained all the hallmarks of the Good Death: the saintly, rapidly expiring mother, exhorting the children whom she would never see again to follow the precepts she had set forth for Christian kindness, piety, and filial duty. Anyone hearing Dennis’s tale would have quickly recognized his story’s basic features, for it was a common narrative, applied as a balm to the emotional wounds of grieving family members.
Nancy’s passing could not have been the peaceful and clean death she might have wished for herself or Dennis would have us believe. Even assuming everything he said was true, the fact remains that she was lying in a “rude cabin” (Dennis’s words) only slightly removed from the “wilderness” and its entirely unromantic muck and violence and filth, where wild animals killed and died, where death was a nasty, natural fact of life. A Good Death was a rare thing in Little Pigeon Creek.27
Abraham probably saw the first symptoms in his mother only a day or so after she began trekking back and forth to the half-face camp and the Brooners’ cabin. Exactly what he felt and experienced as a nine-year-old boy, watching his mother exhibit the symptoms that everyone around him must have noted with growing alarm signaled her imminent death, is unknown and unknowable, but children in similar circumstances share characteristics from which we can generalize. Children who lose a parent at an early age often wrestle with conflicting emotions they are ill equipped to control. An impotent sort of anger at what seems an unfair loss is common, as is a general sense of helplessness and foreboding about the future. Most of all, children of a dying parent experience a loss of security and comfort. Parents typically offer their young children a sense of permanence—in Lincoln’s case, a mother who was always present and supplied his daily needs as he grew up in Kentucky and Indiana—that death would now sever. The presence of a healthy remaining parent (like Thomas Lincoln) matters a great deal, for bereaved children require guidance from the adults in their lives to help lessen the shock and provide reassurance.28
The historical record regarding Lincoln’s childhood is so barren that we have no way of knowing how Abraham reacted to his mother’s fatal illness. No reliable contemporary descriptions exist of Abraham Lincoln as a boy; reminiscences from older people like Dennis Hanks, recorded long after the fact, are all we have, and these are often little more than bromides describing Abraham as a nearly perfect boy. No one recorded how he reacted to his mother’s illness and death, whether he lashed out in frustration, kept his turmoil buried deep inside, or exhibited some other form of behavior.
From what we do know regarding his later personality traits, it seems likely that Abraham tended more to bury his emotions rather than openly act on any inner feelings of rage, helplessness, or despair. This is merely an educated guess, and we should be careful in extrapolating from Lincoln the adult too many assumptions regarding Lincoln the child. But people who knew him later in life agreed that he was generally an undemonstrative sort, not given to revealing his emotions: “shut pan,” as Lincoln described himself.29
Nor can we know whether Thomas or any of the other adults around Abraham helped him cope with his mother’s situation. He and his father were not close, so it seems unlikely that Thomas offered his young son much in the way of guidance or emotional support. His sister, Sarah, was a child of eleven, and Dennis was only nineteen and likely undergoing his own inner turmoil at the deaths of not only his aunt Nancy but also the Sparrows, with whom he had been living when they became ill. Adult neighbors might have been of some comfort to Abraham—the aforementioned William Wood, who sat up with Nancy and to whom Abraham felt close enough to call him “Uncle,” although they weren’t related—but many of these people had sick friends and relatives of their own to care for, with the widespread outbreak of milk sickness in the area.30
Abraham probably endured a sort of quiet, inner desolation as he watched his mother, the woman from whom “Abe got his mind and his fixed morals,” according to Wood, grow steadily weaker. The very silence of the historical record suggests as much; friends and relatives who later recalled in some detail the circumstances surrounding Nancy’s illness and death had nothing to say, good or bad, about her young son’s reaction. Dennis remembered that at the time, both Abraham and his sister, Sarah, “did some work, little jobs, errand[s] and light work.” But neither Dennis nor anyone else recorded how exactly Abraham reacted emotionally to the ordeal. Very possibly he faded into the background, nursing a private grief while his father and other family members and friends were preoccupied with easing Nancy’s final days. Lincoln later remembered this time as an exceedingly lonely episode in his life, and some historians have theorized that Lincoln’s adult bouts of melancholy and depression stemmed from this experience.31
If Thomas Lincoln tried to help his son, he would have done so via the Bible and his faith. He was a religious man and had been at least since Abraham’s birth in Kentucky. Thomas and Nancy adhered to a particular strain of Baptist thought, whose followers were variously called “Separate” or “Hardshell” Baptists. This group emphasized predestination, the Calvinist idea that one’s fate is predetermined at birth. This fatalism could serve many purposes, including a ready explanation for a sudden, tragic death such as that which was befalling Nancy. It was God’s inscrutable will, part of a grand divine plan. There was solace in such an idea, and maybe Thomas or some other adult tried to explain what was happening to Abraham in such terms.32
Whatever the theological leanings of his faith, Thomas could count on little in the way of a church social network, for the Little Pigeon Creek community was too new and too small. The local Baptists numbered around forty people, and they did not yet have a regular minister or a church building. The Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church would not be completed until several years after Nancy’s death; Thomas would loan his carpentry skills to the project.33
It is therefore not surprising that Nancy’s funeral was a perfunctory affair, stripped bare of all but the most basic trappings. Given the pall of death from the milk sickness that claimed several victims in the area, no one seems to have possessed much energy for conducting anything more than a rudimentary service. “There was scarcely enough will in the neighborhood that fall to Bury those that deid,” recalled a neighbor. Thomas fashioned a simple coffin of green wood, which he and his neighbors loaded onto a makeshift sled and dragged up a small knoll to a grove of persimmon trees. A Kentucky minister named David Elkin conducted the funeral service; he was a friend of the Lincoln family and happened to be visiting the Little Pigeon Creek area at the time. No one thought to record what he said or whether anything else occurred—the singing of a hymn, for example. After shoveling dirt on the coffins, Nancy Brooner’s husband, Peter, who had buried his wife a week earlier, shook Thomas Lincoln’s hand, remarking, “We are brothers now.”34
That was it: a small gathering around a gravesite dug atop an isolated hill in the southern Indiana woods, some fitting words spoken by the local minister, and a handshake with a fellow bereaved farmer. Abraham was surely present—he probably helped push the sled carrying his mother’s body up to the gravesite—but exactly what he did or how he behaved that day is unknown.35
Unlike Dennis, he never sentimentalized his mother’s passing, never pasted over the affair with a Good Death tale. If he saw any meaning in Nancy’s passing or its circumstances, he never recorded the fact. Referring briefly in a letter many years later to his mother’s final resting place, he observed that it was “as unpoetical as any spot of the earth.” Otherwise, he barely mentioned Nancy’s death at all, just a brief, dry reference in one campaign autobiography he wrote (in the third person): “In the autumn of 1818 his mother died.”36
Nor did he comment much on the other major family loss he endured while growing up in Indiana: the death of his older sister, Sarah, in 1828 from complications related to childbirth. Variously described as “good humored,” “industrious,” and “quick minded,” Sarah was thickset (like her father) with dark hair and complexion (like her mother). She was eleven years old—two years older than her little brother—when their mother died.37
Eight years later, she married a neighbor named Aaron Grigsby, part of the large Grigsby clan that lived nearby. They settled into the farming life, and Sarah soon became pregnant. She went into labor one cold wintry night in early January 1828, in the cabin she shared with her husband, not far from the Lincoln family home.
What happened next was a dreadful ordeal. The delivery went badly awry, with some unidentified complication sinking Sarah into the depths of nearly unendurable pain. A neighbor woman later remembered her calling in agony for her father, who heard her screams and woke Abraham and Dennis, saying “something is the matter.” Thomas then went after a doctor, but he was too late. “They let her lay too long,” thought the neighbor. Sarah gave birth to a stillborn son and then died herself, either during the birth or shortly afterward.38
As with so much else surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s early life, we have little information regarding precisely what happened to Sarah and her baby. There seems to have been a midwife present (the aforementioned neighbor’s aunt), and Aaron was nearby, though typically fathers did not attend childbirths. While one account has Thomas sending for a doctor, another has Aaron growing alarmed at his wife’s labor pains, hitching a team of oxen to a sleigh, and driving her to his father’s house three-quarters of a mile away, a panicky decision that did his suffering wife no good, as the rig careened “over snags and rough ground, with every jolt sharpening Sarah’s labor pains.” When he reached his family’s house, Aaron then sent for a doctor, but the doctor was so drunk they were forced to find a second doctor, who lived far away and did not arrive before it was too late.39
Which story is accurate and what exactly went wrong is impossible to determine. A stillbirth could result from a number of possible causes: one of various congenital birth defects that fatally distressed the baby prior to labor, an issue with the umbilical cord being wrapped around the baby’s neck or exiting before the baby, or possibly a blockage in the baby’s oxygen supply causing it to suffocate. Letting Sarah “lay too long” suggests there was an issue with extracting the baby that eventually proved fatal, though again we do not know exactly what letting her “lay too long” meant.40
Sarah experienced even less of a Good Death than her mother—a painful and probably gory ordeal on a hard winter’s night, leavened by no sentimental scenes of last rituals or soft words. She and her child were buried together in the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church’s cemetery, the son’s body wrapped in the mother’s arms. According to several accounts, Abraham grieved for the death of his sister. He “sat down on a log and hid his face in his hands while the tears rolled down,” remembered one observer. Local tradition had it that Abraham felt not only grief but anger toward Aaron and his family, holding them responsible for allowing Sarah to suffer too long. There may well be some truth to this, for Abraham did nurture a grudge toward the Grigsbys, fed according to one neighbor by Aaron’s “cruel treatment of his wife.”41
“Cruel” is also an apt word to describe Lincoln’s Indiana childhood. In later years, he occasionally referenced his frontier roots by way of illustrating that he was no stranger to either hard work or manual labor, but he did not sugarcoat those years with the traditional American rags-to-riches story of the poor boy who made good. Indiana was instead for Lincoln more about perseverance in the face of the capricious deaths of his mother and sister. It was not so much about success as survival—his survival, when others close to him perished.
He was nineteen when his sister died, a big, gangling, and restless young man who by now wanted badly to leave Little Pigeon Creek. He finally made his escape in 1831, after the entire family had relocated to equally primitive circumstances on a farm in eastern Illinois. He wandered into the village of New Salem, where he settled into a life pursuing odd jobs—manual laborer, postman, store clerk, surveyor—which at best “procured bread, and kept soul and body together,” as Lincoln later put it.42
Sometime soon after he arrived, Lincoln met Ann Rutledge, the teenage daughter of a New Salem innkeeper with whom Lincoln boarded. Ann was “amiable,” “a good looking, smart, lively girl,” according to neighbors, with fair hair and eyes and a lively disposition. She was also “a good housekeeper, with a moderate education,” having had a bit of schooling in nearby Jacksonville.43
At some point, Abraham and Ann apparently struck up a romantic relationship. The entire affair is shrouded in mystery and a lack of solid primary source evidence. According to the best available accounts, Ann was engaged to marry another man named John McNamar, but he had left the New Salem area, and after a prolonged absence, Ann was uncertain whether he would return. She seems to have subsequently agreed to marry Lincoln. But before they could do so, typhoid fever swept through the area. It killed Ann’s father, and she died on August 25, 1835.44
Some people later claimed that Abraham went nearly insane with grief. “The effect upon Mr. Lincoln’s mind was terrible,” recalled Ann’s brother Robert. “He became plunged in despair, and many of his friends feared that reason would desert him.” Others noted that he became “temporarily deranged,” to the point that his friends felt compelled to remove sharp objects from his presence. One neighbor remembered that “Lincoln was locked up by his friends . . . to prevent derangement or suicide.”45
Some thought that Lincoln was ever after “changed and sad.” These stories of Lincoln’s lifelong grief extended even into his later years as president. According to Isaac Cogdal, a New Salem friend who later visited the White House, Lincoln still mourned his lost love, even during the war. “‘Abe is it true that you fell in love with and courted Ann Rutledge?’” Cogdal recalled the conversation. “‘It is true, true indeed I did,’” Lincoln is supposed to have replied. “‘I have loved the name of Rutledge to this day. . . . I did honestly and truly love the girl and think often, often of her now.’”46
But aside from such reminiscences, recorded after Lincoln’s death and many years after he left New Salem, there is no direct record of Lincoln’s reaction to Ann Rutledge’s death. He never mentioned or alluded to her, or even hinted at any relationship with her in any extant letter or speech. This absence of direct evidence, along with the various biases and idiosyncrasies of William Herndon—Lincoln’s former law partner, who gathered nearly all the available information regarding Ann and who first broached the idea of a romance between her and Abraham—has led some historians to doubt whether any such romance existed.47
Given the multiple eyewitness accounts, it seems a stretch to suggest that Abraham and Ann were not romantically involved at all, and thus it is reasonable to conclude that when she died, Lincoln was distraught with grief. But those two simple, hard nuggets of truth, the romance and the grief, have long been heavily swathed in multiple layers of syrupy sentimentality. Tales of Ann’s flawless character and beauty (“she was beloved by everybody and everybody respected and loved her, so sweet and angelic was she”) and Lincoln’s bottomless sorrow have been piled upon still more tales, to the point that friends, fawning biographers, and even Hollywood added in later years improbable details that beggar belief: that the real cause of Ann’s death was her conflicted heart over Lincoln and his rival, John McNamar; that Lincoln never carried a pocketknife after her death for fear of the sudden impulse to injure himself on recollection of her tragic demise; that his grieving was suddenly triggered by violent weather (“we watched during storms, fogs [and] damp gloomy weather Mr. Lincoln for fear of an accident”).48
In its way, this Ann Rutledge myth is yet another iteration of the Good Death. Where Nancy was the pious Christian mother imparting last words of wisdom to her children, Ann was the star-crossed lover, the flower cut short before its full bloom, robbing her beau of his chance at eternal marital bliss and ever after giving him thoughts of gloom and worse, triggered by the gothic detail of a thunderstorm. “I can never be reconcile[d] to have the snow, rains and storms to beat on her grave,” he is supposed to have declared. Another friend believed that he avoided using the word love after Ann died, his heart “sad and broken.”49
In fact, Ann’s passing could not have been such a Good Death, any more than was Nancy Lincoln’s endless puking in that smoke-filled cabin, or Sarah Lincoln Grigsby’s grisly stillbirth on a miserable winter night. Typhoid was a terrible way to die, its symptoms not all that different from those of milk sickness. Caused by a bacterial infection resulting from the contamination of drinking water with human feces, typhoid subjected its victims to ever more debilitating bouts of diarrhea, stomach cramps, and above all headaches and a crushing fever—one reason why it was often referred to as “brain fever” in Lincoln’s day.50
Lincoln saw Ann suffer the throes of “brain fever,” much as he surely saw his mother’s paroxysms of pain and suffering from the milk sickness years earlier. She lingered for four or five days, and he visited her at least once before she died. “It was very evident that he was much distressed,” remembered a friend who saw him after the visit.51
But what is telling here is not so much the secondhand accounts of Lincoln’s “distress” or supposedly suicidal behavior, but rather his silence, his failure to ever even once mention his relationship with Ann or his reaction to her death. A year after she died, he began a brief courtship with another young woman, named Mary Owens. Mary later wrote, “I do not now recollect of ever hearing him mention [Ann’s] name.” Others also recalled that Lincoln was more or less business as usual soon after Ann died.52
It is a curious matter on its face, but then again, perhaps not, for it would be entirely in keeping with Lincoln’s reactions to the deaths of his mother and sister. Ann died much as Nancy and Sarah: in a sudden, ugly way, cut short before their time by yet another form of death that stalked the primitive areas in which he lived. Some people believed that the deaths of Nancy, Sarah, and Ann fostered in him a lifelong tendency toward melancholy and a certain deep-seated loneliness that dated from those dark days.53
Perhaps. But on a more direct, observable level, the deaths of these three women were raw, ugly, unfiltered things, cruel contrasts with the genteel Good Death that respectable Americans of his day thought they deserved and strove to attain. Their deaths occurred in environments that discouraged romantic ideas about the nature of living and dying. Had Lincoln been born and raised in different circumstances in early nineteenth-century America—say, a comfortable middle-class home in a more settled area—he might well have learned to thickly coat death in the layers of sentiment and unctuous emotionalism that characterized the era’s idea of the best way to die.
But Lincoln never seems to have thought much about a Good Death. Instead, he learned very early in his life that death could be and often was raw and unforgiving, from the screams of his dying sister to the wretched wasting away from disease evident in his mother and fiancée to the almost daily feral encounters common in the Indiana wilderness. “I am not a very sentimental man,” Lincoln once remarked, and this was certainly true where death and dying was concerned.54
Years later, when Lincoln the lawyer and politician had made a successful transition into respectable middle-class society, he would again encounter a death that was sadly and uncomfortably close. By this time, he had learned the customs of mourning. And if he still did not overly sentimentalize death’s truths, he did at least know how to play by the rules.