Lincoln and Ann Rutledge

[Tom Emery]

Roger, Rob, and Lincoln Man, I appreciate the compliments. This was a lot of fun to write, and I'm glad you're enjoying it.

I write a bi-weekly column on Illinois in the Civil War for the Moline Dispatch, among others. The Ann Rutledge article appeared in the Dispatch.

My Civil War columns, and several other historical articles, are accessible at http://www.qconline.com. When you're there, enter my name in the internal search.

[Liz Rosenthal]

Very interesting article, Tom! I enjoyed reading it.

I guess I'm with our own Roger on the Ann Rutledge issue - that the romance happened, and that it was important at the time, but that it didn't haunt Lincoln throughout his life or somehow change the trajectory of his life.

[Tom Emery]

Thanks for your comments, too, Liz. I appreciate them.

We're all in agreement on the impact -- or lack thereof -- on Lincoln's later life. No matter where you fall on the romance, it's really hard to argue for any lasting effect.

[LincolnToddFan]

Count me in with Roger and Tom and Liz. He obviously knew this young woman, cared deeply for her, and grieved terribly at her death. But the fact is that a very short time later, Lincoln was considering marriage to another woman.(Mary Owens). He never even casually mentions Ann in subsequent letters to his most intimate friend at the time, Joshua Speed.

As for her death haunting him to the end of his life, where is the evidence for that? Taking Lincoln's own statements into account(to army nurse Rebecca Pomeroy, artist Francis Carpenter, and his own church pastor) the greatest trial of his life was the loss of Willie, his and Mary's golden child. It was Willie who's death caused him so much suffering that he would go to bed at night and try to conjure conversations with the boy in his dreams.

Youthful first love is very powerful and special. Most of us have experienced it. What could be more devastating than to experience the death of such a person? But the idea that his first tragic experience in love cast a shadow over Lincoln and that he spent the rest of his legendary life brooding over Ann Rutledge is for me, based on little more than Herndon's fevered imagination.

[Liz Rosenthal]

(04-10-2014 09:57 PM)LincolnToddFan Wrote:  Count me in with Roger and Tom and Liz. He obviously knew this young woman, cared deeply for her, and grieved terribly at her death. But the fact is that a very short time later, Lincoln was considering marriage to another woman.(Mary Owens). He never even casually mentions Ann in subsequent letters to his most intimate friend at the time, Joshua Speed.

As for her death haunting him to the end of his life, where is the evidence for that? Taking Lincoln's own statements into account(to army nurse Rebecca Pomeroy, artist Francis Carpenter, and his own church pastor) the greatest trial of his life was the loss of Willie, his and Mary's golden child. It was Willie who's death caused him so much suffering that he would go to bed at night and try to conjure conversations with the boy in his dreams.

Youthful first love is very powerful and special. Most of us have experienced it. What could be more devastating than to experience the death of such a person? But the idea that his first tragic experience in love cast a shadow over Lincoln and that he spent the rest of his legendary life brooding over Ann Rutledge is for me, based on little more than Herndon's fevered imagination.

First, I'd like to say that I've started reading your posts, after a hiatus from this forum, and am really enjoying them! But on to substance....

While I still believe what I said last July, my only quibble with your post here is that we don't really know whether Lincoln wrote to Speed about Ann Rutledge. I have the distinct impression that Speed did not retain all of his Lincoln correspondence. (I think that about Mary Todd Lincoln, too. How can it be that there is so little correspondence between AL and Mary?) When Herndon came around, I don't think that Speed was particularly revealing - it seems he was rather closed-mouthed about the most intimate aspects of Lincoln's life and the nature of their friendship. Admittedly, many of the people whom Herndon interviewed were reticent about revealing intimate facts. (Then again, I recall Judge David Davis telling Herndon that Lincoln himself was very reticent about his true feelings in general.) As I'm sure you know, back in the 19th century, a lot of private matters were just not talked about publicly. Anyway, concrete evidence of Lincoln's relationship with Ann Rutledge may have existed early on but disappeared by the time Lincoln had become a national figure.

[LincolnToddFan]

(04-11-2014 10:22 AM)Liz Rosenthal Wrote:  

(04-10-2014 09:57 PM)LincolnToddFan Wrote:  Count me in with Roger and Tom and Liz. He obviously knew this young woman, cared deeply for her, and grieved terribly at her death. But the fact is that a very short time later, Lincoln was considering marriage to another woman.(Mary Owens). He never even casually mentions Ann in subsequent letters to his most intimate friend at the time, Joshua Speed.

As for her death haunting him to the end of his life, where is the evidence for that? Taking Lincoln's own statements into account(to army nurse Rebecca Pomeroy, artist Francis Carpenter, and his own church pastor) the greatest trial of his life was the loss of Willie, his and Mary's golden child. It was Willie who's death caused him so much suffering that he would go to bed at night and try to conjure conversations with the boy in his dreams.

Youthful first love is very powerful and special. Most of us have experienced it. What could be more devastating than to experience the death of such a person? But the idea that his first tragic experience in love cast a shadow over Lincoln and that he spent the rest of his legendary life brooding over Ann Rutledge is for me, based on little more than Herndon's fevered imagination.

First, I'd like to say that I've started reading your posts, after a hiatus from this forum, and am really enjoying them! But on to substance....

While I still believe what I said last July, my only quibble with your post here is that we don't really know whether Lincoln wrote to Speed about Ann Rutledge. I have the distinct impression that Speed did not retain all of his Lincoln correspondence. (I think that about Mary Todd Lincoln, too. How can it be that there is so little correspondence between AL and Mary?) When Herndon came around, I don't think that Speed was particularly revealing - it seems he was rather closed-mouthed about the most intimate aspects of Lincoln's life and the nature of their friendship. Admittedly, many of the people whom Herndon interviewed were reticent about revealing intimate facts. (Then again, I recall Judge David Davis telling Herndon that Lincoln himself was very reticent about his true feelings in general.) As I'm sure you know, back in the 19th century, a lot of private matters were just not talked about publicly. Anyway, concrete evidence of Lincoln's relationship with Ann Rutledge may have existed early on but disappeared by the time Lincoln had become a national figure.

Hi Liz-
I am happy to hear that you enjoy reading my posts, because I have been going back and reading yours too, and let me say the feeling is mutual! I suppose it helps that I share your opinion on most things! ;)Now on to substance!

I agree with you regarding the dearth of key letters from Lincoln's personal relationships. The reason I doubt if there are any letters to Speed regarding Ann is that he never even spoke of Ann to Herndon when Herndon was writing his seminal Lincoln bio. Even if Speed was as taciturn as he apparently was, surely he would have had something to say about this key relationship in the life of his most famous friend(assuming it was indeed a key relationship)? After all, he was no friend of MTL and apparently told Herndon that Lincoln said he was railroaded into the marriage by Ninian and Elizabeth Edwards(which I doubt, but that's for another thread).

One of the most shortsighted things MTL ever did was to not make at least some of her correspondence from AL public(or arrange for it to be published after her death) when Herndon went on his Rutledge rampage. There is a delightful and revealing letter from AL to MTL written during the time he served in Congress in 1848 and she had returned to Lexington with their two children. In the letter, he regales her with stories about some of the prostitutes he has seen in the area, and he refers to them as "our girls". Apparently he and Mary got a kick out of the hookers during the brief time they lived at the DC boardinghouse and they nicknamed them "our girls".

I think it must have been unique for an upper middle class married couple during Victorian times to have been so uninhibited about sex as the Lincolns seemed to have been...that they were able to share private laughs about the "activities" in the red light district. Can you imagine what else was contained in their correspondence that has been lost to history? We know that the letters existed, because only a couple of weeks after the assassination MTL tearfully told a friend she spent her time reading and arranging them, and what a large pile they were, and what a consolation they were to her, and how some of them were now yellow with age. But RTL, a notoriously stuffy and private guy, might have felt otherwise about the propriety of some of his parents' private correspondence. I can't imagine HIM ever having naughty convos with his wife about street walkers!
Sooo FRUSTRATING!!

Anyway, here I am..rambling again. You are absolutely correct that the letters dealing with Rutledge might be among the many Lincoln letters that have been lost to history. We will never know.

[Hess1865]

Probably RTL burned any letters where Lincoln might have mentioned Ann

[RJNorton]

(04-19-2014 04:17 AM)Hess1865 Wrote:  Probably RTL burned any letters where Lincoln might have mentioned Ann

IMO you may be right, Mr. Hess. I do think he destroyed some letters/papers for what he regarded as "family reasons." A separate story is that Robert burned papers that showed Stanton was involved in a conspiracy against his (Robert's) father. IMO this did not happen.

[Rsmyth]

Tom's article is an excellent summary of the events. My only thoughts are if Lincoln's relationship with Mary Owens had any substance at all, such a short time later, then his grief and love for Ann was not to be life long lasting.

[Lewis Gannett]

(07-18-2012 04:38 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  Just curious as to what members here think of the Ann Rutledge story?

1. I think it's a nice story, but no real proof so I think it's spurious.
2. I think it likely happened the way it's been reported.
3. I'm not sure.
4. No one will ever know.

Best
Rob

Hi Rob! I'm chagrined that I didn't know about the existence of this discussion group until 3:00 this morning. I've been out of the loop, to say the least. It perhaps goes without saying that, as a newbie, I'm unfamiliar with navigation & usage here. But here goes. The Rutledge story in my opinion is an extraordinarily interesting example of different sets of knowledgeable scholars looking at the same, very small body of evidence and drawing from it vastly different conclusions. As you and others here likely know, the story had its origins in what many scholars think was Lincoln's first known mental breakdown, which occurred in New Salem from late August to early September of 1835. This enigmatic episode in Lincoln's life--generally considered one of only two involving mental incapacitation serious enough that contemporaries became very alarmed--occurred in the aftermath of Ann Rutledge's tragic death, probably of typhus, on August 25, 1835. Some but by no means all of Lincoln's New Salem-era friends concluded that Ann's death caused his distress. A number of informants, including Abe's close friend, William Greene, stated for the record (notably to William Herndon, but also, in Greene's case, to Ida Tarbell) that the extremity of Lincoln's mourning for Ann proved the existence of a passionate love affair. The story first reached a wide audience when Herndon delivered a lecture on it on February 16, 1866, in Springfield. He cannily had sent printed broadsides to newspaper editors in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere; telegraphy hastened the story's spread and almost immediate fame; the Ann Rutledge story, imbued with themes of doomed high romance and the previously mysterious melancholy of a recently martyred world figure, virtually overnight became an international sensation. At last, Lincoln's sadness had been explained. Few commentators publicly doubted Herndon's interpretation. Many however were scandalized that the deceased president's former law partner had taken the liberty to so dramatically unearth an old love story that--this was a huge sticking point--cast doubts on the depth of Lincoln's love for his widow, the still-living Mary Todd Lincoln. What a scandal this was. Mary was livid. Her friends (such as they were) were livid. Almost everybody else was profoundly shocked, and fascinated. From these dramatic headwaters the Rutledge story set sail on an amazing voyage through American historiography. The ship, so to speak, survived a storm or two in the early 20th century, but seemingly foundered with all hands in the late 1940s when the great Lincolnist James G. Randall published a scathing and, it seemed, definitive debunking. But! Like a ghostly galleon the story revived nearly fifty years later. It proceeded to make a triumphant world tour with many notable ports of call. Then it sank again, or at least appeared to, thanks in part to yours truly, me (JALA, Winter 2005 and Summer 2010). In answer to the above quiz, I accordingly vote for (1): "I think it's a nice story, but no real proof so I think it's spurious." I can provide more details to the interested. The Rutledge story all by itself is most interesting. The story of the story in my (not disinterested) opinion is even better.

[Gene C]

Lewis, did you edit the book, "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" by C. A. Tripp?

[Lewis Gannett]

Yes. I assisted Dr. Tripp with the preparation of the book. Contrary to some reports I didn't work on the book after his death, other than to help the publisher with copyedit issues. My role was to check research, contribute research, act as sounding board, and polish some of the writing.

[Lewis Gannett]

(08-11-2012 06:30 AM)LincolnMan Wrote:  It's an interesting portrayal of them both. Ann has bright yellow hair. I'm sure that no where in the literature is her hair color described. At any rate, she does look like some kind of Hollywood starlet. I notice also that her face is turned away from Lincoln. Almost stand-offish? Lincoln, on the other hand, seems to be transfixed on her. Can you blame him? Any woman looking like her in New Salem had to be rare indeed! He does look effeminate. So I wonder what the artist is trying to show? The heading on the card states that it is the "courtship." Well, that doesn't appear to be going so well. Maybe the message is that the relationship is doomed-since the card was made in the 20th century and the outcome of the courtship was history.

I'm brand new to this site and have no idea if replying to a post made some time ago registers as a new post, or how it appears. A minor comment, about Ann Rutledge's hair color. Her brother Robert described it as "light" (Herndon's Informant's, 383); her schoolteacher, Mentor Graham, said, "Sandy, or light auburn hair--dark flaxen hair" (HI 242); another informant, Parthena Hill, stated that Ann "had a brown hair" and that she was "heavy set" (HI 604). No one told Herndon or his surrogates that Ann had the blonde "corn silk" hair Carl Sandburg described. Parthena Hill was the wife of Sam Hill, a successful New Salem merchant. She certainly knew Ann Rutledge, probably well. It's instructive in my opinion to keep in mind that the physical descriptions of Ann that Herndon gathered from people who knew her didn't generally point to the slender blonde that later accounts, especially pop-culture accounts, tended to give. Does this matter? I think so, given the fact that historical descriptions even today tend to idealize Ann as the belle of New Salem. Of note: by all accounts, Ann Rutledge was an industrious, clever, and cheerful young woman. She would have made an ideal frontier wife. And in fact, prior to Lincoln's arrival in New Salem and for a time thereafter, two prosperous local worthies, John McNamar and the aforementioned Sam Hill, courted Ann. McNamar won out: Ann agreed to marry him.

[Lewis Gannett]

(04-11-2014 10:22 AM)Liz Rosenthal Wrote:  

(04-10-2014 09:57 PM)LincolnToddFan Wrote:  Count me in with Roger and Tom and Liz. He obviously knew this young woman, cared deeply for her, and grieved terribly at her death. But the fact is that a very short time later, Lincoln was considering marriage to another woman.(Mary Owens). He never even casually mentions Ann in subsequent letters to his most intimate friend at the time, Joshua Speed.

As for her death haunting him to the end of his life, where is the evidence for that? Taking Lincoln's own statements into account(to army nurse Rebecca Pomeroy, artist Francis Carpenter, and his own church pastor) the greatest trial of his life was the loss of Willie, his and Mary's golden child. It was Willie who's death caused him so much suffering that he would go to bed at night and try to conjure conversations with the boy in his dreams.

Youthful first love is very powerful and special. Most of us have experienced it. What could be more devastating than to experience the death of such a person? But the idea that his first tragic experience in love cast a shadow over Lincoln and that he spent the rest of his legendary life brooding over Ann Rutledge is for me, based on little more than Herndon's fevered imagination.

First, I'd like to say that I've started reading your posts, after a hiatus from this forum, and am really enjoying them! But on to substance....

While I still believe what I said last July, my only quibble with your post here is that we don't really know whether Lincoln wrote to Speed about Ann Rutledge. I have the distinct impression that Speed did not retain all of his Lincoln correspondence. (I think that about Mary Todd Lincoln, too. How can it be that there is so little correspondence between AL and Mary?) When Herndon came around, I don't think that Speed was particularly revealing - it seems he was rather closed-mouthed about the most intimate aspects of Lincoln's life and the nature of their friendship. Admittedly, many of the people whom Herndon interviewed were reticent about revealing intimate facts. (Then again, I recall Judge David Davis telling Herndon that Lincoln himself was very reticent about his true feelings in general.) As I'm sure you know, back in the 19th century, a lot of private matters were just not talked about publicly. Anyway, concrete evidence of Lincoln's relationship with Ann Rutledge may have existed early on but disappeared by the time Lincoln had become a national figure.

Speed wrote to Herndon about Ann Rutledge, after Lincoln's death: "It is all new to me" (Herndon's Informants, 431). It's noteworthy that in the surviving Lincoln-Speed correspondence (mostly letters from Lincoln to Speed; Speed's to Lincoln have been lost), Lincoln gave Speed encouragement and advice about Speed's tentative relations with his future wife. Lincoln does not cite his own romantic experience with Ann Rutledge in these letters. Scholars who support the revival of the Ann Rutledge story have not addressed the fact that Lincoln apparently never discussed with Speed his relationship with Ann. Yes, Lincoln was famously, even notoriously private; "the most shut-mouthed man" he ever knew, Herndon memorably said. The one likely exception however was Speed. Lincoln "disclosed his whole heart to me," Speed told Herndon (HI 430).

[David Lockmiller]

(05-08-2014 09:09 AM)Lewis Gannett Wrote:  He never even casually mentions Ann in subsequent letters to his most intimate friend at the time, Joshua Speed.

Speed wrote to Herndon about Ann Rutledge, after Lincoln's death: "It is all new to me" (Herndon's Informants, 431). It's noteworthy that in the surviving Lincoln-Speed correspondence (mostly letters from Lincoln to Speed; Speed's to Lincoln have been lost), Lincoln gave Speed encouragement and advice about Speed's tentative relations with his future wife. Lincoln does not cite his own romantic experience with Ann Rutledge in these letters. Scholars who support the revival of the Ann Rutledge story have not addressed the fact that Lincoln apparently never discussed with Speed his relationship with Ann. Yes, Lincoln was famously, even notoriously private; "the most shut-mouthed man" he ever knew, Herndon memorably said. The one likely exception however was Speed. Lincoln "disclosed his whole heart to me," Speed told Herndon (HI 430).

This posting seems to be contradicted below:

William H. Herndon, Jesse William Weik, Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, Etiam in minimis major, The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln by William H. Herndon, for twenty years his friend and Jesse William Weik

[The Herndon's Lincoln Pubishing Company, Springfield, Ill., 1888.]

At this point, as affording us the most reliable account of Mr. Lincoln's condition and views, it is proper to insert a portion of his correspondence with Mr. Speed. For some time Mr. Speed was reluctant to give these [page 218] letters to the world. After some argument, however, he at least shared my view that they were properly a matter of history, and sent them to me, accompanied by a letter, in which he says:
I enclose you copies of all the letters of any interest from Mr. Lincoln to me. Some explanation may be needed that you may rightly understand their import. In the winter of 1840 and 1841, he was unhappy about his engagement to his wife not being entirely satisfied that his heart was going with his hand. How much he suffered then on that account none knew so well as myself; he disclosed his whole heart to me.

[Lincoln wrote a letter — a long one which he read to me — to Dr. Drake of Cincinnati, descriptive of his case. Its date would be in December, 1840, or early in January, 1841. I think that he must have informed Dr. Drake of his early love for Miss Rutledge, as there was a part of the letter which he would not read. . . I remember Dr. Drake's reply, which was, that he would not undertake to prescribe for him without a personal interview. -Joshua F. Speed, Ms letter, November 30, 1866.]

I would, therefore, conclude that Lincoln at some time did discuss with Speed his relationship with Ann prior to Lincoln writing the letter to Dr. Drake in December, 1840, or early in January, 1841.

This text from the book cited above was followed by an ironic observation from Speed about Lincoln's decision to marry Mary Todd:

In the summer of 1841 I became engaged to my wife. He was here on a visit when I courted her; and, strange to say, something of the same feeling which I regarded as so foolish in him took possession of me and kept me very unhappy from the time of my engagement until I was married. This will explain the deep interest he manifested in his letters on my account.

One thing is plainly discernible; if I had not been married and happy — far more happy than I ever expected to be — he would not have married.