Lincoln and Ann Rutledge

[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.