Life of Abraham Lincoln | Page 5

celebration as had not been seen since the day the Talisman came up the Sangamon. To
this banquet Lincoln was not only invited but placed at the head of the board; having
been only the pilot of the enterprise this time did not exclude him. He made a speech and
made many friends in Springfield. The time was now opportune for him to move to
Springfield. So in the year 1837, Abraham Lincoln, being twenty-eight years of age and a
lawyer, packed his meager possessions in a pair of saddle-bags and moved to the new
Capital, then a town of less than two thousand inhabitants, here to begin a new era in his
life. Besides being very poor he still carried the burden of the "national debt" left to him
from the failure of the partnership with Berry, but he had friends and a reputation for
honesty. In time he pays the debt, and his friends increase in numbers.
The morning that Lincoln went into the store of Joshua Speed in Springfield, and
indicated that he was looking for a place to stay, Speed said: "The young man had the
saddest face I ever saw." Speed indicated that Lincoln could share Speed's own bed in a
room above; Lincoln shambled up, dropped his saddle bags, shambled down again and
said: "Well, Speed, I am moved." With John T. Stewart, his comrade in the Black Hawk
campaign, he formed a law partnership. Lincoln and Stewart were both too much
interested in politics to give their undivided devotion to the law. During their four years
together they made a living, and had work enough to keep them busy but it was not of the
kind that proved either very interesting or lucrative.
He spent much time making public speeches on a variety of occasions and subjects,
obviously practicing the art of eloquent address for his own improvement. In 1838 he was
again elected to the legislature and was minority candidate for Speaker.
Now Mrs. N. W. Edwards was one of the local aristocrats of Springfield, and her sister,
Mary Todd from Kentucky, came to visit her. Mary Todd was beautiful and Lincoln and
Douglas were rivals for her hand. Observers at the time thought that with a brilliant and
talented girl the graceful and dashing Douglas would surely be preferred. But Miss Todd
made her own selection and she and Lincoln were engaged to be married on New Year's
day, 1841.
The day came and the wedding was not solemnized. Now there came upon him again that
black and awful melancholy. He wandered about in utter gloom. To help him, his good
friend Joshua Speed took him away to Kentucky for a trip. Upon his return a
reconciliation with Mary Todd led to their marriage, November, 1842. To Lincoln's
kindly manner, his considerateness and his self-control, she was the opposite. The rule
"opposites attract" may explain the union, and if the marriage was not ideally happy it

may be conjectured that one more happy might have interfered with that career for which
Destiny was preparing him.
In 1841, Stewart went to Congress and Lincoln dissolved the partnership to form another
with Judge Stephen T. Logan who was accounted the best lawyer in Illinois. Contact with
Logan made Lincoln a more diligent student and an abler practitioner of the law. But two
such positive personalities could not long work in harmony, so in 1843 Lincoln formed a
partnership with William H. Herndon, a man of abolitionist inclinations who remained
Lincoln's junior partner until Lincoln's death and became his biographer. But they were
very poor. The struggle was hard, and Lincoln and his bride were of necessity very frugal.
In 1841 he might have had the nomination for Governor, but he declined it; having given
up his ambition to become the "DeWitt Clinton of Illinois." It will be remembered that
the internal improvement theories had not worked so well in practice. The panic of 1837
had convinced both him and his supporters of the unwisdom of attempting such
improvements on too large a scale at one time. Though he had been mistaken he seems
not to have lost the support of his followers, for they were mistaken with him; and the
experience shows that "it is more popular for a politician to be with his constituents in the
wrong than to be in the right against them."
Though he declined the nomination for Governor, his ambitious wife encouraged his
natural inclination to keep his eye on the political field, and to glance in the direction of
Congress. His ambitions were temporarily thwarted. On Washington's birthday in 1842,
during the Washington Temperance movement he made a speech on temperance. While
the whole address was admirable and conceived in a high humanitarian tone it did not
please