Posted by
Richard Davis on Friday, March 23, 2007 8:32:51 AM
I've been to his house before. Abraham Lincoln's house in Springfield, the only one he ever owned. His tenure in the White House was like all presidents, an eight year benefit at best.
The place looks pretty good for an old house. They are doing repairs. Lincoln lived here for awhile after moving from a small settlement called New Salem a few miles away. Springfield then was the place to be, the place to make fortunes, and Abraham Lincoln came to town to do that.
And to forget.
Lincoln was a southern boy, up from Kentucky via Indiana. He left home to seek his place in the world and ended up in a scattering of houses above the Sangamon River, called New Salem.
There he had an experience that scholars say colored his entire outlook on life.
He fell in love. A young girl, Anne Rutledge, nineteen, caught Lincoln's eye, and he fell hard.
Anne, an inkeepers keepers daughter, was not long for this world, however. She fell ill and died. Lincoln spent a few moments with her just prior to her death. Seems that Anne had given up on Lincoln and was engaged to another man, but her heart was still with him. Nobody knows what was said during those few hours that Lincoln spent with Anne, but it is said that she confessed her love for him, and that she had not wanted to be engaged to this other man, who, in fact, had not been seen in the parts for about two years.
But Anne had waited for this man to return from New York. History is not clear if he ever did return to Anne.
Lincoln was not the same after Anne Rutledge was buried on the prairie. He wandered about the country, abandoned his friends, lost his famous sense of humor. He was what today would be called depressed.
Out of this sadness came a resolve to become more than just a prosperous lawyer in the backwater of the country. He began a political career that would in short time take him to the White House.
He did so by promising to end the most horrible crime against man that existed in these United States: to end the enslavement of human beings and to fulfill the words set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, and to make the Constitution whole.
Some say he was just being a political opportunist and seizing an issue to make him stand apart. That's doubtful. Dark days in the White House and the blood of hundreds of thousands would seem to speak against this. There are easier ways to become politically famous, even back in the 1860s.
There is a cemetery not far from where I sit tonight. Buried beneath an ordinary gray stone is Anne Rutledge.
Lincoln freed the slaves, but he was a slave of sorts too, it is said, not to the woman he married and who bore his children, Mary Todd, but to the memory and love of a young girl in a pioneer settlement who loved him like no other.
Though gone many years she walked with him throughout his life and no doubt helped him bear up and keep the Union together.
Lincoln's tomb is a huge monolith of a stone in Springfield. Thousands visit each year. It is soulless and cold.
Had Abraham Lincoln had a choice he might have wanted to be buried about twenty miles up the road in a cemetery with the woman who drove a awkward and homely country lawyer to achieve immortality.
He kept the Union together, perhaps out of love. He could not keep his own union together with Anne Rutledge. Not in this world anyway.
Tonight I stood in front of Lincoln's home. There were no bus loads of tourists; I was all alone on the street. I've been in his house before, and it struck me that we as a country owe so much to a women who never lived in the house.
This is the inscription on Anne Rutledge's grave, written by Edgar Lee Masters in his <i>Spoon Riiver Anthology</i>:
OUT of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation 5
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation. 10
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!