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The same “longing to rise” that carried Seward away from the Hudson Valley brought Chase to the infant state of Ohio, and sent Bates to the Missouri Territory propelled Lincoln from Indiana to New Salem, Illinois. At twenty-two, he departed his family home with all his meager possessions bundled on his shoulder. New Salem was a budding town, with twenty-five families, three general stores, a tavern, a blacksmith shop, a cooper shop, and a tannery. Working simply to “keep body and soul together” as a flatboatman, clerk, merchant, postmaster, and surveyor, he engaged in a systematic regimen of self-improvement. He mastered the principles of English grammar at night when the store was closed. He carried Shakespeare’s plays and books of poetry when he walked along the streets. Seated in the local post office, he devoured newspapers. He studied geometry and trigonometry while learning the art of surveying. And then, at the age of twenty-five, he decided to study law.

In a time when young men were apprenticed to practicing lawyers while they read the law, Lincoln, by his own account, “studied with nobody.” Borrowing law books from a friend, he set about on his own to gain the requisite knowledge and skills. He buried himself in the dog-eared pages of Blackstone’s Commentaries; he unearthed the thoughts in Chitty’s Pleadings; he analyzed precepts in Greenleaf’s Evidence and Story’s Equity Jurisprudence. After a long day at one of his various jobs, he would read far into the night. A steadfast purpose sustained him.

Few of his colleagues experienced so solitary or steep a climb to professional proficiency. The years Seward and Chase spent in college eased the transition into legal study by exposing them to history, classical languages, and scientific reasoning. What is more, Lincoln had no outlet for discourse, no mentor such as Seward found in the distinguished author of The Practice. Nor did Lincoln have the social advantages Chase enjoyed by reading law with the celebrated William Wirt or the connections Bates derived from Rufus Easton.

What Lincoln lacked in preparation and guidance, he made up for with his daunting concentration, phenomenal memory, acute reasoning faculties, and interpretive penetration. Though untutored in the sciences and the classics, he was able to read and reread his books until he understood them fully. “Get the books, and read and study them,” he told a law student seeking advice in 1855. It did not matter, he continued, whether the reading be done in a small town or a large city, by oneself or in the company of others. “The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

Wedded to him, not through union,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

—Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

At New Salem, Lincoln would take his law books into the woods and stretch out on a “wooded knoll” to read. On these forays he was likely accompanied by Ann Rutledge, whose father owned Rutledge’s Tavern, where Lincoln boarded from time to time.

Ann Rutledge was, to our knowledge, Lincoln’s first and perhaps most passionate love. Years after her death, he reportedly divulged his feelings for her to an old friend, Isaac Cogdal. When Cogdal asked whether he had been in love, Lincoln replied, “it is true—true indeed…she was a handsome girl—would have made a good loving wife…I did honestly—& truly love the girl & think often—often of her now.”

Not a single piece of correspondence has been uncovered to document the particulars of their relationship. It must be pieced together from the recollections of neighbors and friends in the small, closely knit community of New Salem. Ann was a few years younger than Lincoln, had “Eyes blue large, & Expressive,” auburn hair, and a beautiful face. “She was beloved by Every body.”