Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [38]
Ann was only twenty-two in the summer of 1835. While New Salem sweltered through one of the hottest summers in the history of the state, a deadly fever, possibly typhoid, spread through the town. Ann, as well as several of Lincoln’s friends, perished in the epidemic. After Ann’s death, Abraham seemed “indifferent, to transpiring Events,” one neighbor recalled, “had but Little to say, but would take his gun and wander off in the woods by him self.” Elizabeth Abell, a New Salem neighbor who had become a surrogate mother to Lincoln, claimed she had “never seen a man mourn for a companion more than he did.” His melancholy deepened on dark and gloomy days, for he could never “be reconcile[d],” he said, “to have the snow—rains and storms to beat on her grave.” Acquaintances feared he had become “temporarily deranged,” and that unless he pulled himself together, “reason would desert her throne.”
Lincoln himself admitted that he ran “off the track” a little after Ann’s death. He had now lost the three women to whom he was closest—his mother, his sister, and Ann. Reflecting on a visit to his childhood home in Indiana some years later, he wrote a mournful poem.
I hear the loved survivors tell
How naught from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
He “was not crazy,” maintained Elizabeth Abell. He was simply very sad. “Only people who are capable of loving strongly,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them.”
Had Lincoln, like Chase, lived in a large city when Ann died, he might have concealed his grief behind closed doors. In the small community of New Salem, there was no place to hide—except perhaps the woods toward which he gravitated. Moreover, as he brooded over Ann’s death, he could find no consolation in the prospect of a reunion in the hereafter. When his New Salem friend and neighbor Mrs. Samuel Hill asked him whether he believed in a future realm, he answered no. “I’m afraid there isn’t,” he replied sorrowfully. “It isn’t a pleasant thing to think that when we die that is the last of us.” Though later statements make reference to an omnipotent God or supreme power, there is no mention in any published document, the historian Robert Bruce observes—except in one ambiguous letter to his dying father—of any “faith in life after death.” To the end of his life, he was haunted by the finality of death and the evanescence of earthly accomplishments.
Lincoln’s inability to take refuge in the concept of a Christian heaven sets him apart from Chase and Bates. While Chase admitted that his “heart was broken” when he buried his second wife, Eliza Smith, he was convinced that “all is not dark. The cloud is fringed with light.” Unlike his first wife, Kitty, Eliza had died “trusting in Jesus.” He could therefore picture her in heaven, waiting for him to join her in eternal companionship.
Sharing the faith that gave solace to Chase, Bates was certain when his nine-year-old daughter, Edwa, died that she had been called by God “to a higher world & to higher enjoyment.” In the child’s last hours, he related, she “talked with calmness, and apparently without alarm, of her approaching death. She did not fear to die, still the only reason she gave for not wishing to die, was that she would rather stay with her mother.”
Seward shared Lincoln’s doubt that any posthumous reunion beckoned. When his wife and precious twenty-one-year-old daughter, Fanny, died within sixteen months of each other, he was devastated. “I ought to be able to rejoice that [Fanny] was withdrawn from me to be reunited with [her