Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [68]
This time around, thanks in part to the wise counsel Lincoln had provided Speed regarding his friend’s tortured love affair with a young woman he had met in Kentucky, Lincoln recognized in his own forebodings “the worst sort of nonsense.” Learning that Speed was plagued with doubts following his betrothal to Fanny Henning, Lincoln labored to convince him that he truly loved the young woman. The problem, he told Speed, was simply an unrealistic expectation of what love was supposed to be like. Speaking of himself as well, Lincoln rhapsodized: “It is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me, to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realize.” Indeed, Lincoln mused, had he understood his own muddled courtship as well as he understood Speed’s, he might have “sailed through clear.”
His doubts about marriage beginning to fade, he searched for final reassurance from his newly married friend. “‘Are you now, in feeling as well as in judgement, glad you are married as you are?’ From any body but me, this would be an impudent question not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me. Please answer it quickly as I feel impatient to know.” Assured that his closest friend had survived the ordeal of marriage and was, in fact, very happy, Lincoln summoned the courage to renew his commitment to Mary.
On the evening of November 4, 1842, before a small group of friends and relatives in the parlor of the Edwards mansion, Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd were married. “Nothing new here,” Lincoln wrote a friend a week later, “except my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder.” Three days short of nine months after the marriage, a son, Robert Todd, was born to the Lincolns, to be followed three years later by a second son, Edward.
LOOKING BACK to the winter of Lincoln’s discontent, there is little doubt that he suffered what would later be called an incapacitating depression. While biographers have rightly looked to the twin losses of Mary Todd and Joshua Speed to explain Lincoln’s descent into depression, less attention has been paid to the blow he must have suffered with the seeming disintegration of the political dreams that had sustained him for so many years. Manifestations of despair after Ann Rutledge’s death had been awful to endure, but this episode was compounded by the shadow of a damaged reputation and diminished hope for the future.
Conscious of his superior powers and the extraordinary reach of his mind and sensibilities, Lincoln had feared from his earliest days that these qualities would never find fulfillment or bring him recognition among his fellows. Periodically, when the distance between his lofty ambition and the reality of his circumstances seemed unbridgeable, he was engulfed by tremendous sadness. If he rarely spoke of his inner feelings, he often expressed emotions through the poetry he admired. Gray’s “Elegy,” which Lincoln quoted in his small autobiography to explain his attitude toward his childhood poverty, asserts that “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” The poet laments a dead young villager of immense but untapped talent. “Here rests his head upon the lap of earth/A youth to fortune and to fame unknown/Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth/And Melancholy marked him for her own.” Lincoln’s life had been a continuing struggle to escape such a destiny. In that troubling winter of 1841, he must have felt, at least for the moment, that his long struggle had been fruitless.
Some students of Lincoln have