In the sweet spring weather of 1835, Abraham Lincoln made a memorable journey. It was the beginning of his summer of love on the winding banks of the Sangamon. Only one historian has noted it as a happy interlude in a youth of struggle and unsatisfied longings, but the tender memory of Ann Rutledge, the girl who awaited him at the end of it, must have remained with him to the day of his martyrdom.
He was returning from Vandalia, Illinois, then the capital, and his first term in the state legislature, to the backwoods village of New Salem that had been his home for four years. The last twenty miles of the journey, from the town of Springfield, he made on a hired horse. The landscape through which he rode that April morning still holds its enchantment; the swift, bright river still winds in and out among the wooded hills, for the best farming lands lie back of the gravelly bluffs, on the black loam prairie. But three-quarters of a century ago central Illinois was an almost primeval world. Settlements were few and far apart. No locomotive awoke the echoes among the verdant ridges, no smoke darkened the silver ribbon of the river, no coal-mine gashed the green hillside. Here and there a wreath of blue marked the hearth-fire of a forest home, or beyond a gap in the bluff a log-cabin stood amid the warm brown furrows of a clearing; but for the most part the Sangamon River road was broken through a sylvan wilderness.
There were walnut groves then, as there are still oaks and maples. Among the darker boles the trunks of sycamores gleamed. In the bottoms the satin foliage of the cottonwood shimmered in the sun, and willows silvered in the breeze. Honey-locusts, hawthorn and wild crab-apple trees were in bloom, dogwood made pallid patches in the glades and red-bud blushed. Wild flowers of low growth carpeted every grassy slope. The earth exhaled all those mysterious fragrances with which the year renews its youth. In April the mating season would be over and the birds silent, a brooding stillness possess an efflorescent Eden.
It was a long enough ride for a young man to indulge in memories and dreams. A tall, ungainly youth of twenty-six was this rising backwoods politician. He wore a suit of blue jeans, the trousers stuffed in the tops of cowhide boots; a hat of rabbit-fur felt, with so long a nap that it looked not unlike the original pelt, was pushed back from his heavy black hair. But below primitive hat and unruly hair was a broad, high forehead, luminous gray eyes of keen intelligence, softened by sympathy and lit with humour, features of rugged strength, and a wide mouth, full and candid and sweet. His wardrobe was in his saddle-bags; his library of law books, most of them borrowed, in a portmanteau on his saddle-bow; a hundred dollars or so of his pay as a legislator in his belt, and many times that amount pledged to debtors. His present living was precarious; his only capital reputation, courage, self-confidence and a winning personality; his fortune still under his shabby hat.
But this morning he was not to be dismayed. Difficulties dissolved, under this fire of spring in his heart, as the snow had melted in the sugar groves. The sordid years fell away from him; debts no longer burdened his spirit. That sombre outlook upon life, his heritage from a wistful, ill-fated mother, was dissipated in the sun of love.
It was on such an April morning as this, four years before, that he had first seen Ann Rutledge. She was in the crowd that had come down to the mill to cheer him when he got the flat-boat he was taking to New Orleans safely over New Salem dam. Ann was eighteen then, and she stood out from the villagers gathered on the bank by reason of a certain fineness of beauty and bearing. Her crown of hair was so pale a gold as to be almost flaxen. Besides always being noted as kind and happy, her eyes are described as a dark, violet-blue, with brown brows and lashes. Her colouring was now rose, now pearl, changing like the anemones that blow along the banks of the Sangamon.1
Hero of the day, the raw youth was taken up the bluff and over the ridge into the busy town of twenty log-houses and shops. He was feasted in the eight-room tavern of hewn logs owned by her father, James Rutledge, and for an hour entertained a crowd of farmers, emigrants, and shopkeepers with droll stories – stories that, unknown to him, would be repeated before nightfall over a radius of twenty miles. He was beginning to discover that men liked to hear him talk, and to wonder if this facility for making friends could be turned to practical use. But as a young man whose fancy had fed on a few books and many dreams, it may have meant more that this beautiful girl waited on the table, laughed at his jokes – too kind of heart, too gentle of breed, to laugh at his awkwardness – and praised his wit and cleverness and strength.
When he pushed his boat off, Ann waved her kerchief from the bank. He looked back at her outlined against the green bluff, to fix it in a memory none too well-furnished with such gracious pictures. He might never see her again. Poor, obscure, indifferently self-educated, unaware of his own powers, he saw before him, at that time, only the vagabond life of a river boatman, or the narrow opportunities of a farm labourer. But he displayed such qualities on that voyage as to win his employer. In July he returned to New Salem as a clerk in Denton Offutt’s store.
