A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (23 page)

Cage wondered what Lincoln made of all this, whether someone with his own penniless and forlorn upbringing could regard the emotional distress of a young aristocratic lady as something remarkable. But he seemed to be listening to her as patiently and sympathetically as if he had never heard of any such trouble visiting anyone, and when Springfield came into view—the soon-to-be-finished capitol building glowing alabaster in the moonlight like something from
The Arabian Nights
—Lincoln and Miss Todd had veered from her past troubles and were competing to see who could do the best impression of Stephen Douglas's stentorian pomposity or James Shields's Irish accent. She was as good a mimic as he was, precise and lacerating. The two of them, Cage thought as the horses picked up their pace at the promise of home, could be dangerous together.

I
F THERE WAS A ROMANCE
to be pursued between Lincoln and Mary Todd, there was much other business to distract from it. Eighteen forty was a crowded year. Not only was Lincoln running for a fourth term in the legislature, but he was an elector for Harrison, meaning that he was away from Springfield for weeks and months at a time campaigning for the Whig presidential candidate in the southern part of the state—known for some eccentric reason as Egypt. When not among the Egyptians Lincoln was riding the Eighth Judicial Circuit, arguing cases in more than a dozen counties in central Illinois. During that spring Cage received occasional letters from Lincoln. Was it true that Ned Baker had gotten into a street fight over the new city charter, and that his opponent had fallen back on that fiendish Democratic trick of sticking his thumb deep into Baker's eye? Had Cage seen any farmers in Sangamon flying Tippecanoe flags on their plows? You would not believe the bedbugs to be encountered in Egypt—a plague out of Exodus. He felt he was holding his own in his debates, even though the Democrats were putting forth their crack nags against him. Only deep into the letters would he inquire about the coterie and specifically about Mary Todd. He had heard that she had arrived home late one night at the Edwards house on a drayman's wagon. True? Had Cage been to any more hops or cotillions? Please describe them in detail, with emphasis on Miss Todd's activities vis-à-vis potential pursuers. Should he write her? Would that mean he was in the race? Should he be? Was she the sort of woman who could make him happy? Was she too headstrong, too full of opinions, too rich for him? Was she beautiful, or at least very handsome? Was it unfair and unrealistic of him to aspire to marry a woman with enticing physical features when he himself would be such a painfully opposite counterpart?

In his correspondence, Lincoln wondered about Mary Todd's disposition. She seemed to expect a steady supply of distraction. How could he possibly match his moods to hers, when he was so subject to self-doubt and emotional lethargy? How could he possibly pay for the things she would need—clothes, conveyances, excitements? No, Lincoln almost always concluded in these letters, as Cage followed the turnings of his correspondent's mind, he should remove himself from the field of action in the case of Miss Todd. He should tend to the business of his reelection and that of old Tippecanoe, and chart his future from there.

Cage answered the letters, of course, but he steered clear of outright advice. He could make an abstract case for a marriage between Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd. They were alike in that the heat of politics warmed their souls and gave their lives purpose, and it was possible that their individual ambitions could be better satisfied if they were united. But he was reluctant to make this case in writing, for fear Lincoln would somehow seize upon his opinion as the decisive factor. If there was a misalliance brewing, as he rather suspected there was, Cage didn't want to be responsible for it.

In March a letter came from Gray and Bowen, the Boston publisher. “A mutual friend whose judgment we value has written to us about your poetical work. We are in the business of getting up some titles in that line and would like to know if at present or in the near future you might have a manuscript and if you might favor us by sending it our way. We are looking for a voice or two from the Western regions and if your poems strike us as favorably as they did our informant we will hope that an agreement for their publication by our firm can be reached.”

Mary waved away Cage's thanks when he saw her the next day on the street as she was walking with Julia Jayne to a performance of the Tippecanoe Singing Club. They were both wearing Harrison banners, which conformed gracefully—and provocatively—with the swell of their bosoms.

“It wasn't a favor at all,” she insisted. “It was simple duty. The world must know of your genius. My father read your poems and was very happy to send them on with his recommendation.”

“I'll write and thank him.”

She took him by the arm and pulled him close as if for a confiding word, though Julia still stood next to her and did not show any reluctance about listening in. “If you're going to write anybody, write your friend. Tell him some of us in Springfield are getting tired of just reading all about the campaign in the newspapers. It would be very nice to hear from somebody who's out on the canvass, on the front lines so to speak.”

He did as she asked, but Lincoln wrote back from some flea-ridden boardinghouse on the far side of the circuit that he would hold off writing Mary Todd, at least for now. “The truth is I would very much like to trade opinions with an active-minded woman of that sort, but I think there could be a hazard in doing so from a distance. What if I were to write something to her in passing that she would seize on and not let go? What if I accidentally proposed marriage? I don't know if her accepting me would be a good thing or a bad thing. I tell you, Cage, I am capable of every sort of miscalculation out here on the circuit, where the snoring lawyers are three abed and the food is usually a greasy wonder. ‘Beware all siren songs' is my watchword just now.”

Cage was glad to see that Lincoln knew his own mind, at least a little—that he was aware that he was helpless where women were concerned. Reading the letter made Cage remember that night in New Salem, when his new friend had lain in bed sobbing over the girl he had loved and who had died. Maybe the loss had been so hard for him that he was afraid to put himself in the way of that sort of tragedy again. Or maybe his skittishness around Mary Owens and now Mary Todd had less to do with old grief than with the fear that he was more intrigued than in love, and that in marrying he would foreclose forever the possibility of finding again what he had found with that poor girl in New Salem.

What wisdom could Cage offer, when he himself was hostage to a similar dilemma, in love with a woman who, though not dead, was so contentedly indifferent to him that she was as ungraspable as a ghost? At least now he had the possibility of publication to distract him. Throughout that spring of 1840, while the minds of Springfield's citizens were trained on the contest between Harrison and Van Buren, he worked on the manuscript he would send to Gray and Bowen. It would not be the same book that he sent without success to Little and Brown. It would be not an overture but the full symphony, each poem its own singular expression but also lending substance to the overall theme, the chronicle of a developing civilization. In the intensifying political season the meetings of the poetical society had been suspended. He was glad of it. He needed to work in solitude, to force himself forward without entertaining the opinions of others. He would not allow himself to be in a hurry. He wrote to the publisher to tell them it might be a year, even two, before the manuscript was completed to his satisfaction. He wanted to compose without comment, without even understanding. He still saw his friends, went out to the theater, still accepted invitations to the parties that were put on all throughout the legislative season. The people he saw there did not know the intensity of his private reflections, did not see him by his lamp late at night, alone, confused, ruled by the need to pursue phantom thoughts and scratch them into existence with his pen.

“Respecting as I do your high concerns and your distaste for all slippery occupations,” Lincoln wrote in May from Egypt, “never have I thought to ask you for money. But the race between Van Buren and Harrison is I think about as much a crusade as a political contest can be. Will you give forty dollars to help bring out the Whigs in Springfield in June? Ash is the treasurer of the event. You can hand the money to him. It will be the biggest Harrison rally of the campaign and his election will help the country recover itself from stagnancy.”

Cage complied without reluctance, knowing that in the political world donor and friend could not be thought as separate things for long. When Lincoln finally returned to Springfield Cage didn't see him until the rally itself, when he stood on a wagon in front of the nearly finished capitol building to address the crowd. Afterwards the
Journal
wrote that there were fifteen thousand people there, though the
Journal
was a Whig paper and bound only to its own partisan truth. But there certainly seemed to be fifteen thousand people helping themselves to the free barbecue that Cage's contribution had helped pay for. They were seated at tables in the square that must have each been 150 feet long, and they ate with the single-minded rapacity of people who never expected to be fed again. The Whigs were running a “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign, and there were log cabin replicas and barrels of cider that were not replicas at all, and that men in their Harrison coonskins had been getting drunk on since the night before.

Women did not have the vote, of course, but that did not stop them from turning out onto the square, waving their banners and calling out “Two dollars and roast beef!” along with everyone else.

Just before Lincoln was introduced, Cage heard his own name called and turned to see Mary Todd pushing toward him through the crowd accompanied by two unsmiling middle-aged men who seemed to regard themselves as chaperones. Mary introduced them as Uncle John and Uncle David. Apparently the entire world was now peopled with nothing but Todd relatives.

“Uncle David,” she said to Cage triumphantly, “fought with General Harrison at Tippecanoe.”

Cage touched the brim of his hat and bowed slightly to Uncle David, saluting his place in history. Uncle David acknowledged this tribute with a grunt. Neither he nor Uncle John, who was merely a doctor, looked particularly happy at the behavior of their brazen niece, who had evidently been wending her way through the crowd without regard to their chaperoning authority, her face sunburned and flushed with excitement. A political rally was better than a hop, better than a cotillion, better than a moonlight sleigh ride.

She was wearing her Harrison banner, which no doubt further aggravated her uncles, who looked like the sort of traditionalists who disapproved of the new fashion of women allowing themselves to get excited about elections. One of them opened his mouth, probably meaning to give her a lecture on this point, but she moved away from him toward Cage, dismissing his concerns with a wave of her hand and telling them that they all needed to be quiet because Lincoln was about to speak.

They were thirty or forty yards away from the speakers' wagon, and the diminutive Miss Todd found her view blocked by a forest of men in tall hats. “Tell that man to take off his hat so the ladies behind him can see,” she ordered Cage. Her voice was loud enough for the man in front of them to hear it himself. He complied, but satisfied himself with a grudging look backwards. Lincoln was speaking now. His voice was even reedier than usual from overuse, but on this clear June day it carried well enough: Van Buren and his fussy aristocratic ways, how if he were to partake of a single swallow of Harrison's hard cider he would ruffle up like the cuffs of his shirt. Cage was amused at the idea of Lincoln, the scrupulous non-drinker, presenting the consumption of alcohol as a test of character. But he knew enough politicians by now to understand that they were more likely to be invigorated by hypocrisy than to be shamed by it.

There were a few stony-faced Democrats scattered through the crowd but it was mostly a fervent Whig audience, and after several more jokes mocking Van Buren's pretensions Lincoln had them all laughing and waving their Tippecanoe banners and spontaneously bursting out into campaign songs, Mary singing lustily along with everyone else—“Van, Van is a used up man”—as her uncles rolled their eyes in helpless disapproval.

“Do you suppose he's afraid of me?” Mary said into Cage's ear as the singing was dying down.

“Lincoln? Afraid of you? Why would you think that?”

“Because he hasn't written me. It doesn't matter, I don't care in the least, but the thought did cross my mind.”