ralist. There was a break between father and son, and the boy left home, though he remained religiously loyal to his mother, visiting her almost every day. He was again employed by Joshua Speed as a clerk in his store, probably at the suggestion of Lincoln, to whom he confided his new religious and political faith. Writing of the time immediately following, Mr. Herndon says: 1

1

On my return to Springfield from college, I hired to Joshua F. Speed as clerk in his store. My salary, seven hundred dollars per annum, was considered good pay. Speed, Lincoln, Charles R. Hurst, and I slept in the room upstairs over the store. I had worked for Speed before going to college, and after hiring to him this time again, continued in his employ for several years. The young men who congregated about the store formed a society for the encouragement of debate and other literary efforts. Sometimes we would meet in a lawyer's office and often in Speed's room. Besides the debates, poems and other original productions were read. Unfortunately we ruled out the ladies. I have forgotten the name of the societyif it had any and can only recall a few of its leading spirits. Lincoln, James Matheney, Noah Rickard, Evan Butler, Milton Hay, and Newton Francis were members. I joined also. Matheney was secretary. We were favored with all sorts of literary productions. Lincoln one night entertained us with a few lines in rhyme intended to illustrate some weakness in woman - her frailty, perhaps. Unfortunately, the manuscript has not been preserved. Besides this organization we had a society in Springfield, which contained and commanded all the culture and talent of the place. Unlike the other one, its meetings were public, and reflected great credit on the community. We called it the "Young Men's Lyceum." Late in 1837, Lin coln delivered before the society a carefully prepared address on "The Perpetuation of Our Free Institutions." The inspiration and burthen of it was law and order. was brought out by the burning of a negro by a mob at St. Louis a few weeks before.) Matheney was appointed by the Lyceum to request of Lincoln a copy of his address and to see to its publication. It was published in

(It

1 Abraham Lincoln, by W. H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik. All references are to the second edition (1892), the first being now practically inaccessible.

the Sangamon Journal, and created for the young orator a reputation which soon extended beyond the limits of the locality in which he lived.

Herndon had always the instinct of a student, though he was lacking in polish, as were most of the loungers who gathered about the inviting fireplace in Speed's store. One evening the talk turned on politics, and the disputants waxed warm as the discussion proceeded - Herndon sitting on a keg listening. Douglas led the Democrats, charging the Whigs with every sort of political crime. At last, excited and vehement, he sprang to his feet and challenged his opponents to debate the question in public, adding that the store was no place to talk politics. His challenge was accepted, and the contest was arranged to take place in the old Presbyterian church-Douglas, J. C. Calhoun, Josiah Lamborn, and Jesse Thomas to represent the Democrats; Stephen T. Logan, E. H. Baker, O. H. Browning, and Lincoln, in the order named, to represent the Whigs. One evening was given to each man, and it required more than a week to complete the tournament. Later, Lincoln and Calhoun debated the tariff question after the same manner, in the court house. Such debates were frequent, serving the double purpose of keeping party spirit alive and of giving young men a chance to be seen and heard.

Others who foregathered at Speed's store, to read poems and talk politics, won fame in after years. In company with these aspiring politicians Herndon began to learn, at close range, the workings of practical politics. He could not have had better teachers, for they were masters of all the various methods of that devious art; Lincoln quite the equal of any of them in pulling a wire or turning a trick. Herndon became in time, as this record will show, one of the most useful Abolitionists in the West- if not in the whole country — and it was due in large part to his training under these adroit leaders; his familiarity with the methods of practical politics making him more astute and wary, but not less intense or uncompromising, than his fellow radicals in the East. Lincoln was re-elected to the Assembly in 1838, after a canvass

which took him into almost every home in the county.

The

next year Major Stuart was re-elected to Congress, leaving his partner to attend to the practice of the firm, which by this time included the beginnings of "circuit riding"- following the judges from one log court house to another, always over bad roads and often across swollen streams; a kind of life Lincoln enjoyed, despite its inconveniences, for its roving, careless freedom, and its rollicking comradeship. So his days ran, full equally of law and politics, until April, 1841, when the firm of "Stuart & Lincoln was dissolved.1

Herndon was nominally a Whig until 1853, and the "log cabin and hard cider campaign" of 1840 was the first in which he took an active part- his part including, besides a number of enthusiastic speeches, some industrious electioneering. Lincoln was on the Whig ticket that year, as candidate for Presidential Elector at large, and spoke at various rallies where a log cabin, with a gourd for a cider mug hanging on one side of the door, and a coon-skin nailed to the logs on the other, was the picturesque emblem of his party. While his friend was thus rising in politics, Herndon had fallen in love and married Mary J. Maxeya Kentucky girl, born near Bowling Green in 1822, whose father, James Maxey, had come to Springfield in 1834. She was a woman to win the love of any man, as gentle and serene as her husband was impulsive and impetuous.

II

Thus far we have had to do with Lincoln chiefly as he touched Herndon, showing how their lives were braided together. He

1 In his Autobiography Joseph Jefferson tells how Lincoln represented his father in a plea before the City Council against an exorbitant and prohibitory license imposed upon his theatre in 1839, as the result of a religious revival. The passage is picturesque but hardly correct, for Lincoln was at that time a member of the Board of Trustees of the town of Springfield, and must have acted in that capacity. The speech attributed to him was probably embellished by Jefferson's imagination, though it was the destiny of Lincoln to be fond of the drama with few opportunities to enjoy it. See Abraham Lincoln, by I. N. Phillips (1910).

was now thirty-one years of age, and behind him lay that strange, lonely, heroic, pathetic story which so many have tried to tell, but which still awaits the touch of a master hand. Indeed, Lincoln must puzzle any artist, for that he was so unlike any model - peculiar, particular, and unique, compounded of so many elements which in smaller natures are contradictory,' and yet withal so simple, natural, and human. The present study does not include his life in detail, even if this were the pen to record it; but as he enters a new career those early years return in the vividness of their monotony, their loneliness, privation, and toil; full of the patience that could walk down a long road without turning, brightened by dutifulness alone, pointed but not cheered by wayside anecdote; until at last, by integrity, fortitude, and resolute will, he was successful; not so much because he was sanguine of himself, as because he rated no eminence or honor too high or too difficult to attain. His later fame, so unlike his early life, made men stare, because they had not seen the steps he took upon the way.

So we meet him in 1840, making his way slowly, unhappy, ambitious, and alone. He was inured to hardship and poverty; rarely ill, being a man of regular habits, wiry and stalwart beyond the best of western men; having a certain innate dignity and charm of nature, despite his ungainly figure and ill-fitting garb; and what he was he had made himself. He had few illusions about himself or the world, and did not expect great destiny to come to him unsolicited, as a lottery prize. He knew there must be work, patience, wisdom, planning, disappointment; and, while he was not lazy, he always loafed a little, studying men more than books, and reading the issues as they developed. Never petulant but sometimes moody, he was fond of solitude and self-communion, and would often sit for hours looking absently at the ceiling, dead to the world and buried in thought. At such times he seemed to be a dreamer thinking. At other times, noted and remembered by his friends, a cloud would fall over his face, and he was the most hopeless and forlorn of mortals, as 1 Life of Lincoln, by J. G. Holland, pp. 240-242 (1886).

though tortured by some hidden sorrow, or brooding over some immemorial wrong that never in time or eternity could be set right. When the shadow lifted he was himself again, beguiling the hours with the aptness and ingenuities of his anecdotes some of them more cogent than delicate, though he tolerated smuttiness only when it was disinfected by wit. His friends were selected with regard to sincerity chiefly; he loved not cliques, and those who knew him best were younger men. He was strangely reserved in friendship, rarely surrendering entire confidence, seldom a hero-worshiper; and for Douglas, his rival in love and politics, he had less admiration than revulsion. All the while he seemed to know everybody, and yet only Speed and Herndon ever felt that they knew him.

Lincoln was hard to know, particularly while he was in the process of making. He was, moreover, so deeply rooted in the soil of his time and place, yet towered so far above it, that the union in him of crudities and refinements was baffling. An example in point, at this period, may be seen in his relations with women, which have been much dwelt upon by his biographers; too much so, perhaps, yet one hesitates to erase a line. A master of men and at ease with them, he had no skill with women, and was never at his best in their presence, being not only deficient, as one of them said, in the knack of small attentions, but quite helpless amid the subtleties of the feminine nature. At the grave of Ann Rutledge he vowed, it is said, never to marry; yet within a few months he was strangely entangled again, learning from Mary Owens the comedy of love as before he had learned its tragedy. Judging from his letters to her, he had not yet put a foot into the upper circle of society, caring less than nothing, apparently, for that side of life.

No sooner had he entered that circle, in which he was never at home, than he met Mary Todd, a Kentucky girl of distinguished lineage, highly cultured, compact of brilliance, coquetry, and wit. Lincoln had not met such a woman before, and he was captivated by her cleverness, vivacity, and beauty. A courtship followed, and the friends of both were