who knew him overwhelmingly endorsed him. “It was merely a matter of shaking more hands.”
His political career had begun.
II
Lincoln needed a success in the wake of his first political defeat, and he knew just where to find it. From an entry dated March 6th, 1833:
I shall do what Offutt could not. By God, I shall run a profitable store in New Salem! Berry * and I have today purchased the whole on $300 of credit, which we have every expectation of paying back within two years’ time. In three years, we shall have saved enough to purchase our building!
Again, the realities proved far less exciting than Abe’s imagination. There were already two general stores in New Salem by the time Lincoln/Berry opened its doors, and barely enough demand to keep those open. Historians have puzzled over why a man with Abe’s intellect and his father’s “horse sense” didn’t foresee the problem of adding a third store to the mix. Or why he seems to have so thoroughly misjudged his partner, William Berry, who proved shiftless, unreliable, and “perpetually drunk.”
The answer seems to be something more than ambition. With the store on the verge of collapse less than a year later, Abe’s journal entries grow increasingly exhausted; desperate. One in particular stands out—not only for its abruptness, but for its closing reference to (we can only assume) his mother.
I must endure.
I must be more than I am.
I must not fail.
I must not fail her.
But fail he did—at least as far as the world of dry goods and ladies’ hats was concerned. The Lincoln/Berry store simply “winked out” in 1834, leaving each man with debts of more than $200. In the end, the unreliable Berry couldn’t even be counted on to stay alive. He died a few years later, leaving Abe saddled with the whole amount. It would take him seventeen years to pay it off.
Had the timing been different, Abe might have packed up and left New Salem forever. But as it happened, there was another election for the Illinois State Legislature just a few short months off. Having little else to do (“none of Henry’s letters having arrived of late”), and encouraged by his good showing the last time around, Abe resolved to run again—and this time, he was determined to run properly. He traveled the county on horseback and on foot, stopping to speak with anyone he encountered. He shook the hands of farmhands toiling in the scorched fields and won their respect with demonstrations of his own frontier-learned skills and God-given strength. He spoke at churches and taverns, horse races and picnics, peppering his stump speech (undoubtedly written on scraps of paper in his pocket as he traveled) with self-deprecating stories of flatboat mishaps and mosquito battles.
“I have never seen a man with a greater gift for speaking,” remembered Mentor Graham after Abe’s death. “He was an ungainly—some might say unpleasant-looking—fellow… tall as a tree, with pant legs that stopped a good six inches above his shoes. His hair was in a constant state of untidiness; his coat ever in need of pressing. When he took his place in front of the crowd, they studied him with furrowed brows and folded arms. But when he launched into his address, their doubts vanished, and they were inevitably moved to thunderous applause—even tears by its conclusion.”
This time he shook enough hands. Abraham Lincoln was elected to the Illinois State Legislature on August 4th, 1834.
A poor son of the frontier, with nary a dollar to his name and not a year of schooling to his credit, sent to Vandalia * to speak for his fellow man! A rail-splitter seated beside men of letters! I admit that I am intimidated at the prospect of meeting such men. Will they accept me as their collegue [sic], or shun me as the unlearned clodhopper with holes in his shoes? In either case, I suspect that my life is forever changed, and cannot help my excitement as December nears.
Abe’s feeling proved correct. His life would never be the same. He would soon count statesmen and scholars among his friends; trade the backwoods folksiness of Sangamon County for the burgeoning sophistication of Vandalia. He’d taken the first step on his way to being a lawyer. His first step on the road to the White House. But it was only one of two turning points that year.
For he had also fallen madly in love.
III
Jack was giving serious thought to turning his crossbow on Abe. They’d just made a miserable 200-mile trip north to the town of Chicago, sleeping under the freezing stars of late autumn, trudging through knee-high mud and waist-high water, “and the ganglin’ fool’d done nothin’ but talk ’bout a girl the whole damned way.”
Her name is Ann Rutledge. I believe her twenty or one-and-twenty years, though I dare not ask. It matters not. Never has a more perfect creature graced this earth! Never has a man been more in love than I! I shall write of nothing but her beauty in these pages for as long as I live.
Armstrong and Lincoln sat with their backs against the rear of a stable stall and their bottoms on a bed of loose hay, their breath visible in the cool night air coming off of Lake Michigan. A horse’s backside loomed over their heads, every twitch of its tail giving rise to the fear that something naturally foul was about to occur. They’d been waiting for their prey all night, one of them speaking in smiling whispers, the other contemplating murder.
“Have you ever been in love, Jack?”
Jack gave no answer.
“It is a strange feeling indeed. One finds oneself intoxicated with happiness for no reason at all. One’s thoughts turn to the most peculiar things….”
Jack pictured a steaming pile of manure falling into Abe’s mouth.
“I long for the smell of her. Do you think me strange for saying so? I long for the smell of her, and for the feeling of her delicate fingers in mine. I long to look at—”
The stable doors opened outside. Boot heels against wooden planks. Abe and Jack readied their weapons.
The vampire could not smell us over the animal stench, nor hear us trampling hay. His footsteps ceased; the stall door opened. Before he had time enough to blink, my ax was thrown in his chest, and Jack’s arrow shot through his eye and into his brain. He fell backward, shrieking and grabbing at his face as blood ran around the sides of the arrow. Upset by the noise, his horse reared up—I grabbed it by the bridle for fear that it would trample us both. As I did so, Jack pulled the ax from the vampire’s chest, raised it above his head, and brought it down on the creature’s face, splitting it clean in two. The vampire was still. Jack raised the ax above his head a second time, and brought it down with even greater force. He did this a third, a fourth time, striking the creature’s head with the blunt side of the blade again and again until nothing more than a flattened bag of skin and hair and blood remained.
“My God, Armstrong… what’s come over you?”
Jack pulled the ax blade—
“I pretended he was you.”
Abe held his tongue on the journey home.
Ann Mayes Rutledge was the third of ten children—daughter of New Salem’s cofounder, James, and his wife, Mary. She was four years Abe’s junior, but every bit his equal when it came to her appetite for books. She’d been away during most of Abe’s first year and a half in New Salem, tending to a sickly aunt in Decatur and reading everything she could get her hands on to pass the time. There is no record of what happened to her aunt (either she died, got better, or Ann simply grew tired of caring for her), but we know that Ann returned to New Salem before or during the summer of 1834. We know this because she and Abe first met on July 29th at the home of
