feet; to beg your forgiveness. I come with a pledge to spend my life reconciling whatever grief I have caused you these long months. If my offer is insufficient—if the sight of me brings you anything other than happiness—then you may close that door knowing that my face shall never trouble you again.”
Mary stood in silence. Abe took a small step back, expecting the door to be slammed in his face at any moment.
“Oh, Abraham, I love you still!” she cried, and leapt into his arms.
Their engagement resumed, Abe wasted no time. He bought two gold wedding rings (on credit, of course) at Chatteron’s in Springfield. He and Mary settled on a simple engraving to grace the inside of both.
Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd were married on a rainy Friday evening on November 4th, 1842, in the home of Elizabeth Edwards, Mary’s cousin. In all, there were fewer than thirty guests looking on as they exchanged vows.
After the ceremony, Mary and I stole away to the parlor while dinner was served, so that we might spend our first moments as husband and wife in quiet solitude. We shared a tender kiss or two, and looked at each other with a certain perplexity—for it was a strange thing to be married. A strange and wonderful thing.
“My darling Abraham,” said Mary at last. “Do not ever leave me again.”
IV
On May 11th, 1843, Abe wrote to Joshua Speed.
What a wonder these months have been, Speed! What bliss! Mary is as devoted and loving a wife as one could want, and I am pleased, Speed—so very pleased to share the happy news that she is with child! We are both overjoyed, and Mary has already begun the task of preparing our home for the arrival. What a fine mother she will make! Please write me immediately, for I wish to know how your recovery is progressing.
The evening of August 1st, 1843, was an unusually hot one, and the open window did little to relieve the heat in Abe and Mary’s tiny second-floor room at the Globe Tavern. Passersby looked up at that open window with intense curiosity as sounds bled into the night air—first of a woman’s pain, and then of a shrill cry.
A son! Mother and child in the best of health!
Mary has done perfectly. It is not six hours since the child’s birth, and already she holds little Robert in her arms, singing to him sweetly. “Abe,” she said to me as he fed, “look what we have done.” I admit that tears filled my eyes. Oh, if only this moment could stretch on for all eternity.
Robert Todd Lincoln (Mary insisted; Abe held his tongue) was born a scant ten months after his parents’ wedding day.
I find myself staring at him for hours on end. Holding him against my chest and feeling the gentle rhythms of his breath. Running my fingers over the smooth skin of his fat, delightful feet. I admit that I smell his hair when he sleeps. Nibble at his fingers when he holds them near. I am his servant, for I shall do anything to earn his slightest smile.
Abe took to parenthood with a passion. But two decades of burying loved ones had taken their toll. As the months went on and Robert grew, Abe seemed increasingly obsessed with losing his son, whether to sickness or some imagined accident. In his journal entries, he began to do something he hadn’t in years: he began to bargain with God.
My only wish is to see him become a man. To have his own family gathered beside him at my grave. Nothing else. I shall happily trade every ounce of my own happiness for his. My own accomplishments for his. Please, Lord, let no harm come to him. Let no misfortune befall him. If ever you require one to punish, I beg you—let it be me.
In accordance with his hopes of seeing Robert reach adulthood, and in hopes of preserving the happiness he’d found in married life, Abe came to a difficult decision in the autumn of 1843.
My dance with death must end. I cannot risk leaving Mary without a husband, nor Robert without a father. I have this very morning written Henry and told him that he should no longer count on my ax.
After twenty years of battling vampires, the time had come to hang up his long coat for good. And after eight years in the State Legislature, his moment to be recognized had come as well.
In 1846, he was nominated as the Whig candidate for the United States Congress.
EIGHT
“Some Great Calamity”
The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good.
I
When Abe retired from hunting in late 1843, he left one of Henry’s errands unfinished.
I made innocent mention of this in letters to Armstrong and Speed, and (as had secretly been my hope) both expressed interest in completing it. Because they remained relative strangers to the art of hunting vampires, I thought it best if they worked together.
Joshua Speed and Jack Armstrong met for the first time in St. Louis on April 11th, 1844. If Speed’s letter (to Abe, written three days later) is any indication, it didn’t go well.
As your letter instructed, we met at the tavern on Market Street yesterday midday. Your description [of Armstrong] was precise, Abe! He is more bull than man! Broader than a barn and stronger than Samson himself! Yet you failed to mention that he is also a cur. As thick-skulled as he is thick. You must forgive my saying so, for I know he is your friend, but never in my thirty years have I encountered a more disagreeable, pugnacious, humorless man! It is obvious why you recruited him (for the same reason one recruits a big, dumb ox to pull a heavy cart). But why you—a man of the finest mind and temperament—would keep his company otherwise I shall never comprehend.
Armstrong never wrote about his impressions of Speed, but it’s likely they were just as unflattering. The wealthy, dashing Kentuckian was spirited and chatty, qualities that Armstrong would have found irksome in the toughest of men. Speed, however, was soft-handed and slight, the very kind of “dandy” that the Clary’s Grove Boys would have stuffed in a barrel and sent down the Sangamon.
Out of nothing more than respect for you, dear friend, we agreed to forgo our grievances and see the errand through.
Their target was a well-known professor named Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, dean of medicine at Kemper College.
Henry had warned me [about McDowell]. The doctor was an “especially paranoid specimen,” he’d said. Paranoid to the extent that he wore an armor breastplate beneath his clothes at all times, lest some assassin try to
