CHAPTER XV.

IN THE LEGISLATURE.

Practical Politics-Lessons in Public Finance-Blowing Bubbles-A great Darkness-1834-36.

MR. LINCOLN had now attained a position which was full of promise. The power of binding men to him by ties of strong personal attachment had been born with him. The capacity for influencing and controlling them when assembled as citizens for the discussion of political questions had been developed in him remarkably and almost without his knowledge. He was now to study and acquire the art or trade of managing a drove of selfish politicians. The material for such a training was gathered for him in perfection at Vandalia. He found himself surrounded by narrow-minded, ignorant embodiments of party prejudice, local jealousy, self-seeking, and self-conceit. In such a mob he could not help becoming a man of some mark, but during the greater part of that first "session" of 1834-1835 he neither sought nor attained especial prominence. He was as yet a student of politics, not ready to be an active worker and still less a leader. Of many things he knew as much as did the majority of his fellow-legislators, and of some things he knew a great deal more, but he was slow to tell them so. Few of them, at all events, could equal him in telling a story with a keen point to it, and none surpassed him in personal height or in the peculiar heartiness of manner which made him so speedily at home amid his new surroundings.

At the beginning of his education as a political manager, he was also at the beginning of a long course of experimental instruction as to what could and what could not safely be done

with public credit. He was to be taught fundamental truths of finance concerning a State or a nation, that he might not, in after-days, come ignorantly and without experience to the discussion and arbitrary decision of precisely such questions, relating to a wider field than that of the very young and now half-crazy State of Illinois.

Lincoln believed in a general system of public improvements, and so did almost everybody else; but the common accord ceased at that point. Beyond it lay a tangled mass of problems as to methods of procuring money wherewith to improve, and right along with these came a chaos of discord and contention as to how and where it should be spent, and which of the outreaching, grasping local interests should first be served. The State was out of debt and its credit stood well in the money markets. It could readily borrow whatever it might need. It had sovereign power to create banks, and, through these, an unlimited capacity for the issue of paper money. The whole population was gambling in town-lots, lands, and almost every other kind of property.

Illinois was by no means alone in her gambling fever. A somewhat similar condition of affairs existed elsewhere, North, South, East, and West.

As for the Legislature, not a soul in Vandalia knew the first principles of finance or political economy. There had been as yet no teaching given to the New Salem member of a sort to open his eyes to the fragility of the bubbles he and his associates were about to inflate. All looked well, and nothing seemed requisite except the soapsuds of the State credit and the creative breath of the Legislature.

The speculative mania did not rise to fever-heat during that first winter, but some very fine bubbles were blown. A State bank was chartered, with a "capital" of a million and a half. A broken-down money-mill of a bank in the wretched village of Shawneetown, in the southern part of the State, was set running again by a law which declared that it had three hun

dred thousand dollars to run with. The State borrowed half a million of actual dollars, and began to spend them on the western end of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Nothing was done for the Sangamon River, and that and other incomplete streams were compelled to postpone for a while, at least, their ambition of becoming "navigable." Their friends, however, were firmly determined that the State credit and statute law should yet supply them with deep, well-made channels and an abundance of river-water, and thus everybody living along the banks of them would be rich at once. Mr. Lincoln was assigned a place upon the Committee on Public Accounts and Expenditures. It was a good enough corner in which to study and acquire the information he stood most in need of, but he did not bring an ounce of practical preparation to the legisla tive work set before him. He toiled away at his task, nevertheless, and at the end of the session he returned to his New Salem home and his law-books.

The year 1835 seemed to open brightly enough, but its coming weeks and months were bringing Lincoln deeper and sadder lessons than any which had yet been given him. He had already discovered in himself the germs of remarkable faculties. He had cultivated all industriously and with success, under the most adverse circumstances. There was in his growing soul yet one more power of whose very existence he was but dimly conscious. It was the power of suffering; the faculty of feeling inward pain more deeply, more keenly, than other men, and of keeping and carrying it longer. The related capacity for concealment did not come at the same time, but was to be developed later, when there should be greater need of it, that he might not fail in doing the duties whose needful performance should entail the suffering.

It is not known precisely when Ann Rutledge told her suitor that her heart was his, but early in 1835 it was publicly known that they were solemnly betrothed. Even then the scrupulous maiden waited for the return of the absent McNa

mar, that she might be formally released from the obligation to him which he had so recklessly forfeited. Her friends argued with her that she was carrying her scruples too far, and at last, as neither man nor letter came, she permitted it to be understood that she would marry Abraham Lincoln as soon as his legal studies should be completed.

That was a glorious summer for him; the brightest, sweetest, hopefullest he yet had known. It was also the fairest time he was ever to see; for even now, as the golden days came and went, they brought an increasing shadow on their wings. It was a shadow that was not to pass away. Little by little came indications that the health of Ann Rutledge had suffered under the prolonged strain to which she had been subjected. Her sensitive nature had been strung to too high a tension, and the chords of her life were beginning to give way.

There were those of her friends who said that she died of a broken heart, but the doctors called it "brain-fever."

On the 25th of August, just before the summer died, she passed away from earth. But she never faded from the heart of Abraham Lincoln. She lived there in love and memory to the very last. In her early grave was buried the best hope he ever knew, and the shadow of that great darkness was never entirely lifted from him.

A few days before Ann's death, a message from her brought her betrothed to her bedside, and they were left alone. No one ever knew what passed between them in the endless moments of that last sad farewell; but Lincoln left the house with inexpressible agony written upon his face. He had been to that hour a man of marvelous poise and self-control, but the pain he now struggled with grew deeper and more deep, until, when they came and told him she was dead, his heart and will, and even his brain itself, gave way. He was utterly without help or the knowledge of possible help in this world or beyond it. He was frantic for the time, seeming even to lose the sense of his own identity, and all New Salem said that he was insane.

He piteously moaned and raved, "I can never be reconciled to have the snow, rains, and storms beat upon her grave!"

The very earth her body slept in gathered to its grassy covering somewhat of the unutterable tenderness the strong man felt for his first love. His best friends seemed to have lost their influence over him, and he resisted their kindly efforts at comfort or control with all the gloomy peevishness and even the cunning of a madman.

All but one; for the same Bowlin Greene who had helped Short save his property for him at the sheriff's sale came now again to the rescue. He managed to entice the poor fellow to his own home a short distance from the village, there to keep watch and ward over him until the fury of his sorrow should wear away. There were well-grounded fears lest he might do himself some injury, and the watch was vigilantly kept. In a few weeks reason again obtained the mastery, and it was safe to let him return to his studies and his work. He could indeed work again, and he could once more study law, for there was a kind of relief in steady occupation and absorbing toil; but he was not, could not ever be, the same man. In time even the joke and the laugh would come to his lips, but they would never cease to have the appearance and character of brief sunshine breaking through a cloud, and there was always a great storm of rain resolutely held back in the inner darkness of that cloud.

Lincoln had been fond of poetry from boyhood, and had gradually made himself familiar with large parts of Shakespeare's plays and the works of other great writers. He now discovered in a strange collection of crude verses, by an unknown hand, the one poem which seemed best to express the morbid, troubled, sore condition of his mind. Those who then or afterwards heard him repeat the lines by William Knox, beginning

"Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"