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general reading, going through Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and Rollins’
Ancient History
; he also kept up his study of law, reading Blackstone’s
Commentaries
and the
Revised Laws of Illinois.
Since there was no attorney available in New Salem he was permitted to plead minor cases before the local justice of the peace, Bowling Green, who was one of his best friends.
    Although Lincoln’s earliest political inclinations were toward the Whig party—he always idolized Henry Clay—his first chance for political advancement came from the Democrats. He was invited by them to run again for the Legislature as joint candidate. He consulted with his Whig friends, was advised to accept the offer, and was elected on August 4, 1834, as Representative to the General Assembly of the State of Illinois.
    Through all this New Salem period there runs a note of freshness, of aspiring youth. This was the springtime of Lincoln’s career, and despite the financial setbacks and the political disappointments, it was the one period of real happiness that his troubled life was to have. The idyllic forest groves and rolling hills of the New Salem country formed a fitting background to it. The village itself was very new and crude, but everyone in it felt sure that it would become an important place. There was hope and vitality in the air, potential wealth in the soil and beauty in the wide horizon of fields and trees. It was in New Salem that Lincoln first experienced the love of woman. Here he met and wooed Ann Rutledge, the now almost legendary girl who has become the center of so much dispute and acrimony. Nearly everything we know about her has come to us through William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer. Herndon first announced the Lincoln-Rutledge love affair to the world in a lecture in 1866. The story, as Herndon gives it, is a very simpleone, a tale that could have been told about many young couples in pioneer settlements.
    Ann Rutledge was the daughter of James Rutledge, New Salem innkeeper, and owner of the local grist- and sawmill. All those who told Herndon about her testified that she was pretty and sweet-tempered, with blue eyes and light hair. She died before photography was invented; no wandering artist ever came to New Salem to sketch her portrait. Like the half-mythical Nancy Hanks she has faded into the mists of tradition, and although her name is familiar to every American, the facts about her life are few.
    She was one of nine children, and she was four years younger than Lincoln. She had been engaged to a John McNamar, a New York farm boy who had come to Illinois to make a living. His real name was McNeil; he took the name of McNamar so his family could not trace him until he had made his fortune. He settled in New Salem, prospered there, and then, in 1832, he left to return east to get his parents. On the way he was delayed by sickness; Ann did not hear from him for months; when she did, his letters were infrequent and finally they stopped altogether. Ann fell in love with Lincoln and he with her. The courtship progressed slowly. In August, 1835, she sickened of “brain-fever”—probably typhoid—and after a short illness she died. That is all we know about Ann Rutledge and her relationship to Lincoln. Even this much has been brought into question as something thought up by Herndon, made public by him because, his critics say, he hated Mrs. Lincoln and wanted to hurt her.
    What Herndon’s critics have attacked is not so much his revelation of Lincoln’s love for Ann Rutledge—although some of them deny that there was ever any love between them—as his story of the terrible effect Ann’s death was supposed to have had upon Lincoln. According to Herndon, Lincoln almost went insane; his friends had to watch him lest he commit suicide; he haunted the grave in which his sweetheartwas buried and he could not tolerate the thought that the snow and the rain should beat down upon the earth