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covering her. Herndon claimed that she was the one great love of Lincoln’s life, and that the contrast between Ann Rutledge and the woman Lincoln finally did marry embittered him and was the root of his melancholy and his strangeness.
    We shall never know the entire truth. Lincoln was singularly close-mouthed, and it is unlikely that he would even mention anything so intimate as this to anyone. Herndon’s evidence did not come from Lincoln but from New Salem people whom he interviewed after his partner’s death. An examination of his original material, which has recently been published, 2 makes out a very strong case for the essential truth of his story. He may have exaggerated, but what we know about Lincoln’s character, as it later developed, seems not incompatible with the Herndon version of the Ann Rutledge affair.
    Ann Rutledge, however, was not the only woman whom Lincoln considered as a possible wife during the New Salem period. The lonely, single man who had to live as best he could in other people’s houses turned desperately toward the thought of some woman to brighten his life and share his troubles. Lincoln was strongly attracted to women, always afraid of them, but always drawn to them by some inward yearning that he could never understand. His ugliness, his ungainliness and his awkwardness made him timid. He was unsure of himself, uneasy in the company of women. He knew that he had little to offer a wife, but he seems to have wanted one terribly. His uncertainty of how to act with women made him a poor ladies’ man, as the correspondence relating to the next woman in his life, Miss Mary Owens, brings out. She said about him, years later, that he was “deficient in those little links which make up the path of a woman’s happiness.”
    Mary Owens arrived in New Salem on August 1, 1836, less than a year after the death of Ann Rutledge. She came from Kentucky on a visit to her married sister and there can be little doubt that she was on a tour to survey the matrimonial prospects in Illinois. The woman-hungry Lincoln immediately began to pay attention to her, although she was rather stout and a year older than he was. He proposed marriage to her, but she delayed accepting him, perhaps because she had noticed that he was inattentive and careless in his dealings with women.
LINCOLN MOVES TO SPRINGFIELD
    Time dragged on. Lincoln went away to attend the Legislature at Vandalia. New Salem’s bright promises of growth dwindled, and the little village began to decline. In the spring of 1837, Lincoln determined to move to Springfield. He had had a hand in the effort to move the state capital there, so he could expect a warm welcome.
    He rode into the public square on a borrowed horse, carrying with him everything he owned. Springfield was then only fifteen years old, but it already had a population of fifteen hundred. New houses were going up every day and there was an air of general prosperity about the place that should have encouraged the young lawyer who was going there to live. But the record we have of Lincoln’s behavior that day shows only gloom and dark foreboding.
    He was entering Springfield with the best prospects that his poor life had yet shown; he was a member of the Legislature; he had already arranged to become the law partner of a man he had met during the Black Hawk War, John T. Stuart, one of the best-known lawyers in the state. It is true that Lincoln was penniless, but his name was already known, and the whole reason for his moving to Springfield was to better himself. His friends, as usual, promptly came to his aid. One of them fed him in his own home for several years withoutcharge; another offered to share his room with Lincoln so he would have a place to sleep. But this man, Joshua Speed, whom Lincoln came to know so well that Speed became the one person in his life to whom he ever unburdened his heart, said about his meeting with Lincoln that day: “I never saw so gloomy and melancholy