house, was asked by Butler's little son, "Where are you going? "To hell, I suppose," was Lincoln's reply.

The reconciliation and marriage was interwoven with a romantic incident of a duel. Lincoln had written a satirical letter in the Sangamon Journal, dated from "Lost Townships," and signed "Rebecca," which lampooned the auditor, Shields, who was a Democrat, for demanding that the taxes be paid in silver instead of in State paper. Shields was outraged at the personal invectives and the satire, and threatened to fight. Mary Todd and a young friend, Julia Jayne, finding the letter from "Rebecca" so successful, wrote another, under the same name, suggesting that Shields marry "Rebecca" instead of fight. The girls then ended the controversy by a poem, which celebrated the marriage. Shields, now trebly outraged, asked who the author was, and when told it was Lincoln, challenged him to a duel. He accepted, and as duelling was forbidden by law in the State of Illinois, they went over into Missouri to fight it out. Lincoln, as the one challenged, had the right to choose the weapons, and he chose heavy broadswords and laid down the conditions. A plank of ten feet was to separate the combatants, which they were not to cross on pain of death. A line three feet wide was to be extended alongside of it, and in this oblong they were to fight. They met, the seconds were arranged, and then satisfactory explanations were offered, and the duel ended in a few written statements. Lincoln seems to have been rather in the wrong in this story, for his own letter was much more offensive than the young ladies', and he had initiated the attack. He never himself liked to refer to

the duel, and begged his friends never to mention it. Fortunately it did not come back very often to bother him much in politics, and only almost eighteen years after, at the time of his election for President in 1860, was it made to go the rounds with any effect.

CHAPTER III

CONGRESS

FTER his marriage Lincoln lived with his wife in the Globe Tavern, kept by a Mrs Beck, paying

A

-four dollars a week for board. There, in August, their son, Robert Todd, was born. With this increase in the family Lincoln bought a house owned by a preacher, in which they lived up to the day he left Springfield for the White House. He had dissolved his partnership with Stuart in 1841, and had formed a new one with Stephen T. Logan, a former judge of the Circuit Court. Judge Logan was " a little weazened man, with a high, shrill voice, a keen, shrewd face, and a shock of yellowwhite hair, picturesque in his old cape, and admittedly the best trial lawyer in the state." He was very

different from Lincoln, the former being punctilious and formal, and loving money very much, while the latter was careless and knew principle better than technicalities. As for wealth, Lincoln regarded it simply as “a superfluity of things we don't need." They were both good Whigs and both ambitious in politics. A year after Lincoln's marriage, in 1843, the partnership was dissolved because of money difficulties, for Lincoln was not getting enough now that his needs were greater, and because of differences in temperament.

Herndon, who was ten years his junior, and who had studied law in the office of Logan & Lincoln, was now invited by Lincoln to become his partner, and the firm

of Lincoln & Herndon hung out its shingle on 20th September 1843. Lincoln, though no longer running for the State Legislature, a post too insignificant for him, was nevertheless still active in politics. In 1842 he was very eager to be sent to Congress. But here, for the first time, he was beaten in Convention on the ground that must have sounded strange to him indeed—his high-born connections. His wife was an Episcopalian, a Todd, an aristocrat, and he himself had once talked of fighting a duel. Also, because he was a Deist, a sceptic, and though advocating temperance he was not over-strict in the matter. The result was that he was nominated as a delegate on behalf of Baker, which he wrote to Speed was "a good deal like a fellow who is made groomsman to a man that has cut him out and is marrying his own dear gal." Not Baker, but a man called Harden won the nomination, and as there seems to have been a tacit agreement that Harden, Baker, Lincoln and Logan should each be sent to Congress in turn, Lincoln reluctantly stood aside for Baker two years later, in 1844. It was not until 1846 that his own turn came. Early in 1842, before his marriage, he had taken part in the Washingtonian movement which was organized to suppress the evils of intemperance. Lincoln spoke all over the State, and in many churches, but good as were his intentions, the result was only to outrage the more ardent crusaders. "In my judgment," he said, "such of us who have never fallen victims have been spared more from the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have. Indeed, I believe if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous

comparison with those of any other class." These sentiments were remembered against him in his canvass for the Congressional election. At the time they were expressed there were open comments of displeasure. "It is a shame," one man was heard to say," that he should be permitted to abuse us so in the House of the Lord."

In 1844, though stepping aside in the Congressional nomination for Baker, he was nominated on the electoral ticket for Clay, and he canvassed the state, making very florid political speeches. He even went into Indiana and spoke at Gentryville, where he had spent his boyhood, and which he had not seen for twenty years. The new cry of "aristocrat " hurled against him worried him. He was in no way disposed to lose his friends of the type of the Clary Grove Boys. "As to my distinguished connections," he said, “ that seems strange to me, for I do not remember of but one who ever came to see me, and while he was in town he was accused of stealing a Jew's harp." To his old friend Matheney he said: "Why, Jim, I am now and always shall be the same Abe Lincoln I was when you first saw me."

The return to the scene of his childhood threw him into a melancholy mood, and he expressed himself in two poems of sad quality. "That part of the country," he wrote, "is as unpoetical as any spot on earth; but still, seeing it and its objects and its inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry; though whether my expression of these feelings is poetry is quite another matter." The following stanza is sufficient to show the strain of his muse: