In these articles about Lincoln, I’ve done my best to adhere to documented facts, which is often hard to do with a historical figure who has achieved legendary status.  I beg forgiveness for the arid prose that sometimes results, and in an effort to make it up to you, this month we will explore a chapter of the Lincoln story that carries with it strong colorings of myth, controversy, and romance.  And I promise to include an Iowa connection.

            Lincoln’s love affair with Ann Rutledge may be the most famous romance that never happened, or it may be a true story whose tragic outcome Lincoln justifiably hoped would remain a private sorrow.  Around 1832, Ann was betrothed to a New Yorker calling himself John McNamar, whose visit home that year to assist his family became indefinitely prolonged.  Ann waited in vain three years for his return.  Meanwhile, young Abe Lincoln came to board for a time at her father’s house.  Lincoln was gawky and uncomfortable in the company of eligible females, but he was also a great favorite of women who came to know him in relaxed circumstances, and besides, Ann wasn’t technically eligible, was she?

            The Rutledges moved from New Salem to nearby Sand Ridge, but Lincoln, by now a local postmaster, surveyor and first-term legislator, continued to visit.  Various witnesses claim he was paying court to Ann, and some believe that they made an agreement to marry once McNamar finally showed himself so Ann could break their engagement.  However, in the summer of 1835, Ann became ill with typhoid.  Lincoln visited her alone during her illness and left much distressed.  After she died on August 25, Lincoln sank into a depression so profound that his friends maintained a suicide vigil.  Ann was 22, Lincoln 26.

            This story is one of a long list of tragedies that Lincoln had to overcome in his life, but it is one that only came to light after his death, which succeeded Ann’s by thirty years.  And the reputation of the man who first spread the tale doomed it to skepticism and outright scorn by many historians.

            William Herndon, nine years Lincoln’s junior, became Abe’s law partner in 1844, and their practice wasn’t dissolved until Lincoln’s death in 1865.  After the assassination, Herndon was obsessed with the idea of telling the true story of the martyr that he knew so well as a man.  He began gathering information from Lincoln’s friends for a biography that he finally finished in collaboration with another writer in 1889.

            While long a Lincoln associate, Herndon was not a favorite of Lincoln’s wife.  When the sophisticated Mary Todd first came to Springfield, Illinois in 1837, she met the frontier-bred Herndon at a social.  Impressed with his dance partner’s gracefulness, Herndon blurted that she “seemed to glide through the waltz with the ease of a serpent.”  You try that sometime.  Mary was not impressed, and in time she and Herndon became bitter enemies.  Mary and Abe married in 1842, and Billy Herndon, who would see Lincoln daily at their law office, was never welcome in the Lincoln home.

            Years later, after getting wind of the touching story of Lincoln and his pre-Mary Todd sweetheart, Herndon tracked down 1830s residents of New Salem and quizzed them on the romance.  He pulled his research together in an 1866 lecture.  Despite indignant protests from the late president’s wife and eldest son, Herndon published his talk in a small booklet, and soon no biography of Lincoln was complete without this intimate look at the adored leader as a young man.

            Later historians, some reacting sympathetically to the traditional portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln as a hysterical harpy, criticized Herndon for asking leading questions and inventing unwarranted assumptions, such as asserting that Ann died of anguish over being engaged to two swains at once.  By the mid-20^th century, it became fashionable to deny that anything more than an innocent friendship existed between Abe and Ann.

            However, the dispute never completely died down, and there are now serious historians who are willing to overlook Herndon’s excesses and accept the earnestness of his eyewitnesses.  You may draw your own conclusions, but I choose to believe that Lincoln captured the heart of the winsome Ann, only to see his darling decline and perish, which affected him so deeply he could not bear to think about the rain falling on her grave.

            And so, as Lincoln would have wished, we will draw a veil over this tragic – wait!  I almost forgot!  The Iowa connection!

            The village of New Salem petered out when the adjacent Sangamon River proved ill-suited to navigation.  The Rutledge family, minus Ann and her father James, who also succumbed to typhoid later in 1835, moved in 1839 to Iowa.  Ann’s mother Mary took her surviving three sons and three daughters to Birmingham in northern Van Buren County.  Some of them wound up in Oskaloosa, and some eventually left the state.  Robert Rutledge became sheriff of Van Buren County.

            Lincoln’s regard for the family remained constant, and he supposedly told an old friend visiting him shortly after his election as president that “I have loved the name of Rutledge to this day.”  Evidence of this attachment may be found in the fact that he appointed Bob Rutledge as U.S. Provost Marshal in Iowa’s first congressional district during the Civil War. 

            Pilgrims still visit Ann Rutledge’s grave near the restored New Salem, but Iowans may find the marker over the mortal remains of her mother at Bethel M.E. Cemetery in Lick Creek Township in Van Buren County.  Mary left her spinning wheel to daughter Nancy, who donated it to the Carnegie Historical Museum in Fairfield before she died in 1901.  Nancy Rutledge Prewitt, Ann Rutledge’s sister, is buried in Fairfield’s Evergreen Cemetery.