Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided - E01: Ambition

in 1882 an old woman was living on a hill on the outskirts of Springfield Illinois she kept her curtains drawn never went outside never received visitors neighborhood children pointed up at her window and parade past frightened by the crazy lady in the upstairs room forty years before she had been married in the parlour of this same house but twelve and still or his ring inscribed with the words love is eternal once she had been the most eligible young woman in Springfield the pampered daughter of Kentucky aristocrats my wife is as handsome as when she was a girl and I a poor nobody then fell in love with her and what is more I have never fallen out [Music] he had been a dirt farmer's son determined to make something of himself in law and politics he is to be President of the United States someday if I not thought so I never would have married him for you can see he is not pretty their marriage survives sharp differences of personality and temperament endured the deaths of children [Music] they reached the White House as partners but the civil war that tore the country apart divided them as well [Music] an assassin's bullet bunged Mary Lincoln into grief and madness [Music] made Abraham Lincoln the obscure Prairie politician who had pledged to love her forever into a legend [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] if you go to the Lincoln Memorial and you look at that figure seated on a throne in this marble temple I remember going as a child and thinking that's what God looked like [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the story of the real Abraham Lincoln has receded so far into the nation's memory that what remains seems little more than a dream the man Mary Lincoln knew and loved and mourned has faded into myth [Music] he was born February 12th 1809 in a cabin in the Kentucky wilderness but Lincoln remembered little of his life there and what he did remember he didn't care to talk about it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life it can be condensed into a single sentence from Gray's elegy the short and simple annals of the pool Lincoln's childhood world is mostly gone except the land around Knob Creek and Sinking Spring Farm and the stories people still tell there I have listened to tales about Lincoln my whole life I listened to my aunt's my dad everybody was some way another talked about Lincoln all the time my grandmother she was born in 1885 and got to talk to a gentleman that his parents played with Abraham Lincoln and his sister when they lived here and he told stories different people around here kind of passed them down they maybe twisted one way or another but they're fairly accurate we think we can't be gospel because they're not really records back neighbors remembered very little about Abraham's mother Nancy Hanks Lincoln some said she used to sing him mournful Scottish ballads Lincoln himself once told a friend she was an intellectual woman sensitive and somewhat sad I don't think we know a lot about Lincoln's mother I see her as a soft-spoken reflective person they claimed she was you know thin she was tall dark-haired those were descriptions that people that knew her gave so you you know you soon then you get your own picture they all agreed that she was both intellectually I don't know what that means in the old recollections I think it meant that she must have thought about things carefully and talked all rather well her communication with Lincoln would seem to have been at an early age one of telling stories it's certainly interesting that all of Lincoln's great writings were written to be read aloud they're all basically oral communications pieces of poetry political poetry Abraham's father Thomas could barely read or write one neighbor remembered him as a plain unpretending plodding man year after year Abraham watched his father worked the fields tied to the land at the mercy of the seasons it was tough but it was tough for everybody at the time you got to understand that there were several families all living on Knob Creek at the same time and they were all more or less equal they were poor but they were equal and probably they didn't realize they were poor because that's the way that was on a frontier boy would would have a lot of responsibility then I would imagine Lincoln came back in this valley looking for berries hickory nuts walnuts probably the herbs to make some of their medicine with and maybe its whim and try to catch the chipmunks I mean that's just what boys do you know we rerun the hills and and he was there sure I've stepped in his tracks many times the Lincoln cabin stood alongside a wilderness road Abraham could listen to travelers tell stories of the wider world and see slaves driven south to be sold [Music] his mother and father or much opposed to slavery they belong to a fundamentalist Baptist group that was anti-slavery and he undoubtedly got from them since the slavery was wrong even before you'd ever seen slaves I knew about slavery he said later on that there's never been a time when I was not anti-slavery and I think that is true when Abraham was seven and his older sister Sarah was nine the Lincoln's packed their few belongings and set out in the dead of winter for Indiana Thomas Lincoln had always disliked living in a slave state and had grown weary of disputes over the ownership of his land it was a frontier area so unsettled that there was no real Road to the flour ground there Tom's thinking they claimed to he had to cut a path in effect for his family to follow [Music] when they reach their wilderness claim the Lincoln's huddled around a fire [Music] their nearest neighbor twas more than a mile away [Music] Abraham later remembered his terror of the wild animals prowling the undergrowth the howling of wolves and the scream of Panthers the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task ahead I the very uh was large for my age and that an axe put into my hands at once and I was almost constantly hinting that most useful instrument life on the frontier was punishing the ceaseless work the isolation and always the threat of sickness and death in 1818 a mysterious illness spread across the Indiana countryside and found its way into the Lincoln Hall Nancy Hanks Lincoln was just 34 when she died Abraham was 9 [Music] he suffered deeply this fed in his mind and spirit a kind of fatalism and a dark brooding [Music] he never got over the loss for the rest of his life Abraham would struggle with depression she was my angel mother all that I am I hope ever to be I old to her [Music] the same year that Abraham Lincoln's mother died 1818 Mary Todd was born on December 13th in Lexington Kentucky [Music] surrounded by luxury the young Lincoln could scarcely have imagined the world in which Mary Todd grew up could not have been more different from Abraham Lincoln's she's living in a mansion with several parlors and a dining room separate bedrooms servant quarters a coach house a beautiful garden in the back she's got all the clothes that she needs and she's got all the material resources that one could have needed to feel herself a lucky young woman her father was a wealthy aristocrat Robert Todd a descendant of the Todd's who had founded Lexington less than 50 years before there was a certain train about all the times they they were very proud people I know they used to say about them god only had one deed his name but the Todd's had to help - all that remains of Mary's mother Eliza Todd is a letter she wrote to her grandfather little more is known about her except that she began having babies with what was then described as becoming regularity the Todd's had six children Mary the fourth was said to be a lively free-spirited impetuous little girl [Music] in 1825 Mary's mother died giving birth to her seventh child [Music] Mary was only six years old and had already shown signs of a high-strung sensitive nature [Music] so at six years old she's motherless she took this very hard according to some of the family legends and indeed she was going to take all of the deaths that littered her life's course very very hard [Music] only weeks after mary's mother's death Robert Todd was looking for a new wife six months later he proposed to Elizabeth Humphries the following year he married her and began having still more children nine of them stepmother and I suppose it's never easy family business but in the case of Robert Smith Todd's second wife it was a disaster all of the first Todd's hated her mary is certainly the most rebellious and there some family stories of Mary dressing up in her stepmothers clothes and her stepmother calling her Satan's limb [Music] there were a lot of children in that household and married felt lost she seemed to have experienced the new mother as hateful and spiteful mary became full of rage she became tantrum II she couldn't find her place in this household and she was screaming crying out for attention Mary yearned for her father's attention most of all she saw in his marriage a betrayal in the chaos of an ever-increasing family the little girl was bereft you have a feeling with Mary that the wounds festered and for a young girl who loved attention who craved attention and needed support I think there was a great sense of loss that had stayed with her the rest of her life [Music] Mary would one day say that her whole childhood had been desolate [Music] after Abraham's mother died Thomas Lincoln seemed unable to care for his two grieving children overcome with misery he went back to Kentucky leaving them behind in the care of a cousin six months later he came home with a new wife Sarah Bush Johnston recently widowed with three small children of her own she came upon this bedraggled little family out in southern Indiana and looked at their men was just appalled she went to work cleaning them up [Music] she symbolized the little family that had been really almost disintegrating created a family where they'd been done before Abraham flourished under his stepmothers care Sarah herself could not read or write but she encouraged Abraham to get what education he could find in the Indiana backwoods all told Abraham had less than a year's formal schooling there were some schools so-called but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond reading writing and siphon to the rule of three there was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education but Abraham was ambitious he taught himself poring over whatever books and newspapers he could find his stepmother remembered that he was unusual he had to understand everything repeated facts to himself until they were fixed in his mind he always regarded himself as quite different from his peers and family smarter than most of the other people in his environment there are reports that he could write out documents for what we're obviously mostly illiterate neighbors he would come home from church and he would stand on a stump and then repeat the the minister's sermon but humorously to the delight of all the assemble children so that you see a kind of a testing a sort of an opportunity to to be special and unique which after all he was a bird lay on his stomach by the fire and read out loud to me and Aunt Sarah a cousin recalled his father would come in and say see here Abe your mother can't work with you a bothering her like that but Aunt Sarah always said it didn't bother her none and she'd tell Abe to go on she was kind she was gentle and she played a really really important role in carrying him through his adolescence psychologically I think Sarah was Johnson save Lincoln Cent Lincoln's life when Sarah Lincoln was an old woman someone asked her about her famous stepson I never gave him a crossword in all my life she said his mind and mine what little I had seemed to move together in the same Channel [Music] in the Year 1828 when Abraham was 19 he got a chance to earn some money helping take a flatboat loaded with cargo down the Mississippi River to New Orleans [Music] he stood six feet four inches strong and wiry all arms and legs that same year his sister Sarah had died in childbirth one neighbor remembered he was moody witty sad and reflective by turns he'd never been to a big city [Music] New Orleans would be like nothing he had ever seen [Music] in New Orleans Abraham saw for the first time human beings bought and sold [Music] in Lexington sites like that were nothing new to Mary Todd [Music] Mary would see slaves being chained and brought in in a game and the auction was right there on Cheapside who's right next to the courthouse so it was just a couple of blocks really from where they lived for Mary slaves were a constant presence she was raised since her mother died when she was a child by her mammy Sally who coddled her dressed her and doted on her Mary Todd was the daughter of a slaveholder a Whig banker so she accepted slavery she just simply thought it was part of life [Music] heated words about slavery and politics flew back and forth across the Todd dinner table Robert Todd was a slave owner but he argued against slavery Mary took her father's part and made clear that she opposed slavery to Henry Clay was a frequent guest leader of the Whig party Speaker of the House longer than any other man he too deplored slavery clay burned with ambition to be President and at 14 Mary was his fiery supporter Mary felt that as long as she could go to the dinner table and respond in an interesting way to her father's conversations with his male friends he would look at her he would pay attention to her so she developed very early on an undue sense of understanding and interest in politics which must have made her a pretty interesting little figure as Mary grew to womanhood she enjoyed parties and shopping for fashionable clothes and appeared high-spirited what we have is an intelligent well-dressed somewhat spoiled young girl who was very popular with the boys on the other hand we have a young girl who stays in school longer than almost all America and women do she learned French she learned English literature had a classical kind of education she was always noted for quoting poetry great pages of classical poetry she had an impeccable Parisian accent for young girls in her world she was way ahead of them despite the emotional difficulties easily getting lost in his huge household she made something for herself [Music] having just completed in my 21st year we left the old homestead in Indiana and came to Illinois our mode of conveyance with wagons drawn by Augustine and I drove one of the feelings we settled a new place and built a log cabin fenced and broke the ground and raised the top of some corn upon it the same year in the autumn all hands are greatly afflicted with a ewe and fever we remained through the succeeding winter which was the winter of the deep snow another difficult move to a new homestead another grueling round of seasons this was not the life Abraham Lincoln imagined for himself Lincoln spent most of his early life trying to get beyond his humble origins he seemed to have to position himself as better than a separate from and really not identified with in any way what his father represented the kind of ignorant past out of which he had come he simply did not like the life that his father lived whatever happened he was not going to be like his father he was going to do something to make a name for himself he had a sense of himself as being different from other people from the beginning he doesn't like farm work he doesn't make any bones about it he wanted recognition he aspires for something more [Music] at 22 Lincoln left home for good and rarely saw his father again he never looked back I was a friendless uneducated penniless boy a piece of floating driftwood Lincoln eventually came to rest at New Salem in central Illinois population 100 the biggest town he had ever lived in he was a gawky fellow ill-dressed funny looking a rube they thought he was rough looking in a rough-looking crowd he simply looked like nothing they had ever seen a real PC but as soon as he started talking you were aware that he was very literate he was well informed to them he sounded educated he went to work in a general store and grist mill [Music] but that was only meant to be a stepping stone just eight months after he got to town he was running for the state legislature March 9 1832 to the people of Sagamore County I am young and unknown many of you I was born and have ever remained and the most humble walks of life I have no wealthy of popular relations to recommend if elected I shall be unremitting and my Labor's to compensate but if the good people of my wisdom shall see fit to keep me in background I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much agreement that having just arrived in a community where he and really established himself he should think of himself as a state legislator they tell something about a driving ambition that this young man had at an early age politics was his way of breaking out of that life that he didn't want to leave it was the road for a young man to become something in life that other people would respect and understand politics was the world that was available to him other worlds weren't quite as easily available that one was right within his reach in 1832 Illinois politics was wide open and Lincoln thought his chances were as good as any man's even though he had no education and was just 23 he campaigned for the improvement of the Sangamon River he believed governments should promote economic progress if steamboats could reach New Salem Lincoln argued the little settlement could become a thriving port he never stood much of a chance running against older better known men Lincoln lost but almost all his New Salem neighbors voted for him he won 277 of their 300 votes most people who got to know Abraham Lincoln liked him [Music] my ever dear murse we expect a very gay winter evening before last my sister gave a most agreeable party upwards of a hundred grace the festive scene when she was 20 Mary Todd left behind the stepmother she so disliked and moved to the growing city of Springfield Illinois she moved into the hilltop home of her sister who had married the son of the former governor she was so charming so flirtatious her brother-in-law said she could make a bishop forget his prayers she was amusing and funny she could quote from Shakespeare's she could quote from the poets and she was steeped in politics in fact I think she intimidated some of the young man she was so much smarter than most of them she didn't think she was prettier attractive she really wasn't she was aware of her physical shortcomings but she was attractive enough and young enough and sprightly and intelligent to be quite a sought after young woman she was a girl of much vivacity and conversation one friend remembered but was subject to spells of mental depression she was either in the garret or in the cellar [Music] at 23 Abraham Lincoln had lost his first election but New Salem offered other possibilities on the frontier a man could try his hand at things change his mind scramble for a living New Salem was Lincoln's college campus there was a village poet two doctors a debating society small industry he was able to serve in a variety of professions blacksmith postmaster surveyor store owner he tried them all and he became everyone's friend he could beat any challenger at weightlifting wrestling horseshoes and he loved to tell funny stories and he called himself a retail dealer because he would take the funny stories from other people from the humorous whose works he read but he would tell them in such a way that he would have everyone else before him he just loved to tell jokes I mean he brought stories he was a great storyteller he was a Paul Bunyan s kind of figure and and it was an absolutely essential part of his character you always have the feeling that Lincoln without being in motion was not a very attractive sort of fellow that he was the homely person that people described him as but the moment he started talking the moment that voice attached to his heart into his mind he became something entirely different his whole body would convulse with laughter his gray eyes lit like a lantern the people in that town grow to respect him they see him as something more than the shuffling panelist gangly character that he appeared when he first walked on the streets it's hard to imagine that one wouldn't be attracted to young Lincoln two years after his first try he ran for state office again my politics is short and sweet like the old woman's dance this time he won from that moment on politics would be his life he was perfectly suited for it he spoke plainly and had a knack for making friends he was a member of the Whig party now and was soon matching wits at the Illinois State Capitol with the other lawmakers making speeches and backroom deals but to pay the bills he set out to become a lawyer in the same way he had got most of his schooling on his own he was a man of practical ambition but he loved poetry and spent hours brooding on lines from Shakespeare's tragedies come seeling night scarf up the tender I've beautiful day and with I bloody and invisible hand cancel and tear to pieces that great bond which keeps me pale light thickens and the crow who makes wing to the rookie would Lincoln would later write that he pondered the meaning of life with such intensity of thought that he wore ideas threadbare and turned them to the bitterness of death as Lincoln's neighbors remembered it the rains never seemed to stop in the summer of 1835 the summer Abraham fell in love he was already 26 shy awkward around women her name was Ann Rutledge the 22 year old daughter of the New Salem innkeeper Abraham Lincoln had difficulties in his relationship with women he like Ann Rutledge perhaps the more because he knew she was engaged to another man this meant that there was no danger in approaching up because she belongs to somebody else the details have long since been forgotten but as time went by Lincoln and Ann seemed to be drawing closer together then Ann became sick with what neighbors described as brain fever probably typhoid it was said that she called Lincoln to her bedside a few days later she died [Music] responded to the loss of what seems to have been his first love with great despair because it had had to have a vote the sudden and tragic loss of his mother and he was adrift he was really adrift he went into a sustained period of melancholia seemed even emotionally unbalanced by the loss unable to function for a long period of time his friends feared that he would never recover that he might even kill himself they were astonished to find the tough young man from the backwoods so tender-hearted so undone by the loss he was strong he was resilient he could take on anybody he wasn't afraid of anything but he discovered something that really had the power to knock him for a loop he had to cope with this vulnerability but he didn't even know he had [Music] he told one friend he could not bear the idea of rain falling on Anne's grave [Music] [Music] when he was 28 Lincoln packed everything he owned into two saddlebags borrowed a horse and said goodbye forever to New Salem the town that had given him his start he was headed to the new Illinois State Capitol at Springfield he had twice won re-election become a Whig Party leader and had finally become a lawyer he was one friend remembered a rising man [Music] by the time she was 21 Mary Todd was one of the most popular young women in Springfield courted by eager politicians and bright young lawyers but she wanted more she told her sister she planned one day to be the wife of a president [Music] one evening at a party at her sister's house meri noticed a man who said he wanted to dance with her in the worst way and she added he certainly did he is still a somewhat uncouth rather awkward and ugly young man but one who was ready to be accepted into the best social circles of the state capital he sees her first dancing with a whole bunch of bows surrounding her she's sensual she's talking really the center of attention and here he is still the gangly character unsophisticated about women unsure about women awkward around women she's five feet tall he's six feet four tall and most unlikely physical couple she was a gentle lady and he was just one step up from a rube she had position in society and he didn't he was still Alana be [Music] some even thought maybe he was courting her for financial advancement but they had politics in common from the very beginning and it got them over many a rough spot in 1840 the Whigs nominated for president of Virginia aristocrat whose supporters like to claim that he lived in a log cabin William Henry Harrison Lincoln stumped Illinois for him and again ran for the legislature while Mary cheered them both on I become quite a politician rather an unladylike profession yet at such a crisis whose heart could remain untouched she loved politics for its own sake because Mary liked a challenge and she liked excitement and I don't think he could find too many young women who were willing to talk about politics it's no accident that she fell in love with a ram Lincoln she sensed both his ambitions and his capacity to realize those ambitions of which she would be apartment when the campaign was over Lincoln had won and so had his log-cabin candidate William Henry Harrison by then Lincoln's friendship with Mary Todd had ripened into something more lincoln mary's sister wrote would listen and gaze on Mary as if drawn by some superior power he called her Molly she called him mr. Lincoln they shared a love of poetry one can imagine them reading poetry aloud to one another and really loving it not just reading it but it touching some part of their heart they shared a certain melancholy they both had these emotional moves these blackened periods they shared a sense of loss and their mothers having died when they were young she somehow saw the depths of this man she saw inside of Lincoln not long after election day Lincoln asked Mary to marry him and she agreed then just a few weeks later he abruptly told her he had changed his mind he wrote a friend that the thought of marriage was indescribably horrible and alarming he was a very confused young man struggling for love and intimacy this is not a man who who easily established intimate relationships he did not know how to make close bonds with really anybody he never told his private thoughts he's terrified of getting married his insecurity with women his concern about intimacy all made him I think just shy away from this commitment there must have been a feeling that if he did give himself over to a woman again as he had to his mother as he had to Ann Rutledge that perhaps the only result of that would be the loss of this woman that he loved Lincoln again fell into a black depression he spent days locked in his room unable to move unable to sleep I am now the most miserable man living if what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family there would not be one cheerful face on earth whether I shall ever be better I can't tell my awfully forbode I shall know to remain as I am as impossible I must I won't be bitter they took the razors out of his room because they were afraid he was gonna commit suicide he was an utter despair utter and total despair marry eventually reappeared in Springfield society Lincoln did his best to avoid her he deems me unworthy of notice I would that the case were different that he would once more resumed his station in society that he should be himself again despite Lincoln's rejection Mary waited there's absolutely no indication that he asked her to wait for him on the contrary there's every one indication that he was not in touch with her at all and she waited through all of 1841 and half of 1842 she waited for an entire year and a half for him to wrestle his demons to the ground before he would come back to her on November 4th 1842 to everyone's surprise Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd stood side-by-side and exchanged vows [Music] they were beginning a marriage which would be at times even more turbulent than their courtship [Music] nothing new here except my marrying which to me is a matter of profound wonder

Channel: St Bindo

Views: 168,162

Rating: 4.7663884 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: RmagWHvAuwY

Length: 48min 56sec (2936 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020