Lincoln's Missing Links

LINCOLN'S OTHER MARY (229 pp.)--Olive Carruthers [with historical appendix by R. Gerald McMurtry)--Ziff-Davis ($2.50).

The "man to match the mountains and the sea" was no match for women. Historians have made great matter of Abraham Lincoln's unhappy marriage to Mary Todd; romantics have told and retold his tragic connection with Ann Rutledge; and now Novelist Carruthers has expanded the few known facts about Lincoln's other big (170 Ibs.) moment, Mary Owens.

In doing so, she has wound fact into such a mess of taffy prose that there is no tasting the original flavor of the personalities. Luckily for the reader who wants to know what really happened, Historian R. Gerald McMurtry, who is an instructor and director of Lincolniana at Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Tenn., retells the unadorned facts in an "appendix" which is almost as long as and far better than Olive Carruthers' novel. It reprints a letter Lincoln wrote in 1838, which tells his version of the story:

". . . In the autumn of 1836 . . . a married lady of my acquaintance . . . proposed to me that on her return [to New Salem, III. from a visit to Kentucky') she would bring a sister . . . upon condition that I would engage to become her brother-in-law with all convenient dispatch--I . . . accepted. . . , In due time [the lady] returned, sister in company sure enough--This stomached me a little. . . . I knew she was oversize, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff. . . . I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother . . . from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than 35 or 40 years. . . . [But] no woman that I have seen, has a finer face . . . and in [mind] she was not inferior . . . to any with whom I had been acquainted. . . . I mustered my resolution and made the proposal to her direct; but shocking to relate, she answered No. . . . I was mortified . . . in a hundred different ways. . . . Others have been made fools of by the girls; but I most emphatically, in this instance, made a fool of myself. . . ."

Despite this light disclaimer (written on April Fool's Day), Lincoln appears to have begun the affair at a full, rolling boil--declaring that he would "catch, tie and marry" the lady. She was 30, he 29 and a member of the Illinois legislature. For about 18 months he continued at a simmer--traipsing over to see her at her sister's house, begging her to "say something that will please me, for really I have not been pleased since I left you." But he ended the affair tepidly with a negative proposal:

"You would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty. Do you believe you could bear that patiently? . . . I want in all cases to do right; and most particularly so, in all cases with women. . . . My opinion is, that you had better not do it. You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may be more severe than you now immagine. . . . If . . . further acquaintance would contribute nothing to your happiness, I am sure it would not to mine. . . ."

Mary sent this clerkly lover packing, married Jesse Vineyard, also a lawyer, and bore five children. It was not until after Lincoln's death, in pungent letters to W. H. Herndon, an early Lincoln biographer, that she told why she had refused Lincoln. Excerpts: "Really you catechise me in true lawyer style. . . . From his own showing, you perceive that his heart and hand were at my disposal; and I suppose that my feelings were not sufficiently enlisted to have the matter consummated. . . . I thought Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman's happiness. . . . The last message I ever received from him was about a year after we parted. . . . He said to my sister, 'Tell your sister that I think she was a great fool, because she did not stay here, and marry me.' Characteristic of the man."

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