In the autumn of 1836 Miss Mary Owens, of
Kentucky, appeared in New Salem,--a comely lass, with "large blue eyes,"
"fine trimmings," and a long and varied list of attractions. Lincoln
immediately began to pay court to her, but in an ungainly and morbid
fashion. It is impossible to avoid feeling that his mind was not yet in
a natural and healthy condition. While offering to marry her, he advised
her not to have him. Upon her part she found him "deficient in those
little links which make up the chain of woman's happiness." So she would
none of him, but wedded another and became the mother of some
Confederate soldiers. Lincoln did not suffer on this second occasion as
he had done on the first; and in the spring of 1838 he wrote upon the
subject one of the most unfortunate epistles ever penned, in which he
turned the whole affair into coarse and almost ribald ridicule. In fact
he seems as much out of place in dealing with women and with love as he
was in place in dealing with politicians and with politics, and it is
pleasant to return from the former to the latter topics.[40]
The spring of 1836 found Lincoln again nominating himself before the
citizens of Sangamon County, but for the last time. His party denounced
the caucus system as a "Yankee contrivance, intended to abridge the
liberties of the people;" but they soon found that it would be as
sensible to do battle with pikes and bows, after the invention of
muskets and cannon, as to continue to oppose free self-nomination to the
Jacksonian method of nomination by convention.
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