Abe Lincoln's unfinished story

A month before he left for Washington, D.C. in February 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln took the train to Charleston, Illinois to bid farewell to his elderly stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, who was still living on a small farm near Charleston.

Staying at the house of acquaintance in Charleston, President-elect Lincoln received a visit from an old friend and fellow lawyer, Colonel A.P. Dunbar and another lawyer of that city, James A. Connolly. Connolly, years later, described the visit to author Jesse Weik. [1]

Lincoln answered the knock, Connolly said, “I confess I was not favorably impressed. His awkward, if not ungainly figure and his appearance generally, failed to attract me, but this was doubtless due to the fact that I was a great admirer of Douglas whose cause I had earnestly supported.”

Lincoln grabbed his old friend’s outstretched palm and exclaimed, “Lord A’mighty, Aleck, how glad I am to see you!” Any trepidation either man had at meeting the new President-to-be, Connolly said, “disappeared like magic.”

“I was introduced and presently we were all sitting together facing the fire. Lincoln did most of the talking. He was cheerful and communicative. After an exchange of ideas and recollections of the past with Dunbar, he was soon telling stories. Apparently there was flood of them, one following another and each invariably funnier that its predecessor. It was a novel experience for me. I certainly never heard anything like it.

Then Connolly reached his favorite part of the memory. “I shall never forget the one story which he had evidently reserved for the last, for he announced that it was the strangest and most amusing incident he had ever witnessed. I know it would be interesting and was, therefore, all attention.”

It was about a girl whose duty it was to find and drive home the family cow. ‘One day,’ said Mr. Lincoln, ‘she rode a horse bareback to the woods. On the way home the horse, frightened by a dog or something which darted from behind a bush, made a wild dash ahead, the girl still astride when suddenly…

At that moment someone knocked on the door, and Lincoln – as he had done for Dunbar and Connolly – rose to answer it, pausing the narrative. Four people greeted Lincoln, and they were shortly followed by others.

Dunbar and I decided to withdraw. As we made our way downtown Dunbar, well knowing what an admirer of Douglas I was, inquired: ‘Now that you have seen and heard the long-legged individual whom our friend Douglas defeated for Senator, what do you think of him?’

Connolly admitted to Weik all those years later: “I had to confess that he [Lincoln] was a marvel – a charming story-teller and in other respects one of the most remarkable men I ever listened to. But he was guilty of one thing I shall never cease to regret. He failed to relate the closing chapter of that last story.”

This was another tale from Abe Lincoln, storyteller.

Mac

Works Cited

[1] Weik, Jesse W. (1922). The Real Lincoln: A Portrait. Boston, MA:Houghton-Mifflin. pp.294-297.