Free A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan Page A

somebody drunkenly challenged somebody else to a duel. Though his life’s work was poetry, not politics, he kept finding himself among political men, drawn to their circle by his own kindred yearning to live a life of consequence. Their talk was feverish and recondite, their personal aspirations and the salvation of the nation urgently entwined. There were set times for elections, but it seemed to Cage that everything was always happening at once, one all-consuming never-ending canvass. It was hard to know the difference between the legal and political professions since so many of the office seekers were lawyers and were often suing each other and running against each other at the same time. Everything and everyone was enmeshed , jostling elbow-to-elbow and nose-to-nose in a scrummaging for advancement that never paused.
    One way to gain advantage, of course, was to marry, and as Springfield began to be the coming place there were more young women with lighted candles in their windows, more cotillions, more sisters and cousins coming to visit from Kentucky or Ohio or Virginia in hopes of meeting a rising man on the western frontier. In that enterprise too Cage stood outside the circle. His mother’s early death and his father’s fatal disgrace had prevented him from learning the hidden rules of social navigation. He did not know how to court a woman. He did not know any women to court. On his nighttime meanderings he would often stop and stare up at the lighted candles, the signal that the lady was at home and willing to receive company, and wish he had the courage to walk up to the front door and present himself.
    This morning he had a hopeful sense that his isolation, his hesitation, were just the artifacts of a stalled existence. Perhaps a vibrant, consequential friend such as Lincoln promised to be would change all that. What he had needed most in life, Cage now realized, what had been missing up until now, was just someone to talk to.
    But it would be a while before their conversation could resume. Lincoln was not often in Springfield during that spring and summer. He was busy with his surveying work, with his solitary law studies, and above all with the need to get himself reelected to the legislature. The 1836 campaign in Illinois was a traveling entertainment that moved from town to town and grove to grove, its cast of characters giving their speeches at every stop, debating their opponents, insulting their honor, sometimes leaping at them and wrestling them down into the dirt. The show came to Springfield in July , just a few weeks before the election.
    The event was planned as a sort of debate, with a revolving cast of Whig and Democratic candidates denouncing each other in turn. It promised excitement and was the sort of thing that even a politically wary man like Cage would not think of missing. He arrived at the courthouse at nine in the morning, an hour before the speeches were to begin, and even so he barely made it into the building before it filled up and the doors were shut. The rest of the crowd would have to stand on the courthouse lawn listening to the debates through open windows.
    Even with the windows open, it was stuffy and hot inside as the midmorning July sun bore down upon the city. All the seats were taken, and Cage stood in the back in a tight press of onlookers, among them Joshua Speed, who was already wiping sweat from his neck with a silk handkerchief. He greeted Cage with his usual openhearted, self-assured delight.
    “Look at Edwards,” Speed whispered. “Somebody should tell him he’s never going to be reelected if he can’t get that scowl off his face.”
    Ninian Wirt Edwards, who had the same name as his father, the former Illinois governor, spoke first for the Whigs. It could be argued that he was Springfield’s leading citizen—he would certainly argue it himself—but from what Cage could gather people only liked him for his money and for the parties he and his wife put on at