Playwright's Notes

To write The Tongue of Their Gladness I had to imagine the realistic behavior of two characters, the young Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, who come to us chiefly as sentimental myths.  Much testimony was collected about Abe Lincoln in the rail-splitting New Salem days when he started his transition from laborer to lawyer.  Far less lore exists about Ann Rutledge.  As a result, I created a good deal more Ann character than we can know from the sources while trying not to violate what we do know.  And of course I created the inner content of Abe and Ann's relationship, the feelings and personal events and talks of which we know just about nothing.  Now that historians have confirmed that their relationship was actual, it's certain that over their several years together as intimate friends in a frontier village Abe and Ann must have shared many a joy and woe, and many a conversation, some hopeful and some dire. 

I put at the center of Abe and Ann's life together, intertwined with their love for each other, the question of whether they could ever be fully together while she was promised to another man.  I took chances in imagining their physical as well as their psychological relationship.  I extended and conjectured and created obstacles and motivations that fuel the story.  Some won't forgive me for violating the narrow limits of what we know, or for soiling the image of Abraham Lincoln with conjectured sexuality, but to go beyond what we know seems to me a necessity when writing anything that more wants to unleash new thinking than confirm old assumptions.  Like many a better playwright before me, I've learned from Aristotle that the the universal rises up and away from the stuck specifics of history. 
 

Could anything like my story have been the case?  There’s evidence that Abe and Ann spent a great deal of time together and planned to be married.  Witnesses reported that Abe loved Ann passionately, that Lincoln became distraught on her death, that his friends feared he would take his own life when she died, that he threatened to throw himself on her grave to protect her from rain and snow.  If these things are true, Abe and Ann’s relationship must have been deep, meaningful, and passionate.  Romantic influence was spreading from Europe through the United States – the exalting of love and its sorrows, the roguish amorousness of Byron, the sentiment of Shelley and Gray, the iconoclasm of Paine and Burns.  Abe and Ann were readers, and there’s reason to believe that their language would have been playful and literate.  Anyone doubting this should take a look at Lincoln’s correspondence with Mary Owens in the two years after the events in The Tongue of Their Gladness, and at his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield in January, 1838.  Nor is it impossible that Ann was Abe’s equal or better at conversation; she was universally described as bright and inquiring, and her father had the largest personal library in New Salem.  Ann’s brother David, away at college in Jacksonville, Illinois, wrote her to encourage her “notion of coming to school.” 

And sex?  These are healthy young people in their twenties, living in a wooded pioneer world closer to the bodily truths of nature than the Puritan severities of New England cities.  If many children were was born out of wedlock in this frontier world, and they were, then many a young couple must have found their way through the awkwardness of first attraction and into each others’ arms.  But as I've said, this is not history.  It is Abe's and Ann's imagined inner lives taking flight from the outward facts that framed and held them in their living years.