Forgotten Dartmouth Men
THE RECENT monumenting of Lincoln's fame through the rebuilding of the village of New Salem, in Illinois, enshrines as well, the memory of the services of Dr. John Allen whose name has long been written into Lincolniana as the physician who attended the Martyr President through the illness following the death of his first sweetheart, Ann Rutledge.
The restoration of that long vanished town, now a State Park, upon the Sangamon River, is an interesting and significant undertaking and constitutes a unique memorial. The first group of cabins, twelve in number, was completed more than a year ago and the work upon the remaining thirteen is now in process. Plans for the landscaping of the village have been drawn by Virginia Prince (a grand-niece, by the way, of Dr. Allen) and will, when nature has done her harmonizing work, restore to the hill-top town the very look and feel of its prototype.
Dr. Allen was born in Chelsea, Vermont. He attended Dartmouth Medical School, graduating in 1828, and moving westward on the great stream of migration that sought opportunity and fortune in the Frontier State, reached New Salem in 1830. There in the little cabin town of perhaps two hundred souls, drawn from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and South Carolina, but seldom from New England, he began the ministrations of his profession.
YOUNG ABE LINCOLN
New Salem, like most outposts of western civilization, had been built up around that first economic necessity of the pioneer, a mill. As early as 1828, James Rutledge and his nephew, John Cameron, had established a mill that was both a saw and a grist mill upon the Sangamon River two miles south of the present town of Petersburg and twenty miles north and west of Springfield—the place that was, nine years later, largely through the political acumen of Lincoln, to become the Capital of the State. Within two years a little settlement had been formed there on the edge of wilderness, and in 1831 young Abe Lincoln, just past his majority, was tending the store and mill, beguiling the social hours with his incredibly droll stories, winning the allegiance of the Clary's Grove boys through championship in their sports, studying grammar with Mentor Graham, trying his skill in the Debating Society, and, presently, proposing himself for candidacy for the next term of legislature.
That village was indeed fortunate in the early thirties, in Illinois, that could claim the services of a doctor, for the perils to life were many. The year 1832 was perhaps the most perilous to human life in the history of Illinois for that year was made terrible by the visitation of the Asiatic cholera. Whole families were sometimes cut down as in the case of the Rev. John Ellis, the founder of Illinois College at Jacksonville.
A COMMUNITY LEADER
Dr. Allen contributed to New Salem, not only the services of his profession but a character so upright and exceptional as to prove a salutary influence upon the social life of the growing town. He and his wife were of the Presbyterian faith, as were his neighbors, the Rutledges. Since the community was strongly Baptist in its leanings—the one church, which was Mentor Graham's school, as well, being of that denomination—the Allen house became the center for the dissemination of the doctrine of Presbyterianism and the Rev. William Berry, whose profligate son was to become the partner of Lincoln in his ill-fated merchandising venture, held weekly services there. There, too, the Doctor organized the Temperance society and became, through that medium, a definite influence for sobriety in a neighborhood presumably on too easy terms of familiarity with hard licker and applejack.
The Debating Society, which James Rutledge had organized, and in which Lincoln learned the first principles of formal public speaking, also met there often. Dr. Allen's professional practice was a wide one and his services never withheld from those who needed them; yet for any rendered on Sunday no fee was charged and one-tenth of all his earnings was given to the Lord. But he was by no means lacking in thrift or financial acumen. It is remembered that he was a good collector and that where cash was lacking farmers were allowed to make payment in hogs which he Jiad killed, stored, and shipped to market at the right time.
The house of Dr. Allen was, after that of Samuel Hill, the most commodius in the village. It stood on a corner where Main Street was intersected by the Springfield road. Across the street from his house was the Berry and Lincoln store, while on his right just across the Springfield road stood the Rutledge tavern. Allen early felt an interest in Lincoln and doubtless the mental alertness and aspiration of the young merchant, whose preoccupation with Blackstone—a volume salvaged from a barrel of old papers come to him in the way of trade and incidentally destined to prove the cornerstone of his professional career-engaged the sympathy of the professional man, but a few years his senior.
Just what influence the Doctor may have had upon the future President is conjectural at best. In the matter of temperance it is known that Lincoln never was a drinking man; nor was he, in a doctrinal sense, a religious one though he was a pew holder in the Presbyterian church in Springfield during his long residence there. But Allen was the only man in Salem holding a college degree or bearing in his manner and mode of thought the stamp of eastern culture and it is unlikely that such a man should have failed to contribute signally to the enlightenment of that eager mind, striving so valiantly, and against great odds, for the education which it craved, and got, in his own quaint phrase, "by littles."
The date of Lincoln's engagement to Ann is believed to be July 4, 1833. It was m the summer of that year that, the merchandising venture having failed, young Abe began the study necessary to the mastery of the surveying job which John Calhoun offered him. The Onstott cooper shop furnished him the asylum necessary to the nightly application to mathematics, the blazing shavings on the hearth supplied a sufficient if uneven light. His political ambition, however, though defeated in the campaign of 1832, was by no means given up and the following year he was elected to the legislature at Vandalia where he served, not too brilliantly but with alertness, his political novitiate in the Ninth General Assembly of the State. On his return to New Salem in the spring of 1835, he found the Rutledges removed from the tavern, the cooper, Onstott, having taken it over, and now dwelling on Sand Ridge, a farming community six miles north of their former home.
LINCOLN'S GREAT GRIEF
Lincoln was occupied by one of his surveying jobs when, late in August of that year, word was brought him by a younger brother of Ann's that his sweetheart had been stricken by the malarial germ that had, with special virulence that year, visited the whole community in which the Rutledges lived. His arrival found her in the last stages of the disease. It is recorded that he was allowed to remain alone with her for two hours after which he left her to release the first onslaught of his grief beneath the branches of a black walnut tree that still stands not far from the place where she passed from life.
Historians have long disputed the importance, and even the authenticity, of Lincoln's love for Ann, and without doubt the serious effect of her death on her lover has been over-dramatized by Herndon, his version being colored by a feeling of malice long cherished in the heart of the historian for the wife of his former partner, Mary Todd Lincoln. It is true that Lincoln, having returned to his surveying after Ann had been laid to rest, was, within a few days, found by Dr. Allen, ravaged by fever and in a state of violent delirium. In his mental wanderings the scenes which had made their last deep impressionscenes touching the death of the girl he had so tenderly loved—were endlessly rehearsed in his nightly ravings. But that the delirium was induced solely by the shock of Ann's death, giving a color of morbid pathology to his life history, is now believed to be unjustified by those who have studied the history of the case. Of his deep grief and feeling of bereavement, however, there can be no question.
It was Dr. Allen who, on some crosscountry errand of mercy, discovered his young friend suffering from an advanced stage of malarial fever—then called brain fever from the dominant symptom of delirium—and seeing the necessity of medical care and tender nursing took him to the home of those kind friends of the young man, the Bowling Greens. The Greens nursed him back to health, under Dr. Allen's direction, and the following year Lincoln again became a candidate for the legislature and was elected to that most notable Assembly (the Tenth General) in the history of the State; the Assembly that was to furnish to the State two governors, and three justices of the Supreme Court; and to Washington eight representatives, six senators, one cabinet member and one President of the United States.
DR. ALLEN A PIONEER
Shortly after Lincoln's departure from New Salem in 1837, to enter the profession of the law in Springfield, the newmade capital of the State, Dr. Allen, and indeed, the whole village, with the exception of Hardin Bale, moved down the hill and "settled" the new town of Petersburg, the laying-off of which had been one of Lincoln's first surveying jobs. Petersburg lay but two miles to the north so that such removals were extremely simple; the tenant in many cases taking his cabin with him.
The Doctor had just effected this change when, his first wife having died, he married Emily Chandler, the sister of that Dr. Charles Chandler of Chandlerville whose horse-trading episode with Lincoln is so often, if incorrectly, related by Lincoln biographers. In Petersburg, Dr. Allen lived for twenty-six years of his life; remarkable for his benevolence, aceticism and religious devotion. At his death (April 1, 1863) he was deeply mourned by the community that he had served so faithfully. A wife (the devoted Emily), a son and four daughters survived him.
The rebuilt Allen cabin stands—as does every other in that reconstructed village- upon the precise spot where its original was built. In plan it reproduced the first house with great fidelity to detail and plan and is entirely furnished with articles indigenous to that region and period; furniture in the possession of relatives of the Doctor's second wife. Facing north, it holds in its gaze the Berry and Lincoln store, the Hill-McNamar store, and the Hill residence—the only two-story structure on the hill. Still farther back against the treeline once stood (and it is hoped it may stand again, in replica) the carding machine of Hardin Bale, its great wheel, forty-five feet in diameter, posed at an angle of twenty-five degrees against the sky. All about the place stand the houses of those pioneers, their workshops and places of business—eight industries, three stores, and a church—sustaining the social and economic autonomy of this little town. First of the second group of cabins to be undertaken, the Rutledge Tavern is now in building. Soon the whole village will stand, as once it stood, bringing the pilgrims to that place the feel and deep emotion of remembered things and among the places of most reverent interest will be the house where dwelt the man who once persuaded back to health and hope the hero of that ghostly town—the house of Dr. Allen.
South From Old Ledyard Bridge
Lincoln's Friend and Doctor
—Dr. John Allen, 1828
