Historian Michael Nelson wrote: Lincoln thrived in Springfield: he lived thereβ¦longer by far than in any other place. In Springfield Lincoln became a successful lawyer, married Mary Todd, fathered four sons, and pursued a flourishing political career that culminated in his election to the presidency in Lincoln biographer William E. He emerged from grinding poverty into a condition in which he owned a home and had a modest sum of money in the bank.
From an obscure figure in State politics he had come to be the recognized leader of a political party that was destined to achieve national success and to determine the policies of the nation with little interruption for more than half a century. Out of a condition of great mental uncertainty in all matters relating to domestic relations he had come into a settled condition as the husband of a brilliant and ambitious woman and the father of a family of sons to whom he was devotedly attached.
Lincoln was a real type of an American gentleman. There were three stages to Mr. The first began with Mr. Lincoln was still something of a country bumpkin in the city even though Springfield was still a village, not a state capital, and quite rural in its own appearances.
For six years, Mr. Lincoln lived the life of a bachelor-lawyer-politician. He roomed with general store owner Joshua F. Speed, a fellow Kentucky transplant, and often took his meals with the family of fellow attorney William Butler. William H. Herndon, who served later as Mr. In this hope he was by no means in error, for his subsequent history shows that he indeed united his friends to himself with hooks of steel.
Lincoln, after his arrival in our city, boarded at the home of Mr. I often observed him as he passed to and fro from his meals to his office. He usually walked alone, his head inclined as if he was absorbed in deep thought, unmindful of surrounding objects and persons. Though he had his wonderful gift of humor, I venture to assert that in the long run of years life was to him serious and earnest. Both Mr. Lincoln and his adopted home town were beginning major transitions. Historian Harry E.
