Encounters
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Elizabeth Edwards, like others in Springfield, realized that Lincoln was “a mighty rough man,” “uncouth,” “moody,” “dull in society,” “careless of his personal appearance,” “awkward and shy.” He avoided church, he once confessed to Mary Owens, because “I am conscious I should not know how to behave myself.” Herndon recalled that “Lincoln had poor judgment of the fitness and appropriateness of things. He would wade into a ballroom and speak aloud to some friend: ‘How clean these women look!’ ” At Springfield social gatherings, young ladies avoided Lincoln. “We girls,” Catherine Bergen Jones recollected, “maneuvered so as to shift on each other the two awkward, diffident young lawyers, Abraham Lincoln and Samuel H. Treat. We preferred the jovial Robert Allen, Stephen A. Douglas, William Black, or the Jones brothers, John Albert and Edward, for our escorts.” The girls may have shunned Lincoln in part because of his ineptitude on the dance floor. When asked why he did not dance, he explained that “my feet weren’t made that way.” At a party in Jacksonville, Lincoln reportedly approached Mary Todd, saying: “I want to dance with you in the worst way.” Afterward she told him: “Mr. Lincoln I think you have literally fulfilled your request—you have danced the worst way possible.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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