The rivalry between William Herndon and Mary Lincoln would shape Lincoln studies for much of the next century; its effects still linger. Ann Rutledge was just one piece of it. Herndon believed, perhaps naively, that he could write his friend’s life fully and honestly, “just as he lived, breathed.” He wanted to discuss openly Lincoln’s unorthodox religious views, his domestic life, and his melancholy. Mary Lincoln wanted to paint an idyllic portrait of her family and marriage. Amazingly, decades after all of Lincoln’s friends and family had passed away, the stories told by William Herndon would be shot from the sky, to be replaced by those preferred by Mary Lincoln.
Soon after he completed his “Lincoln Record,” Herndon got into deep financial trouble. An off-and-on heavy drinker who had been sober for years—including the period in which he gathered his biographical materials—he fell off the wagon. Desperate for cash, he sold the rights to his record to Ward Hill Lamon, a lawyer who had worked with Lincoln in Illinois and who later became his marshal for the District of Columbia. Lamon was estranged from the Republicans after the war and grew close to a prominent Democratic family, to whose son, a partisan journalist named Chauncey Black, he turned over Herndon’s materials, to ghostwrite a book. Thus did the stories Herndon had collected first appear between hard covers. The Life of Abraham Lincoln, by Ward Hill Lamon, appeared in 1872. The book cited Herndon throughout, eliding the interviewer (who himself had considerable personal knowledge of Lincoln) with the many other sources he had drawn upon. Black remained truly a ghost: to this day, the work is discussed as though Lamon really wrote it.
The book kicked up a huge storm. In addition to a lengthy account of the Rutledge romance, it reported that Lincoln’s mother was illegitimate and that Lincoln dissented from orthodox Christianity. Among the copious evidence Herndon had on this matter was a statement from Mary Lincoln—from their interview of September 1866—that Lincoln was not a “technical Christian.” This quite reasonable statement was nevertheless shocking at the time. Herndon became embroiled in a knockdown fight with several prominent preachers who undertook to defend Lincoln against what they regarded as his apostasy. Mary Lincoln sided with the preachers—she said she’d been misquoted—which further deepened the split between her and Herndon, upon whom all kinds of attacks descended, portraying him as a drunk, a liar, and a madman.
In the 1880s, William Herndon sobered up and began to correspond with an ambitious Indiana college boy named Jesse Weik. The two soon joined forces to prepare a biography. Herndon offered raw material—from memory and from the originals of his “Lincoln Record”—which Weik polished and embellished. The book, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, was published in 1889, two years before Herndon died. Here, too, the ghostwriter played a much larger role than is generally acknowledged.
Two decades after Herndon had gathered his materials, he had to decide how to narrate Lincoln’s tortured winter of 1840–1841. As we have seen, many details of the aborted romance of that season remain obscure. Several witnesses agreed that Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd had been engaged, then split, and that he had an extended collapse. But when did they split? Who initiated it? What was going on with Lincoln when he declared himself “the most miserable man living”? It is problematic that, faced with such vexing questions, writers often choose a version of events based on the material in front of them, and tell it without admitting any doubts, as though they were omniscient. When evidence gives only the bare bones, many histories treat the past like a well-dressed pageant, where everyone is in full costume and the author is in a front-row seat. Herndon sometimes took such an approach. Weik pushed the text even further from the facts.
In an early interview, Mary Lincoln’s sister Elizabeth Edwards had said, according to Herndon’s notes, “Lincoln and Mary were Engaged—Every thing was ready & prepared for the marriage—Even to the Supper &c—. Mr L failed to meet his Engagement—Cause insanity.” Later, she repeated this story to a journalist. “Arrangements for wedding had been made,” the writer’s notes read, “—even cakes had been baked—but L. failed to appear . . . Mary was greatly mortified by L’s strange conduct.” In fact, no one else remembered that a wedding had actually been set, nor has a marriage license been found. On the other hand, Elizabeth Edwards was hardly a dubious witness. No one was closer to Mary Todd at the time.
Herndon made the aborted wedding the centerpiece of his story. In a draft, he described the event, adding a few colorful details, such as the bride waiting nervously for the groom, the guests departing one by one. And he assigned it a date, “about January ‘41”—a reasonable guess, all the more so for acknowledging doubt. Jesse Weik elaborated further, having the nervous bride fiddle with the flowers in her hair, then withdraw in grief to her room. Most important, Weik placed the wedding on a specific day. Plucking a phrase from a letter Lincoln wrote a year and a half later, Weik decided that the aborted ceremony had been set for “that fatal first,” January 1, 1841. At the time, it probably seemed a reasonable extrapolation from the facts—the sort of leap often made by historical writers. It would have important implications, however, as future generations seized on the mistake to try to wipe away the truth of the whole period in Lincoln’s life.
Though Lincoln was widely eulogized after his death and became the subject of many articles and books in the late nineteenth century, it was only in the early twentieth century that he became an American demigod. By then, adults who had lived and suffered through the Civil War had mostly died. Whites looked to Lincoln as a symbol of national reconciliation. African Americans looked to him as a symbol of their liberty and equality. And a huge wave of immigrants—about fifteen million of whom arrived between 1890 and 1914—revered him as a symbol of American pluck and possibility. In this era, memorials to honor Lincoln were being built in Washington, D.C. (with a statue modeled on an enthroned Zeus), and on the site of his birth in Kentucky. Lincoln Logs became a popular toy.
A second generation took over Lincoln biography, prominent among them the journalist Ida Tarbell, the poet Carl Sandburg, the minister William Barton, and the former senator Albert Beveridge. Lincoln’s intimates—including Herndon, Speed, and Mary Lincoln—had died, which meant biographers had to rely on the printed record, though they hunted up surviving acquaintances of Lincoln and their children. The accounts of this era gave considerable space to his melancholy, because it was obviously a big part of Lincoln’s life and because it played to the popular understanding of Lincoln as a “man of sorrows” who faced great internal and external difficulties and endured them, emerging as meek, forceful, and grand. The Standard Oil Company published a pamphlet on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Gettysburg: Abraham Lincoln: Man of Suffering. In the 1920s, a homily called “The Failure” started to appear in magazines. It listed Lincoln’s setbacks: “Lost job in 1832. Defeated for state legislature in 1832. Failed in business in 1833. Sweetheart died in 1835. Had nervous breakdown in 1836. Defeated for Speaker in 1838,” and so on. The point was that just as Lincoln had passed through hardship to greatness, ordinary people could do the same. (This list is still a staple of popular culture, appearing on inspirational business posters and in the original Chicken Soup for the Soul; of course it’s posted on numerous Web sites.) For a sense of the attitude toward mental trouble in this era, consider that in 1919, when President Woodrow Wilson had a stroke, which news his aides believed was unsuitable for public consumption, they sent the president’s physician to tell reporters that he was suffering from “nervous exhaustion” that required rest for “a considerable time.” The two-deck banner headline in the New York Times the next day read: PRESIDENT SUFFERS NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, TOUR CANCELED; SPEEDING BACK TO WASHINGTON FOR A NEEDED REST.
In the 1920s and 1930s, people scarcely distinguished the facts of Lincoln’s melancholy from the twin myths of his love for Ann Rutledge and his dreadful marriage to the woman now known as “Mary Todd Lincoln.” Indeed, the dismal career of the president’s widow continued to cast a sh
adow. She had watched two of her children die while her husband was alive; she was with Lincoln when he was killed. Then Tad, the youngest boy, died in 1871, at age eighteen. By then, the former First Lady’s mental illness was well enough understood that the Illinois State Journal of Springfield reported that “her conduct has greatly distressed her friends and relatives in this city and the most charitable construction they can put on her strange course is that she is insane.” In 1875, Robert Todd Lincoln, the one son who lived to adulthood, committed his mother to an asylum. She spent four months as a patient at Bellevue Place, in Batavia, Illinois, and lived her final years in isolation.
In the Progressive Era, the nation was busy exalting its sixteenth president, and it needed a love interest for the narrative—his widow would not do. Instead she became a shrewish antihero, the foil of the patient, humble, and inspiring Great Emancipator. The story that Lincoln had bolted from an actual wedding gained wide circulation. And Ann Rutledge became one of the most famous characters in the country. After all, hadn’t Lincoln loved her? Hadn’t he gone nearly mad at her death and cherished her memory all his life? In 1915, Edgar Lee Masters’s popular Spoon River Anthology, poems in the form of monologues from the dead, included one for Ann that canonized the legend’s astonishing claims:
Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!
Ann Rutledge had become nothing less than the martyred mother of the nation. In Petersburg, Illinois, a new graveyard installed her remains in a central plot, with Masters’s epitaph on the gravestone—fiction having created a new reality. A few miles away, New Salem was rebuilt, with help from William Randolph Hearst, as a kind of shrine to the Lincoln-Rutledge romance. From 1930 to 1940, three motion pictures on Lincoln—D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, and Abe Lincoln in Illinois, based on the hit Broadway play by Sherwood Anderson—featured her and young Abe. In 1937, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad introduced a new passenger train to join the “Abraham Lincoln” on its Chicago–St. Louis line, the “Ann Rutledge.” (Amtrak still uses the name.)
Biographers also embraced the story. Ida Tarbell, the chief authority on Lincoln in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, described a melancholy Lincoln living in the “shadow of Ann Rutledge’s death.” Perhaps the apogee of the legend, in terms of serious biography, came in 1926 when Carl Sandburg, in his two-volume work Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, described Ann Rutledge as a “quiet soft bud of a woman,” a “slim girl with corn-silk hair” who made Lincoln tremble when he so much as looked at her. After her death and his collapse, Sandburg wrote that it took weeks for “an old-time order” to come back to Lincoln, “only it was said that the shadows of a burning he had been through were fixed in the depths of his eyes, and he was a changed man keeping to himself the gray mystery of the change.”
In this same era, students of Lincoln saw the need for a thorough study of Lincoln’s mental life, one that would separate the wheat from the chaff and illuminate established facts with expert testimony. In the early 1920s, a physician named W. A. Evans, who wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune, received several letters from a distant relative of Lincoln who had information about mental illness in the family of Lincoln’s uncle. Dr. Evans forwarded them to a Lincoln scholar of the time, William E. Barton, writing, “I hope you will seriously consider doing the ‘Mind of Lincoln.’ It is needed and I do not know of anyone in the country who can do it so well as you.” Barton seized on the lead and ended up writing several articles based on the material he received from the relative, Berenice Lovely. But soon this material, like so much other good data, would be lost amid the ruins of the Ann Rutledge legend.
The legend crested and fell along with the stock market. In 1928, the Atlantic Monthly began publishing a collection of letters between Lincoln and Rutledge, along with diary entries from a close friend of the couple, narrating their doomed romance. After brief inspections, both Tarbell and Sandburg called the letters genuine. The Atlantic’s editor, Ellery Sedgwick, had been charmed by the owner of the letters, a California actress named Wilma Frances Minor, who said she had found them in an old family trunk. But the letters were obvious fakes. They contained childish misspellings (a lame attempt to simulate early-nineteenth-century prose) and glaring anachronisms (references to Kansas before the state existed). Complaints came after the first installment appeared in December 1928, but Sedgwick dug in his heels and published the second and third installments in January and February 1929. Finally Minor explained that her mother, a spiritualist, had contacted Lincoln and Rutledge from the grave, with Minor herself transcribing the results. “I would die on the gallows that the spirit of Ann and Abe were speaking through my mother and me,” Minor said.
The Minor affair ended up ushering in the third era of Lincoln studies. First the story had been controlled by Lincoln’s friends (and their ghostwriters). Then the popular historians had taken over. Now the reins passed to professional historians, a burgeoning group emerging from new Ph.D. programs (a creation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). University-trained historians tended to look askance at the amateurs who had come before them. For the professionals in the Lincoln field, the Ann Rutledge story was a perfect example of what had gone wrong. For years they had been aching to knock it down, and the Atlantic Monthly threw a hanging curve. Paul Angle, a graduate of the master’s program in history at the University of Illinois and the executive secretary of the Lincoln Centennial Association, did the honors for the historical guild. In the April 1929 Atlantic, he exposed the Minor letters as fakes. Perhaps more important, he used his piece to scold amateurs who tried to write history. The baton had been taken by a new generation.
In the 1930s and 1940s, professional historians assembled a complete edition of Lincoln’s writings, among other reference works, and produced scholarly books on many aspects of his life. Chief among these scholars was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, James Garfield Randall. In 1911, when he received his Ph.D. in history, graduate study in the United States was in its adolescence. He grew up with the field and became a towering figure—“the greatest Lincoln scholar of all time,” declares The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia. Randall was an apostle for, and an arbiter of, high standards in scholarship. His early work focused on constitutional history, but he turned to Lincoln in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The country was drowning in Lincoln material, Randall said in a 1934 lecture, but any “careful scholar” could see “gaps, doubts, prevalent misconceptions, unsupported interpretations, and erroneous assumptions.” Randall began his own biography, which would eventually reach three volumes (the last one finished by a colleague after Randall’s death).
Randall’s wife, Ruth Painter Randall, had long helped with his research and writing. Their partnership would have a big influence on the scholarly and popular understanding of Abraham Lincoln in the second half of the twentieth century. The title of her memoir sheds light on their relationship: I, Ruth: Autobiography of a Marriage; The Self-Told Story of the Woman Who Married the Great Lincoln Scholar, James G. Randall, and Through Her Interest in His Work Became a Lincoln Author Herself. When her husband undertook his full-scale biography, she recounts, he asked her to prepare a chapter on the Lincolns’ marriage. “I well remember the next contributing incident,” she wrote. It was February 14, 1944, and she and her husband were sitting in the parlor of their five-room apartment in Urbana. He was sixty-two years
old, a short man with iron-gray hair and a broad smile. He wore a three-piece suit with a watch in his vest pocket and his Phi Beta Kappa key on the chain. She had white hair with soft curls. She spoke with a slight drawl, a remnant of Roanoke, Virginia, where she grew up and where she met Professor Randall. They began to date several years after his first wife died, and married several years after that. In 1944, they had been married twenty-six years.
On this Valentine’s Day, the Randalls were listening to the radio. Suddenly the program changed to a holiday presentation of a popular drama: the romance between Ann Rutledge and Abraham Lincoln. Professor Randall got up, walked over to the radio, and snapped it off. He told his wife that the original interviews and letters collected by Herndon had just been purchased by the Library of Congress. For decades they had been privately held, and only one biographer since Jesse Weik had been allowed to use them. Randall had already assigned his star graduate student, a Mississippi native named David Herbert Donald, to produce a biography of Herndon for his dissertation. That night, Randall wrote in his diary, “I gave the wife a new assignment . . . suggested she might go after the subject of Lincoln and Ann Rutledge.”
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