government offices closed: Reck, A. Lincoln, 49.
“I never saw him”: Mary Lincoln to Francis Bicknell Carpenter, November 15, 1865, MTL, Life and Letters, 284.
Lincoln said he wanted: Mary Lincoln, interview with WHH, September 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 357–58.
“Come back, boys, come back”: Reck, A. Lincoln, 49.
[>] At dinner: Anson Henry to Mrs. Henry, April 19, 1865, Henry Papers, ISHL.
“more depressed than I had”: Reck, A. Lincoln, 54–55, citing William H. Crook, Through Five Administrations: Reminiscences of Colonel William H. Crook, Body-Guard to President Lincoln, edited by Margarita Spalding Gerry (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), 67–68, 74–75, and Crook, Memories of the White House: The Home Life of Our Presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt, edited by Henry Rood (Boston: Little, Brown, 1911), 40.
At the War Department: Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, 404.
On the way back: Reck, A. Lincoln, 55.
working on papers: William Pitt Kellogg, who had just been appointed by Lincoln as collector of the port of New Orleans, saw the president before he went to the theater and found him “in his room, apparently signing papers.” Paul M. Angle, “The Recollections of William Pitt Kellogg,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 3 (September 1945): 319–39.
“This man is pardoned”: Records of the Judge Advocate General, National Archives, MM761.
He told his guard: Crook, Through Five Administrations, 67.
He told his wife: Anson Henry to Mrs. Henry, April 19, 1865, Henry Papers, ISHL. In his pockets: The contents of Lincoln’s pockets at his assassination were given by the Lincoln family to the Library of Congress in 1937. They can be inspected online at www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm012.html.
“Excuse me now”: Isaac N. Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Chicago, A. C. McClurg, 1909), 431.
EPILOGUE
[>] .41–caliber lead musket ball: Edward Steers, Jr., interview with author, November 16, 2002. Steers is the author of Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
popcorn: Abner Y. Ellis to WHH, January 30, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 179.
oysters . . . coffee: Ward Hill Lamon, interview with WHH, 1865–66, Herndon’s Informants, 466.
[>] “that treading the hard path”: AL, “Eulogy on Zachary Taylor,” July 25, 1850, CWL, vol. 2, 89.
[>] “images of history”: Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1949), 34.
“Those who have spoken”: A. K. McClure and James A. Rawley, Abraham Lincoln and Men of War-Times: Some Personal Recollections of War and Politics During the Lincoln Administration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997; orig. 1892), 72.
“In one of your letters”: WHH to Truman H. Bartlett, August 22, 1887, Truman Bartlett Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, transcription by LSC.
“Let me say to you”: WHH to Truman H. Bartlett, February 27, 1891, Truman Bartlett Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, transcription by LSC.
[>] “if this man had ruled”: Waldo W. Braden, ed., Building the Myth: Selected Speeches Memorializing Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 32.
AFTERWORD
[>] Technically, the partnership continued: As the often-told story goes, Lincoln went to his law office on his last afternoon in Springfield, before leaving for Washington in 1861. As he left the building, he looked up at the sign that hung outside. “Let it hang there undisturbed,” he told Herndon. “Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm of Lincoln and Herndon. If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” When Herndon began his biographical work on Lincoln, the sign hung there still. Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 3, 482–84.
four hundred testimonials: Douglas L. Wilson, “William H. Herndon and Mary Todd Lincoln,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 22, no. 2 (Summer 2001), 8.
“If I die”: WHH to Charles Hart, December 12, 1866, Hidden Lincoln, 51.
[>] He detested hagiography: See Douglas L. Wilson, “William H. Herndon and the ‘Necessary Truth,’ “Lincoln Before Washington, 37–52. According to Herndon, Lincoln considered “biographies as generally written are not only misleading, but false,” because they magnified good qualities and suppressed imperfections and failures. Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 3, 437.
“Is any man so insane”: Joseph Fort Newton, Lincoln and Herndon (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1910), 292, citing WHH to Isaac N. Arnold.
Seventeen of them: Wilson, Lincoln Before Washington, 82.
“I have been searching”: WHH to Josiah G. Holland, June 8, 1865, Holland Papers.
“disposed to shut one eye”: Paul M. Angle, preface to Herndon’s Life of Lincoln: The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1983), xxvii.
“realist rather than an idealist”: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 3, 435.
“write & publish the subjective”: WHH to Josiah G. Holland, June 8, 1865, Holland Papers, transcription by LSC.
[>] knew how to get information: Paul Angle writes, “Herndon’s methods of obtaining information and the spirit which governed him in his investigations are well illustrated by the following letter to Squire Hall . . .
Friend Hall: Will you have the kindness to copy Mr. Lincoln’s bond to Johnson or your father, which I saw when I was down to see you. Copy every word, figure, and name carefully from top to bottom, and send to me, if you please. Don’t fail. I want it to defend Lincoln’s memory. Please write to me at any time you may think of anything that is good or bad of Mr. Lincoln, truthfully just as it happened and took place. Were any of you boys applicants for any office made to Mr. Lincoln while he was President?
Hall—What is your honest opinion—Come honest opinion—in reference to Mr. Lincoln’s love for his kind and relations generally. Please—friend—accommodate me.
Angle, editor’s preface, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, xxvi–xxvii, citing WHH to Squire Hall, January 22, 1866. For more on Herndon’s work, see Herndon’s Informants, xiii–xxiv; and Wilson, Lincoln Before Washington, in particular, “Herndon’s Legacy,” “William H. Herndon and the ‘Necessary Truth,’” “Abraham Lincoln, Ann Rutledge, and the Evidence of Herndon’s Informants,” and “Abraham Lincoln and ‘That Fatal First of January.’”
“I sincerely wish”: WHH to Charles Hart, April 13, 1866, Hidden Lincoln, 32.
“I have not got the capacity”: WHH to Josiah G. Holland, June 8, 1865, Holland Papers.
“Lincoln loved Anna Rutledge”: William H. Herndon, Lincoln, Ann Rutledge and the Pioneers of New Salem (Herrin, Ill.: Trovillion, 1945), 3. “Lincoln first came to himself”: ibid., 47.
[>] “concerning MR. LINCOLN and MISS RUTLEDGE”: “Abraham Lincoln: A Curious and Interesting Romance in the Life of Mr. Lincoln,” New York Times, November 24, 1866, 8.
“I would like to have”: Leonard Swett to WHH, February 14, 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 214.
“the key to his whole life”: C. H. Dall, “Pioneering,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1867, 10.
“Mary Lincoln has had much to bear”: Elizabeth Edwards, interview with WHH, 1865–66, Herndon’s Informants, 444.
“scarcely removed from want”: Mary Lincoln to W. H. Brady, September 14, 1867, MTL, Life and Letters, 435.
her husband’s estate: “Mr. Lincoln’s Estate,” New York Times, October 12, 1867, 1.
style that befitted her: MTL, Life and Letters, 245–46.
she dreamed up a scheme: Fleischner, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly, 305–15.
the New York World published: MTL, Life and Letters, 432.
Accusations flew: Fleischner, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckley, 310, citing the Pittsburgh Commercial, October 29, 1867.
“dreadful woman”: ibid., citing the Springfield Republican, October 15, 1867.
“one of the most humiliating�
�: New York Citizen, October 5, 1867, copy in Randall Papers.
[>] “never addressed another woman,” “whip and spur,” his heart lay buried: Herndon, Lincoln, Ann Rutledge, 40–41, 20, 40–41.
“Mr. Lincoln was a sad”: WHH to Jesse Weik, January 30, 1887, Hidden Lincoln, 16364.
It is not at all clear: One contemporary source does identify Herndon’s dislike for Mrs. Lincoln. Gibson Harris, a law clerk for Lincoln and Herndon, remembered that Herndon “cherished a strong dislike for . . . Mrs. Lincoln, and of this fact made no secret to the office-clerk.” Harris, “My Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” Farm and Fireside, December 1, 1904, 23. But all other indications of discord between the two came after their break, in the wake of Lincoln’s death.
In fact, Herndon had more sympathy: “In her domestic troubles,” Herndon wrote of Mary Lincoln, “I have always sympathized with her. The world does not know what she bore and the history of the bearing . . . The domestic hell of Lincoln’s life is not all on one side.” WHH to Jesse W. Weik, January 9, 1886, Hidden Lincoln, 131.
“my beloved husband’s”: Mary Lincoln to WHH, August 28, 1866, MTL, Life and Letters, 384.
she sat for an interview: Mary Lincoln, interview with WHH, September 1866, Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 2, 357–61.
“dirty dog”: The quotations in this paragraph are in letters from Mary Lincoln to David Davis, March 4 and 6, 1867, MTL, Life and Letters, 414–16.
its effects still linger: The spread of the “gay Lincoln” thesis reflects, in part, continued fallout from the partisan fight between Herndonians and Mary-ophiles. C. A. Tripp, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, did all he could to discredit Herndon’s evidence because the Ann Rutledge story was a thorn in his side. (By Tripp’s account, Lincoln was too busy scheming to get men into bed to care anything for this village girl, let alone fall into a depression after her death.) Even more interesting, the one important scholar of the Lincolns who endorsed Tripp’s book—she wrote the introduction—is Jean Baker, Mary Lincoln’s biographer. The New York Times quoted Baker as saying that Lincoln’s homosexuality would explain his difficult relationship with Mary Todd and “some of her agonies and anxieties over their relationship.” “Some of the tempers emerged because Lincoln was so detached,” Baker said. “But I previously thought he was detached because he was thinking great things about his court cases, his debates with Douglas. Now I see there is another explanation” (Dinita Smith, “Finding Homosexual Threads in Lincoln’s Legend,” New York Times, December 16, 2004).
[>] Soon after he completed . . . An off-and-on heavy drinker . . . Desperate for cash: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon (New York: Knopf, 1948), 247–49, 258–59.
Lamon was estranged: Rodney O. Davis, introduction to Ward Hill Lamon, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999; orig. 1872), v–xxi.
“technical Christian”: Mary Lincoln, interview with WHH, September 1866, Herndon’s Informants, 360.
all kinds of attacks: Angle, preface to Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, xxxi, notes that after the publication of Lamon’s book, items “began to go the rounds of the press charging that he [Herndon] was a lunatic, a pauper, a drunkard, an infidel, a liar, a knave, and almost every other species of degradation.”
In the 1880s, William Herndon: Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon, 296–97.
[>] “Lincoln and Mary were Engaged”: Elizabeth Edwards, interview with WHH, 186566, Herndon’s Informants, 443.
“Arrangements for wedding”: Elizabeth and Ninian Edwards, interview with Jesse W. Weik, December 20, 1883, Herndon’s Informants, 592.
nor has a marriage license: “The marriage license records of Sangamon County—which are complete—show that no license was issued to Lincoln on or before January 1, 1841.” Angle, preface to Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, xliii–xliv. Now that we know Weik dated the wedding at January 1, a new check should be made to see whether any license was issued at any time in the winter of 1840–1841.
“about January ‘41”: “Lincoln & Mary Todd,” WHH fragment, Herndon-Weik Ms., transcription by LSC.
Jesse Weik elaborated further: Herndon’s Lincoln, vol. 2, 214.
[>] In this era: For the swell of Lincoln’s popularity in the Progressive Era, see Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For particular treatment of the myths of Ann Rutledge, see Barry Schwartz, “Ann Rutledge in American Memory: Social Change and the Erosion of a Romantic Drama,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 26, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 1–27.
Lincoln Logs: Lincoln Logs first appeared in 1918. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, 281. See also “Lincoln Logs: Toying with the Frontier Myth,” History Today 43 (April 1993): 31–34.
In the 1920s, a homily: Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 196.
“PRESIDENT SUFFERS NERVOUS BREAKDOWN”: New York Times, September 27, 1919.
Then Tad . . . died: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, 308.
[>] “her conduct has greatly distressed”: MTL, Life and Letters, 442–43, citing Illinois State Journal, October 10, 1867.
In 1875, Robert Todd Lincoln: A complete account of this affair is R. Gerald McMurtry and Mark E. Neely, The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993).
“Out of me unworthy and unknown”: Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 294–95. a new graveyard: Ann’s remains were moved in 1890, and Masters’s poem was inscribed on the new stone in 1920. See Gary Erickson, “The Graves of Ann Rutledge and the Old Concord Burial Ground,” Lincoln Herald 71 (Fall 1969): 90–107.
(Amtrak still uses the name): The “Ann Rutledge” offers daily service between Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri. “Illinois Service,” www.amtrak.com, February 4, 2005.
[>] “shadow of Ann Rutledge’s death”: Tarbell, Abraham Lincoln and His Ancestors, 225. “quiet soft bud of a woman”: Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, vol. 1, 140–41.
“an old-time order”: ibid., 190.
“I hope you will seriously”: W. A. Evans to William E. Barton, April 26, 1921, Barton Papers.
After brief inspections: Walsh, The Shadows Rise, 51. See also Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Minor Affair: An Adventure in Forgery and Detection,” in Lincoln in Text and Context Collected Essays (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), 246–69.
“I would die on the gallows”: Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 297–98.
[>] he exposed the Minor letters: See Paul M. Angle, “The Minor Collection: A Criticism,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1929, 516–25.
“the greatest Lincoln scholar”: Neely, The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia, 255.
any “careful scholar”: J. G. Randall, “Has the Lincoln Theme Been Exhausted?” American Historical Review 41, no. 2 (January 1936): 270–94.
He was sixty-two years old: description of the Randalls from Wayne Temple, interview with author, August 21, 2003.
[>] In 1944, they had been married: Ruth Painter Randall, I, Ruth: Autobiography of a Marriage . . .(Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 88–89.
“I gave the wife”: Randall, I, Ruth, 165.
“It is very largely her work”: James G. Randall to Francis S. Ronalds, February 3, 1945, Randall Papers.
“misty” memories: James G. Randall, Lincoln the President, vol. 2, 321–43.
“disliked and feared Mary Lincoln”: ibid., vol. 1, 67.
[>] “a joyous new focus and vitality”: Ruth Painter Randall, The Courtship of Mr. Lincoln (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957), 126.
“gossiping tongues”: ibid., 114–15.
“I wish I had a better”: Ruth Painter Randall to Philip R. Baker, October 8, 1950, Randall Papers.
“legend for which no shred”: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, 51.
Ralph McGill: Copies of McGill’s column, May 25, 1952, and
Young’s letter of the same day are in the Randall Papers.
[>] “Herndon’s cruelest offense”: MTL, Life and Letters, 34.
[>] “the riddle of Leonardo”: Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 455.
“schizoid manic personality”: A. A. Brill, “Abraham Lincoln as a Humorist,” copy in the Tarbell Papers.
But the clinical language: The newspapers covering the affair led with Brill’s diagnostic language. The Associated Press report began, “Abraham Lincoln was analyzed as a ‘schizoid manic personality,’—a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde who had his baser nature under rigid control.” The New York Times headline on June 6, 1931, was “Dr. Brill Describes Lincoln as ‘Manic.’” On June 15, 1931, an English newspaper in Paris carried the headline “Several Refute Slur on Lincoln.” The piece began, “Admirers of Abraham Lincoln thought that Americans would rush to defend their hero against the charge made by Professor Brill: that the famous President was ‘a schizoid manic.’” A letter on June 13, 1931, to the New York Times, from Octavio E. Moscoso in New York, read, “In view of Dr. A. A. Brill’s dissertation . . . it seems to me that perhaps there might be much to be gained—and hardly anything to lose—by choosing some of the future Presidents of the United States from among the schizoid manic instead of from among the Republicans and Democrats.”
“Herndon was a self-made psychoanalyst”: Randall, Lincoln the President, vol. 1, x.
“soaring psychoanalysis,” “appealed to all,” “irrepressible contribution”: ibid., vol. 2, 336, 324, 322. Paul Angle may have been the first to make the link between Herndon and psychoanalysis. He wrote of Herndon, “Emotional, sentimental, steeped in New England transcendentalism, Herndon was inordinately fond of peering into the souls of his acquaintances in what would now be called psychoanalytical fashion. He was firmly convinced that truth could be got at by intuition, and he never doubted his own clairvoyant capacity.” Preface to Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, xxxviii.
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