by Joshua Zeitz
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Neither Mary nor her son knew that Herndon was preparing a lecture that touched heavily on the Lincolns’ marriage and that by the time of their September meeting he had already formed his point of view. While interviewing the former residents of New Salem the year before, Herndon heard several of them recount the story of Ann Rutledge, the young, auburn-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the local tavern keeper. One of his informants described Ann as “a woman of exquisite beauty, but her intellect was quick—sharp—deep & philosophic as well as brilliant.” Lincoln probably first met Ann when he boarded at the Rutledge Inn in 1831. She was eighteen years old, and he was twenty-two. According to Herndon’s informants, Lincoln fell hard for Ann sometime around 1833 or 1834. Tragically, she reciprocated his feelings but was already engaged to John McNeil, a local merchant from New York with a suspect past. In 1832, while Lincoln was away serving in the Black Hawk War, McNeil confided to Ann that his real name was McNamar. He claimed that his family was deeply in debt and that he had changed his surname to make a clean break of things. Now that he had amassed a fortune of over $10,000, he planned to head east, settle his family’s accounts, and bring them back to New Salem. Upon his return, he and Ann would marry. As weeks turned into months, and months into years, McNamar’s letters grew less frequent and less tender. According to Herndon’s informants, Lincoln began courting the young woman around 1834, and by the following year they decided to marry—but only after she could break off her engagement to McNamar in person, and only after Lincoln completed his legal studies. Decades later, Ann’s cousin James McGrady Rutledge told Herndon of a conversation he had in early 1835 while walking back from a Christian camp meeting nearby. Ann told him that “engagements made too far a hed sometimes failed, that one had failed, Ann gave me to understand, that as soon as certain studies were completed she and Lincoln would be married.” Then a freshman legislator, Lincoln was attending session at the old state capitol at Vandalia when Ann suddenly contracted typhoid fever and died at the age of twenty-two. Some of Herndon’s informants claimed that he returned to New Salem before her passing and had an opportunity to exchange last words at her deathbed; others remembered that he arrived home to find her already gone. “Mr. Lincolns friends after the sudden death of one whom his soul & heart dearly & [?] loved were compelled to keep watch and ward over Mr. Lincoln,” one of the old-timers told Herndon, “he being from the sudden shock somewhat temporarily deranged. We watched during storms—fogs—damp gloomy weather Mr. Lincoln for fear of an accident. He said, ‘I can never be reconcile[d] to have the snow—rains & storms to beat on her grave.’”
The tale astonished and fascinated Herndon, who had no inkling that the citizens of Petersburg had been trafficking in similar gossip for the better part of several decades. A year after his first visit, he returned to Menard County and tracked down none other than John McNamar, now an old man living quietly on the outskirts of what had once been New Salem. “Did you know Miss Rutledge,” Herndon asked. “If so, where did she die?” The old man pointed his finger toward the western horizon and, choking back tears, replied, “There, by that—there, by that currant bush, she died.” McNamar told Herndon that he had bought the desolate farm “in part, if not solely, because of the sad memories that cluster over and around it.” (That part was not entirely true. McNamar owned the land before Ann died and, as one skeptical historian later noted, “had since buried one wife and married another near that same currant bush.”) No matter. Herndon was convinced that he had unlocked the mystery of Lincoln’s deep melancholy. At McNamar’s suggestion, he wandered to the desolate cemetery where Ann was buried, on a bluff overlooking the ruins of New Salem. There, “in the presence of Ann Rutledge, remembering the good spirit of Abraham,” he described the intense rush of emotion that overcame him as he stood in the “presence of the ashes of . . . the beautiful and tender dead.” The following morning, a “misty, cloudy, foggy and cold” autumn day, Herndon awoke early and walked through the remnants of the old town. A solemn, half-crumbled wood shack was all that remained. There, he sat down and once again took pen in hand to record the “ring of a lone cow-bell, rattling, tapping and sounding here and there,” the “roll and roar of the Sangamon,” as it cut a path in the valley below. “The frost had scorched the leaves of the forest, and they hung dry, curled and quivering in the winds as they sighed and moaned.”
Herndon put to good use his forensic study of the physical surroundings of old New Salem when, on November 16, he delivered his much-anticipated lecture, mysteriously titled “A. Lincoln—Miss Ann Rutledge, New Salem—Pioneering, and the Poem Called Immortality—or, ‘Oh! Why Should the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud.’” Dwelling intently on the physical splendor of “the eternal Sangamon, casting and rolling sand and clay, flint and lime-stone, animal and vegetable debris, on either shore as it half omnipotently wills, sometimes kissing the feet of one bluff and then washing the other,” he laid out a geopolitical explanation of Lincoln’s genius rooted in the distinct and rustic landscape of the Illinois prairie. An amateur but ardent student of history, Herndon was well acquainted with the work of Henry Thomas Buckle, the British historian whose recent book, History of Civilization in England, pioneered the use of geopolitical explanations of human progress. Buckle’s thesis anticipated the work of later writers who have identified geography as a determining element of a civilization’s economic and military competitiveness.
In 1865, these ideas were still very much in their nascent form, but Herndon was smitten with Buckle’s thesis and applied it without precision or method to explaining Lincoln’s “Western-ness.” He regaled his audience with florid descriptions of the early-nineteenth-century frontier and its population of inventive and resourceful settlers who could “shave a horse’s main [sic] and tail, paint and disfigure and offer him for sale to the owner in the very act of inquiring for his own horse . . . could hoop up in a hogshead a drunken man, they being themselves drunk, put in and nail down the head, and roll the man down New Salem hill a hundred feet or more. They could run down a lean, hungry wild pig, catch it, heat a ten-plate stove furnace hot, and putting in the pig, could cook it, they dancing the while a merry jig.” If these early settlers were rough or crude, Herndon continued,
What! are Grant and Jackson, Douglas and Benton, Clay and Lincoln, inefficient men, coming west from the spirit of shiftless discontent! . . . the pioneers, with their brave hearts and their defiant and enduring souls, are and were efficient men and women . . . [T]hey consumed and burnt the forest and cleared and cleaned it. They had and have energy and creative activity, with capacity, honesty and valor. They created states and hold them to the Union, to liberty and to justice. They and their children after them can and do point with the highest pride and confidence to the deep, broad-laid, tolerant, generous, magnanimous foundations of these mighty several western states, whereon our liberty and civilization so proudly and firmly stand.
Herndon’s treatise on the geopolitical foundations of Lincoln’s character would form the basis of almost all future biographies of the sixteenth president. Whether they agreed or argued with him, generations of scholars could not ignore his thesis, which was as original then as it is conventional now. Robert Todd Lincoln, for one, was unimpressed. Even as late as 1917, long after Herndon, Hay, and Nicolay had died, Robert strongly denied that his father was a simple, rough-hewn relic of the frontier. That year, the city of Cincinnati unveiled a new statue of Lincoln by the sculptor George Grey Barnard. A minimal likeness, Barnard’s statue showed the president as a clean-shaven western lawyer with plain clothes and a chiseled, rugged visage. The sculptor intended to portray “the mighty man who grew from our soil and the hardships of the earth.” “He must have stood as the republic should stand, strong, simple, carrying its weight unconsciously without pride in rank and culture.” Robert was livid. He thought the statue a “monstrous figure . . . grotesque as a likeness of President Lincoln . . . defamatory as an effigy.”
He had spent a half century attempting to burn a wholly different historical image of his father in the collective consciousness. His Abraham Lincoln was, figuratively, the distant father figure to a nation that he had been, literally, to his eldest son. These battles, in which John Nicolay and John Hay figured as central actors and which Robert would fight until his dying day, still lay far in the distance when Billy Herndon delivered his famous lecture.
For now, there was the matter of Herndon’s more injurious storytelling. After framing the scene of Lincoln’s youth in crude geopolitical terms, Herndon laid out for his Springfield audience and the national newspapers the tragic romantic story of young Abe Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, “the beautiful, amiable, and lovely girl of nineteen.” “Abraham Lincoln loved Miss Ann Rutledge with all his soul, mind and strength,” he continued. When she died, Abe “slept not . . . ate not . . . joyed not.” For the rest of his years, the future president would bear the weight of an inconsolable sadness. He “never addressed another woman . . . ‘yours affectionately’; and . . . abstained from the use of the word ‘love’ . . . He never ended his letters with ‘yours affectionately,’ but signed his name, ‘your friend, A. Lincoln.’” The subtext of Herndon’s argument, which he would later place in much sharper relief, time and again, was impossible to mistake: Lincoln had loved only one woman (Ann Rutledge), and his grief for her was so profound that he never loved another woman, including his wife.
The reaction to Herndon’s lecture was swift and brutal. Though few of her old Springfield or Washington acquaintances harbored much love for Mary, Victorian-era convention held women in general, and wives in particular, as immune from public scrutiny. It was one matter to criticize Mary when she was first lady, when her actions had some bearing on the public purse; it was another matter entirely to do violence to the memory of her marriage and family. Francis Carpenter, a painter who had lived in the Lincoln White House for several months while working on a presidential portrait, spoke for many respectable citizens when he scored Herndon’s lecture as “an invasion of a sacred chamber—a tearing away of the veil which conceals the ‘holy of holies.’” Mary, of course, was enraged. “This is the return for all my husband’s kindness to this miserable man!” she fumed. “Out of pity he took him into his office, when he was almost a hopeless inebriate and although he was only a drudge, in the place—he is very forgetful of his position and assumes a confidential capacity toward Mr. Lincoln.” Robert was equally infuriated, but also concerned. “Mr. Wm. H. Herndon is making an ass of himself,” he told David Davis, and pleaded with his father’s executor to intercede. Because Herndon “speaks with a certain amount of authority from having known my father for so long,” his story, “even if it were . . . all true,” would do great injury to his family’s reputation.
In early December, Robert traveled to Springfield to try his hand with Herndon. The meeting did no good. With rumors flying of a new lecture in the works, he took a soft approach. “I have never had any doubt of your general good intentions,” he wrote to Herndon, “but inasmuch as the construction put upon your language by everyone who has mentioned the subject to me was entirely different from your own, I felt justified to change your expression.” Robert conceded that he had no “right” to censure Herndon’s speeches and offered that “your opinion may not agree with mine but that is my affair . . . All I ask is that nothing may be published by you, which after careful consideration will seem apt to cause pain to my father’s family, which I am sure you do not wish to do.” On Christmas Eve, Robert sent another pleading letter, asking if it was true that he intended “to make some considerable mention of my mother in your work—I say I hope it is not so, because in the first place it would not be pleasant for her or for any woman to be made public property of in that way—With a man it is very different, for he lives out in the world and is used to being talked of.” Robert readily agreed that men like his father could be fairly “exposed to the public gaze,” but he saw “no reason why his wife and children should be included—especially while they are alive . . . I hope you will consider this matter carefully, my dear Mr. Herndon, for once done there is no undoing.”
It was all to no avail. In the coming years, Herndon devoted himself entirely to the project of remembering Abraham Lincoln to the nation. He let his law practice fall by the wayside, moved to a farm on the outskirts of Springfield, nearly went bankrupt, and neglected his family and career in the single-minded pursuit of “truth.” The narrative that Herndon pushed was more damning than anything included in his original lectures. Over the next decade, Americans learned (incorrectly) that Abraham Lincoln’s mother was a “bastard” and that she, like her own mother, had cuckolded her husband. The sixteenth president’s father was not Thomas Lincoln but one Abraham Enlow. How else to explain the achievements of one born so low? Herndon also pressed the notion that his former partner was an atheist or deist and not a “technical Christian,” quoting Mary out of context from the interview that she believed had been in the strictest of confidence. Her intention had been not to paint her husband as a nonbeliever but to suggest that his failure to join or regularly attend a formal church belied his more textured Christian spirituality. Herndon ignored the nuance and went for the direct punch. Worse still, from the Ann Rutledge story he drew the larger conclusion that the president never loved his wife and that she, in turn, knew it and made his domestic life a living hell. Lincoln’s fidelity to Ann Rutledge was “sublime,” he claimed, and all of the “struggles, difficulties, etc., between himself and his wife were partly, if not wholly, caused by Mrs. L’s cognition that Lincoln did not love her, and did love another[.] Lincoln told his wife that he did not love her, did so before he was married to her; she was cognizant of the fact that Lincoln loved another.” In Herndon’s mind, “Mrs. Lincoln’s domestic quarrels . . . sprang from a woman’s revenge which she was not strong enough to resist. Poor woman!” As the years went by, Herndon’s view of Mary hardened. “Jesus, what a home Lincoln’s was!” he told a friend some twenty years after the president’s death. “What a wife!”
Fortunately for the Lincoln family, Billy Herndon lacked all of the necessary discipline to sit down and write a proper book. Unfortunately for them, by 1867 Herndon had recognized this shortcoming himself. “I need kicking, scolding, cussing, etc. in order to make me trot along briskly with head up and tail up,” he acknowledged. In increasingly dire financial straits, he sold copies of his extensive collection of Lincoln materials—including interview transcripts, court records, testimonial letters, and newspaper clippings—to Ward Hill Lamon, the bluff, gregarious lawyer whom Lincoln had befriended on the circuit in the 1850s. Lamon came to Washington with Lincoln, served as U.S. marshal for Washington, D.C., during the war, and later established a prosperous law practice with Jeremiah Black, a prominent Democrat who had served in Buchanan’s cabinet. After securing copies of the Herndon collection, Lamon, too, realized that he lacked the author’s flair. So he joined forces with his partner’s son, Chauncey Black, who undertook the protracted task of ghostwriting Lamon’s history of Lincoln. No one had ever accused “Hill” of being a genius. The president kept him close because he enjoyed his company and because Lamon proved a familiar and comforting presence during the tumult and uncertainty of the war years. But his chronic lapses of judgment caused Lincoln frequent headaches, as when he continued arresting fugitive slaves long after it was the government’s policy to encourage runaways to flee behind Union lines, or when he took it upon his (nonexistent) authority to divert an army unit from the military theater, to protect the capital. Now he displayed no better wisdom in entrusting the late president’s memory to the Black family, which held the Republican Party and its martyr in low esteem. “He certainly does not compare well with the refined and highly cultivated gentlemen (fifteen in number) who preceded him in the executive chair,” the elder Black scoffed. “He also lacked that lofty scorn of fraud and knavery which is inseparable from true greatness. He was not bad
himself but he tolerated the evil committed by others when it did not suit him to resist it.” For five years, Lamon engaged in a lively correspondence with Herndon, who encouraged his old friend to “tell the truth and shame ‘old Nick.’” On the eve of the book’s publication in 1872, David Davis, who had learned of its contents, all but locked Lamon in a room for several hours and compelled him to excise an entire chapter—written, as were all of the chapters, by Chauncey Black—that portrayed the Buchanan administration’s handling of the secession crisis of 1860–61 as deft and represented Lincoln as a bumbling, inept president-elect who inadvertently pushed the nation to war. Black was incensed by the eleventh-hour omission, but what remained in print proved sufficiently explosive. Folding all of Herndon’s material into their dense volume, Black and Lamon were the first to publish in book form the full story of Lincoln’s early life, including the New Salem stories, the alleged details of Lincoln’s troubled marriage to Mary Todd, the depth of the future president’s alleged atheism, and the charge—long thereafter disputed, and much later discredited—of Lincoln’s illegitimate patrimony. On the eve of publication, Hay beseeched a mutual friend to intercede. “Can’t you stop him?” he begged. “For the grave of the dead and the crime of the living prevent it if possible. Its effects will be most disastrous and men occupying intimate relations to Hill will be held more or less responsible.” Robert, too, was furious. “It is absolutely horrible to think of such men as Herndon and Lamon being considered in the light that they claim,” he told Hay.