Herndon on Lincoln: Letters

Herndon on Lincoln: Letters. By William H. Herndon and ed. by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (Urbana: Knox College Lincoln Studies Center and University of Illinois Press, 2016. Pp. xxv, 371, index. Cloth, $35.00.)In 1998 the University of Illinois Press issued Herndons Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln, edited by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis. The same editors have since produced three additional volumes and promise a fourth, now under the joint auspices of the UI Press and the Lincoln Studies Center. In 2006 came Herndons Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, by William H. Herndon and Jesse William Weik, A. M., a faithful and newly annotated presentation of the original 1889 edition, with two chapters added from the 1892 edition. In 2008 appeared the only volume in the series that does not center on the works of William H. Herndon, an exceptionally useful edition of The Lincoln-Douglas Debates. A second volume of Herndon on Lincoln is promised, containing Herndons lectures and other writings about Abraham Lincoln.William Henry Herndon (1818-1891) was a prolific writer but could not manage to write a book. In 1869, after years of traveling, interviewing, copying, corresponding, lecturing and writing essays about Lincoln, he needed money and sold copies of the letters and interviews he had gathered to Lincoln's former friend and sometime bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon. This book presents eighteen letters to Lamon, sixteen of which offered further help with Lamon's biography. In 1872, it appeared as The Life of Abraham Lincoln; From His Birth to His Inauguration As President, by Ward H. Lamon (1872), mostly ghost-written by Lamon's law partner Chauncy F. Black.In 1881, Herndon began a regular correspondence with young Jesse W. Weik of Newcastle, Indiana, who was rapidly becoming a Lincoln scholar himself. Besides visiting with Weik, Herndon wrote him 125 letters, some of them several pages long. Eventually they agreed to cooperate on a new biography of Lincoln, which would end, like the Lamon-Black book, at the beginning of Lincoln's presidency. Herndon hoped this would be a study of the man himself, with each chapter dwelling on an important aspect of Lincoln's character, but, with Weik assuming the main burden of composition, it became instead another birth-to-presidency biography.More than any other Lincoln biographer, Herndon described Lincoln's ancestry and early years so as to demonstrate that this great president came from an illiterate, impoverished family barely surviving in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. In his letters Herndon went farther than in the published works, raising the possibility that Lincoln's father Thomas, in addition to being a chronic underachiever in supporting his family, might have been castrated at some point between the birth of his daughter Sarah and the birth of son Abraham. …