Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Grants from the Lincoln Institute were vital in many ways, especially in enabling me to ransack repositories in locations where I had no friends or family to impose on. In those repositories I received much-appreciated help from librarians and archivists. At the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, which became in effect a second home, I benefited greatly from the kind assistance and warm friendship of John Sellers, Jeff Flannery, and their colleagues, including Fred Bauman, who transcribed for me many documents written in German langschrift. At the National Archives, the legendary Michael Musick helped me on several occasions. There the indefatigable Karen Needles has unearthed for me rare and valuable documents. I also spent a great deal of time in the John Hay Library at Brown University, where Samuel Streit, Jennifer Lee, Mary Jo Kline, J. Andrew Moul, Rosemary Cullen, Ann Dodge, Peter Harrington, and others in the Special Collections Department treated me like family. The staff at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield—including Kim Bauer, Jill Blessman, Bob Cavanagh, Kathryn Harris, Mary Michals, Cheryl Pence, Cheryl Schnirring, and Thomas Schwartz—were unfailingly helpful and cordial over the years.

  I extend thanks, too, to their counterparts at Allegheny College, the Lincoln Museum of Fort Wayne, Indiana, Lincoln Memorial University, the Chicago History Museum, the University of Chicago, the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library, the New York Public Library, Columbia University, the New-York Historical Society, Bowdoin College, the A. K. Smiley Library in Redlands, California, the New Hampshire Historical Society, the University of Vermont, the University of Maine, Bowdoin College, the Maine State Archives, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Public Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Lenox Public Library, the New York State Library, Syracuse University, Cornell University, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan, the Detroit Public Library, the Wisconsin State Historical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, the Hagley Museum and Library of Wilmington, Delaware, the Maryland Historical Society, the Johns Hopkins University, the Virginia Historical Society, the Library of Virginia, the University of Virginia, West Virginia University, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, the Connecticut Historical Society, Bryn Mawr College, the Kentucky Historical Society, the Filson Club, the University of Kentucky, the Missouri Historical Society, the Minnesota Historical Society, the Indiana Historical Society, the Indiana State Library, the University of Indiana, the Northern Indiana Center for History, Depauw University, Vincennes University, the Evansville Public Library, the Vandalia Public Library, the Willard Library (Evansville), the University of Iowa, the State Historical Society of Iowa, the Iowa State Archives, the University of Illinois, the Illinois State Archives, the Abraham Lincoln Public Library in Springfield, Illinois, the Ohio Historical Society (Columbus), the Western Reserve Historical Society (Cleveland), and the Cincinnati Historical Society.

  Librarians at my home institution, Connecticut College in New London, have been unusually helpful. Special thanks are due to the indefatigable efforts of the Interlibrary Loan officers (Helen Aitner and Emily Aylward) and to James McDonald, Beth Hansen, Lori Blados, Brian Rogers, Connie Dowell, and Carol Strang. The best student I taught in my thirty-three years at the College, Minor Myers III, helped significantly as I tried to identify Lincoln’s anonymous journalism. His parents were exceptionally hospitable whenever my quest for the historical Lincoln took me to Bloomington, Illinois. The R. Francis Johnson Faculty Development Fund at Connecticut College helped defray some research expenses.

  Fellow scholars have been generous in reading portions of my manuscript, sharing information with me, and allowing me to see their works-in-progress. Among them are Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College; Allen Guelzo and Gabor Boritt of Gettysburg College; Lewis E. Lehrman; William Hanchett of San Diego State University; Doris Kearns Goodwin of Concord, Massachusetts; Richard Wightman Fox of the University of Southern California; Herman Belz of the University of Maryland; Roger D. Bridges of Springfield; Terry Alford of Northern Virginia Community College; Ari Hoogenboom of Brooklyn College; the late John Y. Simon of Southern Illinois University; Ron Soodalter of Manhattan; the late Don E. Fehrenbacher of Stanford University; Richard Striner and Joshua Wolf Shenk of Washington College; Mark Plummer and Silvana Saddili of Illinois State University; Frank Milligan of President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington; James Oakes of the City University of New York; William Lee Miller of the University of Virginia; Mark E. Steiner of the University of Houston; William C. Harris of North Carolina State University; Thomas Turner of Bridgewater State College; Jennifer L. Weber of the University of Kansas; Lucas Morel of Washington and Lee University; Brooks Simpson of Arizona State University; the late Phillip Shaw Paludan of the University of Illinois at Springfield; Jason Emerson of Cazenovia, New York; Michael Vorenberg of Brown University; Wayne C. Temple of the Illinois State Archives; Richard Hart of Springfield; Stephen Berry of the University of Georgia; John Lupton, Daniel Stowell, and Cullom Davis of the Lincoln Legal Papers; Robert Bray of Illinois Wesleyan University; Paul Verduin of Silver Spring, Maryland; Jennifer Fleischner of Adelphi University; Kenneth Winkle of the University of Nebraska; Joan E. Cashin of Ohio State University; Gerald J. Prokopowicz of Eastern Carolina University; Guy Fraker of Bloomington, Illinois; and Russell H. Beatie of New York.

  The camaraderie of many other Lincolnians makes membership in the Lincoln fraternity especially enjoyable. Among them are Richard Carwardine of Oxford University; Hans Trefousse of Brooklyn College; James McPherson of Princeton University; Joseph Fornieri of the Rochester Institute of Technology; Mike Musick, Steve Carson, Fred Martin, Scott Sandage, Don Kennon, Paul Pascal, Stephen Goldman, Michelle A. Krowl, Gordon Leidner, Jonathan Mann, Clark Evans, Rodney Ross, Bob Willard, and other members of the board of directors of the Abraham Lincoln Institute in Washington; Laurin A. Wollan of Sweet Briar, Virginia; Ronald Rietveld of California State University at Fullerton; Daniel Mark Epstein of Baltimore; Matthew Pinsker of Dickinson College; Dan Weinberg of Chicago; Daniel Pierson of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin; Roger Fisher of the University of Minnesota; Michael Bishop and James Swanson of Washington, D.C.; Steven K. Rogstad of Grand Rapids, Michigan; Richard Hart, Fred Hoffmann, Don Tracy, and other colleagues on the board of the Abraham Lincoln Association in Springfield; John Hoffmann of the University of Illinois; and Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard.

  In the 1960s it was my good fortune to have been taught by David Herbert Donald at both Princeton and Johns Hopkins Universities. He took me under his wing when I was a college freshman and made a tremendous difference in my life, for which I will be eternally grateful.

  I am also grateful to my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, Robert J. Brugger, who helped focus and condense the manuscript. Further aiding in that process was an old friend from graduate school days, William Evitts of Baltimore, who carefully went over the manuscript of the first volume line by line. Richard Behn of the Lincoln Institute also gave the manuscript a close reading. For assistance in obtaining artwork for these volumes, I am indebted to William Furry of the Illinois State Historical Society and his counterparts at the Library of Congress, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, and the Indiana Historical Society. At the Westchester Book Group, Lyndee Stalter, Susan Baker, and their colleagues exerted themselves heroically to get this biography out in time for the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.

  Thanks, thanks to all.

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  Because the notes to this biography had to be kept lean, they are confined mostly to identifying primary sources and do not acknowledge properly the secondary works on Lincoln and his times which I have consulted. Far more extensive and discursive notes may be found in the original unedited version of the book, which is available online at www.knox.edu/lincolnstudies. Readers curious about the enormous secondary literature on Lincoln are referre
d to that version.

  In using primary sources, I have relied wherever possible on contemporary documents rather than reminiscences. Calvin Coolidge once remarked that many people in his hometown of Plymouth, Vermont, “remember some of the most interesting things that never happened.”1 Coolidge’s quip raises a question that historians regularly face: How much credence should be given to the reminiscences of people who knew Lincoln, especially to those recalling events and words from the distant past?

  James G. Randall’s four-volume account of Lincoln’s presidency contains an appendix, primarily the handiwork of the author’s wife, Ruth Painter Randall, warning that “the vagueness of reminiscence given after many years is familiar to all careful historical students; if, in the haste of general reading, this matter is disregarded, the essence of the subject is overlooked. Huge tomes could be written to show the doubtfulness of long-delayed memories.” The Randalls sensibly noted that “the historian must use reminiscence, but he must do so critically. Even close-up evidence is fallible. When it comes through the mists of many years some of it may be true, but a careful writer will check it with known facts. Contradictory reminiscences leave doubt as to what is to be believed; unsupported memories are in themselves insufficient as proof; statements induced under suggestion, or psychological stimulus … call especially for careful appraisal.” The Randalls urged particular caution in using the reminiscences gathered by William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, shortly after the Civil War. Because of J. G. Randall’s prestige as a Lincoln authority (which Mrs. Randall did not enjoy), subsequent scholars have tended to shy away from the Herndon materials, regarding them as unreliable.2

  Among the skeptics was Herndon’s biographer and Randall’s preeminent protégé, David Herbert Donald, who spelled out some of the problems involved in using reminiscences: “To collect historical data through oral interviews, though sometimes necessary, is always hazardous. The reminiscences of a graybearded grandfather have to be guided or they are likely to become incoherent rambling. Yet in controlling an interview, it is very difficult not to influence the informant. To ask some questions is to suggest the answers desired.”3

  The most thorough students of the Herndon collection, Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, have cogently argued that the Randalls’ skepticism was exaggerated.4 Since the Randalls’ day (their critique of Herndon appeared in 1945), historians have come to view reminiscent materials more favorably. The rise of oral history has lent new respectability to interviews like those conducted by Herndon.5

  Wilson noted that the Randalls treated Herndon’s informants as if they were witnesses in court. Like defense attorneys, they sought to discredit everyone who asserted that Lincoln and Ann Rutledge were in love. “Historical scholarship,” Wilson argues, “for whatever similarities it might bear to trying a case in a court of law, is a very different kind of enterprise and employs different methods. Observing the evidentiary safeguards of a criminal trial would, after all, bring a substantial portion of historical inquiry to a halt, for much of what we want to know about the past simply cannot be established on these terms. Abraham Lincoln’s early life is a perfect example. Virtually everything we know about Lincoln as a child and as a young man—his incessant reading and self-education, his storytelling, his honesty, his interest in politics, and so forth—comes exclusively from the recollections of the people who knew him. Non-contemporary, subjective, often unable to be confirmed even by the recollections of others, to say nothing of contemporary documents, this evidence is sheer reminiscence.” Wilson acknowledges that the Randalls’ “caveats about such evidence and the admixture of error and bias it may contain are certainly justified,” but adds that “the historian or biographer has no alternative but to find a way to work with it and, indeed, with anything that may be indicative of the truth.”6

  I make extensive use of the Herndon materials, which Wilson rightly calls “the richest source of information on Lincoln’s early life.” He points out that “Herndon spent a prodigious amount of time and effort pursuing and procuring information about Abraham Lincoln.” The documents he collected “show that he examined and cross-examined his informants with care, that he sought information both open-endedly and on a wide variety of specific topics, that he checked up on doubtful or conflicting stories, and that he acted in accordance with his stated purpose, which was to learn and publish the truth about his great law partner.”7

  The people Herndon interviewed have also been underestimated, Wilson contends: “It is sometimes maintained by an appeal to common experience that Herndon’s informants could not have been expected to summon obscure events from the distant past with anything like accuracy, much less historical reliability, and that Herndon was naive to have believed them.” Such objections, Wilson says, “make it appear that Herndon asked his informants to recall … things they had not thought about or discussed with anyone for twenty-five or thirty years.” In fact, the people whom Herndon consulted had, during the years when Lincoln’s fame grew, “frequent occasion to recall their personal contacts with him and keep alive their memories of his early days.”8

  Having studied the Herndon archive closely, I concur with Wilson and Davis as well as Albert J. Beveridge, who, after examining Herndon’s papers, wrote that “everywhere it is obvious that Herndon is intent on telling the truth himself and getting the truth from those who could give personal, first-hand information.”9 Beveridge told a Lincoln biographer, “I have examined the credibility of Herndon very much as if he were a hostile witness in a murder trial; and there is absolutely no doubt that the old man (he was not very old when he collected this data) was well-nigh fanatically devoted to truth. It is only when he assumes to analyze the ‘souls’ of other people that he is untrustworthy. … But I repeat, that when he states a fact as a fact, you can depend upon it that it is a fact.”10 The Herndon-Weik collection is not without its faults and must be used carefully, but it should be treated as a gold mine rather than a high-level nuclear waste dump.

  I have also made extensive use of other reminiscent material, most notably that contained in the clipping collections at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield. These sources, too, must be treated with caution, especially when Lincoln’s words are quoted. Purists might argue that, given the vagaries of memory, all such quotations should be dismissed out of hand. But as Don E. Fehrenbacher noted, there is “a great accumulation of spoken words attributed to Lincoln that cannot be ignored.” By being too “fastidious,” he warned, historians might produce works “impoverished as a consequence.”11

  Fehrenbacher correctly observed that there “is no simple formula for judging the authenticity of recollected utterances” To estimate their credibility “is a complex and often inconclusive enterprise,” he pointed out. “Special problems abound, such as that of recollections said to be based on contemporaneous notes. Unfortunately, these precious source materials seem never to have survived, and the list of persons assertedly using them includes some of the Munchausens of Lincoln literature. Yet not all such claims are dubious enough to be dismissed out of hand.”

  As Fehrenbacher noted, researchers must also ask: “how much should factual inaccuracy count against the overall credibility of a quotation?” Clearly “the nub of a recollection may be right, even though the details are wrong, but even so, erroneous statements of fact seem to indicate that verbal recall from the same source will be only roughly accurate at best.” Then there is the informant “who in one or more instances proves to be, not just inaccurate, but demonstrably untruthful, perhaps even to the point of inventing conversations that never took place.” Must “the rest of this person’s testimony be set aside according to the rule, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, or is it more reasonable to judge each quotation separately on the principle that even habitual liars tell the truth some of the time?”

  Dealing with contradictory recollections raises further problems. Fehrenbacher sensi
bly counseled, “it might seem that giving credence to those on one side means withholding credence from those on the other. Such is not necessarily the case, however; for there can be little doubt that Lincoln the consummate politician sometimes spoke differently on the same subject to different people.”

  I have tried to verify the recollections of informants by using contemporary evidence, but as Fehrenbacher noted, “satisfactory verification is impossible because the narrator was the only person present to hear what Lincoln said—or at least the only person to leave any record of what he said. The best one can do in such cases is make a judgment based on the auditor’s general reputation, if that is known, plus the circumstantial and substantive verisimilitude of the quotation.”