313. William E. Walter to Carl Sandburg, New York, 11 Jan. 1940, Sandburg Papers, University of Illinois. Born in England in 1847, Jane King was the daughter of the merchant William King (b. 1818), who settled in Springfield in the 1850s, residing at Seventh and Jackson Streets, one block from the Lincolns. Her son said her hatred of Mrs. Lincoln “lived with her until her death” in 1917. The 1860 census refers to her as Jennie.
314. Edward H. House to Edmund C. Stedman, 10 July 1883, quoted in James L. Huffman, A Yankee in Meiji Japan: The Crusading Journalist Edward H. House (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 189.
315. Herndon to Jesse W. Weik, Springfield, 8 Jan. 1886, H-W MSS DLC; Milton Hay to his wife, Springfield, 6 Apr. [1862], Stuart-Hay Papers, IHi.
316. John Jay Janney, “Talking with the President: Four Interviews with Abraham Lincoln,” Civil War Times Illustrated 26 (1987):35.
317. Archibald L. Bowen, “A. Lincoln: His House,” Lincoln Centennial Association Papers, 1925, 63.
318. Reminiscences of Mary Scott Uda, recounting a story told by her mother, New York Herald Tribune, 7 Feb. 1926. The trip could well have been the one taken by the Lincolns to Washington in 1847 or to New York a decade later.
319. Eleanor Gridley to W. A. Evans, n.p., 4 June 1932, copy, Gridley Papers, ICHi.
320. Herndon to Jesse W. Weik, Springfield, 1 Dec. 1885, H-W MSS DLC.
321. Thomas L. D. Johnston, interview with Herndon, [1866], HI, 532. In 1851, Lincoln told his stepbrother that Johnston’s adolescent son, Abraham, was welcome to stay at his house in Springfield: “I understand he wants to live with me so that he can go to school, and get a fair start in the world, which I very much wish him to have.” He promised that “[w]hen I reach home, if I can make it convenient to take him, I will take him.” Lincoln to John D. Johnston, Shelbyville, 9 Nov. 1851, CWL, 2:112. See also Charles H. Coleman, Abraham Lincoln and Coles County, Illinois (New Brunswick, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1955), 70–71.
322. Albert A. North, paraphrased in Herndon to Jesse W. Weik, Springfield, 9 Jan. 1886, H-W MSS DLC. Born in 1825 in Pennsylvania, North was a physician who served as justice of the peace in Capitol Township, Sangamon County, from 1885 to 1889. I am grateful to Dr. Wayne C. Temple of the Illinois State Archives for information about North. Herndon thought the young man’s name was Charles Lewis. He was, Herndon said, “somehow a nephew of Mrs. Lincoln or probably other relative.”
323. Harriet Chapman, interview with Jesse W. Weik (1886–1887), HI, 646.
324. Charles Arnold told this to Benjamin Franklin Stoneberger who in turn told it to Dr. W. A. Evans. Evans, Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, 130. Charles E. Arnold (1808–1888), who lived across the street from the Lincolns’ house from 1849 to 1869, served as treasurer of Sangamon County and later as its sheriff. Stoneberger (1853–1939), who had conversations with Lincolns’ neighbors, was the son of William and Josephine Stoneberger. The family appears in the Springfield City Directory for the first time in 1863. They lived on North Fifth Street through the 1870s and 1880s. B. F. Stoneberger, who was in the candy business in Springfield, died in Chicago. Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 18 Apr. 1939. His sister married Osborn Oldroyd (1842–1930), who lived in the Lincoln home from 1883 to 1893.
325. Mary Lincoln to Emilie Todd Helm, Springfield, 20 Sept. [1857], in Turner and Turner, eds., Mary Todd Lincoln, 50.
326. Reminiscences of McCoy in an unidentified newspaper clipping, dated 12 Feb. 1901, Lincoln Scrapbooks, 3:40, Judd Stewart Collection, CSmH. This McCoy was perhaps Joseph Geiting McCoy (1837–1915), a prominent cattle dealer who was born in Sangamon County on Spring Creek, 10 miles west of Springfield. He attended Knox College (1857–1858) and married Sarah Epler of Pleasant Plains in 1861. They lived for a time near Springfield. After the Civil War McCoy moved to Kansas, where he achieved prominence in business and politics. See the introduction to Ralph P. Bieber’s edition of McCoy’s Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest (1874; Glendale, CA: A. H. Clark, 1940), 17–68.
327. Reminiscences of William T. Baker (b. 1828), Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 18 Jan. 1909. Baker was born in Kentucky in 1828; shortly thereafter his family moved to central Illinois, where his father, James Baker, served in the Black Hawk War with Lincoln in Captain Jacob Early’s company. The Baker family settled in Mt. Pulaski. See Stevens, A Reporter’s Lincoln, ed. Burlingame, 123–127.
328. Preston H. Bailhache, “Recollections of a Springfield Doctor,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 47 (1954): 60. Bailhache (1835–1919) lived in Springfield from 1857 to 1861 and cared for the Lincolns’ children when his partner, Dr. William S. Wallace, was unavailable.
329. Henry B. Stanton, Random Recollections (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1887), 221.
330. Pascal P. Enos, interview with Herndon, [1865–1866], HI, 448–449.
331. Mrs. John A. Logan in the New York Evening Sun, 12 Feb. 1912.
332. Fragment of the manuscript of Helm, Mary, Wife of Lincoln, William H. Townsend Papers, University of Kentucky, Lexington. This passage was not included in the published version of the biography.
333. Harriet A. Chapman to Herndon, Charleston, Illinois, 10 Dec. 1866, HI, 512. Milton Hay reported that Mary Lincoln “was of very saving habits.” Ibid., 729.
334. Undated interview with Elizabeth Edwards by Jesse W. Weik, Weik, Real Lincoln, ed. Burlingame, 355. Paraphrasing what James H. Matheny told him about Mrs. Lincoln, Weik wrote that she “loved fine clothes, but in other respects she was close and in no sense extravagant.” Ibid., 91.
335. Herndon to Jesse W. Weik, Springfield, 5 Feb. 1887 and 10 Oct. 1888, H-W MSS DLC.
336. Gibson William Harris, “My Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” Woman’s Home Companion, Jan. 1904, p. 15.
337. Elizabeth Edwards, interview with Herndon, [1865–1866], HI, 445. This servant may have been Mariah Drake. See Weik, Real Lincoln, ed. Burlingame, 100, and Josiah Kent, interview with Weik, 21 Nov. 1916, ibid., 363.
338. Margaret Ryan, interview with Jesse Weik, 27 Oct. 1886, HI, 597.
339. John F. Mendosa to James R. B. Van Cleve, Springfield, 2 July 1908, reference files of the Abraham Lincoln Association, “Reminiscences,” folder 3, IHi.
340. Henry Haynie in “Success,” n.d., Youth’s Companion, 1 Sept. 1898.
341. Carpenter, Six Months in the White House, 273–274.
342. Whitney, Life on the Circuit, ed. Angle, 184.
343. Isaac N. Arnold, The History of Abraham Lincoln, and the Overthrow of Slavery (Chicago: Clarke, 1866), 503.
344. Nathan W. MacChesney, Abraham Lincoln: The Tribute of a Century, 1809–1909 (Chicago: McClurg, 1910), 300.
345. John McNamar, paraphrased in Volney Hickox, “Lincoln at Home,” Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 15 Oct. 1874.
346. Hay to his wife, Springfield, 9 Apr. 1862, Stuart-Hay Papers, IHi.
347. Margaret Ryan, interview with Jesse W. Weik, 27 Oct. 1886, HI, 596–597.
348. Judge George W. Murray heard this story from Herndon, his law partner during the year 1884. Murray’s statement for William E. Barton, 21 Apr. 1920, Barton Papers, University of Chicago. See also G. W. Murray to Albert J. Beveridge, Springfield, 9 June 1923, Beveridge Papers, DLC. A similar account of this event can be found in Sandburg and Angle, Mary Lincoln, 70–71. Born in 1839 in Ohio, Murray moved to Springfield in 1874 and was elected a judge of Sangamon County in 1890, after having served in the lower house of the Illinois General Assembly. It is not surprising that Lincoln seldom turned on his wife. Social scientists have interviewed battered husbands who do not retaliate against their spouses and report that there are several reasons for their passivity: “The first, based on chivalry, considers any man who would stoop to hit a woman to be a bully. The second, usually based on experience, is a recognition of the severe damage which a man could do to a woman.… A final reason expressed by these beaten men is perhaps a self-serving one. The combination of crying out in pain during the beating and h
aving the wife see the injuries, which often take several weeks to heal, raise the wife’s level of guilt which the husbands consider to be a form of punishment.” Suzanne K. Steinmetz, “The Battered Husband Syndrome,” Victimology 2 (1977):507.
349. Fred I. Dean to Ida M. Tarbell, Washington, 7 Jan. 1900, Tarbell Papers, Smith College. Dean claimed that he had “several talks” with Herndon “upon the subject, & he fully agreed with my views.” Dean to Tarbell, 19 Dec. 1899, ibid. Dean’s parents, Frederick S. and Harriet Dean, moved from Bloomington to Springfield in 1841. Eight years later, they purchased from Peter Van Bergen a lot across from the Lincoln house, and the following year they bought part of an adjacent lot from Lincoln. Dean’s father either died or abandoned the family in the early 1850s, and his wife ran a school until her son, Frederick Irwin Dean (b. 1832), committed her, at the age of 56, to the Jacksonville insane asylum in 1860. She died three days after entering that institution. Dean to Tarbell, Washington, 7 Jan. 1900, ibid.; Fischer-Wisnosky Architects Inc., Historical Structure Report, Dean House (HS-13) (draft, 1990, Sangamon Valley Collection, Lincoln Public Library, Springfield), pp. 2.1–2.5.
350. Helm, Mary, Wife of Lincoln, 120.
351. James Gourley, interview with Herndon, [1865–1866], HI, 452.
352. Fred I. Dean to Ida M. Tarbell, Washington, DC, 7 Jan. 1900, Tarbell Papers, Smith College.
353. Weik, Real Lincoln, ed. Burlingame, 123.
354. Taylorville Semi-Weekly Breeze, 12 Feb. 1909.
355. Elizabeth Lushbaugh Capps, interview with Hannah Hinsdale, clipping dated Yakima, Washington, 2 Feb. [1929?], Lincoln Shrine, A. K. Smiley Library, Redlands, California. Mrs. Capps’s father, Thomas P. Lushbaugh, a merchant in partnership with David Spear, had built a house directly across Eighth Street from the one that the Lincolns bought. Soon after the Lushbauhs took up residence in their new home, the Lincolns moved into the house opposite them. In 1840, Lushbaugh helped organize the first Grand Lodge of Odd Fellows in Springfield. In 1862, his daughter Elizabeth married Charles R. Capps, who had been born in Springfield in 1841. The Lushbaugh family lived in Springfield for approximately six years before moving to Mt. Pulaski (Logan County) in 1846. History of Sangamon County (Chicago: Interstate Publishing, 1881), 622; John Carroll Power, History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County, Illinois (Springfield, IL: Edwin A. Wilson, 1876), 186.
356. Elizabeth A. Capps, “My Early Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” reference files of the Abraham Lincoln Association, “Reminiscences,” folder 1, IHi.
357. Reminiscences of Mrs. Cecelia McConnell, who in 1856, at the age of 18, went to Springfield to live with her aunt and uncle. Buffalo Courier-Express, 11 Aug. 1929, section 9, p. 2. Her uncle witnessed the peddler telling the story to Lincoln.
358. John B. Weber, interview with Herndon, Pawnee, Illinois, [ca. 1 Nov. 1866], HI, 389. Weber (1810–1889) was a cabinetmaker who in 1841 became copyist of land records for the state of Illinois, a post he held until 1849. Sheriff of the county from 1854 to 1856, he lived on Eighth Street between Jackson and Edwards Streets, less than a block from the Lincolns’ house.
359. Herndon to C. O. Poole, Springfield, 5 Jan. 1886, H-W MSS DLC.
360. John Todd Stuart, interview with Herndon, [late June 1865], HI, 63.
361. Bradwell’s statement to Ida Tarbell, memo marked “Lincoln—Items,” folder “Mary Todd Lincoln,” Ida M. Tarbell Papers, Allegheny College. Bradwell (1828–1897), a county judge in Chicago, was the husband of Myra Bradwell, an attorney who represented Mary Lincoln in her successful attempt to win release from a mental hospital in 1875.
362. Charles Arnold, quoted by B. F. Stoneberger, in Evans, Mrs. Lincoln, 155.
363. Elizabeth Todd Edwards, interview with Herndon, 27 July 1887, HI, 623.
364. John H. Littlefield interviewed by C. D. B., Brooklyn Eagle, 16 Oct. 1887.
365. Herndon to Jesse W. Weik, Springfield, 12 Jan. 1886, H-W MSS DLC.
366. Letter by Mary Todd quoted from memory by Mrs. William Preston (née Mary Wickliffe) in a dispatch to the Philadelphia Times from White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, [ca. 1882], copy, William H. Townsend Papers, University of Kentucky, Lexington. In an undated clipping in the William H. Townsend Papers in the Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, it is alleged that the “story of Mrs. Lincoln writing, when a young girl, a letter in which she expressed a determination to become the wife of a President, is confirmed by the production of the document, now in the possession of General Preston, of Lexington, Ky. It was addressed to a daughter of Governor Wickliffe, and contained a playful description of the gawky young Lincoln, to whom she was betrothed.” Townsend Papers, box 1 ½, folder marked “May–Aug. 1954,” IHi. Lincoln wrote Mrs. Preston in 1862, saying: “Your despatch to Mrs. L. received yesterday. She is not well. Owing to her early and strong friendship for you, I would gladly oblige you, but I can not absolutely do it.” Lincoln to Mrs. Margaret Preston, Washington, 21 Aug. 1862, CWL, 5:386.
367. Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847–1865, ed. Dorothy Lamon Teillard (2nd ed.; Washington, DC: Privately published, 1911), 21. Cf. John. Bittinger’s similar account in Mahlon T. Dolman, “With Lincoln Every Night,” National Magazine 29 (Feb. 1909):524.
368. Thomas J. Pickett in the Peoria Weekly Republican, 22 Feb. 1856; Thomas L. Harris to Charles Lanphier, Washington, 7 Mar. [1856], Lanphier Papers, IHi.
369. Reminiscences of Olivia Leidig Whiteman, Vandalia, Illinois, correspondence, 4 Feb., New York Herald, 10 Feb. 1929, section 3, p. 4.
370. Milton Hay, interview with George Alfred Townsend, Cincinnati Inquirer, 26 Aug. 1883; Hay, quoted in Weik, Real Lincoln, ed. Burlingame, 91.
371. Speed told this to John Todd Stuart. Stuart, interview with Herndon, [late June 1865], HI, 63.
372. Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Lincoln, 262–263. Herndon, David Davis, and James Matheny agreed that if Lincoln had married a more amiable woman, in all probability “he would have been satisfied with the modest emoluments of a country lawyer’s practice … and buried in the delights of an inviting and happy home.” Weik, Real Lincoln, ed. Burlingame, 90. See also Herndon quoted by Hardin W. Masters, Portland, Maine, Sunday Telegram, 16 July 1922, p. 30, and Le Grand Cannon to Herndon, near Burlington, Vermont, 7 Oct. [1889], HI, 678–679.
373. Hardin W. Masters, “Lincoln’s Last Law Partner, William H. Herndon, As I Knew Him,” typescript, p. 7, Albert J. Beveridge Papers, DLC.
374. Carl Schurz, Abraham Lincoln: An Essay (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 19.
375. Carl Schurz, interview with Ida Tarbell, 6 Nov. 1897, Tarbell Papers, Allegheny College.
Chapter 7. “I Have Got the Preacher by the Balls”
1. John Hay, “Colonel Baker,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 24 (Dec. 1861), and “The Heroic Age in Washington,” a lecture given in the early 1870s, in Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 122, 154, 158; Hay, Washington correspondence, 22 Oct., Missouri Republican (St. Louis), 27 Oct. 1861, in Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press; 1860–1864 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 123.
2. Charles H. Ray to Thomas Ford, 25 Aug. 1845, Governor’s Correspondence, Illinois State Archives, quoted in Gayle Anderson Braden, “The Public Career of Edward Dickinson Baker” (Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1960), 50; William Herndon, “Analysis of the Character of Abraham Lincoln,” lecture delivered on 26 Dec. 1865 at Springfield, Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 1 (Dec. 1941):437.
3. David Davis to [William P. Walker], Springfield, Illinois, 25 June 1847, David Davis Papers, IHi.
4. Joshua F. Speed to Lincoln, [Frankfort, Kentucky], 13 Feb. 1849, AL MSS DLC.
5. Logan, interview with John G. Nicolay, Springfield, 6 July 1875, Michael Burlingame, ed., An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays (Carbon
dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 37, 38.
6. Isaac Jones Wistar, Autobiography of Isaac Jones Wistar, 1827–1905 (2 vols.; Philadelphia: Wistar Institute, 1914), 1:303–304.
7. Chicago Democrat, n.d., copied in the Illinois State Register (Vandalia), 18 May 1838.
8. Elizabeth J. Grimsley to John Todd Stuart, Washington, 8 May 1861, Grimsley Papers, IHi.
9. David Davis to Julius Rockwell, Bloomington, Illinois, 17 Dec. 1845, Davis Papers, DLC.
10. Elizabeth Caldwell Smith Duncan, biographical sketch of Hardin, [1866], manuscript in the Duncan-Putnam Family Papers, Putnam Museum, Davenport, Iowa.
11. Washington correspondence, 2 Jan. 1894, Boston Herald, n.d., clipping, LMF.
12. William Brown to Jeremiah Brown Jr., Delevan, 25 Dec. 1843, typed copy, Jesse W. Fell Papers, DLC; David Davis to Julius Rockwell, Bloomington, Illinois, 14 May 1844, Davis Papers, DLC.
13. Speech in Congress, 27 July 1848, Roy P. Basler et al., eds., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [hereafter CWL] (8 vols. plus an index; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), 1:515; Lincoln to Robert Boal, Springfield, 7 Jan. 1846, and to B. F. James, Springfield, 14 Jan. 1846, ibid., 1:353, 354.
14. Lincoln to Richard S. Thomas, Springfield, 14 Feb. 1843, CWL, 1:307.
15. Campaign circular, 4 Mar. 1843, CWL, 1:309–318.
16. Illinois State Register (Springfield), 17 Mar. 1843.
17. Abner Y. Ellis to Herndon, Moro, IL, 14 Feb. 1866, HI, 211; Lincoln to Martin M. Morris, Springfield, 26 Mar. 1843, CWL, 1:320.
18. James H. Matheny, interview with Herndon, 3 May 1866, HI, 251.
19. CWL, 1:273, 278.
20. William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (1889; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 166.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1 Page 146
