Abraham Lincoln, Ann Rutledge, and the Evidence of Herndon's Informants

Abraham Lincoln, Ann Rutledge, and the Evidence of Herndon's Informants Douglas L. Wilson The Ann Rutledge story has always sounded like nineteenth-century popular fiction. The most beautiful girl in the village becomes engaged to a rich storekeeper, who admits he has been living under an assumed name and who says he will marry her when he returns from a visit to his aged parents. When he stops writing and shows no sign of returning after two years, the deserted girl accepts the advances of the poor-buthonest postmaster, who has loved her secretly all along. She agrees to marry him, and they plan a bright future, including college for her and a legal career for him, only to have death intervene at the height of their happiness and cancel all their vows. When William H. Herndon came across the Ann Rutledge story unexpectedly after Abraham Lincoln 's death, it gradually took possession of his nineteenth-century soul. He came to believe he had found in the tragedy of Lincoln's first romance at least a partial answer to the mystery of his great law partner's chronic melancholy—namely, that the loss of Ann Rutledge had given a permanent wound to his spirit and altered his outlook on life. This theory he laid on in extravagant terms in a lecture in November 1866 and later incorporated in a more measured and moderate form some twenty-three years later in his biography, Herndon's Lincoln.1 It was perhaps inevitable that such a story should wear out its welcome, threatening, as it does, to reduce Lincoln's deep inner life—if not the key to his greatness—to a romantic cliché. Novels and popular biographies could not resist the theme that was stated most memorably in Edgar Lee Masters's epitaph for Ann Rutledge in Spoon River Anthology: ' Herndon's lecture, "ABRAHAM LINCOLN. MISS ANN RUTLEDGE. NEW SALEM. PIONEERING AND THE POEM.," delivered on Nov. 16, 1866, and distributed as a broadside, has been reprinted in Lincoln and Ann Rutledge and the Pioneers of New Salem (Herrin, 111.: Trovillion Private Press, 1945). His biography, co-authored with Jesse W. Weik, appeared in 1889. Civil War History, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, ° 1990 by the Kent State University Press 302CIVIL WAR HISTORY Out of me unworthy and unknown The vibrations of deathless music; "With malice toward none, with charity for all." Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions And the beneficent face of a nation Shining with justice and truth.2 For the rising generation of twentieth-century Lincoln scholars, the last straw seems to have been Carl Sandburg's The Prairie Years, published in 1926, in which the hero's amorous feelings toward the fair Ann are rendered in mawkish scenes and trembling soliloquies. The following year the young Paul M. Angle attacked the Ann Rutledge story as "one of the great myths of American history."3 All of the evidence in support of it, he argued, was after the fact, with no contemporary evidence of any kind having been produced. He charged Herndon with having chosen his evidence selectively, ignoring and suppressing testimony that cast doubt on the story, and accepting as authentic testimony he should have regarded as suspect. Moreover, Herndon had heedlessly given credence to the doubtful tale of Lincoln's near insanity after the death of Ann Rutledge. This repudiation of the Ann Rutledge story as a critical event in Lincoln's life, reinforced by Angle's sensational exposure a few years later of an Ann Rutledge hoax, found favor with the community of Lincoln scholars,4 but there remained one difficulty: the documents upon which Herndon had based his account were not generally available for examination. This was a consideration of some importance in that the position taken by Angle and others was in large part a critique of Herndon's use of evidence they themselves had not seen. Besides Herndon 's collaborator, Jesse W. Weik, the only scholar to have full access to this prodigious mass of unique source material was Albert J. Beveridge, who, in writing before Angle's attack, had relied on the Herndon documents extensively in his account of...