Abraham and Mary Lincoln

Essay on Sources

131 essay on sources The most important resources for examining and interpreting Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s marriage are, of course, their own words, to the extent that they have survived and are available to scholars. The essential source for any study of Abraham Lincoln is Roy P. Basler’s nine-volume Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), whose appearance facilitated the scholarly reconsideration of Lincoln’s life and professional and political careers during the second half of the twentieth century. A searchable, digital edition of Lincoln’s collected works, which includes more recently discovered documents and incoming correspondence, is available through the Library of Congress and the Lincoln Studies Center (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/ malhome.html). When complete, the Papers of Abraham Lincoln (http://papersofabrahamlincoln.org) will provide access to all documents written by or to Lincoln as both images and searchable transcriptions . Mary Lincoln’s letters are scarcer, so we are more dependent on the observations of others to reconstruct her life. Her outgoing letters are reprinted and interpreted in Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner’s invaluable Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (1987). Jason Emerson’s The Madness of Mary Lincoln (2007) reprints and analyzes a cache of Mary Lincoln’s recently discovered correspondence. A wealth of primary observations survive in the form of contemporary letters, diaries, and newspapers reports. Most valuable for reconstructing the married life of the Lincolns are Elizabeth Keckly’s memoir, Behind the Scenes in the White House (orig. pub. 1868), John Hay’s Inside Lincoln’s White House (1997), William O. Stoddard’s Inside the White House in War Times (2000), Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (1882–83), and Katherine Helm’s True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln (1928). Each views its subject from a unique perspective. Michael Burlingame’s magisterial two-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008), presents a trove of contemporary observations about both Lincolns. A lengthier, unpublished version of Burlingame ’s biography that includes additional observations and details is available online at http://www.knox.edu/Academics/Distinctive- 132 | Essay on Sources Programs/Lincoln-Studies-Center/Burlingame-Abraham-LincolnA -Life.html. Mark Neely and R. Gerald McMurtry’s Insanity File (1986) analyzes Robert Lincoln’s perspective on his mother’s institutionalization through a recently discovered deposit of his personal records. Among contemporary newspapers, the Illinois State Journal in Springfield and the National Republican in Washington were most sympathetic toward the Lincolns. Recollections and reminiscences produced and collected after Abraham Lincoln’s death represent the largest and most controversial body of evidence documenting the couple’s marriage. Soon after Lincoln’s assassination, his longtime law partner, William Herndon, began offering his own reminiscences and compiling the recollections of others through a decades-long oral history project that culminated in his 1889 biography. Within a mere eighteen months of Lincoln’s death, the letters that Herndon had solicited and collected and the interviews that he had conducted and recorded totaled more than four hundred. Through his commitment to compiling extensive documentation through the firsthand reminiscences of people who knew the Lincolns, Herndon made invaluable contributions to both the content and methodology of all subsequent Lincoln scholarship. Much of what we know about the Lincolns’ personal lives, particularly during the period preceding the presidency, originated from Herndon and his collection of letters and reminiscences. Regrettably, however, Herndon had experienced a distant and even frosty relationship with Mary Lincoln, and she did not fare well in his writing nor in other biographical accounts that drew on his enormous collection of reminiscences. Herndon disclosed a bias against Mary Lincoln almost immediately after his law partner ’s death in a series of lectures that he delivered in Springfield in 1865 and 1866. While praising Abraham Lincoln’s public character, conduct, and accomplishments, Herndon portrayed him personally as gloomy, pessimistic, and—through a lifelong religious skepticism —fatalistic. In his fourth and final lecture, Herndon identified Lincoln’s relationship with Ann Rutledge as an important source of this purported melancholy. Arguing that “Abraham Lincoln loved Miss Ann Rutledge with all his soul, mind and strength,” Herndon Essay on Sources | 133 concluded that after her death he never truly loved another woman, including his wife. Overall, he portrayed the couple’s marriage as stormy, dysfunctional, and, on Abraham Lincoln’s part, loveless. Robert Lincoln visited Springfield in a futile attempt to convince Herndon to retract his assertions and, along...