Herndon's Lincoln (review)

Since 1930, scholars have relied on Paul M. Angle's venerable edition of Herndon's Lincoln when consulting the most influential and controversial biography ever written about Abraham Lincoln. In this new volume, coeditors Douglas Wilson and Rodney Davis have brought the landmark biography up to date with more than seventy years of Lincoln scholarship, thereby giving us the definitive modern edition of the work.

As the editors explain in their comprehensive introduction, upon Lincoln's death in 1865, William Herndon, his law partner in Springfield, Illinois, from 1844 to 1861, determined to write a "private" biography of Lincoln—a "warts-and-all" portrait that, quite remarkably for the nineteenth century, would spare no details of Lincoln's prepresidential life, and thus would allow Americans to see how he became the man they knew. To these ends, Herndon immediately began collecting Lincolniana, as well as writing to and meeting with people whom Lincoln had known before his presidency. Despite these pioneering efforts as a collection manager and oral historian, personal and financial difficulties in the 1870s prevented Herndon from writing the biography. However, in the early 1880s, he met Jesse Weik, a young and highly literate government clerk from Greencastle, Indiana, who, eager to honor Lincoln's legacy, offered to help with the writing. Together, the two made the biography happen—Herndon shaping the substance of the narrative, and Weik crafting the prose and style.

The result was Herndon's Lincoln, a biography that in 1889 met mixed reviews. On the one hand, Herndon cast Lincoln in a favorable light: Our enduring impression of the bookish and thoughtful, yet strapping and affable young Lincoln comes largely from Herndon, and we have relished this portrait of young Abe ever since. On the other hand, Herndon included some claims about Lincoln that, in The New York Times' assessment, "a man of good taste would leave unsaid" (xxxiii). Most notably, Herndon questioned the legitimacy of Lincoln's mother, dished on Lincoln's youthful love affairs, painted a tumultuous picture of Lincoln's domestic life with Mary Todd, and suggested that Lincoln had not been an orthodox Christian. Consequently, in the years following the biography's release, the work drew the ire of many people, including Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln. In the twentieth century, scholars criticized the biography on the basis of the questionable reliability of Herndon's informants, whose accounts of Lincoln came largely from memory.

Wilson and Davis address all of these issues head on, both in their introduction and their extensive notations, discussing and citing the scholarly literature regarding these controversies. Additionally—and most impressively—they cite their previously published volume, Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (University of Illinois Press, 1998), to identify places where Herndon embellished an informant's account or where Weik altered Herndon's intended meaning by massaging his proposed language. Paired with their previous volume, Wilson and Davis's new edition of Herndon's Lincoln will not only help scholars scrutinize the biography itself, but will also afford them the remarkable opportunity to see how the memory of one of America's greatest presidents was constructed.