Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln

by Douglas L Wilson (Editor), Rodney O. Davis (Editor), Terry Wilson (Editor)

Overview

Winner of the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award

More than 600 letters and interviews providing information about Abraham Lincoln's prepolitical and prelegal careers are included in this volume, a priceless collection never before available in one place.

Women to whom Lincoln proposed marriage, political allies and adversaries, judges and fellow attorneys, longtime comrades, erstwhile friends—all speak out here in words first gathered by William H. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, between 1865 and 1890. Historian David Herbert Donald has called Herndon's materials "the basic source for Abraham Lincoln's early years."

Some of those Herndon questioned were illiterate; others could read but barely write. Completion of this undertaking took the editors to three major collections for the mammoth task of transcribing documents that often were nearly illegible.

Invaluable to Lincoln scholars and intriguing to anyone curious about Lincoln and his times, the book includes an introduction, scholarly annotations, a registry of the informants, and a detailed topical index.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252085635
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	08/15/2020
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	864
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 2.50(d)

About the Author

Douglas L. Wilson is the director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois. Rodney O. Davis (d. 2019) was co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College. They are the coeditors of Lincoln's Confidant: The Life of Noah Brooks, Herndon on Lincoln: Letters, Herndon's Lincoln, and The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xiii

Editorial Note xxv

Short Citations and Abbreviations xxix

Herndon's Informants: The Texts

1 Letters, Interviews, and Statements Collected by William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, 1865-92 3

2 Informant Testimony Reported in Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (1889) 707

3 Informant Testimony Reported in William H. Herndon's Letters to Jesse W. Weik 713

4 Informant Testimony Reported in Jesse W. Weik's The Real Lincoln (1922) 725

Register of Informants 737

Appendix: Brief Outline of the Joseph Hanks Family, by Paul H. Verduin 779

Index 785

Editorial Reviews

"[Wilson and Davis] have done a service of inestimable value to historians by the complete, accurately transcribed, indexed, and annotated edition of the written accounts of Herndon's interviews with 264 people. . . . It is a monumental achievement of scholarship. That is true not simply because of the editorial skill and effort required to complete it, but mainly because this material is the basis for most of what we know about the first half of Lincoln's life."
—James M. McPherson, New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

Many authors have written trilogies, but Douglas L. Wilson may be the first to publish all three volumes within a few months of each other. Although there is some overlap, they fit together like the tiles of a mosaic to provide a fuller portrait than previously existed of Abraham Lincoln during his formative years in New Salem and Springfield....One can scarcely imagine the countless hours of eye-straining, nerve-agitating, mind-challenging labor necessary to produce this book. It is a monumental achievement of scholarship. -- James M.McPherson, The New York Review of Books

James M. McPherson