[iii-26] Caton, 13; Illinois Reports, xxxvii, 13.
[iii-27] A statement made by Judge David Davis.
[iii-28] Hill, 211-12.
[iii-29] Letter of Hon. Shelby M. Cullom to the author; Bateman, 13-15. See, also, Hill, 236-37; and T. W. S. Kidd, the crier of the court, in Tarbell, i, 273-75.
[iii-30] Judge Lawrence Weldon, quoted in Hill, 212-15.
[iii-31] A letter said to have been written by Lincoln to Mrs. Armstrong, offering her his services, is published in Selby (254), and Hobson (41-42); yet neither of these writers, responding to inquiries by the author, has been able to throw any light on the question of its authenticity. According to other biographers, a communication of such a nature was received by Mrs. Armstrong, who stated, as they allege, that it had been lost. On the other hand, “Duff” himself, in his detailed narrative, makes no reference to a letter from Mr. Lincoln; and John, his younger brother, in an equally full account of the affair, taken down for the author by Thomas D. Masters of Springfield, Illinois, expresses the opinion that no written message on the subject was ever received. The Masters notes concerning this topic read:—
“Mr. Armstrong has no recollection of hearing of any letter being written by Mr. Lincoln to his mother, at the time his brother got into the trouble in question; and he requests me to say to you that he is quite sure that had such a letter been written he would have known of it. He points out to me that his mother was unable to read, and in that early day, had she received a letter from a man such as Lincoln then was,—a much-talked-about lawyer in Springfield,—that by reason of the exigencies of the occasion, and the interest such a letter would have excited in the household, he certainly would have known of it. His recollection is that his mother, probably after the cause was venued to Cass County, made a trip to Springfield, of course, knowing Mr. Lincoln, and feeling friendly to him, and having confidence in him, for the purpose of employing him to assist in the defense of her son at Beardstown.”
[iii-32] A singular parallel presents itself in ancient Athenian history, where Alcibiades and his friends were charged, as Plutarch relates, with mutilating the images of Mercury, on a certain night. When one of the informers was asked how he managed to recognize the features of the accused in the darkness, he answered,—“I saw them by the light of the moon,”—a palpable misstatement, as the affair happened at the time of a new moon which gave practically no light. This anecdote, however, could hardly have prompted Lincoln to consult an almanac in the Armstrong case, because he had not read Plutarch’s Lives at the time of that trial, and only did so two years later.
[iii-33] Judge Abram Bergen, quoted by James L. King, in the North American Review, February, 1898, pp. 193-94. Bergen’s testimony should be supplemented by a statement which “Duff” Armstrong himself made, in his respectable old age, to J. McCan Davis. It was published in the New York Sun of June 7, 1896. According to this report Armstrong then declared: “The almanac used by Lincoln was one which my cousin, Jake Jones, furnished him. On the morning of the trial I was taken outside the court-room to talk to Lincoln. Jake Jones was with us. Lincoln said he wanted an almanac for 1857. Jake went right off and got one, and brought it to ‘Uncle Abe.’ It was an almanac for the proper year, and there was no fraud about it.”