"I do not know how I can aid you. You [Herndon] knew Mr. Lincoln far better than I did, though I knew him well; and you have served up his leading characteristics in a way that I should despair of doing, if I should try. I have only one thing to ask: that you do not give Calvinistic theology a chance to claim him as one of its saints and martyrs. He went to the Old-School Church; but, in spite of that outward assent to the horrible dogmas of the sect, I have reason from himself to know that his 'vital purity,' if that means belief in the impossible, was of a negative sort."—Lamon, Life of Lincoln, pp. 489-90.
Hon. David Davis was quoted as saying:
"I do not know anything about Lincoln's religion, and do not think anybody knew. The idea that Lincoln talked to a stranger about his religion or religious views, or made such speeches, remarks, etc., about it as are published, is to me absurd. I knew the man so well: he was the most reticent, secretive man I ever saw, or expect to see. He had no faith, in the Christian sense of the term,—had faith in laws, principles, causes, and effects—philosophically: you [Herndon] know more about his religion than any man. You ought to know it, of course."—Lamon, Life of Lincoln, p. 489.
Lamon also printed a letter from James H. Matheny, who had been Lincoln's "best man" at his wedding, and a long-time and intimate friend. It would be included in this chapter, as it is to be referred to in the next, but it is reserved for a more important use in the chapter on "Lincoln's Burnt Book."
Lamon's Life of Lincoln lashed into greater fury the tempest that already raged concerning Lincoln's religious faith. Nor was this the only criticism upon it. It was the first of the Lives of Lincoln to which the later term of "muckraking" might have been applied, and its spirit of hostility is best accounted for by the fact that its real author was not Lamon but Black, who not only entertained all the local prejudice which one element in Springfield had against Lincoln, but represented also a bitter political hostility, Black's father having been a member of Buchanan's Cabinet. Indeed there is alleged to have been a three-cornered and acrimonious dispute among the publishers, Lamon, and Black concerning an omitted chapter on Buchanan's administration which had something to do with one aspect of the book's financial failure. Black and Lamon and the publishers all lost money and the book was a financial disaster.
Notwithstanding its tone of astonishing bitterness against Lincoln, its shocking bad taste and its perverted viewpoint, Lamon's biography is a valuable source of information. Concerning it John Hay wrote to Lamon, "Nothing heretofore printed can compare with it in interest, and from the nature of the case all subsequent writers will have to come to you for a large class of facts."
In 1895 Lamon's daughter Dorothy, subsequently Mrs. Teillard, published a book of "Recollections" of Lincoln by her father, with no objectionable matter, and with a considerable number of valuable incidents. But this later book, while avoiding the occasions of criticism which the first book evoked, added little to the character study which the first volume, with all its manifold defects, had contained.
Lamon was a very different man from Lincoln—so different that men who knew them both wondered at Lincoln's fondness for him. And he knew Lincoln intimately. But he was not capable of interpreting the best that was in Lincoln.