The Soul of Abraham Lincoln

by William E. Barton

The second was entitled "Abraham Lincoln; Miss Ann Rutledge; New Salem; the Poem." It was delivered in the old Sangamon County court house in Springfield in November, 1866, and was based on notes which Herndon had recently made on a visit to New Salem, Sunday and Monday, October 14-15, 1866. It contains the material out of which all subsequent romantic works about Lincoln and Ann Rutledge have been woven. It was heard by a small audience, greeted with manifest disapproval, and came near to being hopelessly lost; but is preserved in a limited edition published by H. E. Barker, Springfield. This edition is quoted in part in the foregoing pages, with special reference to Herndon's personal touch with New Salem.

The third was on "The Religion of Abraham Lincoln," and was called out by the Holland biography and the Bateman interview. Of this and the first, Mr. Barker says in his preface to the Ann Rutledge lecture, that they "were allowed to perish for lack of permanence in printed form. Their subject-matter, however, was embodied in the extended Life of Lincoln published in 1872 by Ward H. Lamon, and in the still later Life of Lincoln written and published by Mr. Herndon in 1889."

This material is quoted practically in extenso in the pages of this volume, no important statement having been omitted.

Herndon's regret increased that he had sold to Lamon the copies of his papers. He was in a position where he was getting most of the blame for what Lamon had written, and he was not wholly in sympathy with Lamon's and especially with Black's point of view. Lamon's proposed new edition, with the new volume that was to have covered the years of Lincoln's Presidency, did not materialize. There was probably no publisher who dared undertake it. At length Herndon got to work on his own biography of Lincoln, and was fortunate in associating with himself Mr. Jesse W. Weik, who helped him to complete it. The work was published in 1889 by Belford, Clarke, & Company, of Chicago, and made its appearance in three volumes. Soon after its publication the firm failed. The books were hawked about for a song, the greater part of the edition was unsold, and the balance of the edition is alleged to have been bought up by Lincoln's friends and destroyed. The author of this book paid $35.00 for his set, and could sell it at a profit.

It is a great pity that Herndon had not learned his lesson from the fate of Lamon's book. If he had omitted some of the objectionable matter, he would have made for himself a great name. Even as it was, he did a great piece of work: but he gained neither money nor commendation.

In 1892, Appletons brought out a new edition in two volumes, with some matter omitted, and some new matter by Horace White, and that edition met with favor. But Herndon did not live to see it. He died, poor and battle-scarred, denounced as the maligner of the man he loved.

In his younger days, Herndon drank, and it is alleged that in his later life he used morphine. It is said that he wanted an appointment to a Government Land Office, but that Lincoln, knowing his weakness, did not appoint him, and that this had some share in his feeling, which he still thought to be one of reverence for Lincoln, but which was unconsciously tinged with resentment. To this it is answered that Lincoln did offer Herndon an appointment which Herndon declined: but it was not a very attractive appointment, and there is good reason to believe that Herndon was disappointed, and that he knew Lincoln's reason.

The name which Herndon applied to Lincoln he accepted for himself, that of infidel. Yet it is fair to ask whether this was a just term as applied to Herndon himself. In his lecture on Ann Rutledge, he had occasion to defend himself in advance for views which he knew would be heard with suspicion, and which, indeed, like almost everything he said and did, had the unfortunate quality of increasing his unpopularity, he said:

"You know my Religion, my Philosophy: That the highest thought and acts of the human soul and its religious sphere are to think, love, obey, and worship God, by thinking freely, by loving, teaching, doing good to, and elevating mankind. My first duty is to God, then to mankind, and then to the individual man or woman."—Lecture on Ann Rutledge, pp. 9-10.

One cannot help regretting that the man who had thus defined his own religion should ever have been led to think himself or any other man whom he supposed to be like-minded an infidel.