"Some of the school children had picked up the letter and handed it to Lincoln. Hill and Lincoln were talking about it, when Hill snatched the letter from Lincoln and put it into the fire. The letter was respecting a young lady, Miss Ann Rutledge, for whom all three of these gentlemen seemed to have respect."
Graham lived in New Salem at the time that this incident occurred. Neither Herndon nor Matheny lived there. Graham left New Salem when it ceased to be a town, and spent the remainder of his life among the people who had been his neighbors in New Salem and who became residents with him in the near-by town of Petersburg. Graham had direct access to the facts.
The reason why it was not much talked about is evident enough. Hill, McNamur, and Lincoln all married, and their wives and children were living not far from where these events occurred. The triangular misunderstanding of three young men about a young woman who had died many years before was a matter for quiet gossip on the part of the older inhabitants, but it did not come to the general knowledge of the public until Herndon delivered his unwelcome lecture on Ann Rutledge. In some things he learned and told the truth. But his material had been too hastily gathered, and was too quickly rushed into a lecture to be reliable in all respects, and it requires about four titles to cover its diversified and unstratified subject-matter.
Our knowledge of the burnt book is, therefore, a matter in which we come finally to the remote recollection of James Matheny on the one hand, who never saw the book, and who manifestly misunderstood some parts of the story, and the close and intimate knowledge of Mentor Graham on the other. Lincoln apparently told Matheny in confidence that he while he was living in Salem wrote an essay against the Christian religion, and Matheny regarded it as a secret but told it to Herndon. Herndon heard some gossip about a manuscript which Hill burned, and thought it to have been the same. Mentor Graham had reliable information as to what it was that Hill burned, and moreover knew from his own personal knowledge that Lincoln wrote a very different manuscript than the one of which he told Matheny, for he himself had read it, and remembered its general nature.
Why Lincoln wrote on both sides of the same subject we do not know and it is not necessary to ask. He may have been practicing his skill in debating; he may have held one view at one time and another at another; he may have been uncertain what view he really held and have been seeking to formulate his opinions. It would not be fair to judge his mature opinion by our scant knowledge of what was contained in either of these two manuscripts. But the thing which should be remembered is that we know more about the book in favor of Christianity than we know of the book against it. Mentor Graham was a truthful and a competent witness and he had both seen and read the book, which is not true of anyone through whom we have knowledge of the other essay.
We are not at liberty to draw the sharp distinction which sometimes has been drawn against the rampant infidelity of Lincoln's earlier years and the supposed orthodoxy of his mature life. Neither of these may have been as hard and fast as have sometimes been assumed. It is quite possible that Abraham Lincoln never became a Christian of the type who could have expressed his faith in the terms of the Bateman interview; it is equally possible that even in those callow years when he was reading Tom Paine and Volney and writing sub-sophomoric effusions on things he knew little about, the germ of religious faith was actually present even in his doubt.
CHAPTER XIII
"THE CHRISTIAN'S DEFENCE"