Lincoln's Herndon

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Lincolns Herndon BY DAVID DONALD INTRODUCTION BY CARL SANDBURG 1948 ALFRED A KNOPF NEW YORK Copyright 1948 by ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages and reproduce not more than three illustrations in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Manufactured in the United States of America. Published simul taneously in Canada by The Ryerson Press. PRINTED BY THE HADDQN CRAFTSMEN, SCRANTON, PA. T O The Randalls Introduction by Carl Sandburg THAN an incident and rather like an event it is when at last there arrives a competent book-length biography of William H. Hern don. In the Lincolniana field of students, scholars, authorities and col lectors, one has heard, for years on years, so often the query, When is someone going to do the life of Bill Herndon Isnt it about time Now the question is out. A young man little beyond the middle twen ties in age has toiled and wrought and gone to all the known places where the answers may be and any future scrupulous biographer of Lincolns law partner will have to go to the same places, use the same source materials, and arrive at much the same end result of judgments and portraiture. And that a young man born and raised in the State of Mississippi, on a plantation of thousands of acres, with more than a score of Negro field hands, should migrate to Illinois and in the course of his scholar ship write a comprehensive and vivid study of a striding and vehement Republican agitator against slavery extension this is an American phenomenon and some sort of betokening. The author tells us, This isthe first book-length biography of Herndon. We might add that it is a portrait in extenso of an extraor dinarily picturesque individual, a man often lovable and not infre quently wilful and cantankerous, who would have interest for us, even fascination, entirely aside from his close association with a titanic his torical figure. We may add further that we gather herein a detailed account of how one of the most strangely made of all biographies came to be written across years of weaving it piece by piece of how when at last it found a publisher it met tribulations and miseries enough to sink any ordinary book and leave it lost and forgotten of vii Introduction how the book survives and there have been twenty-five different edi tion, issues and printings. Interwoven through the winding and shad owed tale of how a book, Herndon s Lincoln, came to be made and offered to a suspicious and hazardous readership, we find the materials shaping portraits for us, living figures of men and women of the pio neers midwest prairie. The man Herndon comes bold and plain, the hovering silhouette of Lincoln in the background often moving to the fore in a speaking likeness and reality. And, too, occasionally we pause for a fleeting glimpse of, and a surmise about, the author of Lincolns Herndon, because of the spirit of his interpretations or presentations of stormy clashing disputative actors in the dramas of democracy in a new and young country. Where possible or practical Donald lets his narrative tell itself. He quotes much. With skill he lets the chosen significant lines from let ters, diaries, journals, newspapers, give light on acts and motives. When he does analyze or probe, it is after he has setforth fact and probability in formidable and unprecedented measure. Then as to his personal finding or viewpoint you can take it or leave it. Many will say of his work that it is the most sympathetic approach yet made to Hern don, the man, the witness, on a large scale and with relentless examina tion of all available materials bearing on the role of Herndon as either a deliberate and sloven myth-maker or an anxious and conscientious truth-teller...