William H. Herndon - Herndon on Lincoln: Letters

The Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College has been engaged in a long-standing project to make accessible the many contributions of William H. Herndon to the study of his law partner, Abraham Lincoln. The impetus for the project was the editors concern that a great many of the letters and interviews about Lincoln that Herndon had collected from others were either still unpublished or available only in poorly edited and unreliable texts. The effort to compile and edit all these informant materials culminated in the publication in 1998 of Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln. Drawing on what had been learned in this process about Herndon's efforts as a collector of information and his subsequent collaboration with Jesse W. Weik, the editors next produced an annotated edition of Herndon and Weik's influential biography, Herndon's Lincoln (2006).

The present volume is the first of a two-volume work, Herndon on Lincoln, that will form the conclusion to the series; it is drawn exclusively from letters written by Herndon himself. The second volume will include Herndon's lectures and other writing about Lincoln. Together, these two volumes will make available the very substantial body of writing, much of it scattered or previously unpublished, that constitutes what Herndon had to say about his law partner beyond the precincts of the famous biography.

As Herndon was a prolific letter writer, and his law partner a frequent subject, the number of Herndon's letters that make some mention of Lincoln is quite large, but the Herndon letters and portions thereof included in the present volume constitute a more circumscribed collection, having been selected because they are believed to convey, with few exceptions, something actually indicative about Abraham Lincoln, whether information, anecdote, opinion, or speculation.

As Herndon typically wrote lengthy letters that often address a range of topics, the editors have opted to include here only those portions that concern Lincoln. Admittedly, this raises questions about whether Herndon's remarks appear out of context, and while the editors have attempted to guard against this possibility, the reader is cautioned accordingly. The reader should also note that while the number of letters from Herndon to his collaborator, Jesse W. Weik, relating to work on their joint biography is large enough to fill a substantial book, only those portions that, in the editors judgment, impart information or opinion about Lincoln are included. As will be apparent, such a distinction can prove difficult to make, and the editors are willing to concede that, in some cases, there may well be reasonable grounds for disagreement as to what has been included or left out.

Many of the letters in this volume are published for the first time, but the collection is by no means exhaustive. While the editors performed a national search of repositories and consequently turned up many previously unknown documents, they found references also to others that could not be located but probably still exist. For example, Herndon wrote a good many letters to newspapers, and not all of those that he himself mentions have been located.

Many of Herndon's letters that have already appearedsuch as those in Emmanuel Hertz's The Hidden Lincoln (1938)are presented here for the first time in a carefully edited text.

Perhaps because Hertz proclaimed in his introduction, Here at last is Herndon's complete evidence, the idea took root among scholars and other students of Lincoln that The Hidden Lincoln had pretty well exhausted the field. When complete, the contents of Herndon on Lincoln, especially when combined with that of Herndon's Informants, will demonstrate the magnitude of Hertz's miscalculation.

. Hertz.

. Angle, 97.

. Hertz, 23738.

. The editors are indebted to John M. Hoffman for information about Hertz's materials and their acquisition by the University of Illinois.