Part 31

C. W. Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. 1863.

Dabney. Memoir of a Narrative Received from Colonel John B. Baldwin, of Staunton, touching the Origin of the War. By Reverend R. L. Dabney, D. D., Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. 1. 1876.

Davis. Rise and Fail of the Confederate Government. By Jefferson Davis. 2 vols. 1881.

Dunning. Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics. By William A. Dunning. 1898.

Field. Life of David Dudley Field. By Henry M. Field. 1898.

Flower. Edwin McMasters Stanton. By Frank Abial Flower. 1902.

Fry. Military Miscellanies. By James B. Fry. 1889.

Galaxy. The History of Emancipation. By Gideon Welles. The Galaxy, XIV, 838-851.

Gilmore. Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. By James R. Gilmore. 1899.

Gilmore, Atlantic. A Suppressed Chapter of History. By James R. Gilmore, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1887.

Globe. Congressional Globe, Containing the Debates and Proceedings. 1834-1873.

Godwin. Biography of William Cullen Bryant. By Parke Godwin.

1883. Gore. The Boyhood of Abraham Lincoln. By J. Rogers Gore. 1921.

Gorham. Life and Public Services of Edwin M. Stanton. By George C. Gorham. 2 vols. 1899.

Grant. Personal Memoirs. By Ulysses S. Grant. 2 vols. 1886.

Greeley. The American Conflict. By Horace Greeley. 2 vols. 1864-1867.

Gurowski. Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862. By Adam Gurowski. 1862.

Hanks. Nancy Hanks. By Caroline Hanks Hitchcock. 1900.

Harris. Public Life of Zachary Chandler. By W. C. Harris, Michigan Historical Commission. 1917.

Hart. Salmon Portland Chase. By Albert Bushnell Hart. 1899.

Hay MS. Diary of John Hay. The war period is covered by three volumes of manuscript. Photostat copies in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, accessible only by special permission.

Hay, Century. Life in the White House in the Time of Lincoln. By John Hay, Century Magazine, November, 1890.

The New York Herald.

Herndon. Herndon's Lincoln. The True Story of a Great Life: The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln. By W. H. Herndon and J. W. Weik. 3 vols. (paged continuously). 1890.

Hill. Lincoln the Lawyer. By Frederick Trevers Hill 1906.

Hitchcock. Fifty Years in Camp and Field. Diary of Major-General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, U. S. A. Edited by W. Croffut. 1909.

Johnson. Stephen A. Douglas. By Allen Johnson. 1908.

The Journal of the Virginia Convention. 1861.

Julian. Political Recollections 1840-1872. By George W. Julian. 1884.

Kelley. Lincoln and Stanton. By W. D. Kelley. 1885.

Lamon. The Life of Abraham Lincoln. By Ward H. Lamon. 1872.

Letters. Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln. Now first brought together by Gilbert A. Tracy. 1917.

Lieber. Life and Letters of Francis Lieber. Edited by Thomas S. Perry, 1882.

Lincoln. Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln. Edited by John G. Nicolay and John Hay. 2 vols. New and enlarged edition. 12 volumes. 1905. (All references here are to the Colter edition.)

McCarthy. Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction. By Charles M. McCarthy, 1901.

McClure. Abraham Lincoln and Men of War Times. By A. K. McClure. 1892.

Merriam. Life and Times of Samuel Bowles. By G. S. Merriam. 2 vols. 1885.

Munford. Virginia's Attitude toward Slavery and Secession. By Beverley B. Munford. 1910.

Moore. A Digest of International Law. By John Bassett Moore. 8 vols. 1906.

Newton. Lincoln and Herndon. By Joseph Fort Newton. 1910.

Nicolay. A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln. By John G. Nicolay. 1902.

Nicolay, Cambridge. The Cambridge Modern History: Volume VII.

The United States. By various authors. 1903.

Miss Nicolay. Personal Traits of Abraham Lincoln. By Helen Nicolay. 1912.

N. and H. Abraham Lincoln: A History. By John G. Nicolay and John Hay. 10 vols. 1890.

N. P. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies. First series. 27 vols. 1895-1917.

O. P. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 128 vols. 1880-1901.

Outbreak. The Outbreak of the Rebellion. By John G. Nicolay. 1881.

Own Story. McClellan's Own Story. By George B. McClellan. 1887.

Paternity. The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln. By William Eleazer Barton. 1920.

Pearson. Life of John A. Andrew. By Henry G. Pearson. 2 vols. 1904.

Pierce. Memoirs and Letters of Charles Sumner. By Edward Lillie Pierce. 4 vols. 1877-1893.

Porter. In Memory of General Charles P. Stone. By Fitz John Porter. 1887.

Public Man. Diary of a Public Man. Anonymous. North American Review. 1879.

Rankin. Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln. By Henry B. Rankin. 1916.

Raymond. Journal of Henry J. Raymond. Edited by Henry W. Raymond. Scribner's Magazine. 1879-1880.

Recollections. Recollections of Abraham Lincoln. By Ward Hill Lamon. 1911.

Reminiscences. Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, by Distinguished

Men of his Time. Edited by Allen Thorndyke Rice. 1886.

Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, first session, Thirty-Ninth Congress.

Rhodes. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. By James Ford Rhodes. 8 vols. 1893-1920.

Riddle. Recollections of War Times. By A. G. Riddle. 1895.

Schrugham. The Peaceful Americans of 1860. By Mary Schrugham. 1922.

Schure. Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schure. Selected and edited by Frederick Bancroft. 1913.

Scott. Memoirs of Lieutenant General Scott, LL.D. Written by himself. 2 vols. 1864.

Seward. Works of William H. Seward. 5 vols. 1884.

Sherman. Memoirs of William T. Sherman. By himself. 2 vols. 1886. Sherman Letters.

Letters of John Sherman and W. T. Sherman. Edited by Rachel Sherman Thorndike. 1894.

Southern Historical Society Papers.

Stephens. Constitutional View of the Late War between the States. By Alexander H. Stephens. 2 vols. 1869-1870.

Stoddard. Inside the White House in War Times. By William O. Stoddard. 1890.

Stories. "Abe" Lincoln's Yarns and Stories. With introduction and anecdotes by Colonel Alexander McClure. 1901.

The New York Sun.

Swinton. Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac. By William Swinton. 1866.

Tarbell. The Life of Abraham Lincoln. By Ida M. Tarbell. New edition. 2 vols. 1917.

Thayer. The Life and Letters of John Hay. By William Roscoe Thayer. 2 vols. 1915.

The New York Times.

The New York Tribune.

Tyler. Letters and Times of the Tylers. By Lyon G. Tyler. 3 vols. 1884-1896.

Van Santvoord. A Reception by President Lincoln. By C. J. Van Santvoord. Century Magazine, Feb., 1883.

Villard. Memoirs of Henry Villard. 2 vols. 1902.

Wade. Life of Benjamin F. Wade. By A. G. Riddle. 1886.

Warden. Account of the Private Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase. By R. B. Warden. 1874.

Welles. Diary of Gideon Welles. Edited by J. T. Morse, Jr. 3 vols. 1911.

White. Life of Lyman Trumbull. By Horace White. 1913.

Woodburn. The Life of Thaddeus Stevens. By James Albert Woodburn. 1913.

NOTES

I. THE CHILD OF THE FOREST.

1. Herndon, 1-7, 11-14; 1, anon, 13; N. and H., 1, 23-27. This is the version of his origin accepted by Lincoln. He believed that his mother was the illegitimate daughter of a Virginia planter and traced to that doubtful source "all the qualities that distinguished him from other members" of his immediate family. Herndon, 3. His secretaries are silent upon the subject. Recently the story has been challenged. Mrs. Caroline Hanks Hitchcock, who identifies the Hanks family of Kentucky with a lost branch of a New England family, has collected evidence which tends to show that Nancy was the legitimate daughter of a certain Joseph H. Hanks, who was father of Joseph the carpenter, and that Nancy was not the niece but the younger sister of the "uncle" who figures in the older version, the man with whom Thomas Lincoln worked. Nancy and Thomas appear to have been cousins through their mothers. Mrs. Hitchcock argues the case with care and ability in a little book entitled Nancy Hanks. However, she is not altogether sustained by W. E. Barton, The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln.

Scandal has busied itself with the parents of Lincoln in another way. It has been widely asserted that he was himself illegitimate. A variety of shameful paternities have been assigned to him, some palpably absurd. The chief argument of the lovers of this scandal was once the lack of a known record of the marriage of his parents. Around this fact grew up the story of a marriage of concealment with Thomas Lincoln as the easy-going accomplice. The discovery of the marriage record fixing the date and demonstrating that Abraham must have been the second child gave this scandal its quietus. N. and H., 1, 23-24; Hanks, 59-67; Herndon, 5-6; Lincoln and Herndon, 321. The last important book on the subject is Barton, The Paternity of Abraham Lincoln.

2. N. and H., 1-13.

3. Lamon, 13; N. and H., 1, 25.

4. N. and H., 1, 25.

5. Gore, 221-225.

6. Herndon, 15.

7. Gore, 66, 70-74, 79, 83-84, 116, 151-154, 204, 226-230, for all this group of anecdotes.

The evidence with regard to all the early part of Lincoln's life is peculiar in this, that it is reminiscence not written down until the subject had become famous. Dogmatic certainty with regard to the details is scarcely possible. The best one can do in weighing any of the versions of his early days is to inquire closely as to whether all its parts bang naturally together, whether they really cohere. There is a body of anecdotes told by an old mountaineer, Austin Gollaher, who knew Lincoln as a boy, and these have been collected and recently put into print. Of course, they are not "documented" evidence. Some students are for brushing them aside. But there is one important argument in their favor. They are coherent; the boy they describe is a real person and his personality is sustained. If he is a fiction and not a memory, the old mountaineer was a literary artist--far more the artist than one finds it easy to believe.

8. Gore, 84-95; Lamon, 16; Herndon, 16.

9. Gore, 181-182, 296, 303-316; Lamon, 19-20; N. and H., I, 28-29.

II. THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH.

1. N. and H., I, 32-34.

2. Lamon, 33-38, 51-52, 61-63; N. and H., 1, 34-36.

3. N. and H., 1, 40.

4. Lamon, 38, 40, 55.

5. Reminiscences, 54, 428.

III. A VILLAGE LEADER.

1. N. and H., 1, 45-46, 70-72; Herndon, 67, 69, 72.

2. Lamon, 81-82; Herndon, 75-76.

3. Lincoln, 1, 1-9.

4. Lamon, 125-126; Herndon, 104.

5. Herndon, 117-118.

6. N. and H., 1, 109.

7. Stories, 94.

8. Herndon, 118-123.

9. Lamon, 159-164; Herndon, 128-138; Rankin, 61-95.

10. Lamon, 164.

11. Lamon, 164-165; Rankin, 95.

IV. REVELATIONS.

1. Riddle, 337.

2. Herndon, 436.

3. N. and H., I, 138.

4. Lincoln, I, 51-52.

5. McClure, 65.

6. Herndon, 184.185.

7. Anon, 172-183; Herndon, 143-150, 161; Lincoln, 1, 87-92.

8. Gossip has preserved a melodramatic tale with regard to Lincoln's marriage. It describes the bride to be, waiting, arrayed, in tense expectation deepening into alarm; the guests assembled, wondering, while the hour appointed passes by and the ceremony does not begin; the failure of the prospective bridegroom to appear; the scattering of the company, amazed, their tongues wagging. The explanation offered is an attack of insanity. Herndon, 215; I,anon, 239-242. As might be expected Lincoln's secretaries who see him always in a halo give no hint of such an event. It has become a controversial scandal. Is it a fact or a myth? Miss Tarbell made herself the champion of the mythical explanation and collected a great deal of evidence that makes it hard to accept the story as a fact Tarbell, I, Chap. XI. Still later a very sane memoirist, Henry B. Rankin, who knew Lincoln, and is not at all an apologist, takes the same view. His most effective argument is that such an event could not have occurred in the little country town of Springfield without becoming at the time the common property of all the gossips. The evidence is bewildering. I find myself unable to accept the disappointed wedding guests as established facts, even though the latest student of Herndon has no doubts. Lincoln and Herndon, 321-322. But whether the broken marriage story is true or false there is no doubt that Lincoln passed through a desolating inward experience about "the fatal first of January"; that it was related to the breaking of his engagement; and that for a time his sufferings were intense. The letters to Speed are the sufficient evidence. Lincoln, I, 175; 182-189; 210-219; 240; 261; 267-269. The prompt explanation of insanity may be cast aside, one of those foolish delusions of shallow people to whom all abnormal conditions are of the same nature as all others. Lincoln wrote to a noted Western physician, Doctor Drake of Cincinnati, with regard to his "case"--that is, his nervous breakdown--and Doctor Drake replied but refused to prescribe without an interview. Lamon, 244.

V. PROSPERITY.

1. Carpenter, 304-305.

2. Lamon, 243, 252-269; Herndon, 226-243, 248-251; N. and H., 201, 203-12.

3. A great many recollections of Lincoln attempt to describe him. Except in a large and general way most of them show that lack of definite visualization which characterizes the memories of the careless observer. His height, his bony figure, his awkwardness, the rudely chiseled features, the mystery in his eyes, the kindliness of his expression, these are the elements of the popular portrait. Now and then a closer observer has added a detail. Witness the masterly comment of Walt Whitman. Herndon's account of Lincoln speaking has the earmarks of accuracy. The attempt by the portrait painter, Carpenter, to render him in words is quoted later in this volume. Carpenter, 217-218. Unfortunately he was never painted by an artist of great originality, by one who was equal to his opportunity. My authority for the texture of his skin is a lady of unusual closeness of observation, the late Mrs. M. T. W. Curwen of Cincinnati, who saw him in 1861 in the private car of the president of the Indianapolis and Cincinnati railroad. An exhaustive study of the portraits of Lincoln is in preparation by Mr. Winfred Porter Truesdell, who has a valuable paper on the subject in The Print Connoisseur, for March, 1921.

4. Herndon, 264.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., 515.

7. A vital question to the biographer of Lincoln is the credibility of Herndon. He has been accused of capitalizing his relation with Lincoln and producing a sensational image for commercial purposes. Though his Life did not appear until 1890 when the official work of Nicolay and Hay was in print, he had been lecturing and corresponding upon Lincoln for nearly twenty-five years. The "sensational" first edition of his Life produced a storm of protest. The book was promptly recalled, worked over, toned down, and reissued "expurgated" in 1892.

Such biographers as Miss Tarbell appear to regard Herndon as a mere romancer. The well poised Lincoln and Herndon recently published by Joseph Fort Newton holds what I feel compelled to regard as a sounder view; namely, that while Herndon was at times reckless and at times biased, nevertheless he is in the main to be relied upon.

Three things are to be borne in mind: Herndon was a literary man by nature; but he was not by training a developed artist; he was a romantic of the full flood of American romanticism and there are traceable in him the methods of romantic portraiture. Had he been an Elizabethan one can imagine him laboring hard with great pride over an inferior "Tamburlane the Great"--and perhaps not knowing that it was inferior. Furthermore, he had not, before the storm broke on him, any realization of the existence in America of another school of portraiture, the heroic--conventual, that could not understand the romantic. If Herndon strengthened as much as possible the contrasts of his subject--such as the contrast between the sordidness of Lincoln's origin and the loftiness of his thought--he felt that by so doing he was merely rendering his subject in its most brilliant aspect, giving to it the largest degree of significance. A third consideration is Herndon's enthusiasm for the agnostic deism that was rampant in America in his day. Perhaps this causes his romanticism to slip a cog, to run at times on a side-track, to become the servant of his religious partisanship. In three words the faults of Herndon are exaggeration, literalness and exploitiveness.

But all these are faults of degree which the careful student can allow for. By "checking up" all the parts of Herndon that it is possible to check up one can arrive at a pretty confident belief that one knows how to divest the image he creates of its occasional unrealities. When one does so, the strongest argument for relying cautiously, watchfully, upon Herndon appears. The Lincoln thus revealed, though only a character sketch, is coherent. And it stands the test of comparison in detail with the Lincolns of other, less romantic, observers. That is to say, with all his faults, Herndon has the inner something that will enable the diverse impressions of Lincoln, always threatening to become irreconcilable, to hang together and out of their very incongruity to invoke a person that is not incongruous. And herein, in this touchstone so to speak is Herndon's value.

8. Herndon, 265.

9. Lamon, 51.

10. Lincoln, I, 35-SO.

11. The reader who would know the argument against Herndon (436-446) and Lamon (486-502) on the subject of Lincoln's early religion is referred to The Soul of Abraham Lincoln, by William Eleazer Barton. It is to be observed that the present study is never dogmatic about Lincoln's religion in its early phases. And when Herndon and Lamon generalize about his religious life, it must be remembered that they are thinking of him as they knew him in Illinois. Herndon had no familiarity with him after he went to Washington. Lamon could not have seen very much of him--no one but his secretaries and his wife did. And his taciturnity must be borne in mind. Nicolay has recorded that he did not know what Lincoln believed. Lamon, 492. That Lincoln was vaguely a deist in the 'forties--so far as he had any theology at all--may be true. But it is a rash leap to a conclusion to assume that his state of mind even then was the same thing as the impression it made on so practical, bard-headed, unpoetical a character as Lamon; or on so combatively imaginative but wholly unmystical a mind as Herndon's. Neither of them seems to have any understanding of those agonies of spirit through which Lincoln subsequently passed which will appear in the account of the year 1862. See also Miss Nicolay, 384-386. There is a multitude of pronouncements on Lincoln's religion, most of them superficial.

12. Lincoln, I, 206.

13. Nicolay, 73-74; N. and H., 1, 242; Lamon, 275-277.

14. Lamon, 277-278; Herndon, 272-273; N. and H., 1, 245-249.

VI. UNSATISFYING RECOGNITION.

1. N. and H., I, 28, 28&

2. Tarbell, 1, 211.

3. Ibid., 210-211.

4. Herndon, 114.

5. Lincoln, II, 28-48.

6. Herndon, 306-308, 319; Newton, 4(141).

7. Tarbell, I, 209-210.

8. Herndon, 306.

9. Lamon, 334; Herndon, 306; N. and H., I, 297.

VII. THE SECOND START.

1. Herndon, 307, 319.

2. Herndon, 319-321.

3. Herndon, 314-317.

4. Herndon, 332-333.

5. Herndon, 311-312.

6. Herndon, 319.

7. Lamon, 165.

8. Herndon, 309.

9. Herndon, 113-114; Stories, 18~

10. Herndon, 338.

11. Lamon, 324.

12. Lincoln, 11, 142.

13. Herndon, 347.

14. Herndon, 363.

15. Herndon, 362.

16. Lincoln, II, 172.

17. Lincoln, II, 207.

18. Lincoln, II, 173.

19. Lincoln, II, 165.

VIII. A RETURN TO POLITICS.

1. Johnson, 234.

2. I have permission to print the following letter from the Honorable John H. Marshall, Judge Fifth Judicial Circuit, Charleston, Illinois:

"Your letter of the 24th inst. at hand referring to slave trial in which Lincoln was interested, referred to by Professor Henry Johnson. Twenty-five years ago, while I was secretary of the Coles County Bar Association, a paper was read to the Association by the oldest member concerning the trial referred to, and his paper was filed with rue. Some years ago I spoke of the matter to Professor Johnson, and at the time was unable to find the old manuscript, and decided that the same had been inadvertently destroyed. However, quite recently I found this paper crumpled up under some old book records. The author of this article is a reputable member of the bar of this country of very advanced age, and at that time quoted as his authority well-known and very substantial men of the county, who had taken an active interest in the litigation. His paper referred to incidents occurring in 1847, and there is now no living person with any knowledge of it. The story in brief is as follows:

"In 1845, General Robert Matson, of Kentucky, being hard pressed financially, in order to keep them from being sold in payment of his debts, brought Jane Bryant, with her four small children to this county. Her husband, Anthony Bryant, was a free negro, and a licensed exhorter in the Methodist Church of Kentucky. But his wife and children were slaves of Matson. In 1847, Matson, determined to take the Bryants back to Kentucky as his slaves, caused to be issued by a justice of the peace of the county a writ directed to Jane Bryant and her children to appear before him forthwith and answer the claim of Robert Matson that their service was due to him, etc. This action produced great excitement in this county. Practically the entire community divided, largely on the lines of pro-slavery and anti-slavery. Usher F. Linder, the most eloquent lawyer in this vicinity, appeared for Matson, and Orlando B. Ficklin, twice a member of Congress, appeared for the negroes. Under the practice the defendant obtained a hearing from three justices instead of one, and a trial ensued lasting several days, and attended by great excitement. Armed men made demonstrations and bloodshed was narrowly averted. Two of the justices were pro-slavery, and one anti-slavery. The trial was held in Charleston. The decision of the justice was discreet. It was held that the court had no jurisdiction to determine the right of property, but that Jane and her children were of African descent and found in the state of Illinois without a certificate of freedom, and that they be committed to the county jail to be advertised and sold to pay the jail fees.

"At the next term of the circuit court, Ficklin obtained an order staying proceedings until the further order of the court. Finally when the case was heard in the circuit court Linder and Abraham Lincoln appeared for Matson, who was insisting upon the execution of the judgment of the three justices of the peace so that he could buy them at the proposed sale, and Ficklin and Charles Constable, afterward a circuit judge of this circuit, appeared for the negroes. The judgment was in favor of the negroes and they were discharged.

"The above is a much abbreviated account of this occurrence, stripped of its local coloring, giving however its salient points, and I have no doubt of its substantial accuracy."

3. Lincoln, II, 185.

4. Lincoln, II, 186.

5. Lamon, 347.

6. Lincoln, II, 232-233.

7. Lincoln, II, 190-262.

8. Lincoln, 274-277.

IX. THE LITERARY STATESMAN.

1. Herndon, 371-372.

2. Lincoln, II, 329-330.

3. Lincoln, III, 1-2.

4. Herndon, 405-408.

5. Lincoln. II, 279.

6. Lamon, 416.

X. THE DARK HORSE.

1. Lincoln, V, 127.

2. Tarbell, I, 335.

3. Lincoln, V, 127,138, 257-258.

4. Lincoln, V, 290-291. He never entirely shook off his erratic use of negatives. See, also, Lamon, 424; Tarbell, I, 338.

5. Lincoln, V, 293-32&6. McClure, 23-29; Field, 126,137-138; Tarbell, I, 342-357.

XII. THE CRISIS

1. Letters, 172.

2. Lincoln, VI, 77, 78, 79, 93.

3. Bancroft, 11,10; Letters, 111.

XIII. ECLIPSE.

1. Bancroft, II, 10; Letters, 172.

2. Bancroft, II, 9-10.

3. Herndon, 484.

4. McClure, 140-145; Lincoln, VI, 91, 97.

5. Recollections, 111.

6. Recollections, 121.

7. Recollections, 112-113; Tarbell, I, 404-415.

8. Tarbell, 1, 406.

9. Tarbell, I, 406.

10. Lincoln, VI, 91.

11. Tarbell, 1, 406.

12. Herndon, 483-484

13. Lamon, 505; see also, Herndon, 485.