From Out of the Top Hat: A Blog from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum

A couple of years ago I gave a public lecture on Lincoln’s last days in 1865.  Following the discussion period, as I was leaving the auditorium, a woman approached me to ask one more question.  She hadn’t broached the subject earlier, she said, because it was so distant from my topic.  “Did Lincoln,” she wondered, “really get syphilis when he was a young man?”

I was fascinated that this issue was on her mind, and asked her where she’d first heard about it.  “In one of my medical school textbooks,” she replied.  She couldn’t remember if the textbook treated the syphilis story as a fact, or as a speculation.

I told her that the subject had been widely discussed in the 1980s, when Gore Vidal featured it in his Lincoln: A Novel (1984).  Major historians weighed in at the time to say that the evidence for Lincoln’s having contracted syphilis was inconclusive at best.

After Vidal’s death in summer 2012, I went back to his novel and his shorter writings on Lincoln to try to figure out why he’d dwelt so doggedly on the syphilis idea.  It soon became clear that he’d seized upon it as the first salvo in a campaign to destroy Lincoln’s image as a “saint,” to reduce him to the moral status of a very ordinary man of his times.

The word “syphilis” still conjured up menacing associations in the 1980s, as it had in the 19^th century.  Even the possibility that he had carried the disease — which in its long latency period might have infected Mary Lincoln, and, through her, their children — could help tarnish his reputation as a hero of uncommon virtue.  Vidal played up the devastating implications for Lincoln’s family members as much as he did the original “devilish passion.”

Did Lincoln have the ….? Herndon and Vidal thought so. Artwork by Douglas Volk, 1928.

The “Sandburg-Mt. Rushmore” approach to Lincoln, said Vidal, had blocked a true grasp of his significance.  Blighting the saint would open people’s eyes: the mythic selfless emancipator was actually an aggressive empire-builder.

The politically nimble Lincoln had done much more, said Vidal, than “save” the Union from being split in two.  He had deepened the hold of the union, making the nation, not the states, the sovereign power for all Americans.  Decades after his death, with the holy Lincoln as its chief icon, the imperial American state got to have its cake and eat it too, dominating much of the international order while posing as the one power that acted “with malice toward none and charity for all” other nations.

But where did Vidal get the syphilis story in the first place?  It came from Lincoln’s former law partner William Herndon, who wrote privately in 1891, “Lincoln had, when a mere boy, the syphilis…  About the year 1835-36 Mr. Lincoln went to Beardstown and during a devilish passion had connection with a girl and caught the disease.”

Herndon claimed to have heard those words from Lincoln’s own lips, but he didn’t specify when he’d heard it.  “Old and infirm,” by his own admission, when he wrote the 1891 letter — he died two months later — Herndon sometimes got mixed up about what he’d heard directly from his former partner, what he’d heard from others, and what he’d inferred all by himself.  (In 1889, Herndon said Lincoln had told him that he’d left his “heart” buried in Ann Rutledge’s grave; in 1866, Herndon claimed “a friend” had told him that; some evidence suggests he came up with it himself.  See my blog post of Nov. 30, 2011.)

That doesn’t mean Herndon was confused in this instance, but the reliability of the syphilis tale has been widely questioned.  In his book We Are Lincoln Men (2003), David Herbert Donald concluded that a recollection written down “more than fifty years after Lincoln’s alleged escapade and more than twenty years after his death” could only stand if supported by “confirmatory evidence.”

Herndon may have anticipated the doubts that would greet his story.  “Lincoln told me this,” he wrote to Weik, “and in a moment of folly I made a note of it in my mind…”  In other words, it would have been better for all concerned if he’d simply forgotten about it.  But he’d done what came naturally to him: remembered exactly what he’d been told, and remembered it for all time.  Now he could only kick himself for being such an unyielding servant of the truth.

With Lincoln’s syphilis engraved in his memory as a fact, Herndon had tried to keep it a secret.  But now, approaching his end, he felt compelled to divulge it.  He feared that someone, after his death, might discover the fact and wrongly take it as proof that Abraham had been unfaithful to Mary.  Herndon was absolutely certain that Lincoln had been “true as steel to his wife.”  He’d contracted his case of syphilis six or seven years before his marriage.

The irony of the syphilis tale is that Herndon’s goal — protecting the memory of Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s marital purity — came at the cost of swearing to Lincoln’s pre-marital impurity.  Thankfully, he managed to keep quiet about all this until almost a decade after Mary Lincoln’s death in 1882.  Having suffered after 1866 from Herndon’s wild speculation about her husband’s heart — that after Ann Rutledge’s death in 1835 he had never truly loved another woman — she was spared having to reckon with Herndon’s report about Lincoln’s infected body.

What fits into your shirt pocket, is a little bendable but basically sturdy, and shows the photographic portraits of nearly 500 people? No, not your iPhone.

The answer is the carte de visite (cdv) pictured here. It is backmarked for Ashford, Brothers & Co., of 76 Newgate Street, London, and was probably created in 1863 or 1864. Its caption reads,

“Upwards of five hundred photographic portraits of the most celebrated personalities of the age. With a hand-magnifying glass, every portrait will be seen perfect.”

Bring your magnifying glass, or your microscope

This recent arrival in the Lincoln Collection caught our eye because Abraham and Mary appear in the second row from the bottom, in the center. Both photos were taken in mid-1861, but the carte’s centerpiece — a floral circle traced within the montage — shows the British royal family. Just below Victoria and Albert (he died in Dec. 1861) are the Prince and Princess of Wales, Albert Edward and Alexandra, who were married in March 1863. Lord Palmerston, British prime minister (1859-1865), looms just over that floral family.

Americans fill the bottom two rows, plus George Washington above Lincoln, and politically this card may be judged ‘neutral’ (except, perhaps, for its placing of the prime minister above the royal family). To the right of Lincoln are Jefferson Davis and some his cabinet and generals; to the left of Mary are an equal number of Union men, including editor Horace Greeley at bottom left near Edwin Stanton and Simon Cameron, both of them a secretary of war and another clue that this was certainly made no earlier than January 1862. But we can detect no Ulysses Grant or George G. Meade, so this may pre-date August 1863, when full news of their major July victories reached Europe.

As for those other 400-odd faces, mainly British but evidently some Europeans and a few Asians, we welcome any facial-recognition experts among our readers to send us their ideas. Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Florence Nightingale, Isambard Brunel are likely. Much of the left column depicts women, with a few more here and there.

Our collection’s previous record “tiny faces” cdv, made in New York, depicts 109 Union commanders of the army and navy, with each name printed on the back. This almost-500 cdv suggests not just that the British were technically a little ahead of the Americans in their skilled use of lenses and artful collage, but that the entire science of photography, a quarter-century old when this card appeared, had made leaps not unlike what the laptop and microchip underwent between, say, 1985 and 2010.

Knowing what we do now of photography’s tricks, colors, shadings, and overall development since 1864, just imagine what the next 150 years could bring in the power of computing. And Lincoln would have liked that: he grasped the importance of rail, riflery, and cameras to his own career, and surely would have appreciated the chance to let the people get new information as thunderously as the rains fall. Yet he also might have preferred that 500 names could be printed on the back of a cdv as readily as their faces were. He was a man of the word, not of the image.

As we enter the season of calculating income tax, one of the prized deductions remains donations to charitable organizations.  Typically these non-for-profit organizations host auctions as a source for raising revenue.  It is common to see items with celebrity autographs as the main attractions.

The use of celebrity status to raise money for worthy causes has a long history.  During the Civil War era, the United States Sanitary Commission held frequent events called by various names — Sanitary Fairs, Soldiers’ Fairs, etc. — to raise money for blankets,  medical, and sundry supplies for the soldiers.  Led by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, who had designed New York City’s Central Park, the United States Sanitary Commission established regional networks across the northern states to raise money for the war effort.

A couple of celebrity signatures from the ’60s.

The town of Springfield, Massachusetts, held a Soldiers’ Fair in December 1864 as part of the fund-raising efforts.  As was common, a fair newspaper, The Springfield Musket, was issued throughout the fair to list daily events.  One of the noteworthy items for auction was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Springfield Arsenal.”  Of greater interest was a letter sent by First Lady Mary Lincoln (which does not appear in Justin and Linda Turner’s compilation of her writings).  The text appeared in a January 1, 1865 Washington Sunday Chronicle newspaper article reprinting an article that first appeared in the Springfield (Mass.) Republican on December 30, 1864.  That text is provided in full:

“Mrs. as well as Mr. Lincoln wrote a letter for the Soldiers’ Fair in this city but Mrs. Lincoln’s has only just arrived.  It is addressed to Miss Isabel Clary, and will be raffled for, so that it is not too late, after all, to add to the receipts of the fair.  Ten dollars have been offered for it already, but refused.  Below is the letter, and we will add, for the benefit of those who may not see the original, that it is written on fine initial note paper, unruled, and the writing consequently sloping gently to the right:

                                                EXECUTIVE MANSION,  December 24.

Your letter of the 12^th instant has been received, and as it always affords me much pleasure to forward so laudable an object as the one mentioned in your note, I hasten to comply with your flattering request.  I most sincerely hope that your highest anticipations may be realized, giving you all that may be necessary to carry out plans which present not only a noble purpose, in the cause of our beloved and struggling country, but also a generous, humane, and great good, in the comfort of the brave and noble hearts battling for our glorious Union.  With heartfelt hope, I pray God speed you, and crown your efforts with success. 

                                                                                    Very truly yours,     Mary Lincoln”

Her husband’s response on Dec. 19th was more pro-forma, indicating that matters of state required him to remain in Washington.  However, Lincoln attended the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair in June 1864.  Among the celebrity items offered in Philadelphia were printed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, and John G. Nicolay.  Shrewd visitors would have seen the bargain of purchasing one at the sale price of ten dollars apiece.  Unfortunately, most people declined to purchase a copy, and many remained unsold.  Today, one of these Leland-Boker autographed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation will fetch well more than one million dollars at auction.

If the Christmas season has put partridges on your pear tree, parse the pairs below.  Even in small towns, common surnames can lead you up a tree.

Springfield, Illinois, in the early 1840s was home to about 3,000 people.  If you owned a shop or took the Whig newspaper or ever showed up in court, Abraham Lincoln probably knew you by face or name.

From amidst such a small, tight-knit community, Lincolnophiles today might assume that they can pick out those names from the simplest of references.  And they would be wrong.

NOT William D. Herndon

Case in point: William H. Herndon, born 1818, was Lincoln’s junior law partner from 1844 to 1861.  William D. Herndon was older, born we know not where, and shows up as chair of a public meeting in June 1841 to discuss the astonishing Trailor Murder case (which A. Lincoln argued, and about which wrote a detective story in 1846.)  A patron on the East Coast asked us how Lincoln’s soon-to-be-partner could ethically lead a meeting about a legal case?   The answer is that William D. led that meeting.

We might assume that the two WH’s were related, but how?  Richard Lawrence Miller’s vast new 4-volume study Lincoln and His World (1809-1860) states twice that William D. was a relative of William H., but Miller does not state how.  Nor do the old county histories.  William D. was a Whig, served as a commissioner of the new State Capitol in Springfield in 1837 (he may have been a brick mason), was an elected state representative in 1844, and like A. Lincoln later on, had to fight off charges from Democrats that he was a nativist, contending that he merely thought foreign-born persons should reside permanently in their new land and actually register before voting.

Our ‘Billy’ was the son of Archer and Rebecca Herndon.  Billy’s younger brother was Elliott B. Herndon, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois (based in Springfield), and editor of a Democratic newspaper in 1857-60 that supported the Buchanan side against the Douglas side.  Elliott voted for pro-slavery man John C. Breckinridge for president in 1860.  The two brothers were not close.

Amusingly enough, William D. once hired the firm of Stuart and Lincoln to defend him against a charge of gambling for money in a card game called farrow.  He was acquitted.

Another case in point:  Josiah N. Francis was the secretary of that public meeting in 1841, when people gathered to express dismay at a murder charge against friend and neighbor A. Trailor.  Francis was qualified enough to take the minutes: he had founded the Whig newspaper in town in 1831, and edited it until 1835.  But he gave up the paper that year to Simeon Francis, probably his older brother, in order to go into the cabinet-making business with brother Charles.  Evidently a cabinet-maker of 6 years’ duration can still take minutes, seated next to a brick mason.  So if you see reference to ‘editor Francis’ you need to find out which date to know which man.  Little brother Allen also worked there.

Thanks be to Simeon and his wife Eliza, at any rate: their front parlor served as the secret courting room for A. Lincoln and M. Todd in 1842.  (The exact location of that front parlor is now the entryway to the Presidential Library, 6th and Jefferson Sts.)  But for that parlor, we might not today have a Library in which to puzzle out these threads.

NOT Mary Ann Todd

And did you catch the name of that young belle?  It was Mary Todd.  On 4 November 1842 she became Mary Lincoln, and never again used the maiden name ‘Todd’ or the initial ‘T.’   She had practice at name-dropping: christened ‘Mary Ann Todd’ in 1818, she dropped the ‘Ann’ when her little sister was christened, like an invasive species, ‘Ann Marie Todd.’  And yet … we have seen a finely printed calling card with the name ‘Mary Ann Todd’ from about 1840.  She was staying in Boston, a city our Mary never saw till 1848, with her husband.

By the way, who was Lincoln’s boss as Deputy Surveyor of Sangamon County?  John C. Calhoun.  No, not the pro-slavery senator of the same name from South Carolina.  Even in the 1830s and 1840s, it was a big country, especially in small towns.

Daniel Day-Lewis, the four-time Best-Actor Oscar nominee and two-time winner (for My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood), has outdone himself in Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln.  Earlier big-studio Lincolns of the sound era — Walter Huston, Henry Fonda, and Raymond Massey — played Lincoln.  Day-Lewis manages somehow to embody him.

There’s never been a big-screen Lincoln remotely like this one: quick-witted and brooding, calculating and cheerful, logical and humorous, drawn to philosophical ruminating but ready to strike with resolve when he sees the chance, in early 1865, to abolish slavery once and for all by helping to push the resolution for a 13^th Amendment through the House of Representatives.

Day-Lewis will get his fifth Oscar nomination, and maybe his third Oscar.  Whether he picks up the Oscar or not, he has created a character as richly layered and warmly mysterious as the original Republican hero.

Director Steven Spielberg has said in interviews that he didn’t so much direct his male lead as get out of his way.  But he provided Day-Lewis with two accomplished stars — Sally Field as Mary Lincoln and Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens — and both of them bring out Day-Lewis’s crafty best in the most riveting scenes of the film.

The single other person most responsible for Day-Lewis’s performance is screenwriter Tony Kushner, whose script lets this Lincoln debate, meditate, joke, and out-reason everyone else.  Lincoln is the work of a dramatist used to writing Pulitzer Prize-winning words, as he did two decades ago for Angels in America.

In this 1865 revision of an older print, Lincoln’s head (center) has replaced pro-slavery John C. Calhoun’s head in the tableau of authors and defenders of the U.S. Constitution. Might Daniel Day-Lewis now replace Henry Fonda or Hal Holbrook as the best ‘Lincoln’?

Hence the film feels a lot like a stage play, or a film from the 1930s or 1940s.  Indoor verbal jousting trumps “action” by being the action.  But that’s a perfect choice for capturing the historical Lincoln, the champion wordsmith who adored the theater himself.

Some viewers will find the barrage of verbiage excessive, and yearn for Spielberg’s signature visual movie making.  They’ll have to get by on the comic relief supplied by Lincoln’s storytelling, and on some beautiful silent moments the president shares with his young son Tad.

When I first heard about Spielberg’s plan for a Lincoln movie, I wondered if the film would highlight the emancipator as much as it did the savior of the union.  And I hoped it would not depict Lincoln as such a tender man of charity that his wife Mary would be reduced to the needling, tempestuous thorn in his ever-saintly side.

The stakes were high.  A filmmaker of Spielberg’s stature would shape popular attitudes and beliefs about Lincoln the husband and Lincoln the leader for decades to come.  (Spoiler alert: what follows reveals plot details on both subjects, the Lincoln marriage and Lincoln the emancipator.)

I needn’t have worried.  Spielberg and Kushner, Day-Lewis and Field, have come through with balanced treatments on both scores.  Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field re-create the presidential couple’s tangled relationship in all its human fragility.  Like every other couple, they converse genially about one thing and another.  They debate the meaning of Abraham’s ominous “ship dream.”  They plan a “shindig” (public reception).  And they experience a joint emotional outburst, with Mary vilifying her husband and Abraham shouting her into submission.

The fight ends without reconciliation.  But gradually they realize that their sorrow over 11-year-old Willie’s death in 1862 has taken too huge a toll on their marriage.  Riding in their open carriage on the afternoon of April 14, 1865, they agree to try, at long last, to give up being the servants of their grief.

Meanwhile, Lincoln the emancipator gets his most resounding film portrayal ever.  The president cajoles Congressmen night and day to line up affirmative votes for the abolition amendment.  The film could have left Lincoln there, savoring the end of slavery.  Instead, the script goes out of its way to record the liberator’s final move, months later, on the subject of black freedom: publicly endorsing the vote for some African-American men in his last speech on April 11.

It’s early evening on April 14, 1865, and Lincoln is bantering with friends in a White House sitting room about the April 11 speech.  They note the criticism of it by Thaddeus Stevens, who was seeking the vote for all, not some, black men.

But House Speaker Schuyler Colfax commends the president for being the first chief executive in American history to endorse even limited black suffrage.  With that, a cheerful Lincoln sets off for Ford’s Theatre, telling his friends he has to depart, though he’d rather stay.

The film portrays such a vehement emancipator that one wishes Spielberg had let Lincoln out of the White House to celebrate the new era with the masses of African Americans who gave him and God the credit for freeing them.

Having shown Lincoln in Petersburg, Virginia, with General Grant on April 3, where the President reflects somberly on the military deaths he and Grant have caused, the film could easily have shown us Lincoln walking through Richmond the following day.  On that warm afternoon, with smoke still wafting over the city, thousands of slaves celebrated their first day of de facto freedom by walking alongside him, hailing the hero who had magically appeared in their midst.

Even a small glimpse of that scene could have revived our cultural memory of what used to be an iconic Lincoln event: the emancipator striding into the post-war world in the just-fallen capital of the Confederacy, shoulder to shoulder with the nation’s newly freed men and women.

The film does show Grant and Lee silently doffing their hats to one another after the surrender at Appomattox on April 9.  The Richmond moment could have set the stage for it: on April 4, as journalist Charles Coffin reported, Lincoln took off his hat and bowed silently to an elderly black man who had removed his own at the president’s approach.  Coffin summed up the majesty of that moment, calling the president’s bow “a death-shock to chivalry, and a mortal wound to caste.”

Episode 25, Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”: We return from a brief hiatus to discuss with Dr. James Cornelius Steven Spielberg’s new movie about Abraham Lincoln entitled, “Lincoln”.

Warning: This podcast contains many spoilers of the movie. We would advise listening after you have seen the movie unless you want to have some sections of the movie spoiled.

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Three siblings in the fourth generation of descent from a Wall Street banker, Benjamin B. Sherman, have donated three letters and a ledger book to the Presidential Library & Museum.  The material concerns a public collection taken up in 1865-66 to support Mary, Robert, and Tad Lincoln in their time of woe.  Below are the main points of the letters — 2 of them previously unknown, plus 1 by Mary Lincoln that was incompletely transcribed in the 1972 book of her correspondence.  The hundreds of names in the ledger book — people all over the U.S. and a few Canadians who sent Sherman money to forward to the bereaved family — will be analyzed by ALPLM staff.  All 4 items will go on display in the Museum after some light cleaning.

One revelation is that Mary Lincoln owed money to a furrier (though this does not really surprise), and that she had the ill grace to ask Mr. Sherman, who took up the collection for her, to go around and try to get her debts to other merchants reduced.  The letter by Robert Lincoln puts paid to the old conspiracy theory that he wanted to get his hands on his mother’s money, because here he forswears any claim to the gifts offered him, directing Mr. Sherman to give it all to Mary.  The total fund, delivered to her in May 1866, was about $10,750 — worth roughly $400,000 today.

It is a lovely bit of synonymy over time that a generous volunteer like Benjamin B. Sherman should have descendants today who selflessly donated these materials.  The ALPLM and all interested in the Lincoln story are most grateful to the Thompsons.

To Benjamin B. Sherman                                  Chicago,  Dec 25^th 1865

    95 Wall St., N.Y.

My dear Sir:  Your favor of the 21^st inst. is at hand.  I notice that it was addressed to my brother and myself, as well as to my mother.  So far as I am concerned, I wish whatever of the fund there is in your hands, to be solely appropriated to my mother. 

The income which I derive from my father’s estate, is sufficient to maintain me until I begin to earn my living.  The same is of course true with regard to my brother who is only a little more than twelve years of age.  … we both wish to have nothing to do with the fund, but that it should go where it is most needed. 

…  When you are prepared, please send by express, to Mrs. A. Lincoln, Clifton House, Chicago. 

If you have not already done so, we would wish that you would not advertize.  The amount … is not worth the annoyance we experience at seeing our names in the papers. 

I cannot express as I would, the gratitude we feel for your earnest efforts & the great trouble you have had …   Believe me, Sir,  Very sincerely & truly

                                                                                                 Yours   Robert T. Lincoln
__

To Mr. Sherman                                              Chicago,  Dec. 26th 1865

Episode 19, The Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Retrial (Part Two): In part two of our Roundtable Discussion, our panel focuses on the medical and legal aspects of Mary Lincoln’s trial.

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Episode 18, The Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Insanity Trial (Part One): In this two part episode, we present the audio from the Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Insanity Retrial. The Insanity Retrial of  Mary Todd Lincoln is sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Commission and will take place September 24, 2012 in Chicago, IL and again on October 1, 2012 in Springfield, IL. For more information on the retrial please visit: www.wasmarylincolncrazy.com.

Part one of our discussion focuses on the historical, cultural, and legal surroundings of Mrs. Lincoln’s original trial.

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Part two of a two-part essay.  Part one appeared on November 10th.

Herndon’s 1866 lecture on Ann Rutledge drew the scorn of many who read the newspaper excerpts.  Critics ripped him for going public with Lincoln’s alleged buried-heart comment, a statement certain to anguish the widowed Mary Lincoln.

After watching Ann’s coffin descend into the grave in 1835, Abraham supposedly declared that his “heart, sad and broken, was buried there.”  To Herndon, this meant that Lincoln had lived out the rest of his life without truly loving another woman.

In 1866, no one disputed the reliability of the buried-heart remark, supplied to Herndon, he said, by an unnamed “friend.”  They just blasted Herndon for disclosing it, and claiming that it set the future course of Lincoln’s love life.  As it turns out, they could have challenged the comment’s legitimacy too.

In their edition of Herndon’s Lincoln, his 1889 biography of his partner, Douglas Wilson and Rodney Davis assert (p. 429, n. 6) that Herndon’s lecture silently reveals William Greene, a Lincoln acquaintance since 1831, as his unnamed source.  But the quotation is nowhere to be found, they say, in Greene’s communications with Herndon.  Nor did any other person pass along the buried-heart comment to Herndon.

So where did Herndon get those words?  I suspect that he composed them himself after reading an 1862 newspaper article in the Menard County Axis, a Democratic weekly published in nearby Petersburg.  Sent to him by one of his informants, this piece gushed over the president’s phenomenal rise from New Salem dry goods clerk to Commander-in-Chief.  “What a model of ambition … for the youths of the land,” the story exclaimed.

The Democratic newspaper in which the Lincoln-Rutledge folklore began, 27 years later.

The Axis had picked up the oral tradition of Lincoln’s romance with a beautiful young New Salem woman — “the youth had wrapped his heart with hers” — and cited his desolation over her death as one of the many obstacles he’d overcome on his arduous road to national renown.

The article described him standing by her grave, so distraught “as the cold clods fell upon the coffin, he sincerely wished that he too had been enclosed within it.”  By this account, the stricken Abraham wished he could leave his entire body with Ann, not just his “heart.”  He was saying he wanted to die.  He was not saying he couldn’t love another woman.  Burying his heart was apparently Herndon’s idea, not Lincoln’s.

As if to admit that he had no informant’s testimony to back up his public withering of Mary Lincoln — a woman who, according to him, had never received her husband’s deepest affection in 23 years of marriage — Herndon made a surprising claim in the 1889 biography.

In Herndon’s Lincoln, he wrote: “speaking of [Ann’s] death and her grave Lincoln once said to me, ‘My heart lies buried there.’”  Of course, in the 1866 lecture, Herndon said the remark had come to him from a “friend.”  In 1866, he made no claim that Lincoln had ever mentioned Ann to him at all.

In his lecture, Herndon made one final statement about Ann Rutledge, and this time the New York Times decided not to publish it — the only Herndon comment on Ann that the paper didn’t quote.  This unused observation may have come from the 1862 Axis story too.

After Ann’s death, the Axis article said, Lincoln recovered from his misery by finding “active exercise” for “both mind and body” in his political career.  Herndon attributed that notion to the same “friend” who’d come up with the buried-heart remark.  Lincoln had “leaped wildly into the political arena,” according to the alleged friend, “as a refuge from his despair.”

If fate had instead allowed Abraham to settle down with “Ann Rutledge, the sweet, tender and loving girl, he would have gravitated insensibly into a purely domestic man.”  Though already a state legislator, Lincoln would supposedly have forsaken electoral ambition for the pleasures of the hearth.

Herndon suspected that, for Lincoln, embracing the storm and stress of politics had depended on Ann’s dying.  It took the jolt of her removal to launch Lincoln on his weary pilgrimage toward the supreme sacrifice: surrendering his life for the people.

In this tragic scenario, Ann’s death, like Abraham’s, could be taken as an indirect act of devotion to the Republic.  Never publicly joined in love, they could be bound together in public service.  The loss of her life in 1835 could be tethered to the loss of his life in 1865.  Lincoln’s entire three-decade public career could be seen as framed by two calamitous events, his fiancée’s death and his own martyrdom.

Looking back from the 21st century, we can only wonder what kind of love Ann and Abraham shared.  “Love” covers a spectrum of emotions, desires, and promises.  There’s no way to be sure how far their bond had progressed along the path from intimate friendship to informal betrothal.

Perhaps they themselves didn’t know.  Anyone who has ever been young and in love can imagine that the devastation Abraham felt at her death may have come, in part, from knowing that they hadn’t been given the time to figure out just where they stood.

We do know that Abraham fell in love again.  Seven years after Ann’s death, Lincoln married the mercurial and passionate Mary Todd.  He let himself feel the promise of a lasting tie with a quick-witted, attentive woman whose extensive education, loyalty to the Whig Party, and endorsement of his ambition would help him rise to whatever heights life had in store for him.

With Mary, Abraham could bring love and politics together in a life of companionship, parenting, service, and, for all their domestic discord, moments of tenderness shielded from public view — maybe a reminder to him of moments he’d shared in his youth with Ann Rutledge.