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.

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.

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.

Episode 11, The Law Office Clock: This month, Dr. James Cornelius discusses our Featured Artifact of the Month: The Law Office Clock. Plus, he answers questions regarding Mr. Lincoln’s voice and the soldiers who carried Mr. Lincoln to the Petersen house after he was shot.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Part One of a two-part essay

If you’re interested in Lincoln’s young adulthood, get your hands on Douglas Wilson’s and Rodney Davis’s book Herndon’s Informants.  It brings together more than 600 interviews and statements amassed by Lincoln’s law partner after the assassination in 1865.

Many of his sources had known Lincoln before he moved to Springfield in 1837 at the age of 28.  (He arrived for good in the state capital on April 15, exactly 28 years before his death.)

Herndon’s great virtue was his zeal for collecting all the facts of Lincoln’s personal life, no matter how delicate the subject.  He thought the apotheosis of the martyr in 1865 was making northerners forget his flesh-and-blood friend, whom he’d known for a quarter-century.  But Herndon’s great vice was his mixing of pet theories and pat psychologizing into his fact gathering.

On November 16, 1866, he gave a rambling lecture on the subject of New Salem, where Lincoln had lived before Springfield.  The explosive segment of the talk concerned Ann Rutledge, the “beautiful, amiable, and lovely girl” who became Abraham’s intimate friend in the mid-1830s.

Herndon printed his shocking public lecture of 1866 as this broadside, and the story was also covered by many newspapers.

The lecturer faced a huge problem: neither Abraham nor Ann had left any direct evidence of their bond.  They wrote nothing about it, and said nothing to anyone who recorded their words at the time.

Herndon was forthright about relying on fragmentary memories of people looking back 30 years.  For some reason, he didn’t specify that one of his sources — Isaac Cogdal, an old Lincoln acquaintance from New Salem — told him that he’d spoken to the president-elect about Ann Rutledge just five or six years earlier.

At the end of a long day’s work in late 1860 or early 1861, Lincoln had invited Cogdal to his office, hoping to pump him for news about families he’d known in New Salem, including the Rutledges.  Cogdal gladly obliged, and took advantage of the nostalgic occasion to “dare to ask” Lincoln about his early love life.

“Abe is it true that you fell in love with & courted Ann Rutledge?” Cogdal remembered saying. Lincoln supposedly welcomed this query about a touchy, personal topic he’d never discussed even with his closest friends.  It was a subject sure to cause him grief if he talked about it now and word of the conversation somehow got spread around Springfield.

The president-elect’s words, reconstructed orally by Cogdal and written down by Herndon, were, “I loved the woman dearly & sacredly: she was a handsome girl — would have made a good loving wife — was natural & quite intellectual, though not highly Educated — I did honestly — & truly love the girl & think often — often of her now.”

Cogdal’s reliability has been dismissed by many historians, and affirmed by others.  But even if his memory for Lincoln’s sentiments was perfectly accurate, they touch only on Abraham’s retrospective feelings about Ann.  They say nothing about her feelings for him.

Did Ann love him “sacredly” too (and does “sacredly” suggest “eternally,” or just “purely,” “reverentially”)?  How far did she advance toward becoming his “good loving wife,” rather than someone else’s?

In fact, when Lincoln embarked on his love for her, she was already engaged to someone else.  This man, the merchant John McNamar, had left New Salem and was presumed to have given up on Ann, despite his promise eventually to return to her.  For the moment, Abraham’s “sacred” love meant unrealizable love.

In 1865 and 1866, a number of informants told Herndon that Ann and Abraham had sealed some kind of pact, and were planning to marry after she cleared up her murky status with McNamar.  Naturally, they tried to keep their pact secret, making it all the harder for Herndon’s informants, decades later, to agree about their exact relationship.

But in August 1835, Ann fell ill.  She lingered only long enough for Lincoln to make one last visit to her bedside.  No informant claimed any knowledge of what he and Ann said to each other that day.  Many of them did claim that two weeks later, when Ann expired, Abraham fell completely apart.

Lincoln’s collapse convinced some who’d known nothing about his closeness to Ann that he must have been deeply in love with her, and she with him.  Nothing short of professed and reciprocated love, perhaps with a promise to marry, could account for his wretched state.

Herndon seems to have concurred with this speculation.  Lincoln’s emotional prostration after her death pointed to one conclusion: that Abraham “loved Ann Rutledge with all his soul, mind and strength.  She loved him as dearly, tenderly and affectionately.”

Within weeks, the New York Times and other papers in the U.S. and abroad reprinted almost everything Herndon said about Ann Rutledge.  Many readers regretted his public probing of Lincoln’s private life.  But what infuriated so many readers was not the news of Lincoln’s love for Ann as such.

They were incensed by an additional Herndon revelation.  He said a friend had told him that after Ann was lowered into her grave, Abraham declared (in the friend’s words): “his heart, sad and broken, was buried there.”

That alleged statement by a distraught 26-year-old established to Herndon’s satisfaction that Lincoln had never loved another woman as fully as he had loved Ann Rutledge.  She had been Abraham’s first and final love.

[In Part Two: where Herndon got Lincoln’s alleged words that his heart lay buried in Ann Rutledge’s grave, and how the nation benefited, in Herndon’s estimation, from Ann’s death.]