The Real Lincoln
Who was the man behind the myth? New research delves into Abe's early years
Historians insist, however, that there were bumps on the road to the White House that have been lost to popular history. "It's easy to just hit people with the slam-dunk of martyrdom and perfection," says Joseph Garrera, president of the Lincoln Group of New York, a historical society devoted to Lincoln scholarship, but his rise to power was more complicated than that. In telling this story, though, historians have faced one major obstacle: Lincoln lived in frontier towns for most of his life. Tangible evidence of his comings and goings is hard to come by. As a result, his early years have often gotten short shrift.
The primary source of information on Lincoln's life in Illinois is a long-neglected collection of interviews conducted by William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner of 16 years. After Lincoln was killed, Herndon set out to gather and transcribe the stories of more than 250 people who had known the president during his time on the frontier. Their memories, though, were shaky--many hadn't seen Lincoln for 30 years or more--and their stories were sometimes contradictory. Herndon compiled some of these accounts into a biography in 1889, but the first historians who were able to access his collection, in the 1940s and '50s, dismissed much of it as "gossip" and moved on.
In the past decade, however, scholars have taken a closer look at what Herndon and his interviewees had to say about Lincoln--and many have been surprised by what they've found. "I'd imbibed this notion that the archive was just old codgers making up stories," says Michael Burlingame, professor emeritus of history at Connecticut College, who first dived into Herndon in the early 1990s. "But as I read through it, I thought this was really interesting--it didn't seem to be implausible." Previous generations, he says, "treated this as a nuclear waste dump, but it's really a gold mine."
To Herndon's sources, Lincoln, at first blush, seemed to be every bit the frontiersman of yore. He emerged, literally, out of the woods in 1831 in a tiny town called New Salem, Ill. He was a gangly man, at 6 foot 4, with a gaunt face atop a narrow frame, who sported ill-fitting pants that barely covered his ankles: "As ruff a specimen of humanity as could be found," one observer called him. Lincoln won the townspeople over, though, with his ribald humor and feats of strength. He fought a local bully in a wrestling match and tried his hand at a series of jobs: miller, storekeeper, surveyor, and postman.
Young Abe also seems to have had a soft side. Within a few years of his arrival, many in New Salem said Lincoln fell in love with a young woman named Ann Rutledge, a local tavern keeper's daughter. Historians have quarreled about Ann for generations, with some insisting there was no such relationship. Even Herndon was surprised to hear about her. But Douglas Wilson, codirector of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, convincingly argued recently in a book called Honor's Voice that of 24 people Herndon talked to who knew Lincoln and Ann at the time, 22 said he courted her. They were engaged to be married, it seems, in 1835. But that August, tragedy struck--Rutledge contracted "brain fever" (probably typhoid) and died.
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