Herndon'S Informants: Letters, Interviews, And Statements About Abraham Lincoln

Herndon'S Informants: Letters, Interviews, And Statements About Abraham Lincoln

Winner of the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award More than 600 letters and interviews providing information about Abraham Lincoln?s pre-political and pre-legal careers are included in this volume, a priceless collection never before available in one place. Women to whom Lincoln proposed marriage, political allies and adversaries, judges and fellow attorneys, longtime comrades, erstwhile friends--all speak out here in words first gathered by William H. Herndon, Lincoln?s law partner, between 1865 and 1890. Historian David Herbert Donald has called Herndon?s materials ?the basic source for Abraham Lincoln?s early years.? Some of those Herndon questioned were illiterate; others could read but barely write. Completion of this undertaking took the editors to three major collections for the mammoth task of transcribing documents that often were nearly illegible. Invaluable to Lincoln scholars and intriguing to anyone curious about Lincoln and his times, the book includes an introduction, scholarly annotations, a registry of the informants, and a detailed topical index.Review"[Wilson and Davis] have done a service of inestimable value to historians by the complete, accurately transcribed, indexed, and annotated edition of the written accounts of Herndon's interviews with 264 people. . . . It is a monumental achievement of scholarship. That is true not simply because of the editorial skill and effort required to complete it, but mainly because this material is the basis for most of what we know about the first half of Lincoln's life." --James M. McPherson,New York Review of BooksFrom the Back CoverPublication of this long-awaited volume makes available for the first time in complete and accessible form the most important source of information on Lincoln's early life. For twenty-five years after the president's death William Herndon, his law partner, conducted interviews with and solicited letters from dozens of persons who knew Lincoln personally. Up to now, the valuable information he collected has been available only in a microfilm edition in the Library of Congress, of such poor quality that it has been rarely used, particularly since there was no table of contents or adequate index, and in collections at the Huntington Library and the Illinois State Historical Library. The only previous publication of Herndon's materials, more than a half century ago, contains less than 10 percent of the collection and is so unreliable that scholars have hesitated to use it. Douglas Wilson and Rodney Davis have earned the gratitude and admiration of scholars by taking on the daunting task of collating the collections in the three libraries, painstakingly deciphering the all but illegible handwriting of Herndon and some of his informants, and carefully documenting the entire work.About the AuthorDouglas L. Wilson is the director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois.Rodney O. Davis (d. 2019) was co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College. They are the coeditors ofLincoln's Confidant: The Life of Noah Brooks,Herndon on Lincoln: Letters,Herndon's Lincoln, andThe Lincoln-Douglas Debates.