Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln

Douglas Lawson Wilson, Rodney O. Davis, Terry Wilson, William Henry Herndon, Jesse William Weik

University of Illinois Press, 1998 - Biography & Autobiography - 827 pages

Publication 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.

Contents

• Enclosure: 52
• List of ALs Speaking Appointments in 1858: 64
• Havana: 346
• Peoria: 390
• Ottawa: 397
• Augusta: 415
• Freeport: 431
• Carlinville: 466
• Bloomington: 479
• Mattoon: 503
• 7: 509
• Paris: 542
• Edwardsville: 581
• Sullivan: 592
• Urbana: 630
• Pittsfield: 678
• Monmouth: 696
• Quincy: 709
• Informant Testimony Reported in Jesse W Weiks: 725
• Alton: 728
• Mt Sterling: 742
• Petersburg: 748
• Brief Outline of the Joseph Hanks Family: 779

About the author

Douglas 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 of Lincoln's Confidant: The Life of Noah Brooks, Herndon on Lincoln: Letters, Herndon's Lincoln, and The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln
• Editors: Douglas Lawson Wilson, Rodney O. Davis, Terry Wilson, William Henry Herndon, Jesse William Weik
• Contributor: Terry Wilson
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1998
• ISBN: 0252023285, 9780252023286
• Length: 827 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads of State; History / United States / 19th Century; History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877)