Wilma Frances Minor letters

[maharba]

Rereading my past postings in Shadows Rise and other material on John McNamar/McNamer/McNamara etc, I come to the same conclusions that there was more 'to do' with John McNeal/McNamer than has been brought out, or more than I have read about. It seems to me that the Lincoln experts have been so partisan pro or con on the Lincoln/Rutledge romance, that most of them brushed by McNamer as something like "a young industrious forthright merchant". One or two researchers zeroed in on McNamer as being cold and calculated. All the timing of his presence and absence and reappearance in Illinois seems meaningful to me. Before he left and during his absence he was on good personal and business terms with Lincoln. He mentions Abraham Lincoln broke into a locked trunk he had left and stole items from it, but McNamer was not really surprised or angered by it. I'm guessing it was McNamer and who must have spoken with a strong Scottish brogue accent (if he wanted to), had taught the young Lincoln a fondness for Burns and other scottish poetry. Lincoln being such a good mimic, it would have been amusing to hear Lincoln reciting from memory Burns poetry and inflecting in a strong scottish 'burr' to the reading. I can find no McNeal/McNeil in McNamer's ancestry, as far as I have been able to tell, so far. And his father was already dead, I can't find the record of the financial problems McNamer had supposedly either run from or gone back to NY to settle up. There must have been other letters, perhaps intercepted and read by an unnamed Postmaster?, between McNamer and Ann Rutledge, but which we will never know of. Was McNamer leaving a bad marriage or romance in his coming to Sangamon IL. All the while he was back in NY, surely he had been interested in one or two young ladies while there? Here is one of the 'fictitious letters' from Matilda Cameron,

Sand Ridge April 1836
"...cinse that Macknamer ***** bak hear he doz not mind pore Anns dieing atall—hes setin up alireddy with Deb. Latimer. Abe wuz rite when he tole Ann she wuz luky to git shet of him befor he shoed the klovin huf. that such a feler wood pres the lif outen her - he is a skunkt o my mind he is puttn pore ant Mary Ann and fambly out as allso us folks.."

In essence, Matilda or whoever wrote that, was nearly correct. Was this person Matilda Cameron even real, if so did she go by Mat, Matty, Tilda, Tilde? Who, close to the original source, was feeding 'the letter forger' the information?