"Herndon was born mediocre"

[Mike B.]

(12-04-2012 09:47 AM)Rob Wick Wrote:  Tom,

I'm curious as to what evidence would you consider conclusive? Love letters seem unlikely, given that the two were in close proximity, which would have made letters unnecessary. Also, if any written correspondence did exist, or love poems or whatever, it doesn't belie reason to think that 1) Lincoln could have destroyed them; 2) Robert could have destroyed them; or 3) Mary could have destroyed them. My own opinion is that nothing existed in that realm.

Psychologically, Lincoln remained vulnerable after the death of his mother and his sister. By allowing himself to fall in love with Ann, even if it wasn't the match that some later writers (including Edgar Lee Masters) made it out to be, by opening himself this way, and then to lose Ann in an all too familiar manner, doesn't stretch the bounds of credulity to make one think that his reaction was real. As a point of personal reference, I lost my father when I was five years old. It was the first real memory in my life that stuck with me. Everything that I am is a result of that one incident and its aftermath. To be sure, other factors in life contributed to the current me, but the way I handled each and every thing thrown at me was informed by that original event. So I have absolutely no problem in seeing Lincoln's relationship with women through a prism informed by the death of his mother, and how he had to cope with it in order to proceed. We often look at frontiersmen as rugged individualists unfazed by tragedy, simply because they encountered so much of it. But to believe that their psyches were unaffected by such actions is to make them into something less than human. They simply repressed their thoughts instead of broadcasting them, Oprah-style.

Before I ever heard of the Menard Axis (which as I've said before is strong independent confirmation that some type of romance did exist), it was never a stretch of the imagination to accept that Lincoln had a romance with her. We know he was attracted to other women. If Joshua Speed is to be believed, we know Lincoln was sexually active. Herndon worked with Lincoln for a number of years, often in very close proximity. Off-handed remarks about a time in Lincoln's life would not be considered fanciful or out of character for such a relationship.

Although James G. Randall and Ruth Randall did much to professionalize Lincoln studies, they also put into place a threshold for the burden of proof that is impossible to meet. A preponderance of the evidence shows that Lincoln and Rutledge had a romance. What others (including dramatists and poets) may have added to it has nothing to do with Herndon. As I stated before, his actions toward Mary were very sleazy, but sleaze doesn't make them untrue. Herndon had to know that what he was going to say would have been scandalous to a Victorian audience. But as a trained lawyer, he also had to know that by finessing a point that was known to be true, he could make a much stronger point to a jury. The jury in this case just happened to be posterity.

Best
Rob

I would echo Rob in asking what level of proof could exist reasonably to conclude some kind of romance occurred. As the above mentioned Simon and Wilson show, there is near unanimous agreement on the matter of those still living who were in a position to know.

I think the question of the Ann Rutledge matter and the Randalls goes far beyond the importance of the supposed romance which as Tom E. points out has been dramatized by many.

What Ruth Painter Randall did was essentially "Shoot the messenger." She didn't like much of the material Herndon had collected. So she went after the credibility of Herndon on Ann Rutledge and in doing so did it in a very shoddy manner (i.e. out of context quotes, simply ignorning things, etc., trying to come up with every bad bit of gossip she could on Billy Herndon.)

To paraphrase a fake Lincoln quote, "She was after bigger game." If she could disqualify Herndon on this (never mind Menard Axis and Holland's Informants were independent evidence) she could disqualify or at least cast doubts in much of Herndon's Informants.

The negative effect of this "Sifting the Ann Rutledge Evidence" thus had nothing to do with Ann Rutledge. The real damage (and it was about 50 years worth) was that it made historians not use this wealth of information. As I believe I said before Michael Burlingame has said, "Historians treated it like high level toxic waste." It is almost if the Randalls said it was "And thus sayeth the Lord." I wrote an article in the "Lincoln Herald" about 10 years ago about how historians in the intern almost fell over themselves to say who believed in the Ann Rutledge story the least. It was almost your opening statement of your seriousness as a Lincoln scholar.

The Randalls set up an impossible to reach standard of study on Lincoln's early life that it was all but ignored or given very short shrift.

I look upon the romance as simply a biographical incidenct in his life. The death of a fiance must leave some sort of mark on someone. It doesn't mean that the person never could love another woman ever again, as I have said.