Lincoln and Ann Rutledge

[Lewis Gannett]

(06-24-2014 11:27 AM)LincolnToddFan Wrote:  Hi Lewis-

Wow..I am floored. This is the first time I have heard or read that Herndon knew Ann Rutledge personally...fascinating.

Like Laurie, I don't like Herndon. In fact I loathe him. He sounded like a vicious, cruel bully. His comments about Mary possibly having something to do with the deaths of her own children have also implanted the idea in my mind that he was psychologically unbalanced due to years of alcohol abuse.

I am surprised that AL had a friend like this man. I wonder what Lincoln would have had to say about "Billy's" post-assassination treatment of his widow?

Here's the key Billy Herndon quote:

From Herndon's Life of Lincoln, Da Capo ed., pp. 105-106:

"I knew Miss Rutledge myself, as well as her father and other members of the family, and have been personally acquainted with every one of the score or more of witnesses whom I at one time or another interviewed on this delicate subject.... My father was a politician and an extensive stock dealer in that early day, and he and Mr. Rutledge were great friends."

Again: The idea that AL & AR had a doomed romance unbeknownst to Herndon until after AL's death is completely implausible. Herndon had long been obsessed with L. He'd long known all the self-professed witnesses. Why did he frame the romance as a major new discovery? I don't think it was simply a way to get MTL's goat, or an alcoholic rant, or jealousy because he himself adored AL. Here's what I think. Herndon in all probability had heard that Lincoln had gone a little haywire in the late summer of 1835. He'd probably also heard that Lincoln had expressed sorrow about AR's death. But he probably hadn't made too much of it. Why? Because the more credible of the New Salem informants (e.g., Elizabeth Abell) professed no personal knowledge of AL-AR romance, and those who did claim knowledge were suspect, some of them--William "Slick Willy" Greene, for example--highly suspect. By the way, Hannah Armstrong had nothing at all to say about Rutledge romance. (Michael Burlingame's claim to the contrary is based on a weirdly flimsy newspaper quote from a daughter of Hannah's published in I think 1930. This is what you call desperate evidence. Almost unbelievably iffy evidence, given the myths that by then were carrying such a load of rubbish in popular culture.) OK, back to the point. If Herndon didn't have grounds to buy the romance, why did he make a huge deal of it less than a year after Lincoln was slain? My opinion probably won't be popular here, but what the heck. I think that Herndon wanted to give Lincoln a girlfriend. Why? Mary Owens notwithstanding, Lincoln didn't much go for the girls in New Salem: he really, really didn't, credible informants attested (Douglas Wilson, of all scholars, and by the way I much admire him, makes this very plain in "Women," Chapter Four of Honor's Voice). I also think that Herndon wanted to dilute the fact that Lincoln was highly "sex-minded." Why? Herndon felt duty-bound to protect Lincoln from charges that he found sexual & romantic fulfillment with men. What better way to tamp down discussion of THAT hair-raising idea than to portray Lincoln as indifferent to sexual romance in general? If this is what Herndon set out to do--I'm 97% sure that it was--he succeeded brilliantly.