Lincoln and Ann Rutledge

[Lewis Gannett]

(06-28-2014 09:11 PM)Gene C Wrote:  

(06-28-2014 12:22 PM)Lewis Gannett Wrote:  

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Gene wrote, "There's a little more to it than that. Each of the writers you mentioned had more material to examine than their predecesor." Actually, Gene, with regard to the Rutledge story, the evidence really hasn't changed since Herndon corresponded with and interviewed witnesses. You can find almost every last item in the indispensable book Herndon's Informants. A few interviews with some of Ann's sisters appeared independently of Herndon; in my opinion they add very little to the record, mostly because the sisters in question were very young when Ann died. And then we have such finds as the quote in a newspaper article published in 1930, allegedly from Hannah Armstrong's daughter, which asserts that Lincoln "bawled like a baby" after Ann died. If you consider that good evidence I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

Thanks, after looking through John Walsh's "The Shadows Rise" and the 5 plus pages of bibliography, I realized Hendon's Informants was a key reference, but I thought among all the additional references there would be a reasonable amount of additional or new material.

Hi Gene. Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Douglas L. Wilson & Rodney O. Davis, eds.) appeared in 1998, five years after John Evangelist Walsh published The Shadows Rise: Abraham Lincoln and the Ann Rutledge Legend. It therefore doesn't appear in Walsh's bibliography. An edited and annotated compilation of the many scraps of information Herndon collected during his monumental research project into Lincoln's early life, Herndon's Informants is an amazing, indispensable piece of work. It includes the material Herndon used to prepare his 1866 Rutledge lecture, which introduced the Rutledge story to a national audience. This material is just a small fraction of the book's contents. Very little additional primary-source testimony has been added to it since Herndon finished his investigation in the late 1880s. In other words, the primary-source Rutledge evidence isn't that big a file. I mentioned before that a bright high-schooler can read all of it in just a couple of hours. And yet: scholars at different times have examined this small, mostly unchanging body of evidence and from it extracted completely different pictures. Not just somewhat different pictures: totally different pictures. Why is that noteworthy? The Rutledge story's rise, fall, re-rise, and now the possible re-fall (thanks in part to yours truly) offer a case study of the strengths and drawbacks of "oral history," or history based on storytelling traditions as opposed to physical documents (contemporary letters, diaries, court records, county archives, and so on). That's why the Rutledge story really matters. The controversy isn't simply about truths & untruths in Lincoln's biography. It's about the fundamental question of historical method. How important is that? Important enough that any number of Ph.D. theses could & should be written about it. Memo to ambitious grad students: GET BUSY. For all I know dozens of young scholars are working on the subject. I've actually been out of the loop for some years now. But I have a feeling that up & comers in Lincoln world don't realize what an opportunity the Rutledge story offers to make contributions to basic historiography. By the way, I freely admit that I got into this mostly by accident, and that I remain mostly an amateur. But I've been a fortunate amateur. It goes to show: work hard and you never know what might happen. Meantime, let me assure you that I'm not out to make you mad. I'm aiming for much bigger game than you, my friend. Probably I shouldn't be so candid. On the other hand, as Abe would say: honesty really is the best policy.