Lincoln and Ann Rutledge

[Lewis Gannett]

(06-29-2014 07:34 PM)Gene C Wrote:  

(06-28-2014 10:30 PM)Lewis Gannett Wrote:  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.

My mistake, and a careless one at that. Herndon is listed in the bibliography, but not Herndon's Informants. Thanks for correcting my error.

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(06-29-2014 04:25 PM)LincolnToddFan Wrote:  He had a dirty, I do mean dirty sense of humor.

I have heard he told a few smutty jokes or stories, but do you remember where you might have read this?

About Lincoln's dirty sense of humor. One famous observation came from a legal colleague, Henry Dummer, who said, "Lincoln had two characteristics: one of purity, and the other, as it were, an insane love of telling dirty and smutty stories." Herndon's Informants, 443. Observers pointed out that Lincoln's stories usually had a larger point that redeemed the ribaldry. This was lost on some of the officials Lincoln met in Washington. They couldn't believe that this Westerner president had a seemingly endless supply of off-color jokes. The guy was down to earth to say the least. He also, of course, wrote the finest prose in American civic history.

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(06-30-2014 06:49 AM)Gene C Wrote:  

(06-30-2014 01:44 AM)Lewis Gannett Wrote:  . I think the correspondence between Lincoln & Speed is very telling; the most telling thing of all, actually. And everybody's heard about the four-year bed sharing above the Springfield store. Critics scoff that it was normal to share beds back then because mattresses were expensive. But for four years?

Your scaring me Lewis, I know people who let their dog sleep with them, and their mattress is over four years old.

Yeah yeah yeah. Gene, you asked about the Chronicles of Reuben. It's about two young men who "marry," have sex, and are surprised that they can't have a baby. Like everything else it doesn't make a conclusive case by itself, but it does add to the overall picture. It gives a sense that Lincoln had sex on his mind. This is a man who ran away from girls as an adolescent (his step-mother noticed) and didn't marry until 33. Something does not add up.