Blog Posts about Mary Lincoln

[kerry]

(03-04-2020 12:18 AM)Steve Wrote:  Thanks for sharing your blog, Kerry. I was especially intrigued by your Mistaken Identities Part 2 article (or is it a draft?).

If your concerned about people not being able to follow your blog. Have you considered adding one of those icons that lets people sign up for email announcements to be sent when a new article post has been made. If you can't, you can always post a notice here to make those of us on the Forum aware.

Have you considered writing an article on the clash between Mary and Herndon, especially after the assassination?

Hi Steve...thank you for reading! Part I is also there--both were published in the Manuscript Society's quarterly journal.

I decided to make a substack, https://ke.substack.com/ so that people can register there to be alerted to new posts. It's an email newsletter site, and I migrated my blog articles, but for some reason it put a giant-sized version of the Wordpress footnote icon between every footnote on the Mistaken Identities series. I'm slowly deleting them one by one. But as long as you don't scroll to the footnotes, you can read the articles easily on substack, and sign up for more. The form will allow me to do short daily reveals of things I've found.

I have considered an article on Mary and Herndon---some of it is written. I feel like something's off with how that is understood. I do have something somewhat related to it that I hope to reveal soon. One thing I will point out is that before Ida Tarbell got involved, they weren't consistently portrayed as nemeses.

A better characterization, I suspect, is that Herndon just had a lot of fixations because of the way his mind worked and his personality. He was brilliant, obsessive, and eccentric. Two of his many obsessions were Ann Rutledge and Lincoln's domestic life. He was prone to a great deal of speculation, sometimes insightful and other times not so much. I don't think his actions that caused "the clash" were mainly motivated by a desire to strike at Mary Lincoln. He was caught up in certain ideas.

But it is striking to me that in the early 1890s, several people noted that Herndon had at least tried to be fair to her, as compared with an opportunistically faux-moralizing press. Her oft-quoted cousin Eliza Norris's letter to Emilie Helm makes this point, but that part is never published.