An American Marriage

[Rob Wick]

I will likely buy it if only for the fact that I have all of Burlingame's books. Will I read it immediately (or ever)? Probably not anytime soon.

I think what you're seeing with Burlingame stems from the fact that for so long, James Randall, Benjamin Thomas, and Paul Angle among others (and even Ida Tarbell, to a point) denigrated William Herndon so blatantly and unfairly that one would be surprised if an eventual correction never came about. With Burlingame I think you have an overcorrection. Douglas Wilson and Rodney Davis seem to me to have done a much better job of rehabilitating Herndon in the eyes of Clio.

I've often wondered if Burlingame is doing this in an attempt to overcome his graduate advisor, David Herbert Donald, who helped create the anti-Herndon school. They had a falling out at some point that I don't think was ever resolved.

As for Mary, while it's easy to understand how she could have become the "hellcat" in the eyes of her enemies, she certainly didn't help herself. She gave them plenty of ammunition to use against her. Ida Tarbell often talked about the dichotomy she faced. On the one hand, she thought Herndon was trying to hang onto Lincoln's coattails to salve his own failures in life, but she also disliked Mary for most of her life. She even urged Harper's to hold off on publishing Orville Hickman Browning's diary until after Robert Todd Lincoln died because the suppressed portion of his diary (that Burlingame published decades later) that painted a poor picture of MTL would be easier to include with RTL dead. Of course, Harper's never got the rights to publish the diary, given that the family wanted to make sure the portions were expunged. When Randall and Theodore C. Pease agreed to leave those passage out, the family gave the rights to the Illinois Historical Commission.

Best
Rob