Life On The Circuit With Lincoln

[Gene C]

Life On The Circuit With Lincoln by Henry Clay Whitney
Copyright 1892 with about 600 pages of text

I was looking foreword to reading this, and I was very disappointed.
My copy was a reprint, and The quality of the print, slightly blurry, made my eyes tire after reading only a few pages. The author's writing style left much to be desired. Run on sentences, the frequent use of uncommon words made this book tiresome to read.

For example, the first sentence of this book,
"Among the vicissitudes incident to the progress of a government, based upon general suffrage, and composed of a general heterogeneous people, exponents of the extremes of social life will be found, installed in its curule chair"

There is so much unnecessary supplemental information and unnecessary verbiage, the interesting details of Lincoln's life easily get overwhelmed. There are about 600 pages to this book, which is about 400 to many.

The title of the book is misleading. Only one chapter had much to do with Life on the Circuit. A 30 page chapter, and only half of that was about life on the circuit.
Whitney seems to depend heavily upon Herndon's books and lectures for his information, although he is much kinder to Mrs. Lincoln than Herndon was by pointing out many of her good qualities.

Two well known Lincoln scholars have reviewed this book.
Paul Angle, in a letter to Ida Tarbell in 1936, sent her a copy of his review of Whitney's book.
https://dspace.allegheny.edu/bitstream/h...sAllowed=y

Paul angle writes, "In these pages, to be sure, he will find much about Lincoln, but he will also find much that has hardly the remotest connection with the book's theme, and no connection with it's title."
Paul Angle also questions Whiney's recollections of a speech Lincoln gave at Urbana
on October 24, 1854 and Lincoln's "Lost Speech" made in Bloomington at the Republican State Convention on May 29, 1856. Only the Urbana speech is mentioned in Whitney's book

Angle writes, "One departure from the cannon of historical writing might be accidental, two slips argue intent. Apparently our biographer was determined to add to the world's knowledge of his hero's life, even if invention had to be brought to the aid of recollection."
In addition, "Much more serious, from the standpoint of it's permanent value are certain indications of deliberate misrepresentation on Whitney's part."

Angle goes further by examining some aspects of Whitey's character by looking at a court case Whitney was heavily involved with, the Rawson Divorce case of 1886. Angle shares some the details of this very public and scandalous trial on pages 11 - 14. More on this later, I'm running out of space here,

Benjamin Thomas in Portrait For Posterity - Lincoln and His Biographers has
13 pages in discussion of Whitney's book. Chapter 6 entitled An Epoch Ends, covers some of the same material as Angle. In regards to Lincoln's speech in Urbana and Bloomington, Thomas informs us that Tarbell was more impressed with Whitney's recollection of the two speeches than Angle was. And, more on Whitney's involvement in the Rawson divorce case.
Thomas book is available on Internet Archives (Books To Borrow) and it's free to sign up.
https://archive.org/details/portraitforp...7/mode/2up
I'll go over some of Thomas's comments in a follow up post soon.