Life On The Circuit With Lincoln

[Gene C]

According to Thomas, Whitney's book had it's good points, however "Never a man to underestimate his own powers, Whitney was held at a somewhat lower valuation by his colleagues."
Both Angle and Thomas question Whitney's remarkable recollection of the content of some of Lincoln's speeches given 40 years earlier that no one else ever made notes on. Whitney lost much of his credibility when "in 1930 there came to light a contemporary report of the speech printed in the Alton Courier of June 5, 1856, (Lincoln's lost Bloomington speech) which was so different from Whitney's version as to utterly discredit it."

Thomas writes, "But for the period of 1854 to 1861 the book was valuable. Rich in anecdote and vivid in description...Whitney's admiration of Lincoln was unbounded; but he could see him as no more than a first rate lawyer who was ordinary successful - surely not as the knight-errant of the courtroom that some biographers depicted"

"Whitney thought to make a good income from his book."
"In the first five months after publication only 428 copies were sold..".
....his characterizations of rival authors were uncommonly crusty and tart. ... Miss Tarbell was an 'obscure Bohemian,' whose series in McClure's was a 'weary and oft told plagiarized narrative,' "sponged and cribbed' from others and written in the style of a kindergarten teacher"

If this wasn't enough, both Angle and Thomas point out some of Whitney's character faults, evidenced by his involvement in the Rawsons' divorce case.
This was an event worthy of the supermarket weekly tabloids. For our purposes, it seems that Whitney, the attorney for Mr Rawson, who was a high society banker in Chicago, Knowingly presented some outrageously scandalous and perjured testimony against the former Mrs. Rawson.

"On March 1st, 1886, Stephen W Rawson, president of the Union Trust Company of Chicago and Mrs. America Lucretia Lee were married, each for the second time. Three months later they separated and Mrs. Rawson filed a bill for separate maintenance. Rawson, employing Whitney as counsel, countered with a charge of infidelity. Charges were met with counter charges, and public interest, already aroused by the social eminence of the contestants, was intensified when Mrs. Rawson's son by her first marriage tried to kill his stepfather. And worse was yet to come.

On June 1, 1888, Mrs. Rawson walked into the courtroom, advanced to where Whitney sat, whipped out a pistol, and fired five shots at him point blank. Two bullets took effect and for weeks Whitney was in serious condition. Mrs. Rawson's lawyers--one of whom was John Barton Payne, a man whose word and character were irreproachable--justified her action by publicly accusing Whitney of driving her to desperation by manufacturing the most salacious kind of evidence against her character and hiring witnesses to swear to it.

Finding the courtroom atmosphere a bit torrid, Whitney retired temporarily to the sanctuary of his closet."

Both Angle and Thomas felt that these events ( as well as other events) had some relevance in considering Whitney's reliability and accuracy to the events he wrote about.