The Shadows Rise

[Rob Wick]

Mike,

Of course you're right about Ruth Randall's influence on the story, and that she was the true author of the appendix in Randall's book. Both she and James were even able to convince Carl Sandburg to distrust the story, which he changed in his single-volume history of Lincoln. Randall had a strong dislike of reminisce and wanted history to be written only with documentation, which as I explained to Lewis Gannett, who completed Tripp's book, would have been unlikely to exist given that 1) Ann and Abraham both lived in the same town making letter writing superfluous; 2) that it would be conceivable that if letters did exist, Lincoln could have destroyed them after Ann's death as they were a painful reminder of yet another woman's death which affected him; and 3) if the first two were wrong, it's conceivable that Robert Todd Lincoln could have destroyed any incriminating evidence.

I will have to read the book (and I would urge anyone else interested in the story to do so as well) as both Tarbell and Sandburg wrote a great deal about Ann.

Best
Rob