"Herndon was born mediocre"

[Liz Rosenthal]

I originally posted the following on the "Lincoln is big enough to be inconsistent" thread, and realize that it would have been more suited to this thread! Here goes:

Regardless of whatever anyone may think of William Herndon, we owe him a huge debt of gratitude. Certainly, his description of things that were directly observable, such as Lincoln's gait, we can find nowhere else. As for all of the people he interviewed or corresponded with... well, I hate to think of how much poorer we would be without the huge pile of "oral histories" he sought and accumulated. Others did some interviewing, too - Jesse Weik, John Nicolay, Ida Tarbell - but none to the extent that Herndon did. And Herndon began within a month of his former partner's death! He was a man on a mission and, he, more than any other, could truly say by the end of his life, "Mission Accomplished."

That being said, I agree with David Herbert Donald's criticism of Herndon's intuitive observations. Herndon came up with all sorts of weird descriptions and theories of physical and mental aspects of Lincoln's below-surface characteristics. For example, Lincoln "moved slowly and thought slowly." Though Lincoln's thinking was severely logical, somehow, it was also "gnarly," as was his body. The reason, Herndon said, for Lincoln's slownness was his very sluggish circulation!! (If it were as sluggish as Herndon seemed to suggest, Lincoln would have been dead long before he was ever elected president!)

Herndon also said that Lincoln didn't hate any particular individuals or groups of individuals (which seems mostly accurate), but he didn't love them, either. Now I'm sure we here can all agree that Lincoln was a man who loved many, whether they were family members or close friends. Herndon also couldn't imagine that anyone was ever as close to Lincoln as he was, not even Joshua Speed!

Also irksome for me are some of Herndon's above-surface Lincoln descriptions. For example, he said that Lincoln was "not muscular, but wirey." Almost every description I've read from every other person who ever had a chance to find out stated that Lincoln was very muscular (see, e.g., statements of friends, artists, tailors, doctors, politicians). Herndon also claimed Lincoln's shoulders were narrow and that his chest was thin. This statement is also belied by two things - the comment of a tailor who was sizing Lincoln up for a suit in advance of his inauguration (see, in particular, Holzer's book, Lincoln President-Elect) and the evidence that Lincoln was physically very powerful to the day of his death.

I have to assume that Herndon was focusing on his former partner's slouching posture and tendency to droop his shoulders, which gave the impression of narrow shoulders and a thin chest.

And one other thing. Herndon went on and on about how Lincoln was a great appellate lawyer but a poor nisi prius (trial) lawyer, and he gave as his reason Lincoln's supposed ignorance of the rules of evidence. As someone with a legal background, I think that what Herndon was really observing of Lincoln's lawyerly aptitude was the latter's famous manner of attacking a case by going to the root of the problem, and discarding or ignoring as extraneous anything that did not go to the root.