Lincoln, Davis and Booth: Family Secrets

[Liz Rosenthal]

I should have been a little more involved in this thread than I was earlier. Work has been a nightmare. I piped in about Dennis Hanks and posted about Cape May in another thread but left the other matters for later because it seemed easier at the time.

Anyway, I agree with Eva. Plus, as Roger points out, all the strange stories about Thomas being castrated, or that he wasn't Abe's real father, or that Nancy had an affair or one-night-stand with someone else to produce the 16th president of the United States, were proved to be poppycock a long time ago. Reading Herndon's Informants and even The Hidden Lincoln (a compilation of Herndon's letters to other people compiled and lightly annotated by Emmanuel Hertz) give you part of the story, but only that part in which Herndon is seen struggling to make sense out of Lincoln's paternal background. As others have noted, any number of reputable biographies about Lincoln published since the days of Herndon have debunked those claims. There has been so much excellent scholarship on Lincoln's origins and genealogy that the things raised here are no longer an issue, haven't been for a long time and are being belabored by the author of this new book for no rational reason.