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The controversial Lincoln quotation that begins this article is from and 1870 letter Lincoln's law partner of 16 years, William H. Herndon (1818-1891), wrote to another Lincoln friend and associate, Ward Hill Lamon, to assist Lamon as he prepared one of the first biographies of the slain president. Herndon, who began writing down his reminiscences of Lincoln and collecting those of others soon after Lincoln's assassination, eventually published his own Lincoln biography in 1889, with the collaboration of ghost-writer Jesse Weik. Curiously, the "Virginia nobleman" was now called "a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter"-probably in a stumbling effort to clarify Lincoln's own words. But Herndon also told in the 1889 biography what transpired immediately after Lincoln finished speaking the handful of words about his noble grandfather, his grandmother, and his mother:
[Lincoln] immediately lapsed into silence. Our interchange of ideas ceased, and we rode on for some time without exchanging a single word. He was sad and absorbed. Burying himself in thought, and musing no doubt over the disclosure he had just mad, he drew round him a barrier which I feared to penetrate.
This poignant description, if accurate, clearly conveys the deep significance to Lincoln of what he had just confessed.
Herndon reported in his 1870 letter to Lamon, and also in his Lincoln biography, that Lincoln's confession concerning his "noble" ancestry was made while two men were en route to try a complicated inheritance court case in neigboring Menard County. In the letter Herndon said the confession took place about 1851. In the biography, he said it happened about 1850. While researching the matter in the Menard County, Illinois courthouse, this write discovered records of the likely case in question--Hannah Miller versus Mary E. Miller et al. But since the case dragged on for several years, Lincoln's confession could not be dated with certainty. However, the discovery of the case provided a bit of support for Herndon's testimony.
William Herndon was not the first Lincoln biographer to assert that Abraham Lincoln's best character traits came to him through his mother. Already in 1860, just after Lincoln had been nominated for president, respected Chicago journalist and Lincoln-backer John Locke Scripps wrote and published a brief campaign biography of the candidate, based on interviews with him and on a thumbnail autobiographical sketch he asked Lincoln to write. In this biography Scripps wrote:
Facts in the possession of the write have impressed him with the belief that, although of but limited education, she [Lincoln's mother] was a woman of great native strength of intellect and force of character; and he suspects that those admirable qualites of head and heart which characterize her distinguished son are inherited mostly from her.
Five years later, two months after Lincoln's assassination, Scripps, in reply to a letter from Herndon probing for information, said the following:
Mr. Lincoln communicated [when interviewed for the campaign biography] some facts to me concerning his ancestry which he did not wish to have published, and which I have never spoken of or alluded to before. I do not think, however, that Dennis Hanks [Lincoln's mother's cousin], if he knows anything about these matters, would be very likely to say anything about them.
When these two quotations from Scripps are put together, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that what Lincoln old Scripps in 1860 concerning his mother and his ancestry was probably essentially the same as what he had confidentially told Herndon a decade earlier, in or around 1850. Herndon eventually came out with this secret about Lincoln's ancestry, but Scripps' secret went with him to his grave in 1866. It is of interest to note that John Scripps correctly predicted Dennis Hanks' defensive denial when Herndon later persistenly badgered him for corroboration of the story of Nancy Hanks Lincoln's illegitimacy.
In retrospect, it is astounding to this writer that the matter of Lincoln's percieved aristocratic origins has never been thorougly put to test. Indeed, some will be understandably skeptical concerning the findings here presented. But in the 1980's a new Shakespeare sonnet was discovered. We learned that Columbus didn't discover America at the island we call San Salvador. We had to conclude Robert E. Peary never reached the North Pole. New discoveries can still be made, and old myths debunked.
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