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guard as to what I say, and what all men say. Much of the matter is ten years old, and watch all men, weigh well what is said, search for opportunities, casts of mind, education, and veracities. Follow no man simply because he says so and so. Follow your records, sharply criticizing as you go.î36
As this passage suggests, Herndon knew from his own experience how mem‚ories can fade and become elusive. When his biography was ‚nally in proofs, for example, he developed a concern about his own ‚rst glimpse of Abraham Lincoln and wrote to his collaborator: ¿Be sure that Lincoln Came all the way up to Bogue's Mill. It seems to me that he did and that, I at that time, saw Lincoln, but be sure that I am right. The records [i.e., his letters and interviews, then in Weik's posses‚sion] will ‚x it Ü it has now been 56 years since I saw what now Seems to be the truth to me. Try and get me right. If L Came up to Bogues mill I saw Lincoln & if he did not then I did not see him at Bogues mill.î37 While this dramatizes the precarious qualities of memory, it also demonstrates that Herndon was, to the last, deeply concerned about historical accuracy and more than willing, if the evidence warranted, to have his own memory corrected.
The letters, interviews, and statements included in this edition all relate to William H. Herndon's biographical project, but they are limited, with few excep‚tions, to those that purport to provide information or informed opinion about Abraham Lincoln. The great majority of these documents were received or taken down by Herndon himself, but his own personal recollections of Lincoln are out‚side the scope of this work. A respectable number of documents containing infor‚mant testimony resulted from the work of his collaborator, Jesse W. Weik. Weik continued his Lincoln inquiries after completion of the collaborative biography, but letters and interviews that he collected are restricted in this work to those ac‚quired in the service of Herndon's overall project, which began in 1865 and end‚ed with publication of the revised edition of their biography in 1892. The mate‚rials on Lincoln collected by Weik after that date for other projects are therefore not included. Correspondents who merely supplied copies of Lincoln's letters are ignored. These selection criteria effectively exclude from the present work a very substantial portion of Herndon's and Weik's papers, so that students interested in the progress and details of Herndon's biographical project, in Herndon's own writ‚ing on Lincoln, or in the material on Lincoln that Weik acquired after the appear‚ance of the revised edition will need to supplement this edition with a wider array of documents.
Readers of the material presented here will readily perceive that the pertinence and quality of the testimony offered by Herndon's informants vary widely. Not surprisingly, witnesses are often demonstrably wrong in their recollections of fact. Particularly in such unforgiving matters as dates, informants are often in error (though perhaps a more remarkable circumstance is how often they are right). It
36.
WHH to Ward Hill Lamon, Mar. 6, 1870, Lamon Papers, HL.
37.
WHH to JWW, Nov. 10, 1888, HW.
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