36. MR. HERNDON'S LINCOLN
William H. Herndon was born in Greensburg, Ky.,
December 28, 1816. His father moved to Troy, Madison County, Ill., 2
years later, and in 1821 to a farm in Sangamon County, 5 miles northeast
of Springfield. This was 9 years before Lincoln came to Illinois.
Herndon first saw Lincoln in 1832. At that time Lincoln was serving as a
pilot of a small steamer on the Sangamon River, working as an assistant
to Rowan Herndon, William's cousin. Herndon took up the study of law,
and in 1844 Lincoln took the younger man into his office in Springfield.
Thus the law firm of Lincoln and Herndon was established. It lasted
until Lincoln's death. On his last visit to the office, on February 10,
1861, the day before he left Springfield for Washington, Lincoln asked
that the firm signboard at the foot of the stairs remain unchanged.
"Let it hang there undisturbed," he said.
For more than 16 years prior to Lincoln's
departure from Springfield to take up his duties as President, Herndon
was the almost constant companion and observer of this remarkable man.
Henry C. Whitney, a close friend of both men, has said that Herndon was
Lincoln's political mentor; that he was Lincoln's closest political and
personal friend; and that he had more to do with influencing Lincoln's
political career than any other 10 men. Certain it is that no history of
Lincoln's life before 1860 could be written without the Herndon
manuscripts. Beginning shortly after the President's assassination,
Herndon devoted the remainder of his life, or rather that part of it
which could be spared from the task of earning a precarious livelihood,
to the task of gathering source material on Lincoln. The following
description of Lincoln is from a lecture prepared by Herndon and first
given by him at Springfield, Ill., Dec. 12, 1865.
It is now the time to describe the person of Mr.
Lincoln: he was about six feet four inches high, and when he left the
city, was fifty-one years old, having good health and no gray hairs or
but few on his head; he was thin, wiry, sinewy, raw and big heavy-boned,
thin through the breast to the back and narrow across the shoulders,
standing he leaned forward; was what may be called stoop-shouldered,
inclining to the consumptively built, his usual weight being about one
hundred and sixty or eighty pounds. . . . His organism and structure
were loose and leathery; his body was well shrunk, cadaverous and
shriveled, having very dark skin, dry and tough, wrinkled and lying
somewhat in flabby folds; dark hair, the man looking woe-struck. The
whole man, body and mind, worked slowly, creakingly, as if it needed
oiling. Physically he was a very powerful man, lifting, as said, with
ease four or six hundred pounds. . . . When this man moved and walked
along he moved and walked cautiously, but firmly, his long and big bony
arms and hands on them, hanging like giant hands on them, swung by his
side; he walked with even tread, the inner sides of his feet being
parallel; he put his whole foot down flat at once, not landing on his
heel; he likewise lifted his foot all at once, not rising from the toe,
and hence he had no spring to his walk; he had the economy of full lift
of foot though he had no spring to his walk or apparent ease of motion
in his tread; he walked undulatory, up and down in motion, catching and
pocketing time, weariness all up and down his person preventing them
from locating. The very first opinion that a stranger or one who did not
observe closely would form of Lincoln's walk and motion was that he was
a tricky man, a man of cunning, a dangerous shrewd man, one to watch
closely and not to be trusted, but his walk was the manifested walk of
caution and firmness. In sitting down on a common chair or bench or
ground, he was from the top of his head down to his seat no better than
the average man; his legs and arms were, as compared with the average
man, abnormally, unnaturally long, though when compared to his own
organism, the whole physical man, these organs may have been in harmony
with the man. His arms and hands, feet and legs, seemed to me, as
compared with the average man, in undue proportion to the balance of his
body. It was only when Lincoln rose on his feet that he loomed up above
the mass of men. He looked the giant then.
Lincoln's head was long and tall from the base of the
brain to and from the eyebrows. His head ran backward, his forehead
rising as it ran back at a low angle, like Clay's and unlike Webster's,
almost perpendicular. The size of his hat, measured on the hatter's hat
block was 7-1/8, his head being from ear to ear six and a half inches.
Thus measured it was not below the medium or average size. His forehead
was narrow but high; his hair was dark, almost black, and lay floating
where his fingers put it or the winds left it, piled up and tossed about
at random; his cheekbones were high, sharp, and prominent; his eyebrows
heavy and prominent; his jaws were long, upcurved, and massive, looked
solid, heavy, and strong; his nose was large, long, and blunt, a little
awry toward the right eye; his chin was long, sharp and uncurved; his
eyebrows cropped out like a huge jutting rock out of the brow of a hill;
his face was long, narrow, sallow, and cadaverous, flesh shrunk,
shriveled, wrinkled, and dry, having on his face a few hairs here and
there; his cheeks were leathery and saffron-colored; his ears were large
and ran out nearly at right angles from the sides of his head, caused by
heavy hats in which he carried his big cotton or other handkerchief, his
bank book, his letters, and his memoranda generally, and partly by
nature; . . . his head was well-balanced on his shoulders, his little
gray eyes in the right place. There was the lone mole on his right cheek
just a little above the right corner of his mouth and Adam's apple on
his throat. Beneath this rough and uncouth exterior was a very fine, an
exceedingly fine physical organization, a fine and delicate network of
nerves being woven through it along which feelings and thoughts traveled
and flashed quicker than lightning.
Thus I say stood, walked, looked, felt, thought,
willed, and acted this peculiar and singular man; he was odd, angular,
homely, but when those little gray eyes and face were lighted up by the
inward soul on fires of emotion, defending the liberty of man or
proclaiming the truths of the Declaration of Independence, or defending
justice and the eternal right, then it was that all those apparently
ugly or homely features sprang into organs of beauty, or sank themselves
into the sea of his inspiration that on such occasions flooded up his
manly face. Sometimes it did appear to me that Lincoln was just fresh
from the presence and hands of his Creator.
HERNDON'S NOTES AND MONOGRAPHS, IN
EMANUEL HERTZ, The Hidden Lincoln.
One of the most charming of the Lincoln
photographs. It is the only one that shows Lincoln wearing glasses. He
and his son Tad are caught by the camera in the act of looking over an
album of Brady photographs. The artist, Carpenter, used this photograph
as a model in executing his painting of the Lincoln family. This
photograph was made by Brady in his studio in Washington, February 9,
1864, the same day the photograph used as the frontispiece was made.
Courtesy the U. S. Army Signal Corps.
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