Billy's back

Many thanks to the comments on my various posts this week. I apologize for not having yet responded, but it's been a loopy week: midterms due at my university (though a campus-wide computer crash made that one problematic), parent-teacher conferences for both my kids--you get the idea. I plan to spend the weekend getting caught up.

Meantime, I thought some of you might be interested to know that University of Illinois Press is going to release a new edition of William Herndon's Herndon's Lincoln, edited by Douglas Wilson and Rodney O. Davis. Wilson and Davis are the team that brought us Herndon's Informants, an incomparable and invaluable resource, so the new edition of Herndon's bio will at the very least be well-edited.

Personally, I've always been a little ambivalent about Billy and his biography of Lincoln. I spent a lot of time with it while writing my study of Lincoln's law practice, of course. It contains some wonderful anecdotes (Lincoln lounging in his law office reading newspapers out loud, for example, which annoyed Herndon a great deal). It's also just a very good read. But the doubts about its accuracy are quite well founded. I discovered at least one place in which Billy apparently deliberately altered a piece of evidence (a letter from David Davis) to defame Mary Lincoln (whom Billy disliked). Many of his other anecdotes possess a self-serving, hyperbolic quality that makes me wonder how useful they really are to Lincoln scholars.

Still, the new edition will be well worth acquiring, even at the rather stiff price of $35.00. It will be released in July.