Table of Contents

Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
Editorial Note xxv
Short Citations and Abbreviations xxix
Herndon’s Informants: The Texts
1. Letters, Interviews, and Statements Collected by
William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, 1865–92 3
2. Informant Testimony Reported in Herndon’s Lincoln:
The True Story of a Great Life (1889) 707
3. Informant Testimony Reported in William H. Herndon’s
Letters to Jesse W. Weik 713
4. Informant Testimony Reported in Jesse W. Weik’s
The Real Lincoln (1922) 725
Register of Informants 737
Appendix: Brief Outline of the Joseph Hanks Family,
by Paul H. Verduin 779
Index 785

About the Author

Douglas L. Wilson is the director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois. Rodney O. Davis (d. 2019) was co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College. They are the coeditors of Lincoln's Confidant: The Life of Noah Brooks, Herndon on Lincoln: Letters, Herndon's Lincoln, and The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.

Reviews

Winner of the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award given by the Abraham Lincoln Institute of the Mid-Atlantic.

"[Wilson and Davis] have done a service of inestimable value to historians by the complete, accurately transcribed, indexed, and annotated edition of the written accounts of Herndon's interviews with 264 people. . . . It is a monumental achievement of scholarship. That is true not simply because of the editorial skill and effort required to complete it, but mainly because this material is the basis for most of what we know about the first half of Lincoln's life."
--James M. McPherson, New York Review of Books