Go to this issue's Table of Contents. M A Y 2 0 0 0 The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click here to go to part one or part three. Given the time and place of Lincoln's young manhood, this all seems rather predictable, and may tell us little beyond the fact that the young Lincoln was regarded as having, and no doubt did have, sexual appetites.
Herndon made a point of telling Jesse Weik that Lincoln had "strong passions" for women -- a judgment confirmed by Judge David Davis, who rode the circuit with Lincoln for more than ten years.
But both Herndon and Davis testified that Lincoln had scruples about seduction, and that his conscience "saved" many a woman. Though he believed, with good reason, that Lincoln visited prostitutes as a bachelor, Herndon seems firm in his contention that he avoided illicit sexual contact after marriage.
All these things appear in Herndon's own correspondence and in the archive of letters and interviews he called his "Lincoln Record. Where, if not in his collection of letters and interviews, were these "floating rumors" that Herndon was so concerned about? It has long been known that Herndon did not put everything he was told into his Lincoln Record, whose contents he had duplicated by a copyist in and stored in a bank vault for safekeeping.
Some things Herndon recorded in two little memorandum books. The first mention we have of them is from late , in Herndon's letters to Ward Hill Lamon, a close associate of Lincoln's, to whom he had just sold the copy he had made of his Lincoln Record. Lamon was planning to use Herndon's material in a biography of Lincoln, but after he had a chance to look at the copy, he wrote to Herndon and complained bitterly that he couldn't be sure it was accurate without comparing it with the original.
