Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1896-07-05


 Ill 1859 Lincoln said to him bitterly. sI expect every enc to desert me now but Billy Herndon. That Lincoln believed him worthy and true is shown in mere than one proffered appointment after he became president and in the correspond ence between the two, which not only overfows with cordiality, but betrays confidence and love as deep and abiding as those which exist, or should exist. between brothers.
 l first met MT. Herndon in Spring field, Ills. We were sitting in one of the dingy old rooms which he and Lin coln had used for a law office. There was but little in the furniture of the room or it's surroundings to suggest that within its inclosure these primitive law partners had ever explained the law to their clients, prepared their papers and charged up their fees or that through the only door had passed outward the figure of that tall, sad faced man whom fate had decreed should make his way unerringly to imperishable renown.
 We sat facing the west, and our feet rested on the sills of the old back win dows through which Lincoln and this same law partner had 50 often gazed as they sat there of quiet afternoons undis- J turbed by business or the calls of clients and discussed the varied features of law, religion or politics. Before and overhead was the same sea of blue into which they peered, and below the same picturesque back yard, with it's profusion of wornout boots and discarded tin cans. MT. Herndon, already the deposi- tary of valuable collection of material pertaining to Lincoln, had enlisted my sympathetic interest and assistance in the preparation of life of his former partner which, in Carlyle's language, should tell Gods S naked truth. The pur- pose at first was a series of articles for magazine newly established in Chica- go, but these afterward expanded almost insensibly into two rather pretentious volumes of biography. A great and in many respects an untried field lay be- fore us. As none of the former biograph- CTS of Lincoln had visited either Ken lucky or southern Indiana, was dis patched thither commissioned and de- termined to obtain all the facts.
 Just here it is due the reader to state that nothing was so calculated to create and give impetus to the myriad of un- necessary and groundless stories regard ing Mr. Lincoln's origin as his singu- larly reticent and eyasive conduct when appealed to for particulars of his early life or the details of his ancestry. He had drifted down the Sangamon river into central Illinois shortly after attain ing his majority, coming ill from the south, but beyond that nobody in that region knew anything of his history. When Jesse " Fell, the secretary of the Republican state committee, who, in 1859, suggested the propriety of sketch of his personal history for dis tribution through Pennsylvania and oth- CT adjacent states for the purpose of awakening some interest in his presiden- tial possibilities, Lincoln treated the matter with apparent indifference.
 There is nothing i'll my early his tory, he answered, to interest you or any one else, and besides, as Judge Da- wis would say, it won't pay" At last, however, after good deal of argument Fell drew from him a brief autobio- graphical statement, carefully worded, not dictated to another, but all i'll his own handwriting This mere sketch, which fails to state what his mothers name was or whether his parents were ever married, was the only history or account of his life in existence when the convention chose him as the stand ard bearer of his party in the spring of 1860 After the nomination a horde of newspaper men swooped down on him, notebooks in hand, to jot down what the presidential candidate saw fit to tell them regarding bis origin and family history, but as each fellow in turn was referred to the Fell manuscript he went away with a curious notion i'll his head that ill that exceedingly condensed state- ment of biographical facts something had been adroitly withheld or for some peculiar reason left unsaid On account of the meager display of facts there could not help being demand for some thing more specific. At length, MT. Lin- coln yielding to this desire, prepared another account of his life, which his secretary, Mir. Nicolay, copied and sent to friends in Ohio, New York and else where, but though somewhat longer it was hardly more than 8 repetition of the Fell manuscript. The one curious thing about the whole matter was that Mir Lincoln insisted on writing both these sketches himself. He dictated most of his correspondence to be written by his secretary, but either because be wanted to be mathematically exact or for some other reason which no one knows he prepared these productions with his own hand. The whole thing, viewed at this distance, seems very strange proceeding for Q presidential candidate
 An enthusiastic friend in Kentucky who, in the effort to locate Mir. Lin eoln's origin or identify him with cer- tain family, wrote asking him for the details of his maternal genealogy was