THE REAL LINCOLN, FROM THE TESTIMONY OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES by Minor, Charles L. C - 1904

Richmond: Everett Waddey Co, 1904. Hard Cover. Very Good+ binding. 12mo. 232 pp., frontis. Second edition, revised and enlarged. In original pebbled cloth. In a very bright binding with only trivial shelfwear; binding is solid; early gift inscription on the recto of the frontispiece. This copy belonged to Eppa Hunton IV, grandson of Confederate Generals Eppa Hunton and William Payne and has his stamp on the front pastedown; Hunton's pencil underlining and marginalia scattered throughout. An uncommon edition of this title, one of a host of anti-Lincoln books that materialized in the decades after his death drawing on any unflattering material in new biographies; "particularly William H. Herndon and Ward H. Lamon, provided welcome ammunition for the dwindling but resolute corps of Lincoln-haters. Eagerly they seized upon assertions that Lincoln, among other things, had mocked at Christianity, sold liquor in his grocery, told off-color stories, treated women with disrespect, admitted to Herndon that his mother was probably illegitimate, and suggested that a finger and thumb were as good as a handkerchief" (p. 16)" writes Don E. Fehrenbacher in "The Anti-Lincoln Tradition" in Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association (Vol. 4. 1982. p. 16). An uncommon book with an interesting association.