One Man's Lincoln

Billy Herndon (Honestly) Represents Abe by Wade Hall

Lincoln’s law partner makes the case for a great man.

“They called him a baboon, a murderer, a slave-lover. And they called him the Great Emancipator, the Savior of the Union, a saint. I called him friend and partner.”  One Man’s Lincoln – Billy Herndon’s unvarnished portrait of his great friend Honest Abe.

Abraham Lincoln and Billy Herndon were friends and law partners for eighteen years in Springfield, Illinois.  In early 1861, as he was leaving to be inaugurated president, Lincoln told Herndon to keep his name on the shingle outside their office because he intended to return some day.  After Lincoln’s assassination, Herndon spent the rest of his life collecting materials for a definitive biography.  He would present Lincoln unvarnished, a great man in all his humanity, neither saint nor villain.

Outspoken and controversial, Kentucky-born like Lincoln himself, Herndon finally published his life of Lincoln in 1888. Now, in One Man’s Lincoln, Wade Hall gives us Herndon’s Lincoln in the form of a spellbinding monologue.  In the office he and Lincoln shared, we see an aging Herndon still struggling to decipher Lincoln’s greatness and complexity. Pick up this compelling book, and you’ll find yourself struggling…to put it down.

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About the author

Wade Hall, Playwright

Wade Hall is the author of books, monographs, articles, plays and reviews on Kentucky and Southern literature and history.  His works include Passing for Black: The Life and Careers of Mae Street Kiss, Hell-Bent for Music: The Life of Pee Wee King, and Greetings from Kentucky: A Post Card Tour 1900 – 1950.  Hall is professor emeritus of English at Bellarmine College in Louisville.  Hall now resides in Alabama.