Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865

Ward Hill Lamon knew Abraham Lincoln for nearly two decades before the president's assassination. He was Lincoln's law partner in Springfield, his companion on the prairie circuit, and, most hauntingly, the man seated in the presidential box at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth fired the fatal shot. This memoir, drawn from those years of intimate association, offers something no formal biography can: the unguarded, often hilarious portrait of a man who was still becoming Abraham Lincoln when Lamon first met him. Lamon recalls Lincoln's legendary humor, his black melancholy, his awkward courtship of Mary Todd, and his habits of mind. He writes of the prairie lawyer who could hold a circuit court in stitches and the wartime president who bore the crushing weight of a nation tearing itself apart. This is Lincoln before the mythology calcified, still raw and human and strange. For anyone seeking the man behind the monument, Lamon's account remains an essential and moving witness.