Of course there was nothing to do but look up Mr. Whitney, and that I did. To my great satisfaction I found he had a bunch of yellowed notes. He had always intended to write them up, he said; but when he tried it the result seemed so inadequate that he gave it up.
After much persuasion Mr. Whitney did get out a version of the Speech. When he turned it over to me I took it to the men in Illinois with whom I had talked and asked them what they thought of it. There were those who said, “It’s impossible to write out that Speech.” But there were others who said, “Yes, Whitney has caught the spirit, he has the argument, he even has many of the phrases, as of course he would have if he made notes.”
The most emphatic and enthusiastic statement came from a man of importance—Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago _Tribune_. Mr. Medill had been one of the reporters at Bloomington in 1856 when the speech was made who found himself in the end on top of the table without a note! He thought Mr. Whitney’s version was close to the original. Indeed, he wrote to Mr. McClure a long and interesting letter giving his recollections of the Convention. In that letter he said:
Mr. Whitney has reproduced with remarkable accuracy what Mr. Lincoln said, largely in his identical language and partly in synonymous terms. The report is close enough in thought and word to recall the wonderful speech delivered forty years ago with vivid freshness.
Well, that seemed to us reason enough for publishing Mr. Whitney’s report along with the story of how I had found it, what the people who heard the speech in the first place said about it, both for and against. And that we did.
But out in Illinois there were a number of people who did not want to give up the tradition. The Lost Speech was the greater to them because it was lost. As long as it was lost you could make it bigger than any speech any man ever made, and nobody could contradict you. And so you will find those who claim that the Lost Speech is still lost. And of course you can take it or you can leave it.
More than once when I plumed myself on a “discovery” I encountered the loyalty of men to their legends. There was the Herndon story of Lincoln’s failing to appear at the first wedding arranged for him and Mary Todd. I realized he rather lets his “historical imagination” loose in his description, but I never had questioned his story until by chance I mentioned it to one of the family, a woman who would have been there if there had ever been such a wedding ready. She froze me with her indignation. “Mr. Herndon made that story up out of whole cloth. No such thing ever happened.” Amazed, I flew around to see what other men and women of the circle said. They all denied it. A sister of Mary Lincoln was particularly indignant because Mr. Herndon had put the bride in white silk. “Mary Lincoln never had a white silk dress until she went to Washington,” she sputtered.