What is more surprising, Lincoln was known as a great story teller. But his addresses contain hardly a single anecdote. He told stories in jury trials and to illustrate points in conversation, but he rarely told them in his addresses.[62]
No man who knew Lincoln intimately studied him so long, so industriously, or, in spite of many limitations, so appreciatively, as William H. Herndon. He was a profound believer in the mental and spiritual evolution of Lincoln.
In 1887, while Herndon, after many years of interruption, began again the preparation of his _Life of Lincoln_, he had an extended correspondence, partly from Springfield, and partly from Greencastle, Indiana, where Mr. Jesse W. Weik was at work with him on his book, and with a Boston sculptor, Mr. Truman H. Bartlett, who was planning a statue of Lincoln. Herndon's letters went more and more into detail as the correspondence proceeded, and he gave in some respects the very best affirmation of the development of Lincoln on the higher side of his nature that Herndon wrote at any time.
Herndon seemed to have some apprehension that a study of photographs and life-masks and other evidences of the physical appearance of Lincoln would not reveal the man himself. He said that a person studying his physical nature would say "that his physical nature was low, coarse, and not high and fine." Before he sent this letter he re-read it, and inserted the word "comparatively" before "low." Mr. Bartlett asked him further about this, and Herndon went into detail as to Lincoln's body. "His blood ran slowly. He was of a low or slow mechanical power, within him. I did not intend to say that Lincoln's organization was a low, animal organization. What I meant to say was that it was a slow-working machine. Lincoln's flesh was coarse, pimply, dry, hard, harsh; color of his flesh saffron brown; no blood seemingly in it; flesh wrinkled."
Mr. Bartlett apparently inquired whether the abnormal qualities of frontier life produced these effects, and whether Herndon had known other men of the Lincoln type. Apparently he alluded to the presence of malaria and the large use of pork in frontier diet.
Herndon did not accept the pork and malaria theories. He said that all such theories must give way to facts, and he dealt with facts. The men of the frontier had the best meat in the world, "venison, bear, turkey, and of course some hog."