William H. Herndon, Jesse William Weik, Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, Etiam in minimis major, The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln by William H. Herndon, for twenty years his friend and Jesse William Weik

[6] in the world, persons who knew both himself and his father were constantly pointing to the want of resemblance between the two. The old gentleman was not only devoid of energy, and shiftless, but dull, and these persons were unable to account for the source of his son's ambition and his intellectual superiority over other men. Hence the charge so often made in Kentucky that Mr. Lincoln was in reality the offspring of a Hardin or a Marshall, or that he had in his veins the blood of some of the noted families who held social and intellectual sway in the western part of the State. These serious hints were the outgrowth of the campaign of 1860, which was conducted with such unrelenting prejudice in Kentucky that in the county where Lincoln was born only six persons could be found who had the courage to vote for him.¹ I remember that after his nomination for