ABSTRACT
Excerpt from Henry B. Rankin, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln (1916), pp. 124–7.
Rankin claimed to have been a law clerk in Lincoln s office, and this passage describes events which presumably occurred in 1857. Rankins reminiscence is accepted as authentic by Thomas B. Mosher in A Facsimile of 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass and by Gay Wilson Allen in The Solitary Singer (1955). It is seriously questioned, however, by William E. Barton in Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman (1928), pp. 92–4, on grounds which appear to be compelling.
