PARKER, THEODORE. Two sermons preached before the twenty-eighth Congregational Society in Boston on the 14th and 21st of November 1852, on leaving their old and entering a new place of worship. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, & Company, 1853. William Herndon's copy, signed by him ("W.H. Herndon") twice on front wrapper, once on the title-page, and once on the rear blank wrapper. Publisher's wrappers. 9 3/8 x 5 3/4 inches (24 x 14.75 cm); 56 pp. Several small chips to wrappers, stamped number at head of wrapper, old scotch tape repairs to spine.

William Henry Herndon was Abraham Lincoln's law partner in Springfield, Illinois from 1845 until Lincoln's inauguration as President in 1861. A more passionate opponent of slavery than Lincoln, Herndon was particularly moved by the sermons and speeches of that most eloquent of "radical" Abolitionists, the Boston clergyman Theodore Parker, printings of which Herndon assiduously collected, sometimes passing on his copies to Lincoln. In the three-volume Lincoln biography which Herndon co-authored, 24 years after the President's death, Herndon recalled that after a visit to Boston in 1858, "I brought with me additional sermons and lectures by Theodore Parker, who was warm in his commendation of Lincoln. One of these was a lecture on "The Effect of Slavery on the American People" that was delivered in the Music Hall in Boston, and which I gave to Lincoln, who read and returned it. He liked especially the following expression, which he marked with a pencil, and which he in substance afterward used in his Gettysburg address: 'Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people."

Herndon's memory was faulty. Parker delivered the anti-slavery lecture in July 1858, five months after Herndon returned from Boston. But Parker had used the phrase before, first in an 1850 speech to a New England Anti-Slavery convention - found in Parker's collected works, posthumously published in 1863. Parker used it again in an 1852 sermon, "On the Position and Duty of a Minister'. On page 52 of the first printing of that sermon, presented here, are the words "I have great faith in America; in the American idea; in the ideal of our government - a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people." Here is Herndon's own copy of that first 1853 printing of these famous words - possibly the only version of these words that were in print when Herndon briefly met Parker in Boston five years later.

In his recent study of the Gettysburg Address, Professor A.E. Elmore concluded that "one or more" of Parker's three speeches "was almost certainly Lincoln's actual source for the famous phrase". While it is possible that Herndon also owned a much later reprint of the 1852 sermon that he gave Lincoln, there is no record of the great Lincoln collector Oliver Barrett, who later acquired much of Herndon's library, coming across a copy with the Lincoln pencil underlining Herndon recalled. This appears to be the only known printing of the Parker sermon with clear Herndon provenance, and conceivably the copy from which Lincoln adopted the phrase in the Gettysburg Address: “that these dead shall not have died in vain– that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”