William Herndon’s copy, signed by him (“W.H. Herndon”) twice on front wrapper, once on title page, and once on rear blank wrapper. 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, 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" which 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 afterwards 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 did not deliver the anti-slavery lecture until 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 (reprinted in 1863) and again in this 1852 sermon, "Some Account of My Ministry". On page 52 of the first printing of that sermon, 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." Offered here is Herndon’s own copy of that first 1853 printing of these famous words – possibly the only version of these words which were in print when Herndon briefly met Parker in Boston five years later. In a recent study of the Gettysburg Address, Professor A.E. Elmore concluded that “one or more” of these three speeches of Parker’s “was almost certainly Lincoln's actual source for the famous phrase”. While it’s possible that Herndon also owned another printing of the 1852 sermon which he gave Lincoln, there is no record of such a copy in Herndon’s personal library, much of which was later acquired by the great Lincoln collector Oliver Barrett. This then, seems to be the only known printing of the Parker sermon with clear Herndon provenance – whether or not it was the copy Herndon actually loaned to Abraham Lincoln which inspired one of the most famous oratorical phrases in American history.