Episode 21, Abraham Lincoln’s Last Visit To His Step Mother: This month, we sit down with Dr. Cornelius for a special Mother’s Day themed episode of “SFTV” and discuss Mr. Lincoln’s last visit to his step mother, we answer some questions from Facebook, and debunk a “famous” Mr. Lincoln quote often attributed to him on Mother’s Day.
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For about a century the Lincoln profession has analyzed statements by John Milton Hay that he wrote many of Lincoln’s letters, and/or signed his name to many documents, with the president’s acquiescence. Hay was the assistant private secretary in the Executive Mansion for the entirety of Lincoln’s presidency, serving under secretary John Nicolay, his friend from western Illinois and his elder by six years.
Hay achieved notoriety in many fields. He was graduated from Brown University in 1858 as class poet and then worked in his uncle’s law firm in Springfield. That uncle, Milton Hay, had clerked for Lincoln two decades before. Young John Hay was quick with a pen, providing signed as well as anonymous reportage to newspapers and keeping a fascinating war-years diary. After the years in Mr. Lincoln’s service, he co-authored with Nicolay the 10-volume biography of Lincoln (1890), then rounded out that picture with the 12-volume edition of Lincoln’s own writings (1905). In all this they had close cooperation with and access to documents belonging to Robert Lincoln and others. So Hay knew Lincoln’s hand. And he knew Robert — the two young men were playing cards in the family quarters of the Executive Mansion on the night of 14 April 1865 when Robert’s parents went to Ford’s Theatre. John Hay was nearly a son, perhaps more like a shadow, to the man he had dubbed the ‘tycoon.’
Hay later published poems, stories, a novel, and travel sketches, was U.S. ambassador to London soon after Robert Lincoln served there; and as Secretary of State in the McKinley and T. Roosevelt administrations authored the ‘Open Door’ policy for trade with China. He negotiated the important Hay-Pauncefote Treaties that led to the building of the Panama Canal. In so doing he pursued policies about which Mr. Lincoln had a nascent interest, though did not pursue during the crisis of the Civil War. Hay began to intimate that he had written the famous Bixby letter for Lincoln in 1864 (the original was lost that year), and scholars still hotly debate that topic.
Definitely Hay, and definitely Lincoln's signature
But what of his claim that he ‘signed for’ Lincoln? The document at the right contains Lincoln’s signature only. The document below — a scrap, really — is the closest thing we have to substantiation of Hay’s claim. Most of the text is clearly not in Lincoln’s hand, nor is the date. And the signature does not look very good either. It would be dismissed from the pantheon of ‘Lincoln documents’ were it not for the fact that the main text is in Hay’s hand, and thus the ‘A. Lincoln’ cannot really be a forgery. Did Mr. Lincoln hand over a stack of pleas like this one, from Confederate soldiers who in the days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox suddenly wished to renew their loyalty to the Union? There are perhaps a hundred of these notes written out and/or signed by Lincoln in 1863-65, and the flood of them grew as the war’s eventual victor became clear.
Definitely Hay, and maybe a Hay-as-Lincoln signature
If John Hay was trying to make his hand look like Lincoln’s, he did not execute a particularly good likeness here. Is it possible that Hay’s later claim to have written many of Lincoln’s letters owes mainly to those last days of Lincoln’s life, perhaps this very last day? The harried President wanted to oblige his wife, his friends Major Rathbone and Miss Harris, his own interest, and the nation’s acclaim by getting to Ford’s Theatre for the show. Did he leave some papers behind for the able and trusted young secretary to ‘take care of, if you please, Mr. Hay?’ And was it that last conversation with his chief that caused Hay, in his very later years, to inflate his own memory and thus his words about the frequency of his vicarious role as official presidential signatory? Or have a host of ‘A. Lincoln’ signatures on short notes been dismissed, perhaps undeservedly, because we have not learned to recognize John Hay’s hand?
Episode 20, Book Discussion with author Randall Fuller: In this special episode, we present a book discussion with Randall Fuller author of the book, “From Battlefields Rising: How The Civil War Transformed American Literature”. The discussion took place April 10, 2012 in our Union Theatre.
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Episode 19, The Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Retrial (Part Two): In part two of our Roundtable Discussion, our panel focuses on the medical and legal aspects of Mary Lincoln’s trial.
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Episode 18, The Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Insanity Trial (Part One): In this two part episode, we present the audio from the Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Insanity Retrial. The Insanity Retrial of Mary Todd Lincoln is sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Commission and will take place September 24, 2012 in Chicago, IL and again on October 1, 2012 in Springfield, IL. For more information on the retrial please visit: www.wasmarylincolncrazy.com.
Part one of our discussion focuses on the historical, cultural, and legal surroundings of Mrs. Lincoln’s original trial.
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To celebrate Lincoln’s hundredth birthday in 1909, the Times put on an essay contest for the children of the Greater New York Area. Other urban papers, including the Philadelphia Ledger and the Cleveland Press, organized Lincoln competitions too, though none could rival the size of the Times event.
Drawing on a city population of 4.5 million, about 3 times that of Philadelphia and 9 times that of Cleveland, the Times attracted almost 10,000 qualifying submissions, many from New Jersey, Connecticut, and other towns in New York. All of the handwritten papers — capped at 500 words — arrived with a teacher’s note certifying that the essay had been written “without outside help.”
“WINNERS OF THE LINCOLN COMPETITION MEDALS, CERTIFICATES, CASH PRIZES,” ran the 7-column headline on page 1 of the “Magazine Section” on February 23, 1909. One thousand children had won silver Tiffany medals featuring the bust of Lincoln, and the top 100 were each to get a $5.00 gold piece.
The Magazine printed the top 10 essays, in facsimile form to show off the neatness and penmanship of the best writers. Three of these, said the Times, came from the pens of 10-year-olds, one from a 12-year-old, and the rest from teenagers and one 20-year-old. For the Times, the 10-year-olds (one of whom turned out to be only 9) proved irresistible. Their innocent directness of expression seemed to mirror the mythic simplicity of Lincoln.
Alexandra Kliatshco, age 9 and just 3 years an American. Photo courtesy of Julie Stern, Cyrenius H. Booth Library, Newtown, CT.
How did the Times manage to attract nearly 10,000 essays? By enlisting the eager support of the New York City school system, which added the Times contest to its already extensive Lincoln centennial program.
Teachers were encouraged to assign the 7-part biography of Lincoln published in the paper in early February. (The biography was the work of Frederick Trevor Hill, author of the recent book Lincoln the Lawyer.) They helped their pupils grasp what the Times meant by an “original” response to Hill’s account. A summary would not suffice; students had to express their own sentiments about Lincoln’s slow climb to distinction.
Many teachers actively discussed the Times pieces with their pupils, focusing on Hill’s main point: “Lincoln was not a heaven born genius — merely a plain man who was honest, sincere, and upright.” He learned growing up that strong “character” would get him through failure and disappointment. Any young person in any era, the Times urged, could adopt Lincoln as a model.
The teachers promoted the contest, but the lure of a dazzling medal fired the children’s ambition. Letters poured into the Times office from young hopefuls and their parents, explaining how badly they wanted to win.
One father thought he would help his 14-year-old daughter’s chances by sending in an additional poem she had written that urged equal time for George Washington:
It’s Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln
Just cause he’s a hundred years old,
O’ course he deserves every bit of his praise,
And maybe I am kind o’ bold
To say that there’s some one better,
An’ tho’ I’m only one
I’m goin’ ter stick up for the father
Of this country, George Washington.
The Times cautioned youngsters not to expect special treatment for extra material of this kind. But the 14-year-old did get her medal.
In the aftermath, what did the Times think the competition had achieved? “Thousands of eager, impressible, active young minds” had received a “conception of the great President, which will not easily be effaced,” it wrote. The essays had “made Lincoln a vital reality to them,” to their families, and to countless readers.
In a city with almost 2 million foreign-born residents, the Lincoln contest had made him a subject of daily conversation for at least 100,000 people, said the Times. Immigrants and native-born Americans, often occupying separate worlds, had taken another step towards a shared civic life.
Diminutive Alexandra Kliatshco, a Russian immigrant, and at age 9 the winner of a medal and a $5.00 gold piece, became the paper’s poster-child for equal opportunity in modern America. Alexandra had arrived in America from Russia only 3 years before, knowing no English. She had thrived at P.S. 177 in Manhattan, and she produced an elegant Lincoln piece. Her father, a physician on Henry Street, told the Times that she had excelled at memorizing Russian poetry from the time she was 3 years old.
“I am a little foreign girl, and I have been here only a short time,” her essay began, “but when I read about Lincoln, I thought that I might grow up a great woman as Lincoln was a great man.” And it ended: “We cannot forget the love he bore us and he died leaving the world better than it was. I hope that I can be like Lincoln, unselfish, kind, thoughtful and modest.”
A 1998 profile in the Times noted that her prediction had proven accurate. Alexandra Kliatshco Werner had graduated from Teachers College in 1922 and taught art for 40 years at Jane Addams Vocational School in the Bronx. She loved impressionist paintings, classical music, and Alfred Hitchcock, and had tried her hand at poetry.
According to her daughter, interviewed for this post, she had not held on to her Lincoln medal, preferring to make a gift of it to her father, who died in 1928.
A regular contributor over the decades to the Times “Neediest Cases” fund, Mrs. Werner — the youngest top-ten winner in the centennial Lincoln competition of 1909 — died in 1997 at the age of 97.
Episode 17, Abraham Lincoln Deathbed Painting: This month on Stories from the Vault we sit down with Dr. James Cornelius to discuss a painting of Abraham Lincoln on his deathbed. You may view the painting in our companion video series.
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Both large and small new discoveries or points for debate come up nearly every month about Lincoln and his family. Recent months have been richer than most.
Moving from the small to the large, or perhaps from the amusing to the consequential, we find these four nuggets.
1. Vera Kaikobad, in the journal Medical Acupuncture for 2007 (this one took a while to pierce our attention), has performed what seems to be the first acupuncture analysis of Lincoln. Addressing the 5 Elements for “his Qi energetics” — fire, water, earth, wood, and metal — she finds, e.g., that Lincoln’s ‘lazy’ eye points to “a pronounced wood disposition;” that his cold hands and feet under stress meant “a fire-water axis problem;” and his being a “weak eater” meant “wood afflicting earth.” I am not qualified to comment on this analysis except to say that the lazy eye was thought to originate in a head-kick by a horse when Abe was 10; and that the other two maladies cropped up only in the last months of his life.
2. Mary Lincoln wrote on 5 May 1862 — 10 weeks after Willie Lincoln’s death — to Charles Reeves of Cleveland, Ohio, in a letter newly revealed to the public this month. As often happened in 1862-1882, Mary wrote to express condolences for the death of another person — Reeves’s wife Hester, who had briefly been Willie’s teacher in Springfield– then mainly wrote about her own sorrow.
More interestingly, she refers to a painting of Willie, based on a photograph. If this is the watercolor portrait owned by the ALPLM, gifted by the last Lincoln descendant in 1976, then it is about a decade older than we had thought. If so, in her weeks of self-confinement Mary still found the strength to commission, pay for, and receive the portrait. The letter also tells us that city directories and the census can leave chasms of the unknown, for Hester Reeves was never listed in Springfield.
3. Major Thomas Eckert was in charge of the Military Telegraph office in the War Department, and thus personally close to Lincoln. After the war he was an industrial executive and innovator in telegraphy. At war’s end he legally carried away his code books and message logs, which in early 2012 his descendant sold to the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California.
The code books reveal some new names for our 16th President: he was variously referred to as Berlin, India, Ida, and Irving, inter alia. General McClellan was Andes. Secretary of War Stanton was Indus. The rebels never cracked the federals’ codes, surely one element (if not the major one) in the Union victory. Eckert’s code men chose stray words, then filled in uncoded names alongside them in their logbook as the messages went out. They also added junk words to messages, meant only to confuse a possible spy: abortion, snowball, etc. These 30 volumes will provide many new insights and much information on the conduct of the war.
In March 1865 John Bigelow, U.S. minister in Paris, presented Lincoln with volume 1 of the new 'History of Julius Caesar' by Emperor Napoleon III. Volume 2 had to be presented to Robert Lincoln the next year.
4. Perhaps of greatest interest to Lincolnology is a project, now in its beginning stages, to create a conspectus of all the books the Lincolns owned. Robert Bray’s recent study Reading with Lincoln (2010) is a series of lectures, really, building upon Professor Bray’s 2007 list of books Lincoln is thought to have read. Bray’s study is useful, if maddening at times. The books now in possession of the ALPLM do not much overlap with Bray’s list, and why that may be is for future scholars and students to puzzle out.
The volumes here have been in different vaults and shelves over the decades; and some were only very recently acquired. The wonderful new Presidential Library building, opened in 2004, along with devoted staff and better record-keeping, finally allow us to shelve and then list them together. I will share this information with the other major repositories of Lincoln possessions and see how large a virtual shelf we can fill with the family’s readings. The headline number for the ALPLM’s collection is 152: namely, books presented to, given by, or owned permanently by Abraham, Mary, Robert, his wife Mary, their son Jack, or, in one case their granddaughter Peggy. More to come on this topic later this year.
With its funds drying up, the Jane Addams Hull House Association, a social service agency in Chicago, shut its doors in January 2012 after 122 years of continuous work. The demise of the organization that bears her name brings to mind what Jane Addams accomplished in 1889 when she created Hull House. In doing so, she took Lincoln as a prime inspiration.
Born in 1860, Addams was 29 years old when she founded Hull House as a “settlement” of college-educated women in a working-class neighborhood on the west side of Chicago. (The house took its name from its original owner of 1856.) For them, Hull House offered a new experience of social and vocational freedom. They got to test their book knowledge against the realities of urban life.
Hull House gave direct assistance to the poor, but its mission encompassed an attack on inequality across the board — publicizing inferior housing and working conditions faced by immigrant laborers, acquainting adults and children with the democratic ideals espoused by Lincoln and others.
In the 1880s, a chorus of reformers bewailed the deep class divisions threatening the ideal of citizen equality. A gap between rich and poor had seemed more acceptable when most people believed (as Lincoln did) that any white man working for wages could acquire capital through diligent labor, and eventually become an employer himself.
By the late 1880s — after a decade of class conflict culminating in Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886 — more and more middle-class reformers joined labor organizers in concluding that equal opportunity was dying out. To give every man a shot at economic independence, and to preserve a republic of equal citizens, fundamental change could no longer be avoided, they felt.
But what kind of change could equalize life chances? Addams imagined Hull House as an experimental institution searching for answers. Weekly lectures on political economy brought in eager crowds, including socialists and anarchists. The House became a center of intellectual debate, and Lincoln emerged as a staple of the conversation. Addams modeled her approach to social progress after his.
In the 1850s, he had pushed the American founders’ principle of equality for all, while going slow on the abolition of slavery and seeking an accommodation between free and slave states. In the 1890s, Addams pushed Lincoln’s goal of equality for all, while pursuing an accommodation between labor and capital, and deeper bonds of understanding between immigrants and native-born Americans.
In her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), she noted how much Lincoln had meant to her since childhood. Her father John Addams, an Illinois State Senator starting in 1854, had known him personally (Lincoln liked to address him as “Double D’ed Addams”). She could remember the moment her father told her, at age four, that “the greatest man in the world” had died. He was sobbing as he said it, and looking back years later, Jane saw his torrent of tears over Lincoln as her “baptism” into the wider world.
Devising the Hull House “settlement” — a residence for independent women on the urban frontier, and a living bridge between the classes — assured Addams that she had found a calling worthy of her father’s and Lincoln’s generation, those who had saved the Union and freed the slaves.
But in 1894, when class conflict erupted again in Chicago with the Pullman Strike, she confronted the apparent breakdown of her bridging campaign. “Labor” and “capital” had reached an impasse, and she was bewildered about how to proceed. She was tempted by the Socialist program — government ownership of major industries — but decided it was too rigid. On the other hand, leaving large companies in the hands of men like George Pullman, who could lower his workers’ wages at will, seemed intolerable too.
During hard times in 1894 Jane Addams visited the statue in Lincoln Park, Chicago, for inspiration. The view here, taken by an unknown WPA photographer during the Great Depression of the 1930s, includes a man resting.
In her confusion, Addams sought Lincoln’s help. She set out on a three-mile pilgrimage from Hull House to Lincoln Park, where Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s acclaimed bronze statue of Lincoln had been dedicated in 1887. She wanted to meditate at this shrine to her hero, “to look at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I could, from the marvelous Saint- Gaudens statue.”
Reflecting on Lincoln’s ideas, she found him mute on the labor-capital conflict, since he had never encountered “labor” and “capital” in their late-19th century forms. But she gathered ample wisdom from the words chiseled into the granite bench that stretches around the statue: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
The injustices built into modern industrial life would have to be addressed pragmatically, she realized, not according to the Socialist vision of a progress unfolding through prescribed historical stages. To Addams, “pragmatism” meant practical problem-solving, informed by a set of chosen ideals. Addams took her ideals straight from Lincoln: equality for all and respect for one’s opponents.
One must prepare for partial victories and frequent setbacks. Lincoln had shown the proper patience, being content “to dig the channels through which the moral life of his countrymen might flow.” Amidst all the turn-of-the-century calls for wholesale social transformation, she found that “the memory of Lincoln… came like a refreshing breeze from off the prairie.”
“In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression,” she concluded, “we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment [something] of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.”
Episode 16, Mary Lincoln’s Jewelry: Once again, we are joined by Dr. James Cornelius to discuss artifacts from our collection. This month, we discuss pieces of Mary Lincoln’s jewelry. You may also view the jewelry by watching our companion “Stories from the Vault” video. Mary’s jewelry will be on display this summer.
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