From Out of the Top Hat: A Blog from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum

A classic gag line from the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera deals with contract clauses.  Groucho reassures Chico about the contract: “That’s in every contract, that’s what you call a sanity clause.”  To which Chico responds: “You can’t fool me, there ain’t no sanity clause.”  The question of the existence of Santa Claus is the theme of the movie A Miracle on 34^th Street.  Maureen O’Hara plays a divorced mother, Doris Walker, who hires Edmund Gwenn, who plays the character Kris Kringle, to be a seasonal department store Santa Claus.  When she discovers that the person she hired actually believes himself to be the real Santa Claus, Doris must decide whether to keep the very popular Kris Kringle on staff or dismiss him as potentially dangerous and delusional.  Julian Shellhammer, played by actor Philip Tonge, is a colleague of Doris and offers her this advice: “But … but maybe he’s only a little crazy like painters or composers or some of those men in Washington.” 

Abraham Lincoln as Santa Claus, Comic Monthly Dec. 1864

This brings us to the mysterious statements made by the painter Freeman Thorp, who claimed to have sketched Lincoln from life on two separate occasions.  Thorp was born in Geneva, Ohio, and claimed that he made a pencil sketch of president-elect Lincoln as the train passed through the town on its way to Washington, D.C.  (This sketch will be the subject of a later blog.)  Thorp was an accomplished painter who did numerous oil portraits of famous Washington figures that hang in the United States Capitol.  They include Abraham Lincoln, James G. Blaine, Schuyler Colfax, David B. Henderson, and Joseph G. Cannon.  The success of his art career allowed him to retire in Pequot Lakes, Minnesota.  But time was not kind, and the painter died a poor man in Brainerd, Minnesota, in 1922.  Shortly before his death, Thorp wrote the following letter which remained unfinished but made a rather astonishing claim.  It is unclear to whom it was directed other than ‘Editor.’  Spelling and punctuation have been modernized.

                                                                        “Hubert Minn. Dec 24^th 1921

“Editor

            “Dear Sir If you care to consider a matter that can easily be of great importance to your paper to the country and to the world I will be glad to give you all the facts in the matter.  As to my personal standing and reputation I can refer you to the Senior Senator from Minnesota Knut Nelson to my congressman Harold Knutson whip of the House, and Geo. D. Lass President of the First National Bank of Brainerd, Minn. my banker and if permitted will come to Chicago and present convincing proof of what I desire to lay before you.  In brief it is about Lincoln is new and has never been given to or published in any paper as an item of Lincoln’s life, is by far the most important to mankind of any of the great ideas of his master mind, and more important to the World than any other idea of any mortal man in the World, as you will yourself see, if it is practical and I have the indisputable proof that it is easily practical.  The idea is wholly Lincolns no other man ever thought it out or even thought of it.  Yet put in general operation, it will make every acre of land in the World, upland or lowland, desert or swamp, hill or valley the best in the world for the production of all that the world wants in food or raw material of a vegetable nature for life, health, comfort, and enjoyment, producing 4 times as much per acre as can now be done by the best methods now known to Agriculture.  Fruit, timber growth or grazing, and doing this by the Lincoln method eliminates floods, drought, and any possible famine, converts stream beds now alternately dry or flood of muddy water, into living streams of pure water all the year round, quadrupling the water power, maintaining a uniform navigable stage of rivers, makes it unnecessary for the United States to ever buy or import a dollar’s worth of nitrogen, potash, phosphate, guano, or any commercial fertilizer, enables the continued cropping of the soil for any number of years without lowering its fertility.  All this with less labor per acre than now required to make the meager living of the farmer by much harder labor than this requires. Of course this seems incredible but it has been worked out proven absolutely and put in operation on my demonstration tract of 1500 acres here at Hubert, Minn., and is easily practical for the whole World.  If I can be assured of a hearing I will gladly come to Chicago soon after the New Year at my own expense and go over the whole matter with you showing how I came to know Lincoln and what is more important to know more about him, and the ideas of his than any other man has ever had the opportunity to know that which it is important to learn about him.”

Thorp does not provide a clue to what Lincoln’s “great idea” might be.  The only evidence Thorp offers is that it was tested on his own farm in Hubert, Minn.  That he died poor the following October does not offer much evidence of the success of Lincoln’s idea.  Clearly, Thorp was more successful at delineating images of people than their ideas.

The memorable holiday character of Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol brought into popular usage the phrase “Bah! Humbug!”  Scrooge went beyond ignoring the holiday.  He believed it to be a conspiracy of slackers to get a day off from work.  “A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December,” exclaimed Scrooge.  Ultimately, Scrooge’s problem was his inability to embrace the spirit of the season that also included reconnecting with friends, family, and the less fortunate.  The Scrooge model is supported by a recent study suggesting that the higher one’s socioeconomic status, the lower the “empathic accuracy.”  In other words, one becomes less attuned to the needs of others.  In the triumphal ending, Scrooge’s change of heart also allows for the future of individuals such as Tiny Tim to change as well. 

There is little evidence that Abraham Lincoln celebrated Christmas in ways that Charles Dickens’s novella helped advance: holiday dinner, a Yule log, the exchange of presents, stockings by the fireplace, and a decorated tree.  Subscribing to earlier Protestant traditions of visiting friends at New Year’s, the Lincolns apparently never embraced the emerging Victorian symbols of celebration. 

Looking at what is firmly documented for Lincoln’s activities on December 25^th, we find most of his time spent on letter-writing and, throughout the presidency, dealing with affairs of state.  While serving in the Illinois Legislature in Vandalia, Lincoln voted against adjourning for Christmas.  While serving in the United States House of Representatives, Lincoln spent the 1848 holiday straightening out an old legal issue with his friend Joshua Speed, ending the letter, “Nothing of consequence new here, beyond what you see in the papers.”

December 25, 1861, offers two different views of the Lincoln family.  It is clear that the Lincoln boys spent the day with the Taft family.  Daughter Julia would frequently bring over her brothers Bud and Holly to play with Willie and Tad Lincoln.  She later gave a series of lectures at the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum) about her memories of the Lincoln Executive Mansion.  These lectures were published as a book, Tad Lincoln’s Father (1931).  Julia’s father, Horatio Nelson Taft, kept a diary and recorded this for Wednesday, December 25, 1861: “It has been quite a noisey day about the house.  Our three boys and the Two Lincoln boys have been very busy fireing off Crackers & Pistols.  Willie & Thomas Lincoln staid to Dinner at 4 o’clock.”  Meantime, Abraham and Mary Lincoln were entertaining friends from Kentucky and Illinois as well as some members of his cabinet.  Orville Hickman Browning, who was appointed to serve out the remainder of the Senate seat of the late Stephen A. Douglas, was at this dinner.  There is nothing in his diary entry to suggest holiday flair.  It was during this time that diplomatic difficulties with England, over the seizure of two Confederate diplomats from the British mail packet Trent, were at a climax.  According to Browning, Lincoln pulled him aside following the dinner and reassured him that problems over the Trent affair had been amicably resolved.

That it was business as usual at the Executive Mansion on December 25, 1861, is suggested by private secretary John Nicolay.  Writing to his fiancée Therena Bates, Nicolay jokes: “John [Hay] and I are moping the day away here in our offices like a couple of great owls in their holes, and expect in an hour or two to go down to Willards and get our ‘daily bread’ just as we do on each of the other three hundred and sixty four days of the year.”  Once again, the New Year’s reception served as the most significant holiday on the White House social calendar.

In “The Union Christmas Dinner” of 1864, Lincoln invites Rebel soldiers to take their state-named seats at the table once again.

Lincoln received all sorts of gifts throughout the year.  A specific Christmas gift was sent by telegram on Tuesday, December 20, 1864:

To His Excellency President Lincoln:

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.

W.T. Sherman

Major-General

Undoubtedly one of the most unusual gifts was sent a few weeks before December 25, 1864, by the famed hunter and mountain man Seth Kinman.  Sporting buckskin and long unkempt hair to match a long bushy beard, Kinman began presenting chairs made from animal bones and skins to presidents beginning with James Buchanan and continuing at least through Rutherford B. Hayes.  On November 26, 1864, Kinman visited Lincoln in Washington to present a chair made from elk horns.  Alfred Waud, an artist and illustrator, captured the scene in a drawing now at the Library of Congress.  Lincoln is seen examining Kinman’s rifle, with the elk horn chair in the background.  Clearly, Lincoln was amused by his unusual visitor, who also played two songs for the president on a violin made from the skull of his mule, Dave.

The chair eventually was given by Robert Todd Lincoln to Clinton Lloyd, a friend of Kinman and Chief Clerk of the House of Representatives.  It eventually was passed on to his son, George B. Lloyd of Springfield, Illinois, where it was displayed on several occasions and then disappeared.  Like so many unusual holiday gifts such as gaudy ties, snow globes, and overly imaginative mugs and tea sets, the elk horn chair, one might hope, has been re-gifted with the possibility of resurfacing some day.

This is the first of a two-part piece on the perils of single-source history in the Lincoln field.  Part 2, on Frederick Douglass, will appear in January 2011.

Such is the hunger for facts and stories about Lincoln that we may occasionally fail to double-check the sources.  A good many stories rely on exactly one person’s report or opinion.  Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher’s book Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (1994) contains thousands of contemporary and post-1865 statements about things Lincoln said.  Most rely on one person’s report.  Who are those persons?

William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner for 17 years and his acquaintance for about 24 years, is the largest source.  Nearly everything he said or wrote about Lincoln emerged years, even a quarter-century, after 1865. “All that I am or ever hope to be I get from my angel mother,” quoth Lincoln via Herndon.  Or was it merely “from my mother”?  Both versions come from Herndon.  Neither can be cross-checked against any other source.  The tone, though, is plausibly Lincoln’s.

Other than Herndon, the biggest source, and problem, in Lincoln history is journalists.  They get most of their facts right, and we are hugely indebted to them.  Yet many of them have a desire to seem influential for years after their key association.  And, they age.

Noah Brooks was among the most diligent reporters in Washington during Lincoln’s presidency.  For the Sacramento Daily Union he followed and recorded the great man’s movements for the final two and a half years, as well as filing good war reports.  It is he who tells us, e.g., of Lord Colchester the séance-maker, and Mary and Abraham’s encounter with him, and how one night at a séance across town Brooks suspected fraud and seized someone’s wrist in the dark, and found it was Colchester’s. He then warned the fraudster to leave town.  This has believability to it; but can anyone corroborate it?  Mary Lincoln biographers Jean Baker and Catherine Clinton both recount the episode, in startlingly different ways, adding new information or misstating the old.  Whom are we to believe?  The Fehrenbachers trace one reported Lincolnism as quoted 4 different ways from Brooks’s multifarious memory.

Brooks wrote articles for Scribner’s Monthly and Century Magazine in the 1870s and ’80s, then a biography of Lincoln in 1888 that went through many variations and editions.  All this was supposedly based on his 258 wartime dispatches.  But his 1895 book Washington in Lincoln’s Time has other material and is where anyone beyond the small number of 1863 Sacramento-area subscribers could read that the Lincolns, while visiting General Hooker in Stafford County, Va., in April 1863, drove past a bedraggled camp of freed slaves.  How many of those “little piccaninnies,” Mary asked her husband, do you suppose are named for you?  “Let’s see. This is April, 1863,” answers the president.  “I should say that of all those babies under two years of age, perhaps two thirds have been named for me.”

Is this a president we recognize?  Herbert Mitgang includes the dialogue in a 1958 edition of Brooks’s book.  P.J. Staudenraus omitted it from his 1967 edition.  So, too, Michael Burlingame in his 1998 edition, who does, though, catch Brooks attributing his own views to Lincoln on at least two other occasions.  And Brooks wrote, soon after this unlikely episode, that “No colored persons are employed about the Executive Mansion,” an error that casts into doubt just how close Brooks was to Lincoln.  William Johnson was Lincoln’s regular valet, attending him sporadically but personally for almost three years, till his death by smallpox after traveling to Gettysburg with Lincoln.  William Slade was a doorman, sometimes confused with the other William as a man with access to the president.  Elizabeth Keckly was Mary’s most constant companion, and is in fact the person who encouraged her to seek out spiritualist mollification after Willie Lincoln’s death.  Was Noah Brooks watchful for mediums but blind to blacks?  His 1895 reports about Lincoln may show a hardening of his arteries, or of the nation’s.

Noah Brooks, ca. 1872, early in his “I knew Lincoln” career.

Lincoln’s love of the theater is well known, but not his love of music — from the Marine Band’s regular performances at the White House to the recitals and operas in Washington’s concert halls.  He liked getting out among the evening audiences, and a short carriage ride took him and Mary, plus a friend like Charles Sumner or Edwin Stanton, to Willard’s or Grover’s for a few hours of entertainment, musical as often as dramatic. 

He didn’t know as much about Beethoven or Verdi as he did about some of Shakespeare’s works, but he evidently enjoyed the listening.  Music historian Steven Cornelius counts 19 trips by Lincoln to the opera during the war years.

And Lincoln imagined doing more than just listening to music.  Journalist Noah Brooks, who knew him well, recalled in 1865 that “Mr. Lincoln’s love of music was something passionate,” so much so that he once fantasized about writing some bars to accompany his favorite poem, William Knox’s “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”  Lincoln “said once, when told that the newspapers had credited him with the authorship of the piece, ‘I should not care much for the reputation of having written that, but would be glad if I could compose music as fit to convey the sentiment as the words now do.’”

One of the most heralded performers that Lincoln heard during the war was pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, an ardent Union supporter originally from New Orleans.  A serious composer as well as a talented stylist, Gottschalk’s work impressed a New York critic in 1862: “he has evoked new effects from the instrument that none others had dreamt of; his touch is perfect, and he can accomplish better than any pianist living that most difficult of all feats, making the piano sing.”

Touring widely in a competitive entertainment market, he drew crowds by offering something for everyone: patriotic airs, classical pieces, sentimental ballads, and his own compositions.  He was renowned for his dazzling patriotic hymn of 1862 entitled “Union,” and for his six-minute adaptation of his friend George F. Root’s runaway wartime hit “Battle Cry of Freedom.”  (Both of those Gottschalk pieces, and others, are available on YouTube and at www.gottschalk.fr/Oeuvres/Oeuvres.php.)

For his appearance at Willard’s Hall in Washington on March 24, 1864, Gottschalk set aside front-row seats for Abraham and Mary Lincoln, and he brought in a violinist, a tenor, and a soprano for a varied program of Heinrich Ernst, Rossini, Beethoven, Verdi, Paganini, and Ferdinand Gumbert.

Lincoln never let on what he thought of the evening’s fare, including arias from The Barber of Seville and La Traviata, and the Andante from Beethoven’s “Pathétique Sonata.”  We can assume that he relished Gottschalk’s encore selection — “Union,” which brought down the house — as well as tenor Theodore Habelmann’s rendition of Gumbert’s “My Father’s Home.”  Brooks was insistent on this point: all songs evoking “the rapid flight of time, decay, the recollections of early days, were sure to make a deep impression” on the president.

Lincoln didn’t record his response to Gottschalk, but the pianist recorded his reaction to Lincoln.  “Remarkably ugly,” he wrote in his diary.  In spite of the president’s looks (and failure to wear dress gloves), Gottschalk thought Lincoln conveyed an “intelligent air.”  And his eyes exuded “goodness and mildness.”

That memorable evening spent entertaining Lincoln and other dignitaries (including William Seward) was apparently the last time Gottschalk laid eyes on him.  But it was not the last time he played his “Union” for him. 

Eleven months later, on April 23, 1865, the performer was headed to San Francisco for a series of concerts.  He’d left New York City on April 3, sailing south for Panama on the mail steamer Ariel.  Just before departure, the passengers had heard the latest news from Virginia: Petersburg had fallen to Union forces.  That was the last North American report they would receive until April 23.

On the 23rd, having already crossed the isthmus by train, they were gliding north along the Mexican coast on a much larger steamer, the Constitution.  Among the 400 passengers were Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, a group of Italian singers, and opera star Adelaide Phillips.

Lincoln had heard her perform in New York City in February 1861 at the first opera he ever attended, Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera.  On that occasion Lincoln had arrived late at the Academy of Music and slipped quietly into his seat.  As soon as the curtain fell on Act One, people began chanting “Lincoln! Lincoln!,” and as he rose for a bow, Phillips and the other singers serenaded him with “The Star Spangled Banner.”

As the Constitution steamed northward on April 23, a southbound ship, The Golden City, hailed it, and its captain came aboard to deliver some grim news.  Lincoln had been murdered more than a week before.  Passengers squeezed around a staircase and begged the captain for details.  Some refused to believe his story without newspaper proof.  Apparently anticipating that reaction, he had brought a newspaper with him.  Immediately a passenger was delegated to climb the rigging above the spacious deck and read from the paper in the loudest voice he could muster.

Theodore M. Brown wrote one of the most widely performed new dirges when Lincoln died.

Back on the mainland, Lincoln’s body was lying in state in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and dozens of composers, including T. M. Brown, were hard at work on original funeral dirges in the martyr’s honor.  Gottschalk’s friend George Root completed his “Farewell Father, Friend, and Guardian,” the best known of them all, in time for it to be performed in Chicago when Lincoln’s body lay in state there on May 1.

Aboard ship in the Pacific on April 23, Louis Gottschalk and Adelaide Phillips, along with the rest of the passengers, were just starting to mourn.  The faces of crewmembers, Gottschalk noticed, were smeared from the tears they’d been wiping away.  Passengers, like Justice Field, sat alone or in groups quietly weeping, their heads in their hands.

The following evening, Field presided over a general meeting to draw up and endorse the requisite resolutions.  Gottschalk summed them up: “fidelity to the Government, respect for the memory of the great and good Lincoln, and horror for the execrable act” of the assassin.  He remembered having once seen John Wilkes Booth in a play in Cleveland: “beautiful features,” he recalled, but “a sinister expression” and indeed “something deadly in his look.”

With the resolutions approved, Gottschalk moved to the ship’s piano to accompany the Italian singers in a performance of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  Then he played for Adelaide Phillips as she once again sang “The Star Spangled Banner” for Lincoln.  To finish the ceremony he performed his signature work, “Union,” as he had at Willard’s when Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln sat only a few yards away.

Gottschalk did one more thing for Lincoln: he admonished himself for having mocked the president’s looks and disparaged his evening dress.  “Yesterday his detractors were ridiculing his large hands without gloves, his large feet, his bluntness; today this type we found grotesque appears to us on the threshold of immortality, and we understand by the universality of our grief what future generations will see in him.”