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

To our readers: we share with you this story of an exciting visit last week presented by David Blanchette, our Communications Manager.  The regular blog returns next week.

We work with photographers, film producers, and all sorts of image-makers big and small at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.  Still, it was a pleasant surprise when famed photographer Annie Leibovitz called out of the blue late last summer and asked if she could photograph some Lincoln artifacts for a book she will publish in late 2011, Pilgrimage.  She and her staff talked with Lincoln Curator James Cornelius about items they could photograph, and I handled the usual photography permission process that applies to all such ventures.  Her staff requested that this visit be kept as quiet as possible so Annie could concentrate on her photography rather than distractions.

A date for Annie’s visit was set.  Only to be cancelled.  And re-set.  And re-cancelled.  And re-re-set.  Well, you get the idea.  She is extremely busy, and other jobs bumped this labor-of-love project.

On the third try (or was it fourth?), Annie and her two-man crew arrived at 6:45 a.m. on Wednesday, January 26 in a rented SUV they had driven to Springfield the night before from Lincoln sites in Kentucky and Indiana.  Annie practically bounded out of the car and offered an enthusiastic greeting, especially given the dark morning hour.  Quite tall, with a long mane of blond hair unashamedly going gray; a ready, winning smile; thin, black-framed glasses perched high on her nose; and sporting comfortable athletic shoes to go with her black sweater and pants, Annie looked the part of a seasoned artist who revels in her craft.

As internationally renowned artists go, the group was traveling very light – a couple of camera bags, a tripod, and some hand-held lights.  James Cornelius had several artifacts ready to go on his mobile curator’s cart, and exhibits staff John Malinak and Mike Casey stood ready to open exhibit cases and move exhibit mounts as needed.

Annie first went for Lincoln’s stovepipe hat.  All Museum visitors, young and old, idealistic or cynical, have a “Lincoln moment” when they encounter the real Lincoln hat.  Annie was no exception, her restless energy relenting for just a moment as, chin in hand, she regarded the hat from several angles, expressing her gratitude for the privilege of photographing this most iconic piece of American clothing.  Then, to work.

As artists go, Annie and crew were courteous, appreciative, and very careful around the original artifacts.  They also worked very quickly, with James, John, and Mike kept busy moving, opening, and closing.  Annie and crew were a well-oiled machine – she would choose the angle, her assistants would adjust the tripod and attach the proper camera and lens, and the photography would begin.  Annie photographed with the latest huge- resolution Leica digital camera, but, curiously, also with a point-and-shoot Canon camera, explaining that she used the smaller camera when first starting out on the book and liked the unposed and spontaneous look of its images.

Lincoln’s blood-stained gloves from Ford’s Theatre were next.  These were brought out of the case so Annie could better capture the stains from that fateful night.  At one point, as one of her assistants hovered near the gloves, Annie reminded him to be careful to securely store his light meter in its belt pouch so there was no danger of its falling on or near the artifact.  Click, click, click.  Adjust the angle a little bit; click, click, click.  Switch cameras; repeat the process.  Done.  Smooth, professional, deferential.

Nine o’clock arrived, and we had to vacate the Treasures Gallery so we wouldn’t impede Museum visitors.  James led the procession across the land bridge connecting the Library and Museum, and then down into the Lincoln Vault, where key items from the collection are stored when not on display.  The Gettysburg Address, Mary Lincoln’s diamond necklace, and other artifacts passed in front of Annie’s lenses.  In between takes, James regaled the crew with tales of each Lincoln artifact; his story-telling artistry, honed by years of practice and a true love of the subject matter, proved to be the only thing that caused Annie and crew to pause from their photography.

As the cameras were being put away at the end of the shoot, Annie took one more look around the vault, surrounded by original items from Lincoln’s life.  She hesitated, apparently deciding whether she could try “just one more shot.”  Lamenting that she wished to spend the whole day in the vault but simply did not have any additional time, Annie ended the shoot.

She graciously posed for photographs with all who had helped or observed her that morning, then gave the Museum photographer who had documented her visit a special treat: Annie Leibovitz took my camera, held it at arm’s length, and took a photograph of us standing together.  How many other people can claim they have an original Annie Leibovitz portrait of themselves?

We look forward to seeing Annie again when her book is published, as there might be a special public visit when that occurs.  Until then, we have a rare feeling here at the Museum: a big-name artist visited, and we weren’t reaching for the aspirin.  Enough said.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz captures Lincoln's Stovepipe Hat

Allusions to Abraham Lincoln in American literature are legion, if one looks into memorial poetry, recollective works on the heroism of soldiers, and, these days, even murder mysteries.  ‘What-if’ stories, including plays, about catching Booth early, stopping Booth in the act, or keeping the Lincolns from attending the theatre might fall into this category of ‘invention as sympathy’ in creative writing.

Yet the novel called by some THE Great American Novel may also include a Lincoln figure, at least by analogy.  “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” — this is what old-money Tom Buchanan called nouveau-riche Jay Gatsby during the very tense scene in the Plaza Hotel about halfway through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.  Old-money Tom, enraged that Gatsby could pursue and apparently win the heart of his wife Daisy Buchanan (who was from Kentucky), moved the inter-personal confrontation up a notch: “next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”  (Collier Books, 1980 reprint, p. 130).  In other words, no sooner could ‘society’ allow a low-born nobody to capture the affections of a well-bred lady, than not even skin color would serve as a social marker.

Lincoln and Gatsby, both nobodies from the north woods.

Could F. Scott Fitzgerald have had in mind the social revolution by which a railsplitter married the high-born Mary Todd (who was from Kentucky), then sets the blacks free?  Tom Buchanan … James Buchanan … equal social status for blacks and whites … a mystery man from nowhere (Duluth, Minnesota, for Jay Gatz; New Salem, Illinois, for Abe Lincoln) … a revolution in affairs.  How did the son of a “wandering laboring boy,”  as Lincoln described his father Tom, even meet the high-born Mary Todd, much less marry her?  One may easily see Fitzgerald’s hearkening to the life and times of the 16^th President, in the White House, through that mise en scène at the Plaza.

And Fitzgerald, despite his own rearing in St. Paul, was something of a Confederate sympathizer – proud of his descent from Marylander Francis Scott Key; married to Zelda Sayre, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama.  On that Maryland side of his father’s, Fitzgerald was related to Mary Surratt, whose house served as the meeting place for the assassin John Wilkes Booth.  At the height of his career, Fitzgerald was chosen to spruce up some dialogue for the screenplay of Gone With the Wind, surely a Southern apologist’s dream-job.

The Great Gatsby is not really a political novel.  The genius of Fitzgerald in not staking out a firm moral position between his contesting main characters is analagous to Lincoln’s own genius in refusing to express political malice or denominational preferences during the brothers’ war of the 1860s.  Both Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby seem to have unlikable characteristics; so too Lincoln felt in 1854 that Southerners “are just what we [Northerners] would be in their situation.”  And in 1862 that “the people of the South are not more responsible for the original introduction” of slaves than are people of the North.

So it is not the likability or unlikability of a person, based upon background or manner, that makes Lincoln an epochal figure.  And it is not the historic importance of individuals like Tom Buchanan or Jay Gatz who make them interesting men.  But it is the melding together of these two strands of notability that Fitzgerald employed in his novel.  He chose names and settings that mirrored the struggle over white/black and rich/poor relations in the 1920s, when the Toms were fading and the nouveau-riche American Jays were in the ascendant.  He chose them because a nobody called Abe (from a nowhere northern town) started being called ‘Abraham,’ won the heart of a belle named Mary (who was from Kentucky), and gave his life that the black man might be free — thereby providing an excellent case-study of the great American dream.

A popular myth of 1937, based upon the inventive imagination of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, claimed that Robert Todd Lincoln destroyed many of his father’s papers.  A decade later the great Lincoln scholar David Mearns amply documented why Butler was mistaken in his assumptions about what Robert was burning.  Undoubtedly Butler may have seen Robert burning papers, but they were not those of Abraham Lincoln.  They were probably Robert’s own correspondence and cancelled checks.  What is most often overlooked by historians is what Abraham and Mary Lincoln destroyed before they left for Washington, D.C.

Carl Sandburg’s 1949 portrait of famed Lincoln collector Oliver Barrett provides an entire chapter to describe Barrett’s acquisition of Lincoln manuscripts saved from the flames.  Colorful monikers such as the “hot stove letters” or the “bonfire letters” indicate that the Lincolns themselves were the agents of destruction.  All of the incidents occur as part of their housecleaning in the period immediately before the Lincolns left Springfield in 1861.  The “hot stove letters” threatened death or physical violence upon the president-elect.  Lincoln gladly gave these letters to a cabinetmaker who wished some type of souvenir from Springfield’s most famous citizen.  The “bonfire letters” contained some of the only correspondence exchanged by the Lincolns while he served in Congress.  Mrs. Lincoln was attending to a burn pile in the backyard when a neighbor asked for some of these items.

Further evidence of this practice comes from a letter, now in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, of Truman H. Bartlett to Mrs. Ada Bailhache.  She was the daughter of Mason Brayman, a legal associate of Abraham Lincoln, and the wife of the editor of the Illinois State Journal.  Bartlett was a Boston artist who spent years interviewing individuals who had known Lincoln, and trying to collect every bit of information about Lincoln’s appearance and habits.  Writing on July 2, 1908, Bartlett inquires:

 “Dear Mrs. Bailhache,

Can you remember if the photo you think is the best of Lincoln was originally a photo or an ambrotype or tintype & small size?  Many of the early pictures of Lincoln were tintypes & ambrotypes.  I have heard on good authority that Mrs. Lincoln burnt many of these little pictures just before she left for Washington in ’61.  Horrid fact!

Yours truly,

T. H. Bartlett”

Writing on Bartlett’s original letter, Ada Bailhache replied:

“I cannot remember if the photo I thought best of Lincoln was an ambrotype or tintype and I think it very probable that Mrs. Lincoln did destroy papers — before leaving for Washington as that is the usual custom of housekeeping on breaking up a home.”

While modern observers may share Bartlett’s shock that significant original materials pertaining to Lincoln were destroyed, the acts of destruction seemed less to hide information than to dispose of accumulated clutter.  Both Abraham and Mary Lincoln freely allowed friends and neighbors to take what they wanted from burn piles.  Unlike America’s founding generation, who were self-aware that they were making history and kept meticulous correspondence files, most Illinois political figures of Lincoln’s generation left meager paper trails.  Stephen A. Douglas, a large figure in state and national politics, left correspondence comprising one small volume.  A casual examination of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln suggests that the dearth of letters from the 1840s and the early 1850s indicates that the bulk of material may have been consumed in burn piles.

Rescued from the burn pile: Lincoln’s 1848 letter from “this troublesome world.”

Lincoln took a keen interest in his dream life.  He was fascinated by the meaning of individual dreams and by the whole experience of dreaming.  Unfortunately for us, he said very little about this in his own letters.  Almost everything we know comes from his “recollected words,” that is, words written down by other people, sometimes decades after his death. 

Recollected words vary tremendously in their reliability.  We can trust some of them, but we have to approach this second- or thirdhand evidence cautiously.  It’s easy to be enticed, and misled, by the embellishments and fictions produced by some of his well-meaning friends and acquaintances.

The least reliable of Lincoln’s friends and acquaintances weren’t trying to mislead us.  They wanted to convey some basic Lincoln trait or belief.  Embroidering the facts seemed a justifiable way of bringing home an essential truth.  Making the story more dramatic might even make the storyteller more memorable — someone who stayed close to Lincoln’s side, someone he whispered things to.

To separate the authentic from the inauthentic in Lincoln’s dream life, we must start with what he wrote down himself:  a brief 1863 letter to his wife Mary, who was in Philadelphia with their 10-year-old son Tad.  In two pithy sentences he gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what his dreams meant to him.  “Think you better put ‘Tad’s’ pistol away,” he wrote. “I had an ugly dream about him.”

There’s no telling what Lincoln dreamt about Tad and his pistol, but he feared the dream portended something bad.  This dream was an omen — at least enough of an omen to make Lincoln try to alter Tad’s usual routine with his toy.  (This toy was apparently a real pistol, but supplied only with caps, not cartridges or powder.)

We find Lincoln’s belief in the premonitory power of dreams confirmed by a second well-attested case.  Strikingly, he told the members of his cabinet about this dream on the morning of his assassination, April 14, 1865.  Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote about it in his diary three days later, and Frederick Seward, sitting in on the meeting in place of his father William Seward, the Secretary of State, wrote about it independently, though only decades later.

According to Welles, Lincoln told the cabinet members he’d dreamt the night before that he was moving across some body of water in a “singular, indescribable vessel,” and “moving with great rapidity.”  That’s all Welles wrote down immediately.  Seven years later, in a published article, he claimed that Lincoln had spoken of the vessel’s destination: “a dark and indefinite shore.”  That converted the dream into a virtual premonition of his death.

On the morning of April 14, according to Welles’s initial diary entry, Lincoln did add another telling detail — not about the dream’s content, but about its frequency.  He said he’d had the same dream many times before, not randomly, but before “nearly every great and important event of the War,” including, among others, “Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Stone River, Vicksburg, and Wilmington.”  (Some doubter in the room must have wondered, “how come we’ve never heard about this dream before?”)  At first the speeding vessel was not on a one-way voyage to the land of the dead; it was a virtual mail boat, delivering hot news that Lincoln was desperate to get.

The phenomenal correlation between the dream and a string of major events proved to the president’s satisfaction that some big story was about to break again.  It wouldn’t necessarily be good news — “Sumter” showed the news could be bad — but Lincoln told the cabinet he was betting on good tidings: a surrender by Confederate General Joe Johnston, still squaring off with Sherman in North Carolina.  

Lincoln thus reiterated on the day of his assassination the same conviction he’d expressed in 1863 on the subject of Tad’s pistol.  Dreams possessed at least some predictive capacity.  They weren’t actual revelations of the future, but they gave one a sense, however murky, of what might come to pass.

Lincoln was showing that he subscribed to what Thomas Campbell, in an 1803 poem, had said: “coming events cast their shadows before.”  Currier and Ives used that phrase as the subtitle of an 1864 election-campaign print commenting on McClellan’s possible victory over Lincoln in the upcoming presidential election: “Abraham’s Dream: Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before.”

The print depicts an agitated Lincoln experiencing a nightmare: he’s being kicked out of the White House by Columbia, ominously waving the severed head of a black man at him, as a victorious McClellan ascends the steps.  (Is the sleeping Lincoln worrying that the Emancipation Proclamation has turned northern white voters against him, and that he’s also to blame for post-proclamation white violence against blacks?)

Currier and Ives depict a fictional Lincoln dream of 1864 as a nightmare, at least for the nation.

The print reminds us that in his actual dreaming there were no reported nightmares.  We could call the pistol and vessel cases “anxiety” dreams — he frets about what might happen with Tad’s gun, and he’s itching for news as the vessel takes its sweet time (Lincoln can still easily conjure up in his sleep the pre-telegraphic era of his young adulthood).

Even the most likely candidate for a nightmare — the famous, but inauthentic, “dead president in the White House” dream peddled by Lincoln’s friend Ward Hill Lamon in the 1880s — turns out to be an anxiety dream at most. (It was published in book form in 1895.)  Lamon attributes to Lincoln a dream in which he sees the corpse of an assassinated president on exhibit in the East Room of the White House.  A crowd has assembled to view the body, and many are weeping.

All the sobbing finally wakes Lincoln up, and a few days later he supposedly tells a small group at the White House, including his wife and Lamon, “I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.”  According to Lamon, Lincoln rejected any premonitory significance for this dream.  He didn’t take it as a sign of his own fate.

Lamon claimed in the 1880s to have reconstructed this dream from notes he made in 1865, but like many other reminiscences from his pen, it can’t stand scrutiny.  The biggest reason to doubt his report is that no one in the “small group,” including Lamon, mentioned the dream after the assassination.  There are also major internal contradictions in Lamon’s telling of the story. 

But with the pistol and vessel dreams in mind, we can see that Lamon may have been trying to build his fiction atop the basic truth of Lincoln’s dream life.  Lincoln’s fully confirmed dreams were not dreams of pleasure or horror.  They bothered him, but didn’t traumatize or even unsettle him. 

Lamon’s dead-president dream follows suit in depicting Lincoln as slightly affected, but hardly distraught.  Where Lamon’s concoction departs from the authentic dreams is in having Lincoln pooh-pooh its predictive potential.  “In this dream,” Lamon has the president saying, “it was not me but some other fellow that was killed…. your apprehension of harm to me from some hidden enemy is downright foolishness.” 

Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher, the indispensable authorities on Lincoln’s “recollected words,” mention two other “dreams” derived from secondhand sources, but neither one alters the basic anxiety-dream pattern.  The first has good provenance — Lincoln’s secretary John Hay — but it sounds a lot like a Lincoln joke set arbitrarily inside a “dream.”  Lincoln says he dreamt he was in a group of people, one of whom thought he was “very common-looking,” to which he replied, “common-looking people are the best in the world; that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.”

The second is a touching story about dreaming recollected by a single fragile source.  In 1862 Lincoln supposedly told Le Grand B. Cannon, an army colonel at Ft. Monroe, that when dreaming (repeatedly) of his recently lost son Willie, he felt “a sweet communion with him,” while remaining aware within the dream state that this was “not a reality.” 

That’s a fascinating comment on what it feels like to be inside a dream, and an endearing tale about Lincoln’s longing for Willie.  But in the context of Cannon’s own obvious longing to be close to Lincoln, one has to doubt the story’s veracity.  “He had given me a sacred confidence,” Cannon concludes.  And he’d given it only to him: no one else was around to hear Lincoln’s words, or to witness their supposed shared tears, and Lincoln “never alluded to this incident afterward.”

Cannon’s account was published more than 30 years after Lincoln’s alleged comment.  Cannon is so determined in the 1890s to establish his own “sweet communion” with the long departed Lincoln that he undermines his story’s credibility.

The “sweet communion” remark about Willie is one of my favorite Lincoln statements, and I hate to give it up.  Maybe Lincoln did say it.  But my wishing he said it doesn’t make it so.  I’ll keep it instead as a beautiful expression of Cannon’s sympathy for Lincoln in his fatherly distress, and of his desire to stay close to his hero in memory.

In part 1 , the accuracy, even the veracity, of such Lincoln associates as William Herndon and Noah Brooks was examined.  Only a few of their statements about Lincoln were important in the short or long run, though as described in part 1 mothers and mediums may disagree with me.  Of nearly world significance over the last century has been the contact between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.  The escaped slave, journalist, orator, and publicist claimed to have met with Lincoln 3 times, but only 2 of these meetings are corroborated by a source other than Douglass.  Since World War II scholars have gradually grown more skeptical of some of Douglass’s recollections.

Their first conversation occurred in company with Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas, in the Executive Mansion, on 10 August 1863, over what became a failed attempt to send Douglass to the South to help recruit black troops.  Lincoln, 2 members of his cabinet, and Sen. Pomeroy signed a pass South for Douglass, who wrote a private letter about the meeting on the 12^th.  He spoke about the meeting in December 1863, a speech published in Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator.  Lincoln’s secretary John Hay recorded the meeting in his diary, but neither Hay nor John Nicolay seem ever to have mentioned Douglass again.  Then, in 1881 — according to James Oakes, the most recent scholar on the topic — Douglass published his “most detailed account … and thus less reliable” version of the meeting, in the third of his autobiographies.  He revised that book later; and in 1888 provided a “vague” account that “collapses several different conversations into one.”

Next, Douglass met Lincoln on 19 August 1864.  (LaWanda Cox, in her 1981 book, gives that date, while Oakes, using Douglass’s papers, dates it to 25 August.)  Two other visitors to the president that hour, one of them ex-governor Randall of Wisconsin, also recorded the event.  Douglass wrote of it to a friend 2 months later, and in a speech on 5 June 1865 recollected another incident; then retrieved from memory for the first time, in 1881, more of his dialogue with Lincoln.  Because Douglass lost many of his papers in a house fire in 1872, we do not know what notes he might originally have made.  At any rate, it seems that he was following the same pattern as dozens of other journalists, politicians, and memoirists in the post-Lincoln years: crystalizing and growing in the mind what had been in reality a brief or passing acquaintance with the man.

This 1864 meeting led Lincoln to invite Douglass to come to tea at the Soldiers’ Home; or so Douglass recalled “some years later,” writes Oakes.  A prior commitment prevented his attending.  (Pass up tea with the president?)  But a seminal event such as Lincoln’s second inaugural could not be passed up.  Douglass wrote that he was in the crowd of thousands on 4 March 1865; that later on he and a woman stood in line at the Executive Mansion to greet Mr. Lincoln; that he was turned away at the door as a black man, was tricked into leaving, then saw “a gentleman” he knew, who got him in.  He wound his way amid the throng inside to the president, and had this now-famous exchange:

Frederick Douglass, tireless abolitionist and sometime friend of Lincoln.

“Here comes my friend Douglass.  I am glad to see you.  I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?”  Two lines of apology and encouragement ensue, before Lincoln fairly forces Douglass to admit,

“Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”

So wrote Douglass in 1881, and never earlier.  Did not one of the thousands of other people around that day notice him, not even the helpful “gentleman,” to record this singular appearance and apothegmatic remark, not even one of the other journalists on the scene?  No scholar since – not Booker T. Washington (1906), Benjamin Quarles (1948 and 1962), LaWanda Cox (1981), James Oakes (2008), or five others – has found another mention of Douglass’s front-door, side-door, or hand-to-hand movements.  Yet all cite the obstructed entrance and ensuing dialogue as historical event.

In the same chapter of this 3rd memoir, Douglass related how on the previous night “I took tea with Chief Justice Chase, and assisted his beloved daughter, Mrs. Sprague, in placing over her honored father’s shoulders the new robe … in which he was to administer the oath of office to the re-elected President.”  Yet Quarles never mentions Salmon Chase; and the best study of Chase, by John Niven (1995), never mentions Douglass.

I and the world would welcome any kind of confirmation of these events outside of what Douglass once claimed.  African-American newspapers in Philadelphia and Baltimore reported on the “500” blacks seen at the 4 March 1865 reception, according to Quarles, yet do not mention Douglass.  All history relies on the progressive and cumulative revelation of original sources, and some come to hand later than earlier.  We have hope, just as we have hope that Lincoln so nobly reached out to a shunned man.  But the evidence is growing less and less acceptable to modern readers.  Undeniably, Lincoln and Douglass worked toward the same ends, at different paces, because one was a politician, the other a journalist.  Their common goal did not necessarily make them friends.  By the 1880s, the great majority of Americans in the North wanted to have been Lincoln’s friend.  Douglass, like Noah Brooks, shone in the light cast by Lincoln’s legacy, the brighter he could make their friendship glow.