Episode 3, Mr. Lincoln’s Quill Pen: We talk with Dr. James Cornelius about our Featured Artifact of the Month, Abraham Lincoln’s Quill Pen. We also ask Dr. Cornelius about Mary Lincoln’s Strawberry dress which will be on display May 6, 7, and 8. Dr. Cornelius also answers your questions submitted via facebook.
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Oddly, no photograph seems to exist of Mary Lincoln in her 5 March 1861 First Inaugural gown. Were she and the household too busy, were the photographic studios too full of newly minted government workers as a new administration came to town?
Instead, we know that Mary Lincoln wore the strawberry dress in her first spring as First Lady, in 1861. We know that someone in one of Mathew Brady’s two studios took her picture in it. Two questions arise: Why this dress; and where did she pose?
The tradition of a ‘strawberry party’ had been around for at least a generation in Springfield, Illinois, by the time the Lincolns moved to Washington in February 1861. Such parties were held in hundreds of towns throughout what is now the eastern portion of the United States, and so too were raspberry parties. In central Illinois the season for fresh wild strawberries begins in May, while around Washington it might begin a little earlier. Mary and Abraham once hosted such a party for Springfield families and friends, and they attended other such events. A carriage ride into the country with a picnic lunch – the “young people” (teenagers) usually riding in a separate carriage – provided entertainment, exercise, and sociability.
So among the novel, “Western” ideas Mary Lincoln imported to the nation’s capital was to continue the parties even while war loomed. This accorded with her husband’s wishes that, to name two, the Executive Mansion be freshened up and the Capitol dome be completed. She took along her cousin Lizzie Grimsley to shop in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in early May.
It seems most likely that she bought this beautiful black-silk dress, with machine-embroidered strawberry sprigs, in one of those cities. A reporter for a Democratic paper followed her in New York one day to record her extravangances, but this dress was not mentioned. And with her pretty young cousin along, she could well have stopped at Brady’s photographic studio, 10th St. and Broadway, for what we believe was her first formal pose as First Lady. Why this dress? Perhaps it reminded her, and others around her, of their traditions in Illinois. There is also an outside chance that it was made in Chicago before their journey, or made there and shipped to Washington for her.
Three copies of the cdv I have examined all read ‘Brady / New York,’ but Lloyd Ostendorf’s 1963 book of Lincoln family photographs presumes that Mary sat in Brady’s studio on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington. If Ostendorf is right, then Brady may have used the card to let New Yorkers know of his coup d’arte of being the first to capture the new First Lady on chemically treated glass. Brady was known to advertise each studio in the other city this way. But if Ostendorf is wrong, Mary actually sat in New York, where she more likely acquired the dress.
Mary’s other Lizzie, the dressmaker and confidante Elizabeth Keckly, can not be shown to have worked on the strawberry dress. Though the two women met on 5 March, the day after Lincoln’s swearing in, we do not know exactly when and to what extent she began working for the new First Lady. In her memoir Behind the Scenes (1868), she claimed to have made dozens of dresses for Mrs. Lincoln right from the start. We can suppose that Lizzie Keckly at least helped Mary get into the dress and perhaps altered it slightly for her.
Mary gave the strawberry dress and a summer 1861 gown to her cousin Lizzie. The latter is now in the Smithsonian, the former is in Springfield, both of them through Grimsley descendants – the only intact Mary Lincoln dresses in existence now. Donna McCreary’s book Fashionable First Lady: The Victorian Wardrobe of Mary Lincoln (2007) is the best study of all of her gowns, but she is unable to specify its origins, either. So in an unusual twist of the common historical pattern, today we know the provenance of the strawberry dress since 1861, but we do not know the point of origin of either the dress or the photo.
Mary’s original strawberry dress will be on display in the Presidential Museum from Friday May 6th through Sunday May 8th for Mother’s Day – its first showing in 26 years.
The February 1994 cover of Scientific American showed a publicity photograph of Marilyn Monroe, from the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch, arm and arm with an 1863 image of Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner. The purpose of the cover was to show how digital photography could create photographic images for events that never happened. Lacking a film negative as reference, digital images make it impossible to distinguish between a scene that reflects an actual event and one that digitally creates a mythical event.
Although Marilyn Monroe never met Abraham Lincoln as depicted on the cover of Scientific American, she did admire him and on at least four occasions was photographed with images of Lincoln or with the greatest popularizer of Lincoln, Carl Sandburg. The number of biographies of her pales in comparison with those devoted to Abraham Lincoln, but a theme common in most is that she looked upon Lincoln as the father she never knew in childhood. During a visit to Bryant Cottage in Bement, Illinois, in August 1955, Marilyn Monroe told a reporter, “I have honored and admired Mr. Lincoln since I first heard about him. As a child, he represented sort of a father to me. But then I guess he does for everyone in the U.S.” Her appearance generated a crowd of 10,000 curious onlookers. Bringing in tow her own photographer, Eve Arnold, Monroe had her visit documented at the house museum where legend, not historical documentation, claims that Lincoln and Douglas met to establish the schedule for debates in 1858.
Bust of Carl Sandburg by Joseph Konzal, ca. 1955. Previously owned by Marilyn Monroe. Part of the Taper Collection now owned by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
The earliest image of Monroe and Lincoln was taken in 1954 by the famed photographer Milton H. Greene. It shows Monroe standing in a Cadillac convertible holding up a framed photograph of Abraham Lincoln. The car was a gift from Jack Benny for Monroe’s appearance on his television show The Jack Benny Program. Milton’s son, Joshua, created a limited edition of 500 copies of this famous photograph that were each stamped, numbered, and signed. He presented one such copy in 2007 to the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
Len Steckler, a New York City photographer, took a series of three images of Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg in his apartment in December 1961. Steckler had studied photography with, among others, Edward Steichen, Carl Sandburg’s brother-in-law. As a photographer, Steckler was called upon to capture images of many celebrities, and he soon formed a friendship with Sandburg. Steckler also became acquainted with Marilyn Monroe. These professional relationships led to the meeting between the 35-year-old Monroe and the 83-year-old Sandburg.
The last meeting between Monroe and Sandburg took place in January 1962 in Hollywood. Arnold Newman, the legendary New York photographer, was at the small gathering that included Monroe and Sandburg. Seven images from that evening survive, including one that shows Sandburg teaching Monroe breathing exercises, although most people would conclude that they are dancing. Monroe had trouble sleeping, and, according to Sandburg, breathing properly would help.
An interesting reference to Lincoln is found in the 1960 George Cukor film Let’s Make Love, starring Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand. The basic plot has a playboy billionaire businessman, played by Montand, attending a rehearsal in Greenwich Village of the independent Let’s Make Love musical theater company. The director/producer of the show mistakenly thinks Montand is an actor look-alike of the billionaire who wants a part in the show. Montand pretends to be an actor to woo Marilyn Monroe, only to find it difficult at the end of the film to prove his true identity. Worried that Montand is delusional, Monroe provides the following bit of advice:
“There used to be an actor, he played Abraham Lincoln for so many years. He grew his own beard. He went around in a shawl. And you know what they used to say?
He looks like Lincoln, talks like Lincoln. But he won’t be satisfied until he gets shot.”
It would be interesting to know if Monroe had a hand in adding this reference to the script. Certainly she was one of Lincoln’s biggest fans.
It is unusual to unearth one completely new story about the Lincolns. A recent donation to the Presidential Library and Museum has brought us two new stories that shed important light on the characters of Mary Lincoln and her son Robert, through their friendship with a young couple.
Daniel W. Tillinghast was born in Morrisville, N.Y., nephew of a senator from Rhode Island whom President Lincoln knew slightly as a general of militia in the Civil War. While a boy, Tillinghast moved with his family to Chicago, around 1850.
Louise Boone, born 1844, was a daughter of Dr. Levi Boone, who took office as mayor of Chicago in 1855. Her aunt’s husband was Jesse B. Thomas, Illinois’s first senator. Lincoln wrote to Edwin Stanton on 1 Sept. 1862, “I personally know Dr. Levi D. Boone, of Chicago …” It seems that Louise briefly lived in Springfield as a young lady.
Daniel and Louise met, and married in Chicago in September 1863.
After President Lincoln’s death, Mary, Robert, and Tad were living in July 1865 in a Hyde Park hotel, when scarlet fever broke out in the house. The young Tillinghast couple lived there too. Louise offered to take Tad, apparently as yet little affected by the disease, to her parents’ farm north of the city. She kept him there for a couple of weeks, until the fevers had passed on the sultry South Side.
How could the widowed Mary Lincoln, at this stage with no real income, thank the young lady for perhaps saving her youngest boy’s life? Mary gave the Tillinghasts the 14-karat-gold pen/pencil from the late president’s White House desk. Her gift may have expressed the depth of the potential peril: more than 800 people, most of them children, had died of scarlet fever in Chicago during the 3 previous summers.
The Lincolns soon moved north 8 miles to the Clifton House hotel, on the southeast corner of Madison and Wabash. The Tillinghasts evidently stayed in Hyde Park for a time, and a year later moved to Michigan Avenue, north of the Chicago river. Anyway, on Friday Oct. 27, 1865, about 3 months after Tad’s rescue, Robert wrote this hitherto unknown letter to Daniel from his law-clerk office at the corner of Lake and LaSalle:
“You! Chauncey Brown expects you & me to come to his house & play a game of Billiards this evening. I propose to weigh anchor at 7 ½ P.M. Shall I have the honor of seeing you?
Yours, R.T.L.”
The envelope is addressed to D.W. Tillinghast Esq at 161 Kinzie St., his hides-and-leather business about 3 blocks from Robert’s office.
The two friends had clearly got past the summer’s threat to everyone’s health, and Robert, just 22 years old, had got over his father’s death 6 months earlier at least enough for some Friday night fun. (Note the same-day delivery of mail in central Chicago.) The letter, though, is on black-bordered mourning paper, per custom of the day within the year after the death of a parent.
Robert may also have been growing weary of living in a hotel with his mother and little brother, and he got his own place at year’s end. What is more, Abraham Lincoln had also liked billiards, and his son with his well-positioned friends partook of the game in the last generation before it fell into ill repute amongst the better classes.
This is all we know of direct contact between the families, since no more letters would have been necessary for near neighbors. Daniel and Louise soon had 2 children. Robert soon married, whereupon his mother took Tad, her last dependant, to Europe the next week, and stayed for over 2 years.
In the winter of 1874 Daniel Tillinghast was superintending the start of a big new operation for his business at the Union Stockyards, when he caught cold, which became pneumonia, and died. A sizable obituary of him ran in the Chicago Tribune on April 20, 1874. He was barely 30.
We know any of this, and nearly all of this, thanks to a resplendent piece of generosity by Peggy Davis, of Chatham, Mass., who this year donated both the gold pen / pencil and the letter. Both artifacts go on display in mid-April in the Treasures Gallery. Mrs. Davis, namely Margaret Tillinghast Porter Davis, is the great-granddaughter of Daniel and Louise. Her own grandmother wrote a long letter in 1933 explaining the families’ connection, and that letter will also be on display – the proof is in the provenance, they say in the museum trade.
That epistolary proof in fact fills out a skeletal allusion in a published letter by Mary Lincoln from July 1865 that mentioned a “daughter of Dr. Boone” who took Tad “up to the country.”
For those keeping track, an ounce of gold in 1865 cost roughly $25.00. It is now about $1,450.00. But the value of the sentiment shown by all parties in that 1860s friendship, and in today’s double-storied donation, are inestimable.
A reversible pen and pencil made of 14-karat gold, and its original case, from the desk of President Lincoln.