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

A selfless and tireless researcher connected with the Presidential Library and Museum has made a discovery that provides fresh hope that some day, some how …

On May 30, 1859, Abraham Lincoln signed a contract with a German immigrant named Theodor Canisius. (The eponymous college in Buffalo, New York, was his later, unrelated project.) Lincoln had bought a set of German type and the printing presses that would allow a newspaper to be published in Springfield, with Canisius as editor.  It was called the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger — roughly, the Illinois State Advertiser.

As Lincoln wrote in the contract, which has been on view in the Treasures Gallery of the Presidential Museum for the last several months, “said paper, in political sentiment, not to depart from the Philadelphia and Illinois Republican platforms.” The goal was to appeal to German immigrants, “until after the Presidential election of 1860.”

Lincoln’s ownership of the paper – profits going to Canisius, for his efforts – was secret. Unfortunately, its contents have remained secret, too, since not a single copy of it exists today to the knowledge of anyone in the Lincoln field. But Lincoln sent a copy in early July 1859 to another German, and later released Canisius from the terms of the agreement because evidently he had held up his end of the bargain. So we know that roughly 15 months’ worth of weekly papers did exist.

Now, that selfless researcher reports this to me: “A number of members of the 1861 Illinois General Assembly subscribed to the Staats-Anzeiger at state expense, as legislators were allowed. On February 23, 1861, the state auditor issued warrant #9297 (for $312) to Theodore Canisius for 312 copies of Staats-Anzeiger for members of the state Senate; #9309 (for $92) to Theodore Canisius for 240 copies of the Staats-Anzeiger for the House.”

The date and those figures may mean that 1860 subscriptions were now being paid; or perhaps that 1861 subscriptions taken out. Whether or not the paper continued past the November 1860 election that saw Lincoln win a large number (though not, it is thought, a majority) of German-American votes, we do know that at least 500 copies a week were sent to elected officials, most likely for distribution to voters in their districts.

PLEASE!  Bitte schoen!  If anyone has an old German newspaper sitting in the attic, notify the Presidential Library immediately!  The type will confound most people, which is one reason that we suppose no copies have come to light since. The script is called Fraktur, in which some of the letters do not resemble the standard Latin alphabet used in modern English or German. But the word ‘Illinois’ on the masthead should be fairly apparent.

Thank you very much!  Danke schoen!  And thank you especially, Mr. J.

Episode 8, The Effigy Doll of Mr. Lincoln: This month we talk with Dr. James Cornelius about our Featured Artifact of the Month: The Effigy Doll of Mr. Lincoln. We also find out which biography is Dr. Cornelius’ favorite and settle a small Bob Dylan discrepancy.

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In January 2011 I wrote here to cast doubt upon Frederick Douglass’s 1881 description of his meeting and verbal exchange with the president on 4 March 1865, after the 2^nd Inaugural Speech.  I did so having consulted 7 leading writers on Douglass and read up on the few sketchy contacts between the two men.  My context was Douglass’s journalistic tendency to change his mind, change his words, and change his story – like most journalists (and others) who knew Lincoln.

I may have been too hasty.  But I stand by the bulk of my position.

In historical research, rarely can or should a single answer be found.  None of the major scholars and original sources I had checked mentioned her, but a certain obvious, right-under-our-noses source came to hand last month in a February 1975 article by Christopher N. Breiseth in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.  The article names Elizabeth Keckly as a source of the story; none of the other writers I checked did so.  Her memoir, Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868, and often reprinted), reads thus on pp. 158-161:

“Many colored people were in Washington, and large numbers had desired to attend the levee, but orders were issued not to admit them. A gentleman, a member of Congress, on his way to the White House, recognized Mr. Frederick Douglass, the eloquent colored orator, on the outskirts of the crowd.

‘How do you do, Mr. Douglass?  A fearful jam to-night. You are going in, of course?’

‘No – that is, no to your last question.’

‘Not going in to shake the President by the hand! Why, pray?’

‘The best reason in the world. Strict orders have been issued not to admit people of color.’

‘It is a shame, Mr. Douglass, that you should thus be placed under the ban. Never mind; wait here, and I will see what can be done.’

The gentleman entered the White House, and working his way to the President, asked permission to introduce Mr. Douglass to him.

‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Lincoln. ‘Bring Mr. Douglass in, by all means.  I shall be glad to meet him.’

The gentleman returned, and soon Mr. Douglass stood face to face with the President. Mr. Lincoln pressed his hand warmly, saying: ‘Mr. Douglass, I am glad to meet you.  I have long admired your course, and I value your opinions highly.’

Mr. Douglass was very proud of the manner in which Mr. Lincoln received him.  On leaving the White House he came to a friend’s house where a reception was being held, and he related the incident with great pleasure to myself and others.

On the Monday following the reception  … I was in Mrs. Lincoln’s room the greater portion of the day. While dressing her that night, the President came in, and I remarked to him how much Mr. Douglass had been pleased on the night he was presented to Mr. Lincoln.  Mrs. L. at once turned to her husband with the inquiry, ‘Father, why was not Mr. Douglass introduced to me?’

‘I do not know.  I thought he was presented.’

‘But he was not.’

‘It must have been an oversight then, mother; I am sorry you did not meet him.’”

Keckly concludes: “This ball closed the season.  It was the last time that the President and his wife ever appeared in public.”

This rendition of the 4 March 1865 meeting is close to what Douglass wrote in 1881, with a key omission: Douglass’s fabled story that Lincoln nearly begged him for his opinion of the speech, and his reply, ‘Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.’  Nor did Douglass 1881 mention that it was a Congressman who gained his entrée to the reception.  Nor did Keckly 1868 mention a lady having been present, as did Douglass 1881.  There is another problem: Keckly’s memoir is believed to have been ghost-written by Jane Grey Swisshelm, a crusader and publicist for various causes of the era.  Else, can we imagine that Keckly herself would forget that the Lincolns did appear in public again?  At Ford’s Theatre, 14 April.

I and many other recent writers get a failing grade for overlooking Keckly as an obvious possible source.  Still, how much of the story did Douglass tell Keckly himself; how much did she hear second-hand; how much did Swisshelm invent for publication; how much did Douglass invent?  We will never have answers.

The reader may also judge whether any symbolic enlargement might have been invented for another scene Keckly related about herself, on pp. 165-166:

“The Presidential party were all curiosity on entering Richmond [4 April]. They drove about the streets of the city, and examined every object of interest. The Capitol presented a desolate appearance – desks broken, and papers scattered promiscuously in the hurried flight of the Confederate Congress. I picked up a number of papers, and, by curious coincidence, the resolution prohibiting all free colored people from entering the State of Virginia. A curious coincidence indeed, to pick up such a paper in the ruined room and city.”

Its heft is reminiscent of Douglass’s 1881 invention of the scene at which he helped Chief Justice Chase put on his robes before swearing in Mr. Lincoln.

One more source mentions a Douglass-Lincoln interchange, but from the same origin.  John E. Washington was an African American dentist in Washington, D.C., who in 1942 published a book on his years of research and listening about blacks who knew Lincoln, They Knew Lincoln.  From pp. 115-116:

“The following was told me by Mr. Haley G. Douglass, grandson of Frederick Douglass.  He said his grandfather often told it before audiences.

‘In Lincoln’s day, colored people were not allowed to come into the White House and even Frederick Douglass who had been invited to come to a reception was refused admission until Lincoln saw him in the crowd, sent for him and welcomed him into the room.’”

This is abbreviated, and misleading.  Several various individuals and groups of blacks came in to see Lincoln, including Douglass on 2 occasions, so this ‘not allowed’ line may be overstated.  Douglass 1881 did not claim to have been ‘invited’ in 1865.  The grandson may have conflated the ‘invitation’ with another occasion, in 1863, when Lincoln brought Douglass to the front of a line.  Worse, the episode is followed in Washington’s book by a long, preposterous joke about Lincoln and a poor black man, an anecdote that is almost certainly apocryphal.

All my speculation avails us little.  We remain reliant upon the early-day, if not exactly first-hand, testimony of people close to the events.  So I find that we now have better cause, though the details be shaky, to believe that Douglass and Lincoln shook hands on 4 March 1865.  But we have very strong reason to continue to doubt that Douglass proclaimed the Second Inaugural a “sacred effort” at any point before 1881.

Do readers know of other sources?

The debt-ceiling fracas in Washington has finally ended.  Among its many revelations is President Obama’s persistent identification of his leadership, in style and substance, with Abraham Lincoln’s.  He hasn’t claimed he’s reached Lincoln’s stature; he’s just adopted Lincoln as a model he wants to follow.

When he came into office in January 2009, three weeks shy of Lincoln’s bicentenary, Obama spoke of Lincoln almost continuously, and it seemed to some he might be invoking the cherished hero’s name for political advantage.

In fact, Obama had started thinking and writing about Lincoln even before running for the U. S. Senate in 2004.  That was three years before he declared his candidacy for the presidency on a freezing February day in Springfield, Illinois.  Of course he hoped that appreciating Lincoln would help him politically, but there’s no reason to doubt Obama when he says he’s truly inspired by him.

A century and a half after Lincoln’s death, Obama does seem, under very different historical conditions, to have applied his general approach to governance: insist on reasoned argument as the basis for political debate, seek out bridges to your opponents, look for ways to advance the cause of equality in the long run when the path to it is blocked in the immediate.

During the debt-and-deficit imbroglio, Obama brought Lincoln into the fray as a model compromiser.  He said today’s Congressional Republicans should follow Lincoln’s lead, giving up some of what they wanted (as Obama was doing himself) in order to obtain a desperately needed debt-ceiling extension.

As it happens, he muddied matters in this instance by citing the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 as an example of Lincoln’s penchant for compromise.  True, as Obama said, the much-honored Proclamation didn’t actually “free the slaves.”  It only emancipated slaves ensconced behind enemy lines — and then only in principle, since, in those places, the Proclamation was unenforceable.

But that didn’t mean Lincolnwas compromising when he issued the Proclamation.  He was actually freeing all the slaves he believed he could constitutionally liberate in his capacity as commander-in-chief.  If anything, the Proclamation showed Lincoln to be uncompromising.

A better example of Lincoln’s willingness to compromise on slavery might have been his earlier advocacy of compensated emancipation: paying slaveholders for their property.  Many radical abolitionists rejected this idea, since in their eyes it endorsed the principle that the slaves had rightly been treated as property in the first place. Lincoln thought the end result of freedom trumped any theoretical inconsistency involved in spending money for it.

Of course, as Obama would readily agree, Lincoln’s greatness during the Civil War derived from his repeated refusal to entertain compromise on the central issue — the illegitimacy of secession — and from his readiness to act decisively, when conditions were right, for emancipation.

The relatively unknown Lincoln text that may have most influenced Obama’s approach to presidential governance is the Springfield Lyceum speech of 1838.  A fledgling orator still in his 20s, Lincoln declared that the passions of partisanship could bring the Republic down.

Calm deliberation — “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” — would keep the nation afloat at a time when many impetuous, self-absorbed men would gladly make a name for themselves by sinking it.

What has become clear during Obama’s 30 months in office — and was demonstrated again during the debt-ceiling donnybrook — is that it’s Obama the temperate, bridging Democratic who is now marching behind a centrist “Party of Lincoln” banner all his own.

The Republicans seem to have gone silent on the railsplitter, willingly conceding him to Obama.  True, Republican intellectuals, such as former George W. Bush staffers Peter Wehner or Michael Gerson, still refer admiringly to Lincoln as a vital figure.  Sarah Palin and others do occasionally quote him in passing.

But when is the last time a national Republican figure made anything more than brief or honorific mention of him?  Even formulaic deference to him seems increasingly rare in the Republican camp.  The last time I remember a Republican candidate or elected official making a point of calling the GOP the “Party of Lincoln” was January 2008, when Rudy Giuliani hailed him as the party’s founding father.

Giuliani had just been battered in the Florida Republican primary, coming in a distant third to John McCain and Mitt Romney.  Finished off as a presidential prospect, he left the electoral stage with a plea to Republicans to remember that theirs was “the party of Lincoln” as well as of Reagan and Bush.

Giuliani was hoping Republicans could revive their historic ties to “moderates” as well as “conservatives,” building an ethnically inclusive “50-state” party by promoting “self-government” as opposed to “centralized government.”

The “party of Lincoln” rubric made sense to Giuliani as a way of signaling to moderates and non-whites that Republicans welcomed them too.  Now it’s Obama who may be using Lincoln in an appeal to moderates, including Republicans disgruntled by Tea Party inroads.

Unlike Giuliani, he argues that Lincoln endorsed both self-government and government pure-and-simple.  Federal measures are now essential, he says, for attaining goals that Lincoln also espoused in his day: building up infrastructure, ensuring that a new generation of young Americans can rise in the world, and assisting the poor and the disadvantaged to climb onto the nation’s ladder of opportunity.

In speech after speech during the off-year election campaign of 2010, Obama cited Lincoln’s (undated) note to himself: “the legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves.”

For those fascinated by the ever-evolving place of Lincoln in American culture, the 2012 campaign will be captivating.  Will Obama continue to tout Lincoln as the booster of positive government as well as the practitioner of “compromise”?  Will any Republican candidates pick up on Giuliani’s call to welcome moderates and non-whites into a resurrected “party of Lincoln”?

Eventually, if not in 2012, Republicans and Democrats seem liable to come to blows over the Lincoln mantle, with Republicans promoting him as the protector of individual enterprise, and Democrats lauding him as the defender of equality for all.