Episode 9, The Stereocards of Mr. Lincoln’s first tomb & the box at Ford’s Theatre: In addition to talking about the stereocards, we talk with Dr. Cornelius about a recent donation surrounding the receiving vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery, and a discovery made as a result of our blog. You can view the stereocards on our Youtube page.
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Comes to hand yet another brand-new piece of evidence this year. Earlier it was the gold pen / pencil from Lincoln’s desk when he died; the name of Willie’s “dear friend” in the 1859 ‘chocolate letter’; and the discovery that the German-language newspaper Lincoln secretly owned in 1859-60 was subscribed to by dozens of state legislators (yet nary a copy remains today).
This time the discovery, by an eagle-eyed collector who kindly made the item available to the Presidential Library and Museum, concerns an eye doctor. The printed document shown here will be illegible at this scale to most of us, but its gist is an endorsement by Lincoln, along with 36 other notable medical and political people, of a new clinic. The clinic was run by E. S. Cooper, M.D., in Peoria, Illinois, offering new treatments for “Eye Diseases” and for club-foot in children. The date on this circular letter is Oct. 27, 1851.
The 1851 document about the "Eye Infirmary"
How did Lincoln know this man? How did, say, Stephen A. Douglas, Judge David Davis, Judge Samuel Treat, lawyer and banker Asahel Gridley, future Congressman William Kellogg also know this man? Less surprising – or more surprising? – is that most other medical men in Peoria, 8 of them, endorsed Cooper’s start-up. Also surprising is that public figures in 7 states, including an ex-senator, seemed familiar enough with Cooper’s new treatments, or reputation, to allow their names to be set in type beneath his advertisement.
Cooper’s name does not appear in any of Lincoln’s legal cases or extant correspondence; and the Springfield lawyer was rarely in Peoria in that period, though he was just over the Illinois River in Tazewell County often enough. So the main question for Lincolnists is whether he had direct knowledge of Cooper’s skills.
Robert Lincoln was born in 1843 with a slight strabismus – he was cross-eyed. The turned-in left eye did not affect his performance in school, but kids teased him. In Berlin in 1850 the founder of modern ophthalmology, Albrecht Graefe, began teaching how to make a small incision to weaken a muscle that caused this condition. Apparently within a year Dr. Cooper had learned the method, or read of it. Did he soon exercise his surgical skill on young Robert, whose defect was gone by the time of an 1858 photograph? (Today the Graefe treatment is suggested on a child by age 6. In Robert’s case, he lost most vision in old age in that eye, suggesting an imperfect boyhood cure.)
The only study to address Robert’s malady is Ruth Painter Randall’s Lincoln’s Sons (1955), in which she blithely and unhelpfully states (p. 33) that “an old document” reveals how the home remedy of staring through a keyhole forced Robert’s eye to adjust itself. Jason Emerson, whose full biography of Robert is due in early 2012, reports that he has found no such “old document.” Mrs. Randall would not have known of Cooper’s circular, because the one found this month is the first recorded, though one supposes that Cooper mailed out dozens of them. Did Mrs. Randall make an incorrect inference about the strabismus from some other tale?
Or did Lincoln himself gain from treatment by Cooper? The 40-something attorney is known to have got his first pair of spectacles some time in the early 1850s. Perhaps from Cooper? But why travel 95 miles from home to get something easily available from any number of people in Springfield, particularly as Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Dr. William Wallace, could have recommended an in-town colleague? Or did Cooper examine Lincoln’s ‘lazy left eye,’ evident in so many photos of him?
Just when we think we see Lincoln clearly, new facts turn up. This one matters in the sense that about 2 years earlier, after Robert had been bitten by a possibly rabid dog, did father Abraham take the 6-year-old boy about 140 miles to Terre Haute, Indiana, to procure a madstone – a clump of calcified cow regurgitant which according to frontier folklore could fend off, even draw out, the poison from rabies or snakebite. Yes, the same budding genius, Abraham Lincoln, who procured for himself a scientific patent in the very same twelve month, put some store in the folk medicine of his rural youth.
Today we know that Robert did not die of rabies, though we’re not exactly sure why. We also can hypothesize that his father soon made a sharp turn away from Terre Haute and toward Peoria, toward what became a standard medical treatment thanks to a Euro-American innovator who helped set the Lincolns’ first son on his own course to self-assuredness and future notoriety.
It is even possible that law partner William Herndon influenced Lincoln. James Lander’s article in the Summer 2011 Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association details how many books on science Herndon owned, and examines some evidence of conversation between the partners on such topics. In any event, Lincoln the cultural and political Whig always sought out progress, and in 1851 he seems to have focused on a very specific form of it.
Many subsequent presidents have taken Abraham Lincoln as an exemplar of great leadership and character. The most historically minded among them, from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, have dwelt on his keen grasp of America’s role in the advance of democracy.
Lincoln, for his part, took the famously unsuccessful Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay as his main model of political virtue. Starting out with little education or material resources — just like Lincoln — Clay had become a galvanizing legislator, charismatic speaker, and zealous booster of America’s destiny as the beacon of liberty.
His failure to reach the presidency, said Lincoln, did nothing to lessen his impact on his times. He combined three character traits that in Lincoln’s estimation were common enough singly, but rarely found in one man: eloquence, judgment, and implacable will.
Henry Clay is scarcely more than a name today. He is perhaps less well-known by Americans than the other two members of the mid-19th century “great triumvirate,” Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.
Sculpture of Henry Clay by C.Y. Haynes, 1850, celebrating the senator's support for technology and justice. Haynes's new gilt gesso technique, called a promoetheotype, did not catch on -- just as Clay's and Lincoln's mediating stances never had majority support.
Webster can still get plaudits for memorable speechifying: his rousing “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” etched beneath his massive bronze statue in New York City’s Central Park, is familiar to many. Calhoun is often touted for original political theorizing, especially his concept of the “concurrent majority.”
Clay suffers by comparison. His major achievement — helping to rein in sectional divisiveness for a third of a century — gradually faded from view after the Civil War undid it. And his curious status as an anti-slavery slave-owner strikes many people nowadays as thinly masked hypocrisy. Men like Clay and Thomas Jefferson are often said to have salved their consciences with airy proclamations about equality, while luxuriating from the labor of their chattels.
Yet in his lengthy 1852 eulogy for the departed Clay — a speech delivered in the same Springfield Hall of Representatives where his own body would lie in state in 1865 — Lincoln declared that Clay’s viewpoint on slavery was one of the primary reasons to admire him. It qualified as paradoxical, Lincoln conceded, but it was emblematic of Clay’s good judgment.
Clay understood, said Lincoln, that the abomination of slavery must be tolerated indefinitely: abolishing it right away would wreak havoc, creating problems for blacks and whites alike. There was no way “it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.”
In Lincoln’s assessment, Clay’s entire career sprang from an intense commitment to liberty. “He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country… He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.” Most people loved their country chiefly because it was their home; Clay loved it chiefly because it was edging the entire world toward freedom for all.
Ironically, Clay’s enthusiasm for the spread of liberty made it easy for him to embrace the “colonization” movement — the campaign to mobilize freed American slaves to resettle in Africa. All he had to do was perceive black Americans as a maliciously abused people who had still managed to pick up the ideal of liberty from their Euro-American environment. They could voyage to their “native soil” across the sea as ambassadors of freedom.
At the end of his 1852 eulogy, Lincoln enthusiastically embraced Clay’s colonization program. Liberty for slaves would not come anytime soon, he knew, but when it did come, true liberty would have to occur in two stages. Individual manumission had to be followed by the release of the entire group from their captivity in theUnited States.
Somehow, Lincoln imagined, the relocation of three million black Americans “to their long-lost fatherland” in Africa might be accomplished “so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change.” They could then embark on a new chapter in the history of liberty: “the possible ultimate redemption of the African race and African continent.”
Like his model Clay, Lincoln was so blinded by the bright glow of liberty, and the role former slaves could play in extending it, that he couldn’t perceive a very plain truth: by 1852 Africa was no longer their “fatherland” or “native soil.”
In the last years of his life, Lincoln came to his senses on colonization. He may still have believed in it in the abstract, but he knew that African-Americans, while sometimes supportive of the idea, had largely repudiated it. Most black Americans took theUnited States as their homeland, and loved their country — and its ideal of liberty — in spite of the severe restrictions still placed upon their freedom.
On the evening of April 11, 1865, Lincoln delivered the last speech of his life to a large outdoor crowd at the White House. He endorsed the idea of giving the vote to some black men, signaling his awareness that African-Americans as a group would make their future — and help to spread the principle of liberty — in the United States, not in a foreign land.
John Wilkes Booth was standing in the crowd that night, aghast to hear the president put black men on the path to republican citizenship. Booth decided then and there to stop Lincoln in his tracks.