Episode 14, The Commissioner’s Sale Document for Slaves: This month, we sit down with Dr. James Cornelius to discuss our Artifact of the Month: the broadside announcement for a slave auction in Mr. Lincoln’s home county in Kentucky.
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Episode 13, An interview with Abraham Lincoln presenter, Fritz Klein: On this episode of Stories from the Vault, we speak with Fritz Klein who has been portraying Abraham Lincoln for over 30 years. We discuss a wide variety of topics and he delivers an amazing version of Mr. Lincoln’s Farewell Address to Springfield.
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To only a handful of individuals interested in the Lincoln assassination, the name of Nathan Simms evokes quizzical looks. Simms is one of several individuals who claimed to have held the reins of John Wilkes Booth’s horse on the night of April 14, 1865. Dr. Edward Steers ably demonstrates the problems with Simms’s claims and credits John “Peanut” Burroughs as the rightful holder of Booth’s horse on that fateful night. But if Simms was mistaken about his role on April 14, 1865, it might be premature to dismiss his connection to the assassination.
A letter by architect Walter F. Price to President Herbert Hoover suggests that Simms — misspelled as “Sims” throughout the letter — worked for Mary Surratt. Beyond the new information on Simms, Mr. Price also enclosed three photographs to provide additional visual reference of this obscure individual. The text of the February 3, 1931, letter follows:
“Some weeks ago I went to Marshalton, Chester County, Pa., to visit an old Meeting House; the aged care-taker as I was leaving pointed to a frame House in the edge of the village. He said ‘in that house lived a colored man named Nathan Sims; when he was about seventeen he held a horse for J. Wilkes Booth while he went into the theatre to assassinate President Lincoln.’
Nathan Simms, in Pennsylvania, 1931 – Mary Surratt’s former slave?
“On the 9th of January last I went again to Marshalton about four miles west of West Chester and called at his house. A mulatto woman came to the door and said she was Mrs. Nathan Sims, then added that her husband was in the village getting slop. On my inquiry as to how I should know him, she said he will be carrying two buckets. Within five minutes I met him with his buckets; he admitted he was the Nathan Sims who held the horse for Booth. I turned to walk back with him to his house. He seemed shy and taciturn. To my question as to whether he was the slave of Mrs. Surratt, he said he had been, but later in our short talk, he referred as to having been her bond servant. Of Mrs. Surratt he said only, the soldiers came and bundled her up and took her away. I don’t know what became of her. Near his house I had him stand for his picture by his pump. I took a second picture, trying to secure a little better light on his face.
“I went again on the 25th of January and took a promised picture. In the town I asked for an old and reliable citizen, and was referred to a Mr. Peterson, who said relative to N. Sims’ veracity, that from his knowledge of the man, he felt sure we could depend on anything he might say. Just as I reached the house he came around the corner and I gave him the picture and asked more questions. For example; who are his parents? He replied they were slaves of Dr. Gunton of Maryland. There were several boys in the family and as he was not needed, he was bound over by his master to Mrs. Surratt, and that he worked for her on her ‘big’ farm at Surrattville, where she had much property. He finished by saying that he had lived in Marshalton thirty-six years.”
Nathan Simms may not have held Booth’s horse but he clearly seems to be connected to Mary Surratt. To this extent, he is worth knowing more about as an historical actor.
Episode 12, “Killing Lincoln” Book Discussion: On a special podcast, a panel of historians including: James Cornelius (Lincoln Curator, ALPLM), Daniel Stowell (Director and Editor, Papers of Abraham Lincoln), Ron Keller (Assistant Professor of History and Political Science, Lincoln College, and Director, Lincoln Heritage Museum), and Matthew Holden (Wepner Distinguished Professor in Political Science, University of Illinois Springfield) discuss the Bill O’Reilly/Martin Dugard book, “Killing Lincoln”. The panel is moderated by former Chicago Tribune reporter Patrick Reardon.
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Among the oldest liberties assigned to themselves by government officials is the franking privilege. In Europe it applied to the monarch and highest courtiers. In the U.S. in Lincoln’s day, it allowed a President, his private secretary, a Cabinet member, First Lady, Member of Congress, and a few others to send mail for free. The ‘frank’ is simply their signature written on the envelope where a stamp or seal would normally go.
Lincoln used this privilege often enough, for official business of course. ‘A. Lincoln / M.C.’ (for Member of Congress) appears on a few surviving envelopes from the years 1847-1849. While president, he and his office sent out scores of franked missives each week, and some of these survive, too, though most recipients (then as now) tossed out envelopes. Among the rarest of this type are envelopes with black mourning borders, used for a few weeks after Willie Lincoln died in 1862.
A new type came to the attention of the ALPLM this year. In 2010 we acquired two empty envelopes, both addressed in a fine hand to Hon. John T. Stuart /Springfield/Illinois and sent by free frank “From the President of the United States/ Priv. Sec.” and the signature of John G. Nicolay. As private secretary to the president, Nicolay signed many hundreds of these. The postmarks confirm the privilege: ‘Washington, D.C., FREE’ and the respective dates, March 22 and May 8, 1861.
Who was sending these? The address line is not the hand of Nicolay, nor his assistant John Hay, nor those of Abraham, Mary, Robert, nor even the precocious Willie Lincoln. (Mr. Nicolay did frank Willie’s outgoing letters.) Should one suspect Nicolay of abusing the franking privilege for some friend? Nothing we know of this scrupulous and tireless Bavarian-born public servant, orphaned at 14, suggests that he did anything but work hard his whole life.
Furthermore, no letter by Abraham or Mary to her cousin John was known to date from those weeks. So, who else had this access?
The answer: Mary’s cousin, and Stuart’s cousin also, Elizabeth Todd Grimsley. Married to a man who died young, who never quite provided for her in the manner a Todd might expect, she did need a hand. She traveled with and moved into the Executive Mansion alongside the Lincolns on March 4, 1861. In addition to helping the family get settled, and using her schoolgirl French — as did Mary Lincoln, one night in dinner conversation with the Danish minister to the U.S. — ‘Lizzie’ Grimsley was trying to get appointed as a postmistress. President Lincoln alone had the power to appoint her.
Figuring out who made use of mailing privileges can tell us a little something extra about life with the Lincolns.
It was not her sex or her inside track that gave him pause; he named more than 400 women to such an office. As Lincoln wrote to Stuart on March 30, “The question of giving her the Springfield Post-office troubles me,” because he had just given out jobs to two relatives of Illinois’s junior senator, Lyman Trumbull, and people already criticized Lincoln’s penchant for appointing his old friends as well as Mary’s relations to federal positions. Stuart advised that Lincoln ought not “let the case of Cousin Lizzie trouble … you.” Mainly, cousin Lizzie was too slow: one Beecher Todd had just been named postmaster of Lexington, Ky., and one Washington newspaper jested that 100 Todds were in the city looking for jobs.
Postmasterships were by far the largest category of federal jobs before the war broke out. Applicants and recommenders barraged Lincoln with mail (postage paid) in pursuit of these positions, and ‘Cousin Lizzie’ was after all a loyal Kentuckian, the type of person Lincoln wanted to see in office, anywhere, as war neared. A Buchanan-era Democrat who held the Springfield job, however, kept it till mid-August, when Lincoln appointed someone else. Cousin Lizzie had felt since May that she overstayed her welcome, but confided to cousin John that her own brother as well as Mary Lincoln “insisted” or “urged and urged” her to stay.
Yet once the Springfield job was filled, cousin Lizzie left the White House, after a six-month stay. One of the franked letters to cousin John had indeed discussed the post-office matter, and thus vaguely counted as ‘government business.’ Whether she was qualified to be a postmistress, we will never know. But she did demonstrate that she knew how to use the mails, and presumably did pay for many stamps — after she had left Washington.
A side note to this story for collectors: her two letters to cousin John were donated to what is now the ALPLM in 1937. How many hands did the envelopes pass through before being now reunited with the letters?