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

Most children have big plans, and Jack Lincoln, grandson of the 16th president, had at least one such plan.

The second of three children and the only son of Robert and Mary Lincoln, he saw more from an early age than most children ever get to see.  Born in Chicago in 1873, he moved at age 7 to Washington, D.C., when his father became Secretary of War under President James A. Garfield.  In 1885 the Lincolns returned to Chicago, but 4 years later they moved to London, where his father served as U.S. Minister for President Benjamin Harrison.

Yet sadness followed this family.  Jack’s grandmother Mary Lincoln died in Springfield while he lived in Washington; so did his mother’s mother, Ann Eliza Harlan, two years later.  Of course he never knew his grandfather the president, but because he was named for him — Abraham Lincoln II, always called ‘Jack’ — he had the right to sign his name exactly as his forebear did: A. Lincoln.

Jack Lincoln signed like his grandfather but, unlike the president, could also write it in Greek.

And so he did, to the amusement and confusion of his friends, in a hand very close to that of the president.  The evidence we have of this are 14 books in the Presidential Library collection that belonged to the boy.  Most of these are signed in a way that could fool the historically unsure, since all were published after 1865.

Oliver Optic’s books, including Outward Bound (1866);  Shamrock and Thistle (1867); Red Cross (1867); Dikes and Ditches (1868); Through by Daylight (1869); Going South (1879); Up the River (1881) seem to have been his main target.  He bought them new or used.  Optic was the nom de plume of William T. Adams of Boston, a highly productive and successful author in the early days of children’s series-lit.  These edu-tales took youngsters to foreign settings (Ireland and Scotland for Shamrock, e.g., Holland and Belgium for Dikes) or coastal yachting (Going South) or driving a train (Through by Daylight).  This last book even mentions baseball, one of the earliest such books.

Another pair bear a similar flavor: Capt. Mayne Reid, The Plant Hunters and Stories About Animals, both of which Jack signed in 1884.  Reid was a British military man who wrote tales about Africa and other exotic places.

Jack’s friend Dick Hatton gave him a Christmas present in 1883 in a like vein: Horatio Alger’s The Young Circus Rider (1883).  Jack, or rather his parents, saved his Model First Reader (J. R. Webb, 1873), in which he pencilled his Chicago and Washington addresses in an unsteady young hand.

More interestingly, Jack took over two books not quite his.  William M. Thayer wrote the first children’s book about President Lincoln, The Pioneer Boy (1863), whence comes much of our log-cabin-to-White House national mythos.  This was translated into Greek in 1865 and mailed to President Lincoln by the translator, arriving just after his death. Jack later claimed it from his own father’s library.  So, too, the Hawaiian translation (1869).

And those big plans?  Jack numbered most of these books, with a shelf-mark used by large collectors who need to know exactly where in their library to find each item.  The Optic books at the ALPLM are numbered a2, a11, and a13-17; the Thayer books are e13 and e14.  These marks give clues to the likelihood of at least 3 other shelves of books in Jack’s bedroom.

But the hundreds or thousands of books that world-trotting Jack Lincoln might have hoped to amass over his lifetime never reached that level.  He died in London in March 1890, age 16, of an infection that today would be cleared by a simple shot.  Robert Lincoln knew then that the surname ‘Lincoln’ would die with him (1926, it turned out).  But books and signatures live on.

Episode 15, The 13th Amendment: This month, we speak with Dr. James Cornelius about our recently restored copy of the 13th Amendment which has been signed and dated by Abraham Lincoln. You can also view our companion“Stories from the Vault” video which shows the document.

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In Lincoln’s day, “nostalgia” meant something different than it does today.  Then it was a rarely heard medical word.  Doctors used “nostalgia” to describe a debilitating, even life-threatening, form of homesickness, one afflicting soldiers most of all.  As far as we know, Lincoln, like most people, never used the term.

Only in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries did “nostalgia” evolve into the commonly used word we know today: a remembrance of earlier times that feels somewhat sorrowful, somewhat sweet.

Historians have shown that wistful longing for the bygone world of earlier generations became a defining feature of modern society.  Nostalgia for rural rhythms and the old family hearth helped modern Americans and Europeans adjust to the industrial time clock and the novel pressures of urban living.

Popular fiction and Hollywood films spread the nostalgic frame of mind with 20^th century mega-hits from The Wizard of Oz to Gone With the Wind.  “There’s no place like home” applied as much to the vanished plantation culture of Tara as to the dwindling free-labor homesteads of Kansas.

Lincoln’s generation didn’t know the word “nostalgia,” but many pined for their ever-so-humble “Home, Sweet Home,” one of the most popular songs of the Civil War.  Union prisoners detained at Libby Prison in Richmond sang it regularly.  “Auld Lang Syne” was another staple of the day: a Union band played it at Appomattox Courthouse as Grant made his way into the McLean home to accept Lee’s surrender.

The president’s own favorite nostalgic song may have been “Dixie”: “one of the best tunes I have ever heard,” he told a crowd outside the White House on April 10, 1865.  He asked a band to play it, quipping that the Confederate anthem was once again national property.  (It had been widely played in the North before the war.)

In other words, Lincoln’s cohort loved the sentimental evocation of olden times just as much as their descendants did.  The difference was that later generations gradually realized, as Lincoln and his peers did not, that the vibrant culture of small-town, pre-industrial America had come to an end.

If Lincoln didn’t know the word “nostalgia,” he still produced a remarkable poem in the mid-1840s that captured its most essential element: the joining of sorrow and satisfaction in a remembrance of the past.  Yet this aspiring poet threw overboard the pious reverence for “home” that marked the wistful songs and poems of his own day as much as it did the later culture of nostalgia.

In 1844, at age 35, Lincoln made a return visit to Spencer County, Indiana, where he’d grown from a lad of 7 to a man of 21.  The experience of returning home had put him into a “poetizing mood,” he later wrote, despite the “unpoetical” character of this Hoosier “neighborhood.”

In 1845 and 1846, he produced 24 four-line stanzas to express his sentiments — “though,” he quipped, “whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question.”  It might just be “doggerel.”

The manuscript of Lincoln's poem is in the Library of Congress, but fine printings of it have been made. This is from 1971.

His first stanza hit at the heart of nostalgia: its paradoxical blend of emotions.  (This is the original text, as given in Roy Basler’s Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, pp. 367ff.  A slightly different version appears on pp. 378 and 385ff. of Basler.)

My childhood-home I see again,
And gladden with the view;
And still, as mem’ries crowd my brain,
There’s sadness in it too.

The gladness in his memory, according to the rest of the poem, has nothing to do with remembering his family life or good times with friends or neighbors.  The 24 stanzas mainly recount some highly unpleasant facts picked up on his 1844 trip, such as the deaths of half of his childhood friends.

I hear the lone survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.

The most unpleasant fact of all was the lingering insanity of his schoolmate Matthew Gentry, who had lost his mind at age 19 (when Lincoln was 16).  Twelve of the poem’s 24 stanzas concern the madness of Matthew, son of the richest man in the region.

Poor Matthew! I have ne’er forgot
When first with maddened will,
Yourself you maimed, your father fought,
 And mother strove to kill …

And when at length, tho’ drear and long,
Time soothed your fiercer woes –
How plaintively your mournful song,
Upon the still night rose.

I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed,
Far-distant, sweet, and lone;
The funeral dirge, it ever seemed
Of reason dead and gone.

To drink it’s strains, I’ve stole away,
All silently and still,
Ere yet the rising god of day
Had streaked the Eastern hill.

Air held his breath; the trees all still
Seemed sorr’wing angels round.
Whose swelling tears in dew-drops fell
Upon the list’ning ground.

Here Lincoln remembers, in his youth, prowling the landscape in the dim light of dawn to savor Matthew’s funeral dirge for enlightenment.  Nature itself has absorbed Matthew’s suffering.  “Air held his breath,”Lincoln writes, in his single best poetic phrase.  The atmosphere is laden with Matthew’s lament, his song a melancholic “air” in its own right.

The memory of Matthew is sorrowful, but enlivening too.  Finding poetic words to voice the memory lets Lincoln capture and contain his sadness. Lincoln has realized that the act of writing provides solace and hope.  Art can help relieve his own torment over the suddenness of death, and the fragility of reason.  The poem stands as a secular prayer of sorts, an urgent appeal for the preservation of life and sanity.

At this moment in his life, poetry offered him a comfort that religion or theology could not.  “My Childhood-home I See Again” reveals a Lincoln buoyed up by a steely and stoic faith, poised to embark on his successful 1846 Congressional “canvass” against Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright.