Episode 16, Mary Lincoln’s Jewelry: Once again, we are joined by Dr. James Cornelius to discuss artifacts from our collection. This month, we discuss pieces of Mary Lincoln’s jewelry. You may also view the jewelry by watching our companion “Stories from the Vault” video. Mary’s jewelry will be on display this summer.
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Abraham and Mary Lincoln held greater aspirations for their children than they experienced in life. That they could send their son Robert to Harvard University revealed the importance the Lincolns placed upon education as one of the building blocks of success.
Robert’s success as a lawyer provided wealth and status that his father could only imagine. Indeed, Robert Todd Lincoln was constantly imposed upon by relatives, real and imagined, to provide financial assistance. His Aunt Emily Todd Helm received a regular Christmas check from Robert to help offset her expenses. When he forgot to send it, she reminded him. Aunt Emily was also the person Robert relied upon to explain the Todd family tree to him. On occasion, Robert would receive a letter from someone who claimed to be related. He, in turn, would consult with Aunt Emily, who would explain or deny the connection. Once satisfied of kinship, Robert dutifully sent a small offering of assistance.
Clinton Conkling grew up with Robert in Springfield, Illinois. It was Conkling whom Robert entrusted to find appropriate renters for the family home in Springfield after 1865. Once Mary Lincoln deeded the home to Robert, it was Conkling who convinced Robert to turn over ownership to the State of Illinois, in 1887, rather than sell the property.
As a gesture of appreciation for their friendship, Robert wrote out a check for $1,000 that was used for carved oak stalls in the chancel of Westminster Presbyterian Church, formerly Second Presbyterian Church, which Conkling attended and served as one of the leading members. The gift was in perfect keeping with Robert’s generosity of spirit.
Not everyone in Springfield, however, viewed Robert’s gift in the same spirit of generosity. Conkling’s letter to Robert dated October 6, 1915, tells the story:
“Yours of 4th inst. at hand. It has just come to my ears in a perfectly natural way that your correspondent and another lady had a very warm discussion — not dispute — to-day concerning why you did not do something for the First Presbyterian Church — a church, as they said, so intimately connected with your family and whose pastors had officiated at the funerals of various of its members (your mother) etc. etc. etc. It would seem that the women of the Church are becoming some[what] warm over the matter. They cannot understand why you should have given me something for the Second Presby’n Church, and fail to consider though told of it long ago that it was a personal gift to me for the purpose of the new church on account of the long friendship which has existed between you and me.
“In their talk they referred to what you did for me. I feel you should know this feeling so that, if it seems best to you, you can make such a contribution as will still this sort of talk and cause them to know they are not being discriminated against.
“I have hesitated to write this but I believe you will understand that it [is] meant for your guidance and not to annoy you.
“Excuse me if I have presumed too much.”
Conkling couldn’t help but add the following note on a separate enclosure:
“Between you and me and not to be spoken of the following may be of interest. In 1860 the family of B. S. Edwards were members of the Second Presbyterian Church, but soon after for ‘political reasons’ I was told by one who knew, they withdrew and went to the First Presbyterian Church. This was because the intensely loyal attitude of almost the entire congregation of the Second made the atmosphere uncomfortable. In the First Presby’n Ch. of that day were to be found for the most part the influential men of the community who were opposed to Mr. Lincoln and the coercing of the South. In 1861 there was not a single non-union man in the Second, while in the First were many. It is true there were a few, very few, supporters of your father in the First but there were many many more who opposed him. However you know these facts in a general way as well as I do.
“Now all rise up to do your father honor.”
As a very good amateur historian, Conkling wrote an extensive history of Westminster Presbyterian Church as well as local Springfield history. Benjamin S. Edwards, like his older brother Ninian Wirt Edwards, left the Whig Party to become a Democrat; while the youngest brother, Albert Gallatin Edwards, who later founded the investment company bearing his name, remained firmly in the Republican ranks. Benjamin Edwards was one of the leaders promoting the ratification of a new state constitution in 1862 that was explicitly anti-Lincoln administration. Illinois voters rejected it.
From the red-brick 1876 edifice, the First Presbyterian Church, Mary Lincoln was buried in 1882. Conkling sent Robert Lincoln this postcard in 1915, when Robert donated to his parents' original congregation.
In character with Robert’s philanthropic spirit, two days later he sent a $1,000 check to First Presbyterian Church’s organ fund, confirming the wisdom of the aphorism: ‘no good deed goes unpunished.’
Benjamin Chapin’s career as a stage performer peaked on February 12, 1909, when his four-act play Abraham Lincoln at the White House finished its six-day run in New York City. At least 1,200 customers paid 50 cents, 75 cents, or a dollar to celebrate Lincoln’s one-hundredth birthday at the matinee show of the lavishly appointed Garden Theater on Madison Avenue.
They got to see vignettes of the president dealing with Fort Sumter in 1861, reacting to the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, and getting ready for an evening at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865. An irascible Secretary of War Stanton and a snarly General Joseph Hooker kept putting Lincoln’s equanimity to the test. He assuaged them with stories and jokes, and his patient forbearance also worked wonders on his cantankerous wife. Whether in politics or domestic life, Chapin’s Lincoln put charity first. When Stanton insisted that a traitor be hung for his crime, Lincoln found a reason to pardon him.
Part of the very large 1909 playbill
For a 34-year-old writer-impersonator who had toiled for a decade on lyceum platforms and vaudeville stages as a Lincoln look-alike, this February 12 spent behind the New York City footlights was a day to relish. It gave him hope that his play might hit the jackpot and get picked up for a national tour.
Chapin had felt that hope once before. In the spring of 1906, his brand-new show had appeared for three weeks at the Liberty Theater on West 42nd Street. But he got mixed reviews at best. After the last performance on April 15 — the anniversary of Lincoln’s death — Chapin was forced back on the road. His one-act “playlet” performance ran on vaudeville stages as far west as California, where his dignified show, as the Los Angeles Times remarked, was squeezed into “a hodge-podge of noisy variety.”
Only the gathering excitement for the 1909 Lincoln Centenary got Chapin his one-week revival at the Garden Theater. In a publicity flyer chock-full of testimonials from Mark Twain and lesser lights, Chapin reproduced the most glowing lines from his 1906 notices. Often those reviews had also expressed strong misgivings about the show.
One after another, critics judged his play to be “of very little moment,” as John Corbin said in the New York Sun. They noted that Chapin, who’d never acted before 1906, lacked the theatrical skills to evoke a character so multi-sided as Lincoln. And his rudimentary scripting fell short of delivering the “sterner” side of the president’s leadership, as one writer called it, along with his personal sweetness.
Yet even Chapin’s detractors agreed that he excelled at summoning Lincoln’s physical presence: his towering, ungainly frame, his shambling, awkward movements. The performer’s meticulous make-up and fine command of Lincoln’s mannerisms transfixed many spectators. Those who had never seen Lincoln in the flesh got a good sense from Chapin of why many in the older generation continued to dwell so insistently on the president’s appearance.
The public could easily abide the play’s flaws, said the reviewers, since Chapin’s “embodiment” of Lincoln offered such a wholesome and patriotic payoff. People should be sure to take their children to see it. “With Lincoln present in the flesh, walking and talking, a living man and not a silent figure in the dim pages of history,” said the Los Angeles Times, “anything but absolute respect for the vehicle [the play] is impossible.”
Chapin’s centennial run appears to have marked the end of his theatrical aspirations. As that door closed, another opened. By 1913, he had turned to film, and by 1917, the first four episodes of his planned Lincoln “Cycle” — an extended biographical epic — were playing at the Strand, one of Manhattan’s premier “picture palaces.”
In 1906 and 1909, the New York Times and other papers cautioned playgoers not to expect too much from Chapin’s work. But in 1917, to the filmmaker’s delight, the paper issued a different sort of warning:
“Patrons of the Strand,” said the Times, “should be condemned to seeing trashy modern photoplays all the rest of their days if they do not flock to see the Lincoln cycle on exhibition there this week.”
Benjamin Chapin never got to finish his Lincoln Cycle. He fell ill on Lincoln’s birthday in 1918 and died a few months later, apparently of tuberculosis, in a sanitarium in Liberty, New York. He was only 43 years old. But he had pioneered the impersonation of Lincoln on stage and screen alike. “He took dead history and made it live again,” the Chicago Tribune wrote. Next to a short obituary, the paper placed a photo of Chapin taken from the side, in full Lincoln dress, looking down appreciatively at an American flag.