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

Both large and small new discoveries or points for debate come up nearly every month about Lincoln and his family.  Recent months have been richer than most.

Moving from the small to the large, or perhaps from the amusing to the consequential, we find these four nuggets.

1. Vera Kaikobad, in the journal Medical Acupuncture for 2007 (this one took a while to pierce our attention), has performed what seems to be the first acupuncture analysis of Lincoln.  Addressing the 5 Elements for “his Qi energetics” — fire, water, earth, wood, and metal — she finds, e.g., that Lincoln’s ‘lazy’ eye points to “a pronounced wood disposition;” that his cold hands and feet under stress meant “a fire-water axis problem;” and his being a “weak eater” meant “wood afflicting earth.”  I am not qualified to comment on this analysis except to say that the lazy eye was thought to originate in a head-kick by a horse when Abe was 10; and that the other two maladies cropped up only in the last months of his life.

2.  Mary Lincoln wrote on 5 May 1862 — 10 weeks after Willie Lincoln’s death — to Charles Reeves of Cleveland, Ohio, in a letter newly revealed to the public this month.  As often happened in 1862-1882, Mary wrote to express condolences for the death of another person — Reeves’s wife Hester, who had briefly been Willie’s teacher in Springfield– then mainly wrote about her own sorrow.

More interestingly, she refers to a painting of Willie, based on a photograph.  If this is the watercolor portrait owned by the ALPLM, gifted by the last Lincoln descendant in 1976, then it is about a decade older than we had thought.  If so, in her weeks of self-confinement Mary still found the strength to commission, pay for, and receive the portrait.  The letter also tells us that city directories and the census can leave chasms of the unknown, for Hester Reeves was never listed in Springfield.

3.  Major Thomas Eckert was in charge of the Military Telegraph office in the War Department, and thus personally close to Lincoln.  After the war he was an industrial executive and innovator in telegraphy.  At war’s end he legally carried away his code books and message logs, which in early 2012 his descendant sold to the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California.

The code books reveal some new names for our 16th President: he was variously referred to as Berlin, India, Ida, and Irving, inter alia.  General McClellan was Andes.  Secretary of War Stanton was Indus.  The rebels never cracked the federals’ codes, surely one element (if not the major one) in the Union victory.  Eckert’s code men chose stray words, then filled in uncoded names alongside them in their logbook as the messages went out.  They also added junk words to messages, meant only to confuse a possible spy: abortion, snowball, etc.  These 30 volumes will provide many new insights and much information on the conduct of the war.

In March 1865 John Bigelow, U.S. minister in Paris, presented Lincoln with volume 1 of the new 'History of Julius Caesar' by Emperor Napoleon III. Volume 2 had to be presented to Robert Lincoln the next year.

4.  Perhaps of greatest interest to Lincolnology is a project, now in its beginning stages, to create a conspectus of all the books the Lincolns owned.  Robert Bray’s recent study Reading with Lincoln (2010) is a series of lectures, really, building upon Professor Bray’s 2007 list of books Lincoln is thought to have read.  Bray’s study is useful, if maddening at times.  The books now in possession of the ALPLM do not much overlap with Bray’s list, and why that may be is for future scholars and students to puzzle out.

The volumes here have been in different vaults and shelves over the decades; and some were only very recently acquired.  The wonderful new Presidential Library building, opened in 2004, along with devoted staff and better record-keeping, finally allow us to shelve and then list them together. I will share this information with the other major repositories of Lincoln possessions and see how large a virtual shelf we can fill with the family’s readings.  The headline number for the ALPLM’s collection is 152: namely, books presented to, given by, or owned permanently by Abraham, Mary, Robert, his wife Mary, their son Jack, or, in one case their granddaughter Peggy.  More to come on this topic later this year.

With its funds drying up, the Jane Addams Hull House Association, a social service agency in Chicago, shut its doors in January 2012 after 122 years of continuous work.  The demise of the organization that bears her name brings to mind what Jane Addams accomplished in 1889 when she created Hull House.  In doing so, she took Lincoln as a prime inspiration.

Born in 1860, Addams was 29 years old when she founded Hull House as a “settlement” of college-educated women in a working-class neighborhood on the west side of Chicago.  (The house took its name from its original owner of 1856.)  For them, Hull House offered a new experience of social and vocational freedom.  They got to test their book knowledge against the realities of urban life.

Hull House gave direct assistance to the poor, but its mission encompassed an attack on inequality across the board — publicizing inferior housing and working conditions faced by immigrant laborers, acquainting adults and children with the democratic ideals espoused by Lincoln and others.

In the 1880s, a chorus of reformers bewailed the deep class divisions threatening the ideal of citizen equality.  A gap between rich and poor had seemed more acceptable when most people believed (as Lincoln did) that any white man working for wages could acquire capital through diligent labor, and eventually become an employer himself.

By the late 1880s — after a decade of class conflict culminating in Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886 — more and more middle-class reformers joined labor organizers in concluding that equal opportunity was dying out.  To give every man a shot at economic independence, and to preserve a republic of equal citizens, fundamental change could no longer be avoided, they felt.

But what kind of change could equalize life chances?  Addams imagined Hull House as an experimental institution searching for answers.  Weekly lectures on political economy brought in eager crowds, including socialists and anarchists.  The House became a center of intellectual debate, and Lincoln emerged as a staple of the conversation.  Addams modeled her approach to social progress after his.

In the 1850s, he had pushed the American founders’ principle of equality for all, while going slow on the abolition of slavery and seeking an accommodation between free and slave states.  In the 1890s, Addams pushed Lincoln’s goal of equality for all, while pursuing an accommodation between labor and capital, and deeper bonds of understanding between immigrants and native-born Americans.

In her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), she noted how much Lincoln had meant to her since childhood.  Her father John Addams, an Illinois State Senator starting in 1854, had known him personally (Lincoln liked to address him as “Double D’ed Addams”).  She could remember the moment her father told her, at age four, that “the greatest man in the world” had died.  He was sobbing as he said it, and looking back years later, Jane saw his torrent of tears over Lincoln as her “baptism” into the wider world.

Devising the Hull House “settlement” — a residence for independent women on the urban frontier, and a living bridge between the classes — assured Addams that she had found a calling worthy of her father’s and Lincoln’s generation, those who had saved the Union and freed the slaves.

But in 1894, when class conflict erupted again in Chicago with the Pullman Strike, she confronted the apparent breakdown of her bridging campaign.  “Labor” and “capital” had reached an impasse, and she was bewildered about how to proceed.  She was tempted by the Socialist program — government ownership of major industries — but decided it was too rigid.  On the other hand, leaving large companies in the hands of men like George Pullman, who could lower his workers’ wages at will, seemed intolerable too.

During hard times in 1894 Jane Addams visited the statue in Lincoln Park, Chicago, for inspiration. The view here, taken by an unknown WPA photographer during the Great Depression of the 1930s, includes a man resting.

In her confusion, Addams sought Lincoln’s help.  She set out on a three-mile pilgrimage from Hull House to Lincoln Park, where Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s acclaimed bronze statue of Lincoln had been dedicated in 1887.  She wanted to meditate at this shrine to her hero, “to look at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I could, from the marvelous Saint- Gaudens statue.”

Reflecting on Lincoln’s ideas, she found him mute on the labor-capital conflict, since he had never encountered “labor” and “capital” in their late-19^th century forms.  But she gathered ample wisdom from the words chiseled into the granite bench that stretches around the statue:  “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

The injustices built into modern industrial life would have to be addressed pragmatically, she realized, not according to the Socialist vision of a progress unfolding through prescribed historical stages.  To Addams, “pragmatism” meant practical problem-solving, informed by a set of chosen ideals.  Addams took her ideals straight from Lincoln: equality for all and respect for one’s opponents.

One must prepare for partial victories and frequent setbacks. Lincoln had shown the proper patience, being content “to dig the channels through which the moral life of his countrymen might flow.”  Amidst all the turn-of-the-century calls for wholesale social transformation, she found that “the memory of Lincoln… came like a refreshing breeze from off the prairie.”

“In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression,” she concluded, “we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment [something] of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.”