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

For about a century the Lincoln profession has analyzed statements by John Milton Hay that he wrote many of Lincoln’s letters, and/or signed his name to many documents, with the president’s acquiescence.  Hay was the assistant private secretary in the Executive Mansion for the entirety of Lincoln’s presidency, serving under secretary John Nicolay, his friend from western Illinois and his elder by six years.

Hay achieved notoriety in many fields.  He was graduated from Brown University in 1858 as class poet and then worked in his uncle’s law firm in Springfield.  That uncle, Milton Hay, had clerked for Lincoln two decades before.  Young John Hay was quick with a pen, providing signed as well as anonymous reportage to newspapers and keeping a fascinating war-years diary. After the years in Mr. Lincoln’s service, he co-authored with Nicolay the 10-volume biography of Lincoln (1890), then rounded out that picture with the 12-volume edition of Lincoln’s own writings (1905).  In all this they had close cooperation with and access to documents belonging to Robert Lincoln and others.  So Hay knew Lincoln’s hand.  And he knew Robert — the two young men were playing cards in the family quarters of the Executive Mansion on the night of 14 April 1865 when Robert’s parents went to Ford’s Theatre.  John Hay was nearly a son, perhaps more like a shadow, to the man he had dubbed the ‘tycoon.’

Hay later published poems, stories, a novel, and travel sketches, was U.S. ambassador to London soon after Robert Lincoln served there; and as Secretary of State in the McKinley and T. Roosevelt administrations authored the ‘Open Door’ policy for trade with China.  He negotiated the important Hay-Pauncefote Treaties that led to the building of the Panama Canal.  In so doing he pursued policies about which Mr. Lincoln had a nascent interest, though did not pursue during the crisis of the Civil War.  Hay began to intimate that he had written the famous Bixby letter for Lincoln in 1864 (the original was lost that year), and scholars still hotly debate that topic.

Definitely Hay, and definitely Lincoln's signature

But what of his claim that he ‘signed for’ Lincoln?  The document at the right contains Lincoln’s signature only. The document below — a scrap, really — is the closest thing we have to substantiation of Hay’s claim.  Most of the text is clearly not in Lincoln’s hand, nor is the date.  And the signature does not look very good either.  It would be dismissed from the pantheon of ‘Lincoln documents’ were it not for the fact that the main text is in Hay’s hand, and thus the ‘A. Lincoln’ cannot really be a forgery.  Did Mr. Lincoln hand over a stack of pleas like this one, from Confederate soldiers who in the days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox suddenly wished to renew their loyalty to the Union?  There are perhaps a hundred of these notes written out and/or signed by Lincoln in 1863-65, and the flood of them grew as the war’s eventual victor became clear.

Definitely Hay, and maybe a Hay-as-Lincoln signature

If John Hay was trying to make his hand look like Lincoln’s, he did not execute a particularly good likeness here.  Is it possible that Hay’s later claim to have written many of Lincoln’s letters owes mainly to those last days of Lincoln’s life, perhaps this very last day?  The harried President wanted to oblige his wife, his friends Major Rathbone and Miss Harris, his own interest, and the nation’s acclaim by getting to Ford’s Theatre for the show.  Did he leave some papers behind for the able and trusted young secretary to ‘take care of, if you please, Mr. Hay?’  And was it that last conversation with his chief that caused Hay, in his very later years, to inflate his own memory and thus his words about the frequency of his vicarious role as official presidential signatory?  Or have a host of ‘A. Lincoln’ signatures on short notes been dismissed, perhaps undeservedly, because we have not learned to recognize John Hay’s hand?

Episode 20, Book Discussion with author Randall Fuller: In this special episode, we present a book discussion with Randall Fuller author of the book, “From Battlefields Rising: How The Civil War Transformed American Literature”. The discussion took place April 10, 2012 in our Union Theatre.

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Episode 19, The Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Retrial (Part Two): In part two of our Roundtable Discussion, our panel focuses on the medical and legal aspects of Mary Lincoln’s trial.

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Episode 18, The Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Insanity Trial (Part One): In this two part episode, we present the audio from the Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Insanity Retrial. The Insanity Retrial of  Mary Todd Lincoln is sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Commission and will take place September 24, 2012 in Chicago, IL and again on October 1, 2012 in Springfield, IL. For more information on the retrial please visit: www.wasmarylincolncrazy.com.

Part one of our discussion focuses on the historical, cultural, and legal surroundings of Mrs. Lincoln’s original trial.

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To celebrate Lincoln’s hundredth birthday in 1909, the Times put on an essay contest for the children of the Greater New York Area.  Other urban papers, including the Philadelphia Ledger and the Cleveland Press, organized Lincoln competitions too, though none could rival the size of the Times event.

Drawing on a city population of 4.5 million, about 3 times that of Philadelphia and 9 times that of Cleveland, the Times attracted almost 10,000 qualifying submissions, many from New Jersey, Connecticut, and other towns in New York.  All of the handwritten papers — capped at 500 words — arrived with a teacher’s note certifying that the essay had been written “without outside help.”

“WINNERS OF THE LINCOLN COMPETITION MEDALS, CERTIFICATES, CASH PRIZES,” ran the 7-column headline on page 1 of the “Magazine Section” on February 23, 1909.  One thousand children had won silver Tiffany medals featuring the bust of Lincoln, and the top 100 were each to get a $5.00 gold piece.

The Magazine printed the top 10 essays, in facsimile form to show off the neatness and penmanship of the best writers.  Three of these, said the Times, came from the pens of 10-year-olds, one from a 12-year-old, and the rest from teenagers and one 20-year-old.  For the Times, the 10-year-olds (one of whom turned out to be only 9) proved irresistible.  Their innocent directness of expression seemed to mirror the mythic simplicity of Lincoln.

Alexandra Kliatshco, age 9 and just 3 years an American. Photo courtesy of Julie Stern, Cyrenius H. Booth Library, Newtown, CT.

How did the Times manage to attract nearly 10,000 essays?  By enlisting the eager support of the New York City school system, which added the Times contest to its already extensive Lincoln centennial program.

Teachers were encouraged to assign the 7-part biography of Lincoln published in the paper in early February.  (The biography was the work of Frederick Trevor Hill, author of the recent book Lincoln the Lawyer.)  They helped their pupils grasp what the Times meant by an “original” response to Hill’s account.  A summary would not suffice; students had to express their own sentiments about Lincoln’s slow climb to distinction.

Many teachers actively discussed the Times pieces with their pupils, focusing on Hill’s main point: “Lincoln was not a heaven born genius — merely a plain man who was honest, sincere, and upright.”  He learned growing up that strong “character” would get him through failure and disappointment.  Any young person in any era, the Times urged, could adopt Lincoln as a model.

The teachers promoted the contest, but the lure of a dazzling medal fired the children’s ambition.  Letters poured into the Times office from young hopefuls and their parents, explaining how badly they wanted to win.

One father thought he would help his 14-year-old daughter’s chances by sending in an additional poem she had written that urged equal time for George Washington:

It’s Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln

Just cause he’s a hundred years old,

O’ course he deserves every bit of his praise,

And maybe I am kind o’ bold

To say that there’s some one better,

An’ tho’ I’m only one

I’m goin’ ter stick up for the father

Of this country, George Washington.

The Times cautioned youngsters not to expect special treatment for extra material of this kind.  But the 14-year-old did get her medal.

In the aftermath, what did the Times think the competition had achieved?  “Thousands of eager, impressible, active young minds” had received a “conception of the great President, which will not easily be effaced,” it wrote.  The essays had “made Lincoln a vital reality to them,” to their families, and to countless readers.

In a city with almost 2 million foreign-born residents, the Lincoln contest had made him a subject of daily conversation for at least 100,000 people, said the Times.  Immigrants and native-born Americans, often occupying separate worlds, had taken another step towards a shared civic life.

Diminutive Alexandra Kliatshco, a Russian immigrant, and at age 9 the winner of a medal and a $5.00 gold piece, became the paper’s poster-child for equal opportunity in modern America.  Alexandra had arrived in America from Russia only 3 years before, knowing no English.  She had thrived at P.S. 177 in Manhattan, and she produced an elegant Lincoln piece.  Her father, a physician on Henry Street, told the Times that she had excelled at memorizing Russian poetry from the time she was 3 years old.

“I am a little foreign girl, and I have been here only a short time,” her essay began, “but when I read about Lincoln, I thought that I might grow up a great woman as Lincoln was a great man.”  And it ended: “We cannot forget the love he bore us and he died leaving the world better than it was.  I hope that I can be like Lincoln, unselfish, kind, thoughtful and modest.”

A 1998 profile in the Times noted that her prediction had proven accurate.  Alexandra Kliatshco Werner had graduated from Teachers College in 1922 and taught art for 40 years at Jane Addams Vocational School in the Bronx.  She loved impressionist paintings, classical music, and Alfred Hitchcock, and had tried her hand at poetry.

According to her daughter, interviewed for this post, she had not held on to her Lincoln medal, preferring to make a gift of it to her father, who died in 1928.

A regular contributor over the decades to the Times “Neediest Cases” fund, Mrs. Werner — the youngest top-ten winner in the centennial Lincoln competition of 1909 — died in 1997 at the age of 97.

Episode 17, Abraham Lincoln Deathbed Painting: This month on Stories from the Vault we sit down with Dr. James Cornelius to discuss a painting of Abraham Lincoln on his deathbed. You may view the painting in our companion video series.

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