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

Journalists may be the warp and woof of contemporary history, but if you pick at the threads too hard, the cloth can begin to unravel.  This blog first poked at Noah Brooks on December 13, 2010 (by chance, the anniversary of the battle of Fredericksburg), but for this week’s battle of Chancellorsville, 150th anniversary, the poking must continue.

The well-known and oft-cited comment by Lincoln, when learning of the Union disaster at Chancellorsville, is this: “My God! My God! What will the country say! What will the country say!”

That, at least, is what several good scholars have used.  Michael Burlingame’s edition of Brooks’s wartime reports for the Sacramento Daily Union is called Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (1998).  He cannot quote Brooks quoting Lincoln in those words at the time, however, because Brooks did not record them for his newspaper during that terrible first week of May 1863.  Instead, in a footnote (p. 247, n. 72), Professor Burlingame provides the quotation above, as “reported” by Brooks in his 1895 memoir, Washington in Lincoln’s Time.

Contains the 1895 rendition of the 1878 version of the possible 1863 utterance.

Okay, just because one other senseless ‘quotation’ by Lincoln appeared in Brooks’s 1895 book (see the 2010 blog) does not mean that the whole book is invalid.  But it makes one skeptical.  David Herbert Donald, nonetheless, in his 1995 book Lincoln, also quoted the president (p. 436) as having said it the 1895 old-man-Brooks way.  Donald even titled his chapter “What Will the Country Say!”

But Brooks himself aired a slightly different version of it, earlier.  In Scribner’s Monthly for March 1878 (p. 674), he related how the president said this upon hearing the news from Chancellorsville:

“What will the country say?  Oh, what will the country say?”

Note that it was a question in 1878, without any God involved.  By 1895, Brooks had dropped the “Oh” and added “My God! My God!” and also changed the lament from a question to an exclamation.  One popular battle history, Chancellorsville 1863 by Carl Smith (1998; p. 85), keeps the question mark, drops God, and adds the nonsense that Lincoln went on to liken the Confederate army to “ragamuffins.”

We cannot necessarily fault Brooks for failing to report Lincoln’s deep gloom to his wartime readers.  Brooks got special access to the president because he was a good writer, wrote nice things about Mary Lincoln, and promoted the administration’s cause.  Thus has it always been with journalists.

But this episode brings to mind Brooks’s July 1865 article-for-hire in Harper’s Weekly, three months after Lincoln’s death.  As the nation continued to mourn the war and the assassination, Brooks wrote that Lincoln, on some unspecified date, moaned that “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.  My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.”  (President Obama used a version of this dodgy quotation in his September 2012 convention speech, once again wearing the Lincolnian cloth without first asking a staffer to check its integrity.)

The “overwhelming conviction” diction is not Lincolnian. The phrases are not either.  Brooks wrote for an imagined audience in July 1865, and again in March 1878, and then, once more with feeling, in 1895.  But did he imagine some of it?  All of it?  Oh, my God, how little we truly know of Lincoln!

When Thomas Kenney of Massachusetts accepted 160 acres in Illinois from President James Monroe in 1818 as partial thanks for his service in the War of 1812, he set the later owners of that land along a path to local notoriety and friendship with a giant — Abraham Lincoln.  Now the historic treasures of John Hake of Delray Beach, Florida, the last of one line of that family, have come to the ALPL Foundation.

“It was important to Jack Hake that his collection be publicly accessible, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is the perfect place to fulfill his wishes. The collection will play an integral role in furthering the good work that the Museum and Library does on a daily basis,” said Fred MacLean, long-time friend, attorney, and personal representative of his estate.

The key figure in the Hake family line was his great-great-grandfather, Alexander Sympson (1807-1867), who settled in 1844 on Kenney’s original tract.  Sympson was born in Kentucky just a few miles from young Abe Lincoln and knew the tall youth from hanging around at the local mill. They met again in central Illinois as adults.  By the 1850s both were known state-wide in Illinois, Lincoln as a lawyer-politician and Sympson as a leader in Hancock County — he and wife Nancy could host 300 people to meals in the home and yard for special events.  A wealthy farmer and landowner, he served as a delegate to the 1860 Republican State Convention in Decatur that named Lincoln the state’s candidate for president, a week before the national convention in Chicago.

Letter from Abraham Lincoln to J.W. Forney concerning Coleman C. Sympson

The 49 items in Mr. Hake’s gift include personal letters, cdv’s, cabinet card photos, printed items, official documents, and a scrapbook.  The two highlights shine like the Florida sun: a letter by Candidate Lincoln to Sympson in 1858, writing that “if life and health continue, I shall pretty surely” see him soon during the Senate campaign against Stephen A. Douglas.  In fact, Lincoln stayed with Alexander and Nancy Sympson during that speaking tour.  The second highlight is a letter from President Lincoln to a Washington colleague in 1861, arranging a job for Sympson’s son, and referring to the father as “one of my best friends.”

The son, Coleman C. Sympson, became enrolling and engrossing clerk in the U.S. Senate for 27 years and knew key Illinois figures.  His exacting honesty and accuracy are attested in personal notes by Senator David Davis and by Senator Richard Oglesby.  Another influential friend was Senator Orville Browning.  And Sympson’s cousin, Crittenden Sympson, became a photographer in Carthage, Illinois, in the 1880s, creating fine re-take cabinet cards of an unusual Lincoln image from 1858.

The old man had stumped not only for Lincoln.  In November 1860 he received a personal letter of thanks from newly elected governor Richard Yates.

Soon, old Sympson — almost two years senior to the President — got an official pass on June 20, 1861, to go “over the bridges and into the lines” in Virginia before Bull Run, swearing “at penalty of death” to remain loyal to the Union.  First a captain and quartermaster, he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and marched through Kentucky and Tennessee under General W. S. Rosecrans, with field orders from General J. L. Easton to direct him, and a Nashville cdv of himself as a souvenir.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in such a set is an 1851 letter by Stephen A. Douglas, informing the Senate that as his residence has moved from Quincy to Chicago, he is due less in travel remuneration for his trips to Washington.  Penciled and inked calculations on one page of the letter attest to someone’s careful math about the senator’s honesty.  Two other letters are of family interest, about a student rebellion at Illinois College in 1857, and a sweet missive from cousin Jennie to Miss Kitty Sympson, undated but about 1855.

According to Dr. Carla Knorowski, CEO of the Presidential Library Foundation, “The Hake Collection provides a unique, extraordinary look into a family’s history and the Lincoln and Civil War era. We are very fortunate to have been given this magnificent collection by John Hake. He wanted the artifacts and documents to be publicly accessible, and there is no better place for that than the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.  Not only will the public be able to see pieces of the collection on display in various exhibits from time to time, they will also be available digitally so that scholars, students, and armchair historians will be able to enjoy and learn from them for generations to come. We are truly grateful for Mr. Hake’s commitment to the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln and his times.”

Rounding out this collection of historic keepsakes are an elegant signature by “Mrs. James K. Polk, of Polk Place” on a slip of paper; one by D  R. Locke, alias Petroleum V. Nasby, the popular humorist whom Lincoln was reading aloud to friends on both the night he was re-elected and the afternoon he last went to Ford’s Theatre; a signature of U.S. Grant, clipped from a note; and then, harking back to 1812 soldier Thomas Kenney, the James Monroe signature tied to an order by Governor Bradford of Massachusetts.  Another family member, Jesse B. Quinby, left Ohio in 1841 bearing a sturdy letter of recommendation in a lovely antique script by a village elder.

That young man became Rev. Quinby, who married a daughter of the Sympsons.  Their granddaughter was Mary Louise Sympson Quinby Strimple Hake, mother of Jack Hake.  And so the land grant by President Monroe … the humble introduction for an Ohio boy … the brushes and friendship with Lincoln … civic leadership for generations in their county — all this evidence shows the care of each family.  All this is part of a Lincoln-centered gift to the Presidential Library & Museum, in Springfield, Illinois.

Gwen Podeschi of the Library Reference Desk researched the complicated Sympson genealogy for this story.

What fits into your shirt pocket, is a little bendable but basically sturdy, and shows the photographic portraits of nearly 500 people? No, not your iPhone.

The answer is the carte de visite (cdv) pictured here. It is backmarked for Ashford, Brothers & Co., of 76 Newgate Street, London, and was probably created in 1863 or 1864. Its caption reads,

“Upwards of five hundred photographic portraits of the most celebrated personalities of the age. With a hand-magnifying glass, every portrait will be seen perfect.”

Bring your magnifying glass, or your microscope

This recent arrival in the Lincoln Collection caught our eye because Abraham and Mary appear in the second row from the bottom, in the center. Both photos were taken in mid-1861, but the carte’s centerpiece — a floral circle traced within the montage — shows the British royal family. Just below Victoria and Albert (he died in Dec. 1861) are the Prince and Princess of Wales, Albert Edward and Alexandra, who were married in March 1863. Lord Palmerston, British prime minister (1859-1865), looms just over that floral family.

Americans fill the bottom two rows, plus George Washington above Lincoln, and politically this card may be judged ‘neutral’ (except, perhaps, for its placing of the prime minister above the royal family). To the right of Lincoln are Jefferson Davis and some his cabinet and generals; to the left of Mary are an equal number of Union men, including editor Horace Greeley at bottom left near Edwin Stanton and Simon Cameron, both of them a secretary of war and another clue that this was certainly made no earlier than January 1862. But we can detect no Ulysses Grant or George G. Meade, so this may pre-date August 1863, when full news of their major July victories reached Europe.

As for those other 400-odd faces, mainly British but evidently some Europeans and a few Asians, we welcome any facial-recognition experts among our readers to send us their ideas. Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Florence Nightingale, Isambard Brunel are likely. Much of the left column depicts women, with a few more here and there.

Our collection’s previous record “tiny faces” cdv, made in New York, depicts 109 Union commanders of the army and navy, with each name printed on the back. This almost-500 cdv suggests not just that the British were technically a little ahead of the Americans in their skilled use of lenses and artful collage, but that the entire science of photography, a quarter-century old when this card appeared, had made leaps not unlike what the laptop and microchip underwent between, say, 1985 and 2010.

Knowing what we do now of photography’s tricks, colors, shadings, and overall development since 1864, just imagine what the next 150 years could bring in the power of computing. And Lincoln would have liked that: he grasped the importance of rail, riflery, and cameras to his own career, and surely would have appreciated the chance to let the people get new information as thunderously as the rains fall. Yet he also might have preferred that 500 names could be printed on the back of a cdv as readily as their faces were. He was a man of the word, not of the image.

If the Christmas season has put partridges on your pear tree, parse the pairs below.  Even in small towns, common surnames can lead you up a tree.

Springfield, Illinois, in the early 1840s was home to about 3,000 people.  If you owned a shop or took the Whig newspaper or ever showed up in court, Abraham Lincoln probably knew you by face or name.

From amidst such a small, tight-knit community, Lincolnophiles today might assume that they can pick out those names from the simplest of references.  And they would be wrong.

NOT William D. Herndon

Case in point: William H. Herndon, born 1818, was Lincoln’s junior law partner from 1844 to 1861.  William D. Herndon was older, born we know not where, and shows up as chair of a public meeting in June 1841 to discuss the astonishing Trailor Murder case (which A. Lincoln argued, and about which wrote a detective story in 1846.)  A patron on the East Coast asked us how Lincoln’s soon-to-be-partner could ethically lead a meeting about a legal case?   The answer is that William D. led that meeting.

We might assume that the two WH’s were related, but how?  Richard Lawrence Miller’s vast new 4-volume study Lincoln and His World (1809-1860) states twice that William D. was a relative of William H., but Miller does not state how.  Nor do the old county histories.  William D. was a Whig, served as a commissioner of the new State Capitol in Springfield in 1837 (he may have been a brick mason), was an elected state representative in 1844, and like A. Lincoln later on, had to fight off charges from Democrats that he was a nativist, contending that he merely thought foreign-born persons should reside permanently in their new land and actually register before voting.

Our ‘Billy’ was the son of Archer and Rebecca Herndon.  Billy’s younger brother was Elliott B. Herndon, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois (based in Springfield), and editor of a Democratic newspaper in 1857-60 that supported the Buchanan side against the Douglas side.  Elliott voted for pro-slavery man John C. Breckinridge for president in 1860.  The two brothers were not close.

Amusingly enough, William D. once hired the firm of Stuart and Lincoln to defend him against a charge of gambling for money in a card game called farrow.  He was acquitted.

Another case in point:  Josiah N. Francis was the secretary of that public meeting in 1841, when people gathered to express dismay at a murder charge against friend and neighbor A. Trailor.  Francis was qualified enough to take the minutes: he had founded the Whig newspaper in town in 1831, and edited it until 1835.  But he gave up the paper that year to Simeon Francis, probably his older brother, in order to go into the cabinet-making business with brother Charles.  Evidently a cabinet-maker of 6 years’ duration can still take minutes, seated next to a brick mason.  So if you see reference to ‘editor Francis’ you need to find out which date to know which man.  Little brother Allen also worked there.

Thanks be to Simeon and his wife Eliza, at any rate: their front parlor served as the secret courting room for A. Lincoln and M. Todd in 1842.  (The exact location of that front parlor is now the entryway to the Presidential Library, 6th and Jefferson Sts.)  But for that parlor, we might not today have a Library in which to puzzle out these threads.

NOT Mary Ann Todd

And did you catch the name of that young belle?  It was Mary Todd.  On 4 November 1842 she became Mary Lincoln, and never again used the maiden name ‘Todd’ or the initial ‘T.’   She had practice at name-dropping: christened ‘Mary Ann Todd’ in 1818, she dropped the ‘Ann’ when her little sister was christened, like an invasive species, ‘Ann Marie Todd.’  And yet … we have seen a finely printed calling card with the name ‘Mary Ann Todd’ from about 1840.  She was staying in Boston, a city our Mary never saw till 1848, with her husband.

By the way, who was Lincoln’s boss as Deputy Surveyor of Sangamon County?  John C. Calhoun.  No, not the pro-slavery senator of the same name from South Carolina.  Even in the 1830s and 1840s, it was a big country, especially in small towns.

Three siblings in the fourth generation of descent from a Wall Street banker, Benjamin B. Sherman, have donated three letters and a ledger book to the Presidential Library & Museum.  The material concerns a public collection taken up in 1865-66 to support Mary, Robert, and Tad Lincoln in their time of woe.  Below are the main points of the letters — 2 of them previously unknown, plus 1 by Mary Lincoln that was incompletely transcribed in the 1972 book of her correspondence.  The hundreds of names in the ledger book — people all over the U.S. and a few Canadians who sent Sherman money to forward to the bereaved family — will be analyzed by ALPLM staff.  All 4 items will go on display in the Museum after some light cleaning.

One revelation is that Mary Lincoln owed money to a furrier (though this does not really surprise), and that she had the ill grace to ask Mr. Sherman, who took up the collection for her, to go around and try to get her debts to other merchants reduced.  The letter by Robert Lincoln puts paid to the old conspiracy theory that he wanted to get his hands on his mother’s money, because here he forswears any claim to the gifts offered him, directing Mr. Sherman to give it all to Mary.  The total fund, delivered to her in May 1866, was about $10,750 — worth roughly $400,000 today.

It is a lovely bit of synonymy over time that a generous volunteer like Benjamin B. Sherman should have descendants today who selflessly donated these materials.  The ALPLM and all interested in the Lincoln story are most grateful to the Thompsons.

To Benjamin B. Sherman                                  Chicago,  Dec 25^th 1865

    95 Wall St., N.Y.

My dear Sir:  Your favor of the 21^st inst. is at hand.  I notice that it was addressed to my brother and myself, as well as to my mother.  So far as I am concerned, I wish whatever of the fund there is in your hands, to be solely appropriated to my mother. 

The income which I derive from my father’s estate, is sufficient to maintain me until I begin to earn my living.  The same is of course true with regard to my brother who is only a little more than twelve years of age.  … we both wish to have nothing to do with the fund, but that it should go where it is most needed. 

…  When you are prepared, please send by express, to Mrs. A. Lincoln, Clifton House, Chicago. 

If you have not already done so, we would wish that you would not advertize.  The amount … is not worth the annoyance we experience at seeing our names in the papers. 

I cannot express as I would, the gratitude we feel for your earnest efforts & the great trouble you have had …   Believe me, Sir,  Very sincerely & truly

                                                                                                 Yours   Robert T. Lincoln
__

To Mr. Sherman                                              Chicago,  Dec. 26th 1865

“There was a cabinet meeting that afternoon.  General Grant, who had just returned, gave a very interesting account of the state of the South, and the good feeling manifested by the officers of the Confederate army, who all said that they were ready to lay down their arms and go home to work.  Something was said about hunting up ‘Jeff Davis,’ and Mr. Lincoln said he hoped ‘he would be like Paddy’s flea, when they got their fingers on him he would not be there.’”

So wrote Susan Man McCulloch in her diary for 14 April 1865, later transforming it into a memoir in 1895.  How did she know of this previously unrecorded quip by President Lincoln, in his last day of life?

Susan Man was born near Plattsburgh, New York, in 1818 to a well-off family of settler-farmers.  In 1838 she married Hugh McCulloch of Maine, after they had each migrated to Ft. Wayne, Indiana.  McCulloch became an important banker in that state, then a Treasury official in 1863, shepherding much of the wartime ‘greenback’ policy into life.  In March 1865 he was confirmed by the Senate as Lincoln’s 3rd Secretary of the Treasury.

McCulloch holds the rare distinction of having served 3 presidents in that same capacity: Lincoln briefly, Andrew Johnson for almost 4 years; and Chester Arthur briefly.  His main post-Civil War speeches, and his 1888 memoir, are valuable for his Johnson years. Yet he did comment fairly on the president whom he knew first:

” … the more I saw of him the higher became my admiration of his ability and his character.  Before I went to Washington, and for a short period after, I doubted both his nerve and his statesmanship; but a closer observation relieved me of these doubts, and before his death I had come to the conclusion that he as a man of will, of energy, of well-balanced mind, and wonderful sagacity.  His practice of story-telling when the Government seemed to be in imminent peril, and the sublimest events were transpiring, surprised, if it did not sometimes disgust, those who did not know him well …” (p. 6 of Our National and Financial Future: Address of Hon. Hugh McCulloch, Secretary of the Treasury, at Fort Wayne, Indiana, October 11, 1865).

McCulloch did not see fit to mention the Irish quip in 1865, or in his full 1888 memoir either, or any other publication I can find.  He simply went home on April 14th and repeated it to his wife, who recorded it in her diary.  Lincoln’s first Cabinet had had 3 diarists (Bates, Chase, Welles), but only Welles remained in 1865, and he did not consign the quip to posterity, perhaps because he often played ‘catch-up’ on the diary in days after. Yet by 11:00 p.m. on April 14, the city knew that Lincoln had been shot, Seward possibly murdered too, and everyone’s thoughts moved to a darker plane.

Lincoln’s first recorded jibe about a poor Irishman comes from a 20 June 1848 speech in Congress, when he described the plight of a man with new boots: “I shall niver git ‘em on,” says Patrick, “till I wear ‘em a day or two, and strech ‘em a little.”  He was a little harsher than this, in private, against the Hibernian race during the 1850s, when he and most other Whigs and Republicans knew that some Irish voters were bribed and / or brought over state lines to vote for Democrats, including Stephen A. Douglas.

Part of the reason Lincoln did not hold the Irish in high esteem is seen in this call for New York Irish to forsake the pro-slavery Democrats and vote for a Republican. Few did.

But the jests of 1848 and his last day are not very racist or harsh.  Both show some sympathy with the poor man’s plight, abusing him mildly for his poverty and his traditions.  In that day, nearly everyone, but especially poor immigrants, understood the problems of fleas and ill-fitting footwear.

The point of the ‘Paddy’s flea’ anecdote is similar to another comment Lincoln made that week.  Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House, asked him how the rebel leaders ought to be punished.  “I do not want their blood,” Lincoln said; “scare them out of the country … if they leave, no attempt will be made to hinder them.”  Lincoln never sought show trials or commissions of the type known after wars of the 20th century.  He wanted reconciliation.  He used jokes to soften a message of mercy, or to conceal a willful blindness to past wrongs.

The consonance of Susan McCulloch’s private record with Colfax’s recollection of the victorious week gives us strong support for believing that she did not invent her piece.  It seems that she made an honest record of a memorable exchange with her husband.

How comes it that no one has publicized her remark before?  Logic’s cousin: chance.  Two of her descendants had a copy of her 1895 memoir.  One of them let it be published in 1981 in a magazine devoted to the history of Ft. Wayne, Indiana.  Yet parts of the memoir were silently omitted there.  Now, the other descendant has provided the full 1895 transcript to the ALPLM, and there is the April 14 tale on page 30.  A deep Celtic bow of thanks to the Williams family of Virginia for preserving a historic document and sharing it.

The 65-page typescript of Susan McCulloch’s memoir may be read at the ALPLM.

American presidents get compared most often to, or with, one another.  Was Lincoln as great as Washington?  Was Reagan the speaker that Kennedy was?  Perhaps on occasion they get compared in military terms: was Eisenhower as fine a commanding figure as Washington?  Was Grant as daring as Andrew Jackson?

Wellington statues became Lincoln statues. Why?

Comparisons to, or with, foreign leaders are trickier. Yet there is a coincidence of timing that links Abraham Lincoln to the Duke of Wellington, and unites them in function.  Let us mark this anniversary of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo (June 18, 1815) to ponder the similarities and differences.

The Iron Duke, chipping away in Portugal and Spain from 1809 against a puppet regime of Napoleon, Emperor of the French, prevailed after more than 4 years in difficult terrain, despite unsupportive legislators backing him with insufficient funds and men.  Moving north, he vanquished Europe’s first global-minded tyrant at Waterloo (now in Belgium), securing his British homeland against future threats, and forcing the French provocateur into exile on a remote Atlantic isle where he lived out his remaining 6 years.

Lincoln was still largely unknown in late 1852 when Wellington died and was honored in the first non-royal funeral ever held in Westminster Hall.  But Lincoln was rising in associations: he was asked to give the main eulogy in Chicago when President Zachary Taylor died in July 1850.  When Henry Clay — the Great Compromiser, perhaps the ablest politician of his era — died in July 1852, Lincoln gave the main eulogy in Springfield.  He followed up with his main endorsement the next month of Whig presidential candidate Winfield Scott.  But Scott lost, and the Whigs were in disarray.

Just as suddenly, while president, Abraham Lincoln had to face down the old French Emperor’s nephew, the self-styled Napoleon III, when he tried to impose a European monarch in Mexico.  There are other parallels.  Napoleon I had taken the chance, when the British were distracted by the War of 1812 against the Americans, to extend his empire by invading Russia.  Jefferson Davis, likewise, took a moment of constitutional ambiguity, before Lincoln was sworn into office, to be sworn in as president of a rump state. (The French invader met a cold end; the Mississippian had to flee from fire.)  In 1864 the Frenchman’s nephew ignored the old lesson while the real power in North America — Lincoln’s federal Union — was distracted with the southern rebellion. Napoleon III sent soldiers and seamen, and an Austrian aristocrat, to revive and take the throne in Mexico City.  Lincoln did not exactly chase out the French, a la Wellington; but with the U.S. Gulf Coast in control of the Union Navy (and with British naval power also blunting the French advances), the imperial ambitions of Napoleon III were thwarted.  By 1867 his Austrian man on the throne was shot in a popular uprising led by Benito Juarez.

Lincoln also helped create a political echo of Wellington’s influence. The Duke’s death had given Prince Napoleon the symbolic moment he sought to revive the supposed imperial gloire of la France, by styling himself the new Emperor.  This threat helped cause major shifts in British political parties, as the Tories and Whigs soon emerged as the Conservatives and Liberals.  So, too, Lincoln, not sure if he was still a Whig in 1855, or one of those new Republicans.  He then took up verbal arms and solidified his party’s preeminence for a generation, just as Wellington had done for his Tories with military strategy.  But Lincoln was different: where Wellington had strengthened an old party, Lincoln helped give the new Republicans the issue — non-extension of slavery, and then the abolition of slavery — around which the nation could gather.

So the unsold leftovers of British-made Wellington statues from 1852 got turned into Lincoln statues a decade later, with a new head only, for an American market.  Many were sold in Britain as well –Lincoln’s political ideals were universal.  And his remains (the first non-royal?) lay on the same spot in the U.S. Capitol where Washington’s had lain.  Each of these three –Washington, Wellington, and Lincoln — ignored the temptation to act or become by force or acclamation a ‘royal.’  Yet in artwork and public estimation, they seem to reign supreme.

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?

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.

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.