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

Among the oldest liberties assigned to themselves by government officials is the franking privilege.  In Europe it applied to the monarch and highest courtiers.  In the U.S. in Lincoln’s day, it allowed a President, his private secretary, a Cabinet member, First Lady, Member of Congress, and a few others to send mail for free.  The ‘frank’ is simply their signature written on the envelope where a stamp or seal would normally go.

Lincoln used this privilege often enough, for official business of course. ‘A. Lincoln / M.C.’ (for Member of Congress) appears on a few surviving envelopes from the years 1847-1849.  While president, he and his office sent out scores of franked missives each week, and some of these survive, too, though most recipients (then as now) tossed out envelopes.  Among the rarest of this type are envelopes with black mourning borders, used for a few weeks after Willie Lincoln died in 1862.

A new type came to the attention of the ALPLM this year.  In 2010 we acquired two empty envelopes, both addressed in a fine hand to Hon. John T. Stuart /Springfield/Illinois and sent by free frank “From the President of the United States/ Priv. Sec.” and the signature of John G. Nicolay.  As private secretary to the president, Nicolay signed many hundreds of these.  The postmarks confirm the privilege: ‘Washington, D.C., FREE’ and the respective dates, March 22 and May 8, 1861.

Who was sending these?  The address line is not the hand of Nicolay, nor his assistant John Hay, nor those of Abraham, Mary, Robert, nor even the precocious Willie Lincoln. (Mr. Nicolay did frank Willie’s outgoing letters.)  Should one suspect Nicolay of abusing the franking privilege for some friend?  Nothing we know of this scrupulous and tireless Bavarian-born public servant, orphaned at 14, suggests that he did anything but work hard his whole life.

Furthermore, no letter by Abraham or Mary to her cousin John was known to date from those weeks.  So, who else had this access?

The answer: Mary’s cousin, and Stuart’s cousin also, Elizabeth Todd Grimsley.  Married to a man who died young, who never quite provided for her in the manner a Todd might expect, she did need a hand.  She traveled with and moved into the Executive Mansion alongside the Lincolns on March 4, 1861.  In addition to helping the family get settled, and using her schoolgirl French — as did Mary Lincoln, one night in dinner conversation with the Danish minister to the U.S. — ‘Lizzie’ Grimsley was trying to get appointed as a postmistress.  President Lincoln alone had the power to appoint her.

Figuring out who made use of mailing privileges can tell us a little something extra about life with the Lincolns.

It was not her sex or her inside track that gave him pause; he named more than 400 women to such an office.  As Lincoln wrote to Stuart on March 30, “The question of giving her the Springfield Post-office troubles me,” because he had just given out jobs to two relatives of Illinois’s junior senator, Lyman Trumbull, and people already criticized Lincoln’s penchant for appointing his old friends as well as Mary’s relations to federal positions.  Stuart advised that Lincoln ought not “let the case of Cousin Lizzie trouble …  you.”  Mainly, cousin Lizzie was too slow: one Beecher Todd had just been named postmaster of Lexington, Ky., and one Washington newspaper jested that 100 Todds were in the city looking for jobs.

Postmasterships were by far the largest category of federal jobs before the war broke out.  Applicants and recommenders barraged Lincoln with mail (postage paid) in pursuit of these positions, and ‘Cousin Lizzie’ was after all a loyal Kentuckian, the type of person Lincoln wanted to see in office, anywhere, as war neared.  A Buchanan-era Democrat who held the Springfield job, however, kept it till mid-August, when Lincoln appointed someone else.  Cousin Lizzie had felt since May that she overstayed her welcome, but confided to cousin John that her own brother as well as Mary Lincoln “insisted” or “urged and urged” her to stay.

Yet once the Springfield job was filled, cousin Lizzie left the White House, after a six-month stay.  One of the franked letters to cousin John had indeed discussed the post-office matter, and thus vaguely counted as ‘government business.’ Whether she was qualified to be a postmistress, we will never know.  But she did demonstrate that she knew how to use the mails, and presumably did pay for many stamps — after she had left Washington.

A side note to this story for collectors: her two letters to cousin John were donated to what is now the ALPLM in 1937.  How many hands did the envelopes pass through before being now reunited with the letters?

Today we may hastily ponder what is in some ways still treated as a national holiday: the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing, as leader of three ships, on a Caribbean island on October 12, 1492.  In Lincoln’s day this was not a holiday.  Only New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July (not even Christmas or Easter) were ongoing ‘official’ holidays.

But in Lincoln’s mind, the occasion of that landing and all that followed it were of the greatest moment.  Having jettisoned further publication of his poems after 1846, he turned to less-personal matters.  In September 1848 he saw Niagara Falls, and tried to grasp its historical context:

“When Columbus first sought this continent — when Christ suffered on the cross — when Moses led Israel through the Red-Sea … Niagara was roaring here.”

Then, in giving his lectures ‘Discoveries and Inventions’ in 1858 and 1859, he explicitly cited the 1492 voyage of discovery.  Revising this talk, he prepared what came to be two distinct lectures, because, it is thought today, he was giving up hope of higher elective office and wanted to be a travelling lecturer.  Or, perhaps his mind flagged from the tedium of the law, and he sought a fresh outlet for his intellect.

In any case, Christopher Columbus (he took the Spanish cognate Cristóbal Colón after 1485) was much on Lincoln’s mind as he wrestled with what the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Dred Scott decision of 1857 meant for the future of his nation.  He gave his lectures a half-dozen times around central Illinois, to audiences not large; then dropped the matter and returned to politics and law.

Lincoln admired Columbus; the World's Columbian Exposition, in Chicago in 1893, remembered Lincoln on this ticket.

Here he lays it out as plainly as we could wish.  He probably believed the following as early as April 1858, and certainly by February 1859.  By Lincoln’s compass,

“in the world’s history, certain inventions and discoveries occurred, of peculiar value, on account of their great efficiency in facilitating all other inventions and discoveries.  Of these were the arts of writing and of printing — the discovery of America, and the introduction of Patent-laws.  The date of the first … is unknown; but it certainly was as much as fifteen hundred years before the Christian era; the second — printing — came in 1436, or nearly three thousand years after the first.  The others followed more rapidly — the discovery of America in 1492, and the first patent laws in 1624.”

Can it be any clearer how a man, who missed the American Revolution yet often urged his contemporaries to uphold its principles, viewed the “discovery” of America?   It was of an importance to progress — to invention, to further discovery, to efficiency — behind only the invention of writing and printing.

If Lincoln’s view does not comport with polite received opinion today, he did not predict our future, but instead carried on in like vein.  “Though not apposite to my present purpose, it is but justice to the fruitfulness of that period, to mention two other important events — the Lutheran Reformation in 1517, and, still earlier, the invention of negroes, or, of the present mode of using them, in 1434. But, to return to the consideration of printing …”

The image of Columbus stuck in his mind; he used it twice in his campaign against Douglas in September 1858.  First at Paris, Illinois, in the eastern part of the state: “The idea of Popular Sovereignty was floating about the world several ages before the author of the Nebraska bill saw daylight — indeed, before Columbus set foot on the American continent.” Lincoln repeated this sarcastic gibe word for word for the benefit of those in the western part of the state, at Edwardsville, on September 11th.

Thereafter we have no evidence that he wrote or spoke about the Genoese-born sailor.  His reasons to write the word ‘Columbus’ in 1860 through 1865 all concern the capital city of Ohio, or the small town in western Kentucky much fought over by warring Federals and Confederates.  Yet today we may imagine that in Lincoln’s own voyage of discovery — to the heart of the American experiment, in his war against the ‘popular sovereignty’ fiction that Douglas tried to impose upon the construction of the Constitution, for a new way to “invent” a role for negroes outside of Africa — he continued to ponder the fearlessness and hope that those sailors possessed.

Comes to hand yet another brand-new piece of evidence this year.  Earlier it was the gold pen / pencil from Lincoln’s desk when he died; the name of Willie’s “dear friend” in the 1859 ‘chocolate letter’; and the discovery that the German-language newspaper Lincoln secretly owned in 1859-60 was subscribed to by dozens of state legislators (yet nary a copy remains today).

This time the discovery, by an eagle-eyed collector who kindly made the item available to the Presidential Library and Museum, concerns an eye doctor.  The printed document shown here will be illegible at this scale to most of us, but its gist is an endorsement by Lincoln, along with 36 other notable medical and political people, of a new clinic.  The clinic was run by E. S. Cooper, M.D., in Peoria, Illinois, offering new treatments for “Eye Diseases” and for club-foot in children.  The date on this circular letter is Oct. 27, 1851.

The 1851 document about the "Eye Infirmary"

How did Lincoln know this man?  How did, say, Stephen A. Douglas, Judge David Davis, Judge Samuel Treat, lawyer and banker Asahel Gridley, future Congressman William Kellogg also know this man?  Less surprising – or more surprising? – is that most other medical men in Peoria, 8 of them, endorsed Cooper’s start-up.  Also surprising is that public figures in 7 states, including an ex-senator, seemed familiar enough with Cooper’s new treatments, or reputation, to allow their names to be set in type beneath his advertisement.

Cooper’s name does not appear in any of Lincoln’s legal cases or extant correspondence; and the Springfield lawyer was rarely in Peoria in that period, though he was just over the Illinois River in Tazewell County often enough.  So the main question for Lincolnists is whether he had direct knowledge of Cooper’s skills.

Robert Lincoln was born in 1843 with a slight strabismus – he was cross-eyed.  The turned-in left eye did not affect his performance in school, but kids teased him.  In Berlin in 1850 the founder of modern ophthalmology, Albrecht Graefe, began teaching how to make a small incision to weaken a muscle that caused this condition.  Apparently within a year Dr. Cooper had learned the method, or read of it.  Did he soon exercise his surgical skill on young Robert, whose defect was gone by the time of an 1858 photograph? (Today the Graefe treatment is suggested on a child by age 6.  In Robert’s case, he lost most vision in old age in that eye, suggesting an imperfect boyhood cure.)

The only study to address Robert’s malady is Ruth Painter Randall’s Lincoln’s Sons (1955), in which she blithely and unhelpfully states (p. 33) that “an old document” reveals how the home remedy of staring through a keyhole forced Robert’s eye to adjust itself.  Jason Emerson, whose full biography of Robert is due in early 2012, reports that he has found no such “old document.”  Mrs. Randall would not have known of Cooper’s circular, because the one found this month is the first recorded, though one supposes that Cooper mailed out dozens of them.  Did Mrs. Randall make an incorrect inference about the strabismus from some other tale?

Or did Lincoln himself gain from treatment by Cooper?  The 40-something attorney is known to have got his first pair of spectacles some time in the early 1850s.  Perhaps from Cooper?  But why travel 95 miles from home to get something easily available from any number of people in Springfield, particularly as Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Dr. William Wallace, could have recommended an in-town colleague?  Or did Cooper examine Lincoln’s ‘lazy left eye,’ evident in so many photos of him?

Just when we think we see Lincoln clearly, new facts turn up.  This one matters in the sense that about 2 years earlier, after Robert had been bitten by a possibly rabid dog, did father Abraham take the 6-year-old boy about 140 miles to Terre Haute, Indiana, to procure a madstone – a clump of calcified cow regurgitant which according to frontier folklore could fend off, even draw out, the poison from rabies or snakebite.  Yes, the same budding genius, Abraham Lincoln, who procured for himself a scientific patent in the very same twelve month, put some store in the folk medicine of his rural youth.

Today we know that Robert did not die of rabies, though we’re not exactly sure why.  We also can hypothesize that his father soon made a sharp turn away from Terre Haute and toward Peoria, toward what became a standard medical treatment thanks to a Euro-American innovator who helped set the Lincolns’ first son on his own course to self-assuredness and future notoriety.

It is even possible that law partner William Herndon influenced Lincoln.  James Lander’s article in the Summer 2011 Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association details how many books on science Herndon owned, and examines some evidence of conversation between the partners on such topics.  In any event, Lincoln the cultural and political Whig always sought out progress, and in 1851 he seems to have focused on a very specific form of it.

A selfless and tireless researcher connected with the Presidential Library and Museum has made a discovery that provides fresh hope that some day, some how …

On May 30, 1859, Abraham Lincoln signed a contract with a German immigrant named Theodor Canisius. (The eponymous college in Buffalo, New York, was his later, unrelated project.) Lincoln had bought a set of German type and the printing presses that would allow a newspaper to be published in Springfield, with Canisius as editor.  It was called the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger — roughly, the Illinois State Advertiser.

As Lincoln wrote in the contract, which has been on view in the Treasures Gallery of the Presidential Museum for the last several months, “said paper, in political sentiment, not to depart from the Philadelphia and Illinois Republican platforms.” The goal was to appeal to German immigrants, “until after the Presidential election of 1860.”

Lincoln’s ownership of the paper – profits going to Canisius, for his efforts – was secret. Unfortunately, its contents have remained secret, too, since not a single copy of it exists today to the knowledge of anyone in the Lincoln field. But Lincoln sent a copy in early July 1859 to another German, and later released Canisius from the terms of the agreement because evidently he had held up his end of the bargain. So we know that roughly 15 months’ worth of weekly papers did exist.

Now, that selfless researcher reports this to me: “A number of members of the 1861 Illinois General Assembly subscribed to the Staats-Anzeiger at state expense, as legislators were allowed. On February 23, 1861, the state auditor issued warrant #9297 (for $312) to Theodore Canisius for 312 copies of Staats-Anzeiger for members of the state Senate; #9309 (for $92) to Theodore Canisius for 240 copies of the Staats-Anzeiger for the House.”

This 1864 German paper from Alton, Illinois, turned up in 2009 for the first time. Could Lincoln’s paper turn up next?

The date and those figures may mean that 1860 subscriptions were now being paid; or perhaps that 1861 subscriptions taken out. Whether or not the paper continued past the November 1860 election that saw Lincoln win a large number (though not, it is thought, a majority) of German-American votes, we do know that at least 500 copies a week were sent to elected officials, most likely for distribution to voters in their districts.

PLEASE!  Bitte schoen!  If anyone has an old German newspaper sitting in the attic, notify the Presidential Library immediately!  The type will confound most people, which is one reason that we suppose no copies have come to light since. The script is called Fraktur, in which some of the letters do not resemble the standard Latin alphabet used in modern English or German. But the word ‘Illinois’ on the masthead should be fairly apparent.

Thank you very much!  Danke schoen!  And thank you especially, Mr. J.

In January 2011 I wrote here to cast doubt upon Frederick Douglass’s 1881 description of his meeting and verbal exchange with the president on 4 March 1865, after the 2^nd Inaugural Speech.  I did so having consulted 7 leading writers on Douglass and read up on the few sketchy contacts between the two men.  My context was Douglass’s journalistic tendency to change his mind, change his words, and change his story – like most journalists (and others) who knew Lincoln.

I may have been too hasty.  But I stand by the bulk of my position.

Elizabeth Keckly, who knew the Lincolns very well but did not fully agree with Frederick Douglass

In historical research, rarely can or should a single answer be found.  None of the major scholars and original sources I had checked mentioned her, but a certain obvious, right-under-our-noses source came to hand last month in a February 1975 article by Christopher N. Breiseth in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.  The article names Elizabeth Keckly as a source of the story; none of the other writers I checked did so.  Her memoir, Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868, and often reprinted), reads thus on pp. 158-161:

“Many colored people were in Washington, and large numbers had desired to attend the levee, but orders were issued not to admit them. A gentleman, a member of Congress, on his way to the White House, recognized Mr. Frederick Douglass, the eloquent colored orator, on the outskirts of the crowd.

‘How do you do, Mr. Douglass?  A fearful jam to-night. You are going in, of course?’

‘No – that is, no to your last question.’

‘Not going in to shake the President by the hand! Why, pray?’

‘The best reason in the world. Strict orders have been issued not to admit people of color.’

‘It is a shame, Mr. Douglass, that you should thus be placed under the ban. Never mind; wait here, and I will see what can be done.’

The gentleman entered the White House, and working his way to the President, asked permission to introduce Mr. Douglass to him.

‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Lincoln. ‘Bring Mr. Douglass in, by all means.  I shall be glad to meet him.’

The gentleman returned, and soon Mr. Douglass stood face to face with the President. Mr. Lincoln pressed his hand warmly, saying: ‘Mr. Douglass, I am glad to meet you.  I have long admired your course, and I value your opinions highly.’

Mr. Douglass was very proud of the manner in which Mr. Lincoln received him.  On leaving the White House he came to a friend’s house where a reception was being held, and he related the incident with great pleasure to myself and others.

On the Monday following the reception  … I was in Mrs. Lincoln’s room the greater portion of the day. While dressing her that night, the President came in, and I remarked to him how much Mr. Douglass had been pleased on the night he was presented to Mr. Lincoln.  Mrs. L. at once turned to her husband with the inquiry, ‘Father, why was not Mr. Douglass introduced to me?’

‘I do not know.  I thought he was presented.’

‘But he was not.’

‘It must have been an oversight then, mother; I am sorry you did not meet him.’”

Keckly concludes: “This ball closed the season.  It was the last time that the President and his wife ever appeared in public.”

This rendition of the 4 March 1865 meeting is close to what Douglass wrote in 1881, with a key omission: Douglass’s fabled story that Lincoln nearly begged him for his opinion of the speech, and his reply, ‘Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.’  Nor did Douglass 1881 mention that it was a Congressman who gained his entrée to the reception.  Nor did Keckly 1868 mention a lady having been present, as did Douglass 1881.  There is another problem: Keckly’s memoir is believed to have been ghost-written by Jane Grey Swisshelm, a crusader and publicist for various causes of the era.  Else, can we imagine that Keckly herself would forget that the Lincolns did appear in public again?  At Ford’s Theatre, 14 April.

I and many other recent writers get a failing grade for overlooking Keckly as an obvious possible source.  Still, how much of the story did Douglass tell Keckly himself; how much did she hear second-hand; how much did Swisshelm invent for publication; how much did Douglass invent?  We will never have answers.

The reader may also judge whether any symbolic enlargement might have been invented for another scene Keckly related about herself, on pp. 165-166:

“The Presidential party were all curiosity on entering Richmond [4 April]. They drove about the streets of the city, and examined every object of interest. The Capitol presented a desolate appearance – desks broken, and papers scattered promiscuously in the hurried flight of the Confederate Congress. I picked up a number of papers, and, by curious coincidence, the resolution prohibiting all free colored people from entering the State of Virginia. A curious coincidence indeed, to pick up such a paper in the ruined room and city.”

Its heft is reminiscent of Douglass’s 1881 invention of the scene at which he helped Chief Justice Chase put on his robes before swearing in Mr. Lincoln.

One more source mentions a Douglass-Lincoln interchange, but from the same origin.  John E. Washington was an African American dentist in Washington, D.C., who in 1942 published a book on his years of research and listening about blacks who knew Lincoln, They Knew Lincoln.  From pp. 115-116:

“The following was told me by Mr. Haley G. Douglass, grandson of Frederick Douglass.  He said his grandfather often told it before audiences.

‘In Lincoln’s day, colored people were not allowed to come into the White House and even Frederick Douglass who had been invited to come to a reception was refused admission until Lincoln saw him in the crowd, sent for him and welcomed him into the room.’”

This is abbreviated, and misleading.  Several various individuals and groups of blacks came in to see Lincoln, including Douglass on 2 occasions, so this ‘not allowed’ line may be overstated.  Douglass 1881 did not claim to have been ‘invited’ in 1865.  The grandson may have conflated the ‘invitation’ with another occasion, in 1863, when Lincoln brought Douglass to the front of a line.  Worse, the episode is followed in Washington’s book by a long, preposterous joke about Lincoln and a poor black man, an anecdote that is almost certainly apocryphal.

All my speculation avails us little.  We remain reliant upon the early-day, if not exactly first-hand, testimony of people close to the events.  So I find that we now have better cause, though the details be shaky, to believe that Douglass and Lincoln shook hands on 4 March 1865.  But we have very strong reason to continue to doubt that Douglass proclaimed the Second Inaugural a “sacred effort” at any point before 1881.

Do readers know of other sources?

A recent discovery that Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham, held the fairly important rank of Ensign in the Kentucky militia in 1805 leads us to consider yet again how the son viewed the father’s station in life.  Jim Siberell is the Ohio native who turned up the document in a Kentucky archive concerning the state’s early militia. He published the full story in The Lincoln Herald (v. 112, no. 4, for Winter 2010, pp. 234-245).  He explains that an Ensign was the rank higher than ordinary militia member, and that above Ensign were the ranks Captain, Major, and Colonel.  Thomas’s older brother Mordecai had advanced to the rank of Major.  Other evidence suggests that Tom Lincoln’s purchase of a second sword in 1814 speaks of continued Ensign duty.

As an Ensign, Tom Lincoln needed to show the ability to muster a company of Hardin County men 4 times a year, drill them, and, should the need arise, lead them in battle.  Having seen his own father killed by Indians while plowing in 1786, Tom probably had a firmer resolve against a return of such depredations to the frontier than did some others; though no one on any western frontier until almost 1900 was unaware of the possible threat.  Keeping an eye on the arrival of newcomers to the county was another responsibility, in order to get those men signed on for the required militia service.

These skills were inherited and/or continued by Abraham Lincoln in New Salem, Illinois, in 1832.  New to Sangamon County himself, he was nevertheless elected captain of a small troop when the Black Hawk War broke out.  He mustered the men, drilled them, and led them north toward the arena of battle, though never actually saw any fighting.  He did see scalped white victims of an attack, and helped bury them.

In 1860, then, 9 years after his father’s death, Lincoln wrote an autobiography for use in his presidential campaign.  Part of the goal for the well-known and successful attorney was to associate himself with the hardscrabble pioneer folk. Lincoln described his deceased father as one who “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.”  Based upon the surviving record today, this was nearly accurate, though we may question anew the reasons for that situation.

We might expect an Ensign to be a social and military cut above the ruck of common settlers.  Comparing signatures from the ALPLM, we may now surmise that something had physically altered Thomas’s ability to or habit of handling a pen.  The learned lawyer in Springfield very likely never saw anything in his father’s hand but later-in-life court documents, and assumed that the crabbed or inept marks reflected Tom’s lifelong style.  But in this, Abraham would have been wrong.

Had a lifetime of carpentry work and farming so crippled Tom Lincoln’s hands that his ability to write was fading by the 1820s?  That is the period when his son would have been old enough to grow cognizant of his father’s script, without having the maturity to understand the consequences of overwork, arthritis, perhaps even a mild stroke. (It is also a period for which the ALPLM owns none of the rare Tom Lincoln signatures, so my speculation here cannot be fully illustrated.)

Modern science provides us with another possible explanation.  SCA5 is one form of ataxia, a muscular disorder that usually attacks between the ages of about 30 and 50.  It leaves muscles weak and can cause oddities of gait.  A heavy incidence of this malady, which can lead to somewhat premature death, has been found by a team of geneticists (working in Minnesota and Florida) in descendants today of Tom’s parents Abraham and Bathsheba Lincoln, who had 3 sons and 2 daughters.  The chance of inheriting the malady from a parent was and is 50%.  We are quite certain that the 16^th president, who thus stood a 25% chance of having it, did not; the evidence is simply not found in his writing or his movements.  But did 50-50 Thomas have it?  (If Tom did, the President’s resulting 50-50 chance is not born out by the evidence, either.)

Candidate Lincoln would have had no way to know about ataxia, nor can we prove what afflicted Tom.  But for a man who at age 27 in 1805 was a leader of other men and a strong signer in ink a year later on his marriage bond, the future held a worse fate physically than a son who went his own, self-educated way: inability on an 1836 document even to sign a simple Christian ‘X.’

In sum, Tom Lincoln had many deficiencies of training and luck, and the frontier taught him that reading and writing were hardly necessary to make a living on good soil.  Abraham fairly described his father’s later script, from the point of view of a city lawyer, but that did not sum up the worth of the man.  Abraham and Mary’s youngest son Thomas, called Tad, bearing his grandpa’s name, did not learn to read or write till his teenage years — after his father’s death — and died at 18, though not from ataxia.  There is a poignant comment on inheritance.

When Fort Sumter was fired upon in April 1861, formally starting a Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was 52 years and 2 months old. I am now 52 years and 2 months old. Though I am not president, perhaps some perspective on the many questions about his physical and mental health during the exigent days of his presidency can be gained by a comparison.

He loved his wife, though men and women become gradually less compatible as they age. I love my wife, and yes, that gap in activities and cares is felt in our home, too. Despite the occasional yelling, he and Mary were fine; so are my wife and I. Thanks for asking.

He worked too hard. He lost weight as a result. He did not sleep all that much. Ditto.

He did not drink, and his stories were much admired by friend and even foe alike, and these traits undoubtedly kept him youthful. I fail to meet his standard on both counts.

His feet bothered him a fair bit, and he did not own a pair of boots that fit him comfortably until the last year of his life. We are luckier today: our shoes fit fine, and very few of us suffer from saddle sores. No mercury in our pills, either.

His beard was thinning, and graying just a bit, like the hair at his temples. Mary used a little hair dye to stay ‘young,’ and some have wondered if Abraham borrowed it, but we have no real evidence to support that view. I am not growing a beard or using that stuff.

His two living children by spring 1862 marched to the beat of very different drums. Same choreography in my house. Both of our olders: hard-working, popular, destined for greatness of some sort. Our youngers: rambunctious, not that interested in l’arnin’ or settin’ still – just spunky to beat the band. As they age, they need less parental minding, and that phenomenon suited the presidential schedule.

Artwork by Isa Barnett, 1962. The kind of presidency that wears a man out; the kind of faith that kept him strong.

No one is interested in my DNA. Lincoln’s is sought by people in a half-dozen professions. We probably would learn nothing by sequencing his 150-year-old protein strands. From mine, well, we already know that color-blindness is heritable. This mad pursuit for Lincoln’s DNA is probably fruitless. He did not have Marfan’s Syndrome, and any other maladies he might have had evidently did not lead him to or prevent him from saving the Union or freeing the slaves. Or visiting Gettysburg, as depicted in the artwork here.

The matter far larger than molecules was his daily effort to save the great institutions around him and rectify the ills. Me too, but without his power and grace. Advancing his Presidential Library within so parlous a budgetary environment may kill me yet, and both of us can get ‘voted’ out by our peers. But we fight on with the help of most around us, as would most people in our chairs, “for a vast future also.” There was nothing wrong with Lincoln that an hour with Burns’s poems or a stroll across the park couldn’t cure. Mary forced him to take carriage rides with her to calm him down and keep them close. It worked. It’s the outlook that keeps you healthy.

No, Lincoln’s health as a question should fade to nothingness under the glaring July 4^th sun of a separate question: the health of the “republican example” he wished the United States to set for the world. He would not “abandon that position,” as he told Congress on July 4, 1861 (150 years ago today). And his health did not abandon him. Lincoln was ever the doctor, and never the patient in his own lifetime.

Some of our ‘knowledge’ about Lincoln comes along later rather than sooner.  The newspaper page pictured here is in Hebrew, dated 9 January 1979 (5739 in the ancient Jewish calendar).  This was given to the Presidential Library many years ago without a source, but it seems to have been published in New York.  It is in fairly simple language, likely meant for recent Russian-Jewish immigrants learning Hebrew.  Tens of thousands of people made that migration in the 1970s, many of them to Brooklyn.

The strong yet humble president.

Teaching immigrants about their new culture requires history, humor, and perhaps a little fudging.  The paper is called Gate to the Beginning and the column shown here is “Little Stories About Great Men.”  It includes an anecdote about Hans Christian Anderson with a Danish Jew, and another about a Zionist.  The Lincoln story does not mention that his birthday would occur the next month, but perhaps in 1979 that anniversary was still so well ingrained in all American life (before the confected ‘Presidents Holiday’ that mushes Washington and Lincoln together) that even an immigrant knew.

The story puts Lincoln in the White House blacking his own boots.  In walks an important politician who blurts, “What!  You shine your own boots?”  To which the humble railsplitter quips, “And what did you think?  That I would shine the boots of others?”

We owe Rabbi Michael Datz of Springfield, Illinois, many thanks for translating this tale.  To his ear the wording trades on the old-New York Yiddish phrasing heard in so many movies and plays, ‘And what should I / And why would I …?’  The historian of Lincoln might recognize a couple of other themes.  First, Paul Zall’s highly useful Abe Lincoln Laughing: Humorous Anecdotes from Original Sources by and about Abraham Lincoln (1995) traces the origin of this tale to an unsigned 1909 magazine piece.  Two other works the next year retold and reworded it.  In the three versions, the shocked visitor to the White House was variously said to have been Senator Sumner, Secretary Chase, and British minister Lord Lyons.

With confusion like that, we can never say if the incident occurred.  Lincoln’s Centennial spawned a profusion of dubious ‘new sources’ like this.  But the second theme a Lincolnist can divine is that immigrants old or new might need this ‘teachable moment’ after arriving in an American city where the sight of black men shining others’ shoes was not uncommon.  This particular ‘Great Man’ of the American past had been strong enough to free the slaves and humble enough to do his own menial chore.  Whether the exact quip about the boots was authentic, or somehow got fudged in the retelling, it harmonizes with what we veritably know about Lincoln’s character and deeds.  Lincoln believed in the political and legal equality of black and white; many people believed it in 1909; more believed it in 1979; still more believe it today.  And why should we doubt such tales?

According to his private secretaries and some close friends, President Lincoln had a deserved reputation for bending to women’s plaints and complaints.  William Lee Miller, in his study President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (2008), reviews a notable case in which urgent pleas by the wife and daughter of a condemned man did not succeed in making the chief executive yield; the man concerned was a slave-dealer whose death by hanging went forward as planned.  Much more frequent was the type of case in which the president wrote out a pass for a lady to visit someone behind enemy lines or asked the War Department to remit part of a soldier’s sentence.  He did not like to dismiss a sincere need.

But there is a unique case in which the usually humble president wrote out his true feelings about one lady visitor.  And it is the only case in which we have record that Lincoln wrote the pejorative word “saucy.”  This short note to himself now belongs to the Library of Congress:

ExecutiveMansion
Washington. Aug. 23, 1862.

To-day, Mrs. Major Paul, of the Regular Army calls and urges the appointment of her husband as a Brig. Genl.  She is a saucy woman and I am afraid she will keep tormenting till I may have to do it.   (Collected Works, v. 5, pp. 390-391).

The prognosticator of his own actions was correct: Paul became a brigadier general as of September 5, 1862.

There are two wrinkles to, and perhaps a defense of, Lincoln’s mood in the case.  Just 12 days earlier, he had written to Major General Halleck to state that “Lieut. Col. Paul,” a graduate of West Point, wanted to be posted to active service.  Did the officer’s wife not know that her husband had already been promoted to a colonelcy?  Or was she still referring to him in Lincoln’s presence as a mere major, to underscore her complaint?

A recent act of selflessness by the (female) owner of an original document signed by Lincoln throws a glimmer of light upon this situation.  The complete Papers of Abraham Lincoln project, based here at the Presidential Library, now has a full-color scan of the document, thanks to the private owner.  For one does not jump from major to brigadier general without making the requisite stop at the corner marked ‘colonel.’  Lincoln, ever the diligent signer of military commissions, had already signed Paul’s promotion to lieutenant colonel in the 8^th U.S. Infantry – back on 2 July 1862.

How to explain Mrs. ‘Major’ Paul’s visit on 23 August with her complaint – her lament, prod, push, case, demand — that her husband be promoted?  He had been a lieutenant colonel for 7 weeks before the saucy wife visited the Executive Mansion and referred to her husband as a major.  Was the promotion lost in a file?  Was he refusing to accept it, and holding out for immediate elevation to brigadier general?  Had Edwin Stanton, who duly co-signed the promotion to colonel, held it up because of Paul’s service with the unproductive McClellan in eastern Virginia that season?  Or was this bureaucratic delay caused by two men, Lincoln and Stanton, and many others much less well-known, who were worked to distraction by the demands of war?

Cultural differences may have entered into this matter.  Was this Gabriel René Paul a Frenchman, or of French extraction?  Was his wife?  Did she treat a rube Anglo-Kentuckian like Lincoln with disdain?  Was her aggrieved tone simply less deferential than the president was accustomed to?

The timetable was this: Paul started the year 1862 as a major.  In early July 1862 Lincoln signed his commission promoting him to lieutenant colonel.  In early August Lincoln may have seen him personally and referred to him as Lieut. Col. in addressing Major General Halleck on his behalf.  In late August Mrs. Paul arrived to demand that her husband, ‘Major Paul,’ jump to brigadier general.  And in fact on 5 Sept. 1862 he was thus promoted.

Who was at fault for this minor contretemps?  Is Lincoln’s note-to-self the evidence that he had already forgotten about Paul’s first promotion?  Or was Mrs. Paul lying about his low rank?  Or was she unaware of her husband’s half-way promotion?  Had the soldier himself not even been informed of his promotion?

The handwriting on Lincoln’s “saucy” note is shaky.  He likely made it late in the day.  Earlier the same day, General Charles P. Stone approached Lincoln to ask why he had been arrested.  And this was all on the day after Lincoln had penned his justly famed public letter to Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, explaining and yet not explaining why he did or did not free the slaves – to save the Union.  Greeley was blunt in print about Lincoln’s motives; Mrs. Paul was blunt in person about her husband’s wishes.  Perhaps Lincoln actually wanted to call Greeley “saucy.”  Thus, a wholly separate timetable was superimposed within the Pauls’ complaints and promotions: that of Lincoln’s timetable for the nerve-testing policy for emancipation, from conception (mid-June 1862) to announcement to Cabinet (22 July) to fending off Greeley’s demands (22 August) to revealing the plan to the public (22 September).  All the while trying to get McClellan to pursue Robert E. Lee.

Blinded Brig. Gen. Paul asks another favor of Lincoln, 1865, and is accommodated again.

Brigadier General Paul did valorous service, as seen in the illustration here.  He was nearly blinded at Gettysburg.   Had he remained a major or lieutenant-colonel, perhaps he would have been standing elsewhere at Gettysburg.  The end of the war found him quietly stationed in Kentucky. Let us hope that he and his wife were satisfied.

Oddly, no photograph seems to exist of Mary Lincoln in her 5 March 1861 First Inaugural gown.  Were she and the household too busy, were the photographic studios too full of newly minted government workers as a new administration came to town?

Instead, we know that Mary Lincoln wore the strawberry dress in her first spring as First Lady, in 1861.  We know that someone in one of Mathew Brady’s two studios took her picture in it.  Two questions arise: Why this dress; and where did she pose?

The tradition of a ‘strawberry party’ had been around for at least a generation in Springfield, Illinois, by the time the Lincolns moved to Washington in February 1861.  Such parties were held in hundreds of towns throughout what is now the eastern portion of the United States, and so too were raspberry parties.  In central Illinois the season for fresh wild strawberries begins in May, while around Washington it might begin a little earlier.  Mary and Abraham once hosted such a party for Springfield families and friends, and they attended other such events.  A carriage ride into the country with a picnic lunch – the “young people” (teenagers) usually riding in a separate carriage – provided entertainment, exercise, and sociability.

So among the novel, “Western” ideas Mary Lincoln imported to the nation’s capital was to continue the parties even while war loomed.  This accorded with her husband’s wishes that, to name two, the Executive Mansion be freshened up and the Capitol dome be completed.  She took along her cousin Lizzie Grimsley to shop in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in early May.

It seems most likely that she bought this beautiful black-silk dress, with machine-embroidered strawberry sprigs, in one of those cities.  A reporter for a Democratic paper followed her in New York one day to record her extravangances, but this dress was not mentioned.  And with her pretty young cousin along, she could well have stopped at Brady’s photographic studio, 10^th St. and Broadway, for what we believe was her first formal pose as First Lady.  Why this dress?  Perhaps it reminded her, and others around her, of their traditions in Illinois.  There is also an outside chance that it was made in Chicago before their journey, or made there and shipped to Washington for her.

Three copies of the cdv I have examined all read ‘Brady / New York,’ but Lloyd Ostendorf’s 1963 book of Lincoln family photographs presumes that Mary sat in Brady’s studio on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington.  If Ostendorf is right, then Brady may have used the card to let New Yorkers know of his coup d’arte of being the first to capture the new First Lady on chemically treated glass.  Brady was known to advertise each studio in the other city this way.  But if Ostendorf is wrong, Mary actually sat in New York, where she more likely acquired the dress.

Mary’s other Lizzie, the dressmaker and confidante Elizabeth Keckly, can not be shown to have worked on the strawberry dress.  Though the two women met on 5 March, the day after Lincoln’s swearing in, we do not know exactly when and to what extent she began working for the new First Lady.  In her memoir Behind the Scenes (1868), she claimed to have made dozens of dresses for Mrs. Lincoln right from the start.  We can suppose that Lizzie Keckly at least helped Mary get into the dress and perhaps altered it slightly for her.

Mary gave the strawberry dress and a summer 1861 gown to her cousin Lizzie.  The latter is now in the Smithsonian, the former is in Springfield, both of them through Grimsley descendants – the only intact Mary Lincoln dresses in existence now.  Donna McCreary’s book Fashionable First Lady: The Victorian Wardrobe of Mary Lincoln (2007) is the best study of all of her gowns, but she is unable to specify its origins, either.  So in an unusual twist of the common historical pattern, today we know the provenance of the strawberry dress since 1861, but we do not know the point of origin of either the dress or the photo.

Mary’s original strawberry dress will be on display in the Presidential Museum from Friday May 6th through Sunday May 8th for Mother’s Day – its first showing in 26 years.