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

It is unusual to unearth one completely new story about the Lincolns.  A recent donation to the Presidential Library and Museum has brought us two new stories that shed important light on the characters of Mary Lincoln and her son Robert, through their friendship with a young couple.

Daniel W. Tillinghast was born in Morrisville, N.Y., nephew of a senator from Rhode Island whom President Lincoln knew slightly as a general of militia in the Civil War.  While a boy, Tillinghast moved with his family to Chicago, around 1850.

Louise Boone, born 1844, was a daughter of Dr. Levi Boone, who took office as mayor of Chicago in 1855.  Her aunt’s husband was Jesse B. Thomas, Illinois’s first senator.  Lincoln wrote to Edwin Stanton on 1 Sept. 1862,  “I personally know Dr. Levi D. Boone, of Chicago …”   It seems that Louise briefly lived in Springfield as a young lady. 

Daniel and Louise met, and married in Chicago in September 1863.

After President Lincoln’s death, Mary, Robert, and Tad were living in July 1865 in a Hyde Park hotel, when scarlet fever broke out in the house.  The young Tillinghast couple lived there too.  Louise offered to take Tad, apparently as yet little affected by the disease, to her parents’ farm north of the city.  She kept him there for a couple of weeks, until the fevers had passed on the sultry South Side.

How could the widowed Mary Lincoln, at this stage with no real income, thank the young lady for perhaps saving her youngest boy’s life?  Mary gave the Tillinghasts the 14-karat-gold pen/pencil from the late president’s White House desk.  Her gift may have expressed the depth of the potential peril: more than 800 people, most of them children, had died of scarlet fever in Chicago during the 3 previous summers.

The Lincolns soon moved north 8 miles to the Clifton House hotel, on the southeast corner of Madison and Wabash.  The Tillinghasts evidently stayed in Hyde Park for a time, and a year later moved to Michigan Avenue, north of the Chicago river.  Anyway, on Friday Oct. 27, 1865, about 3 months after Tad’s rescue, Robert wrote this hitherto unknown letter to Daniel from his law-clerk office at the corner of Lake and LaSalle:

    
“You!  Chauncey Brown expects you & me to come to his house & play a game  of    Billiards this evening.  I propose to weigh anchor at 7 ½ P.M.  Shall I have the honor of seeing you?   
Yours, R.T.L.”

The envelope is addressed to D.W. Tillinghast Esq at 161 Kinzie St., his hides-and-leather business about 3 blocks from Robert’s office.

The two friends had clearly got past the summer’s threat to everyone’s health, and Robert, just 22 years old, had got over his father’s death 6 months earlier at least enough for some Friday night fun.  (Note the same-day delivery of mail in central Chicago.)  The letter, though, is on black-bordered mourning paper, per custom of the day within the year after the death of a parent.

Robert may also have been growing weary of living in a hotel with his mother and little brother, and he got his own place at year’s end.  What is more, Abraham Lincoln had also liked billiards, and his son with his well-positioned friends partook of the game in the last generation before it fell into ill repute amongst the better classes.  

This is all we know of direct contact between the families, since no more letters would have been necessary for near neighbors.  Daniel and Louise soon had 2 children.  Robert soon married, whereupon his mother took Tad, her last dependant, to Europe the next week, and stayed for over 2 years.

In the winter of 1874 Daniel Tillinghast was superintending the start of a big new operation for his business at the Union Stockyards, when he caught cold, which became pneumonia, and died.  A sizable obituary of him ran in the Chicago Tribune on April 20, 1874.  He was barely 30.

We know any of this, and nearly all of this, thanks to a resplendent piece of generosity by Peggy Davis, of Chatham, Mass., who this year donated both the gold pen / pencil and the letter.  Both artifacts go on display in mid-April in the Treasures Gallery.  Mrs. Davis, namely Margaret Tillinghast Porter Davis, is the great-granddaughter of Daniel and Louise.  Her own grandmother wrote a long letter in 1933 explaining the families’ connection, and that letter will also be on display – the proof is in the provenance, they say in the museum trade.

That epistolary proof in fact fills out a skeletal allusion in a published letter by Mary Lincoln from July 1865 that mentioned a “daughter of Dr. Boone” who took Tad “up to the country.”

For those keeping track, an ounce of gold in 1865 cost roughly $25.00.  It is now about $1,450.00.  But the value of the sentiment shown by all parties in that 1860s friendship, and in today’s double-storied donation, are inestimable.

A reversible pen and pencil made of 14-karat gold, and its original case, from the desk of President Lincoln.

History is not like wine or scotch; it does not get better as it gets older.  Much of the time it turns sour as the distance grows between the original event and our telling of it.

Yet in some cases the original story was vanishingly told by one person to another, who never wrote it down at all.  Then, it must be rediscovered.  Such a rediscovery happened two weeks ago at the Presidential Library.

In March 1901 a lady with good handwriting wrote from Boston to a well-known Lincoln collector in Chicago named Charles Gunther.  She enclosed, by registered mail, a highly interesting artifact.  She wrote:

“I send you the letter written by Willie Lincoln.  It is probably the only one in existence.  It was kept in the same box with a bon-bon he gave my uncle that was taken from the table at the banquet given for the Prince of Wales at the White House and some of it melted during the warm weather and got on the letter.  Very sincerely,  Adele Rathbun.”

Miss Rathbun was mostly incorrect.  Was her 1901 attention fixed upon the death of Queen Victoria 6 weeks earlier, and the ascent to the throne of the Prince of Wales?  That Prince, known now as Edward VII, had indeed been fêted at the White House, but in October 1860, by President Buchanan.

So Willie took no such bon-bon.  Nor was this the only letter he ever wrote; about 10 survive today.  

Still, this one is the earliest survivor.   In its entirety it reads:

Springfield  April 1859

Dear Friend

I will write you a few lines to let you know how I am getting along   I am pretty well  The roads are drying up  It is Sunday and a pleasant day   I have not any more to say so I must bring my letter to an end

Wm  W  Lincoln

The end 

Who was Adele’s “my uncle”?  Who was Willie’s “Dear friend”?  Since Willie makes no mention of an enclosed sweet, we assume that its recipient put the letter into a box with some chocolate – where else to save a letter from your friend?

The State Historical Library (now the ALPLM) acquired this letter and Adele’s in 1978 from a Chicago dealer, without any story.  It has lain orphan-like with a few later (and clean) missives by the dutiful Willie.  Gwen Podeschi, Reference Librarian at the ALPLM, was asked to start hunting ‘Rathbun.’  She found dozens of possibilities, but never an Adele, and no one the right age.  The key was her turning up of the marriage, in Springfield in June 1858, of Hannah Rathbun to Dr. John Shearer.  Aha: that would be Hannah Shearer, close friend of Mary Lincoln.  Some Maryists would know (but this historian did not) that Hannah’s first husband, Edward Rathbun, had died in Brooklyn, leaving her with two boys, Edward Rathbun, Jr., and James Miner Rathbun, obliging Hannah to move to the home of her brother, Springfield.  Hannah soon met and married Dr. Shearer, and they settled on 8^th Street across from the Lincolns.  The ‘uncle’ to whom Adele Rathbun referred was thus one of these Rathbun boys, sons of the Shearers.

The other clue was found, plainly enough, in Mary’s published letters.  On April 24, 1859, she sent the first of her 11 known letters to Hannah Shearer, who had left Springfield after only 8 months on 8^th Street, for the clear air of Wellsboro, Pennsylvania.  These letters are spicy, full of gossip (not all of it kind), as well as wistfulness for a distant friend whose boys were nearly the same ages as Willie and Tad Lincoln.  Mary wrote on April 24^th – Easter Sunday – and one can picture Willie sitting politely next to his mother, writing to his friend, too.  Mother to mother; son to son.

The sadness of this story, striking like so much in Mary Lincoln’s life, came by degrees.  The Shearers never quite managed a long-planned visit to the White House in 1861, implored though they were; and Willie died on Feb. 20, 1862.  War and death spoiled everything for nation and friends.  Mary never wrote Hannah again … except in November 1864 when she heard that Hannah’s oldest, Edward, Jr., had died.  And never after that.  How painful, yet again, must Mary’s memory of her own lost boy have been, in the reflection of his friend’s early death.

That death left the younger ex-neighbor, James Miner Rathbun, as the father of Adele.  Edward Jr. was thus the uncle in Adele’s 1901 letter.

The Rathbun boys, shortly after moving to Pennsylvania with mother Hannah and her new husband Dr. Shearer, welcomed a new baby brother, or rather half-brother.  The boy was christened William Lincoln Shearer.

The chocolate letter, for all its sad associations in the lives of Mary Lincoln and Hannah Rathbun Shearer, can now be remembered in a better way.  It remains as a happy, and colorful, remembrance of friendly mothers and sons, sharing two Easter Day letters.  Another Prince of Wales will soon ascend to the throne of the United Kingdom, new stories will be invented around that occasion.  Please keep your letters and emails, pass them to kids, and get the stories right.

Recently put on display in the Museum’s Treasures Gallery, this letter by 8-year-old Willie Lincoln is stained with chocolate.

Whole books about Lincoln first appeared in 1860.  Some of his speeches were separately printed as early as 1839, and aside from newspaper renditions of his words, 1837 saw the earliest published Lincoln document.  Since then, perhaps 17,000 titles have appeared.

Collectors love all of this material, both the writings by Lincoln, and writings about him.  The first two bibliographies about him appeared in 1870.  For the mystery at hand, the important listings were by Daniel Fish in 1906 and 1910; Jay Monaghan in 1943-45; and the Library of Congress in 1960.  Individual great collectors, including Fish, published lists to draw attention to their own holdings – about 1,100 printed items in his case.

The standard today remains the effort by librarian Monaghan, whose 2-volume ‘Lincoln Bibliography’ lists 3,958 items.  It is impossible to acquire a copy of each of those 3,958 items today; dozens of them are too rare or obscure.

So how did a 24-volume set of the Nicolay and Hay edition of Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, published by F. D. Tandy of New York in 1905, go unrecorded by any of these people?

Well-hidden Lincoln, in lustrous leather

It is no mean set, as should be clear from the illustration here.  Bound in full brown morocco leather, with floral Art Nouveau gilt onlays decorating each cover, doublures inside each cover, silk-laid endpapers, gilt-topped pages, and scores of specially added fine engravings of people and scenes sprinkled throughout the text, this was the most extravagant publication on Lincoln ever put out.  Original price?  Unknown.

With false humility the set is dubbed ‘The Log Cabin Edition’; a watercolor of that boyhood home graces each volume’s doublure.  And it seems that none of the major amassers and promoters of Lincolniana ever had a set, viz., the ‘Big Five’ collectors W. H. Lambert (d. 1912), C.W. McLellan (d. 1918), Judd Stewart (d. 1919), Daniel Fish (d. 1924), or J. B. Oakleaf (d. 1930).  Incredibly, Jay Monaghan never saw one; and the great modern collector Oliver R. Barrett (d. 1950) did not either.  Major booksellers of 1905-1960, D. H. Newhall, E. J. Wessen, and C. E. Van Norman, seem never to have offered one.

What everyone saw, and owned, was the 12-volume set of Complete Works as edited by Nicolay and Hay, published also in 1905.  A variety of special imprints of this set came out in the period 1905-1914, with catchy edition-titles like ‘Centennial Edition’ and ‘Biographical Edition’ and ‘Gettysburg Edition.’  The mind races to the obvious phrase to begin a full-life coverage of Lincoln, The Log Cabin Edition, yet no publisher has used it otherwise.  Almost incredibly, Tandy published Fish’s bibliography in 1906, after handling the 24-volume jewel, and apparently kept news it from him.  Or should we not believe Tandy’s printed date of publication?

Tandy took the 12 volumes of Nicolay and Hay, bulked them out with those fine engravings, slimmed each volume, and, presto, 24.  How rare is it?  The printed half-title for each volume of the set acquired in 2009 by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum reads,

“The Log Cabin Edition of the Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln is Extra Illustrated and limited to Eight Numbered Copies of which this is Number 4.”  That digit 4 was penned in by hand.

A lengthy search of library catalogs, collectors’ papers, and auction sales finally revealed  that one set had been privately sold in 1922; and, then, that the University of Texas Library owns a set.  They did not know it.  We helped them realize that it is set number 5.

Here is the most fascinating feature of the set.  The 24^th volume is not printed pages.  It is a volume composed of manuscript letters, 26 of them in the set at the ALPLM, bound to match the others in appearance.  The first manuscript is in Lincoln’s hand, a little note that reads “Sec. of War.  Please see Mr. Edwards a moment.  A. L.”  (Plausibly this was his brother-in-law Ninian W. Edwards, who visited Washington in 1862.)  The other 25 manuscripts are by William Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Horace Greeley, signatures of S. A. Douglas and Rutherford B. Hayes, and various political and military figures pre-1860 and post-1865.  Evidently there was so much of this stuff around in 1905 that a well-heeled publisher could sweep up enough to bind – even 8 sets of it.

The surprising start to volume 24: in Lincoln's hand

My hope is that some college library or two out there simply took in one of these treasure-sets long ago and attached the bibliographic record of the 12-volume original to their 24 volumes; and it has reposed on the shelves, unmolested for decades, because other, handier sets were nearby.  This is more or less what had happened to the set at Texas.  Or, one fears that someone long ago disbound volume 24 for its historic and unique contents, and left the oft-printed rest of it aside.  Does anyone know of a 23-volume set that looks like it lost its caboose?

Collectors!  Browsers of used bookstores!  Spelunkers in the garage sales of the hinterland!  Where are sets number 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, or 8?  One could speculate that each set was produced only by subscription, and that sets 6, 7, and 8 never found sponsors.  But surely 1, 2, and 3 existed.

No, the Lincoln field has not been exhausted.  We daily look forward to another discovery.  Likely the next discovery will not fill 32 inches of shelf space.

Allusions to Abraham Lincoln in American literature are legion, if one looks into memorial poetry, recollective works on the heroism of soldiers, and, these days, even murder mysteries.  ‘What-if’ stories, including plays, about catching Booth early, stopping Booth in the act, or keeping the Lincolns from attending the theatre might fall into this category of ‘invention as sympathy’ in creative writing.

Yet the novel called by some THE Great American Novel may also include a Lincoln figure, at least by analogy.  “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” — this is what old-money Tom Buchanan called nouveau-riche Jay Gatsby during the very tense scene in the Plaza Hotel about halfway through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.  Old-money Tom, enraged that Gatsby could pursue and apparently win the heart of his wife Daisy Buchanan (who was from Kentucky), moved the inter-personal confrontation up a notch: “next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”  (Collier Books, 1980 reprint, p. 130).  In other words, no sooner could ‘society’ allow a low-born nobody to capture the affections of a well-bred lady, than not even skin color would serve as a social marker.

Lincoln and Gatsby, both nobodies from the north woods.

Could F. Scott Fitzgerald have had in mind the social revolution by which a railsplitter married the high-born Mary Todd (who was from Kentucky), then sets the blacks free?  Tom Buchanan … James Buchanan … equal social status for blacks and whites … a mystery man from nowhere (Duluth, Minnesota, for Jay Gatz; New Salem, Illinois, for Abe Lincoln) … a revolution in affairs.  How did the son of a “wandering laboring boy,”  as Lincoln described his father Tom, even meet the high-born Mary Todd, much less marry her?  One may easily see Fitzgerald’s hearkening to the life and times of the 16^th President, in the White House, through that mise en scène at the Plaza.

And Fitzgerald, despite his own rearing in St. Paul, was something of a Confederate sympathizer – proud of his descent from Marylander Francis Scott Key; married to Zelda Sayre, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama.  On that Maryland side of his father’s, Fitzgerald was related to Mary Surratt, whose house served as the meeting place for the assassin John Wilkes Booth.  At the height of his career, Fitzgerald was chosen to spruce up some dialogue for the screenplay of Gone With the Wind, surely a Southern apologist’s dream-job.

The Great Gatsby is not really a political novel.  The genius of Fitzgerald in not staking out a firm moral position between his contesting main characters is analagous to Lincoln’s own genius in refusing to express political malice or denominational preferences during the brothers’ war of the 1860s.  Both Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby seem to have unlikable characteristics; so too Lincoln felt in 1854 that Southerners “are just what we [Northerners] would be in their situation.”  And in 1862 that “the people of the South are not more responsible for the original introduction” of slaves than are people of the North.

So it is not the likability or unlikability of a person, based upon background or manner, that makes Lincoln an epochal figure.  And it is not the historic importance of individuals like Tom Buchanan or Jay Gatz who make them interesting men.  But it is the melding together of these two strands of notability that Fitzgerald employed in his novel.  He chose names and settings that mirrored the struggle over white/black and rich/poor relations in the 1920s, when the Toms were fading and the nouveau-riche American Jays were in the ascendant.  He chose them because a nobody called Abe (from a nowhere northern town) started being called ‘Abraham,’ won the heart of a belle named Mary (who was from Kentucky), and gave his life that the black man might be free — thereby providing an excellent case-study of the great American dream.

In part 1 , the accuracy, even the veracity, of such Lincoln associates as William Herndon and Noah Brooks was examined.  Only a few of their statements about Lincoln were important in the short or long run, though as described in part 1 mothers and mediums may disagree with me.  Of nearly world significance over the last century has been the contact between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.  The escaped slave, journalist, orator, and publicist claimed to have met with Lincoln 3 times, but only 2 of these meetings are corroborated by a source other than Douglass.  Since World War II scholars have gradually grown more skeptical of some of Douglass’s recollections.

Their first conversation occurred in company with Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas, in the Executive Mansion, on 10 August 1863, over what became a failed attempt to send Douglass to the South to help recruit black troops.  Lincoln, 2 members of his cabinet, and Sen. Pomeroy signed a pass South for Douglass, who wrote a private letter about the meeting on the 12^th.  He spoke about the meeting in December 1863, a speech published in Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator.  Lincoln’s secretary John Hay recorded the meeting in his diary, but neither Hay nor John Nicolay seem ever to have mentioned Douglass again.  Then, in 1881 — according to James Oakes, the most recent scholar on the topic — Douglass published his “most detailed account … and thus less reliable” version of the meeting, in the third of his autobiographies.  He revised that book later; and in 1888 provided a “vague” account that “collapses several different conversations into one.”

Next, Douglass met Lincoln on 19 August 1864.  (LaWanda Cox, in her 1981 book, gives that date, while Oakes, using Douglass’s papers, dates it to 25 August.)  Two other visitors to the president that hour, one of them ex-governor Randall of Wisconsin, also recorded the event.  Douglass wrote of it to a friend 2 months later, and in a speech on 5 June 1865 recollected another incident; then retrieved from memory for the first time, in 1881, more of his dialogue with Lincoln.  Because Douglass lost many of his papers in a house fire in 1872, we do not know what notes he might originally have made.  At any rate, it seems that he was following the same pattern as dozens of other journalists, politicians, and memoirists in the post-Lincoln years: crystalizing and growing in the mind what had been in reality a brief or passing acquaintance with the man.

This 1864 meeting led Lincoln to invite Douglass to come to tea at the Soldiers’ Home; or so Douglass recalled “some years later,” writes Oakes.  A prior commitment prevented his attending.  (Pass up tea with the president?)  But a seminal event such as Lincoln’s second inaugural could not be passed up.  Douglass wrote that he was in the crowd of thousands on 4 March 1865; that later on he and a woman stood in line at the Executive Mansion to greet Mr. Lincoln; that he was turned away at the door as a black man, was tricked into leaving, then saw “a gentleman” he knew, who got him in.  He wound his way amid the throng inside to the president, and had this now-famous exchange:

Frederick Douglass, tireless abolitionist and sometime friend of Lincoln.

“Here comes my friend Douglass.  I am glad to see you.  I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?”  Two lines of apology and encouragement ensue, before Lincoln fairly forces Douglass to admit,

“Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”

So wrote Douglass in 1881, and never earlier.  Did not one of the thousands of other people around that day notice him, not even the helpful “gentleman,” to record this singular appearance and apothegmatic remark, not even one of the other journalists on the scene?  No scholar since – not Booker T. Washington (1906), Benjamin Quarles (1948 and 1962), LaWanda Cox (1981), James Oakes (2008), or five others – has found another mention of Douglass’s front-door, side-door, or hand-to-hand movements.  Yet all cite the obstructed entrance and ensuing dialogue as historical event.

In the same chapter of this 3rd memoir, Douglass related how on the previous night “I took tea with Chief Justice Chase, and assisted his beloved daughter, Mrs. Sprague, in placing over her honored father’s shoulders the new robe … in which he was to administer the oath of office to the re-elected President.”  Yet Quarles never mentions Salmon Chase; and the best study of Chase, by John Niven (1995), never mentions Douglass.

I and the world would welcome any kind of confirmation of these events outside of what Douglass once claimed.  African-American newspapers in Philadelphia and Baltimore reported on the “500” blacks seen at the 4 March 1865 reception, according to Quarles, yet do not mention Douglass.  All history relies on the progressive and cumulative revelation of original sources, and some come to hand later than earlier.  We have hope, just as we have hope that Lincoln so nobly reached out to a shunned man.  But the evidence is growing less and less acceptable to modern readers.  Undeniably, Lincoln and Douglass worked toward the same ends, at different paces, because one was a politician, the other a journalist.  Their common goal did not necessarily make them friends.  By the 1880s, the great majority of Americans in the North wanted to have been Lincoln’s friend.  Douglass, like Noah Brooks, shone in the light cast by Lincoln’s legacy, the brighter he could make their friendship glow.

This is the first of a two-part piece on the perils of single-source history in the Lincoln field.  Part 2, on Frederick Douglass, will appear in January 2011.

Such is the hunger for facts and stories about Lincoln that we may occasionally fail to double-check the sources.  A good many stories rely on exactly one person’s report or opinion.  Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher’s book Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (1994) contains thousands of contemporary and post-1865 statements about things Lincoln said.  Most rely on one person’s report.  Who are those persons?

William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner for 17 years and his acquaintance for about 24 years, is the largest source.  Nearly everything he said or wrote about Lincoln emerged years, even a quarter-century, after 1865. “All that I am or ever hope to be I get from my angel mother,” quoth Lincoln via Herndon.  Or was it merely “from my mother”?  Both versions come from Herndon.  Neither can be cross-checked against any other source.  The tone, though, is plausibly Lincoln’s.

Other than Herndon, the biggest source, and problem, in Lincoln history is journalists.  They get most of their facts right, and we are hugely indebted to them.  Yet many of them have a desire to seem influential for years after their key association.  And, they age.

Noah Brooks was among the most diligent reporters in Washington during Lincoln’s presidency.  For the Sacramento Daily Union he followed and recorded the great man’s movements for the final two and a half years, as well as filing good war reports.  It is he who tells us, e.g., of Lord Colchester the séance-maker, and Mary and Abraham’s encounter with him, and how one night at a séance across town Brooks suspected fraud and seized someone’s wrist in the dark, and found it was Colchester’s. He then warned the fraudster to leave town.  This has believability to it; but can anyone corroborate it?  Mary Lincoln biographers Jean Baker and Catherine Clinton both recount the episode, in startlingly different ways, adding new information or misstating the old.  Whom are we to believe?  The Fehrenbachers trace one reported Lincolnism as quoted 4 different ways from Brooks’s multifarious memory.

Brooks wrote articles for Scribner’s Monthly and Century Magazine in the 1870s and ’80s, then a biography of Lincoln in 1888 that went through many variations and editions.  All this was supposedly based on his 258 wartime dispatches.  But his 1895 book Washington in Lincoln’s Time has other material and is where anyone beyond the small number of 1863 Sacramento-area subscribers could read that the Lincolns, while visiting General Hooker in Stafford County, Va., in April 1863, drove past a bedraggled camp of freed slaves.  How many of those “little piccaninnies,” Mary asked her husband, do you suppose are named for you?  “Let’s see. This is April, 1863,” answers the president.  “I should say that of all those babies under two years of age, perhaps two thirds have been named for me.”

Is this a president we recognize?  Herbert Mitgang includes the dialogue in a 1958 edition of Brooks’s book.  P.J. Staudenraus omitted it from his 1967 edition.  So, too, Michael Burlingame in his 1998 edition, who does, though, catch Brooks attributing his own views to Lincoln on at least two other occasions.  And Brooks wrote, soon after this unlikely episode, that “No colored persons are employed about the Executive Mansion,” an error that casts into doubt just how close Brooks was to Lincoln.  William Johnson was Lincoln’s regular valet, attending him sporadically but personally for almost three years, till his death by smallpox after traveling to Gettysburg with Lincoln.  William Slade was a doorman, sometimes confused with the other William as a man with access to the president.  Elizabeth Keckly was Mary’s most constant companion, and is in fact the person who encouraged her to seek out spiritualist mollification after Willie Lincoln’s death.  Was Noah Brooks watchful for mediums but blind to blacks?  His 1895 reports about Lincoln may show a hardening of his arteries, or of the nation’s.

Noah Brooks, ca. 1872, early in his “I knew Lincoln” career.

   Let me introduce you to a woman of the past.  She was well-born in a southern state early in the 19^th century.  She was not entirely happy with her home life after a certain point, and left that home as a teenager. She fell in love with a man and eventually married him, giving over nearly all of her personal life and identity to his work, his efforts, his and her children, as was common in that day.  After his death she grieved deeply and thought sadly of him every day.  You are thinking of her name now:  Is it Mrs. Lincoln?  Is it Mary Lincoln?  Is it Mary Todd Lincoln?  The person ‘Mary Todd’ ceased to exist in a legal sense on Nov. 4, 1842, when she wed Abraham Lincoln.  In a personal sense she may have ceased to exist then, too.  She became Mary Lincoln.

   There are 319 documents at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in this woman’s hand.  That total is roughly 70 percent of all known letters by her.  On these 319, she signed herself one dozen distinct ways, involving her full name, initials, with or without ‘Mrs.,’ etc.  She never once used the name ‘Todd’ in any of these, and she never once used the initial ‘T.’  She signed her name ‘Mary Lincoln’ or ‘Mrs. Lincoln’ or ‘Mrs. Abraham Lincoln’ or ‘Mrs. A. Lincoln’ and even, 12 times, ‘Mrs. Cuthbert’ or just ‘Cuthbert.’  (This was a maid in the Executive Mansion who helped Mary Lincoln cover up some of her many unpaid bills between November 1864 and May 1865.)  She did not ever, let me repeat, ever refer to herself as ‘Mary Todd Lincoln.’

   The 1911 campaign to raise a statue for her at Sayre College, in her hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, seems to be the real origin of the name ‘Mary Todd Lincoln.’  Admittedly, when Robert Lincoln’s wife, Mary Harlan Lincoln, was named in the press – this rarely happened – a distinction had to be made between the mother Mary and the daughter-in-law Mary.  But our Mary died in 1882.  Kentuckians were proud of her illustrious heritage, and using three names for her was their fundraising way, I surmise, to re-unite South and North in that 50^th anniversary year of the beginning of the Civil War.  The 3-name usage was fairly common for about 20 years, then faded away until it was revived in the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.  It is now firmly, probably irreversibly, in common usage.  But its use is unfair to the woman who devoted her life from 1842 till 1865 to her living husband, and to his memory from 1865 to 1882.  Let us try to heed her own sense of who she was: Mrs. Abraham Lincoln.  Mrs. Lincoln.  Mrs. President Lincoln.  Mrs. A. Lincoln.  Sometimes to friends, M.L.  Most often, Mary Lincoln.  But never, I repeat never, was she Mary Todd Lincoln.

   Among the points of genius in the U.S. Constitution is the system of electing members to the House of Representatives every two years.  This has often proved a check on the power of the party holding the White House or the Senate.  Off-year elections (a phrase not coined till 1906, but ever important) have in the last couple of decades got the reputation of always going against the President’s party.  It’s not quite true, but for Lincoln, it did prove true.  Why?

   In the fall of 1860, Republicans won a majority of House seats, and southern secession quickly raised that majority appreciably.  Lincoln could count upon 108 Republicans as well as a fair number of the 40 northern Democrats who remained.  (Some members still called themselves Whigs, soon an obsolescent term.)  Yet in Illinois, Douglasites remained supreme: Illinois sent 5 Democrats and 4 Republicans to the House.

   In autumn 1862, Lincoln’s emancipation policy was in some places more unpopular than his administration’s poor management of the war; or, depending upon the county surveyed, vice-versa.  Either way, Republicans lost 22 of their 108 House seats, while Democrats gained 28 (independents, etc., accounting for the gap).  The Republican Speaker of the House lost his seat, Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania – a manufacturing state which in 1860 Lincoln had carefully plied and won with protective-tariff promises but which now trended anti-war.  Probably the most anti-war Northern state, New York, elected an anti-war Democrat as governor, and so did Ohio.  In Pennsylvania and Indiana, the Democrats took control of the state legislature.  Two dozen pro-war Democrats in the House did bolster Lincoln’s view that theirs was a national cause, a cause for Union, and not a party affair.  Yet once again, Lincoln heard Illinois shout against his war and his party.  After redistricting based on the 1860 census added 5 House seats, Illinois in 1862 sent 9 Democrats and 5 Republicans.

   A few days later Lincoln wrote to German-American general Carl Schurz, “We have lost the elections. … Three main causes told the whole story. 1. The democrats were left in a majority by our friends going to the war. 2. The democrats observed this & determined to re-instate themselves in power, and 3. Our newspaper’s, by vilifying and disparaging the administration, furnished them all the weapons to do it with. Certainly, the ill-success of the war had much to do with this.”  (Collected Works, 5: 493-494).  Two days later, Interior Secretary Caleb Smith asked to be relieved of office.

   Had Lincoln prepared the field for the off-year elections?  Not in the way we might expect today, for instead of compromising with his opponents in hopes of holding the middle ground, he bowed to his radical wing’s long-term demand, and his own growing feeling, for an emancipation policy.  With the Illinois Democrats so riven that 40 of the 102 counties refused to send delegates to their state convention in September, Lincoln sent Ward Hill Lamon from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, to try to shore up Republican support.  But roughneck Lamon was no silver-tongued winner of skeptics, and they were not even called Republicans in Illinois that year.  The pol’s had changed their name to the Union party – almost 2 years before the national party did.  When the 1862 votes came in, Lincoln’s oldest friend in the state, and 2^nd bunkmate, William Butler, had been defeated in his re-election bid as state treasurer.  Or should we call John T. Stuart his oldest friend, he who lent him law books from at least 1833?  Perhaps – but Stuart ran for Congress as an ‘independent’ from the Springfield district, against Lincoln’s 1860 election co-manager Leonard Swett, and beat him.  Just what is an independent, in that day or this?  Someone who runs against old friends.

   The crown of ‘oldest intimate friend’ in fact belonged to Joshua Speed.  As late as June 1862 Lincoln was responding positively to a petition co-signed by Speed to release a Kentucky man indicted for treason; and in mid-September – crunch-time in electoral terms – to a request by the governor of Kentucky, and Speed, to stop letting the Union military arrest men in that state, turning over the power to the governor himself.  Lincoln needed Kentucky, which is to say, he needed friends there, even pro-slavery men like Speed.  But he needed Republicans elected in Illinois and the rest of the North even more.

   A clearer sign of his lack of political savvy in 1862 is seen in his letter to Schurz, where Lincoln focused on absent soldier-voters and a spiteful press, and overlooked the public’s distrust of what he prized most, emancipation.  (He also overlooked the hit caused by the nation’s first Income Tax, begun that year, and the dubious advent of the greenback.)  Six days after announcing his timeless, vote-losing Proclamation, he had ruefully deflected Vice President Hamlin’s plaudits thus: “the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. … The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.” (CW, 5: 444)  So, weakened politically, he ended his year with the military edict that ended slavery in rebel territory.  Votes mattered less to Lincoln than a long-term goal reached through short-term force, to wit, military plus emancipatory progress.

   Can it also be said that Lincoln let down the team visually?  He did not have a photographic portrait of himself made in all of 1862.  Indeed, the evidence today is that he visited no photographer between September 1861 and April 1863 (except when he posed with General McClellan and others at Antietam in October 1862, in outdoor ‘at work’ shots).  The usual explanation for his absence from a studio is that Willie Lincoln’s death in February 1862 left him downcast and overworried.  The modern pollster might suspect that new images of Lincoln would do nothing for other Republicans running for office that year.

   Vindication came in 1864 with Lincoln’s re-election.  He exerted himself to arrange for soldiers to get home to vote, something he had not pressed in 1862.  Now Illinois Republicans – running on the nationally approved ticket as the National Union Party – sent 12 Union men to the House, against only 2 Democrats, while the national sweep was nearly as strong.  And Lincoln left us post-election proof of how politically attuned he was after all, in his scrupulous notes of state-by-state voting (see image).  Even in a contest that seemed clearly his by early September 1864, he wanted to see how little or how much each state favored him.  The war had been effectively won by Grant and Sherman, with help from black soldiers, so Lincoln could get back to counting votes.

   No less astute a scholar than James G. Randall of the University of Illinois, a Democrat, pointed out to the American Historical Association annual meeting in 1934 that in the long run,  John C. Frémont’s followers had won in 1864.  Frémont briefly ran for the presidency as an abolitionist Radical that year, but dropped out of the race, regretting that Lincoln’s rule was “physically, militarily, and financially a failure.”  It was those radicals who seized the reins in Congress after 15 April 1865 and rode the vanquished South hard.  Randall’s point is sound; but Lincoln’s 1862 pursuit of both war and emancipation led to successes immeasurable on Election Day.

     To the metaphor-minded contemporaries of Lincoln, each leaf on a tree was like a poem in a book, or a leaf out of life.  The sentimentally attuned wrote booklets of poems with such titles as Leaves from the Battlefield of Gettysburg … and National Poems (by Mrs. E. A. Souder) or The Last Leaf (by Oliver Wendell Holmes).  Most famously, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman preceded his eye- and pen-work on Lincoln’s death and life.

      Hundreds of poems about Lincoln are, in part, a hidden collection at the ALPLM as well as other libraries.  Many of them are not conventionally sentimental. One just donated, from the journal of a 3rd sergeant in the 3rd Iowa Infantry, is called “Uncle Sam’s Mule: By A played out Warrior.”  This “sojer” bemoans his fate at the hands of the army recruiter:

O! Abe, why did you allow the Contractor

To disfigure me thus like a base malefactor?

The scribbler was William C. Newlon, and his sense of humor about the mud and “his body, by welting was red, white, and blue!” was perhaps more typical than not – though Newlon did suffer a post-battle amputation.

      What chiefly emerged from Lincoln’s career was broken-hearted despondency.  His assassination inspired large broadsides with original verse about his greatness, or the devilishness of his cowardly slayer; it inspired poems short or long that were printed in newspapers and magazines across the country; it inspired homespun sorrow now found in scrapbooks.  Some of this tide of sorrow, and in later years the commemoration, was catalogued by Governor Henry Horner, namesake of the Lincoln Collection at the ALPLM.  Born in 1878, later an attorney, judge, and politician, Horner had an eye for books and an ear for those who spoke of Lincoln in rhyme.  More than a thousand poems did he clip or transcribe, and his 16 neat, indexed binders of them are open for all to examine.

      Verse about public affairs had its heyday, by coincidence, in the years around Lincoln’s Centennial.  It has since greatly fallen away, yet his Bicentennial inspired some to dedicate themselves anew to recording their thoughts about him and his legacy, in a dozen printed collections that have found their way to the ALPLM, added to which are that host of poetic lyrics set to music.  This (not set to music, but fitted for it) is by Michael Meng, a Californian:

The gist of my argument with Judge Douglas,

Is simply that,

Slavery is,

Wrong.

Lincoln knew that speech can be poetic, whether lineated as verse or not. During dark hours of the war in 1862, he read Holmes’s “The Last Leaf”:

And if I should live to be

The last leaf upon the tree

In the spring. –

Let them smile, as I do now,

At the old forsaken bough

Where I cling.

       The Bicentennial will not, I predict, mark a new birth of public interest in poetry, even about Lincoln.  But for people who feel that all of the speeches, all of the memoirs, all of the analyses of the legal career or the war or the assassination have tapped the potential sources dry, ponder the unrippled waters of the hundreds of poetic documents, most of them rarely or never read, that turn over the shining leaf of Lincoln’s life and put it into verse.

   William Henry Johnson was born around 1835, site unknown.  He began working for Abraham Lincoln, in Springfield, in early 1860.  Johnson was a black man, who because his name was Johnson has defied modern attempts to trace his origins.  He apparently did the work of an uneducated black man: took care of the Lincolns’ horse Old Bob, perhaps swept the law office or brushed Lincoln’s boots and coat, ran errands.  Unlike the Irish girls, Kentucky men, Portuguese immigrants, and one or two other blacks who had worked for the Lincolns, Johnson became personally close enough to them to ‘stick.’ When the Lincolns rode the train to Washington, D.C., in February 1861, Johnson rode with them, the only non-official person to make this move.  Conceivably there was an element of political statement in Lincoln’s having asked this young man to join him in his journey to the presidency, but, equally likely, Lincoln liked and trusted him.

   There is no portrait of Johnson, as there is of Mary Lincoln’s far better known employee and friend Elizabeth Keckly.  Indeed, the celebrity of Lizzie Keckly stems as much from her skill and her closeness to Mary Lincoln as from her half-dozen portraits, because we ‘know’ about people through their image, and seek more interior information about them to match the exterior sample.  Johnson does appear, fair to assume, in the August 8, 1860, campaign-parade photograph by William Shaw (150 years ago this summer) depicting a Republican parade before the Lincoln home.  Perhaps 250 people are seen at this marvelous political-social event, including a streetful of white people and two dozen black people gathered either in Lincoln’s yard or in the foreground.  Lincoln stands out in a white suit by his door.  For any who think that blacks did not support the crypto-racist, slavery-condoning, Kentucky-born lawyer that year, look at the dozens of blacks standing close by his house, Johnson among them, somewhere.

   The documents at the ALPLM attesting to Johnson’s presence in Washington, D.C., are two: on Mar. 11, 1862, Lincoln wrote him a check for $5.00; and soon Lincoln wrote this, among a small succession of job recommendations:

  “The bearer of this card, William Johnson (colored), came with me from Illinois, and is a worthy man, as I believe.  A. Lincoln    Oct. 24, 1862”

   Johnson, barred by lighter-skinned mulatto staffers from his intended employment at the Executive Mansion because of his dark skin, had to find work elsewhere.  Lincoln helped him get clerk and messenger jobs at the Treasury and Navy Depts. – traditional employers of blacks – and continued to welcome him to the private quarters to trim the president’s beard, brush his coat, tell him what people around town were saying.  While Lincoln prepared a now-famous speech, he wrote to the Treasury, to excuse Johnson from work, “William goes with me to Gettysburg.”  And so the valet stood in the room at the Wills House as the orator finished his remarks for the cemetery dedication the next day.  Both men contracted smallpox in Gettysburg — Lincoln the mild form known as varioloid, recovering after several days; Johnson the serious kind, dying in Washington in January 1864.

   Without family or money, Johnson faced a common grave, except that Lincoln paid for his burial at Arlington National Cemetery – Robert E. Lee’s former estate, presumably dotted with the graves of unfree blacks – and for a monument reading ‘William H. Johnson, Citizen.’  How a man treats another man in private may tell us far more than his public utterances about groups.