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

As early as 1841, people began applying this stalwart phrase to Lincoln.  On New Year’s Day of that year, the Quincy, Illinois Whig described the 31-year-old from Springfield as “a self-made man, and one of the ablest” among all the lawyers and elected officials in the state. 

The Whig didn’t need to explain what “self-made” meant.  The paper presumed everyone knew the term.  Having entered common usage by the late 1820s, it had become a verbal staple, a handy way to praise resourceful men and the nation that had succored them.

Self-made public servants like Lincoln showed to the satisfaction of many that republican liberty really did rule in the U.S., at least in the North and West.  The chance to ascend in public responsibility and esteem wasn’t limited to the privileged few.  Aristocracy was following monarchy into the dustbin of history.

Disciplined climbers could now rise to distinction without benefit of family fortune or cronyism.  All they needed was well-engraved inner character.  The self-made man, wrote the prolific commercial author John Frost in his Self-Made Men of America (1848), was “one who has rendered himself accomplished, eminent, rich, or great by his own unaided efforts.”         

Lincoln took pride in having risen from a low rung on the social ladder, and said so repeatedly.  But he made no pretense of having accomplished that feat without help.  True, he’d done it with little material aid from his family, and like many young men of his era, he’d done it by self-consciously distancing himself from his father.  (Thomas Lincoln did pass along some vital social capital: the storytelling gift that proved integral to his son’s success.)

When 22, Lincoln strode into New Salem, Illinois, in 1831, “penniless” and “friendless,” as he later wrote.  Yet he soon attracted eager backing.  William Lee Miller, in his book Lincoln’s Virtues (pp. 24-25), gives a nice summary of all the “boosts and helps and open doors and befriendings” that launched Lincoln on his path to public renown. 

After a decade in Illinois, having just been crowned by the Quincy Whig as “one of the ablest” self-made men in the state, Lincoln gave an address in Springfield that spelled out the social underpinnings of self-making.  Speaking to the Washingtonian Society, a temperance group, on Washington’s Birthday 1842, he urged all citizens to join the Society by signing its pledge to abstain from spirits. 

Those struggling to escape the lure of liquor, said Lincoln, couldn’t be expected to make their way unassisted.  They needed the active support of a united community, including people like himself who’d never been tempted by drink.  Lincoln took no credit for his own sobriety, attributing it to luck rather than self-discipline.  “Such of us as have never fallen victims [sic] have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.” 

And he extended his point beyond the issue of alcohol.  Everyone, even the morally proficient, had learned self-control by taking their cues from “other people’s actions.”  Everybody absorbed community norms by letting the influence of respected models seep into them.  Self-making amounted to a social achievement, not just an individual one. 

True, Lincoln always held, as he told a small group of free black men whom he invited to the White House 20 years later, that “success does not as much depend on external help as on self-reliance.”  His own experience taught him that relentless resolve lay behind the push for personal advancement.   

But those starting out with limited means — whether freed slaves or penniless migrants — would likely need some “external help.”  Without self-discipline they would surely fail; yet without the moral example and material help of others, self-discipline would languish like seed on rocky ground.

When Lincoln departed from Springfield as president-elect in 1861, he uttered his famous farewell remarks.  Once again, as in the 1842 temperance speech, he underlined the social foundations of self-making.  Speaking from the rear platform of his train on the day before his 52^nd birthday, he thanked his Springfield neighbors for making him into the “old man” he’d become.

“To you, dear friends,” he said in one version of his remarks, “I owe all that I have, all that I am.”  “To this place and the kindness of these people,” he says in another version, “I owe every thing.”

A third version, which appeared in the east-coast press on February 12, 1861, has him saying “to this people I owe all that I am.”  That’s the phrasing put on this late-1860s pocket-sized card, which mistakenly gives the date of publication — his birthday — as the date of delivery.

 Of course, after his death Lincoln couldn’t offer any more correctives to the notion that he’d risen without help.  Americans preferred to cherish him post-mortem as the paragon of self-containment, the brooding genius with the generous heart and steely will.

Another famous self-made man, Frederick Douglass, left one of many testimonials to Lincoln’s unassisted mastery in constructing himself.  Writing a year after the president’s assassination, he praised Lincoln as so self-sufficient, so original, that he had reinvented even the process of self-creation.

“One great charm of his life,” wrote Douglass, “is that he was indebted to himself for himself.  He was the architect of his own fortune, a self-made man, a flat boat captain, a splitter of rails, a man of toil, one who travelled far but made the road on which he traveled — one who ascended high, but with hard hands and honest work built the ladder on which he climbed.  Flung upon the sea of life in the midnight storm, without oars or life preservers he bravely buffeted the billows — and with sinewy arms swam in safety, where other men despair and sink.”

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s battle to get the better of his state’s unionized public employees reminds us that a century and a half ago, on September 30, 1859, Abraham Lincoln appeared at the Wisconsin state fair in Milwaukee to deliver a well-wrought speech on the subject of “labor.”   

He collected $100 for a witty and sparkling meditation on the joys of all disciplined work.  Quipping that farmers should beware of politicians singling them out for praise –since farmers “are neither better nor worse than other people,” only “more numerous”– he gave them the higher compliment of taking their work seriously. 

As a young man, Lincoln had preferred books to his father’s farm implements.  But as a 50-year-old politician he spoke appreciatively, even wistfully, of a rural landscape where the mechanical arts progressed amidst natural rhythms.  He sounded like a Walt Whitman evoking a world of daily wonders.

“Every blade of grass is a study,” he mused, “and to produce two, where there was but one, is both a profit and a pleasure.  And not grass alone; but soils, seeds, and seasons — hedges, ditches, and fences, draining, droughts, and irrigation — plowing, hoeing, and harrowing — reaping, mowing, and threshing — saving crops, pests of crops, diseases of crops, and what will prevent or cure them — implements, utensils, and machines, their relative merits, and how to improve them — hogs, horses, and cattle — sheep, goats, and poultry — trees, shrubs, fruits, and flowers — the thousand things of which these are specimens — each a world of study within itself.”

The Milwaukee speech isn’t well known today.  But part of what Lincoln said in 1859 at the Wisconsin state fair — and repeated nearly word for word in his better-known Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1861 — turned up recently on Democratic and progressive websites during Governor Walker’s showdown with his state’s public workers and Democratic legislators.

The Sheboygan County Democratic Party website quoted Lincoln as saying, “labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.  Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.  Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Those are indeed Lincoln’s words, but they didn’t mean to him what they suggest to us.  We imagine he’s siding with working people in their perennial campaign to wrest higher wages or greater job control from their employers.  We think he’s giving his support (“higher consideration”) to “labor” in its negotiations or stand-offs with “capital.”

But Lincoln meant something different.  When he spoke of labor and capital he was rejecting the idea that in America any essential conflict existed between them.  Labor got “higher consideration” from him because labor took logical and historical precedence.  It was the replenishing source of economic value.  It lay at the root of all capital.

Lincoln’s own personal image of the quintessential laborer may well have been the man wielding his trusty ax, turning a swath of forest to productive use like this barefoot, Paul-Bunyan-style Lincoln created by Charles Turzak in the 1930s.

Charles Turzak’s woodcut, ca. 1933, gives Lincoln the look of the working man he never aspired to be.

In America, Lincoln thought, people willing to work hard could expect eventually to convert their labor into some small pool of capital.  He was sure no permanent wage-earning class existed in the U.S.  Labor kept renewing its vitality as individuals kept clearing land or inventing new machines — like the hoped-for “steam plow” that Lincoln examined at length in his Wisconsin speech. 

In a speech in New Haven, Connecticut, in March 1860, he did publicly endorse the right of working people to strike (referring to a shoe strike in Lynn, Mass.).  But to him that just meant that free laborers were not slaves.  Free workers could “strike” — stop toiling — whenever they wished.  If their employer didn’t respond adequately to their grievances, they could seek opportunity elsewhere.  Dissatisfied workers needed only the right to quit, something slaves would never get.

As David Donald points out in his biography Lincoln (p. 234), the rail-splitter somehow managed to miss “the growing disparity of wealth between the poor and the rich,” and “gave scant attention to the growing number of factory workers who had little prospect of upward social mobility.”

Had Lincoln lived into the late nineteenth century, would his views have evolved?  We’ll never know.  What we do know is that he always felt special affection for those who started on a low rung of the economic ladder and strove to climb higher.  If he’d ever come to sense that American laborers’ upward path was blocked by new industrial conditions, he might well have given “higher consideration” to what we now call “pro-labor” views.

President Obama, in his February 3, 2011, speech to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, got personal about his religious faith.   As he often does, he invoked Lincoln as a point of reference.  “The presidency has a funny way of making a person feel the need to pray,” Obama quipped.  “Abe Lincoln said, as many of you know, ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.’”

The audience laughed appreciatively at the light-hearted Lincoln aside, some of them probably aware that Lincoln’s religiosity, like Obama’s, has been questioned.  In Obama’s case, many persist in suspecting he’s a half-hearted Christian, if not a closet Muslim, and in Lincoln’s case, some historians have doubted whether his religious language ran any deeper than his desire to please his Protestant supporters. 

In Lincoln, his renowned biography from 1995, David Herbert Donald ascribed the theological tenor of the second inaugural address to Lincoln’s desire to make contact with his vast northern audience of Christian believers.  Ronald White’s Lincoln’s Greatest Speech (2002) showed that Donald’s largely secular Lincoln needed to be retired.  

The president’s rationalism was intertwined, White argued, with deep religious conviction and pronounced theological interest.  Never a professed “technical” Christian, as his wife Mary put it, President Lincoln still took the power of God’s Providence very seriously. 

His apparent indifference toward the orthodox Christian belief in Jesus as redeemer didn’t stop him from embracing an updated version of his parents’ Calvinist Lord: the awesome sovereign Father who actively superintended his earthly creation.

The evidence that Lincoln prayed is abundant, though “prayer” can mean many different things.  It runs the gamut from a two-way conversation with God — including petitioning God for assistance or special favors — to a reverential attitude of humility or gratitude in the face of the unknown. 

In Lincoln’s case it seems to have meant a whole-hearted recognition of God’s power, and a willing submission to it.  As he said in his second inaugural address, this almighty God harbored purposes that human beings could never fathom. 

Non-believers often make the mistake of assuming that “submission” to God’s authority means “resignation” to it, as if giving precedence to God’s unanswerable power entails accepting the futility of independent human action. 

But submission, as Lincoln reveals, actually opens up a vast terrain of responsible activity for human beings.  Ironically, God’s inscrutability gives human beings the authority to “work earnestly,” as Lincoln wrote to his Quaker friend Eliza Gurney in 1864, “in the best light He gives us.”  God doesn’t tell people exactly what to do, but God does assist people in acting conscientiously, according to their best judgment.

Did Lincoln’s form of submission to God really involve being driven to his knees many times, since he had no place else to go?  Lincoln, like Obama, may have used the phrase figuratively, even humorously, if indeed he ever spoke it at all.

Lincoln never wrote down those words, and no one reported him uttering them during his lifetime.  The source of the quotation is the young reporter Noah Brooks, who claimed a few months after the assassination that Lincoln “once said” he’d “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.” 

As always, we have to be skeptical about post-mortem recollections of Lincoln’s words.  Observers such as Brooks often push the president’s remarks, however subtly, toward some meaning they hold dear.   Brooks goes on to make Lincoln as pious and reverent as he can: “then he solemnly and slowly added, ‘I should be the most presumptuous blockhead upon this footstool if I for one day thought that I could discharge the duties which have come upon me since I came into this place without the aid and enlightenment of One who is wiser and stronger than all others.’”

By using the term “enlightenment,” Brooks implies that Lincoln thought he received actual divine counsel about the proper course of action.  That would turn his prayer into a two-way conversation: he asked for help, and God supplied at least a clue about the right way to proceed.

But his letter to Eliza Gurney suggests that Lincoln settled for God providing spiritual support, not explicit advice.  God helped people marshal all their resources of concentration and deliberation as they made up their minds.  The “best light” God provided let them express their own “enlightenment.”

Driven literally to their knees or not, Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln concur on the vital necessity of prayer for anyone subjected to the pressures of the presidency.  Prayer offered Lincoln, in Brooks’s words, “his surest refuge at times when he was most misunderstood or misrepresented . . . he was glad to know that no thought or intent of his escaped the observation of that Judge by whose final decree he expected to stand or fall in this world and the next.”

This 1973 book jacket shows Lincoln at prayer in a 1931 sculpture by Herbert Spencer Houck, in the National Cathedral, in Washington, D.C. Houck’s father, a Union Army chaplain, saw Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address.

During his life Lincoln was well known as “Old Abe,” but in 20th-century America he was often remembered for his boyishness.  That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not.  For one thing, “Old Abe” never meant “old” chronologically.  He was barely 40, says biographer David Donald, when the phrase took off in Illinois as an indicator of his “weather-beaten appearance” and his wealth of experience on the stump and the courthouse circuit.

And before long, “Old Abe” turned into a term of endearment as much as a reference to his leathery looks or his legal expertise.  “Old Abe” meant “good old Abe”: it implied “original” and “unique” as much as wrinkled or venerable.

In 1857, when photographer Alexander Hesler captured his disheveled hairdo, Lincoln was consciously cultivating a rumpled man-of-the-people look, not playing the gamin.

When journalist Lloyd Lewis, in his popular 1929 book Myths After Lincoln, called 56-year-old President Lincoln “joyous as a boy,” he was signaling his originality too, and his unpredictability.  You never knew when the distant or brooding Lincoln might break into a sprightly display.  Ironically, “Old Abe” may have stuck as a moniker because Lincoln defied chronological pigeonholing: the adult public man kept confounding expectations about age-appropriate behavior.  He was careless about many things mature people were supposed to dwell on.

Lewis got the image of Lincoln’s boyish joy from an account published in 1887 of Lincoln’s euphoric afternoon in Richmond, Virginia, on April 4, 1865.  Union troops had retaken the Confederate capital the day before, and Lincoln, surrounded by thousands of admiring black southerners, strode up the hill from the downtown dock to Jefferson Davis’s “White House,” newly occupied by Union General Godfrey Weitzel.

As Lincoln got within a few blocks of his destination, a Union officer named Thomas Thatcher Graves came upon the presidential party and offered to guide them the rest of the way.  Lincoln was “walking with his usual long, careless stride,” Graves remembered in an 1887 article, “and looking about with an interested air and taking in everything.”

Once inside the mansion, Graves recalled, Lincoln sat down in Jefferson Davis’s chair, but his curiosity soon got the better of him.  He jumped up and in “a boyish manner” bounded off to investigate the upstairs living quarters.  Indoors or out, in Graves’s recollection, Lincoln was entranced by everything around him.

Naval officer John Barnes was present inside the mansion, too.  He published his recollection of the scene two decades after Graves did, and he portrayed a very different Lincoln sitting in Davis’s chair.  He remembered the president looking “pale and haggard,” and “utterly worn out with fatigue.”  Barnes said Lincoln “sank down … in the chair almost warm from the pressure of the body of Jefferson Davis.”  This Lincoln was too wiped out from his uphill trek through the dusty, smoky downtown to do anything but plop down and plead for a glass of water.

Whether the president was as joyous as a boy or plumb tuckered out, this remembered Lincoln was confirming a vital point made by northern journalists in 1865: he hadn’t sat down in Jefferson Davis’s chair in a huffy, arrogant manner.  His motives were wholly innocent, like those of an elated child or a bedraggled oldster.

Thus, he couldn’t possibly have behaved in an imperial or vindictive way, as one might expect of a conquering commander-in-chief.  Southern whites reading these accounts in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries could rest assured that on April 4, 1865, Lincoln had done nothing to disrespect Jefferson Davis.

Other “boyish” episodes like the one described by Thomas Thatcher Graves may have been recorded in the late 19th century, if not also during Lincoln’s presidency.  He was often called “as simple as a child,” or “as gentle as a woman,” but some observers may have gone further, anticipating Graves by detailing specifically “boyish” behavior.  Describing him as a lovable boy carried a moral charge of innocent striving and blameless action.

In 20th-century American popular culture — especially in the dark days of the 1930s and early 1940s — frequent appeals were made to the virtue of boyishness, to the uncorrupted and youthful male spirit nurtured in rural or small-town America.  John Ford pressed an Abe Lincoln of that description into service in his 1939 film Young Mister Lincoln, starring Henry Fonda.

This wholesome, pristine Lincoln, along with his cinematic companion of 1939 — the Lincoln-loving Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — offered hope for defending and redeeming a threatened Republic.  Both young men were poised for greatness: accomplished enough to perform heroically in provincial courtroom or U.S. Senate, but uncorrupted by the treacheries of power politics.

Lincoln took a keen interest in his dream life.  He was fascinated by the meaning of individual dreams and by the whole experience of dreaming.  Unfortunately for us, he said very little about this in his own letters.  Almost everything we know comes from his “recollected words,” that is, words written down by other people, sometimes decades after his death. 

Recollected words vary tremendously in their reliability.  We can trust some of them, but we have to approach this second- or thirdhand evidence cautiously.  It’s easy to be enticed, and misled, by the embellishments and fictions produced by some of his well-meaning friends and acquaintances.

The least reliable of Lincoln’s friends and acquaintances weren’t trying to mislead us.  They wanted to convey some basic Lincoln trait or belief.  Embroidering the facts seemed a justifiable way of bringing home an essential truth.  Making the story more dramatic might even make the storyteller more memorable — someone who stayed close to Lincoln’s side, someone he whispered things to.

To separate the authentic from the inauthentic in Lincoln’s dream life, we must start with what he wrote down himself:  a brief 1863 letter to his wife Mary, who was in Philadelphia with their 10-year-old son Tad.  In two pithy sentences he gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what his dreams meant to him.  “Think you better put ‘Tad’s’ pistol away,” he wrote. “I had an ugly dream about him.”

There’s no telling what Lincoln dreamt about Tad and his pistol, but he feared the dream portended something bad.  This dream was an omen — at least enough of an omen to make Lincoln try to alter Tad’s usual routine with his toy.  (This toy was apparently a real pistol, but supplied only with caps, not cartridges or powder.)

We find Lincoln’s belief in the premonitory power of dreams confirmed by a second well-attested case.  Strikingly, he told the members of his cabinet about this dream on the morning of his assassination, April 14, 1865.  Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote about it in his diary three days later, and Frederick Seward, sitting in on the meeting in place of his father William Seward, the Secretary of State, wrote about it independently, though only decades later.

According to Welles, Lincoln told the cabinet members he’d dreamt the night before that he was moving across some body of water in a “singular, indescribable vessel,” and “moving with great rapidity.”  That’s all Welles wrote down immediately.  Seven years later, in a published article, he claimed that Lincoln had spoken of the vessel’s destination: “a dark and indefinite shore.”  That converted the dream into a virtual premonition of his death.

On the morning of April 14, according to Welles’s initial diary entry, Lincoln did add another telling detail — not about the dream’s content, but about its frequency.  He said he’d had the same dream many times before, not randomly, but before “nearly every great and important event of the War,” including, among others, “Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Stone River, Vicksburg, and Wilmington.”  (Some doubter in the room must have wondered, “how come we’ve never heard about this dream before?”)  At first the speeding vessel was not on a one-way voyage to the land of the dead; it was a virtual mail boat, delivering hot news that Lincoln was desperate to get.

The phenomenal correlation between the dream and a string of major events proved to the president’s satisfaction that some big story was about to break again.  It wouldn’t necessarily be good news — “Sumter” showed the news could be bad — but Lincoln told the cabinet he was betting on good tidings: a surrender by Confederate General Joe Johnston, still squaring off with Sherman in North Carolina.  

Lincoln thus reiterated on the day of his assassination the same conviction he’d expressed in 1863 on the subject of Tad’s pistol.  Dreams possessed at least some predictive capacity.  They weren’t actual revelations of the future, but they gave one a sense, however murky, of what might come to pass.

Lincoln was showing that he subscribed to what Thomas Campbell, in an 1803 poem, had said: “coming events cast their shadows before.”  Currier and Ives used that phrase as the subtitle of an 1864 election-campaign print commenting on McClellan’s possible victory over Lincoln in the upcoming presidential election: “Abraham’s Dream: Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before.”

The print depicts an agitated Lincoln experiencing a nightmare: he’s being kicked out of the White House by Columbia, ominously waving the severed head of a black man at him, as a victorious McClellan ascends the steps.  (Is the sleeping Lincoln worrying that the Emancipation Proclamation has turned northern white voters against him, and that he’s also to blame for post-proclamation white violence against blacks?)

Currier and Ives depict a fictional Lincoln dream of 1864 as a nightmare, at least for the nation.

The print reminds us that in his actual dreaming there were no reported nightmares.  We could call the pistol and vessel cases “anxiety” dreams — he frets about what might happen with Tad’s gun, and he’s itching for news as the vessel takes its sweet time (Lincoln can still easily conjure up in his sleep the pre-telegraphic era of his young adulthood).

Even the most likely candidate for a nightmare — the famous, but inauthentic, “dead president in the White House” dream peddled by Lincoln’s friend Ward Hill Lamon in the 1880s — turns out to be an anxiety dream at most. (It was published in book form in 1895.)  Lamon attributes to Lincoln a dream in which he sees the corpse of an assassinated president on exhibit in the East Room of the White House.  A crowd has assembled to view the body, and many are weeping.

All the sobbing finally wakes Lincoln up, and a few days later he supposedly tells a small group at the White House, including his wife and Lamon, “I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.”  According to Lamon, Lincoln rejected any premonitory significance for this dream.  He didn’t take it as a sign of his own fate.

Lamon claimed in the 1880s to have reconstructed this dream from notes he made in 1865, but like many other reminiscences from his pen, it can’t stand scrutiny.  The biggest reason to doubt his report is that no one in the “small group,” including Lamon, mentioned the dream after the assassination.  There are also major internal contradictions in Lamon’s telling of the story. 

But with the pistol and vessel dreams in mind, we can see that Lamon may have been trying to build his fiction atop the basic truth of Lincoln’s dream life.  Lincoln’s fully confirmed dreams were not dreams of pleasure or horror.  They bothered him, but didn’t traumatize or even unsettle him. 

Lamon’s dead-president dream follows suit in depicting Lincoln as slightly affected, but hardly distraught.  Where Lamon’s concoction departs from the authentic dreams is in having Lincoln pooh-pooh its predictive potential.  “In this dream,” Lamon has the president saying, “it was not me but some other fellow that was killed…. your apprehension of harm to me from some hidden enemy is downright foolishness.” 

Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher, the indispensable authorities on Lincoln’s “recollected words,” mention two other “dreams” derived from secondhand sources, but neither one alters the basic anxiety-dream pattern.  The first has good provenance — Lincoln’s secretary John Hay — but it sounds a lot like a Lincoln joke set arbitrarily inside a “dream.”  Lincoln says he dreamt he was in a group of people, one of whom thought he was “very common-looking,” to which he replied, “common-looking people are the best in the world; that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.”

The second is a touching story about dreaming recollected by a single fragile source.  In 1862 Lincoln supposedly told Le Grand B. Cannon, an army colonel at Ft. Monroe, that when dreaming (repeatedly) of his recently lost son Willie, he felt “a sweet communion with him,” while remaining aware within the dream state that this was “not a reality.” 

That’s a fascinating comment on what it feels like to be inside a dream, and an endearing tale about Lincoln’s longing for Willie.  But in the context of Cannon’s own obvious longing to be close to Lincoln, one has to doubt the story’s veracity.  “He had given me a sacred confidence,” Cannon concludes.  And he’d given it only to him: no one else was around to hear Lincoln’s words, or to witness their supposed shared tears, and Lincoln “never alluded to this incident afterward.”

Cannon’s account was published more than 30 years after Lincoln’s alleged comment.  Cannon is so determined in the 1890s to establish his own “sweet communion” with the long departed Lincoln that he undermines his story’s credibility.

The “sweet communion” remark about Willie is one of my favorite Lincoln statements, and I hate to give it up.  Maybe Lincoln did say it.  But my wishing he said it doesn’t make it so.  I’ll keep it instead as a beautiful expression of Cannon’s sympathy for Lincoln in his fatherly distress, and of his desire to stay close to his hero in memory.

Lincoln’s love of the theater is well known, but not his love of music — from the Marine Band’s regular performances at the White House to the recitals and operas in Washington’s concert halls.  He liked getting out among the evening audiences, and a short carriage ride took him and Mary, plus a friend like Charles Sumner or Edwin Stanton, to Willard’s or Grover’s for a few hours of entertainment, musical as often as dramatic. 

He didn’t know as much about Beethoven or Verdi as he did about some of Shakespeare’s works, but he evidently enjoyed the listening.  Music historian Steven Cornelius counts 19 trips by Lincoln to the opera during the war years.

And Lincoln imagined doing more than just listening to music.  Journalist Noah Brooks, who knew him well, recalled in 1865 that “Mr. Lincoln’s love of music was something passionate,” so much so that he once fantasized about writing some bars to accompany his favorite poem, William Knox’s “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”  Lincoln “said once, when told that the newspapers had credited him with the authorship of the piece, ‘I should not care much for the reputation of having written that, but would be glad if I could compose music as fit to convey the sentiment as the words now do.’”

One of the most heralded performers that Lincoln heard during the war was pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, an ardent Union supporter originally from New Orleans.  A serious composer as well as a talented stylist, Gottschalk’s work impressed a New York critic in 1862: “he has evoked new effects from the instrument that none others had dreamt of; his touch is perfect, and he can accomplish better than any pianist living that most difficult of all feats, making the piano sing.”

Touring widely in a competitive entertainment market, he drew crowds by offering something for everyone: patriotic airs, classical pieces, sentimental ballads, and his own compositions.  He was renowned for his dazzling patriotic hymn of 1862 entitled “Union,” and for his six-minute adaptation of his friend George F. Root’s runaway wartime hit “Battle Cry of Freedom.”  (Both of those Gottschalk pieces, and others, are available on YouTube and at www.gottschalk.fr/Oeuvres/Oeuvres.php.)

For his appearance at Willard’s Hall in Washington on March 24, 1864, Gottschalk set aside front-row seats for Abraham and Mary Lincoln, and he brought in a violinist, a tenor, and a soprano for a varied program of Heinrich Ernst, Rossini, Beethoven, Verdi, Paganini, and Ferdinand Gumbert.

Lincoln never let on what he thought of the evening’s fare, including arias from The Barber of Seville and La Traviata, and the Andante from Beethoven’s “Pathétique Sonata.”  We can assume that he relished Gottschalk’s encore selection — “Union,” which brought down the house — as well as tenor Theodore Habelmann’s rendition of Gumbert’s “My Father’s Home.”  Brooks was insistent on this point: all songs evoking “the rapid flight of time, decay, the recollections of early days, were sure to make a deep impression” on the president.

Lincoln didn’t record his response to Gottschalk, but the pianist recorded his reaction to Lincoln.  “Remarkably ugly,” he wrote in his diary.  In spite of the president’s looks (and failure to wear dress gloves), Gottschalk thought Lincoln conveyed an “intelligent air.”  And his eyes exuded “goodness and mildness.”

That memorable evening spent entertaining Lincoln and other dignitaries (including William Seward) was apparently the last time Gottschalk laid eyes on him.  But it was not the last time he played his “Union” for him. 

Eleven months later, on April 23, 1865, the performer was headed to San Francisco for a series of concerts.  He’d left New York City on April 3, sailing south for Panama on the mail steamer Ariel.  Just before departure, the passengers had heard the latest news from Virginia: Petersburg had fallen to Union forces.  That was the last North American report they would receive until April 23.

On the 23rd, having already crossed the isthmus by train, they were gliding north along the Mexican coast on a much larger steamer, the Constitution.  Among the 400 passengers were Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, a group of Italian singers, and opera star Adelaide Phillips.

Lincoln had heard her perform in New York City in February 1861 at the first opera he ever attended, Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera.  On that occasion Lincoln had arrived late at the Academy of Music and slipped quietly into his seat.  As soon as the curtain fell on Act One, people began chanting “Lincoln! Lincoln!,” and as he rose for a bow, Phillips and the other singers serenaded him with “The Star Spangled Banner.”

As the Constitution steamed northward on April 23, a southbound ship, The Golden City, hailed it, and its captain came aboard to deliver some grim news.  Lincoln had been murdered more than a week before.  Passengers squeezed around a staircase and begged the captain for details.  Some refused to believe his story without newspaper proof.  Apparently anticipating that reaction, he had brought a newspaper with him.  Immediately a passenger was delegated to climb the rigging above the spacious deck and read from the paper in the loudest voice he could muster.

Theodore M. Brown wrote one of the most widely performed new dirges when Lincoln died.

Back on the mainland, Lincoln’s body was lying in state in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and dozens of composers, including T. M. Brown, were hard at work on original funeral dirges in the martyr’s honor.  Gottschalk’s friend George Root completed his “Farewell Father, Friend, and Guardian,” the best known of them all, in time for it to be performed in Chicago when Lincoln’s body lay in state there on May 1.

Aboard ship in the Pacific on April 23, Louis Gottschalk and Adelaide Phillips, along with the rest of the passengers, were just starting to mourn.  The faces of crewmembers, Gottschalk noticed, were smeared from the tears they’d been wiping away.  Passengers, like Justice Field, sat alone or in groups quietly weeping, their heads in their hands.

The following evening, Field presided over a general meeting to draw up and endorse the requisite resolutions.  Gottschalk summed them up: “fidelity to the Government, respect for the memory of the great and good Lincoln, and horror for the execrable act” of the assassin.  He remembered having once seen John Wilkes Booth in a play in Cleveland: “beautiful features,” he recalled, but “a sinister expression” and indeed “something deadly in his look.”

With the resolutions approved, Gottschalk moved to the ship’s piano to accompany the Italian singers in a performance of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  Then he played for Adelaide Phillips as she once again sang “The Star Spangled Banner” for Lincoln.  To finish the ceremony he performed his signature work, “Union,” as he had at Willard’s when Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln sat only a few yards away.

Gottschalk did one more thing for Lincoln: he admonished himself for having mocked the president’s looks and disparaged his evening dress.  “Yesterday his detractors were ridiculing his large hands without gloves, his large feet, his bluntness; today this type we found grotesque appears to us on the threshold of immortality, and we understand by the universality of our grief what future generations will see in him.”

On April 16, 1865, European newspapers published some “decisive news from the United States,” as Le Temps in Paris phrased it.  You’d think the decisive news on that date would have been the assassination and death of Abraham Lincoln, the world-shaking event that occurred during the night and early morning of April 14-15. 

But in early 1865 no transatlantic telegraphic cable linked the U.S. to Britain or the continent.  American news took almost two weeks to reach England by ship.  From London it could be relayed quickly to Europe and on to Constantinople, Teheran, and other capitals. The “decisive news” announced to European readers on April 16 concerned an American event of April 3:  the fall of Richmond to Union troops.

When Europeans finally got wind of the assassination on April 26, Lincoln had been dead for 12 days and his funeral train was rolling through western New York on its way to Springfield.  The next day, mourners deluged American consular buildings across Europe.

In Paris thousands of French people, mainly students, pressed toward the U.S. mission.  The police blocked their path, fearful that a large, spontaneously formed crowd might prove unruly.  Only a few small delegations were allowed in to offer their sympathies to American officials.

Within days U.S. diplomats in city after city were greeting delegations of mourners.  In Constantinople, various ethnic groups — Armenians, Greeks, and Italians among them — arrived at the U.S. legation to express their condolences.  Hundreds were wearing black mourning badges and carrying Greek or Armenian flags.  One delegation brought a framed photo of Lincoln decorated with laurel.

In France, where the Second Republic had been toppled by Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851, public manifestations of affection for Lincoln were not permitted, since republicans saw him as a beacon of hope for anti-monarchists everywhere.

Yet in the days ahead the French republican press gave detailed coverage to the American funeral events, following the progress of the funeral train from city to city and editorially elevating Lincoln to the company of the immortals— “the battalion of Plutarch,” as one paper put it.

Portrait of Lincoln in silk, 9 inches tall, made in Lyon, France, 1865

This print with no identifying caption — in the collection of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum — shows that Lincoln’s image as well as name were recognized by many Europeans.

Le Temps hailed his individual exploits, and shrewdly slipped in an endorsement of the American republican way of life as the model for all nations:

“His life is one of the most striking examples of what intelligence, work, perseverance, honesty, and common sense can do in a society devoted to all the free expressions of individual activity, and profoundly imbued with the democratic Spirit.”

Americans residing in France tried their best to grieve there, just as they would have done at home.  The first step in public mourning for a civic hero like Lincoln involved assembling citizens in a public place to honor the “illustrious dead.”  The crowd would listen to eulogies and endorse heartfelt resolutions drawn up by a committee of dignitaries.

But the French police looked askance at large American gatherings as much as at French ones.  So a committee of nine Americans privately circulated a letter articulating their feelings about Lincoln, got several hundred of their countrymen to sign it, and handed it over to the American consul-general.

“Already the world is claiming for itself this last martyr to the cause of freedom,” they wrote, “and Abraham Lincoln has taken his place among the moral constellations which shall impart light and life to all coming generations.”

Meanwhile, a group of French republicans, including novelist-poet Victor Hugo and historian Jules Michelet, organized a campaign to spread the republican gospel by raising a subscription among working people for an elegant monument to Lincoln: a small, intricately designed gold Médaille to be presented to Mary Lincoln. 

Ordinary citizens across France were asked to donate 10 centimes each for the medal.  In the end, despite a police campaign to interfere with the subscription, 40,000 French people participated, and Mrs. Lincoln gratefully accepted the gift almost two years after her husband’s death.

On its front side the medal said, “LINCOLN, an honest man, abolished slavery, saved the republic, and was assassinated the 14^th of April, 1865.”

And on the back it said, “Dedicated by the French democracy to LINCOLN, twice elected President of the United States.  Liberty!  Equality!  Fraternity!” 

(You can see the medal at http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/reconstruction/section1/section1_06.html)

“The death of Lincoln,” U.S. Consul-General John Bigelow observed, “is destined to work a radical change in the Constitution of France.”  Perhaps in some small way it did help prepare the ground for the Third Republic, inaugurated in 1870 after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

Whatever its impact on the future, Lincoln’s death provoked an outpouring of sentiment for him across Europe in 1865, lifting him up as a vital symbolic face of republican liberty. 

It was “difficult to imagine,” concluded Bigelow, “the enthusiasm which his name inspires among the masses of Europe at this moment … the death of no man has ever occurred that awakened such prompt and universal sympathy at once among his own country people and among foreign nations.”

   Today this seems an irrelevant or tactless question to ask about any public official.  Harping on a person’s looks is a sign of small-mindedness.  Politicians trying to take down their opponents in 2010 don’t make fun of their physical appearance.  Voters revile ad hominem or ad feminem nastiness. 

   Nowadays it’s hard to find a politician whom anyone would consider ugly in the first place.  After television conquered the land in the 1950s, good looks become a virtual qualification for office.  Some people in the 1960s thought LBJ looked ugly, and happily voted for him.  Could a politician considered unattractive get elected president today?  Who knows?  He or she might face a tough time getting into politics at all.

   It’s hard for us in the 2000s to figure out why so many people in the 1800s thought Lincoln was ugly.  He doesn’t look so bad in the pictures Brady or Gardner took of him.  But even after the assassination — when you’d think people would have stopped assessing his physical attributes — eulogists and mourners kept right on calling him ugly.  A few people, like William Herndon, his former law partner in Springfield, went out of their way to insist Lincoln wasn’t ugly at all, just “homely.”  But before and after his death, friends and foes alike kept remarking on how unlovely he was.

   Lincoln’s Democratic detractors didn’t just dwell on his unattractiveness; they often found him repulsive.  Colonel Charles Wainwright, scion of the old Hudson River elite, saw the president and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton at the opera in Washington, D.C., in 1862, and he tied Lincoln’s ugliness to his unrefined behavior: 

   “It would be hard work to find the great man in his face or figure,” Wainwright wrote in his diary, “and he is infinitely uglier than any of his pictures.  When the audience rose and cheered on his entry, instead of coming forward and bowing like a gentleman, he sat down, stuck his head out over the edge of the box, and grinned like a great baboon.  I was ashamed to think that such a gawk was President of the United States.”

   (Wainwright didn’t think much of Stanton’s looks either, describing him as “a long-haired, fat, oily, politician-looking man.”)

   Walt Whitman, one of Lincoln’s biggest boosters, agreed with Wainwright about the president’s unprepossessing looks.  But in Whitman’s eyes, Lincoln’s ugliness made him all the more endearing:

   “He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.”

   One reason people across the political spectrum felt so free to call Lincoln ugly was that he happily led the way.  He called himself ugly, a politically deft course to take.  Self-flattery loses votes; self-deprecation wins them.  Politics aside, Lincoln was a big fan of popular humor, which until recently found “fat” jokes and “ugly” jokes hilarious.  He’d likely have fallen over in hysterics if he’d ever gotten to hear any of Rodney Dangerfield’s ‘I was such an ugly baby’ lines (still available online).

   A lot of people fell over listening to Lincoln tell jokes, and one of his favorites, according to painter Francis Carpenter, concerned his looks:

   “In the days when I used to be ‘on the circuit,’” Carpenter reported Lincoln saying, “I was once accosted in the cars by a stranger, who said ‘Excuse me sir, but I have an article in my possession which belongs to you.’  ‘How is that?’ I asked, considerably astonished.  The stranger took a jack-knife from his pocket.  ‘This knife,’ said he, ‘was placed in my hands some years ago, with the injunction that I was to keep it until I found a man uglier than myself.  I have carried it from that time to this.  Allow me now to say, sir, that I think you are fairly entitled to the property.’” 

   Chances are that Carpenter attributed this joke to Lincoln without ever having heard him actually utter it.  A version of it was published in a London jest book in 1826, when Lincoln turned seventeen.  But even if Lincoln never said it, Carpenter knew his readers in 1866 would smile, realizing it fit Lincoln to a T.  They’d heard for a very long time of his delight in cutting up his appearance.

   In effect, then, Lincoln encouraged his friends to make fun of his looks by making fun of them himself.  But there’s another big reason why so many people gladly joined in.  It let them magnify the contrast between his face at rest (ugly) and his face in motion (entrancing).  

   “When in repose,” journalist Donn Piatt recalled after Lincoln’s death, “his face was dull, heavy, and repellent.  It brightened like a lit lantern when animated.  His dull eyes would fairly sparkle with fun, or express as kindly a look as I ever saw, when moved by some matter of human interest.”

   Calling Lincoln ugly, in other words, was part of a tried-and-true, before-and-after formula.  However gloomy he might appear (ugly), he was always one joke away from slapping his knee and lighting up the room (transfigured).  By repeating how awful he looked initially, people were describing something real about his character: his charismatic charm kept erupting out of nowhere, catching them by surprise.

Barnard’s ‘Lincoln the Laborer’ of 1917, barred from London and placed in Manchester, England

   Maybe this is the reason Robert Lincoln, the president’s son, so disliked this early-20^th-century George Grey Barnard statue of his father (the photograph is from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library’s collection).  It froze him in the first half of the before-and-after formula.  Robert knew his father could appear downcast and dour.  But cementing him in a look of that sort — his face locked in a glazed stare, his arms hanging stiffly across his chest — missed his most essential physical qualities: motion and transformation.  Lincoln’s character was too volatile to be captured in such a one-sided pose.  (One leading collector dubbed the Barnard statue the “stomach-ache Lincoln.”)

   Lincoln knew he wasn’t the handsomest man in town, and he rose in most people’s estimation by frankly admitting it.  He laughed off the whole ugliness issue.  But occasionally he got serious about the common insinuation that he didn’t look like a gentleman.  Speaking in Springfield on July 17, 1858, as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, he let the audience know that surfaces didn’t count in judging a person’s true refinement.

   He’d embarked on his campaign against Stephen Douglas, he said, “with the intention of conducting it strictly as a gentleman, in substance at least, if not in the outside polish.  The latter I shall never be, but that which constitutes the inside of a gentleman I hope I understand, and am not less inclined to practice than others. [Cheers.]”

        Just a week and a half before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln spent a whirlwind two days visiting Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia.  He’d already been enjoying himself for over a week at City Point, General Grant’s headquarters on the James River — cruising on the water with his son Tad, brushing shoulders with the troops, crafting telegrams on the state of the fighting, and cabling them back to the War Department.  But the side trips to Petersburg and Richmond seem to have given him a special thrill. 

        Unfortunately for us, he never got the chance to reflect on what those visits of April 3 and 4, 1865, meant to him, or to disclose exactly why he went.  We’re left with a few journalists’ dispatches and some later recollections of people who made the trips with him.  Those sources are not all equally reliable, but taken together they affirm an undeniable fact: in both cities Lincoln encountered exuberant throngs of African Americans, and the experience moved him deeply.

        Imagine the moment for them: this was the first full day of their de facto emancipation.  Union troops had retaken Petersburg on April 2 and Richmond on April 3, putting an end to slavery on the ground, though legal emancipation would come later.  Many slaves had cherished Lincoln’s name since 1863, if not earlier, turning him into an icon years before most northerners did.  And in Petersburg and Richmond, as thousands of slaves rejoiced over the end of their bondage, who should show up in the flesh but the liberator himself!  They didn’t hide their euphoria.  Northern soldiers and correspondents got to witness an infectious, delirious outpouring of dance and song. 

        And imagine the moment for Lincoln: having always abhorred slavery, while tolerating it where it was constitutionally protected, he got to savor the sights and sounds of emancipation as an event unfolding in real time.  For years he’d been preoccupied with emancipation as a political and military matter, but now it was exploding all around him, with jubilant slaves praising him and Jesus for ending their oppression.

        In Petersburg, 15 miles southwest of City Point and 30 miles south of Richmond, the streets were “alive with negroes,” Admiral David Porter later remembered, “crazy to see their savior, as they called the president.”  In Richmond, Charles Coffin of the Boston Journal was accidentally standing on the very dock where Lincoln ended up stepping ashore.  “There was a sudden shout” from black people nearby, as Coffin wrote that night.  “They crowded round the President … Such a hurly-burly — such wild, indescribable ecstatic joy I [had] never witnessed.” 

        Coffin is a more reliable witness than Porter, since his report was filed immediately, while Porter’s memories were published two decades later.  Coffin, too, wrote later accounts, inflating his closeness to the president as the years went by.  In his 1865 dispatch he said “a coloured man acted as guide” for the president when Lincoln left the dock on foot for Union army headquarters (in the former Confederate White House, now the Museum of the Confederacy).

        But in an 1881 book, Coffin claimed that he was the one who showed Lincoln the path to “Jeff Davis’s mansion.”  And in 1885 he went even further: now he said Lincoln yelled out to him before reaching shore, asking Coffin to kindly lead the way.  Memory plays tricks as time passes, and the tricks in memories of Lincoln usually magnify the importance of the person doing the remembering.

        Admiral David Porter accompanied Lincoln to both Petersburg and Richmond in 1865, and in his 1886 memoir (after he had become an aspiring fiction writer), he couldn’t resist concocting a dramatic scene, complete with detailed dialogue.  He remembered a group of 12 black laborers who had knelt before Lincoln on the dock “to kiss the hem of his garments.”  Porter played that memory into a carefully scripted and staged event, with Lincoln lecturing the black workers on the proper behavior for citizens of a republic. 

        “Don’t kneel to me,” Lincoln scolds.  “That is not right.  You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.  I am but God’s humble instrument; but you may rest assured that as long as I live no one shall put a shackle on your limbs, and you shall have all the rights which God has given to every other free citizen of this Republic.”

        If Lincoln did deliver such a sermonette just after completing an arduous river journey, Porter couldn’t possibly have remembered the exact language of it.  But there’s good reason to doubt Lincoln made any lofty, well-crafted remarks at this point in his day.  He would have had to quiet the dockside uproar of whooping and hollering.  And if the African Americans on the dock had gotten to hear such a polished and memorable reflection, Charles Coffin would likely have noticed it, too, and reported it.

        Lincoln may have given a short speech to some African Americans later that afternoon at Capitol Square — during his jaunt around town in a “carriage-and-four” — and those remarks may have resembled Porter’s “Don’t kneel to me” speech.  A southern white girl named Lelian Cook didn’t hear what Lincoln said at the square, but she wrote in her diary on that day that he had addressed “the colored people” there, “telling them they were free, and had no master now but God.”

        This recently colorized image in the collection of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library shows Lincoln riding off on his city tour (he was escorted by a detail of African-American troops).  As a black-and-white engraving it first appeared on the front page of the weekly Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper’s issue of April 22, 1865. 

        Note the well-dressed white southerners on the right, suggesting to us a universal welcome for Lincoln from everyone in Richmond.  But reports in 1865 emphasized that the whites in the crowd (one-third of the whole, said Coffin) were people of modest means.  Well-heeled Richmond whites stayed home.  By and large, wrote Thomas Morris Chester, an African-American reporter for the Philadelphia Press, the whites either “stood motionless upon their steps” or “peeped through the window-blinds.”

       We’re left wondering why Lincoln went to Richmond at all, one day after his grueling round trip to Petersburg by train and on horseback.  There are many possible reasons.  One of them stands out when Coffin’s dispatch and Porter’s memoir are combined.  Lincoln had likely been bowled over by witnessing the moment of emancipation in Petersburg.  This life-long hater of slavery may have wanted to re-create that experience on a larger scale in Richmond the following day.  If so, he got his wish.

        His three-quarter-mile walk from the dock to Union army headquarters amounted to a mass movement of emancipated humanity, with Lincoln towering over the other marchers in his tall, silk hat.  The ecstatic throng that swept him up from Governor to Broad, and out Twelfth to Marshall, included, by Coffin’s later guess, about 2,000 African Americans.

        It was a dusty trek, and Lincoln perspired freely under the baking sun.  At one point he stopped to rest, and an old black man approached him.  The man bowed, doffed his hat, and said, “May the good Lord bless you, President Lincoln.”  Lincoln bowed and doffed his hat in return.  Coffin was floored by the president’s simple act of reciprocity.  “A death-blow to chivalry,” Coffin called it, “and a mortal wound to caste.”

        One hopes that Lincoln overheard some of the other comments being made about him that afternoon.  “I know that I am free,” an old black woman said in Chester’s presence, “for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him.”

        Another “good old colored female” offered her hero a giddily protective bit of advice as the day came to a close.  She was standing on the wharf when Lincoln boarded a cutter to take him out to David Porter’s flagship on the James River, where he would spend the night.  The cutter pushed off, the crowd cheered, and she hollered, “Don’t drown, Massa Abe, for God’s sake!”

        In his dispatch composed that night, Coffin said Lincoln had indeed been listening to the words that filled the air that day.  He told his readers to remember “the jubilant cries, the countenances beaming with unspeakable joy, the tossing up of caps … free men henceforth and forever, their bonds cut asunder in an hour — men from whose limbs the chains fell yesterday morning.”  No wonder that Lincoln “felt his soul stirred; that the tears almost came to his eyes as he heard the thanksgivings to God and Jesus, and the blessings uttered for him from thankful hearts.”

        The Boston Journal published those words on April 10, 1865 (afterwards they were widely reprinted).  Five days later Lincoln was dead, primed for a fame that drew on warm memories of his afternoon trek in Richmond.

– Thanks to historian Mike Gorman of the National Park Service for sharing with me his fine research on Lincoln’s day in Richmond.

     One of the pleasures of studying history is figuring out which things about the past we know for sure, and which we don’t.  If you study history for a living you get used to being less than certain about many important facts.  Take the famous comment attributed to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton as he stood weeping beside Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed on the rainy Saturday morning of April 15, 1865.  “Now he belongs to the ages,” Stanton is supposed to have said.  For the entire 20^th century virtually all Lincoln historians took for granted that the Secretary had indeed uttered the word “ages.”  No fact seemed more certain.  Lincoln’s personal secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, in their 1890 biography of the man they had endearingly called “the tycoon,” had lent their authority to the phrase “now he belongs to the ages.”  And in 1865 none other than John Hay had stood beside Lincoln’s deathbed just as Stanton had done.  What could be more certain than words presumably spoken in the hearing of John Hay and the other friends and associates of Lincoln gathered around his deathbed?    

     But in the 21^st century several historians have mounted a challenge to “ages,” claiming that Stanton actually said “now he belongs to the angels.”  There were in fact rumors in the early 20^th century that Stanton perhaps had spoken the word “angels,” not “ages,” but no documentary evidence ever emerged to convert the rumors into historical fact.  Some recent “angels” advocates have pointed to a written work from 1965 as their authority for “angels”:  the book Twenty Days, an excellent collection of Lincoln assassination photographs published by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr.  But as photo historians, not phrase historians, the Kunhardts didn’t pay close enough attention to their textual sources, or alert their readers to where they’d found their sources.

They asserted that James Tanner – a young Civil War amputee who had served as Secretary Stanton’s stenographer at Lincoln’s deathbed — had written a first-hand account of the event and had remembered that Stanton said “angels.”  They excerpted  Tanner’s short memoir in Twenty Days, but they didn’t identify its date of publication or archival location.  We can tell by reading even a few lines of their excerpt that they were quoting a well-known Tanner document entitled “The Passing of Lincoln.”  But the original text of “The Passing of Lincoln” actually says “ages,” not “angels.”  A few years before his death in 1927, Tanner published that recollection in several places, including the magazine National Republic (pictured here).  Every time he published his recollection, he used “ages.” 

     The Abraham Lincoln Presidential library owns a signed copy of Tanner’s original six-page manuscript of “The Passing of Lincoln,” as well as a copy of the pamphlet edition published by the Government Printing Office in 1926 (after it had appeared in the Congressional Record).  Both copies, and the Congressional Record, give “ages,” not “angels.”  It is hard to believe the Kunhardts could have miscopied such a crucial word in Tanner’s original text.  It seems more likely they were working from an unidentified newspaper clipping that had already transposed Tanner’s “ages” into “angels.”

     The lesson for historians is never to accept the word of a later source like the Kunhardts’ book when an earlier source is available to be checked.  Their assertion of “angels” ran up against a 75-year historians’ consensus on “ages.”  Historians writing after 1965 were duty-bound to find the Tanner text excerpted by the Kunhardts and to confirm that they had copied it correctly in Twenty Days. 

     But the same principle of verifying the textual foundation for historical claims applies to the “ages” usage too.  How sure can we be that Stanton ever intoned the words “Now he belongs to the ages” at Lincoln’s deathbed?  Is John Hay’s apparent recollection of those words, published in 1890, an adequate foundation for such a claim?  It would make Hay’s ”Now he belongs to the ages” much more credible if there was a single other deathbed observer who heard Stanton utter some version of that phrase, and said so at the time.  But it turns out there is no confirmation of those words from anyone else present at the deathbed.  No one heard Stanton emit any memorial phrase for Lincoln.

     A New York Herald reporter, pencil in hand, was present in the death chamber when Lincoln passed away, and the detailed dispatch he telegraphed to New York mentioned nothing about Stanton uttering any such phrase.  The first reference to Stanton’s “Now he belongs to the ages” came a full quarter-century later, in Nicolay and Hay’s 1890 biography.

     Unless new evidence comes to light, we’ll never be sure what, if anything, Stanton said when Lincoln died.  As Adam Gopnik shrewdly suggested in his 2009 book Angels and Ages, Secretary Stanton, his chest heaving with grief at half-past seven on April 15, 1865, could easily have muttered “ages,” or “angels,” or both.  And whatever he said could have been missed by the others as he choked on whatever words were struggling to come out of his mouth.

     Or maybe he said nothing then, and decided months or years later (he died in 1869) that in the mental fog and fatigue of April 15 he had thought some version of the “ages” phrase but failed to voice it.  Perhaps he realized that “Now he belongs to the ages” would still make a fitting benediction retroactively, since the martyred president was already sure to endure in the hearts of his fellow citizens.  Stanton could have reported his realization to John Hay, and Hay could have kept it in mind until the 1880s, when he and Nicolay were crafting their “tycoon’s” biography.

     “Ages” certainly rests on dubious foundations, but at least John Hay and James Tanner, who both vouched for it eventually, had been present at Lincoln’s deathbed.  As far as we know, no deathbed mourners or observers ever vouched for “angels.”  That makes the case for “ages,” weak as it may be, much stronger than the case for “angels.”  But there’s no reason for historians to pose as having attained certainty on what Stanton said.  It’s better to admit that “ages” rests on shaky ground, and trust that readers won’t jump to “angels,” which rests on no ground at all.  “Angels” is wafting in the ether.

     Of course in April 1865 northerners and southern blacks didn’t need Stanton to tell them that Lincoln belonged to the ages.  They already knew it.  And the religious majority among them– including Secretary of War Edwin Stanton– knew very well that Lincoln belonged to the angels too.