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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple of years ago I gave a public lecture on Lincoln’s last days in 1865.  Following the discussion period, as I was leaving the auditorium, a woman approached me to ask one more question.  She hadn’t broached the subject earlier, she said, because it was so distant from my topic.  “Did Lincoln,” she wondered, “really get syphilis when he was a young man?”

I was fascinated that this issue was on her mind, and asked her where she’d first heard about it.  “In one of my medical school textbooks,” she replied.  She couldn’t remember if the textbook treated the syphilis story as a fact, or as a speculation.

I told her that the subject had been widely discussed in the 1980s, when Gore Vidal featured it in his Lincoln: A Novel (1984).  Major historians weighed in at the time to say that the evidence for Lincoln’s having contracted syphilis was inconclusive at best.

After Vidal’s death in summer 2012, I went back to his novel and his shorter writings on Lincoln to try to figure out why he’d dwelt so doggedly on the syphilis idea.  It soon became clear that he’d seized upon it as the first salvo in a campaign to destroy Lincoln’s image as a “saint,” to reduce him to the moral status of a very ordinary man of his times.

The word “syphilis” still conjured up menacing associations in the 1980s, as it had in the 19^th century.  Even the possibility that he had carried the disease — which in its long latency period might have infected Mary Lincoln, and, through her, their children — could help tarnish his reputation as a hero of uncommon virtue.  Vidal played up the devastating implications for Lincoln’s family members as much as he did the original “devilish passion.”

Did Lincoln have the ….? Herndon and Vidal thought so. Artwork by Douglas Volk, 1928.

The “Sandburg-Mt. Rushmore” approach to Lincoln, said Vidal, had blocked a true grasp of his significance.  Blighting the saint would open people’s eyes: the mythic selfless emancipator was actually an aggressive empire-builder.

The politically nimble Lincoln had done much more, said Vidal, than “save” the Union from being split in two.  He had deepened the hold of the union, making the nation, not the states, the sovereign power for all Americans.  Decades after his death, with the holy Lincoln as its chief icon, the imperial American state got to have its cake and eat it too, dominating much of the international order while posing as the one power that acted “with malice toward none and charity for all” other nations.

But where did Vidal get the syphilis story in the first place?  It came from Lincoln’s former law partner William Herndon, who wrote privately in 1891, “Lincoln had, when a mere boy, the syphilis…  About the year 1835-36 Mr. Lincoln went to Beardstown and during a devilish passion had connection with a girl and caught the disease.”

Herndon claimed to have heard those words from Lincoln’s own lips, but he didn’t specify when he’d heard it.  “Old and infirm,” by his own admission, when he wrote the 1891 letter — he died two months later — Herndon sometimes got mixed up about what he’d heard directly from his former partner, what he’d heard from others, and what he’d inferred all by himself.  (In 1889, Herndon said Lincoln had told him that he’d left his “heart” buried in Ann Rutledge’s grave; in 1866, Herndon claimed “a friend” had told him that; some evidence suggests he came up with it himself.  See my blog post of Nov. 30, 2011.)

That doesn’t mean Herndon was confused in this instance, but the reliability of the syphilis tale has been widely questioned.  In his book We Are Lincoln Men (2003), David Herbert Donald concluded that a recollection written down “more than fifty years after Lincoln’s alleged escapade and more than twenty years after his death” could only stand if supported by “confirmatory evidence.”

Herndon may have anticipated the doubts that would greet his story.  “Lincoln told me this,” he wrote to Weik, “and in a moment of folly I made a note of it in my mind…”  In other words, it would have been better for all concerned if he’d simply forgotten about it.  But he’d done what came naturally to him: remembered exactly what he’d been told, and remembered it for all time.  Now he could only kick himself for being such an unyielding servant of the truth.

With Lincoln’s syphilis engraved in his memory as a fact, Herndon had tried to keep it a secret.  But now, approaching his end, he felt compelled to divulge it.  He feared that someone, after his death, might discover the fact and wrongly take it as proof that Abraham had been unfaithful to Mary.  Herndon was absolutely certain that Lincoln had been “true as steel to his wife.”  He’d contracted his case of syphilis six or seven years before his marriage.

The irony of the syphilis tale is that Herndon’s goal — protecting the memory of Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s marital purity — came at the cost of swearing to Lincoln’s pre-marital impurity.  Thankfully, he managed to keep quiet about all this until almost a decade after Mary Lincoln’s death in 1882.  Having suffered after 1866 from Herndon’s wild speculation about her husband’s heart — that after Ann Rutledge’s death in 1835 he had never truly loved another woman — she was spared having to reckon with Herndon’s report about Lincoln’s infected body.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the current spotlight on Lincoln actors Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, and Tommy Lee Jones — all three of them up for Oscars on Sunday night, Feb. 24th — it’s easy to overlook the (now) 88-year-old Hal Holbrook, who plays Preston Blair, Sr., in the film.  When Steven Spielberg signed the actor for this small part, he was honoring the hardy impersonator of Mark Twain and the 1976 winner of an Emmy Award for his lead role in the NBC mini-series “Sandburg’s Lincoln.”

By the time producer David Wolper cast him as Lincoln, Holbrook had already been famous for two decades.  His tours as the curmudgeonly Twain had begun in the early 1950s, and by evoking his character on stage, Holbrook became an American institution.

But he fretted about being typecast for life as the warmly cynical sage in his signature white coat.  In the 1960s he sought out other parts, and earned a turn as Lincoln in the 1963 off-Broadway revival of Robert Sherwood’s “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.”

Raymond Massey, the 1940 ‘Lincoln’

During that run, Ed Sullivan showcased him on CBS for Lincoln’s birthday.  More than 10 million people tuned in as he performed the central Lincoln “speech” from the play, a monologue made memorable by Raymond Massey in the original theater production and in the 1940 film.

The real Lincoln never delivered this speech.  It’s a medley drawn from several Lincoln pieces, with a few fictional twists to adapt it to the Depression and the fight against fascism in the 1930s.  Here is a seven-minute clip of Massey’s film speech:

Reciting the speech on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1963 gave Holbrook instant credibility as a Lincoln interpreter, and it may have put him on David Wolper’s radar screen.  A decade later, Wolper signed him to play “Sandburg’s Lincoln,” and the six 50-minute installments aired at irregular intervals from late 1974 to early 1976.  (The show became available on DVD about two years ago.)

The series suffered from frequently wooden plots, static staging, and bland dialogue, but Holbrook’s physical appearance helped keep many viewers engaged.  He didn’t look exactly like Lincoln, but that made him all the more intriguing.

Thanks to veteran make-up artist Charles Schram’s painstaking work — Holbrook sat motionless for three hours every morning as Schram applied seven rubber “appliances” to his face — Holbrook looked something like Lincoln.   He looked enough like Lincoln to make a viewer wonder where exactly the likeness lay, and whether more of it might turn up in the next scene.

Drawing on his Mark Twain persona, Holbrook gave Lincoln a folksy, chatterbox personality that spiced up the undistinguished writing.  This garrulous president was never at a loss for words.  The scripts highlighted the downhome storyteller, the wheeler-dealer politician, the patient husband and father, and the resolute warrior who suffered the loss of every dead soldier.  Left out of this mix were the quiet, contemplative, self-concealing man, and the writer of great passages on freedom and equality.

In the social and political tinderbox of the early-to-mid 1970s, with the American population split over Vietnam and race relations, “Sandburg’s Lincoln” avoided the subject of race, and barely mentioned the word “slavery.”  It left aside the president’s famous words about equality and freedom.  In a one-minute excerpt from the First Inaugural, Lincoln pleaded for national unity — knowing full well that obtaining it would require a minor miracle, the return of “the better angels of our nature.”

Carl Sandburg died in 1967.  Had he lived to see “Sandburg’s Lincoln,” he’d have been shocked by its wholesale disregard of emancipation.  The episode entitled “Unwilling Warrior,” which aired in September 1975, actually showed Lincoln arriving in Richmond, Virginia, on April 4, 1865, for his three-quarter-mile walk to the newly captured Confederate White House.  Writing emancipation out of this historic moment required a diligent effort.

Describing the scene in Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Sandburg celebrated the dense crowds of “black folk, some silent and awe-struck, others turning somersaults and yelling with joy as though their voices and bodies could never tell what they wanted to tell… . As they reached hands toward him in greeting and salute,” Lincoln welcomed them to their first day of de facto freedom.

Holbrook’s Lincoln walks through deserted streets on his way to the Confederate White House.  He doesn’t notice two black men cowering in a doorway, for they are too afraid to show themselves.  Lincoln’s mind is focused on the imminent end of the fighting.  Once ensconced in Jefferson Davis’s chair, and refreshed with a drink of water, he sighs gratefully, “it’s over.”

Sandburg would have winced at the series’ excising of emancipation from the moment of reunion.  But he would have loved the main thread of “Sandburg’s Lincoln”: Hal Holbrook’s depiction of the savvy Midwestern politician who conquered the East and never forgot his roots in the West.

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

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

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

Bring your magnifying glass, or your microscope

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

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

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

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

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

Part of the power of Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln comes from screenwriter Tony Kushner’s skill at navigating the line between history and fiction.  He followed the example of James Agee, the novelist and film critic who wrote five half-hour teleplays on Lincoln for the CBS program “Omnibus” in 1952-1953.  Agee laid down the principle of “reasonable conjecture” to guide the dramatist in creating a gripping story that brought Lincoln alive on the screen.

Agee defined “reasonable conjecture” as speculation based on facts, but not fenced in by them.  Getting at the deepest truths about Lincoln required both dramatic license and dramatic discipline: familiarizing yourself with the available facts before rearranging them and supplementing them to make the story work.  Invented scenes and dialogue were justified if they contravened no known facts and tried to capture the life of Lincoln as he’d lived it.

In 1955, “Omnibus” aired “Mr. Lincoln,” a one-hour abridgement of Agee’s five films. (The hour is available on DVD from The Archive of American Television.)  The first scene shows the principle of “reasonable conjecture” in action.  It’s April 10, 1865, and we find ourselves inside the sun-drenched Washington, D.C., studio of photographer Alexander Gardner.  The film camera is focused on its ancestor, Gardner’s studio camera perched atop its tripod.

We see actor Royal Dano from the back as Gardner prepares his shot, joking about how the Appomattox surrender has made Lincoln do something for the first time: smile for a photographer.  Gradually the “Omnibus” camera zooms in on the studio camera, passing by Lincoln’s shoulder as Gardner instructs him to turn his head slightly to the right.  Gardner removes the lens cap, and we see what he sees: the ever so slight grin of contentment that the real Lincoln did allow Gardner to capture in the “cracked plate” photo of February 5, 1865.

This dialogue between Lincoln and Gardner is a fiction, but a fiction designed to expose a truth: the scores of photos we have of Lincoln miscommunicate his character.  They make him severe and solemn.  Long exposure times ruled out capturing his affability, not to speak of his hilarity.

By lingering on Gardner’s camera, and first showing Lincoln’s face as seen through the lens, Agee’s film addresses a second truth.  Photographs have decisively shaped our awareness of him.  Those of us born in Agee’s era (he died in 1955) almost certainly encountered Lincoln first through iconic images of wisdom, resilience, and patience, not through stories about his everyday human experiences.

It still takes a lot of convincing for many of us to believe that he ever missed the boat, gave up, lost his temper, or behaved as anything less than a perspicacious saint.  (Could he possibly have slapped his son Robert across the face, as Kushner’s script has it?  Never!  Could he have sunk into a depression so deep that he thought he had caused Ann Rutledge’s death, as Agee’s film has it?  Impossible!)

Spielberg’s Lincoln follows the lead of Agee’s “Mr. Lincoln” by introducing the star of the show from behind, and then moving the camera slowly past his shoulder before cutting to a front view of Lincoln sitting before us.  Daniel Day-Lewis is oddly situated, alone on a platform (perhaps a reviewing stand) as a few dozen soldiers mingle nearby before pushing off.

Lincoln bigger than life, if only on the billboard. (Photo by Richard Wightman Fox)

We expect Lincoln, perched on his wooden pedestal, to be the main speaker in this scene, but Kushner makes him the listener, as two young white soldiers and one black soldier recite portions of his year-old Gettysburg Address to him.  This exchange never happened.  But Kushner does double duty with it.  Lincoln is rattled by hearing his exact words spoken by the white soldiers.  He tries to make them stop, embarrassed by the memorized adulation.

Like Agee with the photograph, Kushner seems to be telling us viewers to let Lincoln come down from the pedestal we’ve placed him on.  We’re so busy venerating his image and his words that we’ve forgotten about the man.  It’s time to examine the actual emancipator.  As the black soldier finishes the recitation, speaking of “a new birth of freedom,” Lincoln is moved by his own words.  He hears the judgment in them.  He’s being challenged, not routinely praised.

Kushner shows he’ll also examine the man in relation to his wife.  The second Lincoln scene in his script mirrors the second scene in Agee’s.  They both put Mary and Abraham in a small, warmly lit White House room on an evening in 1865.  They’re relaxing together until conversation turns to an alarming dream Abraham has had.  Agee’s Lincoln recounts his (apocryphal) dead-president-in-the-White-House dream.  Kushner’s Lincoln tells the (factual) fast-moving-ship dream.  (See my post on “Lincoln’s Dreams, Authentic and Inauthentic,” Jan. 10, 2011, for the content of the dreams.)

Both authors invent a fictional tête-à-tête to disclose a basic truth about Abraham and Mary.  Each of them took dreams very seriously as hints of what might happen.  Kushner goes beyond the facts in tying the ship dream to the 13^th amendment (at least in Mary’s mind), but in doing so he brings out the common sensibility of two people usually thought of as opposites: crazy, impatient Mary, and rational, long-suffering Abraham.

Dreams helped Mary and Abraham establish their intimacy.  As she does in Kushner’s scene, Mary appears in real life to have taken on some of Abraham’s anxiety about his dreams.  Her readiness to absorb some of his worries let them feel close.  And that closeness gave him much-needed support as he got back to the daily grind of saving the union and advancing freedom for all.

As we enter the season of calculating income tax, one of the prized deductions remains donations to charitable organizations.  Typically these non-for-profit organizations host auctions as a source for raising revenue.  It is common to see items with celebrity autographs as the main attractions.

The use of celebrity status to raise money for worthy causes has a long history.  During the Civil War era, the United States Sanitary Commission held frequent events called by various names — Sanitary Fairs, Soldiers’ Fairs, etc. — to raise money for blankets,  medical, and sundry supplies for the soldiers.  Led by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, who had designed New York City’s Central Park, the United States Sanitary Commission established regional networks across the northern states to raise money for the war effort.

A couple of celebrity signatures from the ’60s.

The town of Springfield, Massachusetts, held a Soldiers’ Fair in December 1864 as part of the fund-raising efforts.  As was common, a fair newspaper, The Springfield Musket, was issued throughout the fair to list daily events.  One of the noteworthy items for auction was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Springfield Arsenal.”  Of greater interest was a letter sent by First Lady Mary Lincoln (which does not appear in Justin and Linda Turner’s compilation of her writings).  The text appeared in a January 1, 1865 Washington Sunday Chronicle newspaper article reprinting an article that first appeared in the Springfield (Mass.) Republican on December 30, 1864.  That text is provided in full:

“Mrs. as well as Mr. Lincoln wrote a letter for the Soldiers’ Fair in this city but Mrs. Lincoln’s has only just arrived.  It is addressed to Miss Isabel Clary, and will be raffled for, so that it is not too late, after all, to add to the receipts of the fair.  Ten dollars have been offered for it already, but refused.  Below is the letter, and we will add, for the benefit of those who may not see the original, that it is written on fine initial note paper, unruled, and the writing consequently sloping gently to the right:

                                                EXECUTIVE MANSION,  December 24.

Your letter of the 12^th instant has been received, and as it always affords me much pleasure to forward so laudable an object as the one mentioned in your note, I hasten to comply with your flattering request.  I most sincerely hope that your highest anticipations may be realized, giving you all that may be necessary to carry out plans which present not only a noble purpose, in the cause of our beloved and struggling country, but also a generous, humane, and great good, in the comfort of the brave and noble hearts battling for our glorious Union.  With heartfelt hope, I pray God speed you, and crown your efforts with success. 

                                                                                    Very truly yours,     Mary Lincoln”

Her husband’s response on Dec. 19th was more pro-forma, indicating that matters of state required him to remain in Washington.  However, Lincoln attended the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair in June 1864.  Among the celebrity items offered in Philadelphia were printed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, and John G. Nicolay.  Shrewd visitors would have seen the bargain of purchasing one at the sale price of ten dollars apiece.  Unfortunately, most people declined to purchase a copy, and many remained unsold.  Today, one of these Leland-Boker autographed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation will fetch well more than one million dollars at auction.

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

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

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

NOT William D. Herndon

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOT Mary Ann Todd

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

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

Daniel Day-Lewis, the four-time Best-Actor Oscar nominee and two-time winner (for My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood), has outdone himself in Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln.  Earlier big-studio Lincolns of the sound era — Walter Huston, Henry Fonda, and Raymond Massey — played Lincoln.  Day-Lewis manages somehow to embody him.

There’s never been a big-screen Lincoln remotely like this one: quick-witted and brooding, calculating and cheerful, logical and humorous, drawn to philosophical ruminating but ready to strike with resolve when he sees the chance, in early 1865, to abolish slavery once and for all by helping to push the resolution for a 13^th Amendment through the House of Representatives.

Day-Lewis will get his fifth Oscar nomination, and maybe his third Oscar.  Whether he picks up the Oscar or not, he has created a character as richly layered and warmly mysterious as the original Republican hero.

Director Steven Spielberg has said in interviews that he didn’t so much direct his male lead as get out of his way.  But he provided Day-Lewis with two accomplished stars — Sally Field as Mary Lincoln and Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens — and both of them bring out Day-Lewis’s crafty best in the most riveting scenes of the film.

The single other person most responsible for Day-Lewis’s performance is screenwriter Tony Kushner, whose script lets this Lincoln debate, meditate, joke, and out-reason everyone else.  Lincoln is the work of a dramatist used to writing Pulitzer Prize-winning words, as he did two decades ago for Angels in America.

In this 1865 revision of an older print, Lincoln’s head (center) has replaced pro-slavery John C. Calhoun’s head in the tableau of authors and defenders of the U.S. Constitution. Might Daniel Day-Lewis now replace Henry Fonda or Hal Holbrook as the best ‘Lincoln’?

Hence the film feels a lot like a stage play, or a film from the 1930s or 1940s.  Indoor verbal jousting trumps “action” by being the action.  But that’s a perfect choice for capturing the historical Lincoln, the champion wordsmith who adored the theater himself.

Some viewers will find the barrage of verbiage excessive, and yearn for Spielberg’s signature visual movie making.  They’ll have to get by on the comic relief supplied by Lincoln’s storytelling, and on some beautiful silent moments the president shares with his young son Tad.

When I first heard about Spielberg’s plan for a Lincoln movie, I wondered if the film would highlight the emancipator as much as it did the savior of the union.  And I hoped it would not depict Lincoln as such a tender man of charity that his wife Mary would be reduced to the needling, tempestuous thorn in his ever-saintly side.

The stakes were high.  A filmmaker of Spielberg’s stature would shape popular attitudes and beliefs about Lincoln the husband and Lincoln the leader for decades to come.  (Spoiler alert: what follows reveals plot details on both subjects, the Lincoln marriage and Lincoln the emancipator.)

I needn’t have worried.  Spielberg and Kushner, Day-Lewis and Field, have come through with balanced treatments on both scores.  Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field re-create the presidential couple’s tangled relationship in all its human fragility.  Like every other couple, they converse genially about one thing and another.  They debate the meaning of Abraham’s ominous “ship dream.”  They plan a “shindig” (public reception).  And they experience a joint emotional outburst, with Mary vilifying her husband and Abraham shouting her into submission.

The fight ends without reconciliation.  But gradually they realize that their sorrow over 11-year-old Willie’s death in 1862 has taken too huge a toll on their marriage.  Riding in their open carriage on the afternoon of April 14, 1865, they agree to try, at long last, to give up being the servants of their grief.

Meanwhile, Lincoln the emancipator gets his most resounding film portrayal ever.  The president cajoles Congressmen night and day to line up affirmative votes for the abolition amendment.  The film could have left Lincoln there, savoring the end of slavery.  Instead, the script goes out of its way to record the liberator’s final move, months later, on the subject of black freedom: publicly endorsing the vote for some African-American men in his last speech on April 11.

It’s early evening on April 14, 1865, and Lincoln is bantering with friends in a White House sitting room about the April 11 speech.  They note the criticism of it by Thaddeus Stevens, who was seeking the vote for all, not some, black men.

But House Speaker Schuyler Colfax commends the president for being the first chief executive in American history to endorse even limited black suffrage.  With that, a cheerful Lincoln sets off for Ford’s Theatre, telling his friends he has to depart, though he’d rather stay.

The film portrays such a vehement emancipator that one wishes Spielberg had let Lincoln out of the White House to celebrate the new era with the masses of African Americans who gave him and God the credit for freeing them.

Having shown Lincoln in Petersburg, Virginia, with General Grant on April 3, where the President reflects somberly on the military deaths he and Grant have caused, the film could easily have shown us Lincoln walking through Richmond the following day.  On that warm afternoon, with smoke still wafting over the city, thousands of slaves celebrated their first day of de facto freedom by walking alongside him, hailing the hero who had magically appeared in their midst.

Even a small glimpse of that scene could have revived our cultural memory of what used to be an iconic Lincoln event: the emancipator striding into the post-war world in the just-fallen capital of the Confederacy, shoulder to shoulder with the nation’s newly freed men and women.

The film does show Grant and Lee silently doffing their hats to one another after the surrender at Appomattox on April 9.  The Richmond moment could have set the stage for it: on April 4, as journalist Charles Coffin reported, Lincoln took off his hat and bowed silently to an elderly black man who had removed his own at the president’s approach.  Coffin summed up the majesty of that moment, calling the president’s bow “a death-shock to chivalry, and a mortal wound to caste.”

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

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

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

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

    95 Wall St., N.Y.

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                                                 Yours   Robert T. Lincoln
__

To Mr. Sherman                                              Chicago,  Dec. 26th 1865