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

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, due out in November 2012, may prove Oscar-worthy, given its stellar cast of previous Academy-Award winners: Daniel-Day Lewis and Sally Field as Abraham and Mary; Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens.  But three earlier biographical Lincoln features offered excellent acting too, and they all fared poorly come Oscar time.

Despite Walter Huston’s fine performance, D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930) received no nominations.  John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), starring Henry Fonda, could muster only a nomination for best Original Story, and it lost in that category to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  The sole Lincoln best-actor nominee — Raymond Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) — lost out to Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story.

On one occasion, however, the Motion Picture Academy did give a best-picture award to a Lincoln film.  The Oscar for best two-reel (20-minute) short subject of 1955 went to an unpretentious little documentary called The Face of Lincoln.  You can watch the video below.

The Face of Lincoln was a labor of love for sculptor Merrell Gage of the University of Southern California’s Department of Fine Arts.  Born in Topeka in 1892, he began sculpting Lincoln in 1916.  The Seated Lincoln he completed that year was installed at the Kansas State House in 1918, and it conveyed the same fondness for the president that Gage exuded four decades later in the film.

In the statue, Lincoln is not presiding from on high; he’s seated on a low chair, bending toward the spectator in an informal, welcoming posture.  Many sculptors had tried to elicit Lincoln’s humanity.  Gage went after his warmth.  (You can see the statue here.)

Beginning in 1928, Gage took his clay and sculpting tools into public halls and let audiences watch as he created Lincoln’s head from scratch.  While working, he would relate stories of Lincoln’s life.  By the 1940s, despite his many other sculpted works, his one-hour Lincoln show had become his main claim to fame.  Naturally, when he approached retirement in the mid-1950s, USC’s Department of Cinema Studies decided to preserve his act on black-and-white film.

Cover of the booklet that went into the tin with every copy of the film that showed Gage at work.

In 1956, the Motion Picture Academy nominated The Face of Lincoln in two categories: best two-reel short, and best documentary short.  Though it lost in the documentary contest to Disney’s Men Against the Arctic, it beat out the two-reel competitors — one of them The Battle of Gettysburg, which featured the voice of “Lincoln” reading the Gettysburg Address.  It thus became the only Lincoln production ever to win a best-film Oscar.

The Face of Lincoln begins with Gage holding up sculptor Leonard Volk’s 1860 life mask of the 51-year-old Lincoln, running his fingers over it to show the difference between the left and right sides of his face.  For Gage, facial features revealed character and aptitude.

On the left side, Lincoln’s skin is stretched tight, exhibiting Lincoln’s power and decisiveness.  It gives Lincoln his “firm, true look,” indicative of his “legal ability.”  On the right side, a relaxed muscle makes the corner of his lip protrude slightly, suggesting gentleness, the look of the “humanitarian and philosopher.”

With these homespun findings out of the way, Gage gets to the true business at hand:  digging into the clay with his fingers, thumbs, and implements, conversing all the while about the flatboat trip to Louisiana in 1831, the Black Hawk war, and a dozen other iconic moments from Lincoln’s life story.  He spends almost two minutes on little Grace Bedell’s suggestion that the presidential nominee would look better with a beard.

The seductive storytelling can draw our attention away from what else is happening:  with his hands and voice, Gage is expressing his affection for Lincoln.  He’s speaking to him as much as speaking of him.  He’s modeling the face of Lincoln, but he’s also modeling an intimate bond with his hero.

Gage’s attachment to the president is touchingly visualized when Gage briefly mentions the Ann Rutledge story.  The camera pans slowly around the back of Lincoln’s head as we learn that he experienced “what we would call a nervous breakdown” after her sudden death in 1835.  The camera stops to let us join Lincoln in gazing at Gage.  The sculptor is describing the care Lincoln required from “his friends the Bowling Greens” after Ann’s burial.  Gage seems to be comforting his sorrowing friend too, by smoothing out his lapels.

When the Civil War arrives, Gage makes Lincoln’s face age rapidly.  He digs at the hollows of the cheeks and the wrinkles above the eyes.  Gage’s fingers are working hurriedly by the time he gets to Appomattox and Lincoln’s final week of life.  His voice slows down for the trip to Ford’s Theatre, even as his hands rush to complete the crow’s feet beside his eyes and the creases around his mouth.

“You know the rest of the story,” says Gage.  He swivels Lincoln’s head away from the camera as he adds, “you know how the assassin’s bullet forever turned his face from us.”

Millions of Americans saw The Face of Lincoln on television or in school in the mid-twentieth century, and, thanks to the United States Information Agency, millions of people around the world saw it too, with the soundtrack dubbed in their own languages.  It’s a rarely seen work today, but half a century ago audiences knew it embodied the reverential feelings that Lincoln routinely evoked.

It’s been over 70 years since Hollywood produced a biographical feature film on Lincoln.  It’s been over 80 years since Hollywood released a biographical feature touching on Lincoln’s presidency.  That movie was Abraham Lincoln (1930), and its director was the renowned D.W. Griffith, who had made the Civil War and Reconstruction saga Birth of a Nation 15 years earlier.  (Okay, last spring’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter counts as a Hollywood feature, and it certainly is based on one real slice of Lincoln’s life: his facility with an ax.)

Walter Huston (1930) was “the big buck of this lick” and a man’s man in the last Hollywood biopic about Lincoln’s presidency. Almost 4 score and 7 years later, what kind of man will Daniel Day-Lewis’s president be?

Two months from now, soon after the presidential election, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln will come to a theater near you.  With the accomplished Daniel Day-Lewis playing the president, this movie will mark Lincoln’s Hollywood comeback.  RKO’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) — starring Raymond Massey in the performance he’d perfected over a long Broadway run — was the last biopic feature to appear.  And that classic film took Lincoln’s life only as far as his departure for Washington on a chilly winter morning in 1861.

Spielberg’s Lincoln won’t try to cover Lincoln’s whole life either.  Griffith’s 1930 film showed that that is a nearly impossible task.  Too much gets left out, and too many scenes turn out sketchy at best.  Spielberg has announced that his Lincoln, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”), will address only “the last few months” of Lincoln’s life.

Kushner’s script, says Spielberg, will treat the end of the military action but also probe Lincoln’s role in the January 1865 passage of a House of Representatives resolution for  a 13^th amendment that could abolish slavery.  It appears we’re about to get a cinematic Lincoln we haven’t seen before.  This Lincoln cares as much about emancipation as he does about reunion.  After 1862 he cares about them equally, since he believes freeing all the slaves he can makes reunion possible, and since banning all future slavery is a necessary step in fulfilling the nation’s democratic destiny.

Contrast this Lincoln with D.W. Griffith’s Lincoln.  His films dwelt on Lincoln’s desire to reunify the nation, minimizing his interest in emancipation.  Above all else, Griffith’s Lincoln wished for peace between the sections.  In the silent Birth of a Nation, Lincoln (played by Griffith crewmember Joseph Henabery) appears at the start of the film as a reluctant warrior: sitting alone at his desk, he dabs his eyes with a handkerchief after signing the first order for volunteers in 1861.  By the time of Appomattox in 1865, Lincoln has become the South’s “best friend” (as the Confederate Dr. Cameron calls him), a Christ-like conciliator eager to restore white rule to the former Confederacy.

When the scheming Radical Republican Congressman Austin Stoneman, patterned after Thaddeus Stevens, storms into Lincoln’s office, preaching vengeance on the secessionists, the president tells him (as the dialogue card reads), “I shall deal with them as though they had never been away.”  He slowly rises from his chair, stretches up to tower over the Congressman, and peers down at him to dismiss his presumption.

In the 1930 film, Walter Huston’s President Lincoln cares passionately about two things above all: unifying the country and pardoning a young deserter.  The merciful Lincoln is matched by the charitable Robert E. Lee: at war’s end, a tired but elegantly attired Lee pardons a Confederate soldier charged with refusing to fight.  Setting up this parallel between Lincoln and Lee as gentle, forgiving souls nails down Griffith’s notion that the greatest leaders of 1865, North and South alike, wanted only to rebuild a tranquil Union.

Griffith goes out of his way to assure us that his peace-loving Lincoln is also a hyper-masculine man of the people.  “I’m the big buck of this lick,” bellows the burly Huston after besting Jack Armstrong in the famous New Salem wrestling match.  He embarks on a playful, romantic love with Ann Rutledge, and later on a convivial friendship with General Grant.  His ease with Rutledge and Grant proves he’s a man’s man — one who’ll have no trouble tolerating Mary Lincoln’s henpecking while preserving his sense of humor and his alpha-male sense of command.

If Spielberg’s film gets all the way to Lincoln’s final week of life, I hope it dramatizes Lincoln’s “reconstruction” speech of April 11, 1865, when he went on record in support of voting rights for black veterans and other qualified black men.  John Wilkes Booth was in the audience that evening, standing on the north side of the White House.  According to one of his associates, speaking after the assassination, Booth saw red when he heard the endorsement of black suffrage fall from Lincoln’s lips.  He promised that the president would never deliver another speech.

As Eric Foner points out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010), the president’s suffrage comment on April 11 doesn’t prove he would have done more than his successor Andrew Johnson to extend the voting rights of freedmen.  But it does give us reason to hope that, had he lived, he would have found ways to work with Congressional Republicans in easing African Americans’ passage toward full citizenship, while protecting them against violence and intimidation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last February, on a blue and balmy Southern California morning, I drove to Disneyland to take in the famous spectacle “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.”  The final third of it features an almost lifelike audio-animatronic president speaking some eloquent lines, drawn from several of his speeches, on the subject of liberty.

Surprisingly, on a tourist-heavy day with thousands of customers already in the park, only 25 people turned out for the noon performance. They barely dotted the “Opera House” auditorium that can seat over 500 patrons.

I went back for the 2:00 p.m. show, when tens of thousands of perspiring people were clogging Disneyland’s sidewalks and attractions.  This time only 35 people were enjoying the air-conditioned comfort, and Lincoln wisdom, at the Opera House.

Disney’s Lincoln originated at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where it was showcased at the Illinois Pavilion.  The assassination and funeral of President Kennedy in 1963 had sparked a flurry of interest in Lincoln, and Fair officials went all out to bring Disney’s prototype to Queens.  They gave the company a $250,000 “loan” that amounted to a Lincoln appearance fee.  The state of Illinois chipped in with an additional $100,000 for Disney.

Initially, according to the New York Times, Fair audiences found the Lincoln facsimile unconvincing.  The “32 channel magnetic tape” sending electronic impulses to “activate pneumatic and hydraulic valves” produced cumbersome movements of the head, arms, and torso.

During the Fair’s winter recess in early 1965, Disney engineers reworked the mechanism, and attendance more than doubled in the spring and summer: only six percent of fairgoers watched the show in 1964; in 1965 the figure surpassed 12 percent.  Spectators now exclaimed to pavilion personnel that this Lincoln must be “a man impersonating a machine.”

The Illinois Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, 1964, seen on a postcard. Note the Lincoln face and words on its wall at left. From here Disney’s man-machine Lincoln went to Anaheim’s Disneyland Opera House; and so on to the whole world.

In the summer of 1965, to mark Disneyland’s 10^th anniversary, “Great Moments” also opened in Main Street’s new Opera House.  Today, after decades of minor changes and temporary shutdowns, the show goes on with the more supple “autonomatronic” president installed for Lincoln’s bicentenary in 2009.

On my visit, a Disneyland employee named Bob (he preferred not to give his last name) was working the show.  He has been watching over Lincoln off and on since 1979.  He and others in the old guard have successfully argued for keeping Lincoln going when some in the company wished to pull the plug.

Bob advised me to sit front and center to catch the small movements in Lincoln’s face (and his audible exhalation).  As the Los Angeles Times reported when the new Lincoln was unveiled, the engineers “figured out how to capture the musculature of the face using 16 micro-miniaturized motors pushing and pulling [the] silicone skin.”

This Lincoln figure still doesn’t quite look, or sound, like the actual man.  He’s too broad-shouldered, and his voice is a rich baritone rather than a high-pitched tenor.  His arms can make sweeping gestures, but they can’t bend up to grab his lapels.  That said, Disney’s “imagineers” have come eerily close to bringing Lincoln to life.

This crafted president delivers a commanding physical presence with the slow swivel of his head, the stretch of his chest, and the delicate play of his fingers.  His eyes seem to seek you out in the audience.  The “Complete Show” upload includes a close-up of his eyes that is not to be missed.

It’s a shame that in 2009 Disney didn’t take the time to upgrade the show’s introductory history lesson while it was improving Lincoln’s bodily movements.  Centering on Lincoln’s life and leadership, the nine-minute look at American history up to the Civil War combines narration (much of it in Lincoln’s words) with a slide show of colorful paintings and stirring music, including a haunting 90-second duet of “Two Brothers on Their Way, One Wore Blue and One Wore Gray.”

The opening images depict the arrival by ship of two groups of Europeans — the 17th-century Pilgrims and the 19th-century immigrants  – but omit the arrival by ship of the African slaves.  As historians have shown for over a generation, there is no way to grasp the flow of American history in general, or the greatness of Lincoln in particular, without putting slavery and its aftermath at the heart of the story.

Disney’s Lincoln tells us in passing that God “hates injustice and slavery.”  But the real Mr. Lincoln went far beyond hating slavery in the abstract.  He came to realize that reunion depended on emancipation, and that emancipation ultimately meant extending citizenship rights to some of the freedmen.  Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois took the lead in praising him for placing political equality on the American agenda once and for all.

Since 1865 Americans have tried in a thousand ways to keep Lincoln’s memory alive, and Disney’s groundbreaking effort does so by revivifying his body.  Probably no other figure in American history could have prompted such a sustained investment in technological wizardry.  Americans have admired many politicians’ speeches and leadership, but for generations they have found Abraham Lincoln uniquely endearing in his moral character and his physical person.

The recent release of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter takes the well-known story of our Sixteenth President and places it in a fictional world of vampires.  In this fantasy world, Nancy Hanks Lincoln is killed by a vampire, a death witnessed by a young Abraham.  Seeking to avenge his mother’s death, Abraham Lincoln learns the secret art of killing vampires.

While the film has not yet realized the success of the Seth Grahame-Smith novel upon which it was based, many critics are dismissive about the connection between Lincoln and vampires.  In fact, Lincoln and vampires were first paired during the Civil War.  Rather than being the hunter of vampires, Lincoln was often shown as a demonic associate or a vampire himself. 

Lincoln uses the devil's ink to free the slaves.

Adalbert Volck, a Baltimore dentist, engraver, and strong supporter of the Confederate cause, created a series of engravings highly critical of Lincoln and his policies.  In October 1862, Volck finished his engraving “Writing the Emancipation Proclamation.”  Lincoln is shown in a satanic pose, holding the Constitution under foot and composing the Emancipation Proclamation from a devil’s inkwell on a table with a ram’s head at the top of each leg and an all-seeing eye as decoration.  Outside the window at left are flying bats, but it is unclear if they are vampire in nature. 

The famed British cartoonist Matt Morgan’s last Lincoln drawing for Fun, an illustrated magazine, showed a frightened Columbia in bed with Lincoln sitting on top of her stomach.  The caption read “Columbia’s Nightmare.”  Morgan joined the Comic News shortly after leaving Fun in October 1864.  One of his early cartoons for his new employer showed Lincoln, with Satan’s tail, in a tug-of-war with George B. McClellan over a map of the northern states; it is entitled “Pull Devil — Pull Baker,” here an expression roughly meaning ‘both will take revenge.’

Morgan revisited Lincoln as the enemy of Columbia in a post-election cartoon, “The Vampire.” Lincoln is depicted as hovering over a kneeling Columbia, declaring ‘Columbia, thou are mine; with thy blood I will renew my lease on life — Ah! Ah!”  That Lincoln’s critics saw his policies as undermining the Republic, represented by Columbia, is clear.  And Morgan would like his audience to believe that Lincoln, as vampire president, drained the life blood from the Republic in a prolonged and needless Civil War.

Leaving nothing to the imagination, Southern Punch ran a cartoon on November 14, 1863, “Abduction of the Yankee Goddess of Liberty.  The Prince of Darkness (Abraham Lincoln) Bears Her Away To His Infernal Regions.”  The Yankee Goddess protests, “Monster of Perdition, let me go!”  While Lincoln replies, “Never!  You have been preaching about the Constitution too long already.  I was the first to rebel against constituted authority. ‘Hell is murky!’ You go thither!”

Whether Satan or Vampire, Lincoln was seen as the embodiment of evil by many illustrators with Southern sympathies.  It is no wonder that Mary Lincoln later used the term “vampyre press” to describe her own critics.  Ironically, one of Lincoln’s great admirers was an Irish writer who is best known for taking the 1819 story of The Vampyre by Dr. John William Polidori and creating the novel that is the foundation for all other vampire plots.  Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula remains the silver standard for vampire novels, just as Tod Browning’s 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi sets the bar for vampire films.

In early June, websites and newspapers around the world reported an exciting “new find” in Lincoln studies. In May, a researcher working for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project had been sifting through boxes of 19^th century records at the National Archives in Washington. Suddenly she found herself holding a manuscript marked (in black ink), “Chas A Leale, Report on death of President Lincoln.” Just above that title, a cataloguer had written (in red ink) the date “1865.”

Historians had been trying to find this document for nearly a century and a half. It was Dr. Leale’s original account of what he’d done and witnessed on the evening of April 14, and morning of April 15, in 1865.

The 23-year-old Leale had been the first physician to come to Lincoln’s aid as he sat unconscious and mortally wounded in his box at Ford’s Theatre. Leale’s quick decision to lay Lincoln down on the floor of the box — relieving the pressure on his brain — may have been responsible for extending Lincoln’s life until early Saturday morning.

That stretch of nine hours from Booth’s gunshot at about 10:30 p.m. to the president’s death at 7:22 a.m. gave high government officials the chance to gather around the deathbed and absorb the calamity together. Northerners as a group took comfort from the familiar deathbed ritual, described for them in great detail in their Sunday and Monday newspapers and soon reproduced visually in countless commercial lithographs.

An inaccurately drawn, hand-colored print of 1865 suggests why Dr. Leale's memory of Booth's blade grew over time.

Two years later, in 1867, Dr. Leale wrote an account of Lincoln’s death for a congressional committee, and in that document (today located in the Benjamin Butler Papers at the Library of Congress) he said he was drawing on an unpublished manuscript that he’d written “a few hours after leaving [Lincoln’s] death bed.”

The “new find” of June 2012 gives us our first look at what Leale wrote on April 15, 1865 — not the actual pages, but the undated copy of them marked “1865” by the National Archives cataloguer. You can read this copy at http://www.papersofabrahamlincoln.org/New_Documents.htm

It turns out the “new find” doesn’t disclose anything new, but that’s an important bit of knowledge in its own right. We now know there’s no bombshell waiting to be divulged in Leale’s long-misplaced report. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to compare Leale’s 1865 and 1867 documents. It shows us how his memory of the assassination was evolving, and it points us to moments during the last hours of Lincoln’s life that aren’t usually highlighted in treatments of the assassination.

Here I can mention three such moments: Lincoln’s entry into the dress circle at Ford’s Theatre; John Wilkes Booth’s brandishing of his dagger; and the prayer (or was it prayers?) intoned by the Reverend Phineas Gurley at the time of Lincoln’s death.

In 1865, Dr. Leale wrote that he watched from his seat in the dress circle as the president’s party walked by on their way to the box. The audience was cheering heartily, and the president and Mrs. Lincoln “reciprocated” the warm welcome with “a smile and bow” (p. 2).

But this happy Lincoln was replaced in Leale’s 1867 report by a despondent one: “the President as he proceeded to the box looked expressively mournful and sad.” Leale had either suppressed the news of Lincoln’s sorrowful mien in his 1865 account, or remembered the dejected look on his face only after writing that report.

In 1865, Dr. Leale was intently focused on the long knife wielded by the “man of low stature and black hair and eyes” who had leaped to the stage from the president’s box. He noticed the “drawn dagger” Booth was “flourishing in his hand” before he jumped (p. 3) and again as he ran across the stage (p. 4). By 1867, Leale had embellished his memory of the menacing knife. Now Booth had “raised his shining dagger in the air, which reflected the light as though it had been a diamond.”

The dagger was so impressive to Leale that when he rushed to Lincoln’s box about 10:30 p.m. — after “distinctly” hearing “the report of a pistol” crack through the theatre (p. 3) — he first checked the president for a stab wound, not a gunshot wound.

Perhaps the actual stab wound that was staring him in the face — the one inflicted by Booth on Maj. Henry Rathbone, a member of Lincoln’s party — influenced his judgment. But maybe Leale was initially unwilling to countenance the idea that Lincoln had been shot, hoping against hope that he’d only been slashed.

In 1865, Dr. Leale described the scene beside the bed after Lincoln died. The grieving officials and family friends “bowed down” for a prayer delivered by the Lincoln family’s minister Phineas Gurley (p. 20). In 1867, Leale remembered, they all knelt down together for two prayers, one before the president died and the other after his last breath.

With his avid interest in Gurley’s words, we might expect Leale to have heard, and recorded, Edwin Stanton’s phrase “now he belongs to the ages” — if Stanton had in fact said it. Leale made no mention of it in 1865 or 1867. It’s one of the nice ironies of Lincoln’s deathbed vigil that the main thing many Americans remember about it today —  Stanton intoning his moving phrase over Lincoln’s body — was quite likely a much later addition to Lincoln lore. There’s no record of it in 19th-century sources before 1890. If only Dr. Leale had mentioned it in his 1865 report. That would have been a bombshell.

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

Wellington statues became Lincoln statues. Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take a look at this close-up of the obverse (heads side) of the Lincoln penny.  Apart from minor tweaking, this side hasn’t changed in over a century, a sign of Abraham Lincoln’s deep hold as an American hero.

A penny, a statement, a work of art.

Try to imagine this is the first time you’ve seen Lincoln’s face on the penny.  Try to imagine it’s the first time you’ve seen any American leader on any circulating U.S. coin.

That was the situation in the summer of 1909, when citizens got their first look at Lincoln on the new penny.  Previously, almost every U.S. coin in circulation had shown a symbol of “Liberty” on the obverse — an idealized female figure (originally the “goddess of liberty”).  An actual person had never been depicted. U.S. coins were supposed to signal the ideal that animated the body politic, not to herald the greatness of an individual.

The “Indian-head” penny, minted between 1859 and 1909, hadn’t shown an actual Indian, but a white female figure wearing a feather headdress — with “Liberty” spelled out on the headband.  As one magazine explained in 1859, “the obverse presents an ideal head of AMERICA.  The drooping plumes of the North American Indian give it the character of North America.  The head is intended as an illustration of ‘Liberty.’”

At the moment of most intense Lincoln enthusiasm — his 100th birthday in February 1909 — the government announced its initial plans for a new Lincoln coin.  Yet many people were reluctant to part with their long-familiar penny.

Some believed that even their most beloved Chief Magistrate should be kept off the metal currency.  Putting Lincoln or anyone else on a stamp, or on paper money, was fine, they felt.  The solidity and permanence of coinage, however, suggested caution.

The New Orleans Picayune feared setting a precedent that would haunt future generations.  Presidents in power might use coinage to help turn themselves into quasi-monarchs, provoking “the transmogrification of the Republic into an empire.”

The New York Times reminded readers that when the U.S. Senate passed a bill in 1792 to put George Washington on the one-dollar coin, the House rejected the idea as “a feature of monarchy.”  Since the “American Indian typifies the love of liberty and the possession of it,” the Times campaigned to block the new coin — at the very same time that the paper was avidly promoting the Lincoln centennial events and praising his greatness.

“The idea of further honoring the memory of LINCOLN in this way,” said the Times, “is absurd.  That most modest and humble of our Presidents would never have consented to change a long-established custom by putting his own profile on the cent… The Indian must remain.”

The Times soon realized that resistance to the Lincoln penny was futile.  The Theodore Roosevelt administration didn’t need congressional approval to make the change, since the Indian-head cent had been circulating for more than 25 years.

By summer, the 12 sub-treasuries in American cities were getting frenzied orders from banks anticipating heavy customer interest in the new coin.  All the commotion showed the Times, as it satirically noted, “the Lincoln penny is to start a war of extermination on the one bearing the bust of the red man.”  Indian-head pennies would still circulate, but the Mint would no longer make them.  In short order, people would be hiding them in drawers.

On August 2, thousands of men and boys lined up at the sub-treasuries to get the maximum allotment of 25 pennies per person.  In Washington, D. C., 3,000 customers made it up to the disbursement window on the first day.  Instantly a speculative market took over the streets, with newsboys selling pennies for up to a nickel each.  By this point, nearly everyone seems to have loved the Lincoln coin.

One Lincoln disciple, 31-year-old Carl Sandburg, countered the Times claim that Lincoln himself would have disapproved.  The “great, good man,” said Sandburg, would probably be “perfectly willing” for his face to adorn the penny.  True, as symbol-in-chief for “the people,” Lincoln might object to being put on a fancier gold or silver coin.  But he’d likely smile at seeing himself on “the cheapest and most common coin in the country.”

Having fought the new penny in February 1909, the Times joined the applause in August.   With Lincoln’s “face relaxed” and showing “a benign expression,” the paper conceded, the immigrant medalist Victor David Brenner had delivered a “handsome” coin.  “The entire design is noteworthy for its simplicity of line.”

Brenner's design proved so popular that he issued small bronzes of it mounted on marble. He also designed a medal likening his immigrant background to Lincoln's log-cabin origins.

It was soon obvious that people liked this coin so much because it was so artfully designed.  Brenner had given the obverse a spacious layout, which allowed the word “Liberty” plenty of room to catch one’s attention in the open area to Lincoln’s left.

Brenner positioned the coin’s date lower than “Liberty,” leaving another wide-open space for Lincoln to gaze into.  And Brenner managed to invoke the president’s whole body.  This is not a “Lincoln-head” penny.  The shoulders and chest convey his authority and equanimity.

If the Lincoln penny ever succumbs to changing times — its utility in the marketplace is already being widely questioned, with some calling it “worthless” — the nation will have lost a beautiful and historic artifact designed for daily, hand-to-hand exchange.

For about a century the Lincoln profession has analyzed statements by John Milton Hay that he wrote many of Lincoln’s letters, and/or signed his name to many documents, with the president’s acquiescence.  Hay was the assistant private secretary in the Executive Mansion for the entirety of Lincoln’s presidency, serving under secretary John Nicolay, his friend from western Illinois and his elder by six years.

Hay achieved notoriety in many fields.  He was graduated from Brown University in 1858 as class poet and then worked in his uncle’s law firm in Springfield.  That uncle, Milton Hay, had clerked for Lincoln two decades before.  Young John Hay was quick with a pen, providing signed as well as anonymous reportage to newspapers and keeping a fascinating war-years diary. After the years in Mr. Lincoln’s service, he co-authored with Nicolay the 10-volume biography of Lincoln (1890), then rounded out that picture with the 12-volume edition of Lincoln’s own writings (1905).  In all this they had close cooperation with and access to documents belonging to Robert Lincoln and others.  So Hay knew Lincoln’s hand.  And he knew Robert — the two young men were playing cards in the family quarters of the Executive Mansion on the night of 14 April 1865 when Robert’s parents went to Ford’s Theatre.  John Hay was nearly a son, perhaps more like a shadow, to the man he had dubbed the ‘tycoon.’

Hay later published poems, stories, a novel, and travel sketches, was U.S. ambassador to London soon after Robert Lincoln served there; and as Secretary of State in the McKinley and T. Roosevelt administrations authored the ‘Open Door’ policy for trade with China.  He negotiated the important Hay-Pauncefote Treaties that led to the building of the Panama Canal.  In so doing he pursued policies about which Mr. Lincoln had a nascent interest, though did not pursue during the crisis of the Civil War.  Hay began to intimate that he had written the famous Bixby letter for Lincoln in 1864 (the original was lost that year), and scholars still hotly debate that topic.

Definitely Hay, and definitely Lincoln's signature

But what of his claim that he ‘signed for’ Lincoln?  The document at the right contains Lincoln’s signature only. The document below — a scrap, really — is the closest thing we have to substantiation of Hay’s claim.  Most of the text is clearly not in Lincoln’s hand, nor is the date.  And the signature does not look very good either.  It would be dismissed from the pantheon of ‘Lincoln documents’ were it not for the fact that the main text is in Hay’s hand, and thus the ‘A. Lincoln’ cannot really be a forgery.  Did Mr. Lincoln hand over a stack of pleas like this one, from Confederate soldiers who in the days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox suddenly wished to renew their loyalty to the Union?  There are perhaps a hundred of these notes written out and/or signed by Lincoln in 1863-65, and the flood of them grew as the war’s eventual victor became clear.

Definitely Hay, and maybe a Hay-as-Lincoln signature

If John Hay was trying to make his hand look like Lincoln’s, he did not execute a particularly good likeness here.  Is it possible that Hay’s later claim to have written many of Lincoln’s letters owes mainly to those last days of Lincoln’s life, perhaps this very last day?  The harried President wanted to oblige his wife, his friends Major Rathbone and Miss Harris, his own interest, and the nation’s acclaim by getting to Ford’s Theatre for the show.  Did he leave some papers behind for the able and trusted young secretary to ‘take care of, if you please, Mr. Hay?’  And was it that last conversation with his chief that caused Hay, in his very later years, to inflate his own memory and thus his words about the frequency of his vicarious role as official presidential signatory?  Or have a host of ‘A. Lincoln’ signatures on short notes been dismissed, perhaps undeservedly, because we have not learned to recognize John Hay’s hand?

To celebrate Lincoln’s hundredth birthday in 1909, the Times put on an essay contest for the children of the Greater New York Area.  Other urban papers, including the Philadelphia Ledger and the Cleveland Press, organized Lincoln competitions too, though none could rival the size of the Times event.

Drawing on a city population of 4.5 million, about 3 times that of Philadelphia and 9 times that of Cleveland, the Times attracted almost 10,000 qualifying submissions, many from New Jersey, Connecticut, and other towns in New York.  All of the handwritten papers — capped at 500 words — arrived with a teacher’s note certifying that the essay had been written “without outside help.”

“WINNERS OF THE LINCOLN COMPETITION MEDALS, CERTIFICATES, CASH PRIZES,” ran the 7-column headline on page 1 of the “Magazine Section” on February 23, 1909.  One thousand children had won silver Tiffany medals featuring the bust of Lincoln, and the top 100 were each to get a $5.00 gold piece.

The Magazine printed the top 10 essays, in facsimile form to show off the neatness and penmanship of the best writers.  Three of these, said the Times, came from the pens of 10-year-olds, one from a 12-year-old, and the rest from teenagers and one 20-year-old.  For the Times, the 10-year-olds (one of whom turned out to be only 9) proved irresistible.  Their innocent directness of expression seemed to mirror the mythic simplicity of Lincoln.

Alexandra Kliatshco, age 9 and just 3 years an American. Photo courtesy of Julie Stern, Cyrenius H. Booth Library, Newtown, CT.

How did the Times manage to attract nearly 10,000 essays?  By enlisting the eager support of the New York City school system, which added the Times contest to its already extensive Lincoln centennial program.

Teachers were encouraged to assign the 7-part biography of Lincoln published in the paper in early February.  (The biography was the work of Frederick Trevor Hill, author of the recent book Lincoln the Lawyer.)  They helped their pupils grasp what the Times meant by an “original” response to Hill’s account.  A summary would not suffice; students had to express their own sentiments about Lincoln’s slow climb to distinction.

Many teachers actively discussed the Times pieces with their pupils, focusing on Hill’s main point: “Lincoln was not a heaven born genius — merely a plain man who was honest, sincere, and upright.”  He learned growing up that strong “character” would get him through failure and disappointment.  Any young person in any era, the Times urged, could adopt Lincoln as a model.

The teachers promoted the contest, but the lure of a dazzling medal fired the children’s ambition.  Letters poured into the Times office from young hopefuls and their parents, explaining how badly they wanted to win.

One father thought he would help his 14-year-old daughter’s chances by sending in an additional poem she had written that urged equal time for George Washington:

It’s Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln

Just cause he’s a hundred years old,

O’ course he deserves every bit of his praise,

And maybe I am kind o’ bold

To say that there’s some one better,

An’ tho’ I’m only one

I’m goin’ ter stick up for the father

Of this country, George Washington.

The Times cautioned youngsters not to expect special treatment for extra material of this kind.  But the 14-year-old did get her medal.

In the aftermath, what did the Times think the competition had achieved?  “Thousands of eager, impressible, active young minds” had received a “conception of the great President, which will not easily be effaced,” it wrote.  The essays had “made Lincoln a vital reality to them,” to their families, and to countless readers.

In a city with almost 2 million foreign-born residents, the Lincoln contest had made him a subject of daily conversation for at least 100,000 people, said the Times.  Immigrants and native-born Americans, often occupying separate worlds, had taken another step towards a shared civic life.

Diminutive Alexandra Kliatshco, a Russian immigrant, and at age 9 the winner of a medal and a $5.00 gold piece, became the paper’s poster-child for equal opportunity in modern America.  Alexandra had arrived in America from Russia only 3 years before, knowing no English.  She had thrived at P.S. 177 in Manhattan, and she produced an elegant Lincoln piece.  Her father, a physician on Henry Street, told the Times that she had excelled at memorizing Russian poetry from the time she was 3 years old.

“I am a little foreign girl, and I have been here only a short time,” her essay began, “but when I read about Lincoln, I thought that I might grow up a great woman as Lincoln was a great man.”  And it ended: “We cannot forget the love he bore us and he died leaving the world better than it was.  I hope that I can be like Lincoln, unselfish, kind, thoughtful and modest.”

A 1998 profile in the Times noted that her prediction had proven accurate.  Alexandra Kliatshco Werner had graduated from Teachers College in 1922 and taught art for 40 years at Jane Addams Vocational School in the Bronx.  She loved impressionist paintings, classical music, and Alfred Hitchcock, and had tried her hand at poetry.

According to her daughter, interviewed for this post, she had not held on to her Lincoln medal, preferring to make a gift of it to her father, who died in 1928.

A regular contributor over the decades to the Times “Neediest Cases” fund, Mrs. Werner — the youngest top-ten winner in the centennial Lincoln competition of 1909 — died in 1997 at the age of 97.