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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The February 1994 cover of Scientific American showed a publicity photograph of Marilyn Monroe, from the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch, arm and arm with an 1863 image of Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner.  The purpose of the cover was to show how digital photography could create photographic images for events that never happened.  Lacking a film negative as reference, digital images make it impossible to distinguish between a scene that reflects an actual event and one that digitally creates a mythical event.

Although Marilyn Monroe never met Abraham Lincoln as depicted on the cover of Scientific American, she did admire him and on at least four occasions was photographed with images of Lincoln or with the greatest popularizer of Lincoln, Carl Sandburg.  The number of biographies of her pales in comparison with those devoted to Abraham Lincoln, but a theme common in most is that she looked upon Lincoln as the father she never knew in childhood.  During a visit to Bryant Cottage in Bement, Illinois, in August 1955, Marilyn Monroe told a reporter, “I have honored and admired Mr. Lincoln since I first heard about him.  As a child, he represented sort of a father to me.  But then I guess he does for everyone in the U.S.”   Her appearance generated a crowd of 10,000 curious onlookers.  Bringing in tow her own photographer, Eve Arnold, Monroe had her visit documented at the house museum where legend, not historical documentation, claims that Lincoln and Douglas met to establish the schedule for debates in 1858.

Bust of Carl Sandburg by Joseph Konzal, ca. 1955. Previously owned by Marilyn Monroe. Part of the Taper Collection now owned by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

The earliest image of Monroe and Lincoln was taken in 1954 by the famed photographer Milton H. Greene.  It shows Monroe standing in a Cadillac convertible holding up a framed photograph of Abraham Lincoln.  The car was a gift from Jack Benny for Monroe’s appearance on his television show The Jack Benny Program.  Milton’s son, Joshua, created a limited edition of 500 copies of this famous photograph that were each stamped, numbered, and signed.  He presented one such copy in 2007 to the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Len Steckler, a New York City photographer, took a series of three images of Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg in his apartment in December 1961.  Steckler had studied photography with, among others, Edward Steichen, Carl Sandburg’s brother-in-law.  As a photographer, Steckler was called upon to capture images of many celebrities, and he soon formed a friendship with Sandburg.  Steckler also became acquainted with Marilyn Monroe.  These professional relationships led to the meeting between the 35-year-old Monroe and the 83-year-old Sandburg. 

The last meeting between Monroe and Sandburg took place in January 1962 in Hollywood.  Arnold Newman, the legendary New York photographer, was at the small gathering that included Monroe and Sandburg.  Seven images from that evening survive, including one that shows Sandburg teaching Monroe breathing exercises, although most people would conclude that they are dancing.  Monroe had trouble sleeping, and, according to Sandburg, breathing properly would help.

An interesting reference to Lincoln is found in the 1960 George Cukor film Let’s Make Love, starring Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand.  The basic plot has a playboy billionaire businessman, played by Montand, attending a rehearsal in Greenwich Village of the independent Let’s Make Love musical theater company.  The director/producer of the show mistakenly thinks Montand is an actor look-alike of the billionaire who wants a part in the show.  Montand pretends to be an actor to woo Marilyn Monroe, only to find it difficult at the end of the film to prove his true identity.  Worried that Montand is delusional, Monroe provides the following bit of advice:

“There used to be an actor, he played Abraham Lincoln for so many years.  He grew his own beard.  He went around in a shawl.  And you know what they used to say?

He looks like Lincoln, talks like Lincoln.  But he won’t be satisfied until he gets shot.”

It would be interesting to know if Monroe had a hand in adding this reference to the script.  Certainly she was one of Lincoln’s biggest fans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abraham and Mary Lincoln employed a number of hired servants over the almost two decades at their Springfield residence.  Among the many individuals who served them was a black house servant named Epsy Smith.  Her association with the Lincoln family undoubtedly accounts for this lengthy obituary that appeared in the
(Springfield) Illinois State Journal, on Tuesday, May 10, 1892, p. 1, col. 6:

                                        SHE WORKED FOR LINCOLN

                                        Death of a Negress Who Knew
                                        Much About Father Abraham.
                                        Aunt Epsy Smith Passes Away in a Rick-
                                        etty Tenement House in Chicago –
                                        Her Eventful History.

“It was in one of the dilapidated old frame tenement houses on Dearborn St. near Sixteenth, Chicago, where the rattle and roar of constantly passing trains never cease, and where such a thing as a garbage cart or street sweeper is unknown, that “Aunt” Epsy Smith died.  It was near 1 o’clock Sunday morning that she breathed her last.  She was of African descent and unknown, so to speak, in the great metropolis, but she had an eventful life — one of almost historic interest.

The 1835 indenture for Hepsey, a mulatto girl who worked for the Ninian W. Edwards family and, she explained, for the Lincoln family.

Away back in 1827 she was a protégé of Ninian Edwards, at the time governor of Illinois.  She was present at the wedding of Abraham and Mary Todd, and after the wedding was a servant in Lincoln’s home.  She nursed Robert T. Lincoln, the present minister to the court of St. James, when he was a baby.  Her death was caused by the grip, from which she had been suffering since last March.  Her exact age is not known, for she was born a slave and no record of birth was made.  But as near as could be told she was about 72 years old.

Epsy Arnsby Smith was her name in full and she was born on the plantation of Arnold Spear, near Shelbyville, Ky.  The Spears were old friends of Ninian Edwards and shortly after his election as governor Mrs. Spears visited the family and brought Epsy, who was at that time 7 or 8 years old, along as a waiting maid.  She was bright and active and the governor took a liking to her, and when Mrs. Spears was getting ready to return home, she gave the child to him.

When Epsy was a miss, Miss Mary Todd, Mrs. Edwards’ sister, came from Kentucky to live with the governor’s family.  About this time Abraham Lincoln became a frequent visitor at the governor’s mansion and he generally asked for Miss Todd.  It was Epsy’s duty to answer the call and in after years she used to tell her children and grandchildren how she used to usher “Massa Linkum” into the house when he was “a cortin’ Mistus Mary.”

She witnessed the wedding ceremony when Lincoln was married, and during the first few years of his married life she was his house servant.  Then she became engaged to Robert Smith, a colored man living in Vandalia.  Shortly before her wedding she came back to live with the family of Governor Edwards and was married at his house by the minister who performed the ceremony for Lincoln.  And the dress she wore on that occasion, a black brocaded silk, was a present from Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln.

Years rolled by: Lincoln was elected president; the war came and the slaves of the south were freed.  Among the first negroes to come north was “Aunt” Epsy’s father, and the proudest day of his life was when his daughter told him that she had worked for the man who had set him free.

 In 1861 her husband died and then she sold her little home and moved to Greenville, where she lived with her daughter Mrs. Julia Barbee, until last March, when she went to Chicago to live with another daughter, Mrs. Catherine Jackson, 1630 Dearborn street.  Mrs. Jakie Smith, also her daughter, went with her.  She had been there but a few days when she became ill with the grip.  Enfeebled by old age she lingered along until Sunday morning, when she was taken with a spasm and died.  As there was no physician in attendance at the time of her death the matter was reported to Lieutenant Gallagher of the armory, who notified the coroner.

After relating the story of her mother’s life Sunday night Mrs. Smith spoke of the anxiety the poor old “mammie” felt lest she should not be buried by the side of her dead husband in the old graveyard at Vandalia. “But we are too poor to send the body there,” she continued, “and I am afraid her dying request cannot be granted.  I know if Massa Robert Lincoln were here he would help us.  But then he is so far away we can’t let him know

 The funeral will be held today from the dingy tenement house where the old woman died.”

The question arises, Was Epsy Smith the same person as an indentured mulatto girl named Hepsey?  Indentures were contractual relationships in which minors were taught employable skills in return for having their basic needs provided.  Ninian Wirt Edwards, who would become Abraham Lincoln’s brother-in-law, signed an indenture of apprenticeship on October 29, 1835, for Hepsey, who was described as “a mulatto girl aged eleven years …having no parent or guardian.”  Edwards agreed to provide her “good holesome (sic) and sufficient meat drink washing lodging and apparel suitable and proper for such an apprentice and needful medical attention in care of sickness and will cause her to be instructed in the best way and most approved manner of domestic housewifery and will cause her to be taught to read and at the expiration of her term of service will give unto her a new bible and two new suits of clothes suitable and proper for summer and winter wear.”  This arrangement lasted until Hepsey’s 18^th birthday. 

Most leading families in Springfield used hired help.  Indentures from the period of the 1830s and 1840s showed that blacks and “mulattos” were the source of this hired help.  If Edwards was using a phonetic spelling for Hepsey, there is little difference between Hepsey and Epsy.  (The same is true with early Lincoln campaign biographies that confused Abram with Abraham.)  That Epsy was clearly part of the Edwards household and witnessed the Lincoln marriage suggests that Elizabeth sent Hepsey to work for her sister Mary after her service ended with the Edwards family.  In fact, Hepsey and Epsy were undoubtedly one and the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Springfield  April 1859

Dear Friend

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

Wm  W  Lincoln

The end 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Abraham and Mary Lincoln were largely responsible for destroying their own family papers before leaving for Washington, D.C., in 1861, then what did Robert T. Lincoln burn in later years?  Fortunately for historians he wrote down a listing of destroyed documents, in a volume sold as Burr’s Library Index.  His index was created to navigate through his extensive retained correspondence files.  Near the end of the volume there is an entry with the cryptic heading “Papers burned in 1895 and after.”  It is worth transcribing the entire contents of that list, in order to give insight into Robert Lincoln’s behavior.

Robert Lincoln’s list of ‘Papers burned in 1895 & after’

Papers burned in 1895 and after

All my family letters
All M.L. letters of 1875-6
Cheques, 1869-87 incl. 88-89-90-91 & 92
Rects [receipts] 1870-87 incl. 88-89
Washington House lease and papers
Old S&L Docket
All M.H.L. Cheques

Dec 98  All Cash books and ledgers except those current
Dec 00  Old Telephone & Gas Company papers
Dec 03  1897 Res [residential] repair and alterations receipts
Nov 03  Letters to R.T.L. 1877/1879
May 1911  Letters to R.T.L. Since to now—except 10 cases sifted letters kept
May 1911  All Receipts except my late ones
Oct 1913  All Hildene building correspondence
Oct 10-14  All but half a dozen old letters to R.T.L. while attor(?) from Chicago
Oct 10-14  All cheques up to 1905

The list clearly shows that Robert destroyed not his father’s papers, but his own.  It was a common practice to destroy personal letters of a private nature, which accounts for burning the correspondence between himself and his wife.  The period of 1875-6 follows his mother’s confinement and conservatorship, which was undoubtedly a difficult period for both mother and son.  But Robert did not destroy all of these letters, as is evident from the materials that comprise “the insanity file” he kept as a separate folder (the basis for a book published in 1986).  Everything else were things he no longer needed, such as old cancelled checks and business correspondence, materials that most people today put through a shredder rather than burn.

It is likely that Robert lost some of his father’s papers in the 1871 Chicago Fire, or at least he used that fire as an excuse.  In response to one autograph seeker, Robert responded: “I am not the possessor of any autograph letter of my father.  Everything of that kind owned by me was burned in the Chicago Fire.”  When thieves broke into the stable adjoining Robert’s Chicago mansion, he dismissed the matter, claiming the items were “a great many old odds and ends such as books, possibly letters, and that class of things which a man hardly knows what to do with, and yet is very averse to destroying.”

Nicolas Murray Butler’s claim, after Robert’s death, that he prevented Robert from destroying his father’s letters feeds a popular notion of Robert as cold, calculating, and secretive.  Those who knew Robert found him much like his father, and certainly no son did more to patiently deal with the endless requests for a document signed by Abraham Lincoln, endorse a book or painting about Abraham Lincoln, or satisfy the curiosity of the general public who wanted to know his father’s likes and dislikes.  Too much of Abraham Lincoln’s life was already on display for public consumption to be altered by a conspiracy to burn his papers.  The most damning accusations were not contained in Lincoln’s letters but in the published recollections of his associates and friends that lack any independent verification.  It is time to let this conspiracy charge go up in smoke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lincoln never wrote down those words, and no one reported him uttering them during his lifetime.  The source of the quotation is the young reporter Noah Brooks, who claimed a few months after the assassination that Lincoln “once said” he’d “been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.  My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well-hidden Lincoln, in lustrous leather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evidently the only live sketch of Lincoln en route to Washington in February 1861.

One of the lesser-known artists of Abraham Lincoln was Freeman Thorp.  Born in Geneva, Ohio, on June 16, 1844, Thorp developed an interest in art.  On February 15, 1861, he took some cardboard and pencils to sketch the train that carried president-elect Abraham Lincoln to Washington, D.C.  The ALPLM acquired the sketch in the 1950s.

Although only a lad, not yet 17 years of age, Thorp had ambition.  Geneva was not a scheduled stop on the route, but Thorp got lucky.  According to Thorp’s daughter, Sarah:

“… Lincoln’s Inaugural train was held for a half-hour or so at Geneva, Ohio, for some minor repairs.  Thorp was at the station to see the train go thro; and armed, as always, with pencil and cardboard, he made the first sketch-in while Mr. Lincoln good-naturedly addressed the waiting crowd.  Thorp was hanging by one long leg over the iron railing of the rear platform of Mr. Lincoln’s coach.  After the sketch had been returned to him (in 1903 or 4) after its long burial in a barrel of waste papers in the Capitol basement, he spent long hours at various times in ‘re-touching’ the face.”

The “barrel of waste papers in the Capitol basement” refers to a time in the 1870s when Thorp was provided a studio “on top of the Capitol, and there for twenty years he worked.”  If this family recollection is accurate, Thorp created the only artist’s portrait of Lincoln en route to Washington, D.C.

Thorp also wrote down his own notes for later reference.  Likely he referred to them when he completed his Lincoln portrait for the United States Senate, which the federal government purchased for $2,000 in 1920.  Clearly the pencil sketch begun in 1861 was referenced in the 1920 portrait.  Here is Thorp’s 1861 description of Abraham Lincoln:

Abraham Lincoln
Descriptive delineation

Hair dark brown Beard dark brown in front of the ears and at the ends but light brown from the ears down to the middle of the chin upper lip only shaved Eyebrows heavy Eyes blue gray deep set much in shadows but clear and well defined, complexion neither florid nor pale but dark a slight mole on the right cheek in no way disfigured his face figure tall and slim, not slender: but muscular features strong rugged expression earnest animated thoughtful with inherent kindness.

Lincoln described himself as having black hair and gray eyes, but those points are mere quibbles given the dim lighting that day, and given that Thorp was able to observe Lincoln only for a brief time.