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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O! Abe, why did you allow the Contractor

To disfigure me thus like a base malefactor?

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

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

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

The gist of my argument with Judge Douglas,

Is simply that,

Slavery is,

Wrong.

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

And if I should live to be

The last leaf upon the tree

In the spring. –

Let them smile, as I do now,

At the old forsaken bough

Where I cling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     It is commonplace today to plant a tree as a living memorial for an individual, event or cause.  Unlike a plaque or marker, a tree can provide shade and serve as a filter for pollutants that are created by modern lifestyles.  Like plaques and markers, trees can suffer from neglect.  When a group planted a tree in Waukegan to honor the community’s celebrity resident, Jack Benny, they never anticipated that the tree might die.  When it did, radio personality Fred Allen who carried on a friendly feud with Benny over the airwaves declared: “How can they expect the tree to grow in Waukegan when the sap is in Hollywood?”  How indeed.

     Surprisingly, a number of communities and individuals commemorated Lincoln’s death by planting trees in his honor.  The town of Marengo, Illinois within the weeks following Lincoln’s assassination planted elms, weeping willows, myrtle and evergreen trees in honor of the martyred president.  The Chicago Tribune encouraged a nationwide effort claiming: “Green would be to his memory over all the land in nature, as it will be in human hearts.”  No one, to my knowledge, has ever compiled a listing of extant Lincoln memorial trees that were planted in the immediate aftermath of his assassination. 

      According to Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s only surviving son, Abraham Lincoln’s favorite tree was the hard maple.  Abraham Lincoln, however, planted an American elm in the front of his home at 8^th and Jackson in Springfield.  The tree was badly damaged by storms and eventually removed after being destroyed by a fierce wind storm on August 17, 1906.  Attempts to replace the Lincoln tree were unsuccessful.  In 1988, the National Park Service decided to plant an elm tree but instead of using the traditional American elm, replace it with a Japanese-Chinese hybrid that was disease resistant.  The one caveat to planting the tree was the desire to keep the tree looking similar to the Lincoln elm in the 1860 photograph of the Lincoln Home by Boston photographer A.J. Whipple.  This requires the National Park Service to periodically dig up the Japanese-Chinese hybrid and replace it with a smaller version until it too, outgrows its purpose. 

     Finally, one of the earliest promotional narratives for the Soldiers’ Home, what is now called President Lincoln’s Cottage, was a large copper beech tree next to the cottage.  Folklore about Lincoln sitting in its branches, penning thoughts about emancipation, and chasing his sons around the base of the tree helped to provide a human element and compelling Lincoln connection to the site.  When the tree died in 2002, cuttings were taken to propagate and eventually present as legacy trees.  Arborists, however, determined that the age of the tree post-dated Lincoln and therefore could not have been on the grounds at the time Lincoln stayed at the cottage. Clearly, the copper beach tree disembarked after Lincoln.

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Welcome to our blog presented by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum!  As if from out of Lincoln’s top hat, we will be sharing with you interesting stories and details of his life and times.  Stay tuned for new entries posted weekly.  We hope you enjoy and invite you to share your thoughts and comments with us!