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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In part 1 , the accuracy, even the veracity, of such Lincoln associates as William Herndon and Noah Brooks was examined.  Only a few of their statements about Lincoln were important in the short or long run, though as described in part 1 mothers and mediums may disagree with me.  Of nearly world significance over the last century has been the contact between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.  The escaped slave, journalist, orator, and publicist claimed to have met with Lincoln 3 times, but only 2 of these meetings are corroborated by a source other than Douglass.  Since World War II scholars have gradually grown more skeptical of some of Douglass’s recollections.

Their first conversation occurred in company with Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas, in the Executive Mansion, on 10 August 1863, over what became a failed attempt to send Douglass to the South to help recruit black troops.  Lincoln, 2 members of his cabinet, and Sen. Pomeroy signed a pass South for Douglass, who wrote a private letter about the meeting on the 12^th.  He spoke about the meeting in December 1863, a speech published in Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator.  Lincoln’s secretary John Hay recorded the meeting in his diary, but neither Hay nor John Nicolay seem ever to have mentioned Douglass again.  Then, in 1881 — according to James Oakes, the most recent scholar on the topic — Douglass published his “most detailed account … and thus less reliable” version of the meeting, in the third of his autobiographies.  He revised that book later; and in 1888 provided a “vague” account that “collapses several different conversations into one.”

Next, Douglass met Lincoln on 19 August 1864.  (LaWanda Cox, in her 1981 book, gives that date, while Oakes, using Douglass’s papers, dates it to 25 August.)  Two other visitors to the president that hour, one of them ex-governor Randall of Wisconsin, also recorded the event.  Douglass wrote of it to a friend 2 months later, and in a speech on 5 June 1865 recollected another incident; then retrieved from memory for the first time, in 1881, more of his dialogue with Lincoln.  Because Douglass lost many of his papers in a house fire in 1872, we do not know what notes he might originally have made.  At any rate, it seems that he was following the same pattern as dozens of other journalists, politicians, and memoirists in the post-Lincoln years: crystalizing and growing in the mind what had been in reality a brief or passing acquaintance with the man.

This 1864 meeting led Lincoln to invite Douglass to come to tea at the Soldiers’ Home; or so Douglass recalled “some years later,” writes Oakes.  A prior commitment prevented his attending.  (Pass up tea with the president?)  But a seminal event such as Lincoln’s second inaugural could not be passed up.  Douglass wrote that he was in the crowd of thousands on 4 March 1865; that later on he and a woman stood in line at the Executive Mansion to greet Mr. Lincoln; that he was turned away at the door as a black man, was tricked into leaving, then saw “a gentleman” he knew, who got him in.  He wound his way amid the throng inside to the president, and had this now-famous exchange:

Frederick Douglass, tireless abolitionist and sometime friend of Lincoln.

“Here comes my friend Douglass.  I am glad to see you.  I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?”  Two lines of apology and encouragement ensue, before Lincoln fairly forces Douglass to admit,

“Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”

So wrote Douglass in 1881, and never earlier.  Did not one of the thousands of other people around that day notice him, not even the helpful “gentleman,” to record this singular appearance and apothegmatic remark, not even one of the other journalists on the scene?  No scholar since – not Booker T. Washington (1906), Benjamin Quarles (1948 and 1962), LaWanda Cox (1981), James Oakes (2008), or five others – has found another mention of Douglass’s front-door, side-door, or hand-to-hand movements.  Yet all cite the obstructed entrance and ensuing dialogue as historical event.

In the same chapter of this 3rd memoir, Douglass related how on the previous night “I took tea with Chief Justice Chase, and assisted his beloved daughter, Mrs. Sprague, in placing over her honored father’s shoulders the new robe … in which he was to administer the oath of office to the re-elected President.”  Yet Quarles never mentions Salmon Chase; and the best study of Chase, by John Niven (1995), never mentions Douglass.

I and the world would welcome any kind of confirmation of these events outside of what Douglass once claimed.  African-American newspapers in Philadelphia and Baltimore reported on the “500” blacks seen at the 4 March 1865 reception, according to Quarles, yet do not mention Douglass.  All history relies on the progressive and cumulative revelation of original sources, and some come to hand later than earlier.  We have hope, just as we have hope that Lincoln so nobly reached out to a shunned man.  But the evidence is growing less and less acceptable to modern readers.  Undeniably, Lincoln and Douglass worked toward the same ends, at different paces, because one was a politician, the other a journalist.  Their common goal did not necessarily make them friends.  By the 1880s, the great majority of Americans in the North wanted to have been Lincoln’s friend.  Douglass, like Noah Brooks, shone in the light cast by Lincoln’s legacy, the brighter he could make their friendship glow.

A classic gag line from the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera deals with contract clauses.  Groucho reassures Chico about the contract: “That’s in every contract, that’s what you call a sanity clause.”  To which Chico responds: “You can’t fool me, there ain’t no sanity clause.”  The question of the existence of Santa Claus is the theme of the movie A Miracle on 34^th Street.  Maureen O’Hara plays a divorced mother, Doris Walker, who hires Edmund Gwenn, who plays the character Kris Kringle, to be a seasonal department store Santa Claus.  When she discovers that the person she hired actually believes himself to be the real Santa Claus, Doris must decide whether to keep the very popular Kris Kringle on staff or dismiss him as potentially dangerous and delusional.  Julian Shellhammer, played by actor Philip Tonge, is a colleague of Doris and offers her this advice: “But … but maybe he’s only a little crazy like painters or composers or some of those men in Washington.” 

Abraham Lincoln as Santa Claus, Comic Monthly Dec. 1864

This brings us to the mysterious statements made by the painter Freeman Thorp, who claimed to have sketched Lincoln from life on two separate occasions.  Thorp was born in Geneva, Ohio, and claimed that he made a pencil sketch of president-elect Lincoln as the train passed through the town on its way to Washington, D.C.  (This sketch will be the subject of a later blog.)  Thorp was an accomplished painter who did numerous oil portraits of famous Washington figures that hang in the United States Capitol.  They include Abraham Lincoln, James G. Blaine, Schuyler Colfax, David B. Henderson, and Joseph G. Cannon.  The success of his art career allowed him to retire in Pequot Lakes, Minnesota.  But time was not kind, and the painter died a poor man in Brainerd, Minnesota, in 1922.  Shortly before his death, Thorp wrote the following letter which remained unfinished but made a rather astonishing claim.  It is unclear to whom it was directed other than ‘Editor.’  Spelling and punctuation have been modernized.

                                                                        “Hubert Minn. Dec 24^th 1921

“Editor

            “Dear Sir If you care to consider a matter that can easily be of great importance to your paper to the country and to the world I will be glad to give you all the facts in the matter.  As to my personal standing and reputation I can refer you to the Senior Senator from Minnesota Knut Nelson to my congressman Harold Knutson whip of the House, and Geo. D. Lass President of the First National Bank of Brainerd, Minn. my banker and if permitted will come to Chicago and present convincing proof of what I desire to lay before you.  In brief it is about Lincoln is new and has never been given to or published in any paper as an item of Lincoln’s life, is by far the most important to mankind of any of the great ideas of his master mind, and more important to the World than any other idea of any mortal man in the World, as you will yourself see, if it is practical and I have the indisputable proof that it is easily practical.  The idea is wholly Lincolns no other man ever thought it out or even thought of it.  Yet put in general operation, it will make every acre of land in the World, upland or lowland, desert or swamp, hill or valley the best in the world for the production of all that the world wants in food or raw material of a vegetable nature for life, health, comfort, and enjoyment, producing 4 times as much per acre as can now be done by the best methods now known to Agriculture.  Fruit, timber growth or grazing, and doing this by the Lincoln method eliminates floods, drought, and any possible famine, converts stream beds now alternately dry or flood of muddy water, into living streams of pure water all the year round, quadrupling the water power, maintaining a uniform navigable stage of rivers, makes it unnecessary for the United States to ever buy or import a dollar’s worth of nitrogen, potash, phosphate, guano, or any commercial fertilizer, enables the continued cropping of the soil for any number of years without lowering its fertility.  All this with less labor per acre than now required to make the meager living of the farmer by much harder labor than this requires. Of course this seems incredible but it has been worked out proven absolutely and put in operation on my demonstration tract of 1500 acres here at Hubert, Minn., and is easily practical for the whole World.  If I can be assured of a hearing I will gladly come to Chicago soon after the New Year at my own expense and go over the whole matter with you showing how I came to know Lincoln and what is more important to know more about him, and the ideas of his than any other man has ever had the opportunity to know that which it is important to learn about him.”

Thorp does not provide a clue to what Lincoln’s “great idea” might be.  The only evidence Thorp offers is that it was tested on his own farm in Hubert, Minn.  That he died poor the following October does not offer much evidence of the success of Lincoln’s idea.  Clearly, Thorp was more successful at delineating images of people than their ideas.

The memorable holiday character of Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens’s 1843 classic A Christmas Carol brought into popular usage the phrase “Bah! Humbug!”  Scrooge went beyond ignoring the holiday.  He believed it to be a conspiracy of slackers to get a day off from work.  “A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December,” exclaimed Scrooge.  Ultimately, Scrooge’s problem was his inability to embrace the spirit of the season that also included reconnecting with friends, family, and the less fortunate.  The Scrooge model is supported by a recent study suggesting that the higher one’s socioeconomic status, the lower the “empathic accuracy.”  In other words, one becomes less attuned to the needs of others.  In the triumphal ending, Scrooge’s change of heart also allows for the future of individuals such as Tiny Tim to change as well. 

There is little evidence that Abraham Lincoln celebrated Christmas in ways that Charles Dickens’s novella helped advance: holiday dinner, a Yule log, the exchange of presents, stockings by the fireplace, and a decorated tree.  Subscribing to earlier Protestant traditions of visiting friends at New Year’s, the Lincolns apparently never embraced the emerging Victorian symbols of celebration. 

Looking at what is firmly documented for Lincoln’s activities on December 25^th, we find most of his time spent on letter-writing and, throughout the presidency, dealing with affairs of state.  While serving in the Illinois Legislature in Vandalia, Lincoln voted against adjourning for Christmas.  While serving in the United States House of Representatives, Lincoln spent the 1848 holiday straightening out an old legal issue with his friend Joshua Speed, ending the letter, “Nothing of consequence new here, beyond what you see in the papers.”

December 25, 1861, offers two different views of the Lincoln family.  It is clear that the Lincoln boys spent the day with the Taft family.  Daughter Julia would frequently bring over her brothers Bud and Holly to play with Willie and Tad Lincoln.  She later gave a series of lectures at the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum) about her memories of the Lincoln Executive Mansion.  These lectures were published as a book, Tad Lincoln’s Father (1931).  Julia’s father, Horatio Nelson Taft, kept a diary and recorded this for Wednesday, December 25, 1861: “It has been quite a noisey day about the house.  Our three boys and the Two Lincoln boys have been very busy fireing off Crackers & Pistols.  Willie & Thomas Lincoln staid to Dinner at 4 o’clock.”  Meantime, Abraham and Mary Lincoln were entertaining friends from Kentucky and Illinois as well as some members of his cabinet.  Orville Hickman Browning, who was appointed to serve out the remainder of the Senate seat of the late Stephen A. Douglas, was at this dinner.  There is nothing in his diary entry to suggest holiday flair.  It was during this time that diplomatic difficulties with England, over the seizure of two Confederate diplomats from the British mail packet Trent, were at a climax.  According to Browning, Lincoln pulled him aside following the dinner and reassured him that problems over the Trent affair had been amicably resolved.

That it was business as usual at the Executive Mansion on December 25, 1861, is suggested by private secretary John Nicolay.  Writing to his fiancée Therena Bates, Nicolay jokes: “John [Hay] and I are moping the day away here in our offices like a couple of great owls in their holes, and expect in an hour or two to go down to Willards and get our ‘daily bread’ just as we do on each of the other three hundred and sixty four days of the year.”  Once again, the New Year’s reception served as the most significant holiday on the White House social calendar.

In “The Union Christmas Dinner” of 1864, Lincoln invites Rebel soldiers to take their state-named seats at the table once again.

Lincoln received all sorts of gifts throughout the year.  A specific Christmas gift was sent by telegram on Tuesday, December 20, 1864:

To His Excellency President Lincoln:

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.

W.T. Sherman

Major-General

Undoubtedly one of the most unusual gifts was sent a few weeks before December 25, 1864, by the famed hunter and mountain man Seth Kinman.  Sporting buckskin and long unkempt hair to match a long bushy beard, Kinman began presenting chairs made from animal bones and skins to presidents beginning with James Buchanan and continuing at least through Rutherford B. Hayes.  On November 26, 1864, Kinman visited Lincoln in Washington to present a chair made from elk horns.  Alfred Waud, an artist and illustrator, captured the scene in a drawing now at the Library of Congress.  Lincoln is seen examining Kinman’s rifle, with the elk horn chair in the background.  Clearly, Lincoln was amused by his unusual visitor, who also played two songs for the president on a violin made from the skull of his mule, Dave.

The chair eventually was given by Robert Todd Lincoln to Clinton Lloyd, a friend of Kinman and Chief Clerk of the House of Representatives.  It eventually was passed on to his son, George B. Lloyd of Springfield, Illinois, where it was displayed on several occasions and then disappeared.  Like so many unusual holiday gifts such as gaudy ties, snow globes, and overly imaginative mugs and tea sets, the elk horn chair, one might hope, has been re-gifted with the possibility of resurfacing some day.

This is the first of a two-part piece on the perils of single-source history in the Lincoln field.  Part 2, on Frederick Douglass, will appear in January 2011.

Such is the hunger for facts and stories about Lincoln that we may occasionally fail to double-check the sources.  A good many stories rely on exactly one person’s report or opinion.  Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher’s book Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (1994) contains thousands of contemporary and post-1865 statements about things Lincoln said.  Most rely on one person’s report.  Who are those persons?

William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner for 17 years and his acquaintance for about 24 years, is the largest source.  Nearly everything he said or wrote about Lincoln emerged years, even a quarter-century, after 1865. “All that I am or ever hope to be I get from my angel mother,” quoth Lincoln via Herndon.  Or was it merely “from my mother”?  Both versions come from Herndon.  Neither can be cross-checked against any other source.  The tone, though, is plausibly Lincoln’s.

Other than Herndon, the biggest source, and problem, in Lincoln history is journalists.  They get most of their facts right, and we are hugely indebted to them.  Yet many of them have a desire to seem influential for years after their key association.  And, they age.

Noah Brooks was among the most diligent reporters in Washington during Lincoln’s presidency.  For the Sacramento Daily Union he followed and recorded the great man’s movements for the final two and a half years, as well as filing good war reports.  It is he who tells us, e.g., of Lord Colchester the séance-maker, and Mary and Abraham’s encounter with him, and how one night at a séance across town Brooks suspected fraud and seized someone’s wrist in the dark, and found it was Colchester’s. He then warned the fraudster to leave town.  This has believability to it; but can anyone corroborate it?  Mary Lincoln biographers Jean Baker and Catherine Clinton both recount the episode, in startlingly different ways, adding new information or misstating the old.  Whom are we to believe?  The Fehrenbachers trace one reported Lincolnism as quoted 4 different ways from Brooks’s multifarious memory.

Brooks wrote articles for Scribner’s Monthly and Century Magazine in the 1870s and ’80s, then a biography of Lincoln in 1888 that went through many variations and editions.  All this was supposedly based on his 258 wartime dispatches.  But his 1895 book Washington in Lincoln’s Time has other material and is where anyone beyond the small number of 1863 Sacramento-area subscribers could read that the Lincolns, while visiting General Hooker in Stafford County, Va., in April 1863, drove past a bedraggled camp of freed slaves.  How many of those “little piccaninnies,” Mary asked her husband, do you suppose are named for you?  “Let’s see. This is April, 1863,” answers the president.  “I should say that of all those babies under two years of age, perhaps two thirds have been named for me.”

Is this a president we recognize?  Herbert Mitgang includes the dialogue in a 1958 edition of Brooks’s book.  P.J. Staudenraus omitted it from his 1967 edition.  So, too, Michael Burlingame in his 1998 edition, who does, though, catch Brooks attributing his own views to Lincoln on at least two other occasions.  And Brooks wrote, soon after this unlikely episode, that “No colored persons are employed about the Executive Mansion,” an error that casts into doubt just how close Brooks was to Lincoln.  William Johnson was Lincoln’s regular valet, attending him sporadically but personally for almost three years, till his death by smallpox after traveling to Gettysburg with Lincoln.  William Slade was a doorman, sometimes confused with the other William as a man with access to the president.  Elizabeth Keckly was Mary’s most constant companion, and is in fact the person who encouraged her to seek out spiritualist mollification after Willie Lincoln’s death.  Was Noah Brooks watchful for mediums but blind to blacks?  His 1895 reports about Lincoln may show a hardening of his arteries, or of the nation’s.

Noah Brooks, ca. 1872, early in his “I knew Lincoln” career.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1856 Republican ballot, showing Lincoln as an at-large presidential elector for Illinois.

 On August 30, 1860, Abraham Lincoln wrote a reply to Alexander Kelly McClure about the upcoming presidential contest.  McClure, a lawyer, newspaper editor, and chairman of the Pennsylvania State Republican Committee, kept in frequent communication with the Republican presidential nominee.  Lincoln wished to clarify how his chances of victory were materializing in the Keystone State.  “When you say you are organizing in every election district,” Lincoln queried, “do you mean to include the idea that you are ‘canvassing’—‘counting noses?’”  McClure responded that he was counting noses to “the man” in most districts and obtaining a careful “estimate” by loyal party men in the remaining districts.  All signs suggested that Pennsylvania’s 27 electoral votes would go to Lincoln. 

The Electoral College, not a majority of voters, determines who occupies the White House.  Having supporters and detractors over the centuries, the Electoral College was opposed early in his life by Lincoln, who then changed his mind.  Writing on February 13, 1848, to Josephus Hewett, a former Springfield lawyer, Lincoln argued: 

 “I was once of your opinion, expressed in your letter, that presidential electors should be dispensed with; but a more thorough knowledge of the causes that first introduced them, has made me doubt.  Those causes were briefly these.  The convention that framed the constitution has this difficulty: the small states wished to so frame the new government as that they might be equal to the large ones regardless of the inequality of population; the large ones insisted on equality in proportion to population.  They compromised it, by basing the House of Representatives on population, and the Senate on states regardless of population; and the executive on both principles, by electors in each state, equal in numbers to her senators and representatives.  Now, throw away the machinery of electors, and the compromise is broken up, and the whole yielded to the principle of the large states.” 

 While many Jacksonian Democrats preferred to do away with the Electoral College, all political operatives had to yield to the necessity of calculating the electoral math. 

A recently acquired form letter illustrates the calculations which political insiders were generating in anticipation of the 1860 election.  Dr. Charles Leib, a former Pennsylvanian residing in Chicago, began to distribute form letters in late 1859 urging Republican leaders to consider Simon Cameron, a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, as the party’s presidential candidate.  Arguing the electoral math, Leib states: “If we nominate Gen. Cameron and add to the vote of Col. Fremont (114) that of Pennsylvania (27,) New Jersey (7,) Kansas (3) and Minnesota (4,) we will elect him by one majority, if even the democracy [i.e., the Democratic Party] should carry the vote of Illinois (11,) Indiana (13,) California (4) and Oregon (3,) which, however, it will be impossible for them to do.”  Leib warns that “should a candidate be nominated who cannot carry Pennsylvania and New Jersey, he will fail of an election by two votes, should he receive the support of every other free state.”  The letter ends with an electoral breakdown based upon sections — the vote divided between free versus slave states. 

The electoral math was clear to many in both the North and the South that the new Republican party would be able to capture the White House in 1860 if it could build upon its electoral foundation of 1856.  That meant running a moderate who would be appealing in such states as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kansas, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, California, and Oregon.  It was also clear to Southerners that unless they could run a Northern Democrat who was partial to protecting slavery, the electoral math was against them in any election based upon sectional interests.

   “You must write me a good long letter after you get this,” implored Abraham Lincoln to his estranged fiancée, Mary S. Owens.  “You have nothing else to do, and though it might not seem interesting to you, after you had written it, it would be a good deal of company to me in this ‘busy wilderness.’”  Lincoln’s reference to Sangamon County as a ‘busy wilderness” was written only slightly in jest.  Indeed, Lincoln shared the expansive dreams that most residents had for the future of the county and the towns that had sprung up within its boundaries.  The dreams were built on visions of personal happiness and material advancement.  A fundamental element in realizing these visions rested upon the United States Postal System. 

   Tradition has it that Abraham Lincoln was appointed postmaster of New Salem after women of the village complained about the poor service being given by Samuel Hill and petitioned for his removal.  Even though Lincoln was an anti-Jackson man, President Andrew Jackson approved Lincoln’s appointment, being one among hundreds of postmaster applications to be approved.  The postal system was 19^th -century America’s version of the Internet.  The mails transported information that helped individuals in business and professional development, and the mails provided personal correspondence of the nature Lincoln was seeking from Mary Owens –  letters that could be read again and again in the absence of a loved one.  Letters were precious objects, conveying heartfelt sentiments and sharing experiences and dreams for a better life. 

   A small collection of letters sent from New Salem by residents Matthew Marsh and James Fox Clarke describes the rich Illinois prairie soil and the wonderful opportunities for farming and raising a family.  By enticing family and friends from the exhausted soils of New England to a new life in Illinois, the letters were part of a chain migration, encouraging the rapid settlement of the area. The post office also provided access to newspapers and political speeches made by congressmen, connecting individuals on the frontier to a larger identity as a community, state, and nation.

   Abraham Lincoln’s brief, three-year tenure as postmaster offered him many benefits.  Since mail was not delivered, people had to pick their mail up from Lincoln; this system allowed him to read the various state and national newspapers subscribed to by various residents.  Unlike service today by which the sender pays for the cost of postage, in Lincoln’s time as postmaster, the recipient paid for the privilege of receiving mail.  Postal rates varied depending on the distance traveled and the number of pages in the letter.  A single sheet cost 6 cents for the first 30 miles, and up to 25 cents for more than 400 miles.  But Lincoln was willing to accommodate the residents of the area and occasionally placed correspondence in his hat if he were traveling in the direction of postal patrons located miles outside the village.  He also bent the rules by using his franking privileges as postmaster to waive the cost of a letter for a resident.  Mathew Marsh provided a sketch of Lincoln as postmaster in a letter to his brother: “he is a very clever fellow and a particular friend of mine.  If he is there when I carry this [letter] to the office—I will get him to ‘Frank’ it.”  And frank it Lincoln did, saving George Marsh 25 cents.

   New Salem gave way to the town of Petersburg, ending Lincoln’s career as postmaster on May 30, 1836.   Lincoln had clearly enjoyed his brief stint as postmaster.  He provided the line of communication with the larger world beyond frontier Illinois.  The office allowed a young man with political ambitions an opportunity to meet and mingle with townspeople and farmers alike.  And by connecting with the outside world, the office brought new information and ideas to feed the ambitions and imagination of people, like Lincoln, who saw their future in the further settlement and growth of Illinois.

The painting ‘Lincoln the Postmaster at New Salem, Illinois,’ by Fletcher C. Ransom (1942).

   Let me introduce you to a woman of the past.  She was well-born in a southern state early in the 19^th century.  She was not entirely happy with her home life after a certain point, and left that home as a teenager. She fell in love with a man and eventually married him, giving over nearly all of her personal life and identity to his work, his efforts, his and her children, as was common in that day.  After his death she grieved deeply and thought sadly of him every day.  You are thinking of her name now:  Is it Mrs. Lincoln?  Is it Mary Lincoln?  Is it Mary Todd Lincoln?  The person ‘Mary Todd’ ceased to exist in a legal sense on Nov. 4, 1842, when she wed Abraham Lincoln.  In a personal sense she may have ceased to exist then, too.  She became Mary Lincoln.

   There are 319 documents at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum in this woman’s hand.  That total is roughly 70 percent of all known letters by her.  On these 319, she signed herself one dozen distinct ways, involving her full name, initials, with or without ‘Mrs.,’ etc.  She never once used the name ‘Todd’ in any of these, and she never once used the initial ‘T.’  She signed her name ‘Mary Lincoln’ or ‘Mrs. Lincoln’ or ‘Mrs. Abraham Lincoln’ or ‘Mrs. A. Lincoln’ and even, 12 times, ‘Mrs. Cuthbert’ or just ‘Cuthbert.’  (This was a maid in the Executive Mansion who helped Mary Lincoln cover up some of her many unpaid bills between November 1864 and May 1865.)  She did not ever, let me repeat, ever refer to herself as ‘Mary Todd Lincoln.’

   The 1911 campaign to raise a statue for her at Sayre College, in her hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, seems to be the real origin of the name ‘Mary Todd Lincoln.’  Admittedly, when Robert Lincoln’s wife, Mary Harlan Lincoln, was named in the press – this rarely happened – a distinction had to be made between the mother Mary and the daughter-in-law Mary.  But our Mary died in 1882.  Kentuckians were proud of her illustrious heritage, and using three names for her was their fundraising way, I surmise, to re-unite South and North in that 50^th anniversary year of the beginning of the Civil War.  The 3-name usage was fairly common for about 20 years, then faded away until it was revived in the women’s rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.  It is now firmly, probably irreversibly, in common usage.  But its use is unfair to the woman who devoted her life from 1842 till 1865 to her living husband, and to his memory from 1865 to 1882.  Let us try to heed her own sense of who she was: Mrs. Abraham Lincoln.  Mrs. Lincoln.  Mrs. President Lincoln.  Mrs. A. Lincoln.  Sometimes to friends, M.L.  Most often, Mary Lincoln.  But never, I repeat never, was she Mary Todd Lincoln.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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