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

  As Election Day nears, candidates will be out shaking as many hands as possible to indicate to the voters that they are approachable and just ordinary folks.  Baby kissing, once fashionable for candidates, has lost much of its early charm.  The declining appeal probably can be traced to greater awareness of how germs and disease are spread by both hand shaking and kissing.  Barack Obama describes how George W. Bush handled the problem:

   “Obama!” the President said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura.  Laura, you remember Obama.  We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family.  And that wife of yours — that’s one impressive lady.”

   “We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President,” I said, shaking the First Lady’s hand and hoping that I’d wiped any crumbs off my face.  The President turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the President’s hand.

   “Want some? the President asked.  “Good stuff.  Keeps you from getting colds.”

   Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

Lacking both hand sanitizer and a fully developed concept of germs and disease, Lincoln thought of hand shaking as a symbol of trust and friendship.  In formal receiving lines, kid gloves were worn that provided some protection against direct transfer of germs from palm to palm.  But many of Lincoln’s handshake encounters were without gloves, exposing skin to skin.

   Elbridge Atwood, a Springfield resident, wrote to his sister on August 5, 1860, describing an upcoming political rally: “at least all creation are coming and some of the rest of mankind, I pity Old Abe for he will have to stand and shake hands all day.  He is a first rate fellow to shake hands, and every body likes to shake hands with him.”

   Lincoln seems to have had hands of steel, hardened by his frontier experience.  On November 24, 1860, Hannibal Hamlin wrote to his wife, complaining about being in a receiving line with president-elect Lincoln: “They came by thousands.  For two hours and a half it was a continuous shaking of hands.  My hand is sore indeed and I began to doubt if all the bones in it had not been squeezed out.”

   The greatest marathon hand shaking by the President is recorded by the Commissioner of Public Buildings, Benjamin Brown French.  Describing the reception following Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address as “the largest reception I ever saw,” French offered these observations: “From 8 till ¼ past 11 the president shook hands steadily, at the rate of 100 every 4 minutes — with about 5,000 persons!  Over, rather than under, for I counted the 100 several times, and when they came the thickest he was not over 3 minutes, never over 5.  It was a grand ovation of the People to their President, whom they dearly love.”  Lincoln performed another marathon exhibition of hand shaking a month later at the Depot Field Hospital at City Point, Virginia.  Wanting to show his appreciation for the soldiers’ sacrifice for their country, Lincoln shook an estimated 5,000 hands.  Theodore Roosevelt holds the record for shaking hands on the traditional New Year’s Day White House reception.  Approximately 8,513 individuals were greeted by Roosevelt’s hardy hand shake on January 1, 1907.

Volk had Lincoln grasp a broom handle to steady his swollen hand.

   Even Lincoln’s hand grew sore on occasion.  Leonard Wells Volk recalled that while making a plaster casting of Lincoln’s hands “the right hand appeared swollen as compared with the left, on account of excessive hand-shaking the evening before.”  The most famous incident of a sore hand concerns the Emancipation Proclamation.  Lincoln planned to sign the document before the New Year’s reception of dignitaries, but errors in the text required that it be rewritten.  The corrected document was delivered to the Executive Mansion after Lincoln had shaken hundreds of hands.  Lincoln picked up a pen to sign it but stopped because his hand had small tremors after three hours of shaking hands.  When the tremors subsided, he picked up his pen and signed the document, declaring, “I have never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper.”

   Much less frequent than hand shaking, although more appealing to Lincoln, was the opportunity to kiss young ladies on the cheek.  When the president-elect’s train stopped in Westfield, New York, Grace Bedell, the 11-year-old girl who had written to Lincoln to suggest that he grow a beard, was rewarded both by a hand shake and a kiss.  Bedell recalled that Lincoln told her, “You see I let these whiskers grow for you Grace.”

   Benjamin Brown French also documents a marathon kissing session after the Second Inaugural ceremonies.  “In the procession,” wrote French in his diary, “was a sort of triumphal car, splendidly trimmed, ornamented and arranged, in which rode thirty-four young girls.  On our return, the girls all alighted, & I took them in and introduced them to the President.  He asked to be allowed to kiss them all, & he did so.  It was a very interesting scene, & elicited much applause.”  There are no accounts indicating if Lincoln’s whiskers tickled any of the young ladies.

   Among the points of genius in the U.S. Constitution is the system of electing members to the House of Representatives every two years.  This has often proved a check on the power of the party holding the White House or the Senate.  Off-year elections (a phrase not coined till 1906, but ever important) have in the last couple of decades got the reputation of always going against the President’s party.  It’s not quite true, but for Lincoln, it did prove true.  Why?

   In the fall of 1860, Republicans won a majority of House seats, and southern secession quickly raised that majority appreciably.  Lincoln could count upon 108 Republicans as well as a fair number of the 40 northern Democrats who remained.  (Some members still called themselves Whigs, soon an obsolescent term.)  Yet in Illinois, Douglasites remained supreme: Illinois sent 5 Democrats and 4 Republicans to the House.

   In autumn 1862, Lincoln’s emancipation policy was in some places more unpopular than his administration’s poor management of the war; or, depending upon the county surveyed, vice-versa.  Either way, Republicans lost 22 of their 108 House seats, while Democrats gained 28 (independents, etc., accounting for the gap).  The Republican Speaker of the House lost his seat, Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania – a manufacturing state which in 1860 Lincoln had carefully plied and won with protective-tariff promises but which now trended anti-war.  Probably the most anti-war Northern state, New York, elected an anti-war Democrat as governor, and so did Ohio.  In Pennsylvania and Indiana, the Democrats took control of the state legislature.  Two dozen pro-war Democrats in the House did bolster Lincoln’s view that theirs was a national cause, a cause for Union, and not a party affair.  Yet once again, Lincoln heard Illinois shout against his war and his party.  After redistricting based on the 1860 census added 5 House seats, Illinois in 1862 sent 9 Democrats and 5 Republicans.

   A few days later Lincoln wrote to German-American general Carl Schurz, “We have lost the elections. … Three main causes told the whole story. 1. The democrats were left in a majority by our friends going to the war. 2. The democrats observed this & determined to re-instate themselves in power, and 3. Our newspaper’s, by vilifying and disparaging the administration, furnished them all the weapons to do it with. Certainly, the ill-success of the war had much to do with this.”  (Collected Works, 5: 493-494).  Two days later, Interior Secretary Caleb Smith asked to be relieved of office.

   Had Lincoln prepared the field for the off-year elections?  Not in the way we might expect today, for instead of compromising with his opponents in hopes of holding the middle ground, he bowed to his radical wing’s long-term demand, and his own growing feeling, for an emancipation policy.  With the Illinois Democrats so riven that 40 of the 102 counties refused to send delegates to their state convention in September, Lincoln sent Ward Hill Lamon from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, to try to shore up Republican support.  But roughneck Lamon was no silver-tongued winner of skeptics, and they were not even called Republicans in Illinois that year.  The pol’s had changed their name to the Union party – almost 2 years before the national party did.  When the 1862 votes came in, Lincoln’s oldest friend in the state, and 2^nd bunkmate, William Butler, had been defeated in his re-election bid as state treasurer.  Or should we call John T. Stuart his oldest friend, he who lent him law books from at least 1833?  Perhaps – but Stuart ran for Congress as an ‘independent’ from the Springfield district, against Lincoln’s 1860 election co-manager Leonard Swett, and beat him.  Just what is an independent, in that day or this?  Someone who runs against old friends.

   The crown of ‘oldest intimate friend’ in fact belonged to Joshua Speed.  As late as June 1862 Lincoln was responding positively to a petition co-signed by Speed to release a Kentucky man indicted for treason; and in mid-September – crunch-time in electoral terms – to a request by the governor of Kentucky, and Speed, to stop letting the Union military arrest men in that state, turning over the power to the governor himself.  Lincoln needed Kentucky, which is to say, he needed friends there, even pro-slavery men like Speed.  But he needed Republicans elected in Illinois and the rest of the North even more.

   A clearer sign of his lack of political savvy in 1862 is seen in his letter to Schurz, where Lincoln focused on absent soldier-voters and a spiteful press, and overlooked the public’s distrust of what he prized most, emancipation.  (He also overlooked the hit caused by the nation’s first Income Tax, begun that year, and the dubious advent of the greenback.)  Six days after announcing his timeless, vote-losing Proclamation, he had ruefully deflected Vice President Hamlin’s plaudits thus: “the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. … The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.” (CW, 5: 444)  So, weakened politically, he ended his year with the military edict that ended slavery in rebel territory.  Votes mattered less to Lincoln than a long-term goal reached through short-term force, to wit, military plus emancipatory progress.

   Can it also be said that Lincoln let down the team visually?  He did not have a photographic portrait of himself made in all of 1862.  Indeed, the evidence today is that he visited no photographer between September 1861 and April 1863 (except when he posed with General McClellan and others at Antietam in October 1862, in outdoor ‘at work’ shots).  The usual explanation for his absence from a studio is that Willie Lincoln’s death in February 1862 left him downcast and overworried.  The modern pollster might suspect that new images of Lincoln would do nothing for other Republicans running for office that year.

   Vindication came in 1864 with Lincoln’s re-election.  He exerted himself to arrange for soldiers to get home to vote, something he had not pressed in 1862.  Now Illinois Republicans – running on the nationally approved ticket as the National Union Party – sent 12 Union men to the House, against only 2 Democrats, while the national sweep was nearly as strong.  And Lincoln left us post-election proof of how politically attuned he was after all, in his scrupulous notes of state-by-state voting (see image).  Even in a contest that seemed clearly his by early September 1864, he wanted to see how little or how much each state favored him.  The war had been effectively won by Grant and Sherman, with help from black soldiers, so Lincoln could get back to counting votes.

   No less astute a scholar than James G. Randall of the University of Illinois, a Democrat, pointed out to the American Historical Association annual meeting in 1934 that in the long run,  John C. Frémont’s followers had won in 1864.  Frémont briefly ran for the presidency as an abolitionist Radical that year, but dropped out of the race, regretting that Lincoln’s rule was “physically, militarily, and financially a failure.”  It was those radicals who seized the reins in Congress after 15 April 1865 and rode the vanquished South hard.  Randall’s point is sound; but Lincoln’s 1862 pursuit of both war and emancipation led to successes immeasurable on Election Day.

   Today this seems an irrelevant or tactless question to ask about any public official.  Harping on a person’s looks is a sign of small-mindedness.  Politicians trying to take down their opponents in 2010 don’t make fun of their physical appearance.  Voters revile ad hominem or ad feminem nastiness. 

   Nowadays it’s hard to find a politician whom anyone would consider ugly in the first place.  After television conquered the land in the 1950s, good looks become a virtual qualification for office.  Some people in the 1960s thought LBJ looked ugly, and happily voted for him.  Could a politician considered unattractive get elected president today?  Who knows?  He or she might face a tough time getting into politics at all.

   It’s hard for us in the 2000s to figure out why so many people in the 1800s thought Lincoln was ugly.  He doesn’t look so bad in the pictures Brady or Gardner took of him.  But even after the assassination — when you’d think people would have stopped assessing his physical attributes — eulogists and mourners kept right on calling him ugly.  A few people, like William Herndon, his former law partner in Springfield, went out of their way to insist Lincoln wasn’t ugly at all, just “homely.”  But before and after his death, friends and foes alike kept remarking on how unlovely he was.

   Lincoln’s Democratic detractors didn’t just dwell on his unattractiveness; they often found him repulsive.  Colonel Charles Wainwright, scion of the old Hudson River elite, saw the president and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton at the opera in Washington, D.C., in 1862, and he tied Lincoln’s ugliness to his unrefined behavior: 

   “It would be hard work to find the great man in his face or figure,” Wainwright wrote in his diary, “and he is infinitely uglier than any of his pictures.  When the audience rose and cheered on his entry, instead of coming forward and bowing like a gentleman, he sat down, stuck his head out over the edge of the box, and grinned like a great baboon.  I was ashamed to think that such a gawk was President of the United States.”

   (Wainwright didn’t think much of Stanton’s looks either, describing him as “a long-haired, fat, oily, politician-looking man.”)

   Walt Whitman, one of Lincoln’s biggest boosters, agreed with Wainwright about the president’s unprepossessing looks.  But in Whitman’s eyes, Lincoln’s ugliness made him all the more endearing:

   “He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.”

   One reason people across the political spectrum felt so free to call Lincoln ugly was that he happily led the way.  He called himself ugly, a politically deft course to take.  Self-flattery loses votes; self-deprecation wins them.  Politics aside, Lincoln was a big fan of popular humor, which until recently found “fat” jokes and “ugly” jokes hilarious.  He’d likely have fallen over in hysterics if he’d ever gotten to hear any of Rodney Dangerfield’s ‘I was such an ugly baby’ lines (still available online).

   A lot of people fell over listening to Lincoln tell jokes, and one of his favorites, according to painter Francis Carpenter, concerned his looks:

   “In the days when I used to be ‘on the circuit,’” Carpenter reported Lincoln saying, “I was once accosted in the cars by a stranger, who said ‘Excuse me sir, but I have an article in my possession which belongs to you.’  ‘How is that?’ I asked, considerably astonished.  The stranger took a jack-knife from his pocket.  ‘This knife,’ said he, ‘was placed in my hands some years ago, with the injunction that I was to keep it until I found a man uglier than myself.  I have carried it from that time to this.  Allow me now to say, sir, that I think you are fairly entitled to the property.’” 

   Chances are that Carpenter attributed this joke to Lincoln without ever having heard him actually utter it.  A version of it was published in a London jest book in 1826, when Lincoln turned seventeen.  But even if Lincoln never said it, Carpenter knew his readers in 1866 would smile, realizing it fit Lincoln to a T.  They’d heard for a very long time of his delight in cutting up his appearance.

   In effect, then, Lincoln encouraged his friends to make fun of his looks by making fun of them himself.  But there’s another big reason why so many people gladly joined in.  It let them magnify the contrast between his face at rest (ugly) and his face in motion (entrancing).  

   “When in repose,” journalist Donn Piatt recalled after Lincoln’s death, “his face was dull, heavy, and repellent.  It brightened like a lit lantern when animated.  His dull eyes would fairly sparkle with fun, or express as kindly a look as I ever saw, when moved by some matter of human interest.”

   Calling Lincoln ugly, in other words, was part of a tried-and-true, before-and-after formula.  However gloomy he might appear (ugly), he was always one joke away from slapping his knee and lighting up the room (transfigured).  By repeating how awful he looked initially, people were describing something real about his character: his charismatic charm kept erupting out of nowhere, catching them by surprise.

Barnard’s ‘Lincoln the Laborer’ of 1917, barred from London and placed in Manchester, England

   Maybe this is the reason Robert Lincoln, the president’s son, so disliked this early-20^th-century George Grey Barnard statue of his father (the photograph is from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library’s collection).  It froze him in the first half of the before-and-after formula.  Robert knew his father could appear downcast and dour.  But cementing him in a look of that sort — his face locked in a glazed stare, his arms hanging stiffly across his chest — missed his most essential physical qualities: motion and transformation.  Lincoln’s character was too volatile to be captured in such a one-sided pose.  (One leading collector dubbed the Barnard statue the “stomach-ache Lincoln.”)

   Lincoln knew he wasn’t the handsomest man in town, and he rose in most people’s estimation by frankly admitting it.  He laughed off the whole ugliness issue.  But occasionally he got serious about the common insinuation that he didn’t look like a gentleman.  Speaking in Springfield on July 17, 1858, as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, he let the audience know that surfaces didn’t count in judging a person’s true refinement.

   He’d embarked on his campaign against Stephen Douglas, he said, “with the intention of conducting it strictly as a gentleman, in substance at least, if not in the outside polish.  The latter I shall never be, but that which constitutes the inside of a gentleman I hope I understand, and am not less inclined to practice than others. [Cheers.]”

   Americans love stories that reflect determined competition.  Whether it is the baseball rivalry of the Chicago Cubs against the St. Louis Cardinals or ancient rivalries of Athens and Sparta, competition provides a dramatic element to any story.  Artists are usually seen as solitary individuals who pursue their own muse.  Nineteenth-century photographers and printmakers often shamelessly reproduced images from competitors and claimed it as their own.  Less recognized are the collaborative efforts by artists that were typically driven by a profit motive.  The story of The Last Hours of Lincoln illustrates how John Badger Bachelder worked to create for public sale an iconic scene of commemoration by using the services of photographer Mathew Brady, painter Alonzo Chappel, and printmaker Henry Bryan Hall, Jr.

   The Civil War provided abundant opportunities for artists to capture or create images of the war and its military and civilian leaders through sculptures, photographs, paintings, prints, and illustrations in periodicals.  The competition among artists to produce and then be the first to distribute new images of the war characterized much of the Civil War era.  But the need to produce images often led to temporary collaborations.  The artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter hired Mathew Brady to take poses of Lincoln in the White House as visual references for his painting First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln.  Carpenter, a staunch antislavery man, wanted the scene to commemorate the greatest act of Lincoln’s presidency.  He exhibited the painting in several major cities and had it transformed into a very popular steel engraving by Alexander Hay Ritchie.  Abraham Lincoln was one of the first subscribers, ordering the $50 signed artist proof copy.  Less expensive versions could be had for $25 and $10.

   John Badger Bachelder, a New Hampshire artist, traveled to Washington, D.C., on the day Lincoln died, determined to create an iconic scene of Lincoln’s final moments. Knowing that the 47 individuals who visited the room during Lincoln’s final hours had come and gone throughout the night, Bachelder was not concerned that the small room could accommodate only a few people at a given time.  The picture was not intended to be an accurate representation of Lincoln’s moment of death, but rather something of contemplation, representing those who presided throughout the death vigil.  Bachelder wrote letters to every individual who spent time in the room during the night of April 14-15, and scheduled appointments for them at Mathew Brady’s studio.  He requested that they wear the same clothing as they had worn that night.  Bachelder conceived a design in his head and posed individuals in Brady’s studio to realize his composition.  The photographs became points of reference for the painter, Alonzo Chappel, who created two different oil paintings of the scene.  One, now at Brown University, appears to be the first study, while the final work is at the Chicago History Museum.

   In addition to the paintings, Bachelder hired the services of engraver Henry Bryan Hall, Jr., to make steel engraved prints based upon the Chappel painting.  Three subscription books survive, offering the prints in the following styles:  $100 for a limited Artist Proof (200 signed copies); $60 for an India Proof; $35 for a Plain Proof; and $15 for a mass market print.  The work was to be sold entirely through subscription.  These subscription books each have 11 rare Brady session photographs pasted in the front.  In all three, Robert Todd Lincoln, the late president’s son, signed up for the $100 Artist Proof copy.

   In 1869, in a separate project, Bachelder published Isaac Arnold’s Sketch of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, a book largely derived from Arnold’s lengthy biography of Lincoln published three years earlier.  The new frontispiece bore an engraving of Lincoln by Hall, published by Bachelder, and based upon a photograph by Mathew Brady — again showing the artistic interplay of these individuals.  The end matter of the book contained endorsements of the artistic quality of the Hall engraving, along with order information for various sizes and pricings of the engraving through Bachelder’s publishing house.  There were also descriptions for ordering Bachelder’s most famous artwork documenting The Battle of Gettysburg. 

An extremely rare Bachelder / Chappel / Hall print, 1867

The Arnold book ended with a description of The Last Hours of Lincoln project.  A small engraving of the scene, with a key to identify the 47 individuals, was part of the extended promotional matter, ending with endorsements of the project by such figures as J.K. Barnes, U.S. Surgeon-General; Francis Spinner, U.S. Treasurer; and John Hay, private secretary to Abraham Lincoln.  A review reprinted from the Washington Sunday Herald claimed, “It is just such a work as, above all others, should be American property, for if ever there was a National picture, this is one.”

   Despite all of Bachelder’s promotional efforts for The Last Hours of Lincoln, not a single copy from 1869 has turned up, which leads us to pose the question, ‘Why not?’  Isaac Arnold wrote to Bachelder on December 1, 1874, to inquire: “Is the engraving of the death of Lincoln finished?  You know all my pictures were burned in the great fire here [in 1871] & therefore I am the more anxious to obtain more.  If the engraving is finished please send to me at No. 104 Pine St., Chicago & oblige.”  Clearly, Arnold could not remember if he had ever received a print.  And, likely, he had not.  Whether Bachelder did not approve of the finished work by Hall, or whether his ambitious Battle of Gettysburg project got the best of him, we will never know. 

   In a collection of Bachelder materials obtained a few years ago by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum through a generous gift from LaSalle National Bank, a discarded Hall print was among the items.  This image was later distributed, in 1908, by M. David, who thereby published something that Bachelder did not intend for distribution.

        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.