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

Most people have a favorite Lincoln Speech and many have a favorite Lincoln phrase.  For over a century the hands-down winner among the speeches has been the Gettysburg Address, partly because so many schoolchildren started memorizing it in the late 1800s.

As for the phrases, the most beloved of them all may come from the end of the Second Inaugural Address: “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”  For many people, “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” from the end of the Gettysburg Address, and “the better angels of our nature,” the last words of the First Inaugural, have proven equally memorable.

What about Lincoln’s greatest paragraphs?  We don’t usually think of him as having written in paragraph-length units.  We see him as the craftsman of elegant speeches, or historic one-liners.  Yet his longer addresses depended upon powerfully built paragraphs to construct rock-solid arguments.  These speeches amounted to legal briefs designed to meet and refute all possible objections.  The First Inaugural contains a succession of such paragraphs, subjecting the idea of secession to logical and historical demolition.

To my mind, the most exquisite Lincoln paragraphs come from speeches delivered before he was president.  Not yet knowing that he was speaking for the ages, he could address his audiences less formally, and at greater length.  He could indulge in tangents, and join satirical dismissal to dispassionate reason.

In his great speeches from 1854 to 1860, he built a meticulous case against slavery, and for the necessity of tolerating it where it was constitutionally protected.  Tolerating it did not diminish his hatred for it.  If anything, his middle-of-the-road acceptance of slavery (it might last another hundred years, he announced) drove him to greater rhetorical heights in denouncing it.

Two of Lincoln’s most scintillating paragraphs come from the same speech, his 26 June 1857 address in Springfield on the Dred Scott decision of that year.  Responding to Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion — which denied Dred Scott his freedom and ruled that no black person, free or slave, could ever become a citizen — Lincoln heaped scorn on slavery’s backers.

Lincoln attacked Douglas on all the issues of 1857, but focused on the Dred Scott ruling.

They “have him [the slave] in his prison house,” cried Lincoln, in the concluding lines of a longer paragraph.  “They have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him.  One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.”

Later in the speech, Lincoln went after Taney’s claim that the authors of the Declaration of Independence excluded black people when they spoke of “all men” being created equal.  On the contrary, said Lincoln, the authors plainly meant to include them.  Of course they did not mean that all men, at present, were equal in every respect.  But they were most assuredly equal in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“This they said, and this they meant,” proclaimed Lincoln, toward the end of a paragraph on Taney and the Declaration.  This section offers a discerning statement about how moral progress takes place over the long haul of history.

“They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.  They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.  The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use.  Its authors meant it to be, thank God, [and] it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.”

Episode 9, The Stereocards of Mr. Lincoln’s first tomb & the box at Ford’s Theatre: In addition to talking about the stereocards, we talk with Dr. Cornelius about a recent donation surrounding the receiving vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery, and a discovery made as a result of our blog. You can view the stereocards on our Youtube page.

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Comes to hand yet another brand-new piece of evidence this year.  Earlier it was the gold pen / pencil from Lincoln’s desk when he died; the name of Willie’s “dear friend” in the 1859 ‘chocolate letter’; and the discovery that the German-language newspaper Lincoln secretly owned in 1859-60 was subscribed to by dozens of state legislators (yet nary a copy remains today).

This time the discovery, by an eagle-eyed collector who kindly made the item available to the Presidential Library and Museum, concerns an eye doctor.  The printed document shown here will be illegible at this scale to most of us, but its gist is an endorsement by Lincoln, along with 36 other notable medical and political people, of a new clinic.  The clinic was run by E. S. Cooper, M.D., in Peoria, Illinois, offering new treatments for “Eye Diseases” and for club-foot in children.  The date on this circular letter is Oct. 27, 1851.

The 1851 document about the "Eye Infirmary"

How did Lincoln know this man?  How did, say, Stephen A. Douglas, Judge David Davis, Judge Samuel Treat, lawyer and banker Asahel Gridley, future Congressman William Kellogg also know this man?  Less surprising – or more surprising? – is that most other medical men in Peoria, 8 of them, endorsed Cooper’s start-up.  Also surprising is that public figures in 7 states, including an ex-senator, seemed familiar enough with Cooper’s new treatments, or reputation, to allow their names to be set in type beneath his advertisement.

Cooper’s name does not appear in any of Lincoln’s legal cases or extant correspondence; and the Springfield lawyer was rarely in Peoria in that period, though he was just over the Illinois River in Tazewell County often enough.  So the main question for Lincolnists is whether he had direct knowledge of Cooper’s skills.

Robert Lincoln was born in 1843 with a slight strabismus – he was cross-eyed.  The turned-in left eye did not affect his performance in school, but kids teased him.  In Berlin in 1850 the founder of modern ophthalmology, Albrecht Graefe, began teaching how to make a small incision to weaken a muscle that caused this condition.  Apparently within a year Dr. Cooper had learned the method, or read of it.  Did he soon exercise his surgical skill on young Robert, whose defect was gone by the time of an 1858 photograph? (Today the Graefe treatment is suggested on a child by age 6.  In Robert’s case, he lost most vision in old age in that eye, suggesting an imperfect boyhood cure.)

The only study to address Robert’s malady is Ruth Painter Randall’s Lincoln’s Sons (1955), in which she blithely and unhelpfully states (p. 33) that “an old document” reveals how the home remedy of staring through a keyhole forced Robert’s eye to adjust itself.  Jason Emerson, whose full biography of Robert is due in early 2012, reports that he has found no such “old document.”  Mrs. Randall would not have known of Cooper’s circular, because the one found this month is the first recorded, though one supposes that Cooper mailed out dozens of them.  Did Mrs. Randall make an incorrect inference about the strabismus from some other tale?

Or did Lincoln himself gain from treatment by Cooper?  The 40-something attorney is known to have got his first pair of spectacles some time in the early 1850s.  Perhaps from Cooper?  But why travel 95 miles from home to get something easily available from any number of people in Springfield, particularly as Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Dr. William Wallace, could have recommended an in-town colleague?  Or did Cooper examine Lincoln’s ‘lazy left eye,’ evident in so many photos of him?

Just when we think we see Lincoln clearly, new facts turn up.  This one matters in the sense that about 2 years earlier, after Robert had been bitten by a possibly rabid dog, did father Abraham take the 6-year-old boy about 140 miles to Terre Haute, Indiana, to procure a madstone – a clump of calcified cow regurgitant which according to frontier folklore could fend off, even draw out, the poison from rabies or snakebite.  Yes, the same budding genius, Abraham Lincoln, who procured for himself a scientific patent in the very same twelve month, put some store in the folk medicine of his rural youth.

Today we know that Robert did not die of rabies, though we’re not exactly sure why.  We also can hypothesize that his father soon made a sharp turn away from Terre Haute and toward Peoria, toward what became a standard medical treatment thanks to a Euro-American innovator who helped set the Lincolns’ first son on his own course to self-assuredness and future notoriety.

It is even possible that law partner William Herndon influenced Lincoln.  James Lander’s article in the Summer 2011 Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association details how many books on science Herndon owned, and examines some evidence of conversation between the partners on such topics.  In any event, Lincoln the cultural and political Whig always sought out progress, and in 1851 he seems to have focused on a very specific form of it.

Many subsequent presidents have taken Abraham Lincoln as an exemplar of great leadership and character.  The most historically minded among them, from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, have dwelt on his keen grasp of America’s role in the advance of democracy.

Lincoln, for his part, took the famously unsuccessful Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay as his main model of political virtue.  Starting out with little education or material resources — just like Lincoln — Clay had become a galvanizing legislator, charismatic speaker, and zealous booster of America’s destiny as the beacon of liberty.

His failure to reach the presidency, said Lincoln, did nothing to lessen his impact on his times.  He combined three character traits that in Lincoln’s estimation were common enough singly, but rarely found in one man: eloquence, judgment, and implacable will.

Henry Clay is scarcely more than a name today.  He is perhaps less well-known by Americans than the other two members of the mid-19^th century “great triumvirate,” Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun.

Sculpture of Henry Clay by C.Y. Haynes, 1850, celebrating the senator's support for technology and justice. Haynes's new gilt gesso technique, called a promoetheotype, did not catch on -- just as Clay's and Lincoln's mediating stances never had majority support.

Webster can still get plaudits for memorable speechifying: his rousing “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” etched beneath his massive bronze statue in New York City’s Central Park, is familiar to many.  Calhoun is often touted for original political theorizing, especially his concept of the “concurrent majority.”

Clay suffers by comparison.  His major achievement — helping to rein in sectional divisiveness for a third of a century — gradually faded from view after the Civil War undid it.  And his curious status as an anti-slavery slave-owner strikes many people nowadays as thinly masked hypocrisy.  Men like Clay and Thomas Jefferson are often said to have salved their consciences with airy proclamations about equality, while luxuriating from the labor of their chattels.

Yet in his lengthy 1852 eulogy for the departed Clay — a speech delivered in the same Springfield Hall of Representatives where his own body would lie in state in 1865 — Lincoln declared that Clay’s viewpoint on slavery was one of the primary reasons to admire him.  It qualified as paradoxical, Lincoln conceded, but it was emblematic of Clay’s good judgment.

Clay understood, said Lincoln, that the abomination of slavery must be tolerated indefinitely: abolishing it right away would wreak havoc, creating problems for blacks and whites alike.  There was no way “it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.” 

In Lincoln’s assessment, Clay’s entire career sprang from an intense commitment to liberty.  “He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country… He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.”  Most people loved their country chiefly because it was their home; Clay loved it chiefly because it was edging the entire world toward freedom for all.

Ironically, Clay’s enthusiasm for the spread of liberty made it easy for him to embrace the “colonization” movement — the campaign to mobilize freed American slaves to resettle in Africa.  All he had to do was perceive black Americans as a maliciously abused people who had still managed to pick up the ideal of liberty from their Euro-American environment.  They could voyage to their “native soil” across the sea as ambassadors of freedom.

At the end of his 1852 eulogy, Lincoln enthusiastically embraced Clay’s colonization program. Liberty for slaves would not come anytime soon, he knew, but when it did come, true liberty would have to occur in two stages.  Individual manumission had to be followed by the release of the entire group from their captivity in theUnited States.

Somehow, Lincoln imagined, the relocation of three million black Americans “to their long-lost fatherland” in Africa might be accomplished “so gradually, that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change.”  They could then embark on a new chapter in the history of liberty: “the possible ultimate redemption of the African race and African continent.”

Like his model Clay, Lincoln was so blinded by the bright glow of liberty, and the role former slaves could play in extending it, that he couldn’t perceive a very plain truth: by 1852 Africa was no longer their “fatherland” or “native soil.”

In the last years of his life, Lincoln came to his senses on colonization.  He may still have believed in it in the abstract, but he knew that African-Americans, while sometimes supportive of the idea, had largely repudiated it.  Most black Americans took theUnited States as their homeland, and loved their country — and its ideal of liberty — in spite of the severe restrictions still placed upon their freedom.

On the evening of April 11, 1865, Lincoln delivered the last speech of his life to a large outdoor crowd at the White House.  He endorsed the idea of giving the vote to some black men, signaling his awareness that African-Americans as a group would make their future — and help to spread the principle of liberty — in the United States, not in a foreign land.

John Wilkes Booth was standing in the crowd that night, aghast to hear the president put black men on the path to republican citizenship.  Booth decided then and there to stop Lincoln in his tracks.

A selfless and tireless researcher connected with the Presidential Library and Museum has made a discovery that provides fresh hope that some day, some how …

On May 30, 1859, Abraham Lincoln signed a contract with a German immigrant named Theodor Canisius. (The eponymous college in Buffalo, New York, was his later, unrelated project.) Lincoln had bought a set of German type and the printing presses that would allow a newspaper to be published in Springfield, with Canisius as editor.  It was called the Illinois Staats-Anzeiger — roughly, the Illinois State Advertiser.

As Lincoln wrote in the contract, which has been on view in the Treasures Gallery of the Presidential Museum for the last several months, “said paper, in political sentiment, not to depart from the Philadelphia and Illinois Republican platforms.” The goal was to appeal to German immigrants, “until after the Presidential election of 1860.”

Lincoln’s ownership of the paper – profits going to Canisius, for his efforts – was secret. Unfortunately, its contents have remained secret, too, since not a single copy of it exists today to the knowledge of anyone in the Lincoln field. But Lincoln sent a copy in early July 1859 to another German, and later released Canisius from the terms of the agreement because evidently he had held up his end of the bargain. So we know that roughly 15 months’ worth of weekly papers did exist.

Now, that selfless researcher reports this to me: “A number of members of the 1861 Illinois General Assembly subscribed to the Staats-Anzeiger at state expense, as legislators were allowed. On February 23, 1861, the state auditor issued warrant #9297 (for $312) to Theodore Canisius for 312 copies of Staats-Anzeiger for members of the state Senate; #9309 (for $92) to Theodore Canisius for 240 copies of the Staats-Anzeiger for the House.”

This 1864 German paper from Alton, Illinois, turned up in 2009 for the first time. Could Lincoln’s paper turn up next?

The date and those figures may mean that 1860 subscriptions were now being paid; or perhaps that 1861 subscriptions taken out. Whether or not the paper continued past the November 1860 election that saw Lincoln win a large number (though not, it is thought, a majority) of German-American votes, we do know that at least 500 copies a week were sent to elected officials, most likely for distribution to voters in their districts.

PLEASE!  Bitte schoen!  If anyone has an old German newspaper sitting in the attic, notify the Presidential Library immediately!  The type will confound most people, which is one reason that we suppose no copies have come to light since. The script is called Fraktur, in which some of the letters do not resemble the standard Latin alphabet used in modern English or German. But the word ‘Illinois’ on the masthead should be fairly apparent.

Thank you very much!  Danke schoen!  And thank you especially, Mr. J.

Episode 8, The Effigy Doll of Mr. Lincoln: This month we talk with Dr. James Cornelius about our Featured Artifact of the Month: The Effigy Doll of Mr. Lincoln. We also find out which biography is Dr. Cornelius’ favorite and settle a small Bob Dylan discrepancy.

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In January 2011 I wrote here to cast doubt upon Frederick Douglass’s 1881 description of his meeting and verbal exchange with the president on 4 March 1865, after the 2^nd Inaugural Speech.  I did so having consulted 7 leading writers on Douglass and read up on the few sketchy contacts between the two men.  My context was Douglass’s journalistic tendency to change his mind, change his words, and change his story – like most journalists (and others) who knew Lincoln.

I may have been too hasty.  But I stand by the bulk of my position.

Elizabeth Keckly, who knew the Lincolns very well but did not fully agree with Frederick Douglass

In historical research, rarely can or should a single answer be found.  None of the major scholars and original sources I had checked mentioned her, but a certain obvious, right-under-our-noses source came to hand last month in a February 1975 article by Christopher N. Breiseth in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.  The article names Elizabeth Keckly as a source of the story; none of the other writers I checked did so.  Her memoir, Behind the Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868, and often reprinted), reads thus on pp. 158-161:

“Many colored people were in Washington, and large numbers had desired to attend the levee, but orders were issued not to admit them. A gentleman, a member of Congress, on his way to the White House, recognized Mr. Frederick Douglass, the eloquent colored orator, on the outskirts of the crowd.

‘How do you do, Mr. Douglass?  A fearful jam to-night. You are going in, of course?’

‘No – that is, no to your last question.’

‘Not going in to shake the President by the hand! Why, pray?’

‘The best reason in the world. Strict orders have been issued not to admit people of color.’

‘It is a shame, Mr. Douglass, that you should thus be placed under the ban. Never mind; wait here, and I will see what can be done.’

The gentleman entered the White House, and working his way to the President, asked permission to introduce Mr. Douglass to him.

‘Certainly,’ said Mr. Lincoln. ‘Bring Mr. Douglass in, by all means.  I shall be glad to meet him.’

The gentleman returned, and soon Mr. Douglass stood face to face with the President. Mr. Lincoln pressed his hand warmly, saying: ‘Mr. Douglass, I am glad to meet you.  I have long admired your course, and I value your opinions highly.’

Mr. Douglass was very proud of the manner in which Mr. Lincoln received him.  On leaving the White House he came to a friend’s house where a reception was being held, and he related the incident with great pleasure to myself and others.

On the Monday following the reception  … I was in Mrs. Lincoln’s room the greater portion of the day. While dressing her that night, the President came in, and I remarked to him how much Mr. Douglass had been pleased on the night he was presented to Mr. Lincoln.  Mrs. L. at once turned to her husband with the inquiry, ‘Father, why was not Mr. Douglass introduced to me?’

‘I do not know.  I thought he was presented.’

‘But he was not.’

‘It must have been an oversight then, mother; I am sorry you did not meet him.’”

Keckly concludes: “This ball closed the season.  It was the last time that the President and his wife ever appeared in public.”

This rendition of the 4 March 1865 meeting is close to what Douglass wrote in 1881, with a key omission: Douglass’s fabled story that Lincoln nearly begged him for his opinion of the speech, and his reply, ‘Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.’  Nor did Douglass 1881 mention that it was a Congressman who gained his entrée to the reception.  Nor did Keckly 1868 mention a lady having been present, as did Douglass 1881.  There is another problem: Keckly’s memoir is believed to have been ghost-written by Jane Grey Swisshelm, a crusader and publicist for various causes of the era.  Else, can we imagine that Keckly herself would forget that the Lincolns did appear in public again?  At Ford’s Theatre, 14 April.

I and many other recent writers get a failing grade for overlooking Keckly as an obvious possible source.  Still, how much of the story did Douglass tell Keckly himself; how much did she hear second-hand; how much did Swisshelm invent for publication; how much did Douglass invent?  We will never have answers.

The reader may also judge whether any symbolic enlargement might have been invented for another scene Keckly related about herself, on pp. 165-166:

“The Presidential party were all curiosity on entering Richmond [4 April]. They drove about the streets of the city, and examined every object of interest. The Capitol presented a desolate appearance – desks broken, and papers scattered promiscuously in the hurried flight of the Confederate Congress. I picked up a number of papers, and, by curious coincidence, the resolution prohibiting all free colored people from entering the State of Virginia. A curious coincidence indeed, to pick up such a paper in the ruined room and city.”

Its heft is reminiscent of Douglass’s 1881 invention of the scene at which he helped Chief Justice Chase put on his robes before swearing in Mr. Lincoln.

One more source mentions a Douglass-Lincoln interchange, but from the same origin.  John E. Washington was an African American dentist in Washington, D.C., who in 1942 published a book on his years of research and listening about blacks who knew Lincoln, They Knew Lincoln.  From pp. 115-116:

“The following was told me by Mr. Haley G. Douglass, grandson of Frederick Douglass.  He said his grandfather often told it before audiences.

‘In Lincoln’s day, colored people were not allowed to come into the White House and even Frederick Douglass who had been invited to come to a reception was refused admission until Lincoln saw him in the crowd, sent for him and welcomed him into the room.’”

This is abbreviated, and misleading.  Several various individuals and groups of blacks came in to see Lincoln, including Douglass on 2 occasions, so this ‘not allowed’ line may be overstated.  Douglass 1881 did not claim to have been ‘invited’ in 1865.  The grandson may have conflated the ‘invitation’ with another occasion, in 1863, when Lincoln brought Douglass to the front of a line.  Worse, the episode is followed in Washington’s book by a long, preposterous joke about Lincoln and a poor black man, an anecdote that is almost certainly apocryphal.

All my speculation avails us little.  We remain reliant upon the early-day, if not exactly first-hand, testimony of people close to the events.  So I find that we now have better cause, though the details be shaky, to believe that Douglass and Lincoln shook hands on 4 March 1865.  But we have very strong reason to continue to doubt that Douglass proclaimed the Second Inaugural a “sacred effort” at any point before 1881.

Do readers know of other sources?

The debt-ceiling fracas in Washington has finally ended.  Among its many revelations is President Obama’s persistent identification of his leadership, in style and substance, with Abraham Lincoln’s.  He hasn’t claimed he’s reached Lincoln’s stature; he’s just adopted Lincoln as a model he wants to follow.

When he came into office in January 2009, three weeks shy of Lincoln’s bicentenary, Obama spoke of Lincoln almost continuously, and it seemed to some he might be invoking the cherished hero’s name for political advantage.

In fact, Obama had started thinking and writing about Lincoln even before running for the U. S. Senate in 2004.  That was three years before he declared his candidacy for the presidency on a freezing February day in Springfield, Illinois.  Of course he hoped that appreciating Lincoln would help him politically, but there’s no reason to doubt Obama when he says he’s truly inspired by him.

A century and a half after Lincoln’s death, Obama does seem, under very different historical conditions, to have applied his general approach to governance: insist on reasoned argument as the basis for political debate, seek out bridges to your opponents, look for ways to advance the cause of equality in the long run when the path to it is blocked in the immediate.

During the debt-and-deficit imbroglio, Obama brought Lincoln into the fray as a model compromiser.  He said today’s Congressional Republicans should follow Lincoln’s lead, giving up some of what they wanted (as Obama was doing himself) in order to obtain a desperately needed debt-ceiling extension.

As it happens, he muddied matters in this instance by citing the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 as an example of Lincoln’s penchant for compromise.  True, as Obama said, the much-honored Proclamation didn’t actually “free the slaves.”  It only emancipated slaves ensconced behind enemy lines — and then only in principle, since, in those places, the Proclamation was unenforceable.

But that didn’t mean Lincolnwas compromising when he issued the Proclamation.  He was actually freeing all the slaves he believed he could constitutionally liberate in his capacity as commander-in-chief.  If anything, the Proclamation showed Lincoln to be uncompromising.

A better example of Lincoln’s willingness to compromise on slavery might have been his earlier advocacy of compensated emancipation: paying slaveholders for their property.  Many radical abolitionists rejected this idea, since in their eyes it endorsed the principle that the slaves had rightly been treated as property in the first place. Lincoln thought the end result of freedom trumped any theoretical inconsistency involved in spending money for it.

Of course, as Obama would readily agree, Lincoln’s greatness during the Civil War derived from his repeated refusal to entertain compromise on the central issue — the illegitimacy of secession — and from his readiness to act decisively, when conditions were right, for emancipation.

The relatively unknown Lincoln text that may have most influenced Obama’s approach to presidential governance is the Springfield Lyceum speech of 1838.  A fledgling orator still in his 20s, Lincoln declared that the passions of partisanship could bring the Republic down.

Calm deliberation — “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason” — would keep the nation afloat at a time when many impetuous, self-absorbed men would gladly make a name for themselves by sinking it.

What has become clear during Obama’s 30 months in office — and was demonstrated again during the debt-ceiling donnybrook — is that it’s Obama the temperate, bridging Democratic who is now marching behind a centrist “Party of Lincoln” banner all his own.

The Republicans seem to have gone silent on the railsplitter, willingly conceding him to Obama.  True, Republican intellectuals, such as former George W. Bush staffers Peter Wehner or Michael Gerson, still refer admiringly to Lincoln as a vital figure.  Sarah Palin and others do occasionally quote him in passing.

But when is the last time a national Republican figure made anything more than brief or honorific mention of him?  Even formulaic deference to him seems increasingly rare in the Republican camp.  The last time I remember a Republican candidate or elected official making a point of calling the GOP the “Party of Lincoln” was January 2008, when Rudy Giuliani hailed him as the party’s founding father.

Some surprising parties and people have claimed the legacy over the years. Will it continue?

Giuliani had just been battered in the Florida Republican primary, coming in a distant third to John McCain and Mitt Romney.  Finished off as a presidential prospect, he left the electoral stage with a plea to Republicans to remember that theirs was “the party of Lincoln” as well as of Reagan and Bush.

Giuliani was hoping Republicans could revive their historic ties to “moderates” as well as “conservatives,” building an ethnically inclusive “50-state” party by promoting “self-government” as opposed to “centralized government.”

The “party of Lincoln” rubric made sense to Giuliani as a way of signaling to moderates and non-whites that Republicans welcomed them too.  Now it’s Obama who may be using Lincoln in an appeal to moderates, including Republicans disgruntled by Tea Party inroads.

Unlike Giuliani, he argues that Lincoln endorsed both self-government and government pure-and-simple.  Federal measures are now essential, he says, for attaining goals that Lincoln also espoused in his day: building up infrastructure, ensuring that a new generation of young Americans can rise in the world, and assisting the poor and the disadvantaged to climb onto the nation’s ladder of opportunity.

In speech after speech during the off-year election campaign of 2010, Obama cited Lincoln’s (undated) note to himself: “the legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves.”

For those fascinated by the ever-evolving place of Lincoln in American culture, the 2012 campaign will be captivating.  Will Obama continue to tout Lincoln as the booster of positive government as well as the practitioner of “compromise”?  Will any Republican candidates pick up on Giuliani’s call to welcome moderates and non-whites into a resurrected “party of Lincoln”?

Eventually, if not in 2012, Republicans and Democrats seem liable to come to blows over the Lincoln mantle, with Republicans promoting him as the protector of individual enterprise, and Democrats lauding him as the defender of equality for all.

Episode 7, Mr. Lincoln’s Sum Book Page: This month we sit down with Dr. James Cornelius to discuss our Featured Artifact of the Month: Mr. Lincoln’s Sum Book Page. We also take the time to answer questions submitted via facebook.

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A recent discovery that Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham, held the fairly important rank of Ensign in the Kentucky militia in 1805 leads us to consider yet again how the son viewed the father’s station in life.  Jim Siberell is the Ohio native who turned up the document in a Kentucky archive concerning the state’s early militia. He published the full story in The Lincoln Herald (v. 112, no. 4, for Winter 2010, pp. 234-245).  He explains that an Ensign was the rank higher than ordinary militia member, and that above Ensign were the ranks Captain, Major, and Colonel.  Thomas’s older brother Mordecai had advanced to the rank of Major.  Other evidence suggests that Tom Lincoln’s purchase of a second sword in 1814 speaks of continued Ensign duty.

As an Ensign, Tom Lincoln needed to show the ability to muster a company of Hardin County men 4 times a year, drill them, and, should the need arise, lead them in battle.  Having seen his own father killed by Indians while plowing in 1786, Tom probably had a firmer resolve against a return of such depredations to the frontier than did some others; though no one on any western frontier until almost 1900 was unaware of the possible threat.  Keeping an eye on the arrival of newcomers to the county was another responsibility, in order to get those men signed on for the required militia service.

These skills were inherited and/or continued by Abraham Lincoln in New Salem, Illinois, in 1832.  New to Sangamon County himself, he was nevertheless elected captain of a small troop when the Black Hawk War broke out.  He mustered the men, drilled them, and led them north toward the arena of battle, though never actually saw any fighting.  He did see scalped white victims of an attack, and helped bury them.

In 1860, then, 9 years after his father’s death, Lincoln wrote an autobiography for use in his presidential campaign.  Part of the goal for the well-known and successful attorney was to associate himself with the hardscrabble pioneer folk. Lincoln described his deceased father as one who “never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.”  Based upon the surviving record today, this was nearly accurate, though we may question anew the reasons for that situation.

We might expect an Ensign to be a social and military cut above the ruck of common settlers.  Comparing signatures from the ALPLM, we may now surmise that something had physically altered Thomas’s ability to or habit of handling a pen.  The learned lawyer in Springfield very likely never saw anything in his father’s hand but later-in-life court documents, and assumed that the crabbed or inept marks reflected Tom’s lifelong style.  But in this, Abraham would have been wrong.

Had a lifetime of carpentry work and farming so crippled Tom Lincoln’s hands that his ability to write was fading by the 1820s?  That is the period when his son would have been old enough to grow cognizant of his father’s script, without having the maturity to understand the consequences of overwork, arthritis, perhaps even a mild stroke. (It is also a period for which the ALPLM owns none of the rare Tom Lincoln signatures, so my speculation here cannot be fully illustrated.)

Modern science provides us with another possible explanation.  SCA5 is one form of ataxia, a muscular disorder that usually attacks between the ages of about 30 and 50.  It leaves muscles weak and can cause oddities of gait.  A heavy incidence of this malady, which can lead to somewhat premature death, has been found by a team of geneticists (working in Minnesota and Florida) in descendants today of Tom’s parents Abraham and Bathsheba Lincoln, who had 3 sons and 2 daughters.  The chance of inheriting the malady from a parent was and is 50%.  We are quite certain that the 16^th president, who thus stood a 25% chance of having it, did not; the evidence is simply not found in his writing or his movements.  But did 50-50 Thomas have it?  (If Tom did, the President’s resulting 50-50 chance is not born out by the evidence, either.)

Candidate Lincoln would have had no way to know about ataxia, nor can we prove what afflicted Tom.  But for a man who at age 27 in 1805 was a leader of other men and a strong signer in ink a year later on his marriage bond, the future held a worse fate physically than a son who went his own, self-educated way: inability on an 1836 document even to sign a simple Christian ‘X.’

In sum, Tom Lincoln had many deficiencies of training and luck, and the frontier taught him that reading and writing were hardly necessary to make a living on good soil.  Abraham fairly described his father’s later script, from the point of view of a city lawyer, but that did not sum up the worth of the man.  Abraham and Mary’s youngest son Thomas, called Tad, bearing his grandpa’s name, did not learn to read or write till his teenage years — after his father’s death — and died at 18, though not from ataxia.  There is a poignant comment on inheritance.