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

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.”

  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.]”