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

History is not like wine or scotch; it does not get better as it gets older.  Much of the time it turns sour as the distance grows between the original event and our telling of it.

Yet in some cases the original story was vanishingly told by one person to another, who never wrote it down at all.  Then, it must be rediscovered.  Such a rediscovery happened two weeks ago at the Presidential Library.

In March 1901 a lady with good handwriting wrote from Boston to a well-known Lincoln collector in Chicago named Charles Gunther.  She enclosed, by registered mail, a highly interesting artifact.  She wrote:

“I send you the letter written by Willie Lincoln.  It is probably the only one in existence.  It was kept in the same box with a bon-bon he gave my uncle that was taken from the table at the banquet given for the Prince of Wales at the White House and some of it melted during the warm weather and got on the letter.  Very sincerely,  Adele Rathbun.”

Miss Rathbun was mostly incorrect.  Was her 1901 attention fixed upon the death of Queen Victoria 6 weeks earlier, and the ascent to the throne of the Prince of Wales?  That Prince, known now as Edward VII, had indeed been fêted at the White House, but in October 1860, by President Buchanan.

So Willie took no such bon-bon.  Nor was this the only letter he ever wrote; about 10 survive today.  

Still, this one is the earliest survivor.   In its entirety it reads:

Springfield  April 1859

Dear Friend

I will write you a few lines to let you know how I am getting along   I am pretty well  The roads are drying up  It is Sunday and a pleasant day   I have not any more to say so I must bring my letter to an end

Wm  W  Lincoln

The end 

Who was Adele’s “my uncle”?  Who was Willie’s “Dear friend”?  Since Willie makes no mention of an enclosed sweet, we assume that its recipient put the letter into a box with some chocolate – where else to save a letter from your friend?

The State Historical Library (now the ALPLM) acquired this letter and Adele’s in 1978 from a Chicago dealer, without any story.  It has lain orphan-like with a few later (and clean) missives by the dutiful Willie.  Gwen Podeschi, Reference Librarian at the ALPLM, was asked to start hunting ‘Rathbun.’  She found dozens of possibilities, but never an Adele, and no one the right age.  The key was her turning up of the marriage, in Springfield in June 1858, of Hannah Rathbun to Dr. John Shearer.  Aha: that would be Hannah Shearer, close friend of Mary Lincoln.  Some Maryists would know (but this historian did not) that Hannah’s first husband, Edward Rathbun, had died in Brooklyn, leaving her with two boys, Edward Rathbun, Jr., and James Miner Rathbun, obliging Hannah to move to the home of her brother, Springfield.  Hannah soon met and married Dr. Shearer, and they settled on 8^th Street across from the Lincolns.  The ‘uncle’ to whom Adele Rathbun referred was thus one of these Rathbun boys, sons of the Shearers.

The other clue was found, plainly enough, in Mary’s published letters.  On April 24, 1859, she sent the first of her 11 known letters to Hannah Shearer, who had left Springfield after only 8 months on 8^th Street, for the clear air of Wellsboro, Pennsylvania.  These letters are spicy, full of gossip (not all of it kind), as well as wistfulness for a distant friend whose boys were nearly the same ages as Willie and Tad Lincoln.  Mary wrote on April 24^th – Easter Sunday – and one can picture Willie sitting politely next to his mother, writing to his friend, too.  Mother to mother; son to son.

The sadness of this story, striking like so much in Mary Lincoln’s life, came by degrees.  The Shearers never quite managed a long-planned visit to the White House in 1861, implored though they were; and Willie died on Feb. 20, 1862.  War and death spoiled everything for nation and friends.  Mary never wrote Hannah again … except in November 1864 when she heard that Hannah’s oldest, Edward, Jr., had died.  And never after that.  How painful, yet again, must Mary’s memory of her own lost boy have been, in the reflection of his friend’s early death.

That death left the younger ex-neighbor, James Miner Rathbun, as the father of Adele.  Edward Jr. was thus the uncle in Adele’s 1901 letter.

The Rathbun boys, shortly after moving to Pennsylvania with mother Hannah and her new husband Dr. Shearer, welcomed a new baby brother, or rather half-brother.  The boy was christened William Lincoln Shearer.

The chocolate letter, for all its sad associations in the lives of Mary Lincoln and Hannah Rathbun Shearer, can now be remembered in a better way.  It remains as a happy, and colorful, remembrance of friendly mothers and sons, sharing two Easter Day letters.  Another Prince of Wales will soon ascend to the throne of the United Kingdom, new stories will be invented around that occasion.  Please keep your letters and emails, pass them to kids, and get the stories right.

Recently put on display in the Museum’s Treasures Gallery, this letter by 8-year-old Willie Lincoln is stained with chocolate.

If Abraham and Mary Lincoln were largely responsible for destroying their own family papers before leaving for Washington, D.C., in 1861, then what did Robert T. Lincoln burn in later years?  Fortunately for historians he wrote down a listing of destroyed documents, in a volume sold as Burr’s Library Index.  His index was created to navigate through his extensive retained correspondence files.  Near the end of the volume there is an entry with the cryptic heading “Papers burned in 1895 and after.”  It is worth transcribing the entire contents of that list, in order to give insight into Robert Lincoln’s behavior.

Robert Lincoln’s list of ‘Papers burned in 1895 & after’

Papers burned in 1895 and after

All my family letters
All M.L. letters of 1875-6
Cheques, 1869-87 incl. 88-89-90-91 & 92
Rects [receipts] 1870-87 incl. 88-89
Washington House lease and papers
Old S&L Docket
All M.H.L. Cheques

Dec 98  All Cash books and ledgers except those current
Dec 00  Old Telephone & Gas Company papers
Dec 03  1897 Res [residential] repair and alterations receipts
Nov 03  Letters to R.T.L. 1877/1879
May 1911  Letters to R.T.L. Since to now—except 10 cases sifted letters kept
May 1911  All Receipts except my late ones
Oct 1913  All Hildene building correspondence
Oct 10-14  All but half a dozen old letters to R.T.L. while attor(?) from Chicago
Oct 10-14  All cheques up to 1905

The list clearly shows that Robert destroyed not his father’s papers, but his own.  It was a common practice to destroy personal letters of a private nature, which accounts for burning the correspondence between himself and his wife.  The period of 1875-6 follows his mother’s confinement and conservatorship, which was undoubtedly a difficult period for both mother and son.  But Robert did not destroy all of these letters, as is evident from the materials that comprise “the insanity file” he kept as a separate folder (the basis for a book published in 1986).  Everything else were things he no longer needed, such as old cancelled checks and business correspondence, materials that most people today put through a shredder rather than burn.

It is likely that Robert lost some of his father’s papers in the 1871 Chicago Fire, or at least he used that fire as an excuse.  In response to one autograph seeker, Robert responded: “I am not the possessor of any autograph letter of my father.  Everything of that kind owned by me was burned in the Chicago Fire.”  When thieves broke into the stable adjoining Robert’s Chicago mansion, he dismissed the matter, claiming the items were “a great many old odds and ends such as books, possibly letters, and that class of things which a man hardly knows what to do with, and yet is very averse to destroying.”

Nicolas Murray Butler’s claim, after Robert’s death, that he prevented Robert from destroying his father’s letters feeds a popular notion of Robert as cold, calculating, and secretive.  Those who knew Robert found him much like his father, and certainly no son did more to patiently deal with the endless requests for a document signed by Abraham Lincoln, endorse a book or painting about Abraham Lincoln, or satisfy the curiosity of the general public who wanted to know his father’s likes and dislikes.  Too much of Abraham Lincoln’s life was already on display for public consumption to be altered by a conspiracy to burn his papers.  The most damning accusations were not contained in Lincoln’s letters but in the published recollections of his associates and friends that lack any independent verification.  It is time to let this conspiracy charge go up in smoke.

Welcome to “Stories from the Vault” the official podcast of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Each month we’ll be bringing you stories and insights about the artifacts, events, and life of our nation’s sixteenth President.

• Episode 1: We talk with our curator Dr. James Cornelius about our Featured Artifact of the Month for March. We also find out the story behind the donation of a rare photo of Mr. Lincoln’s son, Willie and we answer your questions submitted online. You may listen below or the episode is available for download here: Stories from the Vault Episode 1

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

President Obama, in his February 3, 2011, speech to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, got personal about his religious faith.   As he often does, he invoked Lincoln as a point of reference.  “The presidency has a funny way of making a person feel the need to pray,” Obama quipped.  “Abe Lincoln said, as many of you know, ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.’”

The audience laughed appreciatively at the light-hearted Lincoln aside, some of them probably aware that Lincoln’s religiosity, like Obama’s, has been questioned.  In Obama’s case, many persist in suspecting he’s a half-hearted Christian, if not a closet Muslim, and in Lincoln’s case, some historians have doubted whether his religious language ran any deeper than his desire to please his Protestant supporters. 

In Lincoln, his renowned biography from 1995, David Herbert Donald ascribed the theological tenor of the second inaugural address to Lincoln’s desire to make contact with his vast northern audience of Christian believers.  Ronald White’s Lincoln’s Greatest Speech (2002) showed that Donald’s largely secular Lincoln needed to be retired.  

The president’s rationalism was intertwined, White argued, with deep religious conviction and pronounced theological interest.  Never a professed “technical” Christian, as his wife Mary put it, President Lincoln still took the power of God’s Providence very seriously. 

His apparent indifference toward the orthodox Christian belief in Jesus as redeemer didn’t stop him from embracing an updated version of his parents’ Calvinist Lord: the awesome sovereign Father who actively superintended his earthly creation.

The evidence that Lincoln prayed is abundant, though “prayer” can mean many different things.  It runs the gamut from a two-way conversation with God — including petitioning God for assistance or special favors — to a reverential attitude of humility or gratitude in the face of the unknown. 

In Lincoln’s case it seems to have meant a whole-hearted recognition of God’s power, and a willing submission to it.  As he said in his second inaugural address, this almighty God harbored purposes that human beings could never fathom. 

Non-believers often make the mistake of assuming that “submission” to God’s authority means “resignation” to it, as if giving precedence to God’s unanswerable power entails accepting the futility of independent human action. 

But submission, as Lincoln reveals, actually opens up a vast terrain of responsible activity for human beings.  Ironically, God’s inscrutability gives human beings the authority to “work earnestly,” as Lincoln wrote to his Quaker friend Eliza Gurney in 1864, “in the best light He gives us.”  God doesn’t tell people exactly what to do, but God does assist people in acting conscientiously, according to their best judgment.

Did Lincoln’s form of submission to God really involve being driven to his knees many times, since he had no place else to go?  Lincoln, like Obama, may have used the phrase figuratively, even humorously, if indeed he ever spoke it at all.

Lincoln never wrote down those words, and no one reported him uttering them during his lifetime.  The source of the quotation is the young reporter Noah Brooks, who claimed a few months after the assassination that Lincoln “once said” he’d “been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.  My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.” 

As always, we have to be skeptical about post-mortem recollections of Lincoln’s words.  Observers such as Brooks often push the president’s remarks, however subtly, toward some meaning they hold dear.   Brooks goes on to make Lincoln as pious and reverent as he can: “then he solemnly and slowly added, ‘I should be the most presumptuous blockhead upon this footstool if I for one day thought that I could discharge the duties which have come upon me since I came into this place without the aid and enlightenment of One who is wiser and stronger than all others.’”

By using the term “enlightenment,” Brooks implies that Lincoln thought he received actual divine counsel about the proper course of action.  That would turn his prayer into a two-way conversation: he asked for help, and God supplied at least a clue about the right way to proceed.

But his letter to Eliza Gurney suggests that Lincoln settled for God providing spiritual support, not explicit advice.  God helped people marshal all their resources of concentration and deliberation as they made up their minds.  The “best light” God provided let them express their own “enlightenment.”

Driven literally to their knees or not, Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln concur on the vital necessity of prayer for anyone subjected to the pressures of the presidency.  Prayer offered Lincoln, in Brooks’s words, “his surest refuge at times when he was most misunderstood or misrepresented . . . he was glad to know that no thought or intent of his escaped the observation of that Judge by whose final decree he expected to stand or fall in this world and the next.”

This 1973 book jacket shows Lincoln at prayer in a 1931 sculpture by Herbert Spencer Houck, in the National Cathedral, in Washington, D.C. Houck’s father, a Union Army chaplain, saw Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address.

Whole books about Lincoln first appeared in 1860.  Some of his speeches were separately printed as early as 1839, and aside from newspaper renditions of his words, 1837 saw the earliest published Lincoln document.  Since then, perhaps 17,000 titles have appeared.

Collectors love all of this material, both the writings by Lincoln, and writings about him.  The first two bibliographies about him appeared in 1870.  For the mystery at hand, the important listings were by Daniel Fish in 1906 and 1910; Jay Monaghan in 1943-45; and the Library of Congress in 1960.  Individual great collectors, including Fish, published lists to draw attention to their own holdings – about 1,100 printed items in his case.

The standard today remains the effort by librarian Monaghan, whose 2-volume ‘Lincoln Bibliography’ lists 3,958 items.  It is impossible to acquire a copy of each of those 3,958 items today; dozens of them are too rare or obscure.

So how did a 24-volume set of the Nicolay and Hay edition of Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, published by F. D. Tandy of New York in 1905, go unrecorded by any of these people?

Well-hidden Lincoln, in lustrous leather

It is no mean set, as should be clear from the illustration here.  Bound in full brown morocco leather, with floral Art Nouveau gilt onlays decorating each cover, doublures inside each cover, silk-laid endpapers, gilt-topped pages, and scores of specially added fine engravings of people and scenes sprinkled throughout the text, this was the most extravagant publication on Lincoln ever put out.  Original price?  Unknown.

With false humility the set is dubbed ‘The Log Cabin Edition’; a watercolor of that boyhood home graces each volume’s doublure.  And it seems that none of the major amassers and promoters of Lincolniana ever had a set, viz., the ‘Big Five’ collectors W. H. Lambert (d. 1912), C.W. McLellan (d. 1918), Judd Stewart (d. 1919), Daniel Fish (d. 1924), or J. B. Oakleaf (d. 1930).  Incredibly, Jay Monaghan never saw one; and the great modern collector Oliver R. Barrett (d. 1950) did not either.  Major booksellers of 1905-1960, D. H. Newhall, E. J. Wessen, and C. E. Van Norman, seem never to have offered one.

What everyone saw, and owned, was the 12-volume set of Complete Works as edited by Nicolay and Hay, published also in 1905.  A variety of special imprints of this set came out in the period 1905-1914, with catchy edition-titles like ‘Centennial Edition’ and ‘Biographical Edition’ and ‘Gettysburg Edition.’  The mind races to the obvious phrase to begin a full-life coverage of Lincoln, The Log Cabin Edition, yet no publisher has used it otherwise.  Almost incredibly, Tandy published Fish’s bibliography in 1906, after handling the 24-volume jewel, and apparently kept news it from him.  Or should we not believe Tandy’s printed date of publication?

Tandy took the 12 volumes of Nicolay and Hay, bulked them out with those fine engravings, slimmed each volume, and, presto, 24.  How rare is it?  The printed half-title for each volume of the set acquired in 2009 by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum reads,

“The Log Cabin Edition of the Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln is Extra Illustrated and limited to Eight Numbered Copies of which this is Number 4.”  That digit 4 was penned in by hand.

A lengthy search of library catalogs, collectors’ papers, and auction sales finally revealed  that one set had been privately sold in 1922; and, then, that the University of Texas Library owns a set.  They did not know it.  We helped them realize that it is set number 5.

Here is the most fascinating feature of the set.  The 24^th volume is not printed pages.  It is a volume composed of manuscript letters, 26 of them in the set at the ALPLM, bound to match the others in appearance.  The first manuscript is in Lincoln’s hand, a little note that reads “Sec. of War.  Please see Mr. Edwards a moment.  A. L.”  (Plausibly this was his brother-in-law Ninian W. Edwards, who visited Washington in 1862.)  The other 25 manuscripts are by William Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Horace Greeley, signatures of S. A. Douglas and Rutherford B. Hayes, and various political and military figures pre-1860 and post-1865.  Evidently there was so much of this stuff around in 1905 that a well-heeled publisher could sweep up enough to bind – even 8 sets of it.

The surprising start to volume 24: in Lincoln's hand

My hope is that some college library or two out there simply took in one of these treasure-sets long ago and attached the bibliographic record of the 12-volume original to their 24 volumes; and it has reposed on the shelves, unmolested for decades, because other, handier sets were nearby.  This is more or less what had happened to the set at Texas.  Or, one fears that someone long ago disbound volume 24 for its historic and unique contents, and left the oft-printed rest of it aside.  Does anyone know of a 23-volume set that looks like it lost its caboose?

Collectors!  Browsers of used bookstores!  Spelunkers in the garage sales of the hinterland!  Where are sets number 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, or 8?  One could speculate that each set was produced only by subscription, and that sets 6, 7, and 8 never found sponsors.  But surely 1, 2, and 3 existed.

No, the Lincoln field has not been exhausted.  We daily look forward to another discovery.  Likely the next discovery will not fill 32 inches of shelf space.

Evidently the only live sketch of Lincoln en route to Washington in February 1861.

One of the lesser-known artists of Abraham Lincoln was Freeman Thorp.  Born in Geneva, Ohio, on June 16, 1844, Thorp developed an interest in art.  On February 15, 1861, he took some cardboard and pencils to sketch the train that carried president-elect Abraham Lincoln to Washington, D.C.  The ALPLM acquired the sketch in the 1950s.

Although only a lad, not yet 17 years of age, Thorp had ambition.  Geneva was not a scheduled stop on the route, but Thorp got lucky.  According to Thorp’s daughter, Sarah:

“… Lincoln’s Inaugural train was held for a half-hour or so at Geneva, Ohio, for some minor repairs.  Thorp was at the station to see the train go thro; and armed, as always, with pencil and cardboard, he made the first sketch-in while Mr. Lincoln good-naturedly addressed the waiting crowd.  Thorp was hanging by one long leg over the iron railing of the rear platform of Mr. Lincoln’s coach.  After the sketch had been returned to him (in 1903 or 4) after its long burial in a barrel of waste papers in the Capitol basement, he spent long hours at various times in ‘re-touching’ the face.”

The “barrel of waste papers in the Capitol basement” refers to a time in the 1870s when Thorp was provided a studio “on top of the Capitol, and there for twenty years he worked.”  If this family recollection is accurate, Thorp created the only artist’s portrait of Lincoln en route to Washington, D.C.

Thorp also wrote down his own notes for later reference.  Likely he referred to them when he completed his Lincoln portrait for the United States Senate, which the federal government purchased for $2,000 in 1920.  Clearly the pencil sketch begun in 1861 was referenced in the 1920 portrait.  Here is Thorp’s 1861 description of Abraham Lincoln:

Abraham Lincoln
Descriptive delineation

Hair dark brown Beard dark brown in front of the ears and at the ends but light brown from the ears down to the middle of the chin upper lip only shaved Eyebrows heavy Eyes blue gray deep set much in shadows but clear and well defined, complexion neither florid nor pale but dark a slight mole on the right cheek in no way disfigured his face figure tall and slim, not slender: but muscular features strong rugged expression earnest animated thoughtful with inherent kindness.

Lincoln described himself as having black hair and gray eyes, but those points are mere quibbles given the dim lighting that day, and given that Thorp was able to observe Lincoln only for a brief time.

During his life Lincoln was well known as “Old Abe,” but in 20th-century America he was often remembered for his boyishness.  That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not.  For one thing, “Old Abe” never meant “old” chronologically.  He was barely 40, says biographer David Donald, when the phrase took off in Illinois as an indicator of his “weather-beaten appearance” and his wealth of experience on the stump and the courthouse circuit.

And before long, “Old Abe” turned into a term of endearment as much as a reference to his leathery looks or his legal expertise.  “Old Abe” meant “good old Abe”: it implied “original” and “unique” as much as wrinkled or venerable.

In 1857, when photographer Alexander Hesler captured his disheveled hairdo, Lincoln was consciously cultivating a rumpled man-of-the-people look, not playing the gamin.

When journalist Lloyd Lewis, in his popular 1929 book Myths After Lincoln, called 56-year-old President Lincoln “joyous as a boy,” he was signaling his originality too, and his unpredictability.  You never knew when the distant or brooding Lincoln might break into a sprightly display.  Ironically, “Old Abe” may have stuck as a moniker because Lincoln defied chronological pigeonholing: the adult public man kept confounding expectations about age-appropriate behavior.  He was careless about many things mature people were supposed to dwell on.

Lewis got the image of Lincoln’s boyish joy from an account published in 1887 of Lincoln’s euphoric afternoon in Richmond, Virginia, on April 4, 1865.  Union troops had retaken the Confederate capital the day before, and Lincoln, surrounded by thousands of admiring black southerners, strode up the hill from the downtown dock to Jefferson Davis’s “White House,” newly occupied by Union General Godfrey Weitzel.

As Lincoln got within a few blocks of his destination, a Union officer named Thomas Thatcher Graves came upon the presidential party and offered to guide them the rest of the way.  Lincoln was “walking with his usual long, careless stride,” Graves remembered in an 1887 article, “and looking about with an interested air and taking in everything.”

Once inside the mansion, Graves recalled, Lincoln sat down in Jefferson Davis’s chair, but his curiosity soon got the better of him.  He jumped up and in “a boyish manner” bounded off to investigate the upstairs living quarters.  Indoors or out, in Graves’s recollection, Lincoln was entranced by everything around him.

Naval officer John Barnes was present inside the mansion, too.  He published his recollection of the scene two decades after Graves did, and he portrayed a very different Lincoln sitting in Davis’s chair.  He remembered the president looking “pale and haggard,” and “utterly worn out with fatigue.”  Barnes said Lincoln “sank down … in the chair almost warm from the pressure of the body of Jefferson Davis.”  This Lincoln was too wiped out from his uphill trek through the dusty, smoky downtown to do anything but plop down and plead for a glass of water.

Whether the president was as joyous as a boy or plumb tuckered out, this remembered Lincoln was confirming a vital point made by northern journalists in 1865: he hadn’t sat down in Jefferson Davis’s chair in a huffy, arrogant manner.  His motives were wholly innocent, like those of an elated child or a bedraggled oldster.

Thus, he couldn’t possibly have behaved in an imperial or vindictive way, as one might expect of a conquering commander-in-chief.  Southern whites reading these accounts in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries could rest assured that on April 4, 1865, Lincoln had done nothing to disrespect Jefferson Davis.

Other “boyish” episodes like the one described by Thomas Thatcher Graves may have been recorded in the late 19th century, if not also during Lincoln’s presidency.  He was often called “as simple as a child,” or “as gentle as a woman,” but some observers may have gone further, anticipating Graves by detailing specifically “boyish” behavior.  Describing him as a lovable boy carried a moral charge of innocent striving and blameless action.

In 20th-century American popular culture — especially in the dark days of the 1930s and early 1940s — frequent appeals were made to the virtue of boyishness, to the uncorrupted and youthful male spirit nurtured in rural or small-town America.  John Ford pressed an Abe Lincoln of that description into service in his 1939 film Young Mister Lincoln, starring Henry Fonda.

This wholesome, pristine Lincoln, along with his cinematic companion of 1939 — the Lincoln-loving Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — offered hope for defending and redeeming a threatened Republic.  Both young men were poised for greatness: accomplished enough to perform heroically in provincial courtroom or U.S. Senate, but uncorrupted by the treacheries of power politics.

To our readers: we share with you this story of an exciting visit last week presented by David Blanchette, our Communications Manager.  The regular blog returns next week.

We work with photographers, film producers, and all sorts of image-makers big and small at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.  Still, it was a pleasant surprise when famed photographer Annie Leibovitz called out of the blue late last summer and asked if she could photograph some Lincoln artifacts for a book she will publish in late 2011, Pilgrimage.  She and her staff talked with Lincoln Curator James Cornelius about items they could photograph, and I handled the usual photography permission process that applies to all such ventures.  Her staff requested that this visit be kept as quiet as possible so Annie could concentrate on her photography rather than distractions.

A date for Annie’s visit was set.  Only to be cancelled.  And re-set.  And re-cancelled.  And re-re-set.  Well, you get the idea.  She is extremely busy, and other jobs bumped this labor-of-love project.

On the third try (or was it fourth?), Annie and her two-man crew arrived at 6:45 a.m. on Wednesday, January 26 in a rented SUV they had driven to Springfield the night before from Lincoln sites in Kentucky and Indiana.  Annie practically bounded out of the car and offered an enthusiastic greeting, especially given the dark morning hour.  Quite tall, with a long mane of blond hair unashamedly going gray; a ready, winning smile; thin, black-framed glasses perched high on her nose; and sporting comfortable athletic shoes to go with her black sweater and pants, Annie looked the part of a seasoned artist who revels in her craft.

As internationally renowned artists go, the group was traveling very light – a couple of camera bags, a tripod, and some hand-held lights.  James Cornelius had several artifacts ready to go on his mobile curator’s cart, and exhibits staff John Malinak and Mike Casey stood ready to open exhibit cases and move exhibit mounts as needed.

Annie first went for Lincoln’s stovepipe hat.  All Museum visitors, young and old, idealistic or cynical, have a “Lincoln moment” when they encounter the real Lincoln hat.  Annie was no exception, her restless energy relenting for just a moment as, chin in hand, she regarded the hat from several angles, expressing her gratitude for the privilege of photographing this most iconic piece of American clothing.  Then, to work.

As artists go, Annie and crew were courteous, appreciative, and very careful around the original artifacts.  They also worked very quickly, with James, John, and Mike kept busy moving, opening, and closing.  Annie and crew were a well-oiled machine – she would choose the angle, her assistants would adjust the tripod and attach the proper camera and lens, and the photography would begin.  Annie photographed with the latest huge- resolution Leica digital camera, but, curiously, also with a point-and-shoot Canon camera, explaining that she used the smaller camera when first starting out on the book and liked the unposed and spontaneous look of its images.

Lincoln’s blood-stained gloves from Ford’s Theatre were next.  These were brought out of the case so Annie could better capture the stains from that fateful night.  At one point, as one of her assistants hovered near the gloves, Annie reminded him to be careful to securely store his light meter in its belt pouch so there was no danger of its falling on or near the artifact.  Click, click, click.  Adjust the angle a little bit; click, click, click.  Switch cameras; repeat the process.  Done.  Smooth, professional, deferential.

Nine o’clock arrived, and we had to vacate the Treasures Gallery so we wouldn’t impede Museum visitors.  James led the procession across the land bridge connecting the Library and Museum, and then down into the Lincoln Vault, where key items from the collection are stored when not on display.  The Gettysburg Address, Mary Lincoln’s diamond necklace, and other artifacts passed in front of Annie’s lenses.  In between takes, James regaled the crew with tales of each Lincoln artifact; his story-telling artistry, honed by years of practice and a true love of the subject matter, proved to be the only thing that caused Annie and crew to pause from their photography.

As the cameras were being put away at the end of the shoot, Annie took one more look around the vault, surrounded by original items from Lincoln’s life.  She hesitated, apparently deciding whether she could try “just one more shot.”  Lamenting that she wished to spend the whole day in the vault but simply did not have any additional time, Annie ended the shoot.

She graciously posed for photographs with all who had helped or observed her that morning, then gave the Museum photographer who had documented her visit a special treat: Annie Leibovitz took my camera, held it at arm’s length, and took a photograph of us standing together.  How many other people can claim they have an original Annie Leibovitz portrait of themselves?

We look forward to seeing Annie again when her book is published, as there might be a special public visit when that occurs.  Until then, we have a rare feeling here at the Museum: a big-name artist visited, and we weren’t reaching for the aspirin.  Enough said.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz captures Lincoln's Stovepipe Hat

Allusions to Abraham Lincoln in American literature are legion, if one looks into memorial poetry, recollective works on the heroism of soldiers, and, these days, even murder mysteries.  ‘What-if’ stories, including plays, about catching Booth early, stopping Booth in the act, or keeping the Lincolns from attending the theatre might fall into this category of ‘invention as sympathy’ in creative writing.

Yet the novel called by some THE Great American Novel may also include a Lincoln figure, at least by analogy.  “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” — this is what old-money Tom Buchanan called nouveau-riche Jay Gatsby during the very tense scene in the Plaza Hotel about halfway through F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.  Old-money Tom, enraged that Gatsby could pursue and apparently win the heart of his wife Daisy Buchanan (who was from Kentucky), moved the inter-personal confrontation up a notch: “next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”  (Collier Books, 1980 reprint, p. 130).  In other words, no sooner could ‘society’ allow a low-born nobody to capture the affections of a well-bred lady, than not even skin color would serve as a social marker.

Lincoln and Gatsby, both nobodies from the north woods.

Could F. Scott Fitzgerald have had in mind the social revolution by which a railsplitter married the high-born Mary Todd (who was from Kentucky), then sets the blacks free?  Tom Buchanan … James Buchanan … equal social status for blacks and whites … a mystery man from nowhere (Duluth, Minnesota, for Jay Gatz; New Salem, Illinois, for Abe Lincoln) … a revolution in affairs.  How did the son of a “wandering laboring boy,”  as Lincoln described his father Tom, even meet the high-born Mary Todd, much less marry her?  One may easily see Fitzgerald’s hearkening to the life and times of the 16^th President, in the White House, through that mise en scène at the Plaza.

And Fitzgerald, despite his own rearing in St. Paul, was something of a Confederate sympathizer – proud of his descent from Marylander Francis Scott Key; married to Zelda Sayre, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama.  On that Maryland side of his father’s, Fitzgerald was related to Mary Surratt, whose house served as the meeting place for the assassin John Wilkes Booth.  At the height of his career, Fitzgerald was chosen to spruce up some dialogue for the screenplay of Gone With the Wind, surely a Southern apologist’s dream-job.

The Great Gatsby is not really a political novel.  The genius of Fitzgerald in not staking out a firm moral position between his contesting main characters is analagous to Lincoln’s own genius in refusing to express political malice or denominational preferences during the brothers’ war of the 1860s.  Both Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby seem to have unlikable characteristics; so too Lincoln felt in 1854 that Southerners “are just what we [Northerners] would be in their situation.”  And in 1862 that “the people of the South are not more responsible for the original introduction” of slaves than are people of the North.

So it is not the likability or unlikability of a person, based upon background or manner, that makes Lincoln an epochal figure.  And it is not the historic importance of individuals like Tom Buchanan or Jay Gatz who make them interesting men.  But it is the melding together of these two strands of notability that Fitzgerald employed in his novel.  He chose names and settings that mirrored the struggle over white/black and rich/poor relations in the 1920s, when the Toms were fading and the nouveau-riche American Jays were in the ascendant.  He chose them because a nobody called Abe (from a nowhere northern town) started being called ‘Abraham,’ won the heart of a belle named Mary (who was from Kentucky), and gave his life that the black man might be free — thereby providing an excellent case-study of the great American dream.

A popular myth of 1937, based upon the inventive imagination of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, claimed that Robert Todd Lincoln destroyed many of his father’s papers.  A decade later the great Lincoln scholar David Mearns amply documented why Butler was mistaken in his assumptions about what Robert was burning.  Undoubtedly Butler may have seen Robert burning papers, but they were not those of Abraham Lincoln.  They were probably Robert’s own correspondence and cancelled checks.  What is most often overlooked by historians is what Abraham and Mary Lincoln destroyed before they left for Washington, D.C.

Carl Sandburg’s 1949 portrait of famed Lincoln collector Oliver Barrett provides an entire chapter to describe Barrett’s acquisition of Lincoln manuscripts saved from the flames.  Colorful monikers such as the “hot stove letters” or the “bonfire letters” indicate that the Lincolns themselves were the agents of destruction.  All of the incidents occur as part of their housecleaning in the period immediately before the Lincolns left Springfield in 1861.  The “hot stove letters” threatened death or physical violence upon the president-elect.  Lincoln gladly gave these letters to a cabinetmaker who wished some type of souvenir from Springfield’s most famous citizen.  The “bonfire letters” contained some of the only correspondence exchanged by the Lincolns while he served in Congress.  Mrs. Lincoln was attending to a burn pile in the backyard when a neighbor asked for some of these items.

Further evidence of this practice comes from a letter, now in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, of Truman H. Bartlett to Mrs. Ada Bailhache.  She was the daughter of Mason Brayman, a legal associate of Abraham Lincoln, and the wife of the editor of the Illinois State Journal.  Bartlett was a Boston artist who spent years interviewing individuals who had known Lincoln, and trying to collect every bit of information about Lincoln’s appearance and habits.  Writing on July 2, 1908, Bartlett inquires:

 “Dear Mrs. Bailhache,

Can you remember if the photo you think is the best of Lincoln was originally a photo or an ambrotype or tintype & small size?  Many of the early pictures of Lincoln were tintypes & ambrotypes.  I have heard on good authority that Mrs. Lincoln burnt many of these little pictures just before she left for Washington in ’61.  Horrid fact!

Yours truly,

T. H. Bartlett”

Writing on Bartlett’s original letter, Ada Bailhache replied:

“I cannot remember if the photo I thought best of Lincoln was an ambrotype or tintype and I think it very probable that Mrs. Lincoln did destroy papers — before leaving for Washington as that is the usual custom of housekeeping on breaking up a home.”

While modern observers may share Bartlett’s shock that significant original materials pertaining to Lincoln were destroyed, the acts of destruction seemed less to hide information than to dispose of accumulated clutter.  Both Abraham and Mary Lincoln freely allowed friends and neighbors to take what they wanted from burn piles.  Unlike America’s founding generation, who were self-aware that they were making history and kept meticulous correspondence files, most Illinois political figures of Lincoln’s generation left meager paper trails.  Stephen A. Douglas, a large figure in state and national politics, left correspondence comprising one small volume.  A casual examination of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln suggests that the dearth of letters from the 1840s and the early 1850s indicates that the bulk of material may have been consumed in burn piles.

Rescued from the burn pile: Lincoln’s 1848 letter from “this troublesome world.”