Episode 21, Abraham Lincoln’s Last Visit To His Step Mother: This month, we sit down with Dr. Cornelius for a special Mother’s Day themed episode of “SFTV” and discuss Mr. Lincoln’s last visit to his step mother, we answer some questions from Facebook, and debunk a “famous” Mr. Lincoln quote often attributed to him on Mother’s Day.
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For about a century the Lincoln profession has analyzed statements by John Milton Hay that he wrote many of Lincoln’s letters, and/or signed his name to many documents, with the president’s acquiescence. Hay was the assistant private secretary in the Executive Mansion for the entirety of Lincoln’s presidency, serving under secretary John Nicolay, his friend from western Illinois and his elder by six years.
Hay achieved notoriety in many fields. He was graduated from Brown University in 1858 as class poet and then worked in his uncle’s law firm in Springfield. That uncle, Milton Hay, had clerked for Lincoln two decades before. Young John Hay was quick with a pen, providing signed as well as anonymous reportage to newspapers and keeping a fascinating war-years diary. After the years in Mr. Lincoln’s service, he co-authored with Nicolay the 10-volume biography of Lincoln (1890), then rounded out that picture with the 12-volume edition of Lincoln’s own writings (1905). In all this they had close cooperation with and access to documents belonging to Robert Lincoln and others. So Hay knew Lincoln’s hand. And he knew Robert — the two young men were playing cards in the family quarters of the Executive Mansion on the night of 14 April 1865 when Robert’s parents went to Ford’s Theatre. John Hay was nearly a son, perhaps more like a shadow, to the man he had dubbed the ‘tycoon.’
Hay later published poems, stories, a novel, and travel sketches, was U.S. ambassador to London soon after Robert Lincoln served there; and as Secretary of State in the McKinley and T. Roosevelt administrations authored the ‘Open Door’ policy for trade with China. He negotiated the important Hay-Pauncefote Treaties that led to the building of the Panama Canal. In so doing he pursued policies about which Mr. Lincoln had a nascent interest, though did not pursue during the crisis of the Civil War. Hay began to intimate that he had written the famous Bixby letter for Lincoln in 1864 (the original was lost that year), and scholars still hotly debate that topic.
Definitely Hay, and definitely Lincoln's signature
But what of his claim that he ‘signed for’ Lincoln? The document at the right contains Lincoln’s signature only. The document below — a scrap, really — is the closest thing we have to substantiation of Hay’s claim. Most of the text is clearly not in Lincoln’s hand, nor is the date. And the signature does not look very good either. It would be dismissed from the pantheon of ‘Lincoln documents’ were it not for the fact that the main text is in Hay’s hand, and thus the ‘A. Lincoln’ cannot really be a forgery. Did Mr. Lincoln hand over a stack of pleas like this one, from Confederate soldiers who in the days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox suddenly wished to renew their loyalty to the Union? There are perhaps a hundred of these notes written out and/or signed by Lincoln in 1863-65, and the flood of them grew as the war’s eventual victor became clear.
Definitely Hay, and maybe a Hay-as-Lincoln signature
If John Hay was trying to make his hand look like Lincoln’s, he did not execute a particularly good likeness here. Is it possible that Hay’s later claim to have written many of Lincoln’s letters owes mainly to those last days of Lincoln’s life, perhaps this very last day? The harried President wanted to oblige his wife, his friends Major Rathbone and Miss Harris, his own interest, and the nation’s acclaim by getting to Ford’s Theatre for the show. Did he leave some papers behind for the able and trusted young secretary to ‘take care of, if you please, Mr. Hay?’ And was it that last conversation with his chief that caused Hay, in his very later years, to inflate his own memory and thus his words about the frequency of his vicarious role as official presidential signatory? Or have a host of ‘A. Lincoln’ signatures on short notes been dismissed, perhaps undeservedly, because we have not learned to recognize John Hay’s hand?
To celebrate Lincoln’s hundredth birthday in 1909, the Times put on an essay contest for the children of the Greater New York Area. Other urban papers, including the Philadelphia Ledger and the Cleveland Press, organized Lincoln competitions too, though none could rival the size of the Times event.
Drawing on a city population of 4.5 million, about 3 times that of Philadelphia and 9 times that of Cleveland, the Times attracted almost 10,000 qualifying submissions, many from New Jersey, Connecticut, and other towns in New York. All of the handwritten papers — capped at 500 words — arrived with a teacher’s note certifying that the essay had been written “without outside help.”
“WINNERS OF THE LINCOLN COMPETITION MEDALS, CERTIFICATES, CASH PRIZES,” ran the 7-column headline on page 1 of the “Magazine Section” on February 23, 1909. One thousand children had won silver Tiffany medals featuring the bust of Lincoln, and the top 100 were each to get a $5.00 gold piece.
The Magazine printed the top 10 essays, in facsimile form to show off the neatness and penmanship of the best writers. Three of these, said the Times, came from the pens of 10-year-olds, one from a 12-year-old, and the rest from teenagers and one 20-year-old. For the Times, the 10-year-olds (one of whom turned out to be only 9) proved irresistible. Their innocent directness of expression seemed to mirror the mythic simplicity of Lincoln.
Alexandra Kliatshco, age 9 and just 3 years an American. Photo courtesy of Julie Stern, Cyrenius H. Booth Library, Newtown, CT.
How did the Times manage to attract nearly 10,000 essays? By enlisting the eager support of the New York City school system, which added the Times contest to its already extensive Lincoln centennial program.
Teachers were encouraged to assign the 7-part biography of Lincoln published in the paper in early February. (The biography was the work of Frederick Trevor Hill, author of the recent book Lincoln the Lawyer.) They helped their pupils grasp what the Times meant by an “original” response to Hill’s account. A summary would not suffice; students had to express their own sentiments about Lincoln’s slow climb to distinction.
Many teachers actively discussed the Times pieces with their pupils, focusing on Hill’s main point: “Lincoln was not a heaven born genius — merely a plain man who was honest, sincere, and upright.” He learned growing up that strong “character” would get him through failure and disappointment. Any young person in any era, the Times urged, could adopt Lincoln as a model.
The teachers promoted the contest, but the lure of a dazzling medal fired the children’s ambition. Letters poured into the Times office from young hopefuls and their parents, explaining how badly they wanted to win.
One father thought he would help his 14-year-old daughter’s chances by sending in an additional poem she had written that urged equal time for George Washington:
It’s Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln
Just cause he’s a hundred years old,
O’ course he deserves every bit of his praise,
And maybe I am kind o’ bold
To say that there’s some one better,
An’ tho’ I’m only one
I’m goin’ ter stick up for the father
Of this country, George Washington.
The Times cautioned youngsters not to expect special treatment for extra material of this kind. But the 14-year-old did get her medal.
In the aftermath, what did the Times think the competition had achieved? “Thousands of eager, impressible, active young minds” had received a “conception of the great President, which will not easily be effaced,” it wrote. The essays had “made Lincoln a vital reality to them,” to their families, and to countless readers.
In a city with almost 2 million foreign-born residents, the Lincoln contest had made him a subject of daily conversation for at least 100,000 people, said the Times. Immigrants and native-born Americans, often occupying separate worlds, had taken another step towards a shared civic life.
Diminutive Alexandra Kliatshco, a Russian immigrant, and at age 9 the winner of a medal and a $5.00 gold piece, became the paper’s poster-child for equal opportunity in modern America. Alexandra had arrived in America from Russia only 3 years before, knowing no English. She had thrived at P.S. 177 in Manhattan, and she produced an elegant Lincoln piece. Her father, a physician on Henry Street, told the Times that she had excelled at memorizing Russian poetry from the time she was 3 years old.
“I am a little foreign girl, and I have been here only a short time,” her essay began, “but when I read about Lincoln, I thought that I might grow up a great woman as Lincoln was a great man.” And it ended: “We cannot forget the love he bore us and he died leaving the world better than it was. I hope that I can be like Lincoln, unselfish, kind, thoughtful and modest.”
A 1998 profile in the Times noted that her prediction had proven accurate. Alexandra Kliatshco Werner had graduated from Teachers College in 1922 and taught art for 40 years at Jane Addams Vocational School in the Bronx. She loved impressionist paintings, classical music, and Alfred Hitchcock, and had tried her hand at poetry.
According to her daughter, interviewed for this post, she had not held on to her Lincoln medal, preferring to make a gift of it to her father, who died in 1928.
A regular contributor over the decades to the Times “Neediest Cases” fund, Mrs. Werner — the youngest top-ten winner in the centennial Lincoln competition of 1909 — died in 1997 at the age of 97.
Episode 17, Abraham Lincoln Deathbed Painting: This month on Stories from the Vault we sit down with Dr. James Cornelius to discuss a painting of Abraham Lincoln on his deathbed. You may view the painting in our companion video series.
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Both large and small new discoveries or points for debate come up nearly every month about Lincoln and his family. Recent months have been richer than most.
Moving from the small to the large, or perhaps from the amusing to the consequential, we find these four nuggets.
1. Vera Kaikobad, in the journal Medical Acupuncture for 2007 (this one took a while to pierce our attention), has performed what seems to be the first acupuncture analysis of Lincoln. Addressing the 5 Elements for “his Qi energetics” — fire, water, earth, wood, and metal — she finds, e.g., that Lincoln’s ‘lazy’ eye points to “a pronounced wood disposition;” that his cold hands and feet under stress meant “a fire-water axis problem;” and his being a “weak eater” meant “wood afflicting earth.” I am not qualified to comment on this analysis except to say that the lazy eye was thought to originate in a head-kick by a horse when Abe was 10; and that the other two maladies cropped up only in the last months of his life.
2. Mary Lincoln wrote on 5 May 1862 — 10 weeks after Willie Lincoln’s death — to Charles Reeves of Cleveland, Ohio, in a letter newly revealed to the public this month. As often happened in 1862-1882, Mary wrote to express condolences for the death of another person — Reeves’s wife Hester, who had briefly been Willie’s teacher in Springfield– then mainly wrote about her own sorrow.
More interestingly, she refers to a painting of Willie, based on a photograph. If this is the watercolor portrait owned by the ALPLM, gifted by the last Lincoln descendant in 1976, then it is about a decade older than we had thought. If so, in her weeks of self-confinement Mary still found the strength to commission, pay for, and receive the portrait. The letter also tells us that city directories and the census can leave chasms of the unknown, for Hester Reeves was never listed in Springfield.
3. Major Thomas Eckert was in charge of the Military Telegraph office in the War Department, and thus personally close to Lincoln. After the war he was an industrial executive and innovator in telegraphy. At war’s end he legally carried away his code books and message logs, which in early 2012 his descendant sold to the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California.
The code books reveal some new names for our 16th President: he was variously referred to as Berlin, India, Ida, and Irving, inter alia. General McClellan was Andes. Secretary of War Stanton was Indus. The rebels never cracked the federals’ codes, surely one element (if not the major one) in the Union victory. Eckert’s code men chose stray words, then filled in uncoded names alongside them in their logbook as the messages went out. They also added junk words to messages, meant only to confuse a possible spy: abortion, snowball, etc. These 30 volumes will provide many new insights and much information on the conduct of the war.
In March 1865 John Bigelow, U.S. minister in Paris, presented Lincoln with volume 1 of the new 'History of Julius Caesar' by Emperor Napoleon III. Volume 2 had to be presented to Robert Lincoln the next year.
4. Perhaps of greatest interest to Lincolnology is a project, now in its beginning stages, to create a conspectus of all the books the Lincolns owned. Robert Bray’s recent study Reading with Lincoln (2010) is a series of lectures, really, building upon Professor Bray’s 2007 list of books Lincoln is thought to have read. Bray’s study is useful, if maddening at times. The books now in possession of the ALPLM do not much overlap with Bray’s list, and why that may be is for future scholars and students to puzzle out.
The volumes here have been in different vaults and shelves over the decades; and some were only very recently acquired. The wonderful new Presidential Library building, opened in 2004, along with devoted staff and better record-keeping, finally allow us to shelve and then list them together. I will share this information with the other major repositories of Lincoln possessions and see how large a virtual shelf we can fill with the family’s readings. The headline number for the ALPLM’s collection is 152: namely, books presented to, given by, or owned permanently by Abraham, Mary, Robert, his wife Mary, their son Jack, or, in one case their granddaughter Peggy. More to come on this topic later this year.
With its funds drying up, the Jane Addams Hull House Association, a social service agency in Chicago, shut its doors in January 2012 after 122 years of continuous work. The demise of the organization that bears her name brings to mind what Jane Addams accomplished in 1889 when she created Hull House. In doing so, she took Lincoln as a prime inspiration.
Born in 1860, Addams was 29 years old when she founded Hull House as a “settlement” of college-educated women in a working-class neighborhood on the west side of Chicago. (The house took its name from its original owner of 1856.) For them, Hull House offered a new experience of social and vocational freedom. They got to test their book knowledge against the realities of urban life.
Hull House gave direct assistance to the poor, but its mission encompassed an attack on inequality across the board — publicizing inferior housing and working conditions faced by immigrant laborers, acquainting adults and children with the democratic ideals espoused by Lincoln and others.
In the 1880s, a chorus of reformers bewailed the deep class divisions threatening the ideal of citizen equality. A gap between rich and poor had seemed more acceptable when most people believed (as Lincoln did) that any white man working for wages could acquire capital through diligent labor, and eventually become an employer himself.
By the late 1880s — after a decade of class conflict culminating in Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886 — more and more middle-class reformers joined labor organizers in concluding that equal opportunity was dying out. To give every man a shot at economic independence, and to preserve a republic of equal citizens, fundamental change could no longer be avoided, they felt.
But what kind of change could equalize life chances? Addams imagined Hull House as an experimental institution searching for answers. Weekly lectures on political economy brought in eager crowds, including socialists and anarchists. The House became a center of intellectual debate, and Lincoln emerged as a staple of the conversation. Addams modeled her approach to social progress after his.
In the 1850s, he had pushed the American founders’ principle of equality for all, while going slow on the abolition of slavery and seeking an accommodation between free and slave states. In the 1890s, Addams pushed Lincoln’s goal of equality for all, while pursuing an accommodation between labor and capital, and deeper bonds of understanding between immigrants and native-born Americans.
In her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), she noted how much Lincoln had meant to her since childhood. Her father John Addams, an Illinois State Senator starting in 1854, had known him personally (Lincoln liked to address him as “Double D’ed Addams”). She could remember the moment her father told her, at age four, that “the greatest man in the world” had died. He was sobbing as he said it, and looking back years later, Jane saw his torrent of tears over Lincoln as her “baptism” into the wider world.
Devising the Hull House “settlement” — a residence for independent women on the urban frontier, and a living bridge between the classes — assured Addams that she had found a calling worthy of her father’s and Lincoln’s generation, those who had saved the Union and freed the slaves.
But in 1894, when class conflict erupted again in Chicago with the Pullman Strike, she confronted the apparent breakdown of her bridging campaign. “Labor” and “capital” had reached an impasse, and she was bewildered about how to proceed. She was tempted by the Socialist program — government ownership of major industries — but decided it was too rigid. On the other hand, leaving large companies in the hands of men like George Pullman, who could lower his workers’ wages at will, seemed intolerable too.
During hard times in 1894 Jane Addams visited the statue in Lincoln Park, Chicago, for inspiration. The view here, taken by an unknown WPA photographer during the Great Depression of the 1930s, includes a man resting.
In her confusion, Addams sought Lincoln’s help. She set out on a three-mile pilgrimage from Hull House to Lincoln Park, where Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s acclaimed bronze statue of Lincoln had been dedicated in 1887. She wanted to meditate at this shrine to her hero, “to look at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I could, from the marvelous Saint- Gaudens statue.”
Reflecting on Lincoln’s ideas, she found him mute on the labor-capital conflict, since he had never encountered “labor” and “capital” in their late-19th century forms. But she gathered ample wisdom from the words chiseled into the granite bench that stretches around the statue: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
The injustices built into modern industrial life would have to be addressed pragmatically, she realized, not according to the Socialist vision of a progress unfolding through prescribed historical stages. To Addams, “pragmatism” meant practical problem-solving, informed by a set of chosen ideals. Addams took her ideals straight from Lincoln: equality for all and respect for one’s opponents.
One must prepare for partial victories and frequent setbacks. Lincoln had shown the proper patience, being content “to dig the channels through which the moral life of his countrymen might flow.” Amidst all the turn-of-the-century calls for wholesale social transformation, she found that “the memory of Lincoln… came like a refreshing breeze from off the prairie.”
“In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression,” she concluded, “we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment [something] of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.”
Episode 16, Mary Lincoln’s Jewelry: Once again, we are joined by Dr. James Cornelius to discuss artifacts from our collection. This month, we discuss pieces of Mary Lincoln’s jewelry. You may also view the jewelry by watching our companion “Stories from the Vault” video. Mary’s jewelry will be on display this summer.
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Abraham and Mary Lincoln held greater aspirations for their children than they experienced in life. That they could send their son Robert to Harvard University revealed the importance the Lincolns placed upon education as one of the building blocks of success.
Robert’s success as a lawyer provided wealth and status that his father could only imagine. Indeed, Robert Todd Lincoln was constantly imposed upon by relatives, real and imagined, to provide financial assistance. His Aunt Emily Todd Helm received a regular Christmas check from Robert to help offset her expenses. When he forgot to send it, she reminded him. Aunt Emily was also the person Robert relied upon to explain the Todd family tree to him. On occasion, Robert would receive a letter from someone who claimed to be related. He, in turn, would consult with Aunt Emily, who would explain or deny the connection. Once satisfied of kinship, Robert dutifully sent a small offering of assistance.
Clinton Conkling grew up with Robert in Springfield, Illinois. It was Conkling whom Robert entrusted to find appropriate renters for the family home in Springfield after 1865. Once Mary Lincoln deeded the home to Robert, it was Conkling who convinced Robert to turn over ownership to the State of Illinois, in 1887, rather than sell the property.
As a gesture of appreciation for their friendship, Robert wrote out a check for $1,000 that was used for carved oak stalls in the chancel of Westminster Presbyterian Church, formerly Second Presbyterian Church, which Conkling attended and served as one of the leading members. The gift was in perfect keeping with Robert’s generosity of spirit.
Not everyone in Springfield, however, viewed Robert’s gift in the same spirit of generosity. Conkling’s letter to Robert dated October 6, 1915, tells the story:
“Yours of 4th inst. at hand. It has just come to my ears in a perfectly natural way that your correspondent and another lady had a very warm discussion — not dispute — to-day concerning why you did not do something for the First Presbyterian Church — a church, as they said, so intimately connected with your family and whose pastors had officiated at the funerals of various of its members (your mother) etc. etc. etc. It would seem that the women of the Church are becoming some[what] warm over the matter. They cannot understand why you should have given me something for the Second Presby’n Church, and fail to consider though told of it long ago that it was a personal gift to me for the purpose of the new church on account of the long friendship which has existed between you and me.
“In their talk they referred to what you did for me. I feel you should know this feeling so that, if it seems best to you, you can make such a contribution as will still this sort of talk and cause them to know they are not being discriminated against.
“I have hesitated to write this but I believe you will understand that it [is] meant for your guidance and not to annoy you.
“Excuse me if I have presumed too much.”
Conkling couldn’t help but add the following note on a separate enclosure:
“Between you and me and not to be spoken of the following may be of interest. In 1860 the family of B. S. Edwards were members of the Second Presbyterian Church, but soon after for ‘political reasons’ I was told by one who knew, they withdrew and went to the First Presbyterian Church. This was because the intensely loyal attitude of almost the entire congregation of the Second made the atmosphere uncomfortable. In the First Presby’n Ch. of that day were to be found for the most part the influential men of the community who were opposed to Mr. Lincoln and the coercing of the South. In 1861 there was not a single non-union man in the Second, while in the First were many. It is true there were a few, very few, supporters of your father in the First but there were many many more who opposed him. However you know these facts in a general way as well as I do.
“Now all rise up to do your father honor.”
As a very good amateur historian, Conkling wrote an extensive history of Westminster Presbyterian Church as well as local Springfield history. Benjamin S. Edwards, like his older brother Ninian Wirt Edwards, left the Whig Party to become a Democrat; while the youngest brother, Albert Gallatin Edwards, who later founded the investment company bearing his name, remained firmly in the Republican ranks. Benjamin Edwards was one of the leaders promoting the ratification of a new state constitution in 1862 that was explicitly anti-Lincoln administration. Illinois voters rejected it.
From the red-brick 1876 edifice, the First Presbyterian Church, Mary Lincoln was buried in 1882. Conkling sent Robert Lincoln this postcard in 1915, when Robert donated to his parents' original congregation.
In character with Robert’s philanthropic spirit, two days later he sent a $1,000 check to First Presbyterian Church’s organ fund, confirming the wisdom of the aphorism: ‘no good deed goes unpunished.’
Benjamin Chapin’s career as a stage performer peaked on February 12, 1909, when his four-act play Abraham Lincoln at the White House finished its six-day run in New York City. At least 1,200 customers paid 50 cents, 75 cents, or a dollar to celebrate Lincoln’s one-hundredth birthday at the matinee show of the lavishly appointed Garden Theater on Madison Avenue.
They got to see vignettes of the president dealing with Fort Sumter in 1861, reacting to the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, and getting ready for an evening at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865. An irascible Secretary of War Stanton and a snarly General Joseph Hooker kept putting Lincoln’s equanimity to the test. He assuaged them with stories and jokes, and his patient forbearance also worked wonders on his cantankerous wife. Whether in politics or domestic life, Chapin’s Lincoln put charity first. When Stanton insisted that a traitor be hung for his crime, Lincoln found a reason to pardon him.
Part of the very large 1909 playbill
For a 34-year-old writer-impersonator who had toiled for a decade on lyceum platforms and vaudeville stages as a Lincoln look-alike, this February 12 spent behind the New York City footlights was a day to relish. It gave him hope that his play might hit the jackpot and get picked up for a national tour.
Chapin had felt that hope once before. In the spring of 1906, his brand-new show had appeared for three weeks at the Liberty Theater on West 42nd Street. But he got mixed reviews at best. After the last performance on April 15 — the anniversary of Lincoln’s death — Chapin was forced back on the road. His one-act “playlet” performance ran on vaudeville stages as far west as California, where his dignified show, as the Los Angeles Times remarked, was squeezed into “a hodge-podge of noisy variety.”
Only the gathering excitement for the 1909 Lincoln Centenary got Chapin his one-week revival at the Garden Theater. In a publicity flyer chock-full of testimonials from Mark Twain and lesser lights, Chapin reproduced the most glowing lines from his 1906 notices. Often those reviews had also expressed strong misgivings about the show.
One after another, critics judged his play to be “of very little moment,” as John Corbin said in the New York Sun. They noted that Chapin, who’d never acted before 1906, lacked the theatrical skills to evoke a character so multi-sided as Lincoln. And his rudimentary scripting fell short of delivering the “sterner” side of the president’s leadership, as one writer called it, along with his personal sweetness.
Yet even Chapin’s detractors agreed that he excelled at summoning Lincoln’s physical presence: his towering, ungainly frame, his shambling, awkward movements. The performer’s meticulous make-up and fine command of Lincoln’s mannerisms transfixed many spectators. Those who had never seen Lincoln in the flesh got a good sense from Chapin of why many in the older generation continued to dwell so insistently on the president’s appearance.
The public could easily abide the play’s flaws, said the reviewers, since Chapin’s “embodiment” of Lincoln offered such a wholesome and patriotic payoff. People should be sure to take their children to see it. “With Lincoln present in the flesh, walking and talking, a living man and not a silent figure in the dim pages of history,” said the Los Angeles Times, “anything but absolute respect for the vehicle [the play] is impossible.”
Chapin’s centennial run appears to have marked the end of his theatrical aspirations. As that door closed, another opened. By 1913, he had turned to film, and by 1917, the first four episodes of his planned Lincoln “Cycle” — an extended biographical epic — were playing at the Strand, one of Manhattan’s premier “picture palaces.”
In 1906 and 1909, the New York Times and other papers cautioned playgoers not to expect too much from Chapin’s work. But in 1917, to the filmmaker’s delight, the paper issued a different sort of warning:
“Patrons of the Strand,” said the Times, “should be condemned to seeing trashy modern photoplays all the rest of their days if they do not flock to see the Lincoln cycle on exhibition there this week.”
Benjamin Chapin never got to finish his Lincoln Cycle. He fell ill on Lincoln’s birthday in 1918 and died a few months later, apparently of tuberculosis, in a sanitarium in Liberty, New York. He was only 43 years old. But he had pioneered the impersonation of Lincoln on stage and screen alike. “He took dead history and made it live again,” the Chicago Tribune wrote. Next to a short obituary, the paper placed a photo of Chapin taken from the side, in full Lincoln dress, looking down appreciatively at an American flag.
Most children have big plans, and Jack Lincoln, grandson of the 16th president, had at least one such plan.
The second of three children and the only son of Robert and Mary Lincoln, he saw more from an early age than most children ever get to see. Born in Chicago in 1873, he moved at age 7 to Washington, D.C., when his father became Secretary of War under President James A. Garfield. In 1885 the Lincolns returned to Chicago, but 4 years later they moved to London, where his father served as U.S. Minister for President Benjamin Harrison.
Yet sadness followed this family. Jack’s grandmother Mary Lincoln died in Springfield while he lived in Washington; so did his mother’s mother, Ann Eliza Harlan, two years later. Of course he never knew his grandfather the president, but because he was named for him — Abraham Lincoln II, always called ‘Jack’ — he had the right to sign his name exactly as his forebear did: A. Lincoln.
Jack Lincoln signed like his grandfather but, unlike the president, could also write it in Greek.
And so he did, to the amusement and confusion of his friends, in a hand very close to that of the president. The evidence we have of this are 14 books in the Presidential Library collection that belonged to the boy. Most of these are signed in a way that could fool the historically unsure, since all were published after 1865.
Oliver Optic’s books, including Outward Bound (1866); Shamrock and Thistle (1867); Red Cross (1867); Dikes and Ditches (1868); Through by Daylight (1869); Going South (1879); Up the River (1881) seem to have been his main target. He bought them new or used. Optic was the nom de plume of William T. Adams of Boston, a highly productive and successful author in the early days of children’s series-lit. These edu-tales took youngsters to foreign settings (Ireland and Scotland for Shamrock, e.g., Holland and Belgium for Dikes) or coastal yachting (Going South) or driving a train (Through by Daylight). This last book even mentions baseball, one of the earliest such books.
Another pair bear a similar flavor: Capt. Mayne Reid, The Plant Hunters and Stories About Animals, both of which Jack signed in 1884. Reid was a British military man who wrote tales about Africa and other exotic places.
Jack’s friend Dick Hatton gave him a Christmas present in 1883 in a like vein: Horatio Alger’s The Young Circus Rider (1883). Jack, or rather his parents, saved his Model First Reader (J. R. Webb, 1873), in which he pencilled his Chicago and Washington addresses in an unsteady young hand.
More interestingly, Jack took over two books not quite his. William M. Thayer wrote the first children’s book about President Lincoln, The Pioneer Boy (1863), whence comes much of our log-cabin-to-White House national mythos. This was translated into Greek in 1865 and mailed to President Lincoln by the translator, arriving just after his death. Jack later claimed it from his own father’s library. So, too, the Hawaiian translation (1869).
And those big plans? Jack numbered most of these books, with a shelf-mark used by large collectors who need to know exactly where in their library to find each item. The Optic books at the ALPLM are numbered a2, a11, and a13-17; the Thayer books are e13 and e14. These marks give clues to the likelihood of at least 3 other shelves of books in Jack’s bedroom.
But the hundreds or thousands of books that world-trotting Jack Lincoln might have hoped to amass over his lifetime never reached that level. He died in London in March 1890, age 16, of an infection that today would be cleared by a simple shot. Robert Lincoln knew then that the surname ‘Lincoln’ would die with him (1926, it turned out). But books and signatures live on.