Episode 15, The 13th Amendment: This month, we speak with Dr. James Cornelius about our recently restored copy of the 13th Amendment which has been signed and dated by Abraham Lincoln. You can also view our companion“Stories from the Vault” video which shows the document.
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In Lincoln’s day, “nostalgia” meant something different than it does today. Then it was a rarely heard medical word. Doctors used “nostalgia” to describe a debilitating, even life-threatening, form of homesickness, one afflicting soldiers most of all. As far as we know, Lincoln, like most people, never used the term.
Only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did “nostalgia” evolve into the commonly used word we know today: a remembrance of earlier times that feels somewhat sorrowful, somewhat sweet.
Historians have shown that wistful longing for the bygone world of earlier generations became a defining feature of modern society. Nostalgia for rural rhythms and the old family hearth helped modern Americans and Europeans adjust to the industrial time clock and the novel pressures of urban living.
Popular fiction and Hollywood films spread the nostalgic frame of mind with 20th century mega-hits from The Wizard of Oz to Gone With the Wind. “There’s no place like home” applied as much to the vanished plantation culture of Tara as to the dwindling free-labor homesteads of Kansas.
Lincoln’s generation didn’t know the word “nostalgia,” but many pined for their ever-so-humble “Home, Sweet Home,” one of the most popular songs of the Civil War. Union prisoners detained at Libby Prison in Richmond sang it regularly. “Auld Lang Syne” was another staple of the day: a Union band played it at Appomattox Courthouse as Grant made his way into the McLean home to accept Lee’s surrender.
The president’s own favorite nostalgic song may have been “Dixie”: “one of the best tunes I have ever heard,” he told a crowd outside the White House on April 10, 1865. He asked a band to play it, quipping that the Confederate anthem was once again national property. (It had been widely played in the North before the war.)
In other words, Lincoln’s cohort loved the sentimental evocation of olden times just as much as their descendants did. The difference was that later generations gradually realized, as Lincoln and his peers did not, that the vibrant culture of small-town, pre-industrial America had come to an end.
If Lincoln didn’t know the word “nostalgia,” he still produced a remarkable poem in the mid-1840s that captured its most essential element: the joining of sorrow and satisfaction in a remembrance of the past. Yet this aspiring poet threw overboard the pious reverence for “home” that marked the wistful songs and poems of his own day as much as it did the later culture of nostalgia.
In 1844, at age 35, Lincoln made a return visit to Spencer County, Indiana, where he’d grown from a lad of 7 to a man of 21. The experience of returning home had put him into a “poetizing mood,” he later wrote, despite the “unpoetical” character of this Hoosier “neighborhood.”
In 1845 and 1846, he produced 24 four-line stanzas to express his sentiments — “though,” he quipped, “whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question.” It might just be “doggerel.”
The manuscript of Lincoln's poem is in the Library of Congress, but fine printings of it have been made. This is from 1971.
His first stanza hit at the heart of nostalgia: its paradoxical blend of emotions. (This is the original text, as given in Roy Basler’s Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, pp. 367ff. A slightly different version appears on pp. 378 and 385ff. of Basler.)
My childhood-home I see again,
And gladden with the view;
And still, as mem’ries crowd my brain,
There’s sadness in it too.
The gladness in his memory, according to the rest of the poem, has nothing to do with remembering his family life or good times with friends or neighbors. The 24 stanzas mainly recount some highly unpleasant facts picked up on his 1844 trip, such as the deaths of half of his childhood friends.
I hear the lone survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms;
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.
The most unpleasant fact of all was the lingering insanity of his schoolmate Matthew Gentry, who had lost his mind at age 19 (when Lincoln was 16). Twelve of the poem’s 24 stanzas concern the madness of Matthew, son of the richest man in the region.
Poor Matthew! I have ne’er forgot
When first with maddened will,
Yourself you maimed, your father fought,
And mother strove to kill …
And when at length, tho’ drear and long,
Time soothed your fiercer woes –
How plaintively your mournful song,
Upon the still night rose.
I’ve heard it oft, as if I dreamed,
Far-distant, sweet, and lone;
The funeral dirge, it ever seemed
Of reason dead and gone.
To drink it’s strains, I’ve stole away,
All silently and still,
Ere yet the rising god of day
Had streaked the Eastern hill.
Air held his breath; the trees all still
Seemed sorr’wing angels round.
Whose swelling tears in dew-drops fell
Upon the list’ning ground.
Here Lincoln remembers, in his youth, prowling the landscape in the dim light of dawn to savor Matthew’s funeral dirge for enlightenment. Nature itself has absorbed Matthew’s suffering. “Air held his breath,”Lincoln writes, in his single best poetic phrase. The atmosphere is laden with Matthew’s lament, his song a melancholic “air” in its own right.
The memory of Matthew is sorrowful, but enlivening too. Finding poetic words to voice the memory lets Lincoln capture and contain his sadness. Lincoln has realized that the act of writing provides solace and hope. Art can help relieve his own torment over the suddenness of death, and the fragility of reason. The poem stands as a secular prayer of sorts, an urgent appeal for the preservation of life and sanity.
At this moment in his life, poetry offered him a comfort that religion or theology could not. “My Childhood-home I See Again” reveals a Lincoln buoyed up by a steely and stoic faith, poised to embark on his successful 1846 Congressional “canvass” against Methodist preacher Peter Cartwright.
Episode 14, The Commissioner’s Sale Document for Slaves: This month, we sit down with Dr. James Cornelius to discuss our Artifact of the Month: the broadside announcement for a slave auction in Mr. Lincoln’s home county in Kentucky.
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Episode 13, An interview with Abraham Lincoln presenter, Fritz Klein: On this episode of Stories from the Vault, we speak with Fritz Klein who has been portraying Abraham Lincoln for over 30 years. We discuss a wide variety of topics and he delivers an amazing version of Mr. Lincoln’s Farewell Address to Springfield.
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To only a handful of individuals interested in the Lincoln assassination, the name of Nathan Simms evokes quizzical looks. Simms is one of several individuals who claimed to have held the reins of John Wilkes Booth’s horse on the night of April 14, 1865. Dr. Edward Steers ably demonstrates the problems with Simms’s claims and credits John “Peanut” Burroughs as the rightful holder of Booth’s horse on that fateful night. But if Simms was mistaken about his role on April 14, 1865, it might be premature to dismiss his connection to the assassination.
A letter by architect Walter F. Price to President Herbert Hoover suggests that Simms — misspelled as “Sims” throughout the letter — worked for Mary Surratt. Beyond the new information on Simms, Mr. Price also enclosed three photographs to provide additional visual reference of this obscure individual. The text of the February 3, 1931, letter follows:
“Some weeks ago I went to Marshalton, Chester County, Pa., to visit an old Meeting House; the aged care-taker as I was leaving pointed to a frame House in the edge of the village. He said ‘in that house lived a colored man named Nathan Sims; when he was about seventeen he held a horse for J. Wilkes Booth while he went into the theatre to assassinate President Lincoln.’
Nathan Simms, in Pennsylvania, 1931 – Mary Surratt’s former slave?
“On the 9th of January last I went again to Marshalton about four miles west of West Chester and called at his house. A mulatto woman came to the door and said she was Mrs. Nathan Sims, then added that her husband was in the village getting slop. On my inquiry as to how I should know him, she said he will be carrying two buckets. Within five minutes I met him with his buckets; he admitted he was the Nathan Sims who held the horse for Booth. I turned to walk back with him to his house. He seemed shy and taciturn. To my question as to whether he was the slave of Mrs. Surratt, he said he had been, but later in our short talk, he referred as to having been her bond servant. Of Mrs. Surratt he said only, the soldiers came and bundled her up and took her away. I don’t know what became of her. Near his house I had him stand for his picture by his pump. I took a second picture, trying to secure a little better light on his face.
“I went again on the 25th of January and took a promised picture. In the town I asked for an old and reliable citizen, and was referred to a Mr. Peterson, who said relative to N. Sims’ veracity, that from his knowledge of the man, he felt sure we could depend on anything he might say. Just as I reached the house he came around the corner and I gave him the picture and asked more questions. For example; who are his parents? He replied they were slaves of Dr. Gunton of Maryland. There were several boys in the family and as he was not needed, he was bound over by his master to Mrs. Surratt, and that he worked for her on her ‘big’ farm at Surrattville, where she had much property. He finished by saying that he had lived in Marshalton thirty-six years.”
Nathan Simms may not have held Booth’s horse but he clearly seems to be connected to Mary Surratt. To this extent, he is worth knowing more about as an historical actor.
Episode 12, “Killing Lincoln” Book Discussion: On a special podcast, a panel of historians including: James Cornelius (Lincoln Curator, ALPLM), Daniel Stowell (Director and Editor, Papers of Abraham Lincoln), Ron Keller (Assistant Professor of History and Political Science, Lincoln College, and Director, Lincoln Heritage Museum), and Matthew Holden (Wepner Distinguished Professor in Political Science, University of Illinois Springfield) discuss the Bill O’Reilly/Martin Dugard book, “Killing Lincoln”. The panel is moderated by former Chicago Tribune reporter Patrick Reardon.
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Part two of a two-part essay. Part one appeared on November 10th.
Herndon’s 1866 lecture on Ann Rutledge drew the scorn of many who read the newspaper excerpts. Critics ripped him for going public with Lincoln’s alleged buried-heart comment, a statement certain to anguish the widowed Mary Lincoln.
After watching Ann’s coffin descend into the grave in 1835, Abraham supposedly declared that his “heart, sad and broken, was buried there.” To Herndon, this meant that Lincoln had lived out the rest of his life without truly loving another woman.
In 1866, no one disputed the reliability of the buried-heart remark, supplied to Herndon, he said, by an unnamed “friend.” They just blasted Herndon for disclosing it, and claiming that it set the future course of Lincoln’s love life. As it turns out, they could have challenged the comment’s legitimacy too.
In their edition of Herndon’s Lincoln, his 1889 biography of his partner, Douglas Wilson and Rodney Davis assert (p. 429, n. 6) that Herndon’s lecture silently reveals William Greene, a Lincoln acquaintance since 1831, as his unnamed source. But the quotation is nowhere to be found, they say, in Greene’s communications with Herndon. Nor did any other person pass along the buried-heart comment to Herndon.
So where did Herndon get those words? I suspect that he composed them himself after reading an 1862 newspaper article in the Menard County Axis, a Democratic weekly published in nearby Petersburg. Sent to him by one of his informants, this piece gushed over the president’s phenomenal rise from New Salem dry goods clerk to Commander-in-Chief. “What a model of ambition … for the youths of the land,” the story exclaimed.
The Democratic newspaper in which the Lincoln-Rutledge folklore began, 27 years later.
The Axis had picked up the oral tradition of Lincoln’s romance with a beautiful young New Salem woman — “the youth had wrapped his heart with hers” — and cited his desolation over her death as one of the many obstacles he’d overcome on his arduous road to national renown.
The article described him standing by her grave, so distraught “as the cold clods fell upon the coffin, he sincerely wished that he too had been enclosed within it.” By this account, the stricken Abraham wished he could leave his entire body with Ann, not just his “heart.” He was saying he wanted to die. He was not saying he couldn’t love another woman. Burying his heart was apparently Herndon’s idea, not Lincoln’s.
As if to admit that he had no informant’s testimony to back up his public withering of Mary Lincoln — a woman who, according to him, had never received her husband’s deepest affection in 23 years of marriage — Herndon made a surprising claim in the 1889 biography.
In Herndon’s Lincoln, he wrote: “speaking of [Ann’s] death and her grave Lincoln once said to me, ‘My heart lies buried there.’” Of course, in the 1866 lecture, Herndon said the remark had come to him from a “friend.” In 1866, he made no claim that Lincoln had ever mentioned Ann to him at all.
In his lecture, Herndon made one final statement about Ann Rutledge, and this time the New York Times decided not to publish it — the only Herndon comment on Ann that the paper didn’t quote. This unused observation may have come from the 1862 Axis story too.
After Ann’s death, the Axis article said, Lincoln recovered from his misery by finding “active exercise” for “both mind and body” in his political career. Herndon attributed that notion to the same “friend” who’d come up with the buried-heart remark. Lincoln had “leaped wildly into the political arena,” according to the alleged friend, “as a refuge from his despair.”
If fate had instead allowed Abraham to settle down with “Ann Rutledge, the sweet, tender and loving girl, he would have gravitated insensibly into a purely domestic man.” Though already a state legislator, Lincoln would supposedly have forsaken electoral ambition for the pleasures of the hearth.
Herndon suspected that, for Lincoln, embracing the storm and stress of politics had depended on Ann’s dying. It took the jolt of her removal to launch Lincoln on his weary pilgrimage toward the supreme sacrifice: surrendering his life for the people.
In this tragic scenario, Ann’s death, like Abraham’s, could be taken as an indirect act of devotion to the Republic. Never publicly joined in love, they could be bound together in public service. The loss of her life in 1835 could be tethered to the loss of his life in 1865. Lincoln’s entire three-decade public career could be seen as framed by two calamitous events, his fiancée’s death and his own martyrdom.
Looking back from the 21st century, we can only wonder what kind of love Ann and Abraham shared. “Love” covers a spectrum of emotions, desires, and promises. There’s no way to be sure how far their bond had progressed along the path from intimate friendship to informal betrothal.
Perhaps they themselves didn’t know. Anyone who has ever been young and in love can imagine that the devastation Abraham felt at her death may have come, in part, from knowing that they hadn’t been given the time to figure out just where they stood.
We do know that Abraham fell in love again. Seven years after Ann’s death, Lincoln married the mercurial and passionate Mary Todd. He let himself feel the promise of a lasting tie with a quick-witted, attentive woman whose extensive education, loyalty to the Whig Party, and endorsement of his ambition would help him rise to whatever heights life had in store for him.
With Mary, Abraham could bring love and politics together in a life of companionship, parenting, service, and, for all their domestic discord, moments of tenderness shielded from public view — maybe a reminder to him of moments he’d shared in his youth with Ann Rutledge.
Episode 11, The Law Office Clock: This month, Dr. James Cornelius discusses our Featured Artifact of the Month: The Law Office Clock. Plus, he answers questions regarding Mr. Lincoln’s voice and the soldiers who carried Mr. Lincoln to the Petersen house after he was shot.
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Springfield eagerly anticipated the presidential visit by Herbert Hoover to rededicate the remodeled Lincoln Tomb on June 17, 1931. In advance of the visit, Hoover received an unusual request from famed Lincoln collector Oliver R. Barrett proposing an offer that he hoped the president could not refuse. Writing on June 2, 1931, Barrett declared:
“I have the door plate which, during Mr. Lincoln’s residence in Springfield, was on the front door of his home. Enclosed you will find a photostat of the contemporaneous description of the door plate with the print of the Lincoln Home. A similar description has appeared in one of the Bulletins of The Lincoln Centennial Association.
“I have been requested to permit a reproduction to be made and replaced upon the door. I think, however, it would be more fitting to have the original plate restored to its old place upon the door of the Lincoln home by you on the occasion of your visit to Springfield.
In the 1930s, gentlemen traded around the door plate of this self-made gentleman.
“I have always made it a rule that nothing should go out of my Lincoln collection unless in exchange for some other desirable item which might be added to it. If you would be willing to write your answer to this letter in longhand and send also an appreciation of Lincoln written and signed in longhand, I would be glad to give you the door plate in exchange and when restored by you, it would be unnecessary to make any reference to its former ownership.
“If you have a short appreciation of Lincoln already written, it will serve. If not, I would prefer to have you write on one of the enclosed sheets (the other you may retain if you wish). You will note the former ownership of these sheets by holding to the light to observe the water-mark.
“If you choose to write some thought or excerpt from your address which is to be delivered at the Lincoln Monument, it will not be necessary for you to send the appreciation to me until after the address has been delivered.
“I am sure that Mr. Logan Hay of The Lincoln Centennial Association, Springfield, Illinois, will be very glad to have the door prepared to receive the plate before your arrival.
“In the event of your answer to my letter, I would like to have you address it to my son, Roger Watson Barrett, who, although only fifteen years of age, is, in reality, the owner of the plate which I have brought together.”
Although Barrett’s offer was “very much appreciated,” Hoover, through his secretary Lawrence Richey, respectfully declined the offer. What happened next to the door plate is murky. The Illinois State Historical Library (now called the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum) received it from Jesse Jay Ricks, another Chicago collector, in 1938 but without fanfare. Paul Angle, director of the Library, placed a note on the box indicating that the Library was not to admit owning the original unless the copy on the door of the Lincoln Home was stolen. Ricks was a prominent collector in his own right and perhaps made a swap with Barrett that placed the door plate into his possession.
Barrett’s son, Roger, later went on to a prominent legal career of his own, first as one of the legal team at the Nuremberg Trials and later with the prominent Chicago law firm of Mayer Brown & Platt.
Part One of a two-part essay
If you’re interested in Lincoln’s young adulthood, get your hands on Douglas Wilson’s and Rodney Davis’s book Herndon’s Informants. It brings together more than 600 interviews and statements amassed by Lincoln’s law partner after the assassination in 1865.
Many of his sources had known Lincoln before he moved to Springfield in 1837 at the age of 28. (He arrived for good in the state capital on April 15, exactly 28 years before his death.)
Herndon’s great virtue was his zeal for collecting all the facts of Lincoln’s personal life, no matter how delicate the subject. He thought the apotheosis of the martyr in 1865 was making northerners forget his flesh-and-blood friend, whom he’d known for a quarter-century. But Herndon’s great vice was his mixing of pet theories and pat psychologizing into his fact gathering.
On November 16, 1866, he gave a rambling lecture on the subject of New Salem, where Lincoln had lived before Springfield. The explosive segment of the talk concerned Ann Rutledge, the “beautiful, amiable, and lovely girl” who became Abraham’s intimate friend in the mid-1830s.
Herndon printed his shocking public lecture of 1866 as this broadside, and the story was also covered by many newspapers.
The lecturer faced a huge problem: neither Abraham nor Ann had left any direct evidence of their bond. They wrote nothing about it, and said nothing to anyone who recorded their words at the time.
Herndon was forthright about relying on fragmentary memories of people looking back 30 years. For some reason, he didn’t specify that one of his sources — Isaac Cogdal, an old Lincoln acquaintance from New Salem — told him that he’d spoken to the president-elect about Ann Rutledge just five or six years earlier.
At the end of a long day’s work in late 1860 or early 1861, Lincoln had invited Cogdal to his office, hoping to pump him for news about families he’d known in New Salem, including the Rutledges. Cogdal gladly obliged, and took advantage of the nostalgic occasion to “dare to ask” Lincoln about his early love life.
“Abe is it true that you fell in love with & courted Ann Rutledge?” Cogdal remembered saying. Lincoln supposedly welcomed this query about a touchy, personal topic he’d never discussed even with his closest friends. It was a subject sure to cause him grief if he talked about it now and word of the conversation somehow got spread around Springfield.
The president-elect’s words, reconstructed orally by Cogdal and written down by Herndon, were, “I loved the woman dearly & sacredly: she was a handsome girl — would have made a good loving wife — was natural & quite intellectual, though not highly Educated — I did honestly — & truly love the girl & think often — often of her now.”
Cogdal’s reliability has been dismissed by many historians, and affirmed by others. But even if his memory for Lincoln’s sentiments was perfectly accurate, they touch only on Abraham’s retrospective feelings about Ann. They say nothing about her feelings for him.
Did Ann love him “sacredly” too (and does “sacredly” suggest “eternally,” or just “purely,” “reverentially”)? How far did she advance toward becoming his “good loving wife,” rather than someone else’s?
In fact, when Lincoln embarked on his love for her, she was already engaged to someone else. This man, the merchant John McNamar, had left New Salem and was presumed to have given up on Ann, despite his promise eventually to return to her. For the moment, Abraham’s “sacred” love meant unrealizable love.
In 1865 and 1866, a number of informants told Herndon that Ann and Abraham had sealed some kind of pact, and were planning to marry after she cleared up her murky status with McNamar. Naturally, they tried to keep their pact secret, making it all the harder for Herndon’s informants, decades later, to agree about their exact relationship.
But in August 1835, Ann fell ill. She lingered only long enough for Lincoln to make one last visit to her bedside. No informant claimed any knowledge of what he and Ann said to each other that day. Many of them did claim that two weeks later, when Ann expired, Abraham fell completely apart.
Lincoln’s collapse convinced some who’d known nothing about his closeness to Ann that he must have been deeply in love with her, and she with him. Nothing short of professed and reciprocated love, perhaps with a promise to marry, could account for his wretched state.
Herndon seems to have concurred with this speculation. Lincoln’s emotional prostration after her death pointed to one conclusion: that Abraham “loved Ann Rutledge with all his soul, mind and strength. She loved him as dearly, tenderly and affectionately.”
Within weeks, the New York Times and other papers in the U.S. and abroad reprinted almost everything Herndon said about Ann Rutledge. Many readers regretted his public probing of Lincoln’s private life. But what infuriated so many readers was not the news of Lincoln’s love for Ann as such.
They were incensed by an additional Herndon revelation. He said a friend had told him that after Ann was lowered into her grave, Abraham declared (in the friend’s words): “his heart, sad and broken, was buried there.”
That alleged statement by a distraught 26-year-old established to Herndon’s satisfaction that Lincoln had never loved another woman as fully as he had loved Ann Rutledge. She had been Abraham’s first and final love.
[In Part Two: where Herndon got Lincoln’s alleged words that his heart lay buried in Ann Rutledge’s grave, and how the nation benefited, in Herndon’s estimation, from Ann’s death.]