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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 6, An interview with Richard Hellesen:  On this episode of Stories from the Vault, we sit down with playwright Richard Hellesen. We discuss his writing process, the play One Destiny and his newest work Necessary Sacrifices.

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In the mid-19^th century the mass production of prints and images allowed average citizens to own scenes and portraits that might serve as sources of inspiration.  One such example is the Alexander H. Ritchie print of Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s painting of First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation Before the Cabinet.  The print was wildly popular.  Although sales figures are lacking for this period, the number of prints that can be found today online and at flea markets shows that it was widely disseminated.

One individual who purchased a copy was Herbert Hoover’s grandfather Eli.  The following narrative was written by the 31^st President (who served from 1929 to 1933) and attached to the back of the framed print that now hangs in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum in West Branch, Iowa.  The reader should note that duringHoover’s term as president, the print hung above the very fireplace depicted within the print.

Inspiration: from Lincoln to Carpenter to Ritchie to Hoover to …

“This print is from the Carpenter painting which hangs in the House of Representatives in Washington.  The painting was made from life.  The scene is Lincoln’s study in the White House.  The fireplace in the background is the same today and is easily identified.  The figures in the painting were sketched in by Carpenter in the study but he did the detailed portrait work in the East Room.  The prints were a part of every Midwest household for years after the Civil War.

“This copy was given to my father Jessie Hoover by his father Eli Hoover soon after my father was married and set up housekeeping in the little cottage at West Branch in about 1871.  Thereafter this picture was probably there when I was born.  After my mother’s death in 1879, the print was kept by an uncle Allan Hoover until his death in about 1922 when it went to his brother Davis Hoover.  Uncle Davis gave it to me with the above history in 1927.  It hung in my study at 2300 S Street, Washington, D.C., until 1929, when Mrs. Hoover removed it to the White House where it hung over the same mantel which appears in the picture.  It remained there for four years until 1933.  It was then removed to Palo Alto, and was brought back to my apartment in Waldorf Towers [on Park Avenue in New York] in 1945.  Thus its history seems clear for about 75 years!”

Long before Jackie Kennedy refurbished the White House in the early 1960s, First Lady Lou Henry Hoover extensively documented the White House rooms and furnishings in photographs.  She and President Hoover also converted the Lincoln Bedroom back into the original study and cabinet room as depicted in Ritchie’s print. Hoover used this as his private study and spent numerous hours in it conducting the affairs of state.  In a search for the original furnishings, a number of items turned up, only to be eliminated after careful research.  Four side chairs were the only items that could be reasonably ascertained as coming from the Lincoln presidency.  Undoubtedly, Abraham Lincoln remained Hoover’s inspiration for presidential leadership.

When Fort Sumter was fired upon in April 1861, formally starting a Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was 52 years and 2 months old. I am now 52 years and 2 months old. Though I am not president, perhaps some perspective on the many questions about his physical and mental health during the exigent days of his presidency can be gained by a comparison.

He loved his wife, though men and women become gradually less compatible as they age. I love my wife, and yes, that gap in activities and cares is felt in our home, too. Despite the occasional yelling, he and Mary were fine; so are my wife and I. Thanks for asking.

He worked too hard. He lost weight as a result. He did not sleep all that much. Ditto.

He did not drink, and his stories were much admired by friend and even foe alike, and these traits undoubtedly kept him youthful. I fail to meet his standard on both counts.

His feet bothered him a fair bit, and he did not own a pair of boots that fit him comfortably until the last year of his life. We are luckier today: our shoes fit fine, and very few of us suffer from saddle sores. No mercury in our pills, either.

His beard was thinning, and graying just a bit, like the hair at his temples. Mary used a little hair dye to stay ‘young,’ and some have wondered if Abraham borrowed it, but we have no real evidence to support that view. I am not growing a beard or using that stuff.

His two living children by spring 1862 marched to the beat of very different drums. Same choreography in my house. Both of our olders: hard-working, popular, destined for greatness of some sort. Our youngers: rambunctious, not that interested in l’arnin’ or settin’ still – just spunky to beat the band. As they age, they need less parental minding, and that phenomenon suited the presidential schedule.

Artwork by Isa Barnett, 1962. The kind of presidency that wears a man out; the kind of faith that kept him strong.

No one is interested in my DNA. Lincoln’s is sought by people in a half-dozen professions. We probably would learn nothing by sequencing his 150-year-old protein strands. From mine, well, we already know that color-blindness is heritable. This mad pursuit for Lincoln’s DNA is probably fruitless. He did not have Marfan’s Syndrome, and any other maladies he might have had evidently did not lead him to or prevent him from saving the Union or freeing the slaves. Or visiting Gettysburg, as depicted in the artwork here.

The matter far larger than molecules was his daily effort to save the great institutions around him and rectify the ills. Me too, but without his power and grace. Advancing his Presidential Library within so parlous a budgetary environment may kill me yet, and both of us can get ‘voted’ out by our peers. But we fight on with the help of most around us, as would most people in our chairs, “for a vast future also.” There was nothing wrong with Lincoln that an hour with Burns’s poems or a stroll across the park couldn’t cure. Mary forced him to take carriage rides with her to calm him down and keep them close. It worked. It’s the outlook that keeps you healthy.

No, Lincoln’s health as a question should fade to nothingness under the glaring July 4^th sun of a separate question: the health of the “republican example” he wished the United States to set for the world. He would not “abandon that position,” as he told Congress on July 4, 1861 (150 years ago today). And his health did not abandon him. Lincoln was ever the doctor, and never the patient in his own lifetime.

Episode 5, Mr. Lincoln’s Presidential Seal: Once again, we sit down to talk with Dr. James Cornelius. This month, we discuss Mr. Lincoln’s Presidential Seal.

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Just before Christmas 1859, the 50-year-old Lincoln looked back at his previous decade and noticed that it was split into two roughly equal parts.  For the five years after 1849 (the year he wrapped up his single term in Congress), he’d “practiced law more assiduously than ever before.”  So assiduously, that by 1854 he “was losing interest in politics” as a career.

But in that year he was “aroused again” as a potential candidate for office by “the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.”  The specter of slavery extension north of the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30” — made possible by the Kansas-Nebraska Act — revived his taste for electoral battle.

Win or lose, he’d seized the issue that would crystallize his sharpest thinking, his strongest feeling, and his deftest political calculation.  He would stake out a position at the center of northern opinion on slavery and cling to it with fierce resolve, hating slavery with the passion of an abolitionist, and loving union with the moderation of a conservative.

The rekindling of his political aspirations in 1854 gives the period 1849-1854 a special poignancy in the arc of his public career.  It’s the last bloc of time in his life when he wasn’t sure how to proceed with his life.  Ambitious for public service but lacking concrete options, Lincoln had settled into the law.

Yet for all his relentless activity on the legal circuit, this was a time of vocational limbo, perhaps even (as Michael Burlingame argues in Abraham Lincoln:  A Life, vol. 1, pp. 357-62) a forty-something’s passage through a “mid-life crisis.”

His striking eulogy for President Zachary Taylor in the summer of 1850 suggests how his mind was churning.  He was roaming widely and deeply in thought and feeling, connecting political and military affairs to timeless quandaries about the human condition.

Taylor died in the White House on July 9, after only 16 months in office.  Two days earlier, Lincoln had arrived in Chicago to defend a client in U.S. District Court.  On July 10, with the trial just under way, news of Taylor’s demise reached the city by telegraph.  That evening, a meeting was held to pick the city’s eulogist, and the visiting lawyer and wordsmith from Springfield was promptly chosen.

Lincoln agreed to do the job — he didn’t “feel at liberty to decline” — but he warned the selection committee not to expect much.  “The want of time for preparation,” he wrote, “will make the task for me a very difficult one to perform, in any degree satisfactory to others or to myself.”

When the trial ended on July 24 with exoneration for his client Charles Hoyt (found not guilty of infringing on another man’s water-wheel patent), Lincoln put the final touches on his speech and delivered it the following afternoon at City Hall.

In the main body of the eulogy, Lincoln dramatically recounted Taylor’s exploits in the Mexican War, going out of his way to praise him as an intrepid fighter in the very war Lincoln himself had opposed.  This was one general, he said, who had fearlessly taken the battle to the enemy.  This was also a leader who instinctively put the needs of the whole army, and nation, ahead of personal pique.  By the usual standard of military honor, Taylor would have deprived Colonel William Worth (who’d spoken ill of Taylor in Washington) of further opportunities for heroism.  Instead, he thought only of putting the best officers in place, and he judged Worth one of the best.

Lincoln was praising Taylor for selflessness as much as courage.  Moral stature mattered in war and politics.  It mattered in part, said Lincoln, because with his death, all that was left of Taylor or any other man was “the fruits of his labor, his name, his memory and example.”

Taylor’s sudden end called to Lincoln’s mind both the fragility of the republic — which other leader would now step forward to help rein in the people’s discordant passions? — and the evanescence of human life.  The death of a great man like Taylor forced everyone to confront the brute fact “that we, too, must die.”

High office or privileged station offered no protection against the final leveling.  Yes, personal virtue was revealed by the grandeur of one’s civic accomplishments, but it was also measured by a humble acceptance of life’s brevity.  Lincoln pitched no rosy outcome for Taylor beyond the grave, and sang no hymn to the permanence of his fame.

The eulogist took heart instead from a steadfast stoicism, reminding the audience of Taylor’s last words: “I have done my duty, I am ready to go.”  (As reported in the press on July 10, the president had said,  “I die.  I am ready for the summons.  I have endeavored to do my duty.  I am sorry to leave my old friends.”)

Lincoln went on to state that if they had served their nation with “singleness of purpose,” dying leaders would know they had secured “that country’s gratitude” and “its best honors.”  Lincoln sealed his eulogy by reciting 6 of the 14 stanzas of William Knox’s 1818 poem “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”  He selected verses stressing the common “pilgrimage road” that the living shared with the dead:

So the multitude goes, like the flower or the weed,

That withers away to let others succeed;

So the multitude comes, even those we behold,

To repeat every tale that has often been told.

Newspapers as well as 1865 sheet music misattributed the poem to Lincoln himself.

By 1865, thanks to the wide reprinting of the eulogy, many people associatedthis poem with Lincoln.  Some people thought he’d written it himself.  After his death, hundreds of newspapers around the country ran the complete poem, many of them attributing it to him.  They noted how often he’d recited it from memory, remembering his lost friends and family members.  The final stanza got the most play, and it comforted many readers in part because they knew it had comforted him:

’Tis the wink of an eye, ’tis the draught of a breath,

From the blossoms of health, to the paleness of death.

From the gilded saloon, to the bier and the shroud,

Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!

The first part of the post was published on May 30, 2011.

In April 1865 everyone knew that temporary quarters were needed for the immediate housing of Lincoln’s remains along with those of his departed sons Willie and Eddie. Willie’s casket accompanied Lincoln’s back to Springfield from Washington and was carried out to Oak Ridge Cemetery with Lincoln’s on May 4, 1865, both being placed in the temporary receiving vault in the cemetery.

Edward Baker Lincoln had been buried in Hutchinson Cemetery in 1850. This was a six-acre area immediately west of the old four-acre city graveyard. As Springfield grew, Hutchinson Cemetery was no longer sufficient, having become surrounded by town development. In 1856 the original portion of it was closed to further burials, and by 1866 all burials in these grounds were closed and all the bodies were removed to Oak Ridge.

At Oak Ridge what began as a modest 28 acres in the late 1850s eventually encompassed 115 acres of scenic rolling hills. City officials followed the national trend of placing cemeteries in bucolic rural settings outside of the noise and commotion of daily life. Cemeteries became places where people could commune with nature and see that life, like nature, was cyclical.

The pastoral setting chosen by Mary Lincoln; far from the hubbub of 2nd Street and Jackson

The formal dedication of Oak Ridge occurred on May 24, 1860, and was a major public event that Abraham and Mary Lincoln likely attended. Mary vividly recalled a conversation with her husband shortly before his death as they were taking a carriage ride. Approaching an old country graveyard, Lincoln turned to her and said: “Mary, you are younger than I. You will survive me. When I am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.” This memory of Lincoln’s burial preference became the source of controversy between Mrs. Lincoln and the National Lincoln Monument Association in 1865.

The Association began negotiations to acquire property in the Mather block, a site near Springfield’s public square and visible from the Chicago and Alton Railroad tracks. A temporary receiving vault was begun with the intent that Lincoln’s remains would reside there, not at Oak Ridge. Mrs. Lincoln objected, and her cousin John Todd Stuart consented to her immediate wishes that Abraham and Willie Lincoln’s bodies reside in the temporary vault at Oak Ridge. Most Association members continued to push for the construction of the permanent monument on the Mather property and hoped to persuade Mrs. Lincoln of the merits of their position.

She refused to meet with them and gave the Association an ultimatum: either build the permanent tomb in Oak Ridge, or else she would have her husband’s remains removed to Chicago or to George Washington’s crypt in the United States Capitol. While there had been some talk immediately following Lincoln’s death that his remains should be placed in Washington’s crypt, nothing was done. The overwhelming indicators had favored Springfield. But now it appeared that the dispute between Mary Lincoln and the Association might identify the memory of Lincoln with someplace other than Springfield. Jesse Fell, one of Lincoln’s closest associates, warned the Association that they should defer to Mrs. Lincoln on the subject lest their efforts be seen as tending “more to the enhanced value of town lots than to the dictates of patriotism.”

On June 14, 1865, a vote of the board of directors decided to concede to Mrs. Lincoln’s wishes that the monument be built in Oak Ridge. This vote passed by a slim margin of 8 to 7. The City of Springfield donated the land, and a temporary receiving vault was completed by December to free up the space in the cemetery’s public receiving vault. The remains of Abraham, Willie, and Eddie were all placed in the private temporary vault that month. Mary had carried out her husband’s wishes for “a quiet place.”

Some of our ‘knowledge’ about Lincoln comes along later rather than sooner.  The newspaper page pictured here is in Hebrew, dated 9 January 1979 (5739 in the ancient Jewish calendar).  This was given to the Presidential Library many years ago without a source, but it seems to have been published in New York.  It is in fairly simple language, likely meant for recent Russian-Jewish immigrants learning Hebrew.  Tens of thousands of people made that migration in the 1970s, many of them to Brooklyn.

The strong yet humble president.

Teaching immigrants about their new culture requires history, humor, and perhaps a little fudging.  The paper is called Gate to the Beginning and the column shown here is “Little Stories About Great Men.”  It includes an anecdote about Hans Christian Anderson with a Danish Jew, and another about a Zionist.  The Lincoln story does not mention that his birthday would occur the next month, but perhaps in 1979 that anniversary was still so well ingrained in all American life (before the confected ‘Presidents Holiday’ that mushes Washington and Lincoln together) that even an immigrant knew.

The story puts Lincoln in the White House blacking his own boots.  In walks an important politician who blurts, “What!  You shine your own boots?”  To which the humble railsplitter quips, “And what did you think?  That I would shine the boots of others?”

We owe Rabbi Michael Datz of Springfield, Illinois, many thanks for translating this tale.  To his ear the wording trades on the old-New York Yiddish phrasing heard in so many movies and plays, ‘And what should I / And why would I …?’  The historian of Lincoln might recognize a couple of other themes.  First, Paul Zall’s highly useful Abe Lincoln Laughing: Humorous Anecdotes from Original Sources by and about Abraham Lincoln (1995) traces the origin of this tale to an unsigned 1909 magazine piece.  Two other works the next year retold and reworded it.  In the three versions, the shocked visitor to the White House was variously said to have been Senator Sumner, Secretary Chase, and British minister Lord Lyons.

With confusion like that, we can never say if the incident occurred.  Lincoln’s Centennial spawned a profusion of dubious ‘new sources’ like this.  But the second theme a Lincolnist can divine is that immigrants old or new might need this ‘teachable moment’ after arriving in an American city where the sight of black men shining others’ shoes was not uncommon.  This particular ‘Great Man’ of the American past had been strong enough to free the slaves and humble enough to do his own menial chore.  Whether the exact quip about the boots was authentic, or somehow got fudged in the retelling, it harmonizes with what we veritably know about Lincoln’s character and deeds.  Lincoln believed in the political and legal equality of black and white; many people believed it in 1909; more believed it in 1979; still more believe it today.  And why should we doubt such tales?