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

In April, Steven Spielberg announced Sally Field as his choice to play the president’s wife in Lincoln, the feature film coming in 2012 to a theater near you.   The director said he’d always wanted her for the part.  Why?  Because the two-time Oscar recipient could capture “all the fragility and complexity that was Mary Todd Lincoln.”

There’s no telling how much screen time Sally Field will actually get in the picture, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.  Goodwin’s story centers on Lincoln, his 1860 Republican presidential competitors (Edward Bates, Salmon Chase, and William Seward), and his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.  But selecting Field to star opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, an “Abraham” with two Oscars of his own, suggests that Spielberg may intend more than a passing glance at Mary. 

Given Field’s stature in American popular culture, even a few scenes in such a high-profile venture will affect the image of Mrs. Lincoln for a long time to come.  Let’s hope that the screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner, and Spielberg’s direction, will bring out the full “complexity” of Mary’s “fragility.” 

For all her temperamental swings and failures of judgment, this perpetually insecure soul — emotionally shredded, like her husband, by the death of their 11-year-old son Willie in early 1862, and badgered by Washington critics as a pathetic Western parvenu, if not also a closet secessionist — managed somehow to keep her husband’s health and the Union’s welfare hovering near the front of her mind. 

Too often her ups and downs are reduced to individual craziness, the product of her Todd family’s history of mental distress, aggravated by personal setbacks beginning when she was six with the loss of her mother.  A discombobulated Mary is easily positioned, after Willie’s death, as a spiritualist crank and a continuing burden on her long-suffering spouse.

Lincoln’s forbearance in the face of her tongue-lashings and manic shopping binges bolsters his image as a selfless saint, safely detached from her disorders.  But anyone who has ever been in a decades-long relationship will suspect this picture is one-sided.

Her splenetic displays, and his high-minded silence or forlorn withdrawal, were likely built into the relationship they’d created with one another.  The sparks were part of the substance.

The essential corrective to the portrayal of Mary as an out-of-control, self-aggrandizing deviant — the perfect foil for a charitable servant of the people — is to insist on her intimate ties with Abraham over 22 years of marriage.  In Springfield those ties included political as well as domestic intercourse.  In Washington, she gradually lost her political role, but her civic enthusiasm, and her ardor for her husband’s success and well-being, never waned. 

There’s no reason to think their “scenes,” as Mary labeled one of their White House spats, prevented them from enjoying, and needing, one another’s company.  There’s every reason to believe their angry standoffs were followed, at least some of the time, by eager reconciliation.  Their complexity as a couple helped shape her fragility as an individual.

Any depiction that takes Mrs. Lincoln as the nutty nuisance, the bothersome drag on the forgiving Mr. Lincoln, distorts their quarter-century of impassioned partnership.  So does any portrayal that misses Mary’s ongoing public engagement after Abraham stopped soliciting (or even listening to) her political judgments.

Goodwin’s engrossing Team of Rivals devotes only a few pages to Mary, but it gives Kushner and Spielberg all the evidence they’ll need to show that this long marriage kept being renewed by mutual fervor for politics and public service.

Mary and Abraham had both fallen for Henry Clay’s Whig politics long before they fell for each other.  They fell for each other in part because of their shared political vision.  Once in the national capital, she sought out new ways to exercise her political passions.  After Willie’s death, she poured herself all the more intensively into one of them: hospital work.  

As historian Michael Burlingame points out in his biography Abraham Lincoln:  A Life (vol. II, p. 495), “she won [occasional newspaper] praise for ‘the generous devotion with which she has tenderly cared for the sick and wounded soldiers.’”  Praise came from her husband too, writes Burlingame: “Lincoln gave her $1,000 out of his own pocket to buy Christmas turkeys for the hospitalized troops and helped her distribute them.”

One result of Mary’s inattention to publicity: no contemporary illustration of her hospital work exists. This 1861 scene of volunteers and visitors was probably less ghastly than what she usually saw.

Catherine Clinton (Mrs. Lincoln: A Life, p. 196) observes that Mary “visited the hospitals two or three times a week,” undeterred by what one newspaper called “the fear of contagion and the outcries of pestilence.”

In Team of Rivals (p. 457), Goodwin notes that Mary brought the men “baskets of fruit, food, and fresh flowers . . . to mask the pervasive stench of disinfectant and decay.”  She sat down beside them to write letters to their families.  One young man learned who she was only after the letter bearing her signature had been delivered. 

Urged by Lincoln secretary William Stoddard to curry general favor for her labors, Mary stuck with relative anonymity, having found, as Goodwin writes, “something more gratifying than public acknowledgment (p. 459).”  She got the reward of registering firsthand the soldiers’ devotion to her husband and their fidelity to the Union cause.

In Lincoln, Spielberg and Kushner have the rare chance to give us the Mary who made her husband proud alongside the Mary who made him fret.  The Lincolns collaborated in family building and public service.  She shored him up even as she weighed him down.  He let her find new purpose even as he left her aside, to embark on a presidential calling all his own.

A film centered on civilian leaders in wartime cannot attempt a full treatment of the Lincoln marriage.  But it can let Sally Field signal a fully human Mary, courageous as well as distraught.

Recently, the Lincoln Tomb State Historic Site resurrected the Lincoln Monument Association to serve as a support group for the Lincoln Tomb as well as the War Memorials within Oak Ridge Cemetery.  In referencing the original National Lincoln Monument Association, it is worth reviewing the goals and purposes of the founding organization.

According to her certificate, Susan Torrence became one of thousands who contributed 50 cents to help build the Monument.

Planning that had been undertaken by committee required something more permanent for addressing the long-term issues of designing, funding, constructing, and maintaining an appropriate memorial to Abraham Lincoln.  While committees continued to address the immediate needs of Lincoln’s funeral arrangements, a group of 13 which later expanded to 15 members drew up articles of incorporation.  On May 11, 1865, The National Lincoln Monument Association came into existence as a voluntary society.  Their mission was “to construct a Monument to the memory of Abraham Lincoln, in the city of Springfield, State of Illinois.”  A board of directors was created who would serve a term of 20 years.

The board elected four officers to direct the affairs of the Association.  Governor Richard J. Oglesby was the clear favorite for President.  Jesse K. Dubois, who was a neighbor of Lincoln’s and long-time political associate, became Vice President.  Clinton L. Conkling, a friend of Robert Todd Lincoln and son of James C. Conkling, was elected secretary but not a member of the Association board.  He stepped down at the end of 1865 and was replaced by O. M. Hatch.  James H. Beveridge, who served as the Illinois State Treasurer under Governor Oglesby, became treasurer for the National Lincoln Monument Association.

More than elections occurred at the May 11^th meeting.  Bylaws were approved to govern the Association, “agents appointed to collect funds, agricultural and horticultural societies called on to contribute, and the Treasurer directed to invest funds — which were already beginning to reach the treasury — in United States securities.”  A great deal of progress had been made in a very short period of time.  But just as things appeared to be in good order, an incident occurred that threatened to undo the entire project.  (To be continued.)

THE NATIONAL LINCOLN MONUMENT ASSOCIATION
BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Richard J. Oglesby was a political associate of Lincoln’s.  He gained honor and distinction for his service in the Civil War, returning to Illinois to be elected Governor in 1864.

Orlin H. Miner served as Illinois State Auditor under Governor Oglesby.

John Todd Stuart served in the Illinois legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives, and was a leading lawyer in Illinois.

Jesse K. Dubois served in the Illinois legislature, was receiver of the U.S. Land Office, then Auditor for the State of Illinois, and was a close associate of Lincoln.

James C. Conkling served as mayor of Springfield, in the Illinois legislature, and was a leading lawyer and businessman in the city.

John Williams was a banker.

Jacob Bunn was a banker and eventually became Mrs. Lincoln’s conservator.

Sharon Tyndale served as Illinois Secretary of State under Governor Oglesby.

Newton Bateman was Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Illinois and was a friend of Abraham Lincoln.

Samuel H. Treat served as a Judge of the U.S. Court for Illinois.

Ozias Mather Hatch served as Illinois Secretary of State and was a close political confidant and ally to Abraham Lincoln.

S. H. Melvin was a prominent merchant, banker, and railroad man.

James H. Beveridge served as Illinois Treasurer for Governor Oglesby.

Thomas J. Dennis was mayor of Springfield and an accomplished architect.

David L. Phillips served as the U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of Illinois.

Episode 4, Mr. Lincoln’s Promissory Note: We talk with Dr. James Cornelius about Mr. Lincoln’s Promissory Note, and answer your questions submitted via facebook.

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According to his private secretaries and some close friends, President Lincoln had a deserved reputation for bending to women’s plaints and complaints.  William Lee Miller, in his study President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (2008), reviews a notable case in which urgent pleas by the wife and daughter of a condemned man did not succeed in making the chief executive yield; the man concerned was a slave-dealer whose death by hanging went forward as planned.  Much more frequent was the type of case in which the president wrote out a pass for a lady to visit someone behind enemy lines or asked the War Department to remit part of a soldier’s sentence.  He did not like to dismiss a sincere need.

But there is a unique case in which the usually humble president wrote out his true feelings about one lady visitor.  And it is the only case in which we have record that Lincoln wrote the pejorative word “saucy.”  This short note to himself now belongs to the Library of Congress:

ExecutiveMansion
Washington. Aug. 23, 1862.

To-day, Mrs. Major Paul, of the Regular Army calls and urges the appointment of her husband as a Brig. Genl.  She is a saucy woman and I am afraid she will keep tormenting till I may have to do it.   (Collected Works, v. 5, pp. 390-391).

The prognosticator of his own actions was correct: Paul became a brigadier general as of September 5, 1862.

There are two wrinkles to, and perhaps a defense of, Lincoln’s mood in the case.  Just 12 days earlier, he had written to Major General Halleck to state that “Lieut. Col. Paul,” a graduate of West Point, wanted to be posted to active service.  Did the officer’s wife not know that her husband had already been promoted to a colonelcy?  Or was she still referring to him in Lincoln’s presence as a mere major, to underscore her complaint?

A recent act of selflessness by the (female) owner of an original document signed by Lincoln throws a glimmer of light upon this situation.  The complete Papers of Abraham Lincoln project, based here at the Presidential Library, now has a full-color scan of the document, thanks to the private owner.  For one does not jump from major to brigadier general without making the requisite stop at the corner marked ‘colonel.’  Lincoln, ever the diligent signer of military commissions, had already signed Paul’s promotion to lieutenant colonel in the 8^th U.S. Infantry – back on 2 July 1862.

How to explain Mrs. ‘Major’ Paul’s visit on 23 August with her complaint – her lament, prod, push, case, demand — that her husband be promoted?  He had been a lieutenant colonel for 7 weeks before the saucy wife visited the Executive Mansion and referred to her husband as a major.  Was the promotion lost in a file?  Was he refusing to accept it, and holding out for immediate elevation to brigadier general?  Had Edwin Stanton, who duly co-signed the promotion to colonel, held it up because of Paul’s service with the unproductive McClellan in eastern Virginia that season?  Or was this bureaucratic delay caused by two men, Lincoln and Stanton, and many others much less well-known, who were worked to distraction by the demands of war?

Cultural differences may have entered into this matter.  Was this Gabriel René Paul a Frenchman, or of French extraction?  Was his wife?  Did she treat a rube Anglo-Kentuckian like Lincoln with disdain?  Was her aggrieved tone simply less deferential than the president was accustomed to?

The timetable was this: Paul started the year 1862 as a major.  In early July 1862 Lincoln signed his commission promoting him to lieutenant colonel.  In early August Lincoln may have seen him personally and referred to him as Lieut. Col. in addressing Major General Halleck on his behalf.  In late August Mrs. Paul arrived to demand that her husband, ‘Major Paul,’ jump to brigadier general.  And in fact on 5 Sept. 1862 he was thus promoted.

Who was at fault for this minor contretemps?  Is Lincoln’s note-to-self the evidence that he had already forgotten about Paul’s first promotion?  Or was Mrs. Paul lying about his low rank?  Or was she unaware of her husband’s half-way promotion?  Had the soldier himself not even been informed of his promotion?

The handwriting on Lincoln’s “saucy” note is shaky.  He likely made it late in the day.  Earlier the same day, General Charles P. Stone approached Lincoln to ask why he had been arrested.  And this was all on the day after Lincoln had penned his justly famed public letter to Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, explaining and yet not explaining why he did or did not free the slaves – to save the Union.  Greeley was blunt in print about Lincoln’s motives; Mrs. Paul was blunt in person about her husband’s wishes.  Perhaps Lincoln actually wanted to call Greeley “saucy.”  Thus, a wholly separate timetable was superimposed within the Pauls’ complaints and promotions: that of Lincoln’s timetable for the nerve-testing policy for emancipation, from conception (mid-June 1862) to announcement to Cabinet (22 July) to fending off Greeley’s demands (22 August) to revealing the plan to the public (22 September).  All the while trying to get McClellan to pursue Robert E. Lee.

Blinded Brig. Gen. Paul asks another favor of Lincoln, 1865, and is accommodated again.

Brigadier General Paul did valorous service, as seen in the illustration here.  He was nearly blinded at Gettysburg.   Had he remained a major or lieutenant-colonel, perhaps he would have been standing elsewhere at Gettysburg.  The end of the war found him quietly stationed in Kentucky. Let us hope that he and his wife were satisfied.

Everyone loves a winner, which may account for the continuous battle over who owns the Lincoln story.  Three states — Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois — claim to have been crucial influences upon Abraham Lincoln during his formative years.  The Illinois General Assembly wisely adopted the slogan “Land of Lincoln” in 1955 and had it placed on license plates, ensuring its wide promotion.  To make certain that no other state would infringe on the claim, Congress passed a special act that same year giving Illinois the exclusive use to the phrase “Land of Lincoln.” 

Writers have also been territorial about the Sixteenth President.  John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, was incensed at Ida Tarbell in the 1890s when he discovered that she intended to write a popular biography of Abraham Lincoln.  Nicolay, having recently finished a 10-volume Lincoln biography with John Hay, protested to Tarbell that “you are invading my field.”  His real concern was that a competing Lincoln biography diminishes “the value of my property.”

Not the same old Lincoln story for a new book and movie, opening June 2012.

Perhaps only a handful of Lincoln books have made the kind of sales that give one pause.  Carl Sandburg, David Herbert Donald, and Doris Kearns Goodwin come immediately to mind.  The recent announcements that two feature-length films are now in production — Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, a loosely based adaptation of the Goodwin bestseller — recalls an earlier era when two other Lincoln films were in production at the same time.

 Starring Raymond Massey, Robert Sherwood’s play Abe Lincoln in Illinois was a Broadway hit in the fall of 1938.  New York critics and audiences applauded Massey’s dramatic interpretation of a young Abraham Lincoln.  Hollywood frequently took Broadway hits and quickly turned them into motion pictures.  RKO Pictures wasted no time in purchasing the film rights and began production.  Little did they know that screenwriter Howard Estabrook had written a screenplay in 1935 for Fox Film Corporation entitled Young Lincoln.  But production ceased when Fox merged with Twentieth Century to become Twentieth Century-Fox.  Screenwriter Lamar Trotti, who had finished production of a biopic on Alexander Graham Bell in November 1938, then began rewriting Estabrook’s script, which had taken on the new title Lawyer of the West.  Darryl Zanuck, the producer of the film, changed the name of the film to Young Mr. Lincoln.

The competing Lincoln films resulted in a lawsuit in which Robert Sherwood sued Twentieth Century-Fox.  Sherwood claimed that the Twentieth Century-Fox film was a blatant facsimile of Sherwood’s play, using the same plot elements, a similar title, and similar promotional campaign, and drawing upon the popularity of Lincoln created by Sherwood’s play.  Sherwood said that “there was little public interest in any portion of the life of Lincoln” until his play generated a widespread public awareness.  In many respects, Sherwood’s assertions were similar to those of John G. Nicolay: “you are invading my field” and diminishing “the value of my property.”

Twentieth Century-Fox countered with the obvious fact that Lincoln’s historical life was in the public domain.  All of the facts and events relating to Lincoln’s life would be similar in any biographical film.  Moreover, the claim that Lincoln was unknown to the larger public until Sherwood’s play appeared was easily dismissed with an abridged listing of films and major plays and books published on Lincoln from 1900 to 1939.  Among those dealing with Lincoln’s early life were Carl Sandburg’s 2-volume work The Prairie Years (1926), D. W. Griffith’s 1930 film Abraham Lincoln, and John Drinkwater’s 1919 hit play Abraham Lincoln.  The court sided with Twentieth Century-Fox, allowing the John Ford film that starred Henry Fonda to move toward release a year before Abe Lincoln in Illinois.  And Sherwood need not have worried, since both films were eagerly embraced by audiences.

As early as 1841, people began applying this stalwart phrase to Lincoln.  On New Year’s Day of that year, the Quincy, Illinois Whig described the 31-year-old from Springfield as “a self-made man, and one of the ablest” among all the lawyers and elected officials in the state. 

The Whig didn’t need to explain what “self-made” meant.  The paper presumed everyone knew the term.  Having entered common usage by the late 1820s, it had become a verbal staple, a handy way to praise resourceful men and the nation that had succored them.

Self-made public servants like Lincoln showed to the satisfaction of many that republican liberty really did rule in the U.S., at least in the North and West.  The chance to ascend in public responsibility and esteem wasn’t limited to the privileged few.  Aristocracy was following monarchy into the dustbin of history.

Disciplined climbers could now rise to distinction without benefit of family fortune or cronyism.  All they needed was well-engraved inner character.  The self-made man, wrote the prolific commercial author John Frost in his Self-Made Men of America (1848), was “one who has rendered himself accomplished, eminent, rich, or great by his own unaided efforts.”         

Lincoln took pride in having risen from a low rung on the social ladder, and said so repeatedly.  But he made no pretense of having accomplished that feat without help.  True, he’d done it with little material aid from his family, and like many young men of his era, he’d done it by self-consciously distancing himself from his father.  (Thomas Lincoln did pass along some vital social capital: the storytelling gift that proved integral to his son’s success.)

When 22, Lincoln strode into New Salem, Illinois, in 1831, “penniless” and “friendless,” as he later wrote.  Yet he soon attracted eager backing.  William Lee Miller, in his book Lincoln’s Virtues (pp. 24-25), gives a nice summary of all the “boosts and helps and open doors and befriendings” that launched Lincoln on his path to public renown. 

After a decade in Illinois, having just been crowned by the Quincy Whig as “one of the ablest” self-made men in the state, Lincoln gave an address in Springfield that spelled out the social underpinnings of self-making.  Speaking to the Washingtonian Society, a temperance group, on Washington’s Birthday 1842, he urged all citizens to join the Society by signing its pledge to abstain from spirits. 

Those struggling to escape the lure of liquor, said Lincoln, couldn’t be expected to make their way unassisted.  They needed the active support of a united community, including people like himself who’d never been tempted by drink.  Lincoln took no credit for his own sobriety, attributing it to luck rather than self-discipline.  “Such of us as have never fallen victims [sic] have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.” 

And he extended his point beyond the issue of alcohol.  Everyone, even the morally proficient, had learned self-control by taking their cues from “other people’s actions.”  Everybody absorbed community norms by letting the influence of respected models seep into them.  Self-making amounted to a social achievement, not just an individual one. 

True, Lincoln always held, as he told a small group of free black men whom he invited to the White House 20 years later, that “success does not as much depend on external help as on self-reliance.”  His own experience taught him that relentless resolve lay behind the push for personal advancement.   

But those starting out with limited means — whether freed slaves or penniless migrants — would likely need some “external help.”  Without self-discipline they would surely fail; yet without the moral example and material help of others, self-discipline would languish like seed on rocky ground.

When Lincoln departed from Springfield as president-elect in 1861, he uttered his famous farewell remarks.  Once again, as in the 1842 temperance speech, he underlined the social foundations of self-making.  Speaking from the rear platform of his train on the day before his 52^nd birthday, he thanked his Springfield neighbors for making him into the “old man” he’d become.

“To you, dear friends,” he said in one version of his remarks, “I owe all that I have, all that I am.”  “To this place and the kindness of these people,” he says in another version, “I owe every thing.”

A third version, which appeared in the east-coast press on February 12, 1861, has him saying “to this people I owe all that I am.”  That’s the phrasing put on this late-1860s pocket-sized card, which mistakenly gives the date of publication — his birthday — as the date of delivery.

 Of course, after his death Lincoln couldn’t offer any more correctives to the notion that he’d risen without help.  Americans preferred to cherish him post-mortem as the paragon of self-containment, the brooding genius with the generous heart and steely will.

Another famous self-made man, Frederick Douglass, left one of many testimonials to Lincoln’s unassisted mastery in constructing himself.  Writing a year after the president’s assassination, he praised Lincoln as so self-sufficient, so original, that he had reinvented even the process of self-creation.

“One great charm of his life,” wrote Douglass, “is that he was indebted to himself for himself.  He was the architect of his own fortune, a self-made man, a flat boat captain, a splitter of rails, a man of toil, one who travelled far but made the road on which he traveled — one who ascended high, but with hard hands and honest work built the ladder on which he climbed.  Flung upon the sea of life in the midnight storm, without oars or life preservers he bravely buffeted the billows — and with sinewy arms swam in safety, where other men despair and sink.”

Episode 3, Mr. Lincoln’s Quill Pen: We talk with Dr. James Cornelius about our Featured Artifact of the Month, Abraham Lincoln’s Quill Pen. We also ask Dr. Cornelius about Mary Lincoln’s Strawberry dress which will be on display May 6, 7, and 8. Dr. Cornelius also answers your questions submitted via facebook.

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The February 1994 cover of Scientific American showed a publicity photograph of Marilyn Monroe, from the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch, arm and arm with an 1863 image of Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner.  The purpose of the cover was to show how digital photography could create photographic images for events that never happened.  Lacking a film negative as reference, digital images make it impossible to distinguish between a scene that reflects an actual event and one that digitally creates a mythical event.

Although Marilyn Monroe never met Abraham Lincoln as depicted on the cover of Scientific American, she did admire him and on at least four occasions was photographed with images of Lincoln or with the greatest popularizer of Lincoln, Carl Sandburg.  The number of biographies of her pales in comparison with those devoted to Abraham Lincoln, but a theme common in most is that she looked upon Lincoln as the father she never knew in childhood.  During a visit to Bryant Cottage in Bement, Illinois, in August 1955, Marilyn Monroe told a reporter, “I have honored and admired Mr. Lincoln since I first heard about him.  As a child, he represented sort of a father to me.  But then I guess he does for everyone in the U.S.”   Her appearance generated a crowd of 10,000 curious onlookers.  Bringing in tow her own photographer, Eve Arnold, Monroe had her visit documented at the house museum where legend, not historical documentation, claims that Lincoln and Douglas met to establish the schedule for debates in 1858.

Bust of Carl Sandburg by Joseph Konzal, ca. 1955. Previously owned by Marilyn Monroe. Part of the Taper Collection now owned by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

The earliest image of Monroe and Lincoln was taken in 1954 by the famed photographer Milton H. Greene.  It shows Monroe standing in a Cadillac convertible holding up a framed photograph of Abraham Lincoln.  The car was a gift from Jack Benny for Monroe’s appearance on his television show The Jack Benny Program.  Milton’s son, Joshua, created a limited edition of 500 copies of this famous photograph that were each stamped, numbered, and signed.  He presented one such copy in 2007 to the Lincoln Collection at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Len Steckler, a New York City photographer, took a series of three images of Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg in his apartment in December 1961.  Steckler had studied photography with, among others, Edward Steichen, Carl Sandburg’s brother-in-law.  As a photographer, Steckler was called upon to capture images of many celebrities, and he soon formed a friendship with Sandburg.  Steckler also became acquainted with Marilyn Monroe.  These professional relationships led to the meeting between the 35-year-old Monroe and the 83-year-old Sandburg. 

The last meeting between Monroe and Sandburg took place in January 1962 in Hollywood.  Arnold Newman, the legendary New York photographer, was at the small gathering that included Monroe and Sandburg.  Seven images from that evening survive, including one that shows Sandburg teaching Monroe breathing exercises, although most people would conclude that they are dancing.  Monroe had trouble sleeping, and, according to Sandburg, breathing properly would help.

An interesting reference to Lincoln is found in the 1960 George Cukor film Let’s Make Love, starring Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand.  The basic plot has a playboy billionaire businessman, played by Montand, attending a rehearsal in Greenwich Village of the independent Let’s Make Love musical theater company.  The director/producer of the show mistakenly thinks Montand is an actor look-alike of the billionaire who wants a part in the show.  Montand pretends to be an actor to woo Marilyn Monroe, only to find it difficult at the end of the film to prove his true identity.  Worried that Montand is delusional, Monroe provides the following bit of advice:

“There used to be an actor, he played Abraham Lincoln for so many years.  He grew his own beard.  He went around in a shawl.  And you know what they used to say?

He looks like Lincoln, talks like Lincoln.  But he won’t be satisfied until he gets shot.”

It would be interesting to know if Monroe had a hand in adding this reference to the script.  Certainly she was one of Lincoln’s biggest fans.

It is unusual to unearth one completely new story about the Lincolns.  A recent donation to the Presidential Library and Museum has brought us two new stories that shed important light on the characters of Mary Lincoln and her son Robert, through their friendship with a young couple.

Daniel W. Tillinghast was born in Morrisville, N.Y., nephew of a senator from Rhode Island whom President Lincoln knew slightly as a general of militia in the Civil War.  While a boy, Tillinghast moved with his family to Chicago, around 1850.

Louise Boone, born 1844, was a daughter of Dr. Levi Boone, who took office as mayor of Chicago in 1855.  Her aunt’s husband was Jesse B. Thomas, Illinois’s first senator.  Lincoln wrote to Edwin Stanton on 1 Sept. 1862,  “I personally know Dr. Levi D. Boone, of Chicago …”   It seems that Louise briefly lived in Springfield as a young lady. 

Daniel and Louise met, and married in Chicago in September 1863.

After President Lincoln’s death, Mary, Robert, and Tad were living in July 1865 in a Hyde Park hotel, when scarlet fever broke out in the house.  The young Tillinghast couple lived there too.  Louise offered to take Tad, apparently as yet little affected by the disease, to her parents’ farm north of the city.  She kept him there for a couple of weeks, until the fevers had passed on the sultry South Side.

How could the widowed Mary Lincoln, at this stage with no real income, thank the young lady for perhaps saving her youngest boy’s life?  Mary gave the Tillinghasts the 14-karat-gold pen/pencil from the late president’s White House desk.  Her gift may have expressed the depth of the potential peril: more than 800 people, most of them children, had died of scarlet fever in Chicago during the 3 previous summers.

The Lincolns soon moved north 8 miles to the Clifton House hotel, on the southeast corner of Madison and Wabash.  The Tillinghasts evidently stayed in Hyde Park for a time, and a year later moved to Michigan Avenue, north of the Chicago river.  Anyway, on Friday Oct. 27, 1865, about 3 months after Tad’s rescue, Robert wrote this hitherto unknown letter to Daniel from his law-clerk office at the corner of Lake and LaSalle:

    
“You!  Chauncey Brown expects you & me to come to his house & play a game  of    Billiards this evening.  I propose to weigh anchor at 7 ½ P.M.  Shall I have the honor of seeing you?   
Yours, R.T.L.”

The envelope is addressed to D.W. Tillinghast Esq at 161 Kinzie St., his hides-and-leather business about 3 blocks from Robert’s office.

The two friends had clearly got past the summer’s threat to everyone’s health, and Robert, just 22 years old, had got over his father’s death 6 months earlier at least enough for some Friday night fun.  (Note the same-day delivery of mail in central Chicago.)  The letter, though, is on black-bordered mourning paper, per custom of the day within the year after the death of a parent.

Robert may also have been growing weary of living in a hotel with his mother and little brother, and he got his own place at year’s end.  What is more, Abraham Lincoln had also liked billiards, and his son with his well-positioned friends partook of the game in the last generation before it fell into ill repute amongst the better classes.  

This is all we know of direct contact between the families, since no more letters would have been necessary for near neighbors.  Daniel and Louise soon had 2 children.  Robert soon married, whereupon his mother took Tad, her last dependant, to Europe the next week, and stayed for over 2 years.

In the winter of 1874 Daniel Tillinghast was superintending the start of a big new operation for his business at the Union Stockyards, when he caught cold, which became pneumonia, and died.  A sizable obituary of him ran in the Chicago Tribune on April 20, 1874.  He was barely 30.

We know any of this, and nearly all of this, thanks to a resplendent piece of generosity by Peggy Davis, of Chatham, Mass., who this year donated both the gold pen / pencil and the letter.  Both artifacts go on display in mid-April in the Treasures Gallery.  Mrs. Davis, namely Margaret Tillinghast Porter Davis, is the great-granddaughter of Daniel and Louise.  Her own grandmother wrote a long letter in 1933 explaining the families’ connection, and that letter will also be on display – the proof is in the provenance, they say in the museum trade.

That epistolary proof in fact fills out a skeletal allusion in a published letter by Mary Lincoln from July 1865 that mentioned a “daughter of Dr. Boone” who took Tad “up to the country.”

For those keeping track, an ounce of gold in 1865 cost roughly $25.00.  It is now about $1,450.00.  But the value of the sentiment shown by all parties in that 1860s friendship, and in today’s double-storied donation, are inestimable.

A reversible pen and pencil made of 14-karat gold, and its original case, from the desk of President Lincoln.

Episode 2, Mr. Lincoln’s Bloody Gloves: We talk with Dr. James Cornelius about our featured artifact of the month: Mr. Lincoln’s Bloody Gloves. We also talk about events surrounding Mr. Lincoln’s assassination, the conspiracy surrounding the death of John Wilkes Booth, and historian Thomas Lowry.

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