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

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.

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

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

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

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

Well-hidden Lincoln, in lustrous leather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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