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

For about a century the Lincoln profession has analyzed statements by John Milton Hay that he wrote many of Lincoln’s letters, and/or signed his name to many documents, with the president’s acquiescence.  Hay was the assistant private secretary in the Executive Mansion for the entirety of Lincoln’s presidency, serving under secretary John Nicolay, his friend from western Illinois and his elder by six years.

Hay achieved notoriety in many fields.  He was graduated from Brown University in 1858 as class poet and then worked in his uncle’s law firm in Springfield.  That uncle, Milton Hay, had clerked for Lincoln two decades before.  Young John Hay was quick with a pen, providing signed as well as anonymous reportage to newspapers and keeping a fascinating war-years diary. After the years in Mr. Lincoln’s service, he co-authored with Nicolay the 10-volume biography of Lincoln (1890), then rounded out that picture with the 12-volume edition of Lincoln’s own writings (1905).  In all this they had close cooperation with and access to documents belonging to Robert Lincoln and others.  So Hay knew Lincoln’s hand.  And he knew Robert — the two young men were playing cards in the family quarters of the Executive Mansion on the night of 14 April 1865 when Robert’s parents went to Ford’s Theatre.  John Hay was nearly a son, perhaps more like a shadow, to the man he had dubbed the ‘tycoon.’

Hay later published poems, stories, a novel, and travel sketches, was U.S. ambassador to London soon after Robert Lincoln served there; and as Secretary of State in the McKinley and T. Roosevelt administrations authored the ‘Open Door’ policy for trade with China.  He negotiated the important Hay-Pauncefote Treaties that led to the building of the Panama Canal.  In so doing he pursued policies about which Mr. Lincoln had a nascent interest, though did not pursue during the crisis of the Civil War.  Hay began to intimate that he had written the famous Bixby letter for Lincoln in 1864 (the original was lost that year), and scholars still hotly debate that topic.

Definitely Hay, and definitely Lincoln's signature

But what of his claim that he ‘signed for’ Lincoln?  The document at the right contains Lincoln’s signature only. The document below — a scrap, really — is the closest thing we have to substantiation of Hay’s claim.  Most of the text is clearly not in Lincoln’s hand, nor is the date.  And the signature does not look very good either.  It would be dismissed from the pantheon of ‘Lincoln documents’ were it not for the fact that the main text is in Hay’s hand, and thus the ‘A. Lincoln’ cannot really be a forgery.  Did Mr. Lincoln hand over a stack of pleas like this one, from Confederate soldiers who in the days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox suddenly wished to renew their loyalty to the Union?  There are perhaps a hundred of these notes written out and/or signed by Lincoln in 1863-65, and the flood of them grew as the war’s eventual victor became clear.

Definitely Hay, and maybe a Hay-as-Lincoln signature

If John Hay was trying to make his hand look like Lincoln’s, he did not execute a particularly good likeness here.  Is it possible that Hay’s later claim to have written many of Lincoln’s letters owes mainly to those last days of Lincoln’s life, perhaps this very last day?  The harried President wanted to oblige his wife, his friends Major Rathbone and Miss Harris, his own interest, and the nation’s acclaim by getting to Ford’s Theatre for the show.  Did he leave some papers behind for the able and trusted young secretary to ‘take care of, if you please, Mr. Hay?’  And was it that last conversation with his chief that caused Hay, in his very later years, to inflate his own memory and thus his words about the frequency of his vicarious role as official presidential signatory?  Or have a host of ‘A. Lincoln’ signatures on short notes been dismissed, perhaps undeservedly, because we have not learned to recognize John Hay’s hand?

Episode 9, The Stereocards of Mr. Lincoln’s first tomb & the box at Ford’s Theatre: In addition to talking about the stereocards, we talk with Dr. Cornelius about a recent donation surrounding the receiving vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery, and a discovery made as a result of our blog. You can view the stereocards on our Youtube page.

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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.