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

As we enter the season of calculating income tax, one of the prized deductions remains donations to charitable organizations.  Typically these non-for-profit organizations host auctions as a source for raising revenue.  It is common to see items with celebrity autographs as the main attractions.

The use of celebrity status to raise money for worthy causes has a long history.  During the Civil War era, the United States Sanitary Commission held frequent events called by various names — Sanitary Fairs, Soldiers’ Fairs, etc. — to raise money for blankets,  medical, and sundry supplies for the soldiers.  Led by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, who had designed New York City’s Central Park, the United States Sanitary Commission established regional networks across the northern states to raise money for the war effort.

A couple of celebrity signatures from the ’60s.

The town of Springfield, Massachusetts, held a Soldiers’ Fair in December 1864 as part of the fund-raising efforts.  As was common, a fair newspaper, The Springfield Musket, was issued throughout the fair to list daily events.  One of the noteworthy items for auction was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Springfield Arsenal.”  Of greater interest was a letter sent by First Lady Mary Lincoln (which does not appear in Justin and Linda Turner’s compilation of her writings).  The text appeared in a January 1, 1865 Washington Sunday Chronicle newspaper article reprinting an article that first appeared in the Springfield (Mass.) Republican on December 30, 1864.  That text is provided in full:

“Mrs. as well as Mr. Lincoln wrote a letter for the Soldiers’ Fair in this city but Mrs. Lincoln’s has only just arrived.  It is addressed to Miss Isabel Clary, and will be raffled for, so that it is not too late, after all, to add to the receipts of the fair.  Ten dollars have been offered for it already, but refused.  Below is the letter, and we will add, for the benefit of those who may not see the original, that it is written on fine initial note paper, unruled, and the writing consequently sloping gently to the right:

                                                EXECUTIVE MANSION,  December 24.

Your letter of the 12^th instant has been received, and as it always affords me much pleasure to forward so laudable an object as the one mentioned in your note, I hasten to comply with your flattering request.  I most sincerely hope that your highest anticipations may be realized, giving you all that may be necessary to carry out plans which present not only a noble purpose, in the cause of our beloved and struggling country, but also a generous, humane, and great good, in the comfort of the brave and noble hearts battling for our glorious Union.  With heartfelt hope, I pray God speed you, and crown your efforts with success. 

                                                                                    Very truly yours,     Mary Lincoln”

Her husband’s response on Dec. 19th was more pro-forma, indicating that matters of state required him to remain in Washington.  However, Lincoln attended the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair in June 1864.  Among the celebrity items offered in Philadelphia were printed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, and John G. Nicolay.  Shrewd visitors would have seen the bargain of purchasing one at the sale price of ten dollars apiece.  Unfortunately, most people declined to purchase a copy, and many remained unsold.  Today, one of these Leland-Boker autographed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation will fetch well more than one million dollars at auction.

Three siblings in the fourth generation of descent from a Wall Street banker, Benjamin B. Sherman, have donated three letters and a ledger book to the Presidential Library & Museum.  The material concerns a public collection taken up in 1865-66 to support Mary, Robert, and Tad Lincoln in their time of woe.  Below are the main points of the letters — 2 of them previously unknown, plus 1 by Mary Lincoln that was incompletely transcribed in the 1972 book of her correspondence.  The hundreds of names in the ledger book — people all over the U.S. and a few Canadians who sent Sherman money to forward to the bereaved family — will be analyzed by ALPLM staff.  All 4 items will go on display in the Museum after some light cleaning.

One revelation is that Mary Lincoln owed money to a furrier (though this does not really surprise), and that she had the ill grace to ask Mr. Sherman, who took up the collection for her, to go around and try to get her debts to other merchants reduced.  The letter by Robert Lincoln puts paid to the old conspiracy theory that he wanted to get his hands on his mother’s money, because here he forswears any claim to the gifts offered him, directing Mr. Sherman to give it all to Mary.  The total fund, delivered to her in May 1866, was about $10,750 — worth roughly $400,000 today.

It is a lovely bit of synonymy over time that a generous volunteer like Benjamin B. Sherman should have descendants today who selflessly donated these materials.  The ALPLM and all interested in the Lincoln story are most grateful to the Thompsons.

To Benjamin B. Sherman                                  Chicago,  Dec 25^th 1865

    95 Wall St., N.Y.

My dear Sir:  Your favor of the 21^st inst. is at hand.  I notice that it was addressed to my brother and myself, as well as to my mother.  So far as I am concerned, I wish whatever of the fund there is in your hands, to be solely appropriated to my mother. 

The income which I derive from my father’s estate, is sufficient to maintain me until I begin to earn my living.  The same is of course true with regard to my brother who is only a little more than twelve years of age.  … we both wish to have nothing to do with the fund, but that it should go where it is most needed. 

…  When you are prepared, please send by express, to Mrs. A. Lincoln, Clifton House, Chicago. 

If you have not already done so, we would wish that you would not advertize.  The amount … is not worth the annoyance we experience at seeing our names in the papers. 

I cannot express as I would, the gratitude we feel for your earnest efforts & the great trouble you have had …   Believe me, Sir,  Very sincerely & truly

                                                                                                 Yours   Robert T. Lincoln
__

To Mr. Sherman                                              Chicago,  Dec. 26th 1865

Episode 19, The Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Retrial (Part Two): In part two of our Roundtable Discussion, our panel focuses on the medical and legal aspects of Mary Lincoln’s trial.

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Episode 18, The Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Insanity Trial (Part One): In this two part episode, we present the audio from the Roundtable Discussion on Mary Todd Lincoln’s Insanity Retrial. The Insanity Retrial of  Mary Todd Lincoln is sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Commission and will take place September 24, 2012 in Chicago, IL and again on October 1, 2012 in Springfield, IL. For more information on the retrial please visit: www.wasmarylincolncrazy.com.

Part one of our discussion focuses on the historical, cultural, and legal surroundings of Mrs. Lincoln’s original trial.

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Both large and small new discoveries or points for debate come up nearly every month about Lincoln and his family.  Recent months have been richer than most.

Moving from the small to the large, or perhaps from the amusing to the consequential, we find these four nuggets.

1. Vera Kaikobad, in the journal Medical Acupuncture for 2007 (this one took a while to pierce our attention), has performed what seems to be the first acupuncture analysis of Lincoln.  Addressing the 5 Elements for “his Qi energetics” — fire, water, earth, wood, and metal — she finds, e.g., that Lincoln’s ‘lazy’ eye points to “a pronounced wood disposition;” that his cold hands and feet under stress meant “a fire-water axis problem;” and his being a “weak eater” meant “wood afflicting earth.”  I am not qualified to comment on this analysis except to say that the lazy eye was thought to originate in a head-kick by a horse when Abe was 10; and that the other two maladies cropped up only in the last months of his life.

2.  Mary Lincoln wrote on 5 May 1862 — 10 weeks after Willie Lincoln’s death — to Charles Reeves of Cleveland, Ohio, in a letter newly revealed to the public this month.  As often happened in 1862-1882, Mary wrote to express condolences for the death of another person — Reeves’s wife Hester, who had briefly been Willie’s teacher in Springfield– then mainly wrote about her own sorrow.

More interestingly, she refers to a painting of Willie, based on a photograph.  If this is the watercolor portrait owned by the ALPLM, gifted by the last Lincoln descendant in 1976, then it is about a decade older than we had thought.  If so, in her weeks of self-confinement Mary still found the strength to commission, pay for, and receive the portrait.  The letter also tells us that city directories and the census can leave chasms of the unknown, for Hester Reeves was never listed in Springfield.

3.  Major Thomas Eckert was in charge of the Military Telegraph office in the War Department, and thus personally close to Lincoln.  After the war he was an industrial executive and innovator in telegraphy.  At war’s end he legally carried away his code books and message logs, which in early 2012 his descendant sold to the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California.

The code books reveal some new names for our 16th President: he was variously referred to as Berlin, India, Ida, and Irving, inter alia.  General McClellan was Andes.  Secretary of War Stanton was Indus.  The rebels never cracked the federals’ codes, surely one element (if not the major one) in the Union victory.  Eckert’s code men chose stray words, then filled in uncoded names alongside them in their logbook as the messages went out.  They also added junk words to messages, meant only to confuse a possible spy: abortion, snowball, etc.  These 30 volumes will provide many new insights and much information on the conduct of the war.

In March 1865 John Bigelow, U.S. minister in Paris, presented Lincoln with volume 1 of the new 'History of Julius Caesar' by Emperor Napoleon III. Volume 2 had to be presented to Robert Lincoln the next year.

4.  Perhaps of greatest interest to Lincolnology is a project, now in its beginning stages, to create a conspectus of all the books the Lincolns owned.  Robert Bray’s recent study Reading with Lincoln (2010) is a series of lectures, really, building upon Professor Bray’s 2007 list of books Lincoln is thought to have read.  Bray’s study is useful, if maddening at times.  The books now in possession of the ALPLM do not much overlap with Bray’s list, and why that may be is for future scholars and students to puzzle out.

The volumes here have been in different vaults and shelves over the decades; and some were only very recently acquired.  The wonderful new Presidential Library building, opened in 2004, along with devoted staff and better record-keeping, finally allow us to shelve and then list them together. I will share this information with the other major repositories of Lincoln possessions and see how large a virtual shelf we can fill with the family’s readings.  The headline number for the ALPLM’s collection is 152: namely, books presented to, given by, or owned permanently by Abraham, Mary, Robert, his wife Mary, their son Jack, or, in one case their granddaughter Peggy.  More to come on this topic later this year.

Episode 16, Mary Lincoln’s Jewelry: Once again, we are joined by Dr. James Cornelius to discuss artifacts from our collection. This month, we discuss pieces of Mary Lincoln’s jewelry. You may also view the jewelry by watching our companion “Stories from the Vault” video. Mary’s jewelry will be on display this summer.

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