Episode 25, Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”: We return from a brief hiatus to discuss with Dr. James Cornelius Steven Spielberg’s new movie about Abraham Lincoln entitled, “Lincoln”.
Warning: This podcast contains many spoilers of the movie. We would advise listening after you have seen the movie unless you want to have some sections of the movie spoiled.
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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 25th 1865
95 Wall St., N.Y.
My dear Sir: Your favor of the 21st 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
My dear Sir: Although, my son, wrote you a letter, on yesterday, I have concluded, to write and thank you, most gratefully, for your kind interest, in our deeply afflicted family. We have indeed lost our all, the idolized husband & father is no more with us, and if possible, our adverse fate & the great injustice of a people, who owed so much to my beloved husband, does not contribute, toward lessening, our heavy trials. … We are homeless, and in return for the sacrifices, my great & noble Husband made, both, in his life & death, the paltry, first year’s salary, is offered us, under the circumstances; such injustice, has been done us, as would call the blush, to any true loyal heart! The sum is in reality, only $20,000, as the first month’s salary, was paid My husband & I presume, the tax, on it, will be deducted from it. The interest, of it, will be about $1500. I am humiliated, when I think, that we are destined, to be forever, homeless. I can write no more. I remain, very respectfully Mary Lincoln
P.S. I omitted … mentioning to you … persons apparently reliable, saying, that to their knowledge, $10,000, in money, toward the dollar fund, had been raised for us, in Boston. … you might write to Boston, to ascertain the truth of the report. Knowing, my anxiety, to have a home, where we could at least, have some privacy … I agree with R[obert], it is best, not, to advertise M.L.
if there is any thing, at even an hour, as this, it will be forthcoming.
__
To Mr. Sherman Chicago, Jan. 13th 1866
My dear Sir: … Gen Spinner [Treasurer of the U.S.], two days ago, sent me the sum allowed by Congress, deducting six weeks, from it – with interest – making it $22,025 – leaving me to pay the income tax, which will leave only $20,000. Presuming, as Mr Moser & Mr G[odfrey] did, that you intended settling with them immediately, by return mail … Now, what am I to do? You, have had assurances, from my son, that he or Tad, desire no part, of what you may have. Will there be any objection, on your part, to settle with Moser, when you receive this … May I ask you, as a last favor, to see Mr Moser & Godfrey, when you receive this, and have the fur bill cut down considerably. Your influence can accomplish this. … there is not an hour’s delay. If you will not accede to this proposition, will you please telegraph me, when you receive this. I earnestly request, that you see Mr Godfrey & Moser, without fail when you receive this. I have written to Mr Bentley, ten days since, with reference to this, and he does not reply. I requested him, to have the amount greatly reduced, and send me the bill, and urge upon you to settle it.
I write in great haste & much harassed, by Godfrey’s letter & this unsettled business. Will you grant my request, see Moser & Godfrey … As to Mr Godfrey’s expenses to Wash[ington] … I had no knowledge, of his intention, to present himself on the occasion, and with my limited means, could scarcely meet that expense. I remain truly & gratefully, Mary Lincoln.
Episode 22, Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with his father, Thomas: This month, we sit down with Dr. Cornelius for a special Father’s Day themed episode of “SFTV” and discuss Mr. Lincoln’s role as both son to Thomas Lincoln and father to his own boys.
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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?
Abraham and Mary Lincoln held greater aspirations for their children than they experienced in life. That they could send their son Robert to Harvard University revealed the importance the Lincolns placed upon education as one of the building blocks of success.
Robert’s success as a lawyer provided wealth and status that his father could only imagine. Indeed, Robert Todd Lincoln was constantly imposed upon by relatives, real and imagined, to provide financial assistance. His Aunt Emily Todd Helm received a regular Christmas check from Robert to help offset her expenses. When he forgot to send it, she reminded him. Aunt Emily was also the person Robert relied upon to explain the Todd family tree to him. On occasion, Robert would receive a letter from someone who claimed to be related. He, in turn, would consult with Aunt Emily, who would explain or deny the connection. Once satisfied of kinship, Robert dutifully sent a small offering of assistance.
Clinton Conkling grew up with Robert in Springfield, Illinois. It was Conkling whom Robert entrusted to find appropriate renters for the family home in Springfield after 1865. Once Mary Lincoln deeded the home to Robert, it was Conkling who convinced Robert to turn over ownership to the State of Illinois, in 1887, rather than sell the property.
As a gesture of appreciation for their friendship, Robert wrote out a check for $1,000 that was used for carved oak stalls in the chancel of Westminster Presbyterian Church, formerly Second Presbyterian Church, which Conkling attended and served as one of the leading members. The gift was in perfect keeping with Robert’s generosity of spirit.
Not everyone in Springfield, however, viewed Robert’s gift in the same spirit of generosity. Conkling’s letter to Robert dated October 6, 1915, tells the story:
“Yours of 4th inst. at hand. It has just come to my ears in a perfectly natural way that your correspondent and another lady had a very warm discussion — not dispute — to-day concerning why you did not do something for the First Presbyterian Church — a church, as they said, so intimately connected with your family and whose pastors had officiated at the funerals of various of its members (your mother) etc. etc. etc. It would seem that the women of the Church are becoming some[what] warm over the matter. They cannot understand why you should have given me something for the Second Presby’n Church, and fail to consider though told of it long ago that it was a personal gift to me for the purpose of the new church on account of the long friendship which has existed between you and me.
“In their talk they referred to what you did for me. I feel you should know this feeling so that, if it seems best to you, you can make such a contribution as will still this sort of talk and cause them to know they are not being discriminated against.
“I have hesitated to write this but I believe you will understand that it [is] meant for your guidance and not to annoy you.
“Excuse me if I have presumed too much.”
Conkling couldn’t help but add the following note on a separate enclosure:
“Between you and me and not to be spoken of the following may be of interest. In 1860 the family of B. S. Edwards were members of the Second Presbyterian Church, but soon after for ‘political reasons’ I was told by one who knew, they withdrew and went to the First Presbyterian Church. This was because the intensely loyal attitude of almost the entire congregation of the Second made the atmosphere uncomfortable. In the First Presby’n Ch. of that day were to be found for the most part the influential men of the community who were opposed to Mr. Lincoln and the coercing of the South. In 1861 there was not a single non-union man in the Second, while in the First were many. It is true there were a few, very few, supporters of your father in the First but there were many many more who opposed him. However you know these facts in a general way as well as I do.
“Now all rise up to do your father honor.”
As a very good amateur historian, Conkling wrote an extensive history of Westminster Presbyterian Church as well as local Springfield history. Benjamin S. Edwards, like his older brother Ninian Wirt Edwards, left the Whig Party to become a Democrat; while the youngest brother, Albert Gallatin Edwards, who later founded the investment company bearing his name, remained firmly in the Republican ranks. Benjamin Edwards was one of the leaders promoting the ratification of a new state constitution in 1862 that was explicitly anti-Lincoln administration. Illinois voters rejected it.
From the red-brick 1876 edifice, the First Presbyterian Church, Mary Lincoln was buried in 1882. Conkling sent Robert Lincoln this postcard in 1915, when Robert donated to his parents' original congregation.
In character with Robert’s philanthropic spirit, two days later he sent a $1,000 check to First Presbyterian Church’s organ fund, confirming the wisdom of the aphorism: ‘no good deed goes unpunished.’
Most children have big plans, and Jack Lincoln, grandson of the 16th president, had at least one such plan.
The second of three children and the only son of Robert and Mary Lincoln, he saw more from an early age than most children ever get to see. Born in Chicago in 1873, he moved at age 7 to Washington, D.C., when his father became Secretary of War under President James A. Garfield. In 1885 the Lincolns returned to Chicago, but 4 years later they moved to London, where his father served as U.S. Minister for President Benjamin Harrison.
Yet sadness followed this family. Jack’s grandmother Mary Lincoln died in Springfield while he lived in Washington; so did his mother’s mother, Ann Eliza Harlan, two years later. Of course he never knew his grandfather the president, but because he was named for him — Abraham Lincoln II, always called ‘Jack’ — he had the right to sign his name exactly as his forebear did: A. Lincoln.
Jack Lincoln signed like his grandfather but, unlike the president, could also write it in Greek.
And so he did, to the amusement and confusion of his friends, in a hand very close to that of the president. The evidence we have of this are 14 books in the Presidential Library collection that belonged to the boy. Most of these are signed in a way that could fool the historically unsure, since all were published after 1865.
Oliver Optic’s books, including Outward Bound (1866); Shamrock and Thistle (1867); Red Cross (1867); Dikes and Ditches (1868); Through by Daylight (1869); Going South (1879); Up the River (1881) seem to have been his main target. He bought them new or used. Optic was the nom de plume of William T. Adams of Boston, a highly productive and successful author in the early days of children’s series-lit. These edu-tales took youngsters to foreign settings (Ireland and Scotland for Shamrock, e.g., Holland and Belgium for Dikes) or coastal yachting (Going South) or driving a train (Through by Daylight). This last book even mentions baseball, one of the earliest such books.
Another pair bear a similar flavor: Capt. Mayne Reid, The Plant Hunters and Stories About Animals, both of which Jack signed in 1884. Reid was a British military man who wrote tales about Africa and other exotic places.
Jack’s friend Dick Hatton gave him a Christmas present in 1883 in a like vein: Horatio Alger’s The Young Circus Rider (1883). Jack, or rather his parents, saved his Model First Reader (J. R. Webb, 1873), in which he pencilled his Chicago and Washington addresses in an unsteady young hand.
More interestingly, Jack took over two books not quite his. William M. Thayer wrote the first children’s book about President Lincoln, The Pioneer Boy (1863), whence comes much of our log-cabin-to-White House national mythos. This was translated into Greek in 1865 and mailed to President Lincoln by the translator, arriving just after his death. Jack later claimed it from his own father’s library. So, too, the Hawaiian translation (1869).
And those big plans? Jack numbered most of these books, with a shelf-mark used by large collectors who need to know exactly where in their library to find each item. The Optic books at the ALPLM are numbered a2, a11, and a13-17; the Thayer books are e13 and e14. These marks give clues to the likelihood of at least 3 other shelves of books in Jack’s bedroom.
But the hundreds or thousands of books that world-trotting Jack Lincoln might have hoped to amass over his lifetime never reached that level. He died in London in March 1890, age 16, of an infection that today would be cleared by a simple shot. Robert Lincoln knew then that the surname ‘Lincoln’ would die with him (1926, it turned out). But books and signatures live on.
Episode 11, The Law Office Clock: This month, Dr. James Cornelius discusses our Featured Artifact of the Month: The Law Office Clock. Plus, he answers questions regarding Mr. Lincoln’s voice and the soldiers who carried Mr. Lincoln to the Petersen house after he was shot.
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Comes to hand yet another brand-new piece of evidence this year. Earlier it was the gold pen / pencil from Lincoln’s desk when he died; the name of Willie’s “dear friend” in the 1859 ‘chocolate letter’; and the discovery that the German-language newspaper Lincoln secretly owned in 1859-60 was subscribed to by dozens of state legislators (yet nary a copy remains today).
This time the discovery, by an eagle-eyed collector who kindly made the item available to the Presidential Library and Museum, concerns an eye doctor. The printed document shown here will be illegible at this scale to most of us, but its gist is an endorsement by Lincoln, along with 36 other notable medical and political people, of a new clinic. The clinic was run by E. S. Cooper, M.D., in Peoria, Illinois, offering new treatments for “Eye Diseases” and for club-foot in children. The date on this circular letter is Oct. 27, 1851.
The 1851 document about the "Eye Infirmary"
How did Lincoln know this man? How did, say, Stephen A. Douglas, Judge David Davis, Judge Samuel Treat, lawyer and banker Asahel Gridley, future Congressman William Kellogg also know this man? Less surprising – or more surprising? – is that most other medical men in Peoria, 8 of them, endorsed Cooper’s start-up. Also surprising is that public figures in 7 states, including an ex-senator, seemed familiar enough with Cooper’s new treatments, or reputation, to allow their names to be set in type beneath his advertisement.
Cooper’s name does not appear in any of Lincoln’s legal cases or extant correspondence; and the Springfield lawyer was rarely in Peoria in that period, though he was just over the Illinois River in Tazewell County often enough. So the main question for Lincolnists is whether he had direct knowledge of Cooper’s skills.
Robert Lincoln was born in 1843 with a slight strabismus – he was cross-eyed. The turned-in left eye did not affect his performance in school, but kids teased him. In Berlin in 1850 the founder of modern ophthalmology, Albrecht Graefe, began teaching how to make a small incision to weaken a muscle that caused this condition. Apparently within a year Dr. Cooper had learned the method, or read of it. Did he soon exercise his surgical skill on young Robert, whose defect was gone by the time of an 1858 photograph? (Today the Graefe treatment is suggested on a child by age 6. In Robert’s case, he lost most vision in old age in that eye, suggesting an imperfect boyhood cure.)
The only study to address Robert’s malady is Ruth Painter Randall’s Lincoln’s Sons (1955), in which she blithely and unhelpfully states (p. 33) that “an old document” reveals how the home remedy of staring through a keyhole forced Robert’s eye to adjust itself. Jason Emerson, whose full biography of Robert is due in early 2012, reports that he has found no such “old document.” Mrs. Randall would not have known of Cooper’s circular, because the one found this month is the first recorded, though one supposes that Cooper mailed out dozens of them. Did Mrs. Randall make an incorrect inference about the strabismus from some other tale?
Or did Lincoln himself gain from treatment by Cooper? The 40-something attorney is known to have got his first pair of spectacles some time in the early 1850s. Perhaps from Cooper? But why travel 95 miles from home to get something easily available from any number of people in Springfield, particularly as Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Dr. William Wallace, could have recommended an in-town colleague? Or did Cooper examine Lincoln’s ‘lazy left eye,’ evident in so many photos of him?
Just when we think we see Lincoln clearly, new facts turn up. This one matters in the sense that about 2 years earlier, after Robert had been bitten by a possibly rabid dog, did father Abraham take the 6-year-old boy about 140 miles to Terre Haute, Indiana, to procure a madstone – a clump of calcified cow regurgitant which according to frontier folklore could fend off, even draw out, the poison from rabies or snakebite. Yes, the same budding genius, Abraham Lincoln, who procured for himself a scientific patent in the very same twelve month, put some store in the folk medicine of his rural youth.
Today we know that Robert did not die of rabies, though we’re not exactly sure why. We also can hypothesize that his father soon made a sharp turn away from Terre Haute and toward Peoria, toward what became a standard medical treatment thanks to a Euro-American innovator who helped set the Lincolns’ first son on his own course to self-assuredness and future notoriety.
It is even possible that law partner William Herndon influenced Lincoln. James Lander’s article in the Summer 2011 Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association details how many books on science Herndon owned, and examines some evidence of conversation between the partners on such topics. In any event, Lincoln the cultural and political Whig always sought out progress, and in 1851 he seems to have focused on a very specific form of it.
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.
If Abraham and Mary Lincoln were largely responsible for destroying their own family papers before leaving for Washington, D.C., in 1861, then what did Robert T. Lincoln burn in later years? Fortunately for historians he wrote down a listing of destroyed documents, in a volume sold as Burr’s Library Index. His index was created to navigate through his extensive retained correspondence files. Near the end of the volume there is an entry with the cryptic heading “Papers burned in 1895 and after.” It is worth transcribing the entire contents of that list, in order to give insight into Robert Lincoln’s behavior.
Robert Lincoln’s list of ‘Papers burned in 1895 & after’
Papers burned in 1895 and after
All my family letters
All M.L. letters of 1875-6
Cheques, 1869-87 incl. 88-89-90-91 & 92
Rects [receipts] 1870-87 incl. 88-89
Washington House lease and papers
Old S&L Docket
All M.H.L. Cheques
Dec 98 All Cash books and ledgers except those current
Dec 00 Old Telephone & Gas Company papers
Dec 03 1897 Res [residential] repair and alterations receipts
Nov 03 Letters to R.T.L. 1877/1879
May 1911 Letters to R.T.L. Since to now—except 10 cases sifted letters kept
May 1911 All Receipts except my late ones
Oct 1913 All Hildene building correspondence
Oct 10-14 All but half a dozen old letters to R.T.L. while attor(?) from Chicago
Oct 10-14 All cheques up to 1905
The list clearly shows that Robert destroyed not his father’s papers, but his own. It was a common practice to destroy personal letters of a private nature, which accounts for burning the correspondence between himself and his wife. The period of 1875-6 follows his mother’s confinement and conservatorship, which was undoubtedly a difficult period for both mother and son. But Robert did not destroy all of these letters, as is evident from the materials that comprise “the insanity file” he kept as a separate folder (the basis for a book published in 1986). Everything else were things he no longer needed, such as old cancelled checks and business correspondence, materials that most people today put through a shredder rather than burn.
It is likely that Robert lost some of his father’s papers in the 1871 Chicago Fire, or at least he used that fire as an excuse. In response to one autograph seeker, Robert responded: “I am not the possessor of any autograph letter of my father. Everything of that kind owned by me was burned in the Chicago Fire.” When thieves broke into the stable adjoining Robert’s Chicago mansion, he dismissed the matter, claiming the items were “a great many old odds and ends such as books, possibly letters, and that class of things which a man hardly knows what to do with, and yet is very averse to destroying.”
Nicolas Murray Butler’s claim, after Robert’s death, that he prevented Robert from destroying his father’s letters feeds a popular notion of Robert as cold, calculating, and secretive. Those who knew Robert found him much like his father, and certainly no son did more to patiently deal with the endless requests for a document signed by Abraham Lincoln, endorse a book or painting about Abraham Lincoln, or satisfy the curiosity of the general public who wanted to know his father’s likes and dislikes. Too much of Abraham Lincoln’s life was already on display for public consumption to be altered by a conspiracy to burn his papers. The most damning accusations were not contained in Lincoln’s letters but in the published recollections of his associates and friends that lack any independent verification. It is time to let this conspiracy charge go up in smoke.
