Random Recent Lincoln News

I've been playing catch-up for the past few days and haven't found/made time for Lincolniana. So, there are several blog posts bumping around in my mind and in some notes, including two book reviews. In the meantime, here's a few Lincoln-related stories that shouldn't be overlooked.

The Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College receives $850,ooo NEH grant

The National Endowment of the Humanities, as part of their "We the People" challenge grant program, has awarded its largest grant this year to Knox College's Lincoln Studies Center. The $850,000 challenge grant, which must be matched 3-1 in other fundraising (effectively Knox College must raise another $2.5 million) over the next 5 years, will be used to start a permanent endowment for the Lincoln Studies Center.

Ann (the irrepressible), also known as LincolnBuff2, has written a full article on her blog award the grant award and about the good work over the past decade of the center. The college has also posted a news release about the grant, including their many plans for the endowment proceeds, the most exciting of which sounds like funds for a salary, likely somewhat generous, for the center's director -- "intended as a position of distinction for a major scholar in Lincoln studies."

Lincoln Cottage website launches online educational feature about emancipation

Last week, President Lincoln's Cottage at the Soldier's Home launched another online interactive educational feature, "Lincoln's Toughest Decisions, Debating Emancipation." The presentation allows students to learn about how different members of Lincoln's cabinet advised him on the issue of emancipation by answering questions as one of those members. The program is interesting and seems to target Middle School age students. You can explore the online program for yourself here.

Abraham Lincoln Birthplace Shrine to close for renovations

The National Park Service is closing the Memorial Building, or as I like to more accurately describe it the Birthplace Shrine, for renovations from this week until sometime in 2010 -- the NPS site now says February 2010, but some previous reports have given a range of completion dates into next summer. Evidently the renovation will focus primarily on significant roof improvements and a new heating/cooling circulation system.

Mike Kienzler over at The Abraham Lincoln Observer wryly notes that the restoration of "the faux-Classical temple" which houses the fake birthplace cabin is probably a questionable use of money. I agree that the "traditional" or "symbolic" birthplace cabin, depending on who you ask, is almost certainly not the log cabin of Abraham Lincoln's birth. But the exterior shrine and the interior log cabin are organically related: the purported birthplace cabin, when initially placed in the shrine, was deemed too large for the memorial building, and the logs of the cabin -- then believed to be authentic -- were shortened so that it would be more aesthetically pleasing. (I came across this tidbit in Barry Schwartz' Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, Univ. of Chicago, 2000, p. 282 and also found it in a NPS report on p. 57.)

So, was it good for you? Considering the Lincoln Bicentennial's effects

Brian Dirck, over at A. Lincoln Blog, posted an open question about the long-term impact of the Lincoln Bicentennial celebrations. He wonders whether all the Lincoln hoopla, and all of the books, lectures, panels, etc. involved, have increased our collective knowledge about Lincoln. He wonders too whether it has increased our academic scholarship about Lincoln.

The post ends with two questions to the blogosphere, which Dirck will himself address at some future date.

First, do we now have a better understanding of Lincoln than we did before the bicentennial, on a purely scholarly level? And second, is the national community, as a whole, stronger for having paused and engaged in this year-long act of celebrating Lincoln's life and career?

I don't know if anyone has read enough of the academic work published this year (books, journal articles, magazine articles, Internet pieces, speeches, etc.) to substantively answer the first question. I know that I have yet to read any of the big bicentennial books, especially the biographies by Ronald White and Michael Burlingame, so I am unwilling to comment about the recent scholarly output.

As for the second question, I think that the answer is yes and no. The awareness of Abraham Lincoln, judging by things like Lincoln-related book sales (and the Lincoln publishing industry is still very strong) and Lincoln-related TV programs, was already high even before the bicentennial, at least compared with other historical figures. I'm not sure that the bicentennial really added much to the already very real interest in all things Lincoln.

On the other hand, I imagine that the myriad of exhibits related to Lincoln this year, all across the country, have had some positive impact. From my perspective, both as someone who has read countless press releases for these exhibits, and visited some of them, I think that they were marvelous on numerous levels. Aside from the sheer number of Lincoln artifacts on display, there was obviously an attempt to contextualize these items for a large audience, especially to engage their interest by relating them to our times and to explain their historical milieu. If they were successful, they served to slightly improve the general American awareness of the art and science of history, which will benefit the national community in the years ahead.

However, I think it would be helpful to consider how the first Lincoln bicentennial effected both the Lincoln scholarship of the day and the national community. Merrill Peterson, in Lincoln in American Memory (Oxford, 1994), notes that much writing was produced in 1909, but "[t]he only truly important historical contribution was the Diary of Gideon Welles" (p. 186). Perhaps Peterson shortchanges some other writings of that year (I've not studied the 1909 publications closely), but I imagine he is mostly correct.

Still, I've always believed that the centennial outpouring about Lincoln led to the subsequent rebirth of Lincoln studies in the 1920s, and fertilized the popular imagination to embrace Sandburg's six-volumes, which might have laid the groundwork for modern Lincoln studies and their dual role in academia and popular publishing. Although there seems to have been an explosion of excellent Lincoln-related scholarship in the last 25-30 years, I imagine that the bicentennial may perpetuate, and maybe even increase, such widely-welcome studies for years to come.

The first centennial provided the impetus for a host of Lincoln-related memorial structures and sculptures, including the Lincoln Birthplace Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. While the bicentennial has mostly seen renovations instead of new edifices (such as yet another renovation of Ford's Theatre and the renovation of the Birthplace Memorial building), it has highlighted the wealth of such resources and perhaps will slow the decline in tourism to many of these. But any such impacts will likely be difficult to measure.

I look forward to reading Brian's answers to the questions he poses. But I think he's still hoping for more reader response before he adds his two cents. Here's hoping he gets it.

Are There More Lincoln Papers?

Last Friday evening, Forbes magazine broke a story on their website about the protracted legal battle of several of Gideon Welles heirs over several purported Civil War era artifacts, including hundreds of notes written by President Abraham Lincoln to Welles, his Secretary of the Navy.  The eagle-eyed Abraham Lincoln Observer from Lincoln's favorite newspaper caught the story and posted about it that evening.

Since then, I've waited for some media attention.  When a nationally recognized news organization, like Forbes, breaks a story on their website at 7:15 pm on a Friday, it's because they are trying to brand the scoop.  Since then, only The Hartford Courant has run the story, and evidently no one else.  (So evidently Forbes was racing to beat The Courant's Sunday edition.  Given the nature of the story, which includes a legal dispute going back several years, the one-upsmanship is a bit farcical, but whatever.)

This would be an obscure, and slightly odd, probate case except that among the described artifacts is a trunk alleged to contain 713 notes sent from Lincoln to Welles.  This has several implications.  Such a trove of materials, even if it were routine administrative correspondence, would be a major addition to the extant Lincoln papers.  Such a trove of materials would also be worth millions of dollars, especially if any had Lincoln's signature or were hand-written in full by Lincoln.  Finally, such a trove of materials would also probably belong to the National Archives (and yes, the federal government has assigned an official to investigate this case).

The basic facts are these.  Ruth Welles, married to Gideon Welles grandson, died in 1955 without a will.  Her house remained in the family, and one daughter (from three children) and then that daughter's son (one of four children) has lived in the house.  There are stories of artifacts in the family, not only papers, but a Spencer rifle, a glass decanter, and a cane made from wood from Fort Sumter.  Some Welles descendants claim that some of these artifacts have been sold without their knowledge -- and judging from court documents, without paying taxes.  They have sued to make their cousins produce a list of artifacts still in hand and an account of those that have been sold.  One case was dismissed, however, because none of Ruth Welles' children is alive, and the court ruled that the other descendants didn't have standing to reopen her probate case.

Confused yet?  I happily direct you to the stories, but they are not quite in agreement.  The Forbes article is here.  The Hartford Courant article is here -- it includes a brief video interview with the reporter, which has some additional information.  And here is a related item (on page 14 of a .pdf document) of a previous story in the Summer 2004 edition of ASA Professional, the quarterly journal of the American Society of Appraisers.

There seem to be a couple of problems with the notion that there is the wealth of Lincoln correspondence floating around out there, at least in my mind.  First, the testimony about the Lincoln letters (as opposed to the other heirlooms) is contradictory.  It comes from a single appraiser, Robert J. Connelly.  In the 2004 article, he reportedly had several days to catalogue 713 Lincoln letters in the trunk.  In the recent Forbes article, which draws from either a new interview or some court documents (the source is unstated), Connelly claims he saw them for 2o minutes when an unknown man arrived at his house and pulled the purported trunk out of his car.  Maybe the assessor saw the documents more than one time, but there's still a problem: if I had to speculate, I would guess that Connelly doesn't have a copy of the cataloguing (or maybe he doesn't want to produce it).  Either way, it's pretty difficult to substantiate this story.

Despite this, there seems to be a bigger problem with the story.  I find it very difficult to imagine that no one would have had access to these papers in the last century.  A cursory Internet search does suggest that less attention has been paid to Gideon Welles than others in Lincoln's cabinet -- except, of course, for frequently citing his well-known diary from Lincoln's presidential years.  Only a couple of books deal significantly with him.  Still, especially with the hoopla over the opening of the Lincoln papers in 1947, and the publication of the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln in the 1950s, it seems that anyone with access to these papers would have allowed access to them.

In the Courant article, the lead specialist on the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln collections at the Library of Congress, John Sellers -- mis(?)-identified in the article as Jonathan Sellers -- evidently admits that there is a four-year gap in the currently existing Welles correspondence with Lincoln.  So, like the missing 18 pages from Booth's "diary," documents from these years may yet be found.  But it seems to me an unusually large collection to have been overlooked for 150 years.

In the past week, I have hoped for some scholars to weigh in on the controversy, especially if they have knowledge of folklore about the existence of such documents.  But I'm unaware of any comments.  In particular, I hoped that recent Lincoln Prize winner Craig Symonds, author of Lincoln and His Admirals which examines Lincoln's relationship with the Navy, would comment, but apparently not.  In the meantime, there may be more Lincoln papers out there, waiting to come to historian's attention.  Personally, I imagine this is so -- there likely are some Lincoln documents currently unnoticed or uncatalogued.  But 713 of them in one place?