Lincoln Check Found

Last weekend, it was revealed that someone had located a small collection of checks signed by famous people in bank storage, including one signed by Abraham Lincoln dated just two days before his death.  The sesquicentennial Civil War blog at The Washington Post, "A House Divided," has a nice entry about the check, including comments from Harold Holzer about its likely purpose.  Holzer rightly comments on the emotional importance of the artifact because it is from the final week of Lincoln's life.

Images of Lincoln's check, and a couple of other presidential checks found in the collection, are available from this Washington Post article.

Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana

Earlier this week, the Jewish Journal published an article about noted Lincoln collector Alfred Whital Stern, whose 11,000 item collection was donated to the Library of Congress in 1950. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this part of the collection, which alongside the presidential papers given by Abraham Lincoln's son Robert, forms the heart of the extensive catalog of Lincoln-related in the Library of Congress.

Perhaps the most interesting discovery in this article, for me, was the fact that Stern donated over 1400 books to Hebrew University in Jerusalem a few years before he donated the majority of the collection to the Library of Congress.

As Daniel Weinberg of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop says in the article, "Stern was a monumental figure, his name is writ large in my mind of the Lincoln collectors."

House Where Lincoln('s Stuff) Slept for Sale

According to The LA Times, Louise Taper is selling her large mansion. Taper is well known in Lincoln circles as an avid collector of all things Lincoln, amassing a large and valuable collection over the years. She has been a huge supporter of The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield -- the museum's first temporary exhibit on the assassination was mostly drawn from her vast collection, as well as the Peterson House furniture owned by the Chicago History Museum (or whatever they're calling themselves this month).

Three years ago, she sold (some say at a reduced price) her collection to the museum, including several gems: a Lincoln hat, the gloves Lincoln wore the night he was assassinated, and the famous arithmetic book that has Lincoln's famous scribble: "Abraham Lincoln/ His hand and his pen/ He will be good/ But God knows when."

For years, this collection was housed in this mansion. Andrew Ferguson, in Land of Lincoln (which I've reviewed before), tells of his visit to the Taper residence to view the collection, including the gloves and the book. Now the Lincolniana has moved to Springfield, and evidently Taper is moving on as well.

Studying Lincoln's Boots

Physical items associated with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln are among the most sacred artifacts of Lincolniana.  The contents of Lincoln's pockets are owned by the Library of Congress (and are included in their fantastic bicentennial exposition "With Malice Toward None").  The bedroom furniture of the room in which Lincoln died is owned by the Chicago Historical Museum (formerly the Chicago Historical Society).  Ford's Theatre (part of the National Park Service) has the assassination weapon, a .44 derringer, but the bullet that killed Lincoln is owned by the National Museum of Health and Medicine.  The rocker in which Lincoln was seated at the theater, though, is owned by the Henry Ford Museum.

Interestingly, most of the clothes that Lincoln wore to Ford's Theatre that fateful night are owned by Ford's Theatre, including his frock coat and his boots.  While Ford's Theatre has been undergoing a massive renovation over the past 18 months (the theatre reopened in February, while the basement museum is now scheduled to reopen in July), its collection has been has been in storage.  The police-escorted process of moving the collection was described in The Washington Post in 2007.

Last week, a bootmaker was given permission to examine Lincoln's boots in the storage facility.  Evidently, this is a rare occurence.  A Washington Post article quotes the Park Service saying that this is the first time in almost 20 years that such an examination has been allowed.

There are interesting aspects to the article, especially at the end.  The bootmaker, Michael Anthony Carnacchi, describes the boots as the height of men's fashion at the time.  In fact, a notice of decorative cross-hatching on the heel, along with the description of Moroccan goatskin, make them seem like designer artifacts.  Such an item does not match popular conceptions of Lincoln, the homespun frontier lawyer become homespun president.  While more attention is usually paid to Mary Lincoln's expensive fashion tastes, there are bits of evidence that Lincoln himself occasionally purchased fine clothing.

More intriguing, at least to me, is the final observation in the article, in which the bootmaker describes the heels of the boot.  His last quotation is fascinating -- and also runs counter to the common perception of the meditative, low-key Lincoln.  "When Lincoln walked on a wooden floor, the sound would have been commanding.  'You would have known when the president walked in the room,' he said."  Maybe there is more to the appellation Nicolay and Hay gave Lincoln -- The Tycoon.

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?

Random Lincoln Soundbites

It's Friday ("Take out the trash day" in modern political parlance), and I'm cleaning out my Lincoln-related inbox of the random stories I've been collecting.  None of them merit a full post, but I couldn't quite overlook them either.

Lincoln scholar reviews recent Lincoln books

Up and coming Lincoln scholar Jason Emerson, author of The Madness of Mary Lincoln and Lincoln the Inventor, offers his assessment of the most important recent books about Abraham Lincoln.  His piece, from the April 2009 edition of American Heritage, is available on their website.

Piece on Mary Lincoln

Erin Carlson Mast, of the Lincoln Cottage, has a special guest post on PreservationNation about Mary Lincoln.  It is a wonderful piece that tries to explain how some of the harsh treatment of Mary is unfair, although part of it stems from her often abrasive personality.  You can read it here.  (An aside: I visited the Lincoln Cottage last month and was very impressed by the facility and by the warmth of those who worked there.)

William Lee Miller on Lincoln and Shakespeare

William Lee Miller, author of Lincoln's Virtues and President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman, is currently researching Lincoln's fascination with Shakespeare, which should be a fine book.  Last month, Miller gave a lecture about the project in Virginia, which has been posted as a podcast here.  Miller is an engaging speaker, so I'm sure the lecture is entertaining and informative.

New Lincoln Bobblehead

Everyone has a bobblehead these days.  It used to be limited to superstar athletes; now everyone on the bench has a bobblehead too.  Plus, political figures have gotten in on the act; there are several bobblehead Obamas floating around these days.  Lincoln has gotten the bobblehead treatment -- one of them sits on my desk (a gift).  Next month, a new Lincoln-related bobblehead will be released, this one of the Lincoln Memorial.  (If they can make a lifesize bobblehead Jesus, I suppose they can make a bobblehead marble statue.)

Hurry...Now is the Time to Buy...

Evidently, the sour economy has pushed down prices for Lincolniana, which have skyrocketed beyond all normal range in the last quarter century or so. (In his recent book, Land of Lincoln, Andrew Ferguson suggests that the prices soared due to deep-pocketed buyers like Louise Taper and the late Malcolm Forbes.)

A recent auction in the New York city area featured 19 artifacts associated in some way with Abraham Lincoln, and fetched prices that seem rather extravagant: $30,000 for some lamps which Lincoln might have owned and $8,250 for a letter from the mayor of Springfield announcing a holiday for the Lincoln funeral. But Daniel Weinberg, longtime owner of The Abraham Lincoln Bookstore in Chicago, suggested that the items should have sold for much more.

So if you have a spare $100,000, this is the time to buy. Click here for The New York Times report.

Lincolniana in the News

Most of the media attention on Abraham Lincoln this week has focused on Lincoln books, Lincoln exhibits, Lincoln TV documentaries, or has focused on Lincoln the man. I have blogged about several of these articles, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out a story from The Washington Post that touches specifically on this blog's namesake, Lincolniana.

Michael Ruane has written a fine article on the continued interest in Lincoln artifacts. Also, there is a corresponding link to photographs of several Lincoln artifacts from the night of his assassination.