puzzled efforts to find the reason for the continued life of a certain
great American magazine, going through the file from the Civil War on,
solely to find out what attention had been given to Lincoln. “Not a
Lincoln article in this volume, nor in this,” he cried. “It is not a
great magazine, it has overlooked the most vital factor in our life
since the Civil War, the influence of the life and character of Abraham
Lincoln.”
His insight told him that people never had had enough of Lincoln.
Moreover, he believed that there was to be had for the seeking a large
amount of “unpublished” reminiscences. It was on this conviction that he
started me off.
He was right about “unpublished” material. Lincoln had been dead only
about thirty years, and hundreds of those who had known him in one
connection or another were still living. His secretaries Nicolay and Hay
had finished their great documentary life of their chief. They should
have personal material not in their volumes. There were members of his
Cabinet still living, members of Congress of his time, editors like
Joseph Medill of the Chicago _Tribune_, Horace White of the Chicago
_Tribune_ and later of the New York _Evening Post_, Colonel McClure of
the Philadelphia _Inquirer_. There were scores of men in Illinois towns
who had traveled the circuit with him, for whom he acted as counsel,
scores of people who had as a youth heard the Lincoln-Douglas Debates,
and had been stirred to say, “Lincoln’s got it right.” They had followed
him in his fight against the extension of slavery and later into the war
to save the Union. There was indeed no point of his short trail from
birth to death where living men and women had not known him as
colleagues, friends, opponents, critics.
Also, there had never been a time from the day he had become a
Presidential candidate to the hour of his assassination that his life
had not been under scrutiny. Yet it had been difficult to find out much
about him. “There is not much of me,” he told a friend searching for
biographical material. But there had been enough always to touch deep
springs in American hearts and consciences. Men like William Dean
Howells and J. G. Holland, later to occupy high places in our literary
life, had written campaign lives of him. Hardly was he in his coffin
before his brilliant, if unstable, law partner William Herndon was
gathering from all sources reminiscences, estimates, documents on his
life up to the Presidency; and from his gathering Herndon made a story
of extraordinary vitality and color. Most important—always to remain
most important—was the collection of his Letters and Speeches and the
ten-volume “Abraham Lincoln: A History” by Nicolay and Hay.
Why do more? What was there to be had? Mr. McClure insisted that there
was plenty if one searched.
I went to talk it over with John Nicolay, who as well as his fine
daughter Helen was an honored member of the famous old Washington
Literary Society where I was a frequent guest. I told him what Mr.
McClure proposed. Did he not have something he could give me? He was
emphatic in saying there was nothing of importance to be had. The
collection of letters and speeches he and Mr. Hay had made was complete;
they had told all there was worth telling of Lincoln’s life. He would
advise me not to touch so hopeless an assignment. I think Mr. Nicolay
never quite forgave me for going ahead. Later when the results of my
search began to appear and gradually to shape themselves into a Life of
Lincoln he came to me one evening to protest. “You are invading my
field. You write a popular Life of Lincoln and you do just so much to
decrease the value of my property.”
I was deeply distressed. He thought me a poacher. I told him I believed
he was mistaken. I pleaded that if I could write anything which people
would read I was making readers for him. To know a little of Lincoln was
for the serious a desire to know more. He and Mr. Hay had written
something that all students must have. I could never hope to make an
essential lasting contribution. But he went away unconvinced.
Mr. Nicolay’s point of view, if not generous, was certainly honest. I
understand it better now than I did then. He had lived through the great
years of the Civil War always at Lincoln’s elbow. He had been the stern,
careful, humorless guardian of a man who carried his mail in his hat and
a laugh on his lips. His reverence for him was a religion. He had given
years of conscientious hard labor to the editing of the “Complete Works”
and the writing of the history, and now he was retired. Lincoln was his
whole life. We all come to rest our case on the work to which we have
given our best years, frequently come to live on that, so to speak. When
the time comes that our field is invaded by new workers, enlarged,
reshaped, made to yield new fruit, we suffer shock. We may put up a “No
trespassing” sign, but all to no use.
Mr. Nicolay’s tragedy was in not having found a fresh field. How
different it was with his colleague John Hay, whose secretaryship with
Lincoln had been an episode in a diplomatic career of unusual
distinction and usefulness! In 1894 everybody recognized that he had a
greater future before him. His part in the Life of Lincoln had been but
one of many contributions to the literature of his day. His social
circle was the choicest, and he was rich. Hay had everything; Nicolay,
only Lincoln, and he looked on all who touched his field as invaders.
Mr. Nicolay’s rebuff settled my plan of campaign. I would not begin at
the end of the story with the great and known, but at the start in
Kentucky with the humble and unknown; I would follow the trail
chronologically; I would see for myself what sort of people and places
those were that had known Lincoln, reconstruct the life of his day as
far as living men and women backed by published records furnished
reliable material. I would gather documents as I went, bits of color,
stories, recollections; I would search in courthouses and county
histories and newspapers; I would pick up pictures as I went, a picture
of everything that directly or indirectly touched on what I was after. I
would make sure if among these people who had known him there might not
be letters not in the “Complete Works”; and, if I were lucky, somewhere
on the trail I might turn up the important unpublished reminiscences
which Mr. McClure was so certain existed. It was a gamble, the greater
because I was so profoundly ignorant of American life and history.
It was in February of 1895, the Napoleon work still unfinished, though
far enough ahead to give me a month for a preliminary survey, that I
started for the Lincoln country of Kentucky to begin work on this
program. It was characteristic of Mr. McClure, as he saw me off in the
deadly cold, to take sudden alarm for my comfort. “Have you warm _bed
socks_?” he asked anxiously. “We’ll send you some if not. It will be
awful in those Kentucky hotels.” It was—Louisville aside—awful in more
than one hotel and train in my first month of Lincoln hunting.
The results were not exciting. They were too fragmentary: bits of
unrecorded recollections, a picture, a letter, a newspaper paragraph, a
court record which had passed notice. What was to be done with them?
Here was no smashing new contribution such as an article of unpublished
recollections from Mr. Nicolay might have been, but here were bits of
value if you were to enlarge and retouch the popular notion of the man
Lincoln. It was soon clear to Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips that what I
was collecting must be dovetailed into the published records; and that,
they told me, was my business. Before I knew it I was writing a Life of
Lincoln, though the first three chapters carried the legend, “Edited by
Ida M. Tarbell.” The office seemed gradually to conclude that the editor
had become the author, though I think they were ahead of me in this
decision.
We had a lucky break at the start which launched the undertaking even
better, I think, than the big article we were looking for. Among my
Washington acquaintances was a delightful Chicago woman, Mrs. Emily
Lyons. She belonged to the group of early settlers who were still at
this time in the thick of the exciting struggle to make the city the
richest, the finest physically and socially in the country. Their
energy, their daring, their confidence, their eagerness to learn, to
adapt, was one of the social phenomena of the day. Now Mrs. Lyons’
husband was important in the wealth-producing class as she was in the
social. She knew practically everybody. When she learned that I was
interested in new material on Lincoln she said at once: “Come to
Chicago. I’ll see that you meet Robert Lincoln, and I’ll see that he
gives you something.” Too good to be true. But Mrs. Lyons kept her
promise when I reached Chicago on my first expedition, producing Mr.
Lincoln at once.
“Now, Robert,” she ordered as she filled our cups, “I want you to give
her something worth while.”
To be drinking tea with the son of Abraham Lincoln was so unbelievable
to me that I could scarcely take note of his reply. I searched his face
and manners for resemblances. There was nothing. He was all Todd, a big
plump man perhaps fifty years old, perfectly groomed, with that
freshness which makes men of his type look as if they were just out of
the barber’s chair, the admirable social poise of the man who has seen
the world’s greatest and has come to be sure of himself; and this in
spite of such buffeting as few men had had—the assassination of his
father when he was twenty-four, the humiliation of Mary Lincoln’s
half-crazed public exhibition of herself and her needs, the death of his
brother Tad, the heartbreaking necessity of having his mother committed
for medical care, and more recently the loss of his only son. Robert
Lincoln had had enough to crush him, but he was not crushed. At the
moment he looked and felt, I think, that he had arrived where he
belonged. The Republican party would have been happy, no doubt, to make
him its leader if he had shown political genius recalling that of his
father. They tried him out. Garfield and Arthur made him Attorney
General, Harrison named him minister to the Court of St. James’s, but
nothing happened. He was not political timber, but by this time big
business wanted him. It was his field. He was now president of the
Pullman Company.
I devoured him with my eyes. He was very friendly. To Mrs. Lyons’ order
to do his best for me he laughingly replied, “Of course if you say so,
Emily.” But he went on to say he was afraid he had little that would
help me. Herndon had taken all his father’s papers from the law office.
I think he used the word “stolen,” but I am not sure; at least I knew he
_felt_ they were stolen. He had protested, but was never able to get
anything back. As for the Presidential period, all the correspondence
was packed away in Washington, but it had been fully used by Nicolay and
Hay. However, he had what he believed to be the earliest portrait made
of his father—a daguerreotype never published. I could have that.
I held my breath. If it was true! I held my breath still longer when the
picture was finally in my hands for I realized that this was a Lincoln
which shattered the widely accepted tradition of his early shabbiness,
rudeness, ungainliness. It was another Lincoln, and one that took me by
storm.
Of course we made it the frontispiece to our first installment, and the
office saw to it that those whose opinions were of value had fine prints
of it. It called out some remarkable letters. Woodrow Wilson wrote that
he found it “both striking and singular—a notable picture.” He was
impressed by “the expression of the dreaminess, the familiar face
without its sadness.” Charles Dudley Warner wrote that he found it “far
and away the most outstanding presentation of the man” he had ever seen.
“To my eyes it explains Mr. Lincoln far more than the most elaborate
engraving which has been produced.” A common enough comment was that it
“looks like Emerson.” Edward Everett Hale wrote us that he had shown the
picture to “two young people of intelligence who each asked if it was
not Waldo Emerson.”
A valuable and considered comment came from John T. Morse, the author of
a Life of Abraham Lincoln, as well as editor of a series on leading
American statesmen:
I have studied this portrait with very great interest [wrote Mr.
Morse]. All of the portraits with which we are familiar show us the
man as made; this shows us the man in the making. And I think every
one will admit that the making of Abraham Lincoln presents a more
singular, puzzling, interesting study than the making of any other
man in human history. I have shown it to several persons without
telling them who it was. Some say a poet; others a philosopher, a
thinker, like Emerson. These comments also are interesting, for
Lincoln had the raw material of both these characters very largely
in his composition though political and practical problems so
overlaid them that they show only faintly in his later portraits.
This picture, therefore, is valuable evidence as to his natural
traits.
Robert Lincoln was almost as proud as I was of the character of the
comment. If he felt, as he well may have done, that he was taking a
chance in responding so generously to his friend Mrs. Lyons’ order, he
was rewarded by the attention the picture received from those whose
opinions he regarded highly. Always thereafter he was quick to see me
when I took a Lincoln problem to him, as I did when I had exhausted all
other sources. He was always frank and downright. One puzzle I brought
amused him no little. It was the recurring rumor that Abraham Lincoln
had written a letter to Queen Victoria early in the war begging her not
to recognize the Confederacy. He was said to have sent it direct. Now no
hint, however unlikely, no clue, however shadowy, was passed by in what
had become in the McClure office a veritable bureau of Lincoln research.
“Anything is possible,” was our watchword. I was carrying on a
widespread correspondence and continually dashing in one direction or
another on what turned out often to be wild-goose chases, but also not
infrequently brought in valuable game. Mr. McClure was especially
excited over this letter. The State Department pooh-poohed the idea; the
curator of documents in London was noncommittal. I interviewed people
who were in position to know what was going on, but learned nothing.
Finally I went to Chicago to see Robert Lincoln. His eye seemed harder
to me in his office than over Mrs. Lyons’ tea table, but he quickly put
me at ease. I was certain that my quest was going to seem ridiculous to
him; indeed, it had become a little so to me. But he didn’t throw it
aside. He picked it up and played with it. He had never heard of such a
letter and doubted if it had been written.
“If father had done that,” he said with emphasis, “and Mr.
Adams”—Charles Francis Adams, then minister to Great Britain—“had
learned of it, he would have resigned. Father knew of course that all
communication between governments must be carried on by the credited
ambassadors.”
And then he fell to talking laughingly of his own experiences at the
Court of St. James’s. He said he had received all sorts of things to be
presented to the Queen—patchwork quilts, patent medicines, books, sheet
music. “I suppose,” he said, “that lots of Americans fancy that their
ambassador smokes cigarettes awhile every morning after breakfast with
the Queen. They take it for granted he can drop in for tea any time and
present quilts. Of course such people see no reason why a President
cannot write a Queen direct.” And he laughed until the tears came.
That interview put an end for the time being to the search for “the
letter to the Queen,” as the item had come to be called in the office.
When the Life was finally complete Mr. Lincoln wrote me: “It seemed to
me at first that the field had been too many times gleaned to hope for
much from the work you were undertaking, and I must confess my
astonishment and pleasure upon the result of your untiring research. I
consider it an indispensable adjunct to the work of Nicolay and Hay.”
Mr. Nicolay, however, never agreed.
If Robert Lincoln was always friendly he threw me once into the greatest
panic I suffered in the course of my Lincoln work, though this was long
after the Life was published. I had gone to him to ask if he would
arrange for me to consult the collection of Presidential papers.
“Impossible,” he said. “They are in the safety vault of my bank. I won’t
allow anybody to see them. There is nothing of my father’s there, that
is of value—Nicolay and Hay have published everything; but there are
many letters _to_ him which if published now would pain, possibly
discredit able and useful men still living. Bitter things are written
when men are trying to guide a country through a war, particularly a
Civil War. I fear misuse of those papers so much that I am thinking of
destroying them. Besides, somebody is always worrying me about them,
just as you are, and I must be ungenerous. I think I will burn them.”
I was scared; I feared he would do it, but Herbert Putnam, the head of
the Congressional Library, had already seen to that. He did not burn
them; the Library got them finally, but with the condition that they
were not to be opened until twenty-one years after Robert Lincoln’s
death. He died in 1926. The papers will not be available to students
until 1947, which probably lets me out!
The early portrait set the key for the series and, as it turned out, a
much higher key than I had believed possible. I found that court records
did yield unpublished documents, that every now and then I ran on a man
or woman who said more or less casually, “Why, we have a letter of
Lincoln’s written to father in ——. Copy it if you wish.” Occasionally I
found a speech not in the “Complete Works.” By the time the work was put
into book form in 1899 I had an appendix of three hundred unpublished
speeches and letters. This did not mean that none of them had ever been
in print. Many of them had appeared in newspapers or historical
magazines. “Unpublished” meant uncollected. On the whole this collection
stood the scrutiny of experts very well, though I think I was swindled
in the case of at least one document, a forgery by a man recommended to
me by an honest scholar who had used the man frequently for years.
Forgery was easy, so was pilfering of documents in those days, so little
attention did clerks give to their old papers, so glad were they to get
rid of them. There was frequently no objection to a student carrying off
anything that interested him. One of the most important documents in the
controversy over the legitimacy of Lincoln’s mother is now to be found
in the Barton collection which the University of Chicago bought. Mr.
Barton probably asked permission to take it home for examination, a
common enough practice in Illinois as well as in Kentucky, and forgot to
return it. Probably most of the legal documents in the private Lincoln
collections have been stolen. The original thief would have been
horrified to have that harsh word applied to him. He simply put it into
his pocket with or without permission, saying, “I’ll just take this
along.”
But while I did get together some three hundred pieces I came nowhere
near turning up all the letters and speeches then at large. I was under
a time limit. Since I ended my search scores of items, some of value,
have been published in one or another collection. I shall be surprised
if, as time goes on, there does not turn up every now and then a genuine
letter, though now more than ever caution must be taken in accepting a
new piece. The forging of historical documents has become a lucrative
trade.
From the beginning I did my best to reconstruct the physical
surroundings of Lincoln’s homes and activities. I was particularly
interested in the setting of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which I
followed in their order; but it was not until I reached Galesburg,
Illinois, where on October 7, 1858, the fifth debate was staged, that I
found the stirring and picturesque material I sought in order to picture
the scene of a debate. I was delighted that it should have been the
fifth debate, which I have always considered the most important of the
series, for it was in that that Lincoln brought his argument down to
what to him was the crux of the whole matter, that is, that slavery was
wrong and must be kept back or it would spread over the whole country.
The debate had taken place on the campus of Knox College on the east
front of its historic Old Main, one of the most beautiful college
buildings of that period in the Middle West.
I had the luck to find in Galesburg a helper who not only
enthusiastically seconded my conviction that here was the place for the
illustration which we wanted, but set out heartily to help me find
material. This was John H. Finley, my old friend on the Chautauqua
Assembly _Daily Herald_. Dr. Finley was now president of the
college—“the youngest college president in the United States,” he was
popularly called, doing a piece of work which was winning him more and
more recognition. It was through him that I was able to find the
newspaper reports of the debate. It was through him that I was able to
meet people who could give me recollections of the day.
The picture which resulted from our joint efforts was made by that
excellent artist William R. Leigh, who did many of the illustrations for
the series. It has had a continuing life, being reproduced again and
again on the occasion of the commemorative celebrations of the debate
which Dr. Finley inaugurated in 1896. It was at this celebration that
Robert Lincoln made his first and only public address about his father.
The real fun of the Lincoln work, as well as some of the worth-while
results, came from setting myself little problems. I was curious, for
instance, to know more of Lincoln as a speaker. Whenever I found an
Illinois man who had been with him on the circuit or in public life I
would bombard him with questions. He would tell me how Lincoln looked,
what his voice was like, how he used stories. They all talked more about
the Lincoln and Douglas debates than any other exhibit, but frequently
would conclude by saying, “Well, those were good speeches, but they were
nothing like the Lost Speech. That was the greatest thing Lincoln ever
did.” Or a man would begin by saying, “Well, you can never know much
about him as a speaker, nobody can that never heard the Lost Speech.”
It was, they said, a speech which so stirred his audience that the very
reporters forgot to take their notes. Knowing reporters, I was skeptical
about that, so I looked up some of them. They all told me that when
Lincoln finally ended his speech they found themselves standing on,
instead of sitting by their writing tables—and without a note!
Still I believed that somebody must remember something about the
speech—enough at least to give an idea of the argument. Perhaps, I said
to myself, I may pick up some of the phrases—get some real notion of it;
so I went prowling about asking questions and finally learned that in
the state of Massachusetts was a man who was said to have taken notes—a
cool-headed man—a lawyer, not a reporter. His name was Henry C. Whitney.
He knew Lincoln well, had travelled the circuit with him, had published
a “Life on Circuit with Lincoln” with which I was familiar.
Of course there was nothing to do but look up Mr. Whitney, and that I
did. To my great satisfaction I found he had a bunch of yellowed notes.
He had always intended to write them up, he said; but when he tried it
the result seemed so inadequate that he gave it up.
After much persuasion Mr. Whitney did get out a version of the Speech.
When he turned it over to me I took it to the men in Illinois with whom
I had talked and asked them what they thought of it. There were those
who said, “It’s impossible to write out that Speech.” But there were
others who said, “Yes, Whitney has caught the spirit, he has the
argument, he even has many of the phrases, as of course he would have if
he made notes.”