Abraham Lincoln: The Man, The Myth, The Making of a President

JOHN HAY LIBRARY | BROwN UNIveRsItY

JANUARY 6, 2009 –

MARcH 6, 2009 –

A BIceNteNNIAL exHIBItION IN HONOR Of ABRAHAM LINcOLN (1809 –1865)

JOHN HAY LIBRARY | BROwN UNIveRsItY | JANUARY 6 – MARcH 6, 2009

Abraham Lincoln

The Man, The Myth, The Making of a President

left to right:

Lithograph version of a photograph of Abraham Lincoln made circa 1909 from an original negative created in 1864 by Matthew Brady

and then owned by Frederick Hill Meserve;

Bunker, “Great and Astonishing Trick of Old Abe, The Western Juggler,” published in Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun, April 1861;

Sir John Tenniel, “The Federal Phoenix,” published in Punch, December 3, 1864.

At the beginning of the year 2009, we mark two anniversaries of note.

The first is the 146th anniversary of the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation

(January 1). The second is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln

(February 12), the man who authored that document and signed it into law,

thus signaling the end of slavery. Between these two dates, Americans will pause

to celebrate the remarkable consequence of these two significant events: the

inauguration of the first president of the United States to be born of African heritage.

This historic moment seems a fitting time to reflect upon the long cultural journey

Americans have taken over the course of the past two centuries, since the cold winter

night when Abraham Lincoln came into the world in a ramshackle cabin deep in

the woods near Hodgenville, Kentucky. Born to an impoverished farm family in an

America that accepted slavery as a viable system of labor and social differentiation,

Lincoln could little have guessed at the turns his life would take, let alone that it

would be he who would preside over the demise of the slave system in the United

States and the preservation of its government under the banner of emancipation.

Dissected endlessly by scholars, Lincoln at 200 remains an enigma, his every

action open to multiple, even opposing interpretations. Lincoln’s complexities and

his reticence in speaking about personal matters have led successive generations

of authors to impute to him a wide range of qualities, beliefs and behaviors

with which he had no particular association in life. This propensity to employ

Lincoln’s persona to promote a variety of often conflicting social, political and

cultural agendas exploded after his assassination and the long period of public

mourning that followed. The first crescendo of interpretation, re-interpretation and

misrepresentation came in the decades just before and after the celebration of the

Lincoln Centennial in 1909, and a second in our own times, with the approach

of 2009.

This Bicentennial exhibition, in attempting to capture these threads of the American

experience, essentially tells three stories. First and foremost, it provides a set of

intimate glimpses from the life of Abraham Lincoln as he lived it, documenting his

rise from humble origins in the woodlands and prairies of the West to the presidency

of the United States.

Second, the exhibition retells the story of Lincoln from the public perspective,

gathering together some of the key themes of American mythology with which

Lincoln’s name and memory became entangled along with issues for which Lincoln

has been used as a principal icon since his assassination in April 1865.

Finally, by exploring both Lincoln myths and Lincoln’s reality in parallel display, the

exhibition aims to provoke questions about the varied intersections of life, politics

and race in American life, both in Lincoln’s day and in our own.

“Alw

ays

Che

rish

the

Mem

ory

of A

brah

am L

inco

ln”

(Bos

ton,

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: A.O

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ne &

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, 187

3)

LINcOLN tHe MAN

Abraham Lincoln was unschooled, ill-mannered, inexperienced, and subject

to bouts of dour melancholy. He was also well-read, witty, honest, honorable,

a good speaker, a good listener and a quick study. Lincoln’s many seeming

contradictions inspired both praise and condemnation from Americans during

his lifetime as well as from subsequent generations. These competing views of

Lincoln have forced scholars to delve into deep and detailed examination of

the surviving record. Yet despite these efforts, the true character of the man

who served as 16th president of the United States remains as elusive as ever.

Little documentation survives from Lincoln’s early years, a period about which

he himself remained largely silent in later life. Lincoln’s studiousness and his

reading habits have been widely documented, and his evolution from farm work

to storekeeper to lawyer has been traced by every biographer. Still, his personal

relationships with family and friends remain mysterious and speculative. Materials

displayed in this section of the exhibition document Lincoln’s development, from his

early childhood in Kentucky and Indiana to his work as a flatboatman, militia leader,

surveyor, lawyer, and politician, showing his development as a man, as an advocate

for individual rights and liberties, as a maker of public policy and as a national leader.

One thing that we can say with authority about the times in which Lincoln

came of age is that it was an era when slavery permeated every aspect of

American life. Race was an issue that Lincoln could not fail to confront,

either in politics or in everyday life. During the past half-century, Lincoln’s

seemingly inconsistent approaches to the core issue of American race relations

have elicited heated debate from a variety of perspectives. Was Lincoln a weak

opponent or a strong advocate of emancipation as a governmental policy?

Was the Emancipation Proclamation a happy accident of circumstance, or

the result of a deliberate course of action grounded in moral principle?

left:

Advertisement for the

Lincoln & Lamon partnership

(Danville, Illinois: 1852).

top:

“Single Rule of Three,” leaf from Abraham Lincoln’s manuscript

Sum Book, created 1824 to 1826.

left:

Survey map of Albany, Illinois, made and certified by Abraham

Lincoln, Deputy Surveyor of Sangamon County, June 16, 1836.

bottom:

A. Lincoln, “Manner of Buoying Vessels” (Washington, D.C.: U.

S. Patent Office, 1849). These illustrations formed part of U.S.

Patent 6,469, issued on May 22, 1849.

Recent historical interpretation points to nuances in Lincoln’s perspective

on slavery and abolition. At the most fundamental level of individual rights,

Lincoln firmly believed that people of color had God-given, or natural,

rights that were guaranteed to them under the Constitution of the United

States — rights that included, as he put it, the right to enjoy the bread earned

by their own labor. This, of course, made slavery a moral wrong. Beyond that,

as President, Lincoln acted on the belief that African Americans were entitled

to the same basic privileges and immunities of citizenship in the United States

that were accorded to white citizens. However, when it came to the question

of social and political equality among black and white Americans, Lincoln

equivocated. Recognizing that local sentiment was strongly opposed to racial

equality, he thus deferred to the states and localities to regulate such areas as

voting privileges, eligibility for elective office and jury service, access to public

education, and marriage laws.

Lincoln’s thinking on race was heavily influenced by the writings of Thomas

Jefferson and the speeches of his fellow Kentuckian, Henry Clay, both of whom

believed that blacks and whites could not live together in an America where

slavery had been abolished because the very fact of slavery had created too

much bitterness between the races. To both men, and — at least initially — to

Lincoln himself, colonizing freed people in other

locations — possibly Africa, where colonies of

ex-slaves had been established in Liberia and Sierra

Leone, or perhaps in the Caribbean where Haiti

had become an independent republic under Black

leadership — seemed the best option for resolving

racial frictions. Lincoln, however, abandoned

colonization as a post-emancipation option once

persuaded that African American soldiers had

demonstrated their viability for full citizenship

through personal sacrifice on the battlefield.

left top: President Lincoln’s instructions to Treasury Secretary

Salmon P. Chase, regarding Maj. Gen. David Hunter’s

unauthorized order emancipating slaves in Florida, Georgia

and South Carolina under the rubric of martial law.

left bottom: “Battle of Olustee, Florida” (Chicago: Kurz

& Allison, 1894). This print depicts the battle of February

20, 1864, one of the earliest in which soldiers of color were

deployed on the battle lines and proved their valor.

right: Working draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in the hand

of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, dated September 2, 1862.

Although Lincoln famously claimed emancipation was not his central purpose

for going to war with the South, in a letter to newspaper editor Horace Greeley,

in the end emancipation both helped him achieve the goal of winning the

war to preserve the Union and sealed his own fate, as a group of disgruntled

Southerners conspired to end his life. Indeed, emancipation looms as the largest

and most significant element of Lincoln’s legacy in our own times.

LINcOLN tHe MYtH

The same ambiguous qualities that have provoked so much speculation by

scholars have also prompted the exploitation of Lincoln’s life story in a wide

variety of genres. Self-improvement groups have embraced Lincoln as the

iconic figurehead for the self-made man. Lincoln’s sole speech before an Illinois

temperance group in 1842 continues to animate the advocates of anti-addiction

programs. The story of Lincoln’s early years in a rude cabin inspired several

generations of poor school children, both white and Black, to pull themselves

up from humble origins.

From the moment it became news, Lincoln’s tragic death sparked a massive

outpouring of sentiment that forged a wholesale re-imagining of Lincoln’s

actions as President. He quickly became the martyr who died to preserve

the nation, the saint who ended an immoral and inhumane institution and

abolished oppression, the prophet who envisioned an America greater than

Americans had yet known. Public hunger to learn more about Lincoln was

fed by a range of writers who researched and penned biographies of the late

president. Admiration for Lincoln’s rise to greatness grew widely with the

dissemination of each new tome, and sparked emulation by many. The details

of Lincoln’s early life on the Western frontier became the iconography of

America itself, while Lincoln’s actions as president to free the slaves made him

the voice of moral authority in the Northern states and for African Americans.

By the turn of the twentieth century, no politician could hope to position

himself in public life without taking a position on Lincoln and many attempted

to sport Lincoln’s mantle.

As new generations of Americans have succeeded Lincoln and his generation,

the sense of Lincoln’s importance in American life has diminished. Today

Lincoln’s image is as often as not employed to market goods and services,

rather than to suggest moral character. This portion of the exhibition explores

a number of the ways in which Lincoln’s image has been used to promote

particular agendas for the popular audience since 1865, from defining national

identity to marketing consumer wares.

left:

Anonymous, “Truth and Justice

Shall Not Fail” (undated

broadside, likely produced at the

Tuskeegee Institute, circa 1900).

left:

Jay N. Darling, “Lives of Great

Men Remind Us All” (February

10, 1923), published in Collier’s;

reproduced courtesy of the

“Ding” Darling Wildlife Society.

right:

William Newman, “House

Cleaning at Washington,”

published in Frank Leslie’s

Budget of Fun, 1864.

tHe sIxteeNtH PResIdeNt:

ABRAHAM LINcOLN ANd NAtIONAL LeAdeRsHIP

Lincoln’s greatness rests on his astute vision of the nation and its future. His

foresight, articulated in 1858 during the Illinois Senate campaign in the famous

“House Divided” speech, animated his presidency. As commander-in-chief,

Lincoln thus successfully used both military and political strategies to advance

national goals, including emancipation, often without the support of his

military commanders and other leaders.

At the time of his death, on April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was 56 years

old. He had written only a brief memoir about his early life, and shared

little of a personal nature with even his closest friends. We do not have from

Lincoln the benefit of an extended late-in-life presidential autobiography, such

as that written by his successor, Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln’s early biographers,

particularly his law partner William Herndon, made assiduous efforts to collect

memoirs about him from those who had known or encountered him before

they too passed on. Yet, the record they have left us sheds no definitive light on

the man many regard as our greatest president.

We cannot know what Lincoln himself would have written about his

presidency had he lived to a ripe old age and chosen to reflect back on his

time in office and his achievements as president. Nor can we project with any

authority what he would have thought of the nation’s peregrinations on the

question of race since 1865.

After 200 years, is Lincoln still relevant to American life in the 21st century?

No exhibition can answer that question. But through this display of documents,

images and artifacts, we hope to stimulate viewers to think deeply about the life

of Abraham Lincoln, the nature of the presidency, and the ongoing significance

of racial questions in shaping American history and culture.

right:

Unsigned Lincoln manuscript called

“Meditation on the Divine Will,” circa

September 1862. The themes expressed

in this manuscript formed the basis for

much of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

Address in March 1865.

bottom:

Anonymous, “Assassination of President

Lincoln” (undated chromolithograph).

left:

U. S. War Department

broadside, April 1865 (detail).

fOLLOw IN LINcOLN’s fOOtstePs: ReAd MORe

In Print:

Brian R. Dirck (ed.), Lincoln Emancipated:

The President and the Politics of Race

(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007)

Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years

(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926)

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals:

The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005)

Douglas Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword:

The Presidency and the Power of Words

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

Frank J. Williams, Judging Lincoln

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002)

Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect:

Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008)

Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

Ronald C. White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002)

Online:

Lincolniana at Brown

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/lincoln/index.html

The Lincoln Institute

http://www.abrahamlincoln.org/

Mr. Lincoln’s Virtual Library

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alhome.html

background image:

“Abraham Lincoln with his Son” (undated lithograph made from February 1864 photograph by Mathew Brady)

[I]n the case of this ungainly boy there was no necessity of any external

incentive. A thirst for knowledge as a means of rising in the world was innate

in him. . . . All the little learning he ever acquired he seized as a tool to better

his condition. He learned his letters that he might read books and see how

men in the great world outside of his woods had borne themselves in the

fight for which he longed. . . . In all the intervals of his work — in which he

never took delight, knowing well enough that he was born for something

better than that — he read, wrote and ciphered incessantly. His reading

was naturally limited by his opportunities, for books were among the rarest

luxuries in that region and time. But he read everything he could lay his

hands upon, and he was certainly fortunate in the few books of which he

became the possessor.

— John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History

(New York: The Century Company, 1890), Volume I, pp. 33–35

Abraham Lincoln: The Man, The Myth, The Making of a President

A Bicentennial Exhibition at the John Hay Library, Brown University

January 6 – March 6, 2009

Curated by Holly Snyder, with the assistance of Robyn Schroeder

Brochure text by Holly Snyder

Brochure design by Ben Tyler

1,000 copies printed by Brown University Graphic Services, January 2009

We would like to acknowledge, with gratitude, the ongoing support of the following persons

for the Brown University Library’s Lincoln Bicentennial project:

Hon. Frank J. Williams

Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and

Chair, Rhode Island Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission

Sue A. Stenhouse

Director of Community Relations, Office of the Governor and

Vice-Chair, Rhode Island Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission

Harriette Hemmasi

Joukowsky Family University Librarian, Brown University Library

Samuel Allen Streit

Director of Special Collections, Brown University Library

Patrick Yott

Co-Leader of Integrated Technology Services, Brown University Library

We also thank the following staff members of the Brown University Library

for their contributions to the success of this project:

Kathleen Brooks

Alison Bundy

Jane Cabral

E. Ann Caldwell

Rosemary Cullen

Ann Morgan Dodge

Peter Harrington

Brent Lang

James Andrew Moul

Robin Ness

Patricia E. Putney

Ned Quist

Jean Rainwater

Erica Saladino

Barbara Schulz

Tom Stieve

Virginia Twomey

A BIceNteNNIAL exHIBItION IN HONOR Of ABRAHAM LINcOLN (1809 –1865)

JOHN HAY LIBRARY | BROwN UNIveRsItY | JANUARY 6 – MARcH 6, 2009

“Lincoln’s Address at Gettysburg”

(lithograph; Philadelphia:

Wm. Finley and Co., 1894)