“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.”