Part 16

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.”

The most emphatic and enthusiastic statement came from a man of importance—Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago _Tribune_. Mr. Medill had been one of the reporters at Bloomington in 1856 when the speech was made who found himself in the end on top of the table without a note! He thought Mr. Whitney’s version was close to the original. Indeed, he wrote to Mr. McClure a long and interesting letter giving his recollections of the Convention. In that letter he said:

Mr. Whitney has reproduced with remarkable accuracy what Mr. Lincoln said, largely in his identical language and partly in synonymous terms. The report is close enough in thought and word to recall the wonderful speech delivered forty years ago with vivid freshness.

Well, that seemed to us reason enough for publishing Mr. Whitney’s report along with the story of how I had found it, what the people who heard the speech in the first place said about it, both for and against. And that we did.

But out in Illinois there were a number of people who did not want to give up the tradition. The Lost Speech was the greater to them because it was lost. As long as it was lost you could make it bigger than any speech any man ever made, and nobody could contradict you. And so you will find those who claim that the Lost Speech is still lost. And of course you can take it or you can leave it.

More than once when I plumed myself on a “discovery” I encountered the loyalty of men to their legends. There was the Herndon story of Lincoln’s failing to appear at the first wedding arranged for him and Mary Todd. I realized he rather lets his “historical imagination” loose in his description, but I never had questioned his story until by chance I mentioned it to one of the family, a woman who would have been there if there had ever been such a wedding ready. She froze me with her indignation. “Mr. Herndon made that story up out of whole cloth. No such thing ever happened.” Amazed, I flew around to see what other men and women of the circle said. They all denied it. A sister of Mary Lincoln was particularly indignant because Mr. Herndon had put the bride in white silk. “Mary Lincoln never had a white silk dress until she went to Washington,” she sputtered.

But in spite of all the documents and evidences I collected demolishing the episode, I reaped only sour looks and dubious headshakes. I had spoiled a good story or tried to. It still remains a good story. Every now and then somebody tells it to me. A biographer who tries to break down a belittling legend meets with far less sympathy than he who strengthens or creates one.

The most important piece of ghost writing I ever did came in the course of the Lincoln work—Charles A. Dana’s “Recollections of the Civil War.” Mr. Dana, at that time the active editor of the New York _Sun_, had had an exceptional war experience dating from 1862 to 1865 as assistant to Secretary Stanton. He had spent much time in the field; he had been with Grant at Vicksburg, with Rosecrans and Thomas at Chattanooga, again with Grant in the Peninsular Campaign. “The eyes of the government at the front,” Mr. Lincoln called him.

No man in the administration had had better opportunity of judging Lincoln, particularly in relation to the conduct of the war, and none was a better judge of character.

Could I get the whole story as far as it concerned Lincoln? I hesitated to ask it. The truth was, I was afraid of Mr. Dana. I knew him only on the editorial page of the New York _Sun_. He was too clever, too quick-witted, too malicious for me to get on with, I feared. They laughed at me at the office when I voiced my qualms. Nobody was held higher there than Charles A. Dana. He had been a customer of the McClure Syndicate from the beginning, and they believed in his professional integrity, admired his detestation and relentless pursuit of fakers, honored and tried to imitate his editorial motto, “If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.”

“Why should you feel this way?” reproved Mr. Phillips. “Mr. Dana is a gentleman.”

“Nonsense! I’ll take care of it for you,” said Mr. McClure, and he rushed to the _Sun_, office. He did fix it and more, for, returning, he told me with glee that Mr. Dana was willing to give his whole war story, that is if I would do the work and arrange some practical plan for the interviews. The first step, of course, was to find what Dana material, published and unpublished, was in the war records. The editing of the records then under way was in charge of J. Leslie Perry. Mr. Perry did not believe in women fussing with history, particularly with Civil War history. War was man’s business.

“How can you understand it?” he shouted at me.

However, I insisted on my rights, and nobody could have been more helpful when he considered a thing an obligation of his official position. To the end Mr. Perry’s chief satisfaction came when he caught me slipping. “That’s what comes from allowing a woman to write history,” he would say jubilantly.

Between us we brought together a grist of Dana’s dispatches and reports. I crammed on the campaigns, and by appointment appeared at the end of Mr. Dana’s day, about four o’clock in the afternoon, for my first interview.

His desk was stripped of everything that pertained to the newspaper, but held a row of the latest books, not only in English but in three or four other languages, as well as a copy of the _Cosmopolis_, an ambitious and rather pretentious review in three or four languages issued for a short time in the late nineties.

Mr. Dana had already repented of his promise to Mr. McClure. “I am not interested in what I did in the past,” he said irritably. “I am interested only in the present; I am trying to keep up with the world of today. I am studying Russian now—a very fascinating language. I don’t want to bother with what I did in the Civil War. What do you propose?”

What I proposed was that he let me come to him with a stenographer and a set of prepared questions, say three times a week. He agreed, and for a good many weeks of the winter of ’96 and ’97 I went regularly to the _Sun_ office after the paper was put to press. By the summer of 1897 I had my manuscript well in shape. Mr. Dana had never seen any of it. “Send me the proofs, I’ll read them.”

Publication was to begin in November of 1897. Mr. Dana went to London for the summer. I sent the proof of the first chapter over with a good many qualms, for it was all in the first person—“I” and “We.” It came back with only a few verbal corrections—no comments. He was never to read more of his Recollections. The number of the magazine which carried the first chapter carried the notice of his death.

We published the entire story, and later the articles were put into a book, but with no credit to the ghost!