Mr. Lambert’s collection of Lincolniana has been made most intelligently. Primarily it consists of the literature directly relating to Lincoln, and includes a large number of books and pamphlets, the list of biographies and eulogies being very full. It also comprises a large number of engravings of Lincoln, and a number of autograph letters and documents, chief among which are a leaf from Lincoln’s sum-book, 1824; the precipe in his first lawsuit; letter to William H. Herndon, relative to General Taylor and the Mexican War; letter to his step-brother, John D. Johnston, refusing assent to the latter’s proposition to dispose of the mother’s interest in property; printed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Lincoln, attested by Mr. Seward, and certified by Mr. Nicolay, being one of the twenty copies made for the great Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia, 1864; and a series of autograph letters of William H. Herndon, written in 1866 and 1867, relative to his lectures on Lincoln and the biography which he proposed writing. Among the books are a copy of Paley’s works, from Lincoln’s private library; “Angel on Limitations,” from his law library; and “Webster’s Dictionary,” used by Lincoln at the White House.
The office table, bookcase, revolving chair, and wooden inkstand owned and used by Lincoln in his law office at Springfield, with certificates from Mr. Herndon and others as to the genuineness of these articles, are in the collection. From the inkstand, Mr. Herndon states, the “house-divided-against-itself” speech was written.
The Volk life-mask and casts of hands, the Clark-Mills life-mask, and an original ambrotype of Lincoln, made in August, 1860, are also owned by Mr. Lambert.
The oldest and probably the largest collection of Lincolniana which has been made is known as the Oldroyd collection, and is at present in the house in Washington, D. C., where Lincoln died, April 15, 1865. The collection takes its name from its owner, Colonel O. H. Oldroyd. The germ of the collection was a campaign badge which excited the possessor’s desire to have others. In the days of 1860 in Ohio—Mr. Oldroyd lived in Ohio—it was easy to get badges adorned with Mr. Lincoln’s face, or with a section of the rail fence and the flatboat which had been adopted by the people as his armorial bearings. The campaign badges which young Oldroyd saved naturally drew other things to them; pictures off tomato cans, tobacco pouches, soap and chewing-gum wrappers, and what not; cuts from the newspapers, campaign pictures.
If Mr. Oldroyd had not been born with the collecting spirit all this would probably have amounted to nothing. It would have been relegated to the garret and one day have been burned. But he had that itching for possession, and the more he had the more he wanted. He spent all he could earn in buying new treasures, and he began a general exchange with other collectors, until by the close of the war he probably had the finest lot of Lincolniana in the United States.
It was the possession of this collection which induced Mr. Oldroyd to go to Springfield, Ill. Here he hoped to add easily to what he had already gathered, much concerning Lincoln’s early life, and to find a permanent home for his whole collection. Few people appreciated the value of Lincoln souvenirs in those days, and many curious pieces came into Mr. Oldroyd’s hands for the asking. As the collection became larger and the public began to show interest in it, Mr. Oldroyd determined to put it in a place where he could exhibit it freely. The old Lincoln homestead, bought by Mr. Lincoln in 1846, the house where he was living when elected to the Presidency, was standing. It had been sadly neglected for many years, and now was vacant. Mr. Oldroyd rented it, and put his collection into the double parlors of the house. The place became soon one of the “monuments” of Springfield, and visitors went out of their way to see it. It became the headquarters for old soldiers and the starting point for all kinds of patriotic gatherings. Mr. Robert Lincoln, seeing the interest which the public took in his father’s old home, and appreciating the efforts of Mr. Oldroyd to make a complete collection, turned over the Lincoln homestead in 1887 to the State as a perpetual memorial to Abraham Lincoln. The legislature of Illinois formally accepted the gift, and installed Mr. Oldroyd as guardian of the house, it being understood that his collection was to remain with him.
The undertaking proved a success, and matters went well until in 1893 the administration changed. For some reason which only those initiated into the mysteries of party government can understand, it was deemed unwise by the party rulers to allow Mr. Oldroyd, who happened to be of the opposing faith, to remain in charge of the Lincoln Home; so he was relieved of his functions as guardian, and a new incumbent selected. One result of the change, which the new administration had probably not counted on, was that, as the collection in the house belonged to Mr. Oldroyd, and not to the State, when he went out that went out too. The intelligent people of Springfield of both parties regretted exceedingly this ludicrous application of party principles to so non-partisan a subject as a collection of Lincoln relics; but nothing was done to save the museum, and Mr. Oldroyd was obliged to leave the town where he had struggled with pathetic patience for so many years to get a permanent home for his Lincolniana.
After some casting about he finally determined to remove to Washington, and he was encouraged to this step by several men of the city and government—prominent among whom were Chief Justice Fuller, Dr. Hamlin, a leading clergyman, General Schofield, and the Hon. G. G. Hubbard. These gentlemen had founded a Lincoln Memorial Association; and, renting the house on Tenth Street where Lincoln had died on April 15, 1865, they installed Mr. Oldroyd in it. Their plan was to petition Congress to buy the house and collection, and to appropriate enough for the guardian’s salary. Considerable interest was awakened in the enterprise, and the association, on the strength of this, felt justified in keeping the house open for several months. The appropriation did not come, however, and the gentlemen decided that the expenses could not be kept up indefinitely, and that it would be necessary to close up the exhibit until the heart of Congress could be converted.
The situation was a difficult one for Mr. Oldroyd. He had made the change from Springfield to Washington at large expense to himself, and now he could ill afford to carry on the enterprise alone. But with a pluck and a devotion to his cause which has characterized all his movements he decided to take the burden on himself, rent the house, keep open the museum, and trust to the public to support it. To aid in the undertaking, he compiled and published a small volume—“The Words of Lincoln.” The profits from the sale of this book, together with the small fee charged to enter the museum, are all that now support the undertaking.
The collection whose history has been here sketched is full of curious and interesting articles. Among the personal effects of Mr. Lincoln which Mr. Oldroyd has collected, the most valuable is undoubtedly the tall silk hat which was worn by Lincoln on the night of his assassination. There are several specimens of the plain and homely garments used by Mr. Lincoln in his early days in Illinois. Of household furniture there are many examples. The most touching is, undoubtedly, the simple, old-fashioned cradle in which Mrs. Lincoln, and, if tradition is correct, Mr. Lincoln also, rocked “Tad” and Willie. A wooden settee which stood for years on the veranda of the Springfield house, is exhibited, as well as the cooking-stove which stood in the Lincoln kitchen at the time when the family moved to Washington. Mr. Oldroyd says that he has been offered extravagant sums by stove dealers for this stove, they wanting it presumably to use as an advertisement. Another valuable piece of furniture is the wooden office chair which Mr. Lincoln used when he first began to practise law in 1837. A chair of still greater interest is an old-fashioned haircloth rocker in which he sat in Ford’s Theatre on the night on which he received his death-wound.
Several autograph letters from Mr. Lincoln are owned by Mr. Oldroyd. By far the most interesting specimen of his writing is the short autobiography which he prepared for his friend Jesse Fell before the campaign of 1860. This autobiography was the foundation of all the histories which were issued in such great numbers just before and after his first election.
In Lincoln portraiture the collection is very full, though it is rather from a historical point of view than from an artistic that it is valuable. Mr. Oldroyd has copies of nearly all of the engravings and lithographs issued in Mr. Lincoln’s lifetime. He has also a splendid lot of wood-cuts gathered from newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. In this collection of prints there are numbers of views of the Lincoln family and of various scenes connected with Mr. Lincoln’s public career. From the spring of 1860 until after the funeral, in 1865, there were few issues of the illustrated papers in this country which did not contain something on the President. Mr. Oldroyd has succeeded in getting nearly all of these prints, among them a great many caricatures. He has a full set of “Vanity Fair,” and many of the Currier and Ives lithographs, now so rare. An interesting feature of the collection is the number of curios it contains—campaign documents of various kinds, such as badges, medals, pins, letter paper and envelopes, flags, etc.
The use that was made by advertisers of Lincoln’s face during his Presidency is shown by a case of common articles; there are tomato cans, soap, washing fluid, tobacco pouches, cigarette cases, spruce gum, and many other trivial articles, all enclosed in highly-colored papers bearing portraits of Mr. Lincoln, surrounded by a rail fence or some popular campaign legend.
The only complete collection of the portraits of Lincoln issued by the government which we have ever seen, Mr. Oldroyd owns. Among them is a revenue stamp calling for five pounds of tobacco; another is good for seventy gallons of distilled spirits, a third for four ounces of snuff, and a fourth calls for cigarettes. Lincoln’s head appears on a variety of postage stamps; the four, six, fifteen, and ninety-cent stamps all bear his face. The six-cent stamp of each of the Departments has a head of Lincoln. The old fifty-cent “shin plaster” is exhibited. It was the only one of our scrip issue which bore a head of Lincoln. His picture is also to be found on a ten-dollar greenback, a one-hundred-dollar United States note, and a one-hundred-dollar government bond.
The most valuable portion of the Oldroyd collection is undoubtedly its books, pamphlets, and clippings. The library contains almost all of the biographies which have been issued, a large number of memoirs by contemporaries of Lincoln, and many war records. There are copies of some three hundred different sermons delivered at the time of Lincoln’s death, as well as a great number of the pieces of music composed in his honor.
A precious book in Mr. Oldroyd’s Lincoln library is the Bible owned by Thomas Lincoln, the father of the President. This Bible bears the date of 1798; it undoubtedly went with the Lincolns from Kentucky to Indiana, and was carried from there by them when they moved into Illinois. It was kept in the family of Thomas Lincoln’s step-children until 1892, when it was sold to be exhibited at the World’s Fair. It afterward passed to Mr. Oldroyd.
At present it is not known what will be done with the Oldroyd collection. The owner has made heroic efforts to keep it together, and it is to be hoped that some way will open by which he can realize his ambition.
A series of articles on the middle and later periods of Lincoln’s life will be found in the McClure’s Magazine, beginning with the number for March, 1896. These articles are prepared by the authors of the present volume, assisted by many persons who were in close personal association with Lincoln, and possess important facts and reminiscences never before published. The articles are very fully illustrated with numerous portraits of Lincoln, his friends and associates, and with pictures, specially drawn or photographed for the Magazine, of all important places and scenes with which he was connected.
1. This table was prepared especially for this work by the Hon. L. E. Chittenden of New York, Register of the Treasury under Mr. Lincoln. In the Appendix will be found a full memorandum of Lincoln’s genealogy, also prepared by Mr. Chittenden.
2. We owe this interesting document to the courtesy of R. T. Durrett, LL.D., of Louisville, Kentucky, a gentleman who for many years has made a specialty of the pioneer history of his State, and through whose energetic and intelligent researches most of the documents concerning the pioneer Abraham Lincoln have been unearthed.
3. Christopher Columbus Graham, as reported by H. W. Cleveland of Louisville, Ky., in an interview in 1884, in Mr. Graham’s hundredth year, and never before published.
4. Unpublished MS. of an interview with Austin Gollaher, by D. J. Thomas.
5. The first flour cake made in Louisville, Kentucky, was made in 1779. The records of the city thus describe the event: “It is related that, when the first patch of wheat was raised about this place, after being ground in a rude and laborious hand-mill, it was sifted through a gauze neckerchief, belonging to the mother of the gallant man who gave us the information, as the best bolting-cloth to be had. It was then shortened, as the housewife phrased it, with raccoon fat, and the whole station invited to partake of a sumptuous feast upon a flour cake.”—History of the Ohio Falls Counties, page 174.
6. Unpublished MS. by A. Hoosier.
7. The first authorized sketch of Lincoln’s life was written by the late John L. Scripps of the Chicago “Tribune,” who went to Springfield at Mr. Lincoln’s request, and by him was furnished the data for a campaign biography. In a letter written to Mr. Herndon after the death of Lincoln, which Herndon turned over to me, Scripps relates that in writing his book he stated that Lincoln as a youth read Plutarch’s “Lives.” This he did simply because, as a rule, almost every boy in the West in the early days did read Plutarch. When the advance sheets of the book reached Mr. Lincoln, he sent for the author and said, gravely: “That paragraph wherein you state that I read Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ was not true when you wrote it, for up to that moment in my life I had never seen that early contribution to human history; but I want your book, even if it is nothing more than a campaign sketch, to be faithful to the facts; and in order that that statement might be literally true, I secured the book a few days ago, and have sent for you to tell you I have just read it through.”—Jesse W. Weik.
8. From an unpublished MS. by A. Hoosier.
9. Preserved in “Abraham Lincoln. Complete Works.” Edited by John G. Nicolay and John Hay. Volume I., page 639. The Century Company.
10. Interview with Mr. T. W. S. Kidd of Springfield, Illinois, editor of “The Morning Monitor.”
11. It still happens frequently in the mountain districts of Tennessee that the funeral services are not held until months after the burial. A gentleman who has lived much in the South tells of a man marrying a second wife at a decent interval after the death of his first, but still before the funeral of the first had taken place.
12. Letter to —— Johnston, April 18, 1846. “Abraham Lincoln. Complete Works.” Edited by John G. Nicolay and John Hay. Volume I., pages 86, 87. The Century Co.
13. 1830–1831. “The winter of the deep snow” is the date which is the starting point in all calculations of time for the early settlers of Illinois, and the circumstance from which the old settlers of Sangamon County receive the name by which they are generally known, “Snow-birds.”
14. This story of Kirkpatrick’s unfair treatment of Lincoln we owe to the courtesy of Colonel Clark E. Carr of Galesburg, Illinois, to whom it was told several times by Greene himself.
15. William Cullen Bryant, who was in Illinois in 1832, at the time of the Black Hawk War, used to tell of meeting in his travels in the State a company of Illinois volunteers, commanded by a “raw youth” of “quaint and pleasant” speech, who, he learned afterwards, was Abraham Lincoln. As Lincoln’s captaincy ended on May 27th, and Mr. Bryant did not reach Illinois until June 12th, and as he never came nearer than fifty miles to the Rapids of the Illinois, where the body of rangers to which Lincoln belonged was encamped, it is evident that the “raw youth” could not have been Lincoln, much as one would like to believe that it was.
16. See “Wisconsin Historical Collections,” Volume X., for Major Anderson’s reminiscences of the Black Hawk War.
17. There were many prominent Americans in the Black Hawk War, with some of whom Lincoln became acquainted. Among the best known were General Robert Anderson; Colonel Zachary Taylor; General Scott, afterwards candidate for President, and Lieutenant-General; Henry Dodge, Governor of the Territory of Wisconsin, and United States Senator; Hon. William L. D. Ewing and Hon. Sidney Breese, both United States Senators from Illinois; William S. Hamilton, a son of Alexander Hamilton; Colonel Nathan Boone, son of Daniel Boone; Lieutenant Albert Sydney Johnston, afterwards a Confederate general. Jefferson Davis was not in the war, according to the muster-rolls of his company, which report him absent on furlough from March 26 to August 18, 1832.
18. “Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln.” Edited by Allen Thorndike Rice, 1886.
19. This incident was told by Lincoln to Mr. A. J. Conant the artist, who in 1860 painted his portrait in Springfield. Mr. Conant, in order to catch Mr. Lincoln’s animated expression, had engaged him in conversation, and had questioned him about his early life; and it was in the course of their conversation that this incident came out. It is to be found in a delightful and suggestive article entitled, “My Acquaintance with Abraham Lincoln,” contributed by Mr. Conant to the “Liber Scriptorum,” and by his permission quoted here.
20. The date here given is wrong; the marriage took place on June 12, 1806. The error arose in copying the record the first time, the date of the marriage following that of Thomas Lincoln being taken instead of the one before his name.
21. The memoranda for Lincoln’s genealogy (page 223), and the introduction to this work, as well as the first chapter, show that we do know now, beyond a doubt, who and what Lincoln’s ancestors were.