• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Who Stole the Gettysburg Address? MARtin P. JOHnsON The Gettysburg Address was missing. The “battlefield draft” that Abraham Lincoln had taken from his coat as he looked across the freshly dug graves on November 19, 1863, the two pages written in the president’s own hand and completed the morning of the great speech, the document that dedicated the nation to “a new birth of freedom,” had disappeared. It was 1908, and in anticipation of celebrations marking the cente- nary of the slain president’s birth in 1809, Robert Todd Lincoln had vainly searched for the original manuscript of the speech among the papers inherited from his father. The document had last pub- licly surfaced in 1894, when John G. Nicolay, President Lincoln’s personal secretary and later custodian of the Lincoln papers, had published an article about the Gettysburg Address that included a facsimile.1 Nicolay had died in September 1901, so Robert turned to Nicolay’s daughter, Helen Nicolay. “We are having a good many inquiries at this time about matters relating to my father,” he wrote her on November 6, 1908, “and I venture to trouble you to ask whether you know where the original manuscript of the Gettysburg Address is.” But Helen replied with unwelcome news. “I do not know where the original ms. of the Gettysburg Address is. It is a mystery that has puzzled and distressed me for a long time. Now that you have asked me I am going to tell you the whole story.”2 The “whole story” of the “original manuscript” of the Gettys- burg Address mystified not only Helen Nicolay and Robert Todd Lincoln, but it has also baffled historians, archivists, and students of Lincoln almost since the speech was given some seven score years ago. It is a story of surprising discoveries, allegations of theft, 1. “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,” Century Magazine 47 (February 1894): 596– 608. The author welcomes correspondence on the Gettysburg Address: s10mpj1 @yahoo.com. 2. R. T. Lincoln to H. Nicolay, November 6, 1908, and H. Nicolay to R. T. Lincoln, November 9, 1908, in “Some Correspondence Regarding a Missing Copy of the Gettysburg Address,” part 1, Lincoln Lore, no. 1437 (November 1957), 3. Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2003 © 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2 Who Stole the Gettysburg Address? and assumptions that over decades have solidified into certain- ties. Above all, reopening the strange case of the disappearance and unexpected recovery of the Gettysburg Address allows us to finally solve some of the most vexing mysteries surrounding the most admired speech in the history of the republic. As Helen told Robert, his inquiry only reinvigorated the search for the delivery text of the Gettysburg Address that she herself had begun in early 1902, shortly after her father’s death. Having previously served as her father’s secretary, Helen was at that time just beginning a series of “Boy’s Life of” biographies with a volume on Lincoln, and so the Gettysburg Address held more than mere family interest for her. Upon her father’s death, and with Robert’s approval, she had transferred the Lincoln papers to John M. Hay, who had been John Nicolay’s assistant in the Lincoln White House. After the Civil War, Hay had become a literary and political figure in his own right. He and Nicolay had coauthored a massive biogra- phy of Lincoln and then coedited Lincoln’s collected works, which was why Robert had originally given them custody of the Lincoln papers in 1874. By the time that Helen gave the Lincoln papers to Hay in December 1901, he had risen to be secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt and was overseeing a budding American em- pire in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Cuba.3 Hay stored the Lincoln papers at the State Department, but then, as Helen Nicolay told Robert Todd Lincoln, “Mr. Hay told me shortly after the transfer was made—that your father gave my father the original ms. of the Gettysburg Address.” John Nicolay had never mentioned this to his daughter and former secretary. In a letter to James Grant Wilson, a respected figure who had known Lincoln, Helen wrote that she had then searched among her father’s papers for the valuable document, which “should now belong to me” but found nothing. This likely did not surprise her, because from that moment, that is, early 1902, “my impression is that it was inadvertently among the mss. which did not belong to my father but were only in his custody.”4 She explained in another letter that 3. David C. Mearns, The Lincoln Papers: The Story of the Collection with Selections to July 4, 1861. 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 1: 89–91. At the State Department the papers “remained locked up under Colonel Hay’s direct orders in the office of one of his important assistants,” Robert Todd Lincoln wrote to R. W. Gilder, Novem- ber 23, 1908; Robert Todd Lincoln Papers, Henry Horner Lincoln Collection, Illinois State Historical Library (hereafter cited as RTL Papers, ISHL). Thomas Schwartz kindly provided copies of letters in the collection. 4. H. Nicolay to R. T. Lincoln, November 9, 1908, and H. Nicolay to J. G. Wilson, Martin P. Johnson 3 before turning the Lincoln manuscripts over to Hay, “I had found one or two apart from the rest, and thinking they were out of place put them with the others.” She even recalled the color and general appearance of the document.5 Helen Nicolay asked John Hay to look for the manuscript among the Lincoln papers at the State Department, but as of early 1902 nobody seemed to know its whereabouts. The fate of the missing manuscript was of special concern because the years before the First World War were the high point of the cult of Lincoln, when his Get- tysburg Address was almost universally hailed as the most perfect brief speech in the history of the English language. By 1913 Congress had approved plans for the Lincoln Memorial, which was to have the Gettysburg Address carved on an inner wall, making the selection of the proper version of the address a national necessity.6 The search for the missing manuscript continued in 1905, when Secretary of State Hay died. His widow, Clara Hay, then transferred the Lincoln papers to Robert Todd Lincoln,7 but his own later search was as fruitless as Helen’s had been. Still, consummate gentleman that he was, Robert assured Helen Nicolay in 1908 that “if in the course of further examinations it is found, it will be considered as belonging to you; but I have little hope of such good fortune.” Helen responded optimistically that “if it has been stolen, it is too important a document to remain hidden indefinitely,” and that “if it is among my papers or yours it will of course come to light.” In either eventuality, the manuscript would presumably be restored to her. “I only hope for all our sakes,” she concluded, “that the mystery will soon be cleared up.”8 Yet the missing manuscript was found in neither the Nicolay papers nor the Lincoln papers, and when it was found, the cir- November 3, 1908, Lincoln Lore 1437, 3. 5. H. Nicolay to R. W. Gilder, December 8, 1908, Lincoln Lore 1437, 4. Helen’s hasty remarks refer only to “my recollection of the color, looks ie. of the ms. my father had”; H. Nicolay to Clara Hay, December 12, 1908, Ibid. 6. In 1895 Congress had voted to place at Gettysburg a bronze tablet engraved with the address but had mandated a text that does not correspond to any in Lincoln’s hand or to contemporary newspaper accounts. The statute is reprinted in Henry Sweetser Burrage, Gettysburg and Lincoln: The Battle, the Cemetery, and the National Park (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906), 211. 7. Mearns, Lincoln Papers, 1: 91. 8. R. T. Lincoln to H. Nicolay, November 12, 1908, H. Nicolay to R. T. Lincoln, November 16, 1908, Lincoln Lore 1437, 3. Robert repeated to several people that the “original manuscript” belonged to Helen, for example, his letter to Gilder, November 23, 1908, RTL Papers, ISHL. 9. H. Nicolay to R. W. Gilder, December 8, 1908, Lincoln Lore 1437, 4. 4 Who Stole the Gettysburg Address? cumstances of its discovery only deepened the mystery. For in late November 1908, Clara Hay made a remarkable discovery among her late husband’s papers: a draft of the Gettysburg Address writ- ten in Abraham Lincoln’s own hand. Helen Nicolay expressed great relief that the text had been found, but recognized that its manner of discovery placed her in a difficult position. Hay was known to bind his personal collection of important manuscripts in leather volumes, and as Helen wrote to the editor and poet Richard Wat- son Gilder, the newly found manuscript was “bound like the other Lincoln mss. owned by Mr. Hay.” This left no doubt that Hay had considered the document to be his property. Yet, Helen Nicolay also reaffirmed that she had been “absolutely certain” that John Hay had told her that Lincoln had given the original manuscript of the Gettysburg Address to her father. And she strongly suspected that she had incorrectly placed it with the Lincoln papers that she had given to Hay.9 It is possible that Helen Nicolay was mistaken about what Hay told her, but it seems unlikely, for when she had asked Hay to look for the manuscript among the Lincoln papers at the State Depart- ment, he would have corrected any error.

Load more

  19

Copy Link