The
Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project is shutting down the search for documents at
the national archives in Washington, D.C., where the bulk of papers related to
the Great Emancipator have been located.
The
project has two researchers based at the archives. Illinois Times has learned that both will lose their jobs on June
30. The cuts will result in just three researchers remaining at the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and is the latest in a series of
reductions that began in the fall of 2015, when the project had a dozen
researchers.
Chris
Wills, spokesman for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency that oversees
the project, confirmed that the search has been suspended, but he did not say
that it will be curtailed permanently.
“The
search for Lincoln-related documents at the National Archives is on hold while
we focus on how to handle the 100,000 documents that have been collected and
what additional material should be gathered,” Wills wrote in an email. “The
current priority for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln is to improve its policies
and procedures so that our staff’s hard work and taxpayers’ money is not
wasted.”
Alan
Lowe, ALPLM director, this spring put together an ad hoc group of five experts
from around the nation to recommend the best way to publish documents that have
been gathered since 2000, when the project, which began as an effort to gather papers
related to Lincoln’s work as a lawyer, broadened its search to include every
document read or written by the Great Emancipator. The IHPA last week denied a
request by Illinois Times for correspondence between agency officials and the five experts, saying that the
newspaper’s request was overly broad.
The
National Archives have yielded about 75 percent of the papers gathered by
researchers who’ve been working since 2000 to gather every document ever read
or written by Lincoln, according to testimony at a recent civil service
commission hearing in which former project director Daniel Stowell is appealing
his January dismissal. Vast portions of the archives remain unsearched by the
papers project, including U.S. Army records from the Civil War.
Treasures
found at the archives include a copy of Lincoln’s second annual message to
Congress delivered in 1862, which researchers discovered in 2012. “In giving
freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what
we give, and what we preserve,” Lincoln wrote in the message that is a precursor
to modern State of the Union addresses. “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose,
this last, best hope of earth.”
More
recently, researchers at the archives found a letter from the widow of Jack
Armstrong to Lincoln. The relationship between Lincoln and the Armstrong family
is infamous. Long before entering politics, Lincoln had wrestled Armstrong in New
Salem. Armstrong was stockier and more muscular, and historians are divided on
who won, but Lincoln proved himself a courageous and skilled wrestler, and the
two became fast friends after the match. Years later, Lincoln defended
Armstrong’s son William in a murder trial, winning acquittal after undercutting
the testimony of a witness who said that he’d seen the killing by the light of
a full moon. Lincoln gave the jury an almanac showing that there had been no
moon out that night. William Armstrong joined the Union army, but fell ill, and
so his mother Hannah wrote to the president, asking that her son be discharged.
Lincoln wrote back, telling Hannah Armstrong that he had discharged her son.
That letter is at Brown University. But Hannah Armstrong’s letter to Lincoln,
asking that her son be released from duty, was only recently found at the
National Archives by researchers for the papers project.
The
cuts come after the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum recently confirmed
that it is ending a longstanding partnership with University of Illinois
Springfield, which is the official employer of all five of the project’s
current researchers. Money from federal grants that helped pay salaries flowed from the
ALPLM’s private foundation to the university, but that arrangement will be
terminated on June 30 (“Divorce court,” May 25, 2017). Sources say that the
three researchers based in Springfield will remain on the job but will become
ALPLM employees as opposed to university employees.
Lowe has expressed frustration at the project’s failure to publish papers unrelated to Lincoln’s legal career. While Lincoln’s legal papers have been published both online and in book form, the project has published few papers that don’t relate to Lincoln’s career as a lawyer. During Stowell’s civil service commission hearing, Lowe, who took the top job at the ALPLM last summer, testified that he felt the project wasn’t properly managed.
Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2017.
