The
Papers of Abraham Lincoln project is a disaster, according to a panel of
experts who have blasted the effort to collect and publish every document ever
read or written by the Great Emancipator.
There
is no editorial direction. The staff is demoralized and divided. Time and money
has been wasted on collecting papers that Lincoln didn’t write and likely never
read. And the project will never be completed unless there is immediate change.
These
are just a few of conclusions of five historians who were asked by Alan Lowe,
director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, to evaluate
the project. The written evaluations submitted in March and April are the
clearest picture yet of what’s gone wrong with the project, which suffered deep
cuts in the fall of 2015 with little explanation, aside from tight budgets,
about why change is needed.
“It
is pretty harsh, and they did find major issues,” Lowe said in an interview.
“They all, to a person, said it is a project worth doing.”
The experts painted pictures of wasted money and a project adrift. They agreed
that the effort to collect Lincoln documents has bogged down due to impossible
goals of perfection and completeness.
Matthew
Pinsker, a Lincoln historian at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, compared the
project’s status to Union’s plight during the early years of the Civil War,
when General George McClellan resisted Lincoln’s demands to prosecute the war
instead of making endless preparations for battles that never came.
“You
must act,” Pinsker wrote in his review of the project. “The PAL (Papers of
Abraham Lincoln) is staring down at its own George McClellan moment.”
Researchers
have wasted time writing footnotes to explain such common terms as “flintlock”
and “Mississippi River,” reviewers found, as if scholars didn’t know anything
about Lincoln or the United States. Susan Perdue, director of a program at the
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities that advises projects that are
assembling historic documents, wrote that the Lincoln project has spent $3.5
million in the past decade gathering documents, including papers that are
already available online. The “obsessive fixation” with finding documents has
resulted in a cost of $52 for each document found, and each of the 68,000
documents located will require nine hours of staff time to prepare footnotes
and otherwise prepare it for publication, she wrote.
“The
project has lost sight of the original mission,” Perdue wrote. “In my 30 years
of work, I have never witnessed a group of people so shell shocked, so unsure
of their own abilities to do the work, so unable to figure out their priorities,
and so uncertain of the future.”
In
one case, a piece of state legislation concerning Cook County has been
transcribed and footnoted to explain such words as “Chicago” and “Illinois.”
“This
is absurd,” wrote Daniel Feller, director of the Papers of Andrew Jackson at
the University of Tennessee. “It would be absurd even if this act was an actual
Lincoln document, but there is nothing to show that it is. Lincoln apparently
did not introduce this law, or speak on it. It is not even clear that he voted on
it. He just happened to be a member of the legislature that passed it.”
The
transcription of the law that Feller found “fairly routine” was included in a
successful federal grant request for money from the National Historic papers
and Records Commission, with the notation that it was “a tantalizing glimpse of
what was in store.”
“Indeed
it is, in the same sense that the Titanic’s first sighting of the iceberg
offered a tantalizing glimpse of what was in store,” Feller wrote. “Because,
without a change in course, what is in store is imminent and complete disaster.
Documenting Lincoln’s legislative years in this exhaustive manner has all but
paralyzed the project’s progress in the 1830s. Doing it for his two years in
Congress in the 1840s will do the same again. We will never get to the
presidency.”
The
experts criticized researchers based in Washington D.C. who have combed the
National Archives for documents. Their effectiveness has been judged by the
quantity of documents found rather than quality, which has resulted in the
project collecting mundane records such as proclamations of land sales that
contain only Lincoln’s signature. Reseachers in Washington don’t know the
editing process or how to establish priorities, the experts found.
“Without
question, they have a difficult time finding positions at other documentary
editing projects if this is their only work experience,” wrote Perdue, who had
a dim view of staff members who had applied for jobs at documentary projects
where she has worked. “These candidates (from the papers project) were not competitive
with other applicants from projects where they had even a minimal amount of
experience on editorial production (i.e., research, fact checking and
annotation).”
The
ALPLM is cutting the project’s two Washington-based staffers as of July 1. A
$72,000 scanner at the National Archives that’s been used to copy documents
likely will be shipped to Springfield. The project has also paused grant
requests to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National
Historical Papers and Records Commission, an arm of the National Archives,
which have both provided money in the past. Both entities, according to Lowe,
recommended some of the experts who served on the review team.
“At
the recommendation of the NHPRC, we are not applying for a grant in this next
funding cycle,” ALPLM spokesman Chris Wills wrote in an email. “They (the NEH
and NHPRC) have advised us that it would be better to wait until next summer,
when we will have new policies and procedures in place for the papers
(project).”
With
the project eliminating researchers in Washington, the project as of July 1
will have three employees. Just two years ago, there were a dozen. Staffing
will never be as robust as it has been in the past, predicted Patrick Lewis,
director of a project sponsored by the Kentucky Historical Society that is
assembling papers from Kentucky governors who served during the Civil War.
Without naming names, Lewis criticized Daniel Stowell, the project’s former
director who is contesting his January dismissal.
“The
problem that Papers of Abraham Lincoln ran into stemmed from being too tempted
to include ‘neat’ and ‘interesting’ and never make the hard decisions that
editors make,” Lewis wrote. “Scholars get tempted; directors stand firm.”
Lowe
said that the ALPLM via the institution’s private foundation has secured funding
from an anonymous donor to retain Perdue as a consultant to help establish new
policies for the project. Staffing, he said, may not be as big as it has been
in past years, but he will wait for Perdue to complete her work to determine
what’s best.
“In
my experience in the past with documentary editing projects, three or four
people is what, often, they would have,” Lowe said. “I guess that’s to be
answered.”
Funders,
Lowe said, have been shown the experts’ written assessments.
“To
their credit, they have supported the effort along the way,” Lowe said. “They,
kind of like us, have said this is a project worth doing. They want to support
it. But they do say, you obviously have issues, and they need to get fixed.
They, like us, realize there are problems, and now we have to figure out how to
fix those problems.”
Before
coming to the ALPLM last summer, Lowe said that he’d heard concerns about the
project, most notably, concerns about the lack of documents published since the
project 17 years ago started searching for documents not connected to Lincoln’s
legal career – lawsuits and other papers associated with Lincoln’s career as a
lawyer were gathered and published before the search was expanded to include
every document he ever read or wrote. The papers project, he predicted, will be
resurrected and ultimately prove a success.
“It’s
a resource that will change the world of Lincoln scholarship and education
about Abraham Lincoln,” Lowe said.
Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2017.
