On the morning of Thursday, March 13, seven people gathered around a long wooden table inside the offices of the Lincoln Legal Papers. Few subjects have been written about more than Abraham Lincoln, yet these scholars are constantly uncovering new facts and interesting connections.
Two groups, working independently of each other, are currently compiling all of Abraham Lincoln’s writings, plus historically related materials. One calls itself the Abraham Lincoln Papers; it’s a collaborative effort between the Library of Congress and the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg. Drawing primarily from the Library of Congress’s 20,000-strong collection of Lincoln writings–donated by Lincoln’s son Robert Todd–the project is essentially expanding and improving upon Roy Basler’s multi-volume Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Basler’s work was first published in 1953 by the Abraham Lincoln Association, which sponsors its own searchable format of the collection at a site hosted by the University of Michigan (http://www.hti.umich.edu/l/lincoln/). The Abraham Lincoln Papers plans to have its own on-line version completed by 2010.
The other group is Springfield’s The Papers of Abraham Lincoln. This group wanted to start from scratch, maintaining that computer technology, new research methods, and historical discoveries warrant a fresh approach to building a reference work. It’s a joint effort between the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and the University of Illinois at Springfield’s Abraham Lincoln Presidential Center for Governmental Studies. While the Galesburg group’s project is working with tens of thousands of documents, Daniel Stowell, the director and editor of the Springfield group, estimates The Papers of Abraham Lincoln eventually will include 150,000 to 500,000 documents obtained from all over the country. It’s halfway into the first third of the project, called The Lincoln Legal Papers, “perhaps the most important archival investigation now under way in the United States,” according to David Herbert Donald, Harvard professor and author of Lincoln, the highly acclaimed 1995 biography published by Simon & Schuster.
According to Stowell, Herbert’s book, widely considered the best one-volume Lincoln biography written, was the first to take advantage of information indexed by the Legal Papers. The Lincoln Legal Papers will be followed by two more, equally ambitious series covering Lincoln’s pre-presidential and presidential writings. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln hopes to complete the project by 2025. Of the 13-member staff currently working on different aspects of the project, nine are full-time, three are visiting fellows, and one is a graduate student. They’ve come together to create the definitive resource for the next generation of Lincoln scholars.
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The seven scholars have spent the morning scrutinizing a chapter for an upcoming book: a sampling of Lincoln’s 5,100 legal cases. The book is meant to serve as a gateway to a DVD-ROM set of Lincoln’s entire legal writings and related documents, collected by Lincoln Legal Papers and published a few years ago by the University of Illinois Press. The collection takes up more than 210,000 pages. The DVD-ROM set costs $2,000.
Each scholar has been assigned a color, and all the color-coded comments have been inserted into a computer document, which is projected onto a screen. The chapter covers one legal case, Lewis for the use of Longworth v. Lewis. It’s the only case for which Lincoln presented an oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court and needed to apply to the Supreme Court Bar just to argue it.
In 1820, a Revolutionary War veteran named Moses Broadwell bought about 2,000 acres of land in Ohio. Broadwell eventually moved to Sangamon County, died in 1827, and is buried in Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery. In 1823, he sold a few hundred acres of his Ohio land to William Lewis. Evidently, Broadwell never had a clear title to some of the land. This got Lewis into a bind with the guy who held the real title, and in 1825 an Ohio court evicted Lewis from the property he thought he had bought. Years later, Nicholas Longworth, a rich Ohio developer and wine maker, came into possession of the acreage, probably having purchased it from Lewis, who may or may not have known about the title problem at the time of the sale. Like Lewis, Longworth discovered he didn’t really own the land and in 1845 sued the original source for recompense, the late Moses Broadwell, whose estate was being managed by Thomas Lewis, a public administrator (and no relation to William). Thomas Lewis hired Stephen Logan and his partner Abraham Lincoln to represent Broadwell’s estate in court.
The Supreme Court didn’t pick and choose court cases back then. Instead, it took on every one in which judges disagreed. There was nothing spectacular or precedent-setting about this case. At issue was whether Longworth acted in time to take advantage of an Illinois statute of limitations law that set deadlines for out-of-state plaintiffs suing parties based in state. It was tricky because the law was repealed and then the repeal was lifted a few years later. Lincoln argued that the deadline was still affected by the old law. Longworth argued the deadline should be set from when the law was reenacted. Whoever won would determine whether Longworth made the deadline for filing the suit. Unfortunately, there’s no transcription of Lincoln’s oral arguments, only an entry in the Supreme Court’s log noting that he made one. Regardless, Lincoln, who was serving in the U.S. House of Representatives at the time, lost the case.
The chapter provides very little narrative and relies heavily upon the legal documents related to the case. There’s quite a bit of 19th century legalese, including a lengthy section that surveys the property. Reading through it–and keeping an eye out for mistakes in footnotes–can be tedious, even to a serious scholar. One comment inserted by assistant editor Stacy Pratt McDermott after the land survey reads, “This is the most convoluted description of land I have ever seen. Ugh!”
“We prefer to quote a whole letter rather than lift a phrase or two,” explains Dennis Suttles, another assistant editor and the one who did the most work on the Longworth v. Lewis chapter. “Let the document tell part of the story.” This is one of the project’s most important principles: Each document–whether written by Lincoln, to Lincoln, or about something related to Lincoln–is a window into Lincoln’s time period. As such, it’s best to include the whole document and let historians interpret the details.
The staff has traveled to as far as California to scan, transcribe, and dig up records related to particular cases. When exhaustively annotated and indexed, a mid-19th century legal case can open up a lot of windows, shedding light on aspects of history currently in the dark.
Consider just a few of the aspects in this rather mundane legal case. One of the justices Lincoln argued before was Roger Taney, who replaced John Marshall and wrote the famous ruling in the Dred Scott case. Taney died in 1864 and his replacement, Salmon Chase, was Lincoln’s only Supreme Court appointment. Thomas Lewis, the Broadwell estate’s publicly-appointed administrator, later tried to strike it rich with a butter churning invention he called an “atmospheric churn,” which he sold to a St. Louis firm. Longworth’s son, Nicholas, married Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice and was appointed Speaker of the U.S. House in 1936, only to die shortly afterward. While Lincoln lost his motion, the Longworth trial itself was sent back to a lower court, but the trial’s final records were burned in the Chicago Fire of 1871. The trial probably resulted from the poor way land purchases were recorded as pioneers rushed westward, taking advantage of super-cheap government land auctions and giveaways. A broad stroke of 19th century history flows out from one tiny, confused dispute over a few acres of Ohio land. Imagine what can be mined by connecting the dots layered throughout more than 5,000 trials and cases.
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Question: Which four U.S. states are technically commonwealths?
Answer: Kentucky (Lincoln’s birthplace), Massachusetts, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
Throughout the morning meeting, John Lupton, the project’s assistant director and editor, tossed up trivia questions. Whether he intended to or not, the trivia broke up the monotony.
Shortly before the commonwealth question, Dennis Suttles was defending how he used census records to prove that William Lewis, the evicted landowner, actually lived in Ohio before 1829. Someone asked why something called the Virginia Military District, established to give people like Broadwell land after the Revolutionary War, was located in Ohio. The group debated whether a measurement called a “rod” was the same thing as a “pole” (“There’s a joke in there somewhere,” quipped assistant editor Dan Monroe), whether the words “saving clause” and “exemption” could be used interchangeably, and how to annotate “a triple negative in the historic document that should be a double negative.”
Not too long after being accused of a bias to include the war record of every person who appears in a document, Lupton lobbed another question. “In which state are the most Revolutionary War soldiers buried?” Answer: Ohio.
One focus of group dynamics is the various roles people assume as they work together. There’s the ringleader, who heads off tangents, builds consensus, and keeps the proceedings on schedule. This role is most definitely filled by Stowell, who can fight his way through tortured minutia as easily as he can stop a dead-end debate and forge ahead. There’s the joker, who lightens things up, usually when work is at its most harried and tense. This is, alternatively, any one of them. There’s the antagonist, who, if he’s doing his job, acts as the group’s conscience (if he’s not, he directly challenges the ringleader’s authority). Of the seven, no one appeared to take on this role for the whole group, but a few paired off to counter each other from time to time. And then there are those who fall in line under the most authoritative person or persons. In a healthy group, these roles are productive and not always played out by the same person from project to project or meeting to meeting. Regardless, the dynamic itself becomes a member of the group, contributing to the whole in ways that none of the individual members would have been able to.
“Part of what makes our editorial work so thorough and solid is the give-and-take that we have as a group in the meetings that direct the research and writing of each chapter,” says Stacy Pratt McDermott. “We all have our own expertise and particular areas of concentration, and we all have strong opinions about what will work and won’t work.
“It is within that space–in between the opposing perspectives–that we find answers to complex questions regarding transcription, annotation, research, and presentation,” she says. “In each argument, the alliances of staff members are very different and that, too, serves us well.”
By all appearances, the group members get along well. Humor lightens things up, or pokes fun.
After “Moses Broadwell and Jane his wife” appears in the text, McDermott inserted “Meet George Jetson.” After contributing editor Susan Krause remarked that “so many people have died in this paragraph,” Stowell responded with a comment of his own: “Probably everyone, Susan,” noting, of course, that every person mentioned in the chapter died long ago. Lupton is lightly chastised by two different team members for one comment in which he used the words “duplicative” and “summarizable.” A reflective comment by assistant editor Dennis Suttles earns the reply: “Is the above note from Dennis or is it the voice of God?”
Such comments, while routine, took place within a much more serious framework about how to do history right. For every joke, there’s serious debate about something such as the beginning parenthesis in a historical document that wasn’t followed by an ending one: Where was it supposed to go? Should they insert it somewhere? Should they annotate the mistake and offer an interpretation? After debating the issue, it was decided the single parenthesis probably was placed in the text by someone other than the writer–perhaps a court clerk. The document was left untouched.
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According to Stowell, there was quite a bit of debate about how to organize the gateway book. Should cases be indexed chronologically, by venue (federal versus state), case type (murder, divorce, covenant), legal decision (wins, losses, appeals), or by strict representation (60 percent of the book should be based on a certain type of case because that’s what Lincoln the lawyer spent 60 percent of his time on). In the end, Stowell made the decision to supply each case type with three examples.
Regarding the three murder cases included in the book (murder cases comprised less than 1 percent of Lincoln’s legal career, according to Lupton), they were chosen to represent the different amounts of documentation from one case to the next. One includes basic records and one includes transcripts and an extensive description. The third is moderately documented, but the most important information–Lincoln’s use of an almanac to clear his defendant who was spotted by a witness, allegedly with the help of moonlight–comes not from the court records but years after the trial from “reminiscences,” or oral histories of judges, relatives, and even the acquitted suspect whom Lincoln defended, William “Duff” Armstrong.
Other difficult decisions had to be made. Stowell ruled that annotations would be limited regarding the “post-case” life of individuals mentioned in documents. “It doesn’t matter if Longworth, say, became a Civil War general,” Stowell says, “because he wasn’t at the time of the trial.” Stowell admits this decision is still a sore spot among some team members who argued for maximum historical context. Stowell, though, is reluctant to encourage the “seeds of greatness” syndrome, when someone claims that one small event somehow destined a person for greatness or infamy.
Documenting some cases require long-distance trips, such as the one McDermott took to California. McDermott was working on a chapter presenting a legal case for which Lincoln wrote his longest brief, 43 pages, defending the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad.
“One of the defendants in the case was Henry Bacon, a St. Louis banker and O&MRR director,” McDermott says. “During my initial research for the case, I learned that Bacon ended up in California and died there. Further investigation revealed that he left a substantial manuscript collection and that the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, had his papers. To top it off, and shore up my appeal for this expensive research trip, Samuel Barlow’s papers were also at Huntington. Samuel Barlow was a New York lawyer who was also the legal counsel for the O&MRR.
“The research trip was very worthwhile, because it yielded not only general insights into the complex nature of the case, it also provided invaluable information about Henry Bacon and his role with the railroad. As icing on the cake, I also found a letter in the Barlow collection in which Bacon, in a letter to Barlow, provided his perspective on the case. The letter was the final document in the chapter and really provided an essential conclusion of the case and a rare example of a litigant’s reaction.”
Last year, the Lincoln Legal Papers received $375,173 in funding. More than a third came from the State of Illinois, about one-fifth came from the federal government, and the rest came from private donations and foundation grants. The largest expense was for salaries: $327,668. The next highest expense–$9,992–was for creating the Lincoln Legal Paper’s curriculum book, From Courtroom to Classroom, a self-contained lesson-plan guide for teachers. A mere $7,670–about $590 per staff member–was spent on travel.
With more funds, Stowell says, the Papers of Abraham Lincoln would be able to do much more sophisticated referencing. He mentions the many anonymous newspaper editorials attributed to Lincoln. Computational and linguistic studies of word usage, grammar, and style can help determine, within 90 percent probability, whether Lincoln was indeed the actual author of a text. Another document to test is the famous Bixby letter, supposedly written by Lincoln to a widow who had lost five sons in the Civil War. One prominent scholar believes the letter was actually written by Lincoln’s private secretary, John Hay. But such tests are sophisticated and expensive. “We’re not doing that right now,” Stowell says, “but I’d like to.”
Stowell cautions that there’s no end to creating the perfect historical methodology. Even if a document is within 90 percent probability written by Lincoln, is that good enough? Or should the bar be lower?
Most of the scholars working on the project say they’ve learned more about Lincoln since they’ve been in Springfield. Some of them also find that it’s difficult to tear down some of the many misconceptions that surround the man. Truths about Lincoln include: he didn’t write Gettysburg on the way over to the speech; he was as lucrative a corporate attorney as he was a defender of the disadvantaged; he didn’t always refuse a case he didn’t believe in; and “no one worked harder to distance himself from the common man.”
“My respect for Lincoln has increased substantially since I’ve been here” says assistant editor Chris Schnell. “There’s a lot of substance behind the myth. He was extremely talented. I didn’t know he was a poet and inventor.”
There’s still a lot of enigma and mystery hanging over our understanding of Lincoln. This project proves we’ve just begun to tap the body of knowledge revolving around Lincoln’s law practice. As The Papers of Abraham Lincoln sort through the other two-thirds of his writings, there should be nothing but an increased interest in him. As one of the Springfield scholars notes, there’s a sure lesson to be learned after studying Lincoln: “Once you think you have him figured, something else come out.” u
This article appears in Apr 3-9, 2003.
