The Lincoln–Douglas Debates (1994 reenactments)

Transcription

Rod Ross: Welcome. My name is Rod Ross. I am not only an archivist with the Center for Legislative Archives here in the National Archives building, I’m also a board member of the Lincoln Institute that in the past several years has co-sponsored a free, all day March symposium – including lunch – at the College Park facility of the National Archives on the latest in Lincoln scholarship. Today I am privileged to introduce Philip B. Kunhardt III, whose handsome book Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon is a signal contribution to American letters through both text and visual representations and countless sequel tales for Lincoln lore from Lincoln’s 1865 assassination to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. Some of you may be familiar with the Smucker’s Jam TV add with a youngster with the surname of Smucker complaining that no one ever asks him what he wants to be when he grows up. One wonders whether the same preordained destiny accounts for Philip B. Kunhardt III’s vocational choice. I have to confess that in preparing my remarks for today I had great difficulty in keeping straight the various Philip and Peter Kunhardts. It all began with a Civil War soldier named William Neil Meserve whose son Frederick Hill Meserve established a truly outstanding collection of Lincoln materials in the late 19th century. Frederick Hill Meserve’s daughter married a Kunhardt, which accounts for the Kunhardt connection. Materials from the Meserve collection, now controlled by the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation of which today’s speaker is a co-founder, were a basis for the 1992 predecessor volume with today’s speaker one of three Kunhardt co-creators of that book, just as he is one of three Kunhardt co-creators of today’s book. Philip B. Kunhardt III is co-author of Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography, 1992, P. T. Barnum: America's Greatest Showman, 1995, The American President, 2000, and Looking for Lincoln, 2008, with yet another Lincoln work scheduled for completion later this year. As a TV producer, he has to his credit more than 15 documentaries and documentary series including ABC’s Lincoln, 1992, Discovery’s Insanity Files, 1994, and PBS’s Mandate: The President and the People, 2005. Kunhardt is currently a Bard Center fellow in Annandale, NY where he teaches about Lincoln and about Frederick Douglass. He has appeared on The Today Show, The Charlie Rose Show, National Public Radio, CNN, and Larry King Live. He has spoken at the Smithsonian, Yale University, The New York Historical Society, and now the National Archives. I give you Philip B. Kunhardt III. Philip B. Kunhardt III: Thank you Rod, that was a very nice introduction. And thank you, Doug Swanson, for setting this up, being my host, and being so warm and welcoming. It is a complicated lineage, and you did a pretty good job with that Rod. And there is a certain kind of fatalism, I guess, about how one’s vocation arrives. But in my case I resisted the Lincoln world until my 30’s, and then was asked by my father to serve as a research assistant with him on a book he was writing on the Gettysburg Address. And I got hooked. I essentially did research on three of his chapters and began reading widely in the critical literature, and began to realize that this was a subject of great interest to me as well. In 1991 I had the opportunity to join my father – now recently in retirement – and my brother Peter, who was an ABC television producer. And the three of us founded our own company to write and produce films and books on historical subjects related to this immense collection of photographs that had come down to us in our family from my great-grandfather Frederick Hill Meserve. I grew up knowing the old man. He lived to the ripe old age of 97. He was born the year Lincoln died. So through that one man I felt as a young man myself that I could reach back and almost touch the era of Abraham Lincoln. It never seemed that far away or distant to me as it seemed to many other people today who think of that as ancient history. Especially students that I teach. To get them excited about the 19th century takes a little bit of work. Eventually they do, but it seems so ancient to them. The era before moving picture in particular. Though I have to say – and I’m going to be kind of freeform today in my talk with you – I have to say that one of the greatest compliments I received after producing Lincoln in 1992 for ABC was a person who came up to me and said, “I had no idea that film footage existed of Abraham Lincoln.” I said, “What are you talking about?” And he said, “Yeah, I saw it in your movie.” And I said, “No, no, no. This was all just using still photographs. You must have been responding to the moves of the camera across the photographs that bring a lifelike quality to them.” And they were astounded. I mean it was kind of odd that they had this false impression, but I found it a compliment. Let me tell you a little bit about – why another Lincoln book in the year 2009? Of course it’s the great bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. So many of us who like and care about this great person have wanted to do new work on his life. Somebody has estimated that in this bicentennial year there will be at least a new book every week. At least 52 new published books in the year 2009. And more in the works. Eric Foner recently told me he’s waiting for later to publish his own large book on Lincoln. He says, “I’m waiting for the rest of you to kill each other off, and then I’ll move in.” But you know, Lincoln has been written about by so many people over the years. So many giant minds and historians. What possibly new is there to be said about him? And of course when I began contemplating my new project I didn’t want to – I decided right off that I wasn’t going to do another biography, that’s for sure. But what new way was there into the subject? And I’m trying to reconstruct how I came to the narrative framework for Looking for Lincoln. I think it came in a variety of ways. For one, in my 1992 book that I co-author with my dad we had ended that biography – and that was a traditional biography following the years 1809-1865 – it had a little twist in that it began in midstream. It began with Abraham Lincoln sneaking into Washington in disguise following his 1860 election to arrive amidst death threats for his inauguration. And then it flashed back to the years of his upbringing. But it was essentially a traditional biography, richly illustrated. But at the end of it we had added something we called “the aftermath”. And it was a little tantalizing look into the future. How the Lincoln we have come to know came to be. Because historical reputations don’t just come out of nowhere. They rest on the labors of many individuals who care for that memory and preserve it, contest it, argue it, and lead it forward. And so we gave a little taste of that. And I remember a conversation with my dad many years ago where I saidto him, “You know that aftermath, you could expand that into an entire book.” And so that conversation was in the back of my mind. I was also very lucky that my brother and I inherited from our great-grandfather and his daughter an immense library of Lincoln materials. And these had been largely unused. A lot of them had been in boxes for some 50 years, moldering in some boxes. And for the first time with this project we decided to get them all out, put them on stacks in shelves, catalog them, and make them available in digital catalog for our own research purposes. They amounted to 5,000 volumes. As I said, many of them had not been opened since my great-grandfather was working with them. They had slips of paper in them with his notes and interesting photographs that he had tucked away that nobody had seen for all those years. So one of my great privileges was to spend a good deal of my first year with the project simply getting to know that library – reading through it, finding out what was in there. And I was interested to see that a lot of the materials coalesced around the great year 1909, which was the centennial year of Lincoln’s birth and a really grand occasion in our national history. Certainly the largest commemorative event centered on any one individual in our country’s history. Now you always have to be careful with archivists around whenever you say something superlative like that – “It’s the greatest!” But in my opinion, no other single figure has been remembered and celebrated and commemorated to the extent that Abraham Lincoln was in 1909. In fact, it makes this bicentennial pale in comparison. Virtually the whole country stopped what it was doing to pay a unified homage to the memory of Lincoln. Schools closed, every newspaper put him on the cover, and there were speeches in all the cities across North and South. By this time in 1909 the South had come to embrace Lincoln’s memory as well as the North. And I’ll get back to talking a little bit about the centennial in a bit. But I found that a lot of the books centered around this period. There were a lot of things published at that time. I also found that there were a lot of materials, as you would expect, from the post-assassination period. And then finally there were a lot of things having to do with simply primary source, first-hand, reminiscent accounts – biographies by people who had known Lincoln, collections and essays by people who had known Lincoln. And as I came to see this, it pointed me towards the idea for the new book. It would not be a biography; it would be the story of the story of the story. It would begin with the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln and it would continue for sixty years, roughly, to the time of the death of Lincoln’s oldest son Robert in 1926. He symbolically to me represents the end of the era of we who knew him – of the firsthand people who had been affected by Lincoln. And of course a few others lived longer than that. Some young children that had met Lincoln lived on much longer. But essentially those who had known him best had passed out of the picture at that point. I mentioned Robert. Robert is the one figure who stretches through the entire book. He haunts it in a way, just as he was haunted by the memory of his father. You know, he was supposed to be in the theater with his father that night. He had been invited to attend. Turned out he wasn’t feeling that well. He decided to stay in the White House where his friend John Hay and he hung out upstairs and played some cards. For the rest of his life, I think he was agonized over this decision. How might things have gone differently if he had perhaps had been there? What might he have been able to do to prevent this horrible murder? This kind of feeling did haunt him. He became the kind of self-appointed guardian of his father’s memory, and he played a very important role in that regard. Some of it was excessive, some of us believe – that he could be controlling. He tried to suppress treatments of his father, for example, that he didn’t agree with – both literary and artistic. For example he would use his own money to buy up copies of a book he didn’t like on his father and then just destroy them – get them off the market. It’s a bit much. He also took charge of his father’s papers. After the death of his father, Lincoln’s papers were in some disarray in the White House. Mostly upstairs in the Cabinet room, but in other places in the house. You probably know there were vandals or tourists or whatever you want to call it coming into the White House after the assassination. It was looted. Things disappeared at that time. And we owe it to Robert the fact that these papers were gathered up, boxed, and shipped out to Illinois where they could be safeguarded – ultimately to make their way into the hands of the American people at the Library of Congress. And if you’ve used the online digital access to these papers you know what a tremendous resource they are. Robert always hoped that he would use the papers to write his own book about his father. But he didn’t have it in him. He wasn’t able to do that. In fact he rarely spoke publicly about his father. But he did keep them away from other would-be authors. He denied access to scholars and others who would liked to have used those papers with one exception. His father’s personal secretaries at the White House, John G. Nicolay and John Hay were given access to the papers to write an official biography of Abraham Lincoln, which when it appeared many years later was dedicated to Robert. If Robert was not by his father’s side, in the White House on the night of the murder, his mother Mary Todd Lincoln certainly was. Mary Todd Lincoln is a very controversial and fascinating figure, and she plays an important part in our book. Of course she had already suffered the loss of her beloved son Willie in 1862. She was a woman of some nervous temperament. A very brilliant woman, in my opinion. A passionate woman devoted to her husband and prone to emotional excess. A problematical figure. We were talking about that earlier, Rod and I. different scholars have different takes on her. But she said in an interview later in her life that that last day, April 14th, she’d never seen her husband in the presidency look so happy. That the weight of the war was lifting from his shoulders. That he even suggested they go on a carriage ride together just the two of them – a very rare event for them. And they had talked about their future together, what they would do after the war, after the presidency. There was a sense of relief. And he even said to her, “Mary, we must not be as miserable as we’ve been. Between the war and the loss of Willie we’ve both been very miserable. We need to live.” Well that very same night, of course, Lincoln was murdered sitting beside his wife. His last words were whispered to her, and this event threw Mary into catastrophic darkness that lasted really the rest of her life. And I won’t go into it now in detail, but that story is a very tragic story – how Mary drifted over the years into becoming really one of the most despised figures in this country. It is so odd to me that the widow of this revered figure, Abraham Lincoln, should have ended up so despised. One paper called her a mercenary prostitute. She was put on a very short lease by the executor of her husband’s estate David Davis. She briefly had her own home, but was mostly forced to live in what she called “hated boarding houses.” When the press became virulent against her she finally fled the country with her son and lived in a kind of exile in Europe. Later she was institutionalized for insanity by her son Robert, but she got out and proved her sanity in another court of law. She broke all ties with him, called him her monster of mankind son, and disappeared again to the continent to live out most of the remainder of her life. So the story of Mary Lincoln I find to be a tragic kind of counterpoint to the story of her husband and his memory. As he became more and more revered, she became more and more pushed to the side. And in her place, interestingly, a fantasy figure from the past – a real girlfriend of Lincoln’s from his early years, Ann Rutledge, we’ve all heard of – she was rediscovered as one of Lincoln’s early loves. And she was kind of raised up almost into a position of divine consort next to the great deity of Abraham Lincoln, even as Mary Lincoln was pushed aside and anathematized. Very odd story. When I show you some slides in a few minutes I’ll tell you more about that. Another figure, of course, that I didn’t mention yet, was the figure of William Herndon. He played an extremely important role in the preserving of Lincoln’s memory. This was Lincoln’s law partner from Springfield, Illinois for 17 years. He was devoted to Lincoln. The day of the assassination was one of the bleakest days in his life. He decided to go on and dedicate the rest of his days to research into his great friend’s life. And he launched what’s been called the first great oral history project in our history. He decided to find and speak with and interview anybody and everybody he could find that had known his friend going back to childhood. And so he launched this multiyear process. It’s fascinating. And the great publication in recent years on this you may know of by friends of mine is called Herndon’s Informants, which now makes his interview materials very accessible both in book form and online. And they make fascinating reading. And I won’t go into huge detail over some of these, except let me give you one example. William Herndon heard that Lincoln’s step-mother was still alive, and she was living up in a little town of Illinois called Goosenest Prairie. She was living in a tiny little two room log cabin. It was in some decay. Amazing to me, again, just as an aside, that the mother of the president of the United States was living in a tiny little rough cabin in Illinois. It just shows you the distance in time from our own period. Herndon had to ride his horse some distance to find the cabin. And when he got there he did find Sarah Bush, but he was disappointed at first. She seemed to be out of it, to have lost her memory. Kind of didn’t recognize who he was. But eventually he got down on his hands and knees and looked her in the eye, and suddenly a light shone in her eyes and she got who he was and what he was there for. And all these stories started coming out about Lincoln as a boy. And this is one of the richest interviews Herndon got. When you think of the myth of the young Lincoln reading by the firelight, walking to borrow books and writing on a shingle and shaving it off and writing again. All of these things that are now part of the lore of the young Abraham Lincoln. Many of them come from her memories told to William Herndon that day at Goosenest Prairie. Wonderful to read those things. But this is an example. Ultimately there were hundreds of these interviews. Not only written – Herndon would take shorthand, sit there and take good dictation. He was very good about that. But he also then commence in many cases a correspondence with his interviewees – a written correspondence that in some cases went back and forth many times and included follow-up questions and whatnot. In this way he amassed a tremendous amount of information. Herndon, of course, is also responsible for the Ann Rutledge story. He discovered it in his research. It’s a factual story. It’s certainly a very important person in Lincoln’s early life. But he had never talked about it with Mary. It was just part of his past. And when he came out and lecturedand said in Springfield that this was the true love of Lincoln’s life, that he’d never loved anybody else, that he’d never loved his own wife, that his heart lay buried in the grave with Ann Rutledge. Of course when Mary read the transcripts of that talk, she was beside herself. This became her true, hated enemy, William Herndon. And I think he went way too far. I mean how would he know this? He claimed to know Lincoln better than his wife did. Mary said, “He never even mentioned her name to me. I never heard a breath of that word.” And she didn’t deny that Ann had existed, but simply that he just didn’t think about her that much during their long marriage – volatile as it was, but deeply loving. One more figure I’ll talk about very briefly is the figure of Frederick Douglass. A fascinating character that I have come to think very highly of. You all know the great Frederick Douglass, the former slave from Maryland who escaped to the North and became part of the abolitionist movement and eventually one of the great abolitionists in our lead up to the Civil War. Early on a strong critic of Abraham Lincoln. Felt he was moving too slowly on the whole matter of emancipation. Felt critical of him on many levels Interestingly, after the emancipation Proclamation he was invited to the White House and actually met Abraham Lincoln and had a long talk with him one-on-one. And he came away from that talk a changed man. This man who he had criticized as uncommitted to the cause of abolition – he came away saying, “I was wrong. He is as committed as I am.” He may not agree with all his tactics, but he came to believe in him and the authenticity of his commitment to freedom for all. And he went on to become – there’s so many things to say about Frederick Douglass. Let me just say that at the assassination he too was devastated. It was a terrible day for him. Mary Lincoln reached out to him at that time. He’d come to think highly of her. She in some ways was more committed to the abolition cause than her husband. She was an extraordinary woman in many ways. But she sent Frederick Douglass a gift upon her husband’s death, and it was her husband’s favorite walking stick. It was an antler-headed cane. And she said, “My husband loved this, and he would like you to have it.” And that became one of his prized possessions. He took it with him wherever he went – to many of his speeches. And he became one of the great orators of the day. And he often spoke about Abraham Lincoln in the years ahead. He gave dozens of talks about Lincoln which make very interesting reading to this day. Sometimes he would take this cane up and he would wave it around and say, “This cane used to belong to Abraham Lincoln, and now it belongs to me.” And he saw his vocation, in a way, to keep alive the memory of the progressive Lincoln – Lincoln the Emancipator. The Lincoln who was slowly but surely coming to a vision of a multiracial future for this country. And Frederick Douglass said, “I know if he had lived he would have finished that journey with us. He was at heart a progressive figure, an anti-slavery figure.” And so Douglass kept alive this memory of Lincoln. And in some ways that was a very different memory than the memory propounded even by Robert Lincoln, who often said, “My father was a very conservative man,” and emphasized the conservatism of the Lincoln Legacy. So this represents one example of the kind of ways that Lincoln’s memory was contested after his death. And of course the memory was very different wherever you went. If you were in the North versus the South – very, very different memories of who Abraham Lincoln had been. And as scholars like David Herbert Donald have taught us all, there was a difference between the east coast and the western memories of Lincoln as well. On the east coast he was always more revered for his statesmanship, but the western memory emphasized that kind of Paul Bunyan-like character that he was as well – that self-made man of the woods who told stories and made friends. The human Lincoln. And somehow our memory of him is a merging between different memories of different groups. So that I don’t go on too long, let me just tell you – I’m now going to talk briefly about this period, 1865-1926 in one new way. This period in which Lincoln’s memory grew and grew and grew. His reputation grew higher and higher until by 1909, the year of the centennial, it had reached a kind of apex. And he had surpassed the reputation of even George Washington as the most revered figure in our country’s history. Ironically this period coincided with the steady decline in race relations in our country. So that decade by decade after that extraordinary experiment of Reconstruction after the Civil War you see a terrible backward turn into the era of Jim Crow and segregation and lynching. As if this marvelous, progressive legacy of the Civil War and of Abraham Lincoln was being betrayed – it was somehow being shoved to the backburner. And I learned from the scholar David Blight that what was going on was that the nation really came to feel that it needed to heal the breach between North and South – between the white north and the white south. And it came to feel it couldn’t do that effectively and at the same time address the race problem in this country. And that was shoved to the backburner. In 1908, just six months before the Lincoln centennial, a terrible race riot broke out in the city of Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln’s home town. A white woman named Mabel Hallam claimed to have been raped by a black man. This is often the way riots would begin. Later it turned out that she had lied, that she had made it up. She was trying to protect a boyfriend from another man. The white population of Springfield – a large group of them – began to assemble in the African- American section of town. A mob assembled. Photographs show boys and men and some women amongst the mob. The people were dragged out of their houses. Houses were set on fire. And in one case an 84-year-old man was dragged out of his house, his throat was cut, and he was pulled up on a rope and lynched. And he was dangling within sight of the great statue of Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the city. And a voice was heard to cry out, “Lincoln freed you. We’ll show you where you belong.” You don’t hear too much about these race riots, but 2,000 African-Americans fled from the city of Springfield during these three days. Eventually the National Guard came in to bring peace and order. Many of them never returned. It was a terrible, terrible time in that city’s history. Just six months later came the bicentennial. And this was, as I said, the greatest event of any of its kind. And storm center for the observations was Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln’s home town. And so they had a tremendous array of events scheduled for the day. Ambassadors came in from overseas, and it was a star-studded affair from morning till night February 12th, 1909. It culminated in a grand gala banquet. The only problem was that the banquet was entirely segregated. “A lily-white affair,” said the Chicago Tribune, “from first to last.” The African-American community in Springfield revered Lincoln. It was they in a sense – and African-Americans across the country – that were safeguarding the legacy and memory of Lincoln as emancipator even as white Americans wanted to forget that aspect of his legacy. And you can trace this as well over these decades. In the early years after the assassination there was tremendous interest in Lincoln as emancipator. And this gradually declined to the point where Lincoln as savior of the Union replaced that memory. The African-American community in Springfield said, “No we want our own commemorative event,” and they held it. They organized their own event in the largest black church in the city – it held, I think, a thousand people. And they had their own speeches. And during the lead-up to this book I read, I think, hundreds of speeches that were given at the time of the Lincoln Centennial. And there was one that was given that night in Springfield that I found the most moving of any of them all. It was by a minister by the name of James McGee. And James McGee got up and he said it’s wrong that we’ve been kept out of the great gala banquet. We should be there. We love Lincoln as much as anybody in this city, as much as anybody in this country. And furthermore, African-Americans across this land need to continue to revere him and need to make pilgrimages to this city to pay homage to what he called "Lincoln’s sacred dust." And then James McGee looked ahead into the future a hundred years to the year 2009 and he made a prediction. He predicted that by that year, racial prejudice would have been banished from the land as Salem witchcraft. And when I read that I felt the chills go up my spine. And we all know that racial prejudice is still with us. But we also know that in this year we have inaugurated the first African-American president of the United States. And at that inauguration, whatever your politics, this is a matter of tremendous pride. At Obama’s inauguration he said a generation earlier his father couldn’t have got a cup of coffee in this town. And Abraham Lincoln certainly could not have predicted this outcome, either. But in many ways there’s an arc that connects our time with the age of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and all those who struggled for freedom and equality in that far-gone era that we might call the first Civil Rights movement. That had so much hope and then died, and took many, many decades to come back again. Thank you. What I’d like to do, if it’s alright with you, is I have a few pictures to show you. Because I’m known for pictures, not just for words. These will help bring to life a little bit of what I’ve talked about this afternoon, and also maybe a few new things. So I think I can work this button. Yes. I’ll just tell you a little bit about what you’re seeing. This is of course – you may recognize this is a famous photograph – a famous flag raising ceremony at Fort Sumter off the coast of South Carolina. This is where the war started. The firing on Fort Sumter was the catalyzing event that began the Civil War. And here the day is April 14th, 1865 and the war, in a sense, is coming to an official end. That same day, the photographers who were there for the ceremony went into the city of Charleston and photographed the rubble, the ruined city following the fires. And they saw this small group of African-American kids sitting and not many others around. That same evening Lincoln headed out for the theater wearing this hat. We loved this hat so much we put it on the cover of our book. It’s so recognizable. It belongs to the Smithsonian Institute, of course. There’s Ford Theater as it looked back then. You can see 10th Street. Muddy 10th Street. And there’s the box. There’s the chair. You can still see the wonderful reproduction of it in the theater. This is a photograph of what the stage looked like at Act III, Scene II just before the murder took place. It was set for that scene about to begin. Lincoln’s body was taken, as we all know – and tourists by the thousands come and see this to this day – he was taken across the street looking for someplace to get away from the crowd. Some private place where he could be laid. And a man who was living in a boarding house came to the door and said, “Bring him over here. He can use my room.” So they went upstairs into the back of this small boarding house, past two rooms, into a back bedroom. Very tiny room if you’ve been in there. And over the course of the night Lincoln lay dying. The man in the chair next to him holding the watch is the Surgeon General, Barnes. He’s pronouncing death at 7:22 in the morning. This man, a very interesting figure, lived in the boarding house. And he was a photographer. And he actually – as soon as Lincoln’s body was removed from the room he brought his camera and set it up in the bedroom, and he took a picture of the bed. Very rare view of the bed. You can see the blood-soaked pillow. This wood-spindle bed that Lincoln died in. It was too short for his long body. They tried to break off the wooden spindles, but they were too hard. The men in the room couldn’t break the bed, so he had to be laid diagonally on it. And these boots were left behind. As soon as the – almost immediately, just as at the White House, souvenir hunters descended on the Peterson house and began taking things. Everything disappeared, basically. Anything moveable. His boots, the blood-soaked pillows, the bandages on the floor. People started actually carrying off pieces of wallpaper. There was even evidence that people took splinters from the floor just to have some memento of what they already recognized to be one of the extraordinary moments in American history. And many of these things disappeared for a generation and then began coming up for sale. Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, took charge of the manhunt for the assassins, and also for the public information that was released. You can see in this picture the Treasury Building with the black bands, mourning bans. You can see the flag at half mast. This is Easter Sunday. It’s weird that the assassination took place on Good Friday, and two days later churches all across the country had to think about the meaning of the assassination on Easter Day. It also happened to coincide with Passover, and we chronicle how rabbis also dealt with the huge event of this martyrdom. The beginning of what we call the apotheosis of Lincoln, his rise in mythology. He began to be compared to Moses. You remember Moses died before he ever entered the Promised Land. Martin Luther King evoked that in one of his last speeches. “I may not get there with you.” Lincoln may not get to the Promised Land of the post-war era, but he had taken the people to the edge and had been able to glimpse into it from Mount Pisgah. Christian preachers compared him to Christ himself – to the idea that as Christ died for the sins of the world on Good Friday, Lincoln had died on Good Friday for the sins of his nation. And you’ll remember his second inaugural address referred to the sins of the nation – that the war, in a sense, was punishment for a crime that had been committed by both North and South. Because the North was complicit in the institution of slavery and had profited from that trade, both sides had to bear the brunt of the punishment. There was a deep theological aspect to Lincoln’s political rhetoric, and the country picked up on this in this aftermath period. He became referred to as the nation’s savior. Just as Washington was its father, Lincoln became known as its savior. You know William Seward had been attacked that same night. I’m sure in an audience such as this, you all know the story of how the Secretary of State was also on the attack list that Booth and his co-conspirators were going to take out. A man named Paine had come into his house and attacked him with a knife. He could have certainly killed him, had he not been wearing a metal brace around his face that had been setting a broken jaw from an earlier carriage accident. He was slashed very badly, and he was unconscious for much of the period after this. On Easter Sunday he was awake and was wheeled to a window where he could look out and saw a half mast flag, such as this one. And then he guessed that Lincoln had been killed. When he asked the question – and Doris Kearns Goodwin likes to tell this story, if you’ve heard her – he asked the question, “Is Lincoln dead?” And they said, “How did you know?” He said, “He would have been the first one to visit me if he were still alive.” For years we thought that Seward never was photographed full frontal in order to hide the scars of the wound. During the course of research for this book we found this one picture, and you do see some of the scars on the left side of his face. Lincoln’s funeral train back to Springfield. He was taken back there alongside with his son Willie who was disinterred from a Washington tomb and taken back to be buried with his father. This grand Lincoln funeral train, which almost recreated his inaugural journey east four years earlier. Adding a few different cities. Taking the body back slowly so that the American people could mourn and come out and see funeral after funeral in city after city. And stand by the railroad lines and see the train go by, almost in slow motion. Each city competing who had the grander hearse to receive him with. This is Philadelphia. That’s broad street, on the way to Independence Hall, where that funeral took place. And this is obviously New York City. That’s city hall in New York where a huge ceremony took place. And finally, after a week’s travel back to Springfield, this is Lincoln’s home decorated for the funeral. That’s his horse, Old Bob. He was brought out of retirement and allowed to – given the honor of leading the procession to the graveyard. People lined up to pay their respects. Mary Lincoln stayed at home back in Washington. She was too devastated to attend the funeral. Interestingly – let me go back once – the city fathers in Springfield had a different idea of what to do with Lincoln. They wanted to see him buried in a big tomb in the center of the city. They made their own plans for this. Even though Mary Lincoln had said that it was his wish and hers that he be buried in a beautiful rural cemetery there that they had chosen. It came down to a bad fight between them with letters and telegrams going back and forth. Robert was trying to negotiate for them. And finally Mary had to threaten them. She said, “If you persist in disobeying my wishes, I’ll have him brought back to Washington and he’ll be buried here in this crypt underneath the capital building. Which had been originally built to house the remains of George Washington, but was never used as such. And they backed off and said okay. They would proceed with a memorial of their own without the body in the city. This is a wonderful piece of art that came in the same period that showed Lincoln coming up into the heavens to be greeted by Father Washington. This is again the idea of the apotheosis of Lincoln. Here’s a group of teachers. This is interesting to me because it represents a new phenomenon, which is the idea of taking pilgrimages to the historical sites associated with Abraham Lincoln. And this occurred the very first summer after the assassination. A group of teachers in Indiana who sought out one of Lincoln’s cabins there and posed in front of it. This became a tremendous new swelling interest to the American public. To seek out the places where Lincoln had been – his home in Springfield, his cabins, the White House itself, Ford’s Theater, etc. And in a sense to commune with the memory of Lincoln. One of the earliest biographers of Abraham Lincoln was this woman. Very little thought of or heard about. Phebe Ann Hanaford. She was actually one of the nation’s first Unitarian ministers and wrote an interesting biography of Lincoln that came out that very same year. That’s William Herndon, and that’s the house where he found the step-mother Sarah Bush and where he conducted her interview. There she is. And Herndon of course went on to produce with a partner a very important, three volume early biography of Lincoln’s early, pre-presidential life that is of influence to this day. That’s Frederick Douglass as he looked about the time of Lincoln’s assassination. There’s the stick I told you about that you can see in the Frederick Douglass Home in Anacostia. He went on to become one of the grand old men of the republic. He deserves a wonderful lecture of his own. Mary drifted from one sad stage of her life to another. At times she became very involved with what was known as spiritualism. She came to believe that she could contact her beloved lost who were waiting for her in heaven. And there were photographers such as this one who were willing to take advantage of that deep belief and hope and produce for her this image, which she believed was real. That he had captured the image of her ghostly husband tenderly behind her. I’d like to know what she paid him for this. And there’s Robert at about the time he had his mother institutionalized. That’s the last image of Mary. And here we see some of the – I mentioned that African-Americans kept alive the emancipationist legacy of Abraham Lincoln, and one of the ways they did so was in honoring the emancipation day itself, which became largely a black observation. Rather ignored by white America. I love this picture of this woman at her writing desk. You can see a painting of Lincoln. And here’s some of the scenes from the Springfield race riots of 1908. This is William Donegan, the 84-year-old man who was lynched. I don’t think I mentioned to you, he turned out to have been Abraham Lincoln’s boot-maker and friend. Here’s what the country was becoming more and more preoccupied with, which was healing the breach between North and South. This is a reunion at Gettysburg. They’re reenacting Pickett’s Charge. The Confederates, instead of getting to the top of the ridge and being mowed down, would get up and have handshaking ceremonies. And this is an extremely important part of our history, healing this breach. It’s not to be ridiculed in any way. It was extremely important. My only problem is, why could it not have gone on and at the same time the healing of the racial breach? Something that Theodore Roosevelt wanted. He wished it were possible. He tried to make it possible in many ways, but the country didn’t want it. Even at the amazing dedication of the Lincoln memorial, they decided there would be no talk about slavery or emancipation or race. This was an inappropriate theme. It was all going to be about national unity, North and South. And if you visit the memorial you’ll see that symbolism in the architecture itself. The entwined symbols of North and South, and Lincoln as the savior of the Union. There’s even behind-the-scenes correspondence where the organizer said, “We want nothing about slavery or emancipation or race. This is only rubbing salt in the old wounds. Robert Lincoln actually came out of hiding. This is his last public event. You can see him being escorted up the steps for this event. He had weirdly been on hand for the assassination not only of his father, but of two other presidents: Garfield and McKinley. And he came to think he was a jinx. He stayed away. When presidents invited him to things he would say, “You don’t want me.” But there were two presidents on the stand on this day and he came out. And just four years later he died. And this is his little funeral in Manchester, Vermont. His funeral there. When you think of the millions who came out for his father, and then just a tiny handful by his wishes for his own very private ceremony. And finally I wanted to show you my great-grandfather Frederick Hill Meserve and his daughter Dorothy Kunhardt, as taken about 1905. And there he is as I remember him in his upstairs study in New York City where my father would take me as a boy of twelve to see him. And I would be the object of his kindly interest. This is one of his finds. He saved 15,000 Matthew Brady glass negatives from destruction, including this famous view which went on to become the image on the Lincoln penny. And there is my father Phil Kunhardt Jr. with one of his great friends Gordon Parks right at the end of his life. My father died in the year 2006. Did not get to see this project come to fruition, but was a big fan of it and I wish he were here. And we dedicated our book to him. And that’s all. Thank you. Thank you all. I don’t know how we’re doing for time. Rod Ross: Probably two quick questions. Philip B. Kunhardt III: I apologize, I went on too long. But I’d like to take any questions you have. Anybody? Yes sir. Why don’t you start and then you be second, sir. Go ahead. Audience Member: I’d just like to ask you what’s being done in terms of application of modern technology – digitalization of the images? Are they being enhanced? Is more information being pulled out of them? Philip B. Kunhardt III: Are you talking about our collection in particular? Audience Member: As a basis. Philip B. Kunhardt III: Well I don’t know about more information. I am fascinated when we do find new information in old pictures that have been neglected. This very year a researcher discovered what is probably Abraham Lincoln riding on a horse at the Gettysburg Ceremonies. It had been in a glass plate that had never been seen before, because nobody had looked with such a close eye in the crowd. Albeit, the figure is seen from behind, but it’s riding a horse and wearing a top hat and there are people saluting that figure. And to me there’s some mysteries about it. It’s odd that this figure – the attention of most in the crowd is on the dais, and yet this figure is riding in the opposite direction. I don’t quite – I can’t quite pinpoint when that would have been in the day’s ceremony. So I still stay somewhat neutral on that identification, though I think it’s very interesting. A generation ago, a famous researcher here at the National Archives, Josephine Cobb, who is a great friend of our family’s, did discover the image of Abraham Lincoln actually in the midst of delivering his Gettysburg Address in one of those same crowd shots. And in that enlargement, you can clearly see him looking down at his manuscript in the midst of that ceremony. That was one of the great finds. In terms of digitization, we have a collection of about 80,000 images and we are in the process of getting high-resolution digitized versions of all of them. It’s been in a private collection all these years, but we’re now gifting it to the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation. It is going to be fully available to public use, and we’ll see what happens there. Thank you. Audience Member: Yes, I wanted to ask you about Lincoln’s birthday, which was celebrated as a state holiday in some states like my native California. I was surprised to learn it was not celebrated in all states. So I was wondering if you had looked into that and whether the subsequent substitution of President’s Day had anything to do with an attempt to make Lincoln more acceptable to the South. Philip B. Kunhardt III: That’s a great question. I wish I had a pre-thought out answer to it, which I don’t. But you’re absolutely correct. The Lincoln centennial was actually kind of a grassroots movement. It was not a top down remembrance. And state by state was how that birthday was remembered. And it was only later that it became a national observance. I think it’s interesting that after the assassination there was a kind of struggle to determine whether the assassination date, the death date, April 16th, 1865, versus the birth date, February 12th, would be the better day for a big Lincoln commemorative event. And they kind of went back and forth for awhile. Ultimately the death date receded and the birth date – probably partly because it was so close in time to Washington and increasingly to Frederick Douglass as well, later in the 20th century. I’m a little vague on my answer, but you are absolutely correct that the states did differ in terms of their commemorative events. The South, obviously, in the beginning had no interest at all in celebrating Lincoln’s life. He was largely hated throughout the South. After the war he was seen as the one who had brought all this suffering and pain on them. And yet you did see people who respected him. Robert E. Lee certainly did, and others. But it took in a sense almost a whole generation turning over in the South before a new generation wanted to rethink the past and become part of the whole country again. And they began to see things about Lincoln that weren’t as bad as they had heard. He had southern roots of his own, as his wife did. He had that kind of malice towards none, that sense of forgiveness at the end of the war that another leader might not have had. Certainly some of the more Radical Republicans of the day wanted vengeance and wanted harsher justice. And Lincoln, without giving up the backbone – the absolute commitment to the end of slavery – Lincoln wanted to see healing for this country. We were never going to go backward into the old era, into the slave era. That was for sure. But he wanted to see healing, and this made him a more attractive figure, I think, in the South. And his reputation began to spread. And I do believe by 1909 his memory was honored in many states in the South. Not all. Certainly in Kentucky, his own home state, a major observance which Theodore Roosevelt attended and which I found was the most interracial event that I could find in the whole year. There were numerous African-Americans present, including on the speaker’s stand. And Theodore Roosevelt himself lifted up Lincoln’s legacy as emancipator alongside that of national savior. And it was a little moment of possibility there. What might have been if we could have followed that vision. And then it wasn’t to be. Yes ma’am? Can we take one more? I didn’t bring a wristwatch, so I’m sorry if I went over. This will be the last question. Audience Member: What were Lincoln’s last words? And my second question is: is the crypt below the capital still vacant? Philip B. Kunhardt III: There are people here that know better than I. I’ve actually never toured it firsthand. I would like to, but it is still there. It has never been used as a burial site. And I don’t know if the public is ever allowed in. Is that the case? Yes? You can go see that. I should do that. Clinton, we should come back. I have my son Clinton with me here today. We should do that sometime. The last words of Lincoln. Again it’s always dangerous to say the last or the first or the greatest, but what we think maybe his last words were turning to his wife and saying – well he put his arm around her at one point. And his wife looked at him and said, “What will Mrs. Harris think of you with your arm around me?” And he looked at her and he said, “She won’t think a thing.” Thank you very much. Doug Swanson: Folks, we’re going to be moving up to the Archives shop now for the book signing. So if you meet us upstairs, then you can ask Philip some more questions.