It's About Time Lincoln Got a Presidential Library

More books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other historical figure in world history except Napoleon Bonaparte. Hundreds of new books about Lincoln are published every year. Major centers and universities dedicated to the study of Abraham Lincoln exist in half a dozen states in America, in Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan and even Albania. And while there has been great discussion about how the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, currently under construction in Springfield, Illinois, will affect that state’s tourism, no one has asked how it will affect Lincoln scholarship, or if there is even anything new to discover about the ubiquitous Civil War president.

These are important questions because “the notion that there is nothing new to discover about Lincoln is just dead wrong,” said Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln scholar and co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. “I think the scholarship of the 1990s has proved that, we’ve found all kinds of new sources.”

The Lincoln presidential library is a $115 million complex that will house the Illinois State Historical Library’s Lincoln collection, which is the largest in the world at more than 49,000 items. The collection has been stored for years in the basement of the Illinois Old State Capitol, accessible only to researchers. The public will now have access beginning in summer 2004.

Bringing the Illinois State Historical Library collection out of the basement, making it more readily available as well as more visible through an auspicious presidential library is certainly important, but is not the only contribution to Lincoln scholarship, said Wilson.

The Illinois State Historical Library is unmatched in the study of Lincoln’s pre-presidential life because it is so rich in Illinois history, Wilson said. Not only does it contain thousands of Lincoln items, but also an enormous amount of manuscript material related to Lincoln, such as the personal papers of his contemporaries. The library also has a vast collection of contemporary newspapers and journals, which it will continue to expand.

Despite the holistic implications in the name, the collection at the Lincoln presidential library is not an amalgamation of all the major Lincoln collections scattered across the country. Nor could it be. There is an unwritten rule in museum science that says what belongs to one museum stays at that museum. The Illinois state collection continues to grow nevertheless.

Private donations to the state’s collections have been made at an unprecedented rate since the announcement of the presidential library plan in 1999, including rare and one-of-a-kind photographs and newspaper prints, as well as original documents from Lincoln’s legal career and one previously unknown Mary Lincoln letter. These new additions offer new scholarship opportunities in the study of Lincoln by making available previously unavailable, and in some cases unknown, Lincoln-related materials.

The presidential library is not only a repository, but it will also disseminate information in ways important to Lincoln research. The library is currently working to digitize all of Lincoln’s papers, house temporary exhibits, host scholarly conferences and lecture series and create education outreach programs , said director Richard Norton Smith. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation is also reviewing a possible research fellowship program.

Fellowships are an important development to advancing Lincoln scholarship, said John Rhodehamel, curator of American history manuscripts at the Huntington Library. The Huntington Library contains thousands of rare books on Lincoln and the Civil War, and annually spends about $900,000 on research fellowships.

“There are not enough humanities research centers in the country -- as opposed to universities – where people can come and really concentrate on a certain topic and be paid to do it,” Rhodehamel said.

The presidential library will enhance Lincoln scholarship also by its design, said Thomas F. Schwartz, Illinois State Historian. The library was not built to be the be-all, end-all of Lincoln libraries or to eclipse other collections, but to incite people’s interest and encourage them to further exploration. Like the hub of a wheel, the library points people outward to explore the larger Lincoln landscape. “Anyplace that seeks to tell the Lincoln story can become a destination, can become a portal,” Schwartz said.

Besides the abundance of Lincoln sites in Illinois alone, there are major Lincoln collections at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Ind., and the Lincoln Library-Museum in Harrogate, Tenn.

The sheer number of Lincoln repositories around the U.S. and the world, as well as the huge effort being put into creating the new library, inevitably prompts the perennial questions about Lincoln studies: is there anything new and original left to say or research about the prairie lawyer and Civil War president?

“I’m persuaded that the kinds of materials that are at the historical library are going to yield more and more as we learn more about Lincoln’s early life,” said Wilson, whose pre-presidential Lincoln biography, Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln, won the Lincoln Prize.

Wilson and his co-director at the Lincoln Studies Center, Lincoln scholar Rodney O. Davis, are achieving editorial projects that further illuminate Lincoln’s pre-presidential life and coincide with that aspect of the presidential library. In 1997, they published the seminal book Herndon’s Informants, which printed for the first time all the letters about Lincoln received by Lincoln’s former law partner, William Herndon, in preparation for his Lincoln biography.

Another recent breakthrough in Lincoln study, stemming from historic Illinois newspapers, was the finding of a poem about suicide written by Lincoln and published anonymously in 1838. This poem, while known to exist, had never been found before by Lincoln scholars, including Herndon. The find sheds further light not only on Lincoln’s literary skills, but also on his penchant for melancholy.

“We are in a really rich period of interest [in Lincoln]. I don’t think it’s been this strong since 1959,” said Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer. There have been “a huge number of books” published recently that further illuminate Lincoln, such as recent scholarship about the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln as commander in chief, Holzer said

“It’s on everybody’s mind, especially with a presidential election coming up,” he said.

Daniel Weinberg, owner of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, Inc. in Chicago, Illinois, agreed, and said that as a bookseller focused on Lincoln, he sees the state of Lincoln scholarship as “alive and well,” with 300-400 new books published every year.

“ Lincoln permeates,” Weinberg said. “Every generation has to revisit him.”

Lincoln scholars agree that this is a propitious time for the opening of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. While interest in Lincoln is cyclical, there is a current upswing due to upcoming celebrations of the sesquicentennial of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 2008, Lincoln’s bicentennial birthday in 2009, and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War beginning in 2011.