That interview put an end for the time being to the search for “the letter to the Queen,” as the item had come to be called in the office.
When the Life was finally complete Mr. Lincoln wrote me: “It seemed to me at first that the field had been too many times gleaned to hope for much from the work you were undertaking, and I must confess my astonishment and pleasure upon the result of your untiring research. I consider it an indispensable adjunct to the work of Nicolay and Hay.”
Mr. Nicolay, however, never agreed.
If Robert Lincoln was always friendly he threw me once into the greatest panic I suffered in the course of my Lincoln work, though this was long after the Life was published. I had gone to him to ask if he would arrange for me to consult the collection of Presidential papers. “Impossible,” he said. “They are in the safety vault of my bank. I won’t allow anybody to see them. There is nothing of my father’s there, that is of value—Nicolay and Hay have published everything; but there are many letters to him which if published now would pain, possibly discredit able and useful men still living. Bitter things are written when men are trying to guide a country through a war, particularly a Civil War. I fear misuse of those papers so much that I am thinking of destroying them. Besides, somebody is always worrying me about them, just as you are, and I must be ungenerous. I think I will burn them.”
I was scared; I feared he would do it, but Herbert Putnam, the head of the Congressional Library, had already seen to that. He did not burn them; the Library got them finally, but with the condition that they were not to be opened until twenty-one years after Robert Lincoln’s death. He died in 1926. The papers will not be available to students until 1947, which probably lets me out!
The early portrait set the key for the series and, as it turned out, a much higher key than I had believed possible. I found that court records did yield unpublished documents, that every now and then I ran on a man or woman who said more or less casually, “Why, we have a letter of Lincoln’s written to father in ——. Copy it if you wish.” Occasionally I found a speech not in the “Complete Works.” By the time the work was put into book form in 1899 I had an appendix of three hundred unpublished speeches and letters. This did not mean that none of them had ever been in print. Many of them had appeared in newspapers or historical magazines. “Unpublished” meant uncollected. On the whole this collection stood the scrutiny of experts very well, though I think I was swindled in the case of at least one document, a forgery by a man recommended to me by an honest scholar who had used the man frequently for years.
Forgery was easy, so was pilfering of documents in those days, so little attention did clerks give to their old papers, so glad were they to get rid of them. There was frequently no objection to a student carrying off anything that interested him. One of the most important documents in the controversy over the legitimacy of Lincoln’s mother is now to be found in the Barton collection which the University of Chicago bought. Mr. Barton probably asked permission to take it home for examination, a common enough practice in Illinois as well as in Kentucky, and forgot to return it. Probably most of the legal documents in the private Lincoln collections have been stolen. The original thief would have been horrified to have that harsh word applied to him. He simply put it into his pocket with or without permission, saying, “I’ll just take this along.”
But while I did get together some three hundred pieces I came nowhere near turning up all the letters and speeches then at large. I was under a time limit. Since I ended my search scores of items, some of value, have been published in one or another collection. I shall be surprised if, as time goes on, there does not turn up every now and then a genuine letter, though now more than ever caution must be taken in accepting a new piece. The forging of historical documents has become a lucrative trade.
From the beginning I did my best to reconstruct the physical surroundings of Lincoln’s homes and activities. I was particularly interested in the setting of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which I followed in their order; but it was not until I reached Galesburg, Illinois, where on October 7, 1858, the fifth debate was staged, that I found the stirring and picturesque material I sought in order to picture the scene of a debate. I was delighted that it should have been the fifth debate, which I have always considered the most important of the series, for it was in that that Lincoln brought his argument down to what to him was the crux of the whole matter, that is, that slavery was wrong and must be kept back or it would spread over the whole country.
The debate had taken place on the campus of Knox College on the east front of its historic Old Main, one of the most beautiful college buildings of that period in the Middle West.