The dean of all Abraham Lincoln scholars passed away on March 31, 2025. He was 101. Wayne Calhoun Temple, known to everyone as “Doc,” celebrated his 101st birthday on February 5th.
Temple was an internationally recognized authority on Abraham Lincoln. He was the Chief Deputy Director of the Illinois State Archives for decades. After serving under Eisenhower in Europe during World War II and receiving an undergraduate degree in engineering, Temple began his career as a historian working as a research assistant under the renowned professor J.G. Randall, then earning master’s and Ph.D. degrees under the direction of Randall and then Richard R. Current. Over the years he was a prolific writer and received many awards, including the “Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial edition of the Order of Lincoln.” He was Editor-in-Chief of the Lincoln Herald, Secretary-Treasurer of the National Lincoln-Civil War Council, on Memorial Bibliography committee for Lincoln Lore, and many other service positions. Temple also was a guest on a Lincoln Documentary produced by PBS and a member of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s Advisory Committee to mark the 200th Anniversary of Lincoln’s birth in 2009.
Among his many books are Abraham Lincoln: From Skeptic to Prophet, Lincoln’s Connections with the Illinois-Michigan Canal, Lincoln’s Surgeons at His Assassination, Lincoln’s Travels on the River Queen, and Lincoln’s Confidant: The Life of Noah Brooks.
Those of us in the Lincoln Group of DC who took the tour out to Illinois in 2016 got to meet Wayne Temple in person. He and the late Dick Hart told us stories of their long careers in Lincoln scholarship. I had the privilege of being at his table for dinner and having a long discussion about Lincoln’s connections with the Illinois & Michigan Canal, which I talked about in my own book on Lincoln’s interests in science and technology. Temple was 92 years old at the time and only recently retired from the Illinois State Archives. That’s him and his wife from 2016 in the photo above.
Wayne Temple was the impetus for the Lincoln Day-by-Day project in 1959, which the Lincoln Group of DC helped bring to fruition. In fact, Wayne said he was incredibly proud to have worked with us and acknowledged that Day-by-Day never would have happened without the LGDC. He further suggested that there are plenty of gaps that perhaps we could work to fill in even today.
No doubt much will be said in the next few days as Lincoln scholars and aficionados recount their memories of “the dean,” “Doc” Wayne Temple. I know I will as I recently wrote about my own interactions with him as part of my forthcoming book. He will be missed.
[Photo credit: David J. Kent, taken in 2016 in Springfield, IL]
Coming in February 2026: Unable to Escape This Toil
Available now – Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.
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David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.
His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
Abraham Lincoln stood at the podium in the U.S. House of Representative chambers on July 27, 1848. His topic – the presidential question. Notwithstanding the negative reaction to his previous “spot resolutions” speech, Lincoln was still considered an effective speaker and thus was called upon to help convince people that Zachary Taylor was the correct choice as the Whig nominee for president. Lincoln had strongly supported the nomination of Taylor over the aging Henry Clay, previously Lincoln’s beau ideal of a statesman. He even spoke at the nominating convention in favor of Taylor.
Join me and author Michael Vorenberg on Thursday, March 13, 2025, for the White House Historical Association’s History Happy Hour. The program is free and begins at 6 pm ET. 
The Annual Abraham Lincoln Institute (ALI) Symposium is set for March 22, 2025, at historic Ford’s Theatre in downtown Washington, DC. The full day program starts at 9 am and runs to 5 pm.
In February 1860, the western-bred Abraham Lincoln must have been astonished by the hustle and bustle around lower New York City. Having crossed the Hudson River from Jersey City to Manhattan, Lincoln made his way to the Astor House, one of most luxurious hotels in New York City, conveniently located near City Hall and Publishers Row (aka, Newspaper Row or Printing House Square) housing the city’s most important newspapers. New York City had grown by over fifty percent just in the last decade, many of whom were immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and other European nations. If Lincoln’s room was on the ground floor of the Astor House, he would have looked out on St. Paul’s Chapel, built in 1766 and where George Washington attended services immediately after taking the oath of office as the first president of the United States. No doubt Lincoln would have looked into the chapel. Today, from a vantage point on Broadway, you can see the new One World Trade Center looming behind the Chapel’s historic spire. From the other side, standing in the burying ground facing the skyscraper, is a “Bell of Hope” rung every year on September 11 to reflect both the mourning of that day and the Chapel’s role as a refuge during that warm, clear cataclysmic day in 2001.
The newly bearded President-Elect Abraham Lincoln is making his way from Springfield, Illinois to Washington for his inauguration as president of the United States. But today, February 18, 1861, he was spending an eventful day traveling to Albany, New York.
While Abraham Lincoln had a well-deserved reputation as a soft touch during the Civil War, readily finding excuses to offer mercy to Union soldiers who had fallen asleep or abandoned their posts, he also approved the hanging of the only slave trader ever to be executed by the United States. Captain Nathaniel Gordon was a repeat offender, caught with nearly 900 enslaved men, women, and children crammed into the tiny space below decks off the coast of Congo. But Gordon wasn’t particularly worried. For the first 40+ years of the law that made international slave trading illegal and punishable by death, no man was ever executed. Why now? And why by Lincoln?
Abraham Lincoln was a steady proponent of Internal Improvements projects in Illinois. That said, there were problems. The few projects initiated randomly to encourage widespread district support resulted in a hodgepodge of disconnected rail lines, many of which ran only a few miles to nowhere in particular. Most projects simply disappeared.
Abraham Lincoln was always interested in technology, so when the Civil War arrived as soon as he was inaugurated, he worked hard to convince the usually conservative military to employ the latest technological advances. One such advance caused him to look to the skies to give every advantage to Union troops. That was the use of balloons in war.
