Tag: Abraham Lincoln

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Lincoln’s Influence on Civil War Science at York Civil War Round Table

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York PA CWRT logo

I’m excited to report that I will be presenting at the York (Pennsylvania) Civil War Round Table on Wednesday, May 15, 2024. This will be an in-person meeting at the York Historical Society Museum, 250 East Market Street, York, PA 17403. It will also be broadcast via Zoom. Both in-person and Zoom attendance is open to the public and free from 7:00 to 8:30 pm.

Please register for this free program in advance for head-count purposes:

In Person registration: Click Here

For Zoom link: Click Here

More information below per the York CWRT website:

David J. Kent will speak on the topic of “Lincoln’s Influence on Science and Technology in the Civil War.” Abraham Lincoln had a lifelong fascination with science and technology, a fascination that would help institutionalize science, win the Civil War, and propel the nation into the modern age. Kent will discuss how science and technology gradually infiltrated Lincoln’s remarkable life and influenced his growing desire to improve the condition of all men. The presentation will show where Lincoln gained his scientific knowledge, and how that background led him to encourage its further development and use during the war.

David J. Kent is an Abraham Lincoln historian, a former scientist, and the current President of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia. He is also on the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and the Board of Advisors of the Lincoln Forum. He is a frequent speaker on Abraham Lincoln topics and served as Master of Ceremonies for the Lincoln Memorial Centennial program in 2022. David has won numerous awards both for his scientific work and as an Abraham Lincoln historian. He has written several books, including his most recent, Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and his previous Lincoln book for young people, Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America. He has also written books on Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. He is currently working on a book about Lincoln’s two visits to New England.

The York Civil War Round Table is a non-profit organization that seeks to promote, interpret, preserve, and protect the Civil War heritage of York County, Pennsylvania, through the education and exchange of information with its members and the general public. Membership is free and open to anyone interested in learning more about the American Civil War.

Founded as the White Rose Civil War Round Table, the York CWRT holds monthly meetings the third Wednesday of every month except December at 7:00 p.m. in the Meeting Hall of the York County History Center’s Historical Society Museum at 250 East Market Street in York, Pennsylvania. Each meeting features a guest speaker talking about a Civil War topic of local or national interest. Meetings are FREE and open to the public.  For upcoming programs, please visit the Cannonball webpage http://www.yorkblog.com/cannonball/york-cwrt/.

I look forward to seeing everyone there soon.  Signed books can be purchased at the in-person event, or order via this website or Amazon or Barnes and Noble or your favorite independent bookstore.

 

Fire of Genius

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

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.

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Unexpected Lincoln – The Other Booth Brother in Manchester-by-the-Sea

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Junius_Brutus_Booth_Jr_-_Brady-HandyWe all know John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln. And then there was Edwin Booth, the great Shakespearean actor known for his performances of Hamlet. But there was another Booth brother in the acting business, and you won’t believe where he showed up in this edition of Unexpected Lincoln.

Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. was the eldest son and namesake of the great British/American actor (not surprisingly named Junius Brutus Booth, Sr.). The Senior Junius Booth was considered one of the greatest actors of his time, that is, when he wasn’t having mental health and drinking issues. After abandoning his wife and son in England, Junius Senior absconded to the United States with Mary Ann Holmes, a flower girl he has just met. They had twelve children together, most notably the three actor brothers and their sister Asia. Junius Junior was the least known of the three, an okay actor that never reached the fame (and infamy) of his two younger siblings. Only once did the three brothers perform together on stage, in Julius Caesar (ironically, or perhaps presciently, Caesar and Brutus entered into John Wilkes’s thought processes when contemplating the assassination of Lincoln).

Booth, Jr., like all of the Booth actors, had an erratic life, including three marriages. The first was brief, the second died giving birth to their only child (who somehow lived a long life, dying at age 78 in 1937). Booth, Jr. was out in California for much of the Civil War, returning east in 1867 to become manager of the Boston Theatre, and married an Australian-born widow, Marion Agnes (Rookes) Perry, who was also an actress and dancer thereafter known as Agnes Booth.

Here’s where the unexpected comes in.

While managing the Boston Theatre (in, obviously, Boston, Massachusetts), Booth Jr. started a hotel and summer theater operation in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a Massachusetts seacoast town on Cape Ann north of Boston. [BTW, there was a critically acclaimed film of the same name starring Casey Affleck in 2016 that is definitely worth seeing]. I’m quite familiar with Manchester-by-the-Sea as it’s close to my hometown and my grandmother lived there for 102 years. I was completely unaware, however, that the aforementioned Junius Brutus Booth, Jr. had a hotel and summer stock theater there and, in fact, is buried in the cemetery I had passed hundreds of times.

Booth House_Masconomo House_Manchester MA

Having recently discovered this fact, I made a beeline for Manchester on my recent road trip to New England. And there it was. First, the hotel. On the narrow road just before the famous Singing Beach was an old house (above) that I had barely noticed on my many walking trips down that road. The main house is where Junius and Agnes lived while they let out rooms in the hotel extension next door. Most of the hotel portion burned down early in the 20th century, but a small part of it remains as the residence of the current owners, who now make the main house (the original that survived the fire) available for rental at a hefty price per night. It’s a short walk to the beach. This is the house that Booth built.

After finding the house (which, to be honest, could use some landscaping work), I drove up the road to the Rosedale Cemetery. I had seen a photo of the gravestones on Find-a-Grave (an incredibly useful website for finding dead people) but it didn’t give a location in the cemetery. This was the third cemetery I visited on this particular road trip; the first two conveniently told me the exact location. This one didn’t but the photo seemed to show the graves near a granite wall, so I circled the cemetery perimeter looking for a granite edge. Almost giving up (the cemetery is mostly ringed by a wrought iron fence), I suddenly noticed the unique shape of Junius, Jr.’s tombstone. Quickly pulling over into a miraculously available parking spot, I confirmed that this was the correct spot. In this section, the wrought iron fence sat atop a short granite wall base.

Junius Booth’s gravestone is literally an open book, which is how I was able to locate it so quickly. The book appears open to its middle pages and sits on a short pedestal such that the top is maybe three feet off the ground. The inscription is worn with age but still legible if you look closely. Oddly, it says he died in September 1884 while all the other information says he died in 1883 at age 61. Next to him is the scroll-like gravestone of his last wife, Marion Agnes Schoeffel. Yes, that’s Agnes Booth. Even though she remarried to a man named John B. Schoeffel, Agnes chose to be buried next to her more famous second husband and three of their children. The next Junius in line, their son Junius Brutus Booth III, died by suicide in 1912 and is buried in Brightlingsea, Essex, England.

Like his brother Edwin, Junius Jr. had been hauled into Old Capitol Prison in Washington, DC after their more infamous brother John Wilkes had assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Both Edwin and Junius Jr. were interrogated and released, and both went on to continuing careers in the theater after short hiatuses. By the way, Edwin had an encounter with another Lincoln, having famously saved the life of Robert Lincoln at a train station in late 1864 or early 1865. See more about that incident here. Junius ended up in New England, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Unexpected Lincoln is on the trail of other little-known connections to Lincoln, including more from my New England road trip that I’ll relate soon.

Photo credits: Top = Junius Brutus Booth Jr. by Mathew Brady, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; Second from Top: Masconomo House, Manchester, MA from rental listing; Grouping = Booth gravestones, Rosedale Cemetery, Manchester, MA by David J. Kent

 

Fire of Genius

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

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.

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Abraham Lincoln Assassination Science

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Lincoln mourning ribbonApril 14, 1865, had been a busy day for Abraham Lincoln. The previous week he had walked through Richmond, arriving back in Washington to a telegram saying the South’s main army would fight no more. On this Good Friday, Lincoln felt rejuvenated, relieved that the war would soon end and he could focus his second term on reconstructing the Union. The day started with a welcome visit. Captain Robert Lincoln, the president’s son, returned to the city in time to join Lincoln for breakfast. Robert brought firsthand witness to the recent surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Many formal interviews later (including with former New Hampshire senator John P. Hale, whose daughter Lucy was later discovered to be secretly engaged to John Wilkes Booth), Lincoln held a cabinet meeting in which he related a recurring dream of a ship “moving with great rapidity toward a dark and indefinite shore.”

Perhaps inspired by the dream or simply his interest in technology, Lincoln and Mary went out for a carriage ride and found their way to the Washington Navy Yard. After touring the vessels and talking with Navy Yard staff, the Lincolns returned to the White House and shortly thereafter set out again for what they had hoped would be a relaxing night at the theater. Our American Cousin, a comedy, should lift their spirits as this long grueling Civil War appeared to be coming to an end.

Instead, Lincoln’s life ended. John Wilkes Booth had slipped into the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre and fired a single shot into the back of Lincoln’s head. Booth then slashed Rathbone before leaping from the box to the stage, yelled Sic Semper Tyrannus, “Thus Ever to Tyrants,” and ran out the stage door into the alley, where he escaped on horseback. In contrast to the advanced repeating weapons that Lincoln so often advocated, Booth’s gun was a Deringer, made to fire one lead ball. A Deringer (the original design, as opposed to a derringer, which is any similar gun by other manufacturers) is a single-shot, muzzle-loading, seven-groove rifled, percussion pocket pistol. Most Deringers were .41 caliber, but the one used by Booth was .44 caliber, a remarkably large ball for such a small gun. Prior to entering the theater, Booth loaded the Deringer by pouring ten grains by weight of black powder into the muzzle before ramming in one lead ball wrapped in a tiny cloth patch. A percussion cap was put in place and the hammer rested gently up until the time Booth pulled the trigger.

As I wrote in a previous post:

Dr. Charles Leale examined the fallen president and knew immediately the wound was mortal. Twenty-three years old and only six weeks after receiving his medical degree from Bellevue Hospital Medical College, Leale found himself in charge of the shocking murder scene. He had been sitting in the dress circle at Ford’s Theatre when “about half past ten…the report of a pistol was distinctly heard and about a minute after a man of low stature with black hair and eyes was seen leaping to the stage beneath, holding in his hand a drawn dagger.” Rushing to the Presidential Box, Leale observed Lincoln “in a state of general paralysis.” Lincoln’s labored breath was intermittent, no pulse could be detected, and he was “profoundly comatose.”

Leale’s description of his actions that night grew more detailed and extravagant in repeated telling over the years, but the basic facts remained the same. He was joined in the box by surgeons Doctors Charles F. Taft and Albert F. A. King. They agreed that Lincoln would not survive the rugged trip back to the White House yet were concerned that the president should not die in a theater—still considered a dubious location, especially on Good Friday. He was carried out the front door and across the street to be placed in the small rear room of Petersen’s boarding house, where he was laid out diagonally on a bed too short for his elongated body. These doctors were joined at the Petersen house by several other surgeons, including Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes and Lincoln’s personal physician, Robert K. Stone. Stone noted that the wound was plugged by coagulating blood, bone debris, and brain tissue, causing a buildup of cranial pressure and “stertorous” (noisy and labored) breathing. “On cleaning this away,” wrote Stone lyrically, “the wound bled steadily . . . and respiration became instantly as sweet and regular as an infant.” Lincoln never regained consciousness. A long metal Nélaton’s probe was inserted into the wound several times to determine the path of the ball. Nothing more could be done except to monitor the president’s pulse and breathing over a night of waiting for the inevitable.

Lincoln’s death, and that of his son Willie, led to advances in embalming science, which I discussed in this previous post.

I dive much more into the assassination and the related science in my book, Lincoln: The Fire of Genius, from which this post is adapted.

Fire of Genius

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

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.

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Lincoln’s Fateful 11th of April

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Lincoln MemorialAbraham Lincoln had a busy day, this April 11, 1865. There were meetings, then more meetings, and proclamations (and more proclamations), a pass for his friend, and a request to General Grant. That evening he would give a speech that would cost him his life.

Early in the day he consulted with General Benjamin Butler. Butler seemed to be involved in everything important happening in the war, from the workaround to avoid more bloodshed in Baltimore as northern troops first passed through the southern-leaning city on the way to protect Washington. Then there was New Orleans and Fortress Monroe and that whole business with Butler declaring that any enslaved people who escaped into Union lines would be considered contraband of war, and thus would not be returned to the South. It was this topic – what to do with the freed people – that Lincoln and Butler discussed on this fateful day, just two days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

Despite the surrender of Lee’s army, the war was not over. Lincoln issues several proclamations closing certain ports of entry and defining foreign port privileges. He also modifies the blockade of Key West, Florida. The end was near, but there was more to be done.

Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s friend and the current Marshall of the District of Columbia, stopped by the White House with Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher to discuss a proposed trip to Richmond. Now that the Confederate capital had fallen, Lamon was to serve as Lincoln’s eyes for a reconstruction convention. Lincoln writes Lamon a pass: “Allow the bearer, W.H. Lamon & friend, with ordinary baggage to pass from Washington to Richmond and return.” Lamon would still be in Richmond four days later.

The meetings were not over. Secretary of the Navy in his diary describes a contentious cabinet meeting in which cotton trade is the chief topic. Lincoln had authorized some restricted trade of cotton with the South to help northern textile mill owners get back to business, but there were questions as to whether it was aiding the South as well. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lincoln was writing to General Grant that the President was ill but “would be very much pleased to see you this…evening,” adding that she would like Grant “to drive…with us to see the illumination.”

Lincoln may have been ill, but he was also busy putting the finishing touches on what would turn out to be the last public speech he would give in his presidency, and indeed, in his life.

The night before, when news of Lee’s surrender was ballyhooed in the papers, a crowd had gathered at the White House and chanted for Lincoln to give a speech. He begged off, saying the occasion called for thoughtfully considered remarks rather than an off-the-cuff victory speech. When he arrived at the window on the 11th he gave a much longer, and much more serious, speech than the crowd anticipated. Focusing on the newly approved constitution for reconstructing Louisiana, the first former Confederate state to do so. While generally in favor of the effort, he did note that:

It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.

Lincoln had been pushing for African American voting rights in private letters to the military governor in Louisiana, but the legislature thought that was too radical for the times and left it out. Lincoln’s pronouncement that at least some African Americans – certainly those who risked their lives serving in the Union army and navy – should have the ability to vote was the first time he would publicly make his views clear. At least one person in the audience found it to be too much. John Wilkes Booth heard Lincoln’s call, and after expressing his racial hatred, vowed, “That is the last speech he will ever give.”

He was right. Four days later, on the evening of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth slipped into the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre and fatally shot the seated Lincoln in the back of the head. Lincoln died the next morning never having regained consciousness.

Assassinated, in large part, because of that fateful speech on April 11th.

[Photo Credit: David J. Kent at the Lincoln Memorial]

Fire of Genius

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

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.

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Lincoln Wins the Sand Bar Case

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Abraham Lincoln photoOn April 4, 1860, a mere six weeks before he would be nominated as the Republican candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln wins a case formally known as Johnston v. Jones & Marsh.

Lincoln’s experience getting stuck on the mill dam came in handy when he took on one of his most informative cases, commonly called the Sand Bar Case. The case was revealing because, in an age where trial transcripts were almost never kept, journalist Robert Hitt was paid to sit through the entire trial and create a comprehensive 482-page trial transcript, although he omitted the closing arguments.

The case revolved around the accretion of new land created by various efforts to turn Lake Michigan’s shoreline at Chicago into a practical harbor, something nature had not designed it to do. Channels were dug, piers were built, and a great deal of sand was dredged. Eventually, Chicago had a harbor. In 1833, the government cut a channel across lakefront lots owned separately by William Johnston and William Jones. A newly erected pier caused the accretion of nearly 1,200 feet of new land, roughly six acres, which both Johnston and Jones claimed as their own. After four trials, the last of which found for Johnston, Jones appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed the judgment and sent it back to the lower courts. At this point, Jones retained Lincoln, and after an eleven-day trial, the jury sided with Jones.

The case highlighted Lincoln’s knowledge of natural environments and his clear, logical communication to jurors. A legal colleague, while not specifically talking about the Sand Bar Case, seemed to capture the flavor of it when he called Lincoln “an admirable tactician” who “steered this jury from the bayous and eddies of side issues and kept them clear of the snags and sand bars, if any were put in the real channel of his case.” Fellow lawyer Leonard Swett also suggested Lincoln had a knack for focusing the juror on the key question while minimizing the rest. “By giving away six points and carrying the seventh, he carried the case.” Lincoln demonstrated this Euclidean logic and technical expertise in a letter to Johnson’s attorney Robert Kinzie before the trial, querying him on such technical matters as the intersection of the pier, the accreted new lakeshore, and the properties in question, as well as the timing of the land formation and any changes since the initial pier was erected. During the trial, Lincoln’s background in surveying helped him cross-examine the surveyor George Snow, catching that there were two maps created, each one alternatively benefiting the claims of the two litigants. Lincoln’s questioning of the land surveys was key to winning the case. He was paid $350 for his services (about $11,600 today).

[Adapted from Lincoln: The Fire of Genius]

[Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Abraham_Lincoln_by_Nicholas_Shepherd,_1846-crop]

Fire of Genius

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

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.

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LAST CHANCE to Win a Free Signed Copy of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius!

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Only a couple of more days left to win one of five free, signed copies of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius on Goodreads!

You can win one of five free signed copies of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius on Goodreads.

Click here for more information and to enter now through March 30, 2024.

Goodreads Giveaway March 2024

 

 

 

Click here to get more information and to enter. Giveaway ends on March 30th.

Fire of Genius

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

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.

 

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Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne Meets Abraham Lincoln, and Gets Censored

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Emanuel Leutze, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsOn March 13, 1862, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great novelist, met Abraham Lincoln in the White House. He was not impressed.

By this time, Hawthorne was already well-known for some of his most famous novels, including The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, not to mention his laudatory 1852 campaign biography of fellow New Englander Franklin Pierce that helped Pierce get elected to the presidency. Hawthorne was certainly not a war hawk. He gave equivocal, at best, support for the Union in the Civil War, although he wrote a friend at the outset that he thought it absurd for the North to spend its energy, treasure, and lives “in holding on to a people who insist on being let loose.” Traveling to Washington in early 1862, Hawthorne toured the capitol before being invited to join a delegation from a Massachusetts whip factory. After an uncomfortably long wait while Lincoln finished eating his breakfast, the delegation’s spokesman, Massachusetts Representative Charles R. Train, presented the president with an “elegant horsewhip,” which was adorned with an ivory handle and a cameo medallion of the president. Lincoln thanked them with this short reply:

I thank you, Mr. TRAIN, for your kindness in presenting me with this truly elegant and highly creditable specimen of the handiwork of the mechanics of your State of Massachusetts, and I beg of you to express my hearty thanks to the donors. It displays a perfection of workmanship which I really wish I had time to acknowledge in more fitting words, and I might then follow your idea that it is suggestive, for it is evidently expected that a good deal of whipping is to be done. But, as we meet here socially, let us not think only of whipping rebels, or of those who seem to think only of whipping negroes, but of those pleasant days which it is to be hoped are in store for us, when, seated behind a good pair of horses, we can crack our whips and drive through a peaceful, happy and prosperous land. With this idea, gentlemen, I must leave you for my business duties.

The group was ushered out after a mere ten minutes.

While Hawthorne was present only as a hanger-on, he soon wrote his wife to tell her: “I have shaken hands with Uncle Abe.”

But Hawthorne had another reason for being there. He was preparing an essay for The Atlantic Monthly, which was published in July 1862. The article itself, as suggested by the title, “Chiefly About War Matters” under the byline, “by a Peaceable Man” (later to be revealed to be Hawthorne), was more about the war than it was Lincoln. But it was with Lincoln that a problem arose. Hawthorne’s description of Lincoln was quite a bit less laudatory than his biography of Pierce. While parts were backhanded praise, in other parts it was downright insulting. Here’s a snippet:

The whole physiognomy is as coarse a one as you would meet anywhere in the length and breadth of the States; but, withal, it is redeemed, illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look out of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted with rich results of village experience. A great deal of native sense; no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart, and thoroughly so, and yet, in some sort, sly,—at least endowed with a sort of tact and wisdom that are akin to craft, and would impel him, I think, to take an antagonist in flank, rather than to make a bull-run at him right in front. But, on the whole, I like this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter, would as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom it would have been practicable to put in his place.

The Atlantic‘s editor, James Fields, thought that was a bit too harsh during times of war and insisted that the offending sections be removed before publication, to which Hawthorne begrudgingly acquiesced. Later he would say that the removed section was “the only part of the article really worth publishing.” Writing again publicly under the “Peaceable Man” byline, Hawthorne managed to get the Atlantic several months later to publish the following retort:

You can hardly have expected to hear from me again, (unless by invitation to the field of honor,) after those cruel and terrible notes upon my harmless article in the July Number… Not that I should care a fig for any amount of vituperation, if you had only let my article come before the public as I wrote it, instead of suppressing precisely the passages with which I had taken most pains, and which I flattered myself were most cleverly done.

The objectional section was reinstated years later when the piece was republished as part of the collected works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by George Parsons Lathrop, who just happened to later marry Hawthorne’s daughter, Rose.

No word on what happened to the whip.

[Photo Credit: Nathaniel Hawthorne by Emanuel Leutze, around the time he wrote “Chiefly About War Matters,” Public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

Fire of Genius

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

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.

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Win a Free Signed Copy of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius!

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You can win one of five free signed copies of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius on Goodreads.

Click here for more information and to enter now through March 30, 2024.

Goodreads Giveaway March 2024

 

 

 

Click here to get more information and to enter. Giveaway ends on March 30th.

Fire of Genius

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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On Leap Year Day, After Cooper Union, Lincoln Visits Robert in Exeter, New Hampshire

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Lincoln at Cooper Union, Mathew Brady photographWith Leap Year Day, February graced the nation with an extra twenty-four hours on February 29, 1860. Abraham Lincoln was already feeling weary by the time he clambered onto the 10:40 am train from Providence, Rhode Island, to Exeter, New Hampshire. It was nearly two in the morning the day before by the time he finished his grand lecture at Cooper Union in New York City, joined the organizers for dinner, and spent several hours after midnight proofreading the text of the speech to be printed that day in the New York Tribune. A brief forty winks of sleep, then up again and on a train to Providence to give yet another long lecture that night. Having that speech gone well, and another late dinner, now he was on another train to finally see his son, Robert, in Exeter, the original rationale for this excursion into New England after New York.

Robert was at Phillips Exeter Academy cramming to retake his Harvard entrance exams, which he had failed miserably the previous summer. While he waited for his father to arrive, Robert fielded queries from political leaders in New Hampshire asking if Lincoln could speak to them as well. By the time Lincoln arrived in Exeter that evening, he had committed to speaking in the New Hampshire cities of Concord, Manchester, Dover, and then finally in Exeter. So much for a relaxing visit with the son he hadn’t seen in over six months. Lincoln would go on to do a dozen speeches on this two-week visit, including several in Connecticut, Hartford and New Haven among them, and back to Rhode Island for one more in Woonsocket before a couple more in Connecticut and a slow, winding railroad home to Illinois.

Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech, which many claim as “the speech that made Lincoln president,” had been an extraordinary effort. He had spent months researching the voting patterns of the “fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question [slavery expansion] just as well, and even better, than we do now.” His old nemesis, Stephen A. Douglas, had used this line to suggest the Founders of the country has intentionally chosen to have a nation permanently “half slave and half free.” Lincoln painstakingly demonstrated that, in fact, the opposite was true. The Founders, through the voting patterns of each that Lincoln documented, had clearly intended to restrict the expansion of slavery and put it on a path toward its ultimate extinction.

In a letter written to his wife Mary impatiently waiting back in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln tells her about the unexpectedly added speeches he had been asked to give in New England.

I have been unable to escape this toil — If I had foreseen it I think I would not have come East at all. The speech at New-York [Cooper Union], being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well, and gave me know trouble whatever. 

But he added,

The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences, who have already seen all my ideas in print-

The speech at Cooper Union had not only been widely covered and printed in the several large New York papers with broad distribution, it had been picked up and reprinted in virtually every significant newspaper in the country. That was especially true in New England once the public – and political operatives – knew that the westerner Lincoln was in the area giving a series of speeches. At Cooper Union he spoke for an hour and half. At his various stops in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, newspapers noted that he spoke at least that amount of time, even up to two hours, as he gave essentially the same speech, sometimes with added flourishes (the ones involving snakes and “wens” were particularly colorful). By all reports, notwithstanding the usual partisan paper gamesmanship, these speeches were important contributors to his eventual election to the presidency.

Lincoln would finally arrive home in the early morning of Wednesday, March 14th. In May, he became the surprise Republican nominee over the party standard bearer, William Seward.

Meanwhile, Robert had taken is studies in Exeter seriously, at least enough to pass the entrance exams and enter Harvard College in the fall of 1860. Of course, by then his father had been chosen as the Republican Party nominee for president, with his election in November almost assured by the splitting of the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic party (both were pro-slavery, but the South wanted disunion in order to protect and expand slavery across the nation).

By December, Southern states started seceding from the Union, initiating the Civil War.

[Photo Credit: Mathew Brady taken the day of the Cooper Union speech, via Wikimedia]

Fire of Genius

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

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.

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John Quincy Adams Dies with Abraham Lincoln in the House

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John Quincy AdamsOn February 21, 1848, Abraham Lincoln was attending proceedings in the House of Representatives, when suddenly, the Speaker of the House, Robert Charles Winthrop, was interrupted “by several gentlemen, who sprang from their seats to the assistance of the venerable John Quincy Adams, who was observed to be sinking from his seat in what appeared to be the agonies of death.” Adams was carried to the rotunda, and from there to the speaker’s room, where he remained until his last breath two days later. Lincoln would serve on the official House funeral arrangements committee for Adams, the former president and his House colleague during Lincoln’s sole term in Congress.

Lincoln had more in common with our sixth president then most people know. Like Lincoln, Adams was not a scientist himself but encouraged it, including writing a treatise on the reform of weights and measures. His nearly religious promotion of astronomical observatories helped create the study of astronomy in America, pushing in an 1843 oration the practical value of astronomy. He reminded humanity to look “heavenward” as if “the special purpose of their creation” was “observation of the stars.” During his tenure as a congressman following his presidency, Adams fought against both anti-British and antifederalist biases to get the Smithson bequest devoted to scientific research. Like Adams, Lincoln saw science and technology as something that could improve the lives of all Americans. He saw a mechanism by which all men could better their condition.

While Henry Clay, Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman,” is best known as promoting the Whig’s “American System” of economic development that Lincoln spent most of his career espousing, it was Alexander Hamilton and John Quincy Adams who originally developed and drove the idea. They believed in modernizing the nation through government-supported “internal improvements,” as well as the establishment of a national bank to help finance these improvements, and high tariffs to protect American investment from cheap foreign goods.

Lincoln would later take up the mantle of John Quincy Adams, the man who had worked so hard to accept the money that made the Smithsonian Institution possible. Lincoln clearly came to rely on Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry’s expertise and made every effort to protect the Smithsonian during the war. Funding was always a problem, and in a November 11, 1862, letter to William Seward, Henry anxiously begged for Lincoln to grant power of attorney to a London law firm attempting to recover a part of the original bequest of James Smithson not yet received. Lincoln granted Henry’s request, and the remaining funds, approximately $25,000 in gold, were transferred. The Smithsonian would continue to exist.

Several months after John Quincy Adams’s death, Lincoln would make his way to Adams’s home turf in Massachusetts to give a series of stump speeches for the Whig presidential nominee, Zachary Taylor. Adams had lived a long public life beyond his presidency, dying at 80 years old. Lincoln would not survive six weeks beyond his second inauguration, his life taken by an assassin’s bullet at the age of 56.

[Photo Credit: Mathew Brady via Wikimedia]

Fire of Genius

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

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.