Tag: New England

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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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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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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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Lincoln Agrees to Speak at Cooper Union, And the Rest is History

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Lincoln at Cooper Union, Mathew Brady photographOn this date, November 13, 1859, Abraham Lincoln agreed to give a speech at Cooper Union in lower Manhattan in New York City. History suggests this is the speech that made Lincoln president.

Except he wasn’t actually agreeing to a speech at Cooper Union. In his letter to James A. Briggs, with whom he has previously corresponded about the event, he agreed to give a political speech at what he thought would be the famous Plymouth Church across the river in Brooklyn. Under the leadership of its first minister, Henry Ward Beecher, Plymouth was a center of anti-slavery activism at this time, and speaking there was sure to raise Lincoln’s profile as the still new Republican party moved toward picking its presidential nominee. If the Beecher name sounds familiar, it’s because his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, authored perhaps the most influential book of the time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Originally invited to speak in late fall 1859, Lincoln agreed if the date could be pushed off until February to accommodate his political and legal schedule. The final date was set for February 27, 1860. Briggs eventually realized that coaxing an audience across the potentially frigid East River in the dead of winter may be problematic and thus sought to pass off sponsorship of the speech to the Young Men’s Central Republican Union, which moved it back to Manhattan. Considerable confusion arose in communicating this fact and it was only after he arrived in New York that Lincoln understood he would speak at Cooper Union instead of Plymouth Church. He hurriedly edited his speech for what he assumed would be a less religious audience.

I discussed the content of the speech here but suffice to say it went well for Lincoln. Earlier that day he had his photo taken at the studio of Mathew Brady, later acknowledging that the speech and Brady’s photograph made him president.

Having already planned to visit his son Robert at Phillips Exeter Academy after Cooper Union, he graciously accepted an offer to give a speech in Providence, Rhode Island on his way to New Hampshire. That idea quickly escalated into at least a dozen speeches in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut before he could make his way back to Illinois. This was Lincoln’s second, and last, trip to New England, having stumped through eastern Massachusetts for the successful Whig presidential nominee Zachary Taylor in 1848. This time Lincoln was stumping more on his own behalf and promoting the now Republican party view that slavery must not extend into the western territories. Again, he was well-received, and this time the New England electoral votes were comfortably in Lincoln’s corner (as they would be also in 1864).

As they say, the rest is history. Cooper Union, the Brady photograph, and the release of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in book form all contributed to making Abraham Lincoln the best candidate for president in 1860.

And the war came.

For those looking for more information on the Cooper Union speech, I highly recommend the 2009 book by Lincoln historian Harold Holzer called, aptly enough, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President.

[Photo by Mathew Benjamin Brady – US Library of Congress, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25065667]

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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Mary and Robert Lincoln Go to Manchester, Vermont

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HildeneMary Lincoln hated Washington, especially during the pestilent humidity of the capital city during the heat of summer. It’s the reason President Lincoln moved to the soldier’s home (now President Lincoln’s Cottage) each summer, beginning with 1862 after Willie’s death earlier that year. Mary would take Tad northward, often to New York and into New England, usually to be joined by Robert during his summer break from his studies at Harvard College. In 1863 they traveled to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, then in August of 1864 Robert met his mother and brother in the Green Mountains of Vermont. He intended to return with the president in the summer of 1865, but the assassination kept that from happening. Notwithstanding, the 1864 trip would capture Robert’s fancy enough to return decades later to build his own summer cottage known as Hildene.

On their visit in 1864, the Lincoln family (minus the President, who was busy trying to save the Union), stayed at the Equinox House Hotel in Manchester. Manchester is in southwestern Vermont in Bennington County, home to the Robert Frost Stone House Museum, where the poet wrote some of the poems that garnered him four Pulitzer Prizes. It’s unknown whether Robert Lincoln ever met Robert Frost, although Frost frequented the area in the 1920s when Lincoln was in the final years of his life. In any case, Robert Lincoln had many opportunities to become familiar with the area long after his initial visit with his mother. In the 1890s, he commonly visited his Chicago law partner, Edward S. Isham, who had a large estate called Ormsby Hill just outside of town. Following Isham’s death, Lincoln returned for a two week stay at the Equinox Hotel and decided to buy land – conveniently adjacent to Ormsby Hill – to build “a modest summer place.” He named the resulting 24-room Georgian estate Hildene, combining the Old English words for hill (Hil) and valley (dene), reflecting the highland and lowland portions of the now 412-acre property.

Earlier this year I also traveled to Vermont, roughly following the route Robert would have followed as he made his way from Harvard. Even today the environment remains pristine. It’s no wonder Robert Frost was inspired to write his most famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” while living at the Stone House. After a brief pilgrimage to Frost’s house, I moved on to my main goals in Manchester – the Equinox and Hildene.

I had booked a room at the Equinox Golf Resort and Spa because I wanted to feel the presence of Mary, Tad, and Robert as they enjoyed the time away from the constant trials of civil war. The Equinox was expanded in 1980 but retains the original portions where the Lincoln’s stayed. The sprawling, but intensely beautiful, white edifice now sprawls across several buildings while maintaining its historic charm. The Equinox Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s impossible not to be awed by the history. My visit to Hildene wasn’t until the next morning so I had time to wander around Manchester to visit the compelling River Walk and Veterans Park, hit up the local independent bookstore (for Lincoln books, of course), and take in a late lunch at the quaint Mystic Restaurant.

When I finally did get to Hildene it was easy to see why Robert Lincoln felt at home there. Built when he was still president of the Pullman sleeping car company, Robert maintained his house in Chicago, then later when he was Secretary of War to two presidents, a house in Washington, D.C. But Hildene was where he went to relax. The home itself is cozy despite its two-dozen rooms (some of which were for his servants). While he did do some work there, he wanted it not as a show house for guests but as a retreat to escape the madness of corporate and government life. He even built himself an observatory where he could gaze at the stars. After Robert’s death in 1926, the house remained in the family, with his granddaughter, Mary Lincoln Beckwith (who everyone called Peggy), the last Lincoln descendant to live at Hildene. She died in 1975, leaving the property (at least briefly) to the Church of Christ, Scientist in accordance with her grandmother’s wishes. It wasn’t long before Hildene was transferred to the nonprofit Friends of Hildene that now owns and runs it.

There is much more about Hildene to talk about, including the Pullman car and goat farm, but I’ll save those for another day. Peggy herself deserves some discussion as she reminds me of another woman I admired, Katharine Hepburn.

[Photo: Hildene, 2023, 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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Robert Lincoln’s Observatory at Hildene

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Hildene observatoryRobert Lincoln got his initial interest in astronomy from his father. Abraham Lincoln was fascinated by astronomy, as I discuss in my book, Lincoln: The Fire of Genius, and in a previous post. Robert did him one better – he built his own observatory at Hildene, which I saw on a recent visit to Robert’s Vermont summer home.

As I crested the hill walking from Hildene’s welcome center to house, my eyes immediately gravitated to the odd-looking domed structure standing at the edge of the woods. Robert’s observatory. About 12 feet in diameter and maybe 20 feet tall, the observatory was much smaller than I expected. Whereas his father had a fascination with astronomy, Robert had made it into a deep hobby. Robert had a habit of diving into his avocations – he surveyed all of Hildene as it was being built and did math problems in the evenings “to relax” – and astronomy was no exception. It was Robert who selected and surveyed the site for the observatory not far from the main house.

In addition to his father’s influence, Robert’s interest was likely expanded by his mentor and benefactor Jonathan Young Scammon, who besides being a lawyer, banker, and newspaper publisher was a dedicated amateur astronomer. Robert frequently used the large telescope at Dearborn Observatory on the campus of Chicago University (now Northwestern), often accompanied by close friend, and later renowned astronomer Shelbourne Wesley Burnham. According to Robert Lincoln biographer, Jason Emerson, Robert became a voracious reader of books on astronomy, about thirty of which still remain in his library at Hildene. “I belong to the class of old-young amateurs in astronomy, but I enjoy my study of it very much,” Emerson says Robert wrote to the director of the Lick Observatory in California. Before building the observatory, he used his telescope on a tripod, and would synchronize his stopwatch every day at the Manchester telegraph office to ensure the precision of his astronomical calculations. Later, he installed a relay at Hildene so he could get exact noontime readings via telegraph without having to go into town.

Hildene Observatory

Originally, Robert’s telescope was a four-inch diameter Bardon, which in the observatory on a high point overlooking the “dene” gave a wonderfully unobstructed view of the sky. As his expertise and interest grew, however, the Bardon proved inadequate, so in 1909 he commissioned construction of a six-inch refracting telescope as a replacement. He became quite proud of the observatory and often bragged about it to his friends.

Being a scientist myself, I lingered at the observatory for a while, fascinated by the existing telescope. Whether it still worked or not was somewhat moot, as it was locked behind a metal gate to protect it from tourists. It was also time to go inside the main building to meet the archivist. More on that soon. As fascinating as it was inside the mansion, I couldn’t help but look back at the mini-dome as I strolled back down the hill. I would have loved to hang out with Robert gazing at the stars.

[Photos 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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A Controversial Abraham Lincoln Statue – No, Not That One

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Lincoln Trilogy close upAbraham Lincoln is the most memorialized president in American history, in terms of the number of monuments and statues in all fifty states and the U.S. territories. According to the National Monument Audit completed in 2021, there were 193 Lincoln monuments in America, followed by George Washington at 171, Christopher Columbus at 149, and Martin Luther King Jr. with 86. Those numbers keep changing – several new Lincoln statues have gone up in 2023 alone, and statues to Columbus and Confederate General Robet E. Lee are being removed. But Lincoln is likely to continue to have the most statues. That said, not all of them are great. Some of them are downright controversial.

Among the controversial ones are Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Memorial, aka the Freedman’s Memorial, in Lincoln Park, Washington, DC. From its dedication in 1876, its visual depiction of a standing Lincoln and a kneeling African American man beginning to rise from enslavement, the statue has been problematic. A copy of it was removed from its pedestal in Boston during the protests of 2020, while activists attempted to have it taken down in Washington (a bill to have it removed has been introduced by DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton). The fact that it was paid for entirely from funds raised by the formerly enslaved and that Frederick Douglass keynoted the dedication has not kept the discomfort at bay. Meanwhile, the so-called “belly-ache” statue by George Grey Barnard was vehemently attacked by none other than Robert T. Lincoln, the only living son of Lincoln. Robert successfully kept a copy of that statue from being placed in London. The original did get placed in Lytle Park in Cincinnati, with the copy going off to Manchester, England while a copy of Chicago’s Augustus Saint-Gaudens statue is now featured prominently in Parliament Square, London.

Which gets us back to Vermont. Yes, Vermont.

During my recent travels in New England I stopped at Hildene, which I’ll have more about later. Down the road in Bennington, Vermont is the Bennington Museum, in front of which stands a Lincoln grouping called “The Lincoln Trilogy,” although it is also known by a reimagined name, “The American Spirit.” At first glance you can see why the statue is controversial.

Lincoln Trilogy, Bennington Museum, Vermont

Lincoln stands fully clothed, complete with a heavy cape and top hat. Sitting at his feet is a barely covered female figure looking up to him from his waist. He has his hand on her head. His other hand grasps the head of a small boy, unclothed and standing below him. The juxtaposition of the three figures is jarring, at best, even after taking a while to examine it. What could the artist have been thinking?

For one, the artist was not originally thinking the three figures were designed to be placed together.

The standing figure of the boy is called Fils de France, designed independently in 1918 to reflect a young boy gazing intently into the distance symbolizing rebirth of France following the devastation of World War I. The female figure was also produced in 1918 and in response to the War. Called Nirvana, the statue was originally completely nude, the woman’s attitude of tranquility personified the Buddhist concept of nirvana as a spiritual emancipation from passion, hatred, and delusion. Both individual statues are inside the Museum. They follow the stylistic tradition of idealized nude figures developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Lincoln statue provides a stark contrast. One of many Lincoln statues the artist, Clyde du Vernet Hunt, created in his lifetime, it reflects a tribute to Lincoln as an actual historical figure. Hunt revered Lincoln as an idealist, humanitarian, and emancipator, which he tried to capture in the powerfully majestic pose of the statue. Each statue was designed to stand on its own merits and meanings.

Clyde du Vernet Hunt was born in Scotland to American parents traveling in Europe. His grandfather had been a U.S. Congressman and his father served in the adjutant-general’s department during the Civil War. Clyde Hunt studied engineering and art and maintained a studio in Paris and home in Vermont. Hunt was invited to exhibit his work at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1918, a remarkable achievement for an American artist. He submitted his bronze Fils de France (the boy sculpture) and the marble Nirvana (the woman sculpture), both of which received favorable reviews. A decade later, the Societe des Artistes Francais asked him to participate in the exclusive Paris Salon. He created a large plaster group combining the Lincoln statue with the figures of Nirvana and Fils de France. Lincoln and the boy are exact duplicates of the original versions, but Hunt enlarged the female figure of Nirvana and discretely draped the nude female for inclusion in the grouping. [How discrete the draping is a matter of opinion]. Hunt entitled the grouping simply “Lincoln” for the Paris Salon but envisioned it as representing the ideals of Faith (Nirvana), Hope (Fils de France), and Charity (Lincoln, from his “charity for all and malice toward none”). Within this context back in the states, the Fils de France was reinterpreted as “young America.”

The Museum admits that the intellectual concept behind the Lincoln Trilogy was more successful than the visual relationship of the three figures. Even they admit the combination of three distinctly individual sculptures of differing scale and spatial orientation is “somewhat awkward.” After returning to the US in 1938, Hunt cast the trilogy in bronze for display at the New York World’s Fair. Hunt’s heirs presented the bronze trilogy to the Bennington Museum in 1949, where the director of the museum appended the title “The American Spirit” to the statues, an interpretation influenced by the nationalism of the 1940s. So whereas one of the statues depicts a Civil War president, and two of the statues were influenced by World War I, the reinterpretation and retitling came about due to World War II.

Despite the controversy, the statue grouping is worth a visit. The Bennington Museum is a short drive from Robert T. Lincoln’s summer home at Hildene, so definitely put it on your agenda if you’re in the area.

[Photos 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 Goes to Harvard and Yale

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Massachusetts State HouseAbraham Lincoln famously had less than one year of formal schooling, but you can find him now at both Harvard and Yale.

Needless to say, you can find him at every university in Illinois and colleges in other states. During his senate campaign against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, the two men were required to walk in the door of the Old Main, still the oldest building on the Knox College campus. Once inside they climbed out a window onto the makeshift speaker’s platform, moved next to the building as protection against a rainy day. Lincoln quipped that this was his first time ever going into a college. After a laugh, the audience settled down to a rip-roaring 3-hour debate between the two long-time rivals.

During the Civil War, Lincoln’s son Robert attended Harvard, alma mater of quite a few American presidents, as well as abolitionists like Charles Sumner (whose statue sits just outside of Harvard Yard) and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot, and perhaps more surprisingly, Henry David Thoreau. Lincoln was given honorary degrees from Knox College, Princeton, and Columbia, but never Harvard. And yet, there he is in Cambridge Commons, a full figure of Lincoln standing tall in the center of a monument to the city’s Civil War heroes.

Not to be outdone, the Massachusetts State House in downtown Boston has a bust of Lincoln and a painting in Doric Hall (apparently another bust is in the Senate chambers, but I missed that). I didn’t miss the women’s rights protest outside featuring Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and Mayor Michelle Wu (who I had also seen a half hour earlier at Boston City Hall for a ceremony honoring a late state congressman).

Lincoln Memorial Oak tabletSeveral days before my visit to Harvard I was on the Yale campus. Lincoln had given a speech in 1860 in Union Hall. The hall no longer stands (the High School in a Community is now in its place) but there is a memory of Lincoln on the green at Yale. There, at least up until recently, stood a majestic Oak deemed the “Lincoln Memorial Oak” that had stood for ages. In late 2012 the stately old tree was toppled by Superstorm Sandy, revealing old bones from the 17th and 18th centuries from the original graveyard it had been growing over. With the massive old tree gone, a new tree was planted along with a granite stone explaining its history.

I’ll have more photos and stories from my road trip as I get the chance.

[All photos 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.