The Lincoln Letters

One night last week, the Library of Congress staged the biggest show in its history. Its collection of Lincoln papers, given to the Library by Lincoln's son Robert on condition that they be kept under lock & key until 21 years after his death, was about to be opened.

As the 12:01 deadline (the hour of Robert Lincoln's death) approached, 23 Lincoln scholars and members of the Library staff left a banquet hall and walked solemnly into a room in the Library annex. Among them was white-thatched Lincoln Historian Carl Sandburg, who had spent part of the evening singing songs of the Lincoln period to his colleagues. Steel doors swung open, and the collection, 194 black-backed volumes, stood revealed.

Most of the attendant scholars were already familiar with some of the 18,350 pieces of personal and official mail, manuscript and memoranda. Much of the material has been referred to and quoted in the works of Lincoln's two secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay. Later it became the source material of innumerable books by other authors. But it would be a rich mine of Lincolniana. Few collections have led so closely guarded an existence.

Although Robert Lincoln lent the vast pile of papers to Nicolay and Hay, who had them for 27 years, he refused to make the collection public. According to legend, he was afraid that Indiana's late Senator Albert Beveridge would use some item to write something unfavorable about the Lincoln family.

The next afternoon, 3,500 people crowded into the Library's rotunda to watch a public ceremony. Lincoln's great-grandson, Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, and General Grant's grandson, Major General Ulysses S. Grant III, were introduced. So were 14 authors of more than 100 books on Lincoln. None spoke; they simply stepped up on a platform, bowed silently, and stepped down.

The Library of Congress braced itself for a flood of inquiries. Said Dr. C. Percy Powell of the Library's Manuscripts Division: "Everyone who had a grandfather in the Civil War will come in here to see if Lincoln wrote him a letter."

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