American History & Jewish History Blog

In downtown Cincinnati, an 11-foot bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln has been hovering near its busy thoroughfares for over a hundred years. Devoid of his signature beard and framed by rumpled hair instead of his stately hat, Lincoln’s face looks wrinkled and tired. It is a version of Lincoln cast from a time before he became president, from when his humble beginnings and failures would seem to have nearly consumed him whole. When sculptor George Gray Barnard’s statue was unveiled in 1917 by former President William H. Taft, the pushback was immediate: this was not the version of Lincoln that the nation sought to canonize; the statue was pilloried in many newspapers and magazines as a “melancholy mistake in bronze, and as “something the cat brought in on a wet night.”[1] Robert Todd Lincoln referred to the statue as “grotesque.”[2] Yet Theodore Roosevelt called it “the greatest statue of our time.”[3] When a copy of the statue was offered to London as a commemoration of the peace between the United States and the United Kingdom, what would have been a domestic debate surrounding the image of the nation’s sixteenth president rapidly became an international one, as cries of uproar and support could be heard on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Amongst the people who came to the defense of this depiction of Lincoln was one of the most famous women in America at the time, renowned journalist and Lincoln biographer Ida Tarbell. Though the sculpture is now firmly ensconced as a great work of art, and Lincoln’s earlier years are now widely perceived to be the foundation of his great character, none of this was a given in 1917. Tarbell had endured a similar journey over two decades before in undertaking a biography of the country’s most beloved leader. The modern audience most likely doesn’t think twice about the depiction of Lincoln as a Kentucky laborer, and that is a testament to the success of Tarbell’s work. 

Ida Tarbell (1857-1944) is a contradiction in terms. She is essentially the mother of investigative journalism whose name is barely remembered, and a trailblazing woman who opposed suffrage for women.[4] When she is recalled, however, it’s for her takedown of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Her life actually began at this critical juncture of what defined her career. Ida Tarbell was born in Pennsylvania to a farming family who decided to seek their fortunes in the new oil boom months after Ida was born. Unfortunately, like many other small oilmen, Ida’s father’s business fell victim to the Cleveland Massacre in 1872. Essentially, John D. Rockefeller negotiated deals with railways to give rebates and discounts to his company, Standard Oil. This allowed him to drop the price significantly and put all the smaller refineries out of business, thus consolidating Rockefeller’s hold on the oil industry. The misfortune that befell the Tarbells was certainly a defining moment in Ida’s life but she was also determined to succeed and contribute to society.

Ida finished high school at the top of her class in 1876. She went on to earn a BA in biology in 1880 and an MA in 1883. She then pursued journalism while cultivating an attraction to French history. 1891, she moved to Paris to work on her first biography about Madame Roland. In 1892, she was hired by Sam McClure to write for his eponymously named magazine. There, she interviewed leading luminaries such as Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola, and Alexandre Dumas.[5] McClure was impressed with Tarbell’s writing and research and eventually commissioned a Napoleon biography to be released as a serial in 1894. This brought Tarbell, now back in the U.S. and living in Pennsylvania, to Washington, DC, to the estate of Gardiner Hubbard who had an extensive Napoleon collection. Hubbard was also supporting his son-in-law, Alexander Graham Bell, and his work on the telephone. Thus, Tarbell often dined with the Bells in addition to the director of the Smithsonian and prominent politicians.

Tarbell’s writing on Napoleon saw sales at McClure’s surge.  She was becoming highly regarded for her well-researched pieces accompanied by clear prose and lyrical language. Tarbell’s next assignment was to write about Lincoln. Five years earlier, in 1890, John Hay and John Nicolay’s Abraham Lincoln: A History had been published. Tarbell, like many people, felt that a ten-volume biography on Lincoln authored by the president’s personal secretaries would sate the public’s desire for Lincoln material. McClure disagreed and directed the bewildered Tarbell to begin her research immediately. Ida first called on Nicolay (she was in a literary society with Nicolay’s daughter), who unwittingly put Tarbell’s work on Lincoln on the path to greatness. He refused to allow her access to any of the Lincoln papers in his possession and told her that her assignment was “hopeless” and that he and Hay had already told “all that was worth telling of Lincoln’s life.”[6] So Tarbell turned her focus towards Lincoln’s early life beginning in Kentucky, following young Lincoln to Indiana, New Orleans, Illinois, and finally, to the White House. Over the course of her journey, she studied the people and places that had been overlooked in understanding Lincoln.

Perhaps the reason Tarbell was so adamant in her defense of Barnard’s work two decades later was that Barnard’s focus echoed her own: the earlier, rougher period of Lincoln’s life. And indeed, Tarbell faced so many of the barriers that Barnard had. Rival magazines sneered that “McClure’s had gotten a girl to try and write a life of Lincoln.”[7] In addition to debunking many myths purveyed by biographers who emphasized the later period of Lincoln’s life, Tarbell’s work actually aimed to show that Lincoln’s early life on the frontier had a positive impact on his character as well as his presidency. 

After Tarbell began to publish the first installments of her Lincoln biography, it was Nicolay who came to her. His attitude hadn’t changed. “You are invading my field,” he exclaimed. “You write a popular Life of Lincoln, and you do just so much to decrease the value of my property.”[8] Robert Todd Lincoln, on the other hand, was a solid ally. He gave her a never-before-seen portrait of Lincoln (which she used as the frontispiece to her book), made himself accessible to her, and when the work was done, considered it “an indispensable adjunct to the work of Nicolay and Hay.”[9] Robert Todd Lincoln’s praise for a book that focused on the “humble and unknown” aspects of his father’s life seems at odds with the debate around the Cincinnati statue that would be unveiled less than twenty years later, with he and Tarbell falling on opposite sides of the debate. The controversy over the Lincoln statue divided Americans over not only Lincoln’s legacy, but the character of the United States. 

Tarbell never stopped writing about Lincoln, and she continued to write profile after profile for McClure’s. She seemed to be connected to the major luminaries of her time and to be omnipresent at historical events. In 1898, Tarbell had been at the military HQ when the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbour. She firsthand witnessed the US response to the news, observing Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt bursting into the room like “a boy on roller-skates.” It was Mark Twain who put her in touch with the vice president of Standard Oil for her takedown of the company, and it was this work that led Theodore Roosevelt, now President Roosevelt, to refer to Tarbell and her ilk as “muckrakers” (Tarbell was not thrilled with the moniker and responded in print).

Tarbell’s work on Lincoln and Napoleon laid the groundwork for her exposé of the corruption of Standard Oil. In gaining access to internal documents, which she studied, interviewing company employees, and consulting professionals about her findings, she essentially created what we call investigative journalism. Her book, The History of the Standard Oil Company remains the gold standard of investigative journalism.[10] Perhaps ironically, Rockefeller’s biographer makes a stronger case for Tarbell’s work: “Only three times in the American past have writers produced works that transcended their literary qualities and became in themselves powerful enough to shape history. The first was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense; the second, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; third, Ida M. Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company.”[11]

1. See “A Calamity in Bronze! Mr. Barnard’s ‘Lincoln’ Once More.” The Art World, vol. 3, no. 2, 1917, pp. 99–103. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25588174. Accessed 29 Aug. 2023.
2. Robert Todd Lincoln, writing to  William Howard Taft on March 22,  1917, referred to the statue as a “monstrous figure, grotesque as a likeness of President Lincoln and defamatory as an effigy.” Cited by Judith Rice in  Rice, Judith A. Abraham Lincoln and Progressive Reform, 1890-1920. 1993. University of Illinois, Doctoral Dissertation. Proquest. p. 6 
3. Williams, Dan. “George Grey Barnard.” The North American Review, vol. 243, no. 2, 1937, pp. 276–86. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25114876. Accessed 30 Aug. 2023.
4. The obvious tension between being a renowned journalist and editor at a time when this was an aberration for women and being anti women’s suffrage is addressed by virtually every scholar who writes about Tarbell. For a chronological discussion of Tarbell’s writings on the subject, as well as a nuanced exploration of Tarbell’s background and relationships, see Stinson, Robert. “Ida M. Tarbell and the Ambiguities of Feminism.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 101, no. 2, 1977, pp. 217–39. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20091149. Accessed 14 Aug. 2023.
5.  Son of the author of The Count of Monte Cristo
6. Tarbell, Ida M. All in the Day’s Work. New York, Ny, The Macmillan Co, 1939, p. 163
7. McCully, E. A. (2014). Ida M. Tarbell: The Woman who Challenged Big Business– and Won! Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 95
8.   Tarbell, p. 163
9. Ibid, p. 169
10. Weinberg, Steve. Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller. New York, Norton, 2009, p. 24
11. “Hawke, David Freeman. John D.: The Founding Father of the Rockefellers. Harper & Row, 1980.” p. 213‌

“During a week in which our country has endured shock, I’ve thought a lot about resilience and determination.” –  Gabrielle Giffords

One of the greatest letters of consolation ever written. Chief Curator Sara Willen narrates the story of Abraham Lincoln’s many personal losses and of his condolence letter to young Fanny McCullough. The original manuscript and transcript can be viewed here.

Transcript

Lincoln said that all that he was or ever hoped to be he got from his mother. Now, his mother died when he was nine years old. Lincoln never talked about the loss of his mother. There’s a poem in which he refers to it at one point, and then there is this letter, which is probably one of the great letters ever written of consolation, especially to a young person. It’s called the Fanny McCullough letter.

Dear Fanny, it is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave father, and especially that is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You cannot now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet, it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say, and you need only believe it to feel better at once. The memory of your dear father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad, sweet feeling in your heart of a purer and holier sort than you have known before. Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother. Your sincere friend, A. Lincoln.

It’s important to Lincoln Scholars because he mentions his own deep grief, which just less than a year before had been compounded again by the death of his second son. Meanwhile, of course, men are dying around him day and night, in terrible, terrible battles. He is wallowing in death. It tells us how Lincoln survived in the past and at that particular moment.

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln left deep scars on the American psyche and people, who had just been traumatised by four years of Civil War. The devastation also left Mary Todd Lincoln a widow, scarcely three years after the death of their second son, Willie. Mary, who had been holding hands with the president when he was shot, was never the same. But what about the other people present and witnesses to the assassination? What emotional wake did it leave in their lives?

There were only four people in the presidential box at Ford’s theatre on the night of the assassination; Abraham Lincoln, Mary Lincoln, Major Henry Reed Rathbone, and his fiance, Clara Harris. Well known is the fate of the President and the First Lady, but what of their companions?

Rathbone, who tried to apprehend Booth, was stabbed in his arm to the bone by the assassin. Despite sustaining a serious injury, Rathbone managed to pull Booth’s coat, as the latter escaped by jumping twelve feet from the box to the stage. Rathbone’s persistence may have caused Booth to break his leg when he landed awkwardly on the stage. By the time the numerous physicians who were tending to Lincoln got to Rathbone, he had lost a lot of blood due to a severed artery. Although Rathbone did physically recover, his mental health deteriorated over the years. He and Clara Harris married, and in 1882, President Chester Arthur appointed Rathbone the US Consul to Hannover, where his mental health deteriorated even further. The following year, Rathbone tried to attack his three children, and fatally shot his wife in the head as she protected them. The children were sent to live with Clara’s brother, William Harris, in the USA. Their father died in an insane asylum 28 years later, in Hildesheim, Germany.

Many of the physicians who cared for Lincoln left eyewitness reports and medical summaries of the events of the night, including his personal physician, Dr. Robert King Stone.  

The youngest eyewitness to the assassination was a five-year-old Samuel J. Seymour, who sat on his godmother’s lap in the balcony across from the presidential box. He recalls Lincoln slumping over, as well as Booth jumping to the stage. That night, “I was shot at 50 times, at least in my dreams–” and, Seymour goes on, “I sometimes still relive the horror of Lincoln’s assassination, dozing in my rocker, as an old codger like me is bound to do.”

You can see Seymour appearing on a a game show called I Have a Secret in February of 1956, less than two months before he passed away at the age of 96.

Video Transcript

Speaker
…I’ve Got A Secret. I would like to go over and personally escort our next guest on the show tonight.

Speaker

There you go. Now then sir, will you tell our panel, please… Let’s get in a little closer. Do you mind if I pull you in, sir? There we go. Will you tell our panel, please, what your name is and where you’re from?

Samuel J. Seymour
I am Samuel J. Seymour. I’m from Maryland.

Speaker

This is Mr. Seymour from Maryland. And we brought Mr. Seymour all the way up from Maryland and by golly, he got in the hotel and fell down the steps and gave himself a shiner. And we urged him not to come on the show tonight, as a matter of fact, and finally got in touch with his doctor and the doctor said it was up to Mr. Seymour. Mr. Seymour said he wouldn’t miss it, so here he is and feeling [inaudible 00:01:05].

[inaudible 00:01:07].

Speaker
Now then Mr. Seymour, how old are you by the way, sir?

Samuel J. Seymour
96.

Speaker
96 years old.

[inaudible 00:01:21].

Speaker
Now Sir, if you’ll whisper your secret to me, I’m sure the folks at home would like to know what it is.

Speaker
Well, now to help classify his secret I will tell you it concerns something that he witnessed. And Bill Cullen, we’ll start with you. Something that he saw, something he saw happen.

Speaker
This thing that Mr. Seymour saw, does it have historical significance?

Speaker
Does this have historical significance, Mr. Seymour? I would say yes, wouldn’t you, sir?

Speaker
Yeah. I can’t hear him very good. You’re going to have to tell-

Speaker
Yeah, sir. There’s quite a distance between our desks here. Let’s all speak up. Huh?

Bill Cullen
Does it have have political significance?

Speaker
It had political significance at the time.

Samuel J. Seymour
Yeah.

Speaker
Yes.

Bill Cullen
Well, if you’re 96, that would make the Mr. Seymour born in-

Henry
1860.

Bill Cullen
1860.

Speaker
That Henry, he’s such a mathematician.

Bill Cullen
Yeah. He’s been writing over there all the time. This thing that didn’t have anything to do with the Civil War, Mr. Seymour?

Speaker
No. It had not to do with the Civil… Well, let’s say indirectly it was concerned with the Civil War. All right in answering?

Samuel J. Seymour
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Speaker
Anyway.

Samuel J. Seymour
Did it concern a famous person in American history, a very well-known person?

Speaker
Did it concern a famous person, Mr. Seymour?

Samuel J. Seymour
Yeah.

Speaker
Yeah.

Bill Cullen
Would it help me to know who this person was?

Samuel J. Seymour
What’d he say?

Speaker
He wants to know if it would help him to know who this person was, and he has to know who that is, yes.

Bill Cullen
Did this man hold political office?

Speaker
Did this man hold political officer, sir?

Samuel J. Seymour
Yes.

Speaker
Yes. $20 down and $60 to go. And we go to Jane Meadows.

Samuel J. Seymour
You’re killing me.

Jane Meadows
Mr. Seymour, would-

Speaker
Henry is being his usual helpful self by whispering to Jane, “McKinley.”

Jane Meadows
And I’m not listening. Mr. Seymour, would this person have ever been president of the United States?

Speaker
Was he ever president, this man?

Samuel J. Seymour
I think he was once.

Speaker
He was.

Jane Meadows
Would it have been Abraham Lincoln?

Speaker
It was Abraham Lincoln. Yes.

Jane Meadows
You witnessed something to do with Abraham Lincoln. Was this a pleasant thing?

Speaker
Was it a pleasant thing you saw, sir?

Samuel J. Seymour
Not very pleasant I don’t think.

Speaker
No.

Samuel J. Seymour
I was scared to death over it.

Speaker
He said, “No. He was scared to death.”

Jane Meadows
Would it have had anything to do with the President Lincoln’s death by any chance?

Speaker
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Unfortunately, yes.

Jane Meadows
Did Mr. Seymour witness the shooting of President Lincoln?

Speaker
We found out about Mr. Seymour through a recent article in the American Weekly, and it said, “I saw Lincoln shot.” And this article is by Samuel J. Seymour. And it goes on to say that Mr. Seymour was five-years-old at the time. He had been taken to Ford’s Theater by some good friends. And the curious thing was that when he was his youth, five years of age, when he saw Booth jump from the box to the stage, at which time he broke his leg, his only concern was not for the president because he didn’t realize that the president had been shot, but the poor man who fell out of the balcony. And that’s all of his memory is of going to the theater and seeing a man fall out of the balcony.

Sir, it’s been a great joy and you might say an honor to have… You are by the way, the only living witness of that tragic event. And we are certainly going to forfeit the complete $80 to you just for your courage in coming here to see us tonight.

(silence)

Lincoln and the Jews: A History illustrates how President Abraham Lincoln – perhaps best known for his efforts in abolishing slavery – intended to secure equality and freedom for all Americans, including another growing minority group in Civil War-era America: the Jews. Read the reviews and discover the story at our online exhibition or purchase a copy of the book.

“Abraham Lincoln and the Jews don’t exactly go together in the popular imagination like bagels and lox. While Lincoln has been championed as a Moses leading African Americans out of slavery, the 16th president’s ties to the Tribe have not been well examined or even clearly acknowledged.” – Emily Shire, The Daily Beast. (more…)

Lest anyone think that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – delivered 150 years ago, today – came out of thin air, one has only to look at the wonderful, if weary, elegance of his 25 words written to General Robert Huston Milroy on October 19, 1863, just one month prior. Whether a warm-up to narrowing down his thoughts in a short, concise, and understandable manner, or merely a discrete example of the same,  Lincoln was capable, we see here – be it in a national address,  a debate, or on a simple card –  of a literary brilliance unsurpassed by any other American president and barely, by any other American, period. This, then, is perhaps the best presidential short composition ever.

Lincoln Would be Glad to See General Milroy, “Were it not that I Know he Wishes to Ask for What I Have Not to Give”

Famous people, as a general rule, do not become assassins. The man who shot Abraham Lincoln point-blank in the back of the head, however, was the most popular actor of his time. Yet John Wilkes Booth, for most of the Civil War, did not see himself in the role of assassin, but spy.  At twenty-six, he was rich, handsome, adored – and a secret Confederate agent. Here, writing 150 years ago today, Booth works behind the scenes to appear in Washington, at Ford’s Theatre – an appearance which would prove but a rehearsal for the role in which he is still reviled:  assassin.