Abraham Lincoln Corrects His Presidential Salary Payment, Which Credits Him With Days Not Worked

Background

“Mr. Lincoln,” his wife wrote, “is almost monomaniac on the subject of honesty.” Lincoln was so unflinchingly honest, in fact, that at every stage and condition of life, to his name has been attached, justly, the appellant “Honest.” 

Whether this reputation sprang from the tale that as a country shopkeeper, discovering he mistakenly overcharged a customer a few cents, he closed the store and walked miles to make the correct change; or as a lawyer, collecting judgments for his clients. Lincoln, who scrupulously turned over every penny, and characteristically refused to make himself out as anything grander than a dirt-poor laborer (as he so notably wrote that he “is not a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect”) who rose, by dint of his own effort, to become a hardworking lawyer and heroic president – these letters illustrate why Lincoln’s honesty and integrity were legend.

On the day Lincoln receives his first presidential paycheck, he makes a clear, and quiet, demonstration of his integrity in action. 

On to-day, and on the first fifth of each month, please to send me a Warrant for the amount of my salary as President of the United States. Your Obt. Servt, A. Lincoln

What Lincoln noticed, of course, was that the request he was about to sign credited him with four days he did not work. It stipulated that his paycheck was to be dated and sent on the first of every month – when in fact, his first full day on the job, as president, began on March 5th. Hence the new president corrected, in his own hand, the day of the month his salary should begin, crossing out “first” and writing in “fifth.” When, later that day, Lincoln received his first salary warrant, for $2,083.33, he promptly deposited it.

Lincoln was about to earn his money. One week later, the nascent Confederate States of America bombarded the Federal citadel of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina - and the four years of unprecedented carnage and upheaval that was the American Civil War, had begun.

----

Those familiar with original source material will no doubt note, and duly weigh, the importance of Lincoln’s unusual autograph emendation on the document featured here. It bespeaks an immediate reaction, and as such, is both intimate and revelatory. What Lincoln saw before him was so egregious a wrong, he would perforce correct it, himself, on the spot. Corrections to texts are, in fact, of keen interest to historians and collectors alike, for they expose, with a special forcefulness of expression that gives importance to something singled out -- the writer’s innermost thinking.

Physical Description