{"id":4548,"date":"2014-03-07T19:39:29","date_gmt":"2014-03-08T00:39:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=4548"},"modified":"2014-03-13T09:18:16","modified_gmt":"2014-03-13T14:18:16","slug":"history-in-the-making-who-was-abraham-lincoln","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2014\/03\/07\/history-in-the-making-who-was-abraham-lincoln\/","title":{"rendered":"The mysterious new Lincoln letter"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This photo of a newly discovered Lincoln letter (provided by the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project) provoked scholars to wonder why there is a section mysteriously clipped out<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Last Friday, the Associated Press reported on\u00a0the discovery of a previously unknown Abraham Lincoln document<\/a>, and with it, a puzzling mystery.\u00a0 Addressed only to \u201cMy dear Sir,\u201d a portion of the letter had been carefully removed, eliminating the key to understanding its meaning.\u00a0 Lincoln appears to have been writing\u00a0\u201cin haste\u201d to someone asking if he or she could \u201ckeep up a correspondence\u201d with an unknown person. \u00a0“I like to know his views occasionally,” Lincoln wrote. \u00a0Researchers at the Papers of Abraham Lincoln<\/a> project focused on the peculiar phrase, \u201ckeep up a correspondence,\u201d and ran it through their database, matching it to a letter written to Lincoln<\/a> by fellow Republican Leonard Swett<\/a> in June 1860.\u00a0 In his note<\/a>, Swett mentioned that he would \u201ctry to keep up a correspondence during the Campaign\u201d with \u201cour friend T W of Albany.\u201d \u00a0Researchers believe these initials refers to Thurlow Weed<\/a>, the powerful editor of the Albany Evening Journal, <\/i>a leading Republican newspaper from New York. \u00a0During that period, Weed was essentially serving as a campaign manager for New York senator William Henry Seward<\/a>, whom Lincoln had just defeated for the Republican presidential nomination in May 1860. \u00a0Candidate Lincoln needed full backing from Seward, Weed and their various supporters in the upcoming election but worried that he might not receive it because they were so disappointed over Seward’s unexpected defeat. \u00a0This would explain why Lincoln and Swett wanted to keep close tabs on Weed and his views and why Lincoln may have sent the mysterious letter featured above.<\/p>\n

New letters and documents relating to Abraham Lincoln turn up more frequently than you might realize. \u00a0Just a few weeks ago for Time magazine, House Divided Project director Matthew Pinsker highlighted some recent\u00a0discoveries\u00a0<\/a>that give us powerful new insights into Lincoln.\u00a0 In 2008, scholars revealed that Lincoln had once fired off an angry letter<\/a> to the editor of the Chicago Tribune<\/i>\u00a0which belittled another Republican politician as “Sister Burlingame”<\/a> and which Pinsker calls “the angriest, nastiest written statement Lincoln ever produced.” \u00a0 Another newly discovered\u00a0letter from 1859<\/a> reveals that Lincoln privately called slavery \u00a0the only \u201cliving issue of the day\u201d and wrote that it would be “idiotic” to think otherwise. \u00a0Pinsker also points out that even something as monumental as the transcript for\u00a0Lincoln\u2019s very first national speech<\/a> (1847) has only just recently been made available to scholars.<\/p>\n

For teachers and students using our Lincoln’s Writings: The Multi-Media Edition<\/a> site, we’ve added a new tool to help you examine some of the best of these recent documents for yourself. \u00a0Under the “Special Topics<\/a>”\u00a0heading, which can be found in the right-hand sidebar of every page, there is a link to \u00a0“recently discovered documents<\/a>.” As you browse each of these documents, you can also use the tags at the bottom of each page to find other related materials.<\/p>\n

In your quest for new Lincoln materials, however, always keep in mind that there are sometimes Lincoln forgeries in circulation, especially over the Internet. \u00a0This problem has even fooled us before<\/a>. \u00a0Just remember that the most reputable sources for Lincoln documents remain the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln <\/a>\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0the Papers of Abraham Lincoln<\/a>. \u00a0And, of course, we’ll do our best to help navigate the truth as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, the Associated Press reported on\u00a0the discovery of a previously unknown Abraham Lincoln document, and with it, a puzzling mystery.\u00a0 Addressed only to \u201cMy dear Sir,\u201d a portion of the letter had been carefully removed, eliminating the key to understanding its meaning.\u00a0 Lincoln appears to have been writing\u00a0\u201cin haste\u201d to someone asking if he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,172,81,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antebellum-1840-1861","category-letters-diaries","category-recent-news","category-recent-scholarship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/78"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4548"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4558,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548\/revisions\/4558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}