The Wired Mr. Lincoln and The Secret Civil War

One of the treasures of the New York State Library’s collection is Abraham Lincoln’s own handwritten first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. How it got there [hint: it was a gift from Lincoln himself] is a story for another time; today, it’s all about where this draft document was likely written.  

While some say that Lincoln began writing the first draft of this proclamation on a steamboat while returning to Washington after a military tour, David Homer Bates, author of Lincoln In The Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corps during the Civil War, published in 1907, told a different story. 

He related the story of Major Thomas Thompson Eckert, superintendent of the War Department’s Telegraph Office, who observed that Lincoln came to his office nearly every day and worked at Eckert’s desk in the cipher-room, writing and reading despatches from the war front.  One day, he asked Eckert for a quire of paper and, for several days, labored over the wording of some special document.   

Whenever Lincoln left the cipher-room, he either took the document with him or asked Eckert to lock the document away, knowing that it would be safe from prying eyes in the hands of the man responsible for the military’s secret messages.  After a while, he revealed to Eckert that he was “…writing an order giving freedom to the slaves in the South, for the purpose of hastening the end of the war.”   According to Eckert, that first draft of what was to become known as the Emancipation Proclamation was written with one of the small Gillott barrel-pens that were issued to the telegraph cipher-operators by the War Department.

Thomas T. Eckert himself was a telegraph man before and after the Civil War, having built the first telegraph line on the Fort Wayne railroad in the 1850s and later serving as president and board chairman of Western Union after the war.

During the war, Eckert ran the War Department’s telegraph operation.  At the time the telegraph was a new technology, but was eagerly embraced by President Lincoln and his high command, who found it to be an effective way to speedily communicate in code with the commanders in the field.   

Here’s a photo of Eckert and some of his men in the field from the Library of Congress collection.  Eckert is seated in the chair on the left. Notice the civilian – not military – clothes.  It looks rather like a men’s sports outing or class reunion, not a military operation.

The Telegraph Office handled the war's secrets, all contained in thousands of coded messages.  Messages on wires to Washington from field commanders.  Messages on wires from Washington to the generals. Thousands of messages, most in cipher, transmitted over miles of wires by operators in Morse code.  In other words, secret messages, written in one kind of code and transmitted in yet another kind of code.

For many years, it was assumed that much of this secret telegraphic correspondence had been either lost or destroyed. Turns out, however, that it was not.  Rather, it left Washington with Major Eckert, and when he died in 1910, it stayed with members of his family.

And earlier this week, the folks at the Huntington Library in California announced that they had purchased the entire collection – all 76 volumes of messages and cipher books - for an undisclosed sum. The collection – which hasn’t been seen by historians since the Civil War itself - had been in the possession of Eckert’s descendants for almost a century and had been sold en bloc at auction in 2009.  Seth Kaller, the dealer who purchased it and later offered it for sale stipulated that it would only be sold to an institution, or to a private buyer who would permit “scholarly and public access.”

The Huntington stepped up to the plate and added it to their already massive Civil War manuscript collection.  The opening of this collection to researcher is huge news in the Civil War history field.

You can read the story of the Huntington purchase here in the LA Times story and you can also read the complete catalog description ofthe Eckert collection here on Seth Kaller’s website. 

Naturally, this raises an interesting question or two:  if these documents came from the War Department’s Telegraph Office, aren’t they “public documents” and therefore, shouldn’t they be part of NARA’s collection?

Short answers:  No and no. In fact, NARA declined them.

There’s some information about these questions in the LA Times story, but it will be a good opportunity for me to talk more about the idea of “public documents”, a legal thingie called replevin and just who “owns” what sometime real soon. 

Stay tuned.  There’s more to come. 

Today, however, it’s all about the Eckert Collection going to the Huntington.

When The Good Guys Do The Right Thing, Everyone Comes Out On Top

Every once in a while, things fall into place and the good guys do the right thing.  Then everybody wins.

Yesterday, my copy of The Manuscript Society News (Vol 33, No 1) arrived in the mail.  Among the many interesting articles was librarian Sam Fore’s description of the private and independent Harlan Crow Library in Dallas, Texas, driving home the point that a researcher needs to cast a broad net in search of manuscript material.

For example, while the complete set of autographs from each of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence and each of the sitting Presidents would not be out of place in this kind of collection, the manuscript journal of Georgia delegate William Pierce, Jr. that includes his “character sketches” of all the other delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention would no doubt provide a unique insight into the gentlemen who shaped the nation.  Similarly, artist Gilbert Stuart’s own handwritten 1795 list of those who were to receive copies of his portrait of George Washington is interesting in its own right.

Note: this is truly a "private" library, attached to the personal residence of real estate mogul Harlan Crow.  You see photos of the interior here.

Still, back to the “good guys - do the right thing” idea…

On page 21 of the News, a short paragraph related that the Jersey City (NJ) Free Public Library found a manuscript volume from the 18^th century in their collection.  Specifically, it was a transcription of the 1749 – 1755 court records of Stafford County Virginia that had been copied in 1795 by the then- Stafford County deputy court clerk John Fox.  It had been “liberated” from the Virginia courthouse during the Civil War by a captain of the Fourth New York Regiment and brought north, probably as a “war prize.”  Eventually, it came to rest in Jersey City.

In any case, the good folks at the Jersey City Public Library did the right thing and repatriated the volume to Stafford County, Virginia – its rightful owner - after its century and a half vacation in New Jersey.

Why is this important on several levels?

If you do Virginia research, you probably already know that Stafford is one of those “burned” counties where many records were destroyed during the Civil War.  In fact, the Library of Virginia lists Stafford as “almost hopeless” in its online research aid.  So, any time anything gets back to Stafford, it’s good news.

By the way, for those with an interest in manuscripts, documents, autograph collecting and all historic things hand-written, you might want to investigate becoming a member of the Manuscript Society.   

You can learn more by visiting the Society’s website at: www.manuscript.org.

Coming Down With Blue Pinky Finger Syndrome

 I’m sorry to say that I do not have any fond memories of learning to write in elementary school.   

Don’t get me wrong – I have memories all right, but none of them are fond.

You see, since I’m left-handed, everything in the educational universe was designed to annoy, disable, thwart or otherwise discombobulate my early attempts at writing neatly.  Everything was all turned around.

First off, there were those little desks – those blonde chair-like things with shiny metal legs, adorned with a small flat surface for books and writing attached to the right-hand side.  We left-handers – especially we the pudgy ones - had to go through all sorts of physical contortions, twisting ourselves in miniature versions of Dr. Frankenstein’s misshapen assistant (“Yes, Master…”) just to write our names in block letters on the tops of our papers.

Then, there was the simple fact that, in the English-speaking world, we tend to write everything from left to right, unless we’re doing some sort of parlor trick, in which case, all bets are off.  Plus, I went to an elementary school that mandated the use of fountain pens – no ball-points permitted.  Believe it or not, ball-point pens were considered “new-fangled” and pencils were not permitted.  So, that means that we lefties always left school at the end of the day with BPF (Blue Pinky Finger) syndrome, looking like some ominous form of digital necrosis had set in.  (In case you haven’t given it much thought, you can take my word for it; it is VERY DIFFICULT to write anything from left to right with your left hand AND a fountain pen without smearing wet ink all over your pinky finger.)

But enough about me and my tribulations; suffice it to say that I’m a lousy penman when it comes to longhand.  I can do it in a pinch, but generally I tend to write in a kind of calligraphic shorthand that few can read.  So, you’d think that I'd jump on the bandwagon of the pedagogically enlightened folks running the schools in Indiana and Hawaii (and, it seems, lots of other states) and cheer the news that kids no longer will have to learn to write cursive.

Well, actually…no.  That’s a Very Bad Idea.

Sure, cursive is hard and old-fashioned. It’s difficult and slow.  Sure, keyboarding skills are probably more important in the 21^st century. And, right, there’s no “standard” as to what constitutes “cursive” that’s universally accepted.  And absolutely – writing in cursive can be sheer agony if you’re a southpaw.

But – and it’s an important “but” – being able to WRITE cursive it the easiest way to learn how to READ cursive.

Imagine a whole generation of Americans unable to easily read the cache of their grandparents’ letters.  Imagine a future researcher going into a county court house and leaving, unable to read the deed transcriptions made in the 1870s?

Can’t happen here, you say?  Well, then talk to folks who do German research and they’ll tell you the difficulty reading the German cursive script known as Suetterlin.  And it’s not just English-speakers – it’s modern young Germans who’ve never had to learn it.

Imagine being cut off from your culture because you are not able to read something written in longhand a century ago?

I’ll take Blue Pinky Finger Syndrome over cultural and historical illiteracy any day!