Chapter VII: Part 7

I wonder if students in the United States know how much they owe to this man. He gave his life to making a library first to serve Congress, for he held the firm conviction that Congressmen generally needed educating, and that books handy in which he could find materials for their committee work and their speeches would contribute to the process. He made it his first business to provide them as near on the instant as possible with what he thought they needed. In return for this service he used every opportunity to wheedle, shame, beg money from them, money for books, equipment, an increased staff, and always for better accommodations; for Mr. Spofford had a great vision of a national library, educating not only Congress but the people. To realize that vision he had become what he was when I knew him, a devoted, domineering, crabbed czar of his realm. He worked incessantly, doing everything, knowing everything. He paid little attention to the irritated criticisms of those who saw only the inconveniences and dust and overcrowding of the old rooms, and who charged him with inefficiency and tyranny. His mind was on the arrangement and administration of the marble pile already under way across the square. This was what he had been working for—a worthy place for books. His sharp, irritated, “There, maybe you can find something in that,” banging a dusty volume on my table, has often sounded in my ears as in later years I worked at the commodious desks of the library he had dreamed, and which to my mind is a monument to him more than to any other man—naturally enough since he was the only man I ever knew who had anything to do with its existence.

Six weeks, and I had my first installment ready. I had done it with my tongue in my cheek. Impudence, it seemed to me, to write biography on the gallop. I had kept myself to it by repeating in moments of disgust: “Well, a cat may look at a king. I’ll sketch it in, and they can take or leave it.” But Mr. Hubbard liked what I had done, and that meant Mr. McClure hurried it to the printers while I in hot haste went ahead with my sketching.

I expected nothing for myself from it more than the forty dollars a week, and the inner satisfaction of following the thrilling drama from the terror of ’93 down to St. Helena. That satisfied me. But to my surprise I did get the last thing in the world I had expected, the approval of a few people who knew the field. John C. Ropes wrote me he liked the treatment: “Come and lunch with me when you are in Boston and see my Napoleon collection.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Of course I went.

Charles Bonaparte, the grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, and Mrs. Bonaparte invited Mr. Hubbard and me to lunch with them in Baltimore to see their collection. Curious the little things one remembers of long-ago experiences! Out of that visit I recall only that Mrs. Bonaparte told me that in the garret when she came into the house where Jerome and his American wife, Elizabeth Patterson, had lived, there were literally barrels of string, short lengths neatly rolled, accumulated by the sister-in-law of Napoleon. Why remember that when the home was full of treasures on my subject? Probably because I have never been able to throw away a string without a pang.

Something better worth remembering was the startling resemblance to Napoleon in a certain pose of Charles Bonaparte. As he stood talking unconsciously, hands behind his back, slightly stooped, he was the counterpart of Raffet’s Napoleon, the most natural of them all.

A bit of consolation for my hasty work came from the last source I would have expected: William Milligan Sloane, the author of an elaborate study, the outcome of years of research, recently published by the _Century Magazine_. That was the way biography should be written, I told myself: years of research, of note-taking, of simmering and saturation. Then you had a ripened result. I said something of this once to Mr. Sloane.

“I am not so sure,” he replied, “that all the time you want to take, all the opportunity to indulge your curiosity and run here and there on bypaths, to amuse yourself, to speculate and doubt, contribute to the soundness or value of a biography. I have often wished that I had had, as you did, the prod of necessity behind me, the obligation to get it out at a fixed time, to put it through, no time to idle, to weigh, only to set down. You got something that way—a living sketch.”

I couldn’t have listened to more consoling comment. There must have been something in his characterization of “living,” for now, over forty years since it first appeared in book form, I still receive annually a small royalty check for my “pot-boiling” Napoleon!

What really startled me about that sketch was the way it settled things for me, knocked over my former determinations, and went about shaping my outward life in spite of me. It weakened my resolve never again to tie myself to a position, to keep myself entirely footloose; it shoved Paris into the future and substituted Washington. It was certainly not alone a return to the security of a monthly wage, with the possibility that the wage would soon grow, that turned my plans topsy-turvy, though that had its influence. Chiefly it was the sense of vitality, of adventure, of excitement, that I was getting from being admitted on terms of equality and good comradeship into the McClure crowd.

The “Napoleon” had given the magazine, now in its second year, the circulation boost it needed. My part in it was not exaggerated by the office or by me. We all agreed that it was the pictures that had done it, but the text had framed the pictures, helped bring out their value, and it had been done at a critical moment.

The success of the “Napoleon” sketch did me a good turn with the Scribners, who had had my manuscript of “Madame Roland” for some time. They were hesitating about publishing it. There was no popular appeal. I was entirely unknown, but the “Napoleon” work gave me sufficient backing to persuade them. At least that was the explanation the literary head of the concern, William C. Brownell, gave me. Thus my first book was my second to appear. My reward for writing it came from my interest in doing it, what I learned about how to go at a serious biographical study, certainly not in royalties. My first check was for forty-eight cents. I had used up my share of the small sales in corrections of the proofs and gift copies.

I must stay with them, declared Mr. McClure. And the more I saw of Mr. McClure and his colleagues, the more I wanted to stay. Of my first impression of S. S. McClure in Paris I have spoken. Closer views emphasized and enlarged that impression. He was as eager as a dog on the hunt—never satisfied, never quiet. Creative editing, he insisted, was not to be done by sitting at a desk in a comfortable office. It was only done in the field following scents, hunts. An omnivorous reader of newspapers, magazines, books, he came to his office primed with ideas, possibilities, and there was always a chance that among them was a stroke of genius. He hated nothing so much in the office as settled routine, wanted to feel stir from the door to the inner sanctum. And he had great power to stir excitement by his suggestions, his endless searching after something new, alive, startling, and particularly by his reporting.

He stood in awe of no man, but dashed back and forth over the country, back and forth to Europe interviewing the great and mighty. He brought back from his forays contracts with Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Kipling. It was something to find yourself between the covers of a book printing a Jungle story. They all came out in _McClure’s_ in those years and were followed by “Captains Courageous” and “Stalky” as well as many of the greatest of the short stories and poems—“The Ship That Found Herself,” “The Destroyers,” the “Recessional”—things that left you breathless and gave to a number the touch of genius for which the office searched and sweated.

Mr. McClure was always peering over the Edge of the Future. It was this search for what was on the way that brought to _McClure’s_ the first article in an American magazine on radium, the X-ray, Marconi’s wireless, Lilienthal’s and Octave Chanute’s gliders, Langley’s steam-driven air-runner and in time the first article on the Wrights’ flying machine.

In my field of biography and history the Edge of the Future meant to Mr. McClure the “unpublished” or the so poorly published that its reappearance was equal to a first appearance. The success of a feature spurred him to effort to get more of it, things which would sharpen and perpetuate the interest. He was ready to look into any suggestion, however unlikely it might seem to the cautious-minded. He was never afraid of being fooled, only of missing something.

His quick taking of a hint, his warm reception of new ideas, new facts, had its drawbacks. If they were dramatic and stirring Mr. McClure was impatient of investigation. He wanted the fun of seeing his finds quickly in print. At one point in the publication of the Napoleon he caused me real anxiety by his apparent determination to print a story for which I could find no authority.

Among the contributors to the Syndicate at that time was a picturesque European with a title and an apparently endless flow of gossip. He pretended to have been a member of the Court of Napoleon III and in the confidence of the Emperor. This relation accounted for his having been invited to join a strange secret party made up by the Emperor, who was worried over a rumor that the body of Napoleon I did not lie under the dome of the Invalides. It was not known who did lie there or what had become of Napoleon. To reassure himself the Emperor decided to go with a few chosen friends and open the tomb. They gathered in the dead of night. The tomb was opened. There lay Napoleon, unchanged. The Emperor’s mind was at rest. He swore the group to secrecy, but took affidavits to be used in case of political necessity. The fall of the Empire seems to have made the gentleman feel that his oath was no longer binding, and that he could cash in on his adventure.

I did not believe the story, but when I expressed my doubt all I could get out of Mr. McClure was a severe, “What a pity you do not know something about Napoleon!” No new idea to me, since it was the first thing I was thinking every morning when I went to work. What I did not know, as I worried over the possible publication of what I believed a fake, was that in spite of his quick and enthusiastic acceptance of a good story, S. S. McClure cared above all for the soundness, the truthfulness of the magazine. Good stories—yes. But they must hold water, stand the scrutiny of those who knew. Moreover, he knew what I did not as yet, that he could go the limit in his enthusiasms since he had at his side a partner on whom he counted more, I think, than he then realized to balance his excitements.

This happened now. The story was in type, scheduled. Mr. McClure was going to Europe. “While you’re over there, Sam,” said his partner quietly, “you better verify that Napoleon story. We’ll hold it until we hear from you.”

A few weeks later came a laconic postal card. “Don’t publish the story of the opening of Napoleon’s tomb. It wasn’t opened.”

I never heard the matter referred to after that. By the time he returned he had forgotten what to me was a near tragedy, to him a joyful bit of editorial adventure.

I came later to feel that this quick kindling of the imagination, this untiring curiosity, this determination to run down every clue until you had it there on the table, its worth or worthlessness in full view, was one of Mr. McClure’s greatest assets; but it was an asset that would have landed him frequently in hot water if it had not been for the partner who had saved him from the Napoleon hoax, John S. Phillips—J. S. P. as he was known in the office.

Living in Washington as I had been doing, I had seen little of Mr. Phillips, only heard of him, for his name was the one oftenest on Mr. McClure’s tongue. His calm and tactful handling of the “General,” as the office called Mr. McClure, in the ticklish Napoleon story delighted me.

“Here’s a man,” I told myself, “who has a nose for humbugs as well as one who knows the power of patience when dealing with the impatient.”

_At her desk in the McClure’s office, 1898_
]

As time went on and I spent more and more of it in New York, finally settling there at the end of the decade, I had better opportunities to watch Mr. Phillips in action. I was not long in learning that he was the focus of every essential factor in the making of the magazine: circulation, finance, editing. Into the pigeonhole of his old-fashioned roll-top desk went daily reports of bank balances, subscriptions received, advertising contracts to be signed, books sold. I doubt if he ever went home at night without having a digest of those reports in his head. He knew their relation to the difficult problem of putting the undertaking on its feet.

It was largely Mr. Phillips’ love of fine printing and his habit of keeping track of the advances in printing processes that led _McClure’s_ late in the nineties to set up its own plant. It included all of the new miraculous self-feeding machines, automatic presses, folders, binders, stitchers.

It was the first magazine plant of the kind in the country and had many visitors. Among them was Mark Twain. Mr. Phillips tells an amusing story of his visit. As they stood watching the press perform, a sheet went awry on the bed. The press at once stopped and rang a bell calling for the pressman, who immediately came and helped the big automat out of its plight.

“My God, man!” cried Mark Twain, “That thing ought to vote.”

It did more than cast votes for _McClure’s_. It saved the money which finally balanced the budget—and then some.

To those of us on the inside it was always a marvel that John Phillips found time to be an editor, as well as a focusing center for everything that went on. At the bottom of his constant editorial supervision was, I think, a passion for the profession. He was unmistakably the most intellectual, as well as the best intellectually trained, person in the office. After graduating at Knox College in Illinois he had taken a degree at Harvard and later spent two years studying literature and philosophy in the University of Leipzig. When he came to the magazine he put all his training into the professional problem.

He was an invaluable aid to the group of staff writers the magazine was building up. He was no easy editor. He never wheedled, never flattered, but rigidly tried to get out of you what he conceived to be your best, taking it for granted that you wanted to make the most of your piece and it was his business to help you. I never had an editor who so quickly and unerringly spotted weaknesses, particularly in construction. He had a fine feeling, too, for the right word, took the trouble to search for it, often bringing in a penciled memo of suggestions long after you had decided to let it go as it was. He knew the supreme value of naturalness, detested fake style. “A kind of disease,” I have heard him say, quoting somebody.

It always disturbed a few of us that nobody outside of the office knew what an important part in the making of _McClure’s_ John Phillips played. He had that rare virtue—the willingness and ability to keep out of the picture if thereby he could make sure the picture was not spoiled in the making.

The one member of the staff besides Mr. McClure whom I knew, when I began to find myself so to speak absorbed, was already by virtue of his unusual gift for comradeship a friend as well as a species of boss—that was Auguste F. Jaccaci, a brilliant artist and art editor as well as one of the most versatile and iridescent personalities I have ever known. I first met Jac, as he was called by everybody, in Paris, when as an advance agent of the new magazine he was sounding out possibilities for writers and illustrators. He took me out to dinner and paid the _addition_. We talked until late, then he simply put me on my omnibus and let me go back to the Latin Quarter alone. Here was established the _modus operandi_ for our frequent visiting in the future, in Paris, in New York, in Washington—with one revision. After that first dinner I paid my share of the check, save on special occasions when Jac, a knowing epicure, selected the dinner and treated me.

It was he who showed me the first copy of _McClure’s_, that of August, 1893, showed it to me at five-thirty in the morning, at a café across the square from the Gare Saint-Lazare where he had ordered me by cablegram from London to meet him. For nobody in the world excepting a member of my family should I have been willing at that hour to cross Paris. But I couldn’t afford to show a lack of interest. Moreover, I must confess that this preposterous order flattered me a little. It was taking me man to man, I said to myself. And so I was there. He had to bully the garçon to get a table out on the sidewalk and make us coffee.

All this was a good basis for a comradeship which lasted to his death. It lives in my memory as something quite apart in my relations with men. Jac had a certain superior appreciation and wisdom never quite put into words, but which you felt. I for my part was always straining to understand, never quite reaching it. Part of his charm was his confidence in his own superiority and his anxiety lest we didn’t quite realize it. And then there were his rages. They came and went like terrible summer thundershowers. He would roar down the corridor of the office while I sat and watched him enthralled. Those rages, whether directed at me or somebody else, never made any other impression on me than that of some unusual natural phenomenon.

Here then were the leaders in the crowd to which I had been admitted by virtue of a hasty sketch of Napoleon Bonaparte done on order.

Thank God I had sense enough to realize that here were three rare personalities, and that to miss such associations would be sheer stupidity. Also to know that I was an unusually lucky woman to be accepted.

Then there was the magazine they were making. There was something youthful, gay, natural about it which captivated me. Often, too, it achieved a most precious thing. Mr. Phillips called it a “lift.” To be youthful, gay, natural with a “lift”—that was an achievement.

And then I found the place so warmly and often ridiculously human. Mr. McClure was incapable of standing up before a hard-luck story, with the result that he brought into that overcrowded office a string of derelicts ranging from autocratic scrub ladies to indigent editors—brought them in and left them for J. S. P. to place. But J. S. P. was not far behind in his sympathy for those who were down and out. I watched him more than once rescue an author who perhaps out of sheer discouragement had taken to drink and landed in jail. Mr. Phillips saw that he was bailed out, his debts paid, work given him. I never ceased to wonder that these two men loaded with work and responsibility should seemingly consider it part of their daily job to rescue the wastrel and the disheartened.

There was reason enough for me to stay with _McClure’s_.

9
GOOD-BYE TO FRANCE

The Napoleon sketch had not been finished before Mr. McClure was urging me into a new job—not writing this time, but editing, editing according to his recipe. “Out with you—look, see, report.” Abraham Lincoln was the subject. My heart fell. “If you once get into American history,” I told myself, “you know well enough that will finish France. It will also finish your determination to solve the woman question and determine the nature of revolutions. They will go the way of the microscope and your search for God. Are you to spend your life running, now here, now there, never follow a path to its end?” Or was I taking my ambitions too seriously? It seemed probable. However, I was to have five thousand a year if I went along. There was no question in my mind but it was my duty to earn that money.

Lincoln was one of Mr. McClure’s steady enthusiasms. I once saw him, in puzzled efforts to find the reason for the continued life of a certain great American magazine, going through the file from the Civil War on, solely to find out what attention had been given to Lincoln. “Not a Lincoln article in this volume, nor in this,” he cried. “It is not a great magazine, it has overlooked the most vital factor in our life since the Civil War, the influence of the life and character of Abraham Lincoln.”

His insight told him that people never had had enough of Lincoln. Moreover, he believed that there was to be had for the seeking a large amount of “unpublished” reminiscences. It was on this conviction that he started me off.

He was right about “unpublished” material. Lincoln had been dead only about thirty years, and hundreds of those who had known him in one connection or another were still living. His secretaries Nicolay and Hay had finished their great documentary life of their chief. They should have personal material not in their volumes. There were members of his Cabinet still living, members of Congress of his time, editors like Joseph Medill of the Chicago _Tribune_, Horace White of the Chicago _Tribune_ and later of the New York _Evening Post_, Colonel McClure of the Philadelphia _Inquirer_. There were scores of men in Illinois towns who had traveled the circuit with him, for whom he acted as counsel, scores of people who had as a youth heard the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and had been stirred to say, “Lincoln’s got it right.” They had followed him in his fight against the extension of slavery and later into the war to save the Union. There was indeed no point of his short trail from birth to death where living men and women had not known him as colleagues, friends, opponents, critics.

Also, there had never been a time from the day he had become a Presidential candidate to the hour of his assassination that his life had not been under scrutiny. Yet it had been difficult to find out much about him. “There is not much of me,” he told a friend searching for biographical material. But there had been enough always to touch deep springs in American hearts and consciences. Men like William Dean Howells and J. G. Holland, later to occupy high places in our literary life, had written campaign lives of him. Hardly was he in his coffin before his brilliant, if unstable, law partner William Herndon was gathering from all sources reminiscences, estimates, documents on his life up to the Presidency; and from his gathering Herndon made a story of extraordinary vitality and color. Most important—always to remain most important—was the collection of his Letters and Speeches and the ten-volume “Abraham Lincoln: A History” by Nicolay and Hay.

Why do more? What was there to be had? Mr. McClure insisted that there was plenty if one searched.

I went to talk it over with John Nicolay, who as well as his fine daughter Helen was an honored member of the famous old Washington Literary Society where I was a frequent guest. I told him what Mr. McClure proposed. Did he not have something he could give me? He was emphatic in saying there was nothing of importance to be had. The collection of letters and speeches he and Mr. Hay had made was complete; they had told all there was worth telling of Lincoln’s life. He would advise me not to touch so hopeless an assignment. I think Mr. Nicolay never quite forgave me for going ahead. Later when the results of my search began to appear and gradually to shape themselves into a Life of Lincoln he came to me one evening to protest. “You are invading my field. You write a popular Life of Lincoln and you do just so much to decrease the value of my property.”

I was deeply distressed. He thought me a poacher. I told him I believed he was mistaken. I pleaded that if I could write anything which people would read I was making readers for him. To know a little of Lincoln was for the serious a desire to know more. He and Mr. Hay had written something that all students must have. I could never hope to make an essential lasting contribution. But he went away unconvinced.

Mr. Nicolay’s point of view, if not generous, was certainly honest. I understand it better now than I did then. He had lived through the great years of the Civil War always at Lincoln’s elbow. He had been the stern, careful, humorless guardian of a man who carried his mail in his hat and a laugh on his lips. His reverence for him was a religion. He had given years of conscientious hard labor to the editing of the “Complete Works” and the writing of the history, and now he was retired. Lincoln was his whole life. We all come to rest our case on the work to which we have given our best years, frequently come to live on that, so to speak. When the time comes that our field is invaded by new workers, enlarged, reshaped, made to yield new fruit, we suffer shock. We may put up a “No trespassing” sign, but all to no use.

Mr. Nicolay’s tragedy was in not having found a fresh field. How different it was with his colleague John Hay, whose secretaryship with Lincoln had been an episode in a diplomatic career of unusual distinction and usefulness! In 1894 everybody recognized that he had a greater future before him. His part in the Life of Lincoln had been but one of many contributions to the literature of his day. His social circle was the choicest, and he was rich. Hay had everything; Nicolay, only Lincoln, and he looked on all who touched his field as invaders.

Mr. Nicolay’s rebuff settled my plan of campaign. I would not begin at the end of the story with the great and known, but at the start in Kentucky with the humble and unknown; I would follow the trail chronologically; I would see for myself what sort of people and places those were that had known Lincoln, reconstruct the life of his day as far as living men and women backed by published records furnished reliable material. I would gather documents as I went, bits of color, stories, recollections; I would search in courthouses and county histories and newspapers; I would pick up pictures as I went, a picture of everything that directly or indirectly touched on what I was after. I would make sure if among these people who had known him there might not be letters not in the “Complete Works”; and, if I were lucky, somewhere on the trail I might turn up the important unpublished reminiscences which Mr. McClure was so certain existed. It was a gamble, the greater because I was so profoundly ignorant of American life and history.

It was in February of 1895, the Napoleon work still unfinished, though far enough ahead to give me a month for a preliminary survey, that I started for the Lincoln country of Kentucky to begin work on this program. It was characteristic of Mr. McClure, as he saw me off in the deadly cold, to take sudden alarm for my comfort. “Have you warm _bed socks_?” he asked anxiously. “We’ll send you some if not. It will be awful in those Kentucky hotels.” It was—Louisville aside—awful in more than one hotel and train in my first month of Lincoln hunting.

The results were not exciting. They were too fragmentary: bits of unrecorded recollections, a picture, a letter, a newspaper paragraph, a court record which had passed notice. What was to be done with them? Here was no smashing new contribution such as an article of unpublished recollections from Mr. Nicolay might have been, but here were bits of value if you were to enlarge and retouch the popular notion of the man Lincoln. It was soon clear to Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips that what I was collecting must be dovetailed into the published records; and that, they told me, was my business. Before I knew it I was writing a Life of Lincoln, though the first three chapters carried the legend, “Edited by Ida M. Tarbell.” The office seemed gradually to conclude that the editor had become the author, though I think they were ahead of me in this decision.

We had a lucky break at the start which launched the undertaking even better, I think, than the big article we were looking for. Among my Washington acquaintances was a delightful Chicago woman, Mrs. Emily Lyons. She belonged to the group of early settlers who were still at this time in the thick of the exciting struggle to make the city the richest, the finest physically and socially in the country. Their energy, their daring, their confidence, their eagerness to learn, to adapt, was one of the social phenomena of the day. Now Mrs. Lyons’ husband was important in the wealth-producing class as she was in the social. She knew practically everybody. When she learned that I was interested in new material on Lincoln she said at once: “Come to Chicago. I’ll see that you meet Robert Lincoln, and I’ll see that he gives you something.” Too good to be true. But Mrs. Lyons kept her promise when I reached Chicago on my first expedition, producing Mr. Lincoln at once.

“Now, Robert,” she ordered as she filled our cups, “I want you to give her something worth while.”

To be drinking tea with the son of Abraham Lincoln was so unbelievable to me that I could scarcely take note of his reply. I searched his face and manners for resemblances. There was nothing. He was all Todd, a big plump man perhaps fifty years old, perfectly groomed, with that freshness which makes men of his type look as if they were just out of the barber’s chair, the admirable social poise of the man who has seen the world’s greatest and has come to be sure of himself; and this in spite of such buffeting as few men had had—the assassination of his father when he was twenty-four, the humiliation of Mary Lincoln’s half-crazed public exhibition of herself and her needs, the death of his brother Tad, the heartbreaking necessity of having his mother committed for medical care, and more recently the loss of his only son. Robert Lincoln had had enough to crush him, but he was not crushed. At the moment he looked and felt, I think, that he had arrived where he belonged. The Republican party would have been happy, no doubt, to make him its leader if he had shown political genius recalling that of his father. They tried him out. Garfield and Arthur made him Attorney General, Harrison named him minister to the Court of St. James’s, but nothing happened. He was not political timber, but by this time big business wanted him. It was his field. He was now president of the Pullman Company.

I devoured him with my eyes. He was very friendly. To Mrs. Lyons’ order to do his best for me he laughingly replied, “Of course if you say so, Emily.” But he went on to say he was afraid he had little that would help me. Herndon had taken all his father’s papers from the law office. I think he used the word “stolen,” but I am not sure; at least I knew he _felt_ they were stolen. He had protested, but was never able to get anything back. As for the Presidential period, all the correspondence was packed away in Washington, but it had been fully used by Nicolay and Hay. However, he had what he believed to be the earliest portrait made of his father—a daguerreotype never published. I could have that.

I held my breath. If it was true! I held my breath still longer when the picture was finally in my hands for I realized that this was a Lincoln which shattered the widely accepted tradition of his early shabbiness, rudeness, ungainliness. It was another Lincoln, and one that took me by storm.

Of course we made it the frontispiece to our first installment, and the office saw to it that those whose opinions were of value had fine prints of it. It called out some remarkable letters. Woodrow Wilson wrote that he found it “both striking and singular—a notable picture.” He was impressed by “the expression of the dreaminess, the familiar face without its sadness.” Charles Dudley Warner wrote that he found it “far and away the most outstanding presentation of the man” he had ever seen. “To my eyes it explains Mr. Lincoln far more than the most elaborate engraving which has been produced.” A common enough comment was that it “looks like Emerson.” Edward Everett Hale wrote us that he had shown the picture to “two young people of intelligence who each asked if it was not Waldo Emerson.”

A valuable and considered comment came from John T. Morse, the author of a Life of Abraham Lincoln, as well as editor of a series on leading American statesmen:

I have studied this portrait with very great interest [wrote Mr.
Morse]. All of the portraits with which we are familiar show us the
man as made; this shows us the man in the making. And I think every
one will admit that the making of Abraham Lincoln presents a more
singular, puzzling, interesting study than the making of any other
man in human history. I have shown it to several persons without
telling them who it was. Some say a poet; others a philosopher, a
thinker, like Emerson. These comments also are interesting, for
Lincoln had the raw material of both these characters very largely
in his composition though political and practical problems so
overlaid them that they show only faintly in his later portraits.
This picture, therefore, is valuable evidence as to his natural
traits.

Robert Lincoln was almost as proud as I was of the character of the comment. If he felt, as he well may have done, that he was taking a chance in responding so generously to his friend Mrs. Lyons’ order, he was rewarded by the attention the picture received from those whose opinions he regarded highly. Always thereafter he was quick to see me when I took a Lincoln problem to him, as I did when I had exhausted all other sources. He was always frank and downright. One puzzle I brought amused him no little. It was the recurring rumor that Abraham Lincoln had written a letter to Queen Victoria early in the war begging her not to recognize the Confederacy. He was said to have sent it direct. Now no hint, however unlikely, no clue, however shadowy, was passed by in what had become in the McClure office a veritable bureau of Lincoln research. “Anything is possible,” was our watchword. I was carrying on a widespread correspondence and continually dashing in one direction or another on what turned out often to be wild-goose chases, but also not infrequently brought in valuable game. Mr. McClure was especially excited over this letter. The State Department pooh-poohed the idea; the curator of documents in London was noncommittal. I interviewed people who were in position to know what was going on, but learned nothing. Finally I went to Chicago to see Robert Lincoln. His eye seemed harder to me in his office than over Mrs. Lyons’ tea table, but he quickly put me at ease. I was certain that my quest was going to seem ridiculous to him; indeed, it had become a little so to me. But he didn’t throw it aside. He picked it up and played with it. He had never heard of such a letter and doubted if it had been written.

“If father had done that,” he said with emphasis, “and Mr. Adams”—Charles Francis Adams, then minister to Great Britain—“had learned of it, he would have resigned. Father knew of course that all communication between governments must be carried on by the credited ambassadors.”

And then he fell to talking laughingly of his own experiences at the Court of St. James’s. He said he had received all sorts of things to be presented to the Queen—patchwork quilts, patent medicines, books, sheet music. “I suppose,” he said, “that lots of Americans fancy that their ambassador smokes cigarettes awhile every morning after breakfast with the Queen. They take it for granted he can drop in for tea any time and present quilts. Of course such people see no reason why a President cannot write a Queen direct.” And he laughed until the tears came.

That interview put an end for the time being to the search for “the letter to the Queen,” as the item had come to be called in the office.

When the Life was finally complete Mr. Lincoln wrote me: “It seemed to me at first that the field had been too many times gleaned to hope for much from the work you were undertaking, and I must confess my astonishment and pleasure upon the result of your untiring research. I consider it an indispensable adjunct to the work of Nicolay and Hay.”

Mr. Nicolay, however, never agreed.

If Robert Lincoln was always friendly he threw me once into the greatest panic I suffered in the course of my Lincoln work, though this was long after the Life was published. I had gone to him to ask if he would arrange for me to consult the collection of Presidential papers. “Impossible,” he said. “They are in the safety vault of my bank. I won’t allow anybody to see them. There is nothing of my father’s there, that is of value—Nicolay and Hay have published everything; but there are many letters _to_ him which if published now would pain, possibly discredit able and useful men still living. Bitter things are written when men are trying to guide a country through a war, particularly a Civil War. I fear misuse of those papers so much that I am thinking of destroying them. Besides, somebody is always worrying me about them, just as you are, and I must be ungenerous. I think I will burn them.”

I was scared; I feared he would do it, but Herbert Putnam, the head of the Congressional Library, had already seen to that. He did not burn them; the Library got them finally, but with the condition that they were not to be opened until twenty-one years after Robert Lincoln’s death. He died in 1926. The papers will not be available to students until 1947, which probably lets me out!

The early portrait set the key for the series and, as it turned out, a much higher key than I had believed possible. I found that court records did yield unpublished documents, that every now and then I ran on a man or woman who said more or less casually, “Why, we have a letter of Lincoln’s written to father in ——. Copy it if you wish.” Occasionally I found a speech not in the “Complete Works.” By the time the work was put into book form in 1899 I had an appendix of three hundred unpublished speeches and letters. This did not mean that none of them had ever been in print. Many of them had appeared in newspapers or historical magazines. “Unpublished” meant uncollected. On the whole this collection stood the scrutiny of experts very well, though I think I was swindled in the case of at least one document, a forgery by a man recommended to me by an honest scholar who had used the man frequently for years.

Forgery was easy, so was pilfering of documents in those days, so little attention did clerks give to their old papers, so glad were they to get rid of them. There was frequently no objection to a student carrying off anything that interested him. One of the most important documents in the controversy over the legitimacy of Lincoln’s mother is now to be found in the Barton collection which the University of Chicago bought. Mr. Barton probably asked permission to take it home for examination, a common enough practice in Illinois as well as in Kentucky, and forgot to return it. Probably most of the legal documents in the private Lincoln collections have been stolen. The original thief would have been horrified to have that harsh word applied to him. He simply put it into his pocket with or without permission, saying, “I’ll just take this along.”

But while I did get together some three hundred pieces I came nowhere near turning up all the letters and speeches then at large. I was under a time limit. Since I ended my search scores of items, some of value, have been published in one or another collection. I shall be surprised if, as time goes on, there does not turn up every now and then a genuine letter, though now more than ever caution must be taken in accepting a new piece. The forging of historical documents has become a lucrative trade.

From the beginning I did my best to reconstruct the physical surroundings of Lincoln’s homes and activities. I was particularly interested in the setting of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which I followed in their order; but it was not until I reached Galesburg, Illinois, where on October 7, 1858, the fifth debate was staged, that I found the stirring and picturesque material I sought in order to picture the scene of a debate. I was delighted that it should have been the fifth debate, which I have always considered the most important of the series, for it was in that that Lincoln brought his argument down to what to him was the crux of the whole matter, that is, that slavery was wrong and must be kept back or it would spread over the whole country.

The debate had taken place on the campus of Knox College on the east front of its historic Old Main, one of the most beautiful college buildings of that period in the Middle West.

I had the luck to find in Galesburg a helper who not only enthusiastically seconded my conviction that here was the place for the illustration which we wanted, but set out heartily to help me find material. This was John H. Finley, my old friend on the Chautauqua Assembly _Daily Herald_. Dr. Finley was now president of the college—“the youngest college president in the United States,” he was popularly called, doing a piece of work which was winning him more and more recognition. It was through him that I was able to find the newspaper reports of the debate. It was through him that I was able to meet people who could give me recollections of the day.

The picture which resulted from our joint efforts was made by that excellent artist William R. Leigh, who did many of the illustrations for the series. It has had a continuing life, being reproduced again and again on the occasion of the commemorative celebrations of the debate which Dr. Finley inaugurated in 1896. It was at this celebration that Robert Lincoln made his first and only public address about his father.

The real fun of the Lincoln work, as well as some of the worth-while results, came from setting myself little problems. I was curious, for instance, to know more of Lincoln as a speaker. Whenever I found an Illinois man who had been with him on the circuit or in public life I would bombard him with questions. He would tell me how Lincoln looked, what his voice was like, how he used stories. They all talked more about the Lincoln and Douglas debates than any other exhibit, but frequently would conclude by saying, “Well, those were good speeches, but they were nothing like the Lost Speech. That was the greatest thing Lincoln ever did.” Or a man would begin by saying, “Well, you can never know much about him as a speaker, nobody can that never heard the Lost Speech.”

It was, they said, a speech which so stirred his audience that the very reporters forgot to take their notes. Knowing reporters, I was skeptical about that, so I looked up some of them. They all told me that when Lincoln finally ended his speech they found themselves standing on, instead of sitting by their writing tables—and without a note!

Still I believed that somebody must remember something about the speech—enough at least to give an idea of the argument. Perhaps, I said to myself, I may pick up some of the phrases—get some real notion of it; so I went prowling about asking questions and finally learned that in the state of Massachusetts was a man who was said to have taken notes—a cool-headed man—a lawyer, not a reporter. His name was Henry C. Whitney. He knew Lincoln well, had travelled the circuit with him, had published a “Life on Circuit with Lincoln” with which I was familiar.

Of course there was nothing to do but look up Mr. Whitney, and that I did. To my great satisfaction I found he had a bunch of yellowed notes. He had always intended to write them up, he said; but when he tried it the result seemed so inadequate that he gave it up.

After much persuasion Mr. Whitney did get out a version of the Speech. When he turned it over to me I took it to the men in Illinois with whom I had talked and asked them what they thought of it. There were those who said, “It’s impossible to write out that Speech.” But there were others who said, “Yes, Whitney has caught the spirit, he has the argument, he even has many of the phrases, as of course he would have if he made notes.”

The most emphatic and enthusiastic statement came from a man of importance—Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago _Tribune_. Mr. Medill had been one of the reporters at Bloomington in 1856 when the speech was made who found himself in the end on top of the table without a note! He thought Mr. Whitney’s version was close to the original. Indeed, he wrote to Mr. McClure a long and interesting letter giving his recollections of the Convention. In that letter he said:

Mr. Whitney has reproduced with remarkable accuracy what Mr. Lincoln
said, largely in his identical language and partly in synonymous
terms. The report is close enough in thought and word to recall the
wonderful speech delivered forty years ago with vivid freshness.

Well, that seemed to us reason enough for publishing Mr. Whitney’s report along with the story of how I had found it, what the people who heard the speech in the first place said about it, both for and against. And that we did.

But out in Illinois there were a number of people who did not want to give up the tradition. The Lost Speech was the greater to them because it was lost. As long as it was lost you could make it bigger than any speech any man ever made, and nobody could contradict you. And so you will find those who claim that the Lost Speech is still lost. And of course you can take it or you can leave it.

More than once when I plumed myself on a “discovery” I encountered the loyalty of men to their legends. There was the Herndon story of Lincoln’s failing to appear at the first wedding arranged for him and Mary Todd. I realized he rather lets his “historical imagination” loose in his description, but I never had questioned his story until by chance I mentioned it to one of the family, a woman who would have been there if there had ever been such a wedding ready. She froze me with her indignation. “Mr. Herndon made that story up out of whole cloth. No such thing ever happened.” Amazed, I flew around to see what other men and women of the circle said. They all denied it. A sister of Mary Lincoln was particularly indignant because Mr. Herndon had put the bride in white silk. “Mary Lincoln never had a white silk dress until she went to Washington,” she sputtered.

But in spite of all the documents and evidences I collected demolishing the episode, I reaped only sour looks and dubious headshakes. I had spoiled a good story or tried to. It still remains a good story. Every now and then somebody tells it to me. A biographer who tries to break down a belittling legend meets with far less sympathy than he who strengthens or creates one.

The most important piece of ghost writing I ever did came in the course of the Lincoln work—Charles A. Dana’s “Recollections of the Civil War.” Mr. Dana, at that time the active editor of the New York _Sun_, had had an exceptional war experience dating from 1862 to 1865 as assistant to Secretary Stanton. He had spent much time in the field; he had been with Grant at Vicksburg, with Rosecrans and Thomas at Chattanooga, again with Grant in the Peninsular Campaign. “The eyes of the government at the front,” Mr. Lincoln called him.

No man in the administration had had better opportunity of judging Lincoln, particularly in relation to the conduct of the war, and none was a better judge of character.

Could I get the whole story as far as it concerned Lincoln? I hesitated to ask it. The truth was, I was afraid of Mr. Dana. I knew him only on the editorial page of the New York _Sun_. He was too clever, too quick-witted, too malicious for me to get on with, I feared. They laughed at me at the office when I voiced my qualms. Nobody was held higher there than Charles A. Dana. He had been a customer of the McClure Syndicate from the beginning, and they believed in his professional integrity, admired his detestation and relentless pursuit of fakers, honored and tried to imitate his editorial motto, “If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.”

“Why should you feel this way?” reproved Mr. Phillips. “Mr. Dana is a gentleman.”

“Nonsense! I’ll take care of it for you,” said Mr. McClure, and he rushed to the _Sun_, office. He did fix it and more, for, returning, he told me with glee that Mr. Dana was willing to give his whole war story, that is if I would do the work and arrange some practical plan for the interviews. The first step, of course, was to find what Dana material, published and unpublished, was in the war records. The editing of the records then under way was in charge of J. Leslie Perry. Mr. Perry did not believe in women fussing with history, particularly with Civil War history. War was man’s business.

“How can you understand it?” he shouted at me.

However, I insisted on my rights, and nobody could have been more helpful when he considered a thing an obligation of his official position. To the end Mr. Perry’s chief satisfaction came when he caught me slipping. “That’s what comes from allowing a woman to write history,” he would say jubilantly.

Between us we brought together a grist of Dana’s dispatches and reports. I crammed on the campaigns, and by appointment appeared at the end of Mr. Dana’s day, about four o’clock in the afternoon, for my first interview.

His desk was stripped of everything that pertained to the newspaper, but held a row of the latest books, not only in English but in three or four other languages, as well as a copy of the _Cosmopolis_, an ambitious and rather pretentious review in three or four languages issued for a short time in the late nineties.