Hey, there's a sort of national Civil War project!

I wrote back in 2011 about the possibility that the nation's theatre companies might outshine the federal government in observing the sesquicentennial; here's evidence that's happening:  Four regional theatres and a performing arts center have announced partnerships with four universities to commission, develop, and premiere several new pieces of professional theatre relating to the war, along with presenting student work and academic symposia and the like.  The umbrella organization calls itself the National Civil War Project.

"The American Civil War is arguably one of the most significant times in American history, an era that raised issues still relevant today," the press release's lead paragraph says in a sentence that does nothing but demonstrate how useless the word "arguably" is.  (Is there really an argument to be made that the Civil War is not one of the most significant times in American history?  Could we hear that argument, please?)  The institutions involved are located in a few cities not all that far apart from each other, all on or near the Atlantic:  Cambridge, Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington, and a Maryland suburb of Washington called College Park.  "These diverse localities symbolize the geographic scope of the American Civil War," the press release tells us with a straight face.  I guess "symbolize" can mean whatever it wants in this context, but in truth the geographic scope of the war comprised fighting in twenty-three states and six territories, plus naval battles. The final shot of the war was fired by a Confederate warship disrupting Union trade off the coast of Alaska; the final land battle was in Texas. No battles occurred in Massachusetts, however, so I suppose Cambridge symbolizes the siege of Vicksburg or something.

All right, so the press release is badly written and the project itself is not really national; the Tri-State-and-Federal-District Civil War Project is still an ambitious undertaking that may well generate a bunch of good plays, and so more power to them. Here's how it's supposed to go:  

The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta is working with Emory University to develop and produce a stage version of Native Guard, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book of poetry about the Louisiana Native Guards, a Union regiment made up of former slaves.  The author is Natasha Trethewey, head of Emery's creative writing program, who also double-dips as Poet Laureate of both the United States and the State of Mississippi. She'll be working on the show with Alliance's artistic director, Susan V. Booth, who directed shows around Chicago for a number of years and does great work.

American Repertory Theater, housed at Harvard University, is collaborating with its landlord on a set of programs that include developing and producing three shows:  The Boston Abolitionists, about the Anthony Burns trial, to be devised by an ensemble of students in A.R.T.'s training program; War Dept., a musical being written by composer Jim Bauer and visual artist Ruth Bauer that A.R.T. describes as a show "set in Ford’s Theater that explores the lives of friends and family who search for answers among the records of the Civil War dead and wounded;" and Memoranda During the War, an opera being composed by Matt Aucoin based on Walt Whitman's journals of his time as a volunteer nurse in military hospitals during the war.

There are few cities that have the rich and complicated Civil War history that Baltimore has, but Center Stage in Baltimore (whose website renders its name both as one word and as two--is this really a hard thing to get the board to vote on?), working with the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, says it's commissioning an as yet untitled work by "a leading British playwright" that will explore British and international perspectives on the war.  Um, okay.  They also promise "the regional premiere of a Civil War-themed work around which significant artistic and community engagement programming will take place;" that turns out to be Paula Vogel's lightweight holiday show A Civil War Christmas.  Ah well, so much for seizing the opportunity at Center Stage.

Arena Stage in Washington, in collaboration with George Washington University, plans three shows. One is Healing Wars, a dance piece with narration conceived and to be choreographed by Liz Lerner, whose idea the whole Project is.  It "explores the experiences of the healers tasked with treating the physical and psychic wounds of battle."  Our War will be an anthology piece commissioned from 25 playwrights that promises to be about not just the war but its continuing legacy.  As yet untitled is a new piece from serial one-man-show deviser Daniel Beaty, "portraying the depth and breadth of humanity involved in the American Civil War."  I presume Beaty, who's apparently great at this kind of thing, will play them all.

Most of this seems like a healthy amount of interesting activity.  Let's hope something comes of it.

Civil War stamps for 1863--that is to say, 2013

I've been absent from the blog for over six months, mostly due to a mild case of exhaustion--not fatigue or burnout, just an accumulated period of sleep deprivation.  I'm all rested now, I've made some permanent changes to my schedule and one thing I missed blogging about back in May when it was news was the release of this year's Civil War stamps.  Every year during the sesquicentennial the Postal Service issues two stamps, each commemorating a key military event from 150 years earlier.  The 2013 stamps commemorate, inevitably, the siege of Vicksburg and the battle of Gettysburg, the twinned events that turned the course of the war toward Union victory during the first week of July 1863.  The Vicksburg stamp is taken from a Currier and Ives print published while the seige was still ongoing; the Gettysburg stamp is from an 1887 painting of the battle done by our old friend Thure de Thurlstrup, whose painting of the battle of Antietam was the basis for one of last year's stamps and who also painted "Sheridan's Ride." 

The specific event portrayed by Currier and Ives was summed up in the caption they gave their engraving:  "Admiral Porter's Fleet Running the Rebel Blockade of the Mississippi at Vicksburg, April 16, 1863."  Here's the original, via the Naval Historical Center:

The script under the headline caption gives these details:

"At half past ten P.M. the boats left their moorings & steamed down the river, the Benton, Admiral Porter, taking the lead -- as they approached the point opposite the town, a terrible concentrated fire of the centre, upper and lower batteries, both water and bluff, was directed upon the channel, which here ran within one hundred yards of the shore. At the same moment innumerable floats of turpentine and other combustible materials were set ablaze. In the face of all this fire, the boats made their way with but little loss except the transport Henry Clay which was set on fire & sunk."

Fun fact to know and tell:  Admiral David Dixon Porter was the brother by adoption of Admiral David Farragut, whose capture of New Orleans was depicted on one of last year's stamps. 

The Thurlstrup painting upon which the Gettysburg stamp is based depicts a moment of Pickett's Charge, perhaps the climax of the whole war.  Specifically, it shows General Winfield Hancock overseeing the devastating Union defense against the charge.  Thurlstrup had been commissioned to paint twelve Civil War battles by L. Prang and Company, the commercial printer who popularized the Christmas card.  Prang paid for careful research, and preliminary sketches were vetted by survivors of each battle depicted. 

Thurlstrup's (or perhaps Prang's) title for the painting was "Hancock at Gettysburg," though today it's more often called simply "Battle of Gettysburg."  A further indication of how much Hancock's Civil War fame has faded is that the Library of Congress makes a rookie error in its listing for this painting:

Shows Major General George Hancock leading the attack popularly known as "Pickett's Charge."

"George" is Pickett's first name, not Hancock's.  And of course Hancock is not leading the charge, he's defending against it.

One other thing:  I want to stress just how great this whole series of stamps is.  Compare them with two other Gettysburg commemoratives.


The one to the left was issued in 1963 as part of the Civil War Centennial.  Nothing wrong with it, of course, but it doesn't even attempt the richness of historical detail or the sheer  gorgeousness of  the stamps we're getting now.  It is, however, miles above the cheesiness of what they issued in 1995, shown on the right.  This one purports also to show Pickett's Charge, but except for the stone wall it could almost be any generic Civil War battle.  And, for crying out loud, Brenda Starr had better artwork. 

The art designer for the Civil War Sesquicentennial stamps is Phil Jordan, and if the budget sequester hasn't eliminated his contract, he should renegotiate for
more money.  I learn from the website for something called Knottywood Treasures that he was art director for Air and Space, the magazine of the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum, for fifteen years and has designed over 250 stamps for the USPS on a contract basis since 1991.  He designs a lot of air-and-space-related stamps, commemorating things like the first moon landing and classic American aircraft.  He also did the great Thornton Wilder stamp, which I'm inserting here because I find playwrights more interesting than airplanes.

Music for New Year's Eve: The Year of Jubilo

Tomorrow is the sesquicentennial of the most revolutionary New Year's Day in American history, the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.  The Proclamation is to this day not universally well understood; the always excellent James McPherson explains the impact it had in 1863 as well as anyone can in this recent piece; he calls it "a bombshell on the American public."

The song "The Year of Jubilo" (also known as "Kingdom Coming," "Ole Massa's Run Away," and "Lincoln's Gunboats") was written in the months leading up to the great day, and imagines what did in fact go on to happen:  as the Union Army advanced, slaveowners fled, leaving their now former slaves to claim their freedom.  

It was written by Henry Clay Work, a self-taught musician who had grown up in a household used as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and who composed in his head without an instrument.  His biggest hit was another Civil War song, "Marching through Georgia," but he had post-war hits as well.  "My Grandfather's Clock," from 1876, was recorded several times throughout the 20th Century, and as recently as 2004 by BoyzIIMen.  The Oxford English Dictionary cites the song's 19th-Century popularity via sheet music as the origin of the term "grandfather clock" to refer to a weight-and-pendulum clock in a tall case.  His 1868 hit "The Ship that Never Returned" is not particularly remembered today, but its melody and basic theme were lifted in the early 20th Century for the greatest train song ever, "The Wreck of the Old 97."

The "Jubilo" recording I've posted above is by Chubby Parker, principally remembered today for having the version he recorded of "Froggie Went A-Courting" included on The Anthology of American Folk Music.  Parker was a regular on the WLS National Barn Dance in the mid-'20s, and his popularity there gave him a recording career.  He made about 50 records, mostly of songs from the previous century.

Music for Christmas

Longfellow's poem "Christmas Bells," written on Christmas Day 1863, has over the years been set to two different melodies as the Christmas carol known by its first line, "I heard the bells on Christmas Day."  In the 1870s, a London composer and church organist named John Baptiste Calkin set it to a melody he had composed thirty years earlier; in the 1950s, Johnny Marks--an American Jewish songwriter who cranked out the Christmas hits "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "A Holly Jolly Christmas," and "Rockin' around the Christmas Tree"--composed the setting more frequently heard today.

Still, there are a number of lovely recordings of the Calkin version out there, including this nice one by Elvis Presley and The Jordanaires.  What I've posted above, though, is the Marks version sung by the magnificent voice of Harry Belafonte.

All recorded versions I've heard omit the three verses of Longfellow's poem that tie it to the Civil War and thereby give it real depth.  Here's the whole poem; it's verses 3, 4, and 5 that get skipped:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day


Their old, familiar carols play,

and mild and sweet

The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


And thought how, as the day had come,


The belfries of all Christendom

Had rolled along

The unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


Till ringing, singing on its way,


The world revolved from night to day,

A voice, a chime,

A chant sublime

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


Then from each black, accursed mouth


The cannon thundered in the South,

And with the sound

The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


It was as if an earthquake rent


The hearth-stones of a continent,

And made forlorn

The households born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


And in despair I bowed my head;


"There is no peace on earth," I said;

"For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"


Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:


"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.

Y'all gonna be an American.

I suppose this is not completely unrelated to the subject of the previous two posts, but it's election news worth noting that Jon Hubbard and Loy Mauch both lost their seats in the Arkansas legislature this month.  It's also news that they did so without actually losing much if any support compared to when they were first elected in 2010.

They're both Republicans, and their party did quite well overall in the Arkansas voting.  Not only did Romney/Ryan carry the state with 60.5% of the vote, but all four Republican candidates running for the U. S. House won in landslides and on the state level the GOP took control of both legislative houses for the first time since Reconstruction.  But Hubbard and Mauch, both Republican incumbents, were thrown out by voters.

Hubbard, a former high school teacher, had spent much of the campaign defending what he had written in a compilation of letters-to-the-editor he had published in book form.  A fair number of deeply offensive excerpts were publicized during the campaign, but here's the money quote:

… the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise. The blacks who could endure those conditions and circumstances would someday be rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth.

As for Mauch, he's a member of the League of the South, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a neo-Confederate hate group.  Like Hubbard, he spent years writing letters-to-the-editor that demonstrate he is able to see American slavery as part of a bigger picture that eludes those who criticize it.  Here he is, apparently forgetting the plotline of the Book of Exodus:

Nowhere in the Holy Bible have I found a word of condemnation for the operation of slavery, Old or New Testament. If slavery was so bad, why didn’t Jesus, Paul or the prophets say something?

Okay, so these hateful clowns got elected to a single term in their state legislature when their unreconstructed racism was not all that widely known to their voters, and when their views were better publicized, they got voted out.  A good story with a happy ending.  Sure, but what I have not seen reported anywhere is the fact that the support for Mauch actually increased from 2010 to 2012, and that for Hubbard stayed about the same.

Mauch got elected two years ago with 4041 votes out of 7561; he lost this month with 4586 out of 10,141.  That is to say, he actually increased his number of votes by 13.5% and lost only because other voters turned out in much greater numbers than in 2010, presumably to express their disgust with him.

Hubbard's vote total went down, but not by much.  He won the first time with 5162 votes out of 8930, and lost this time with 5031 out of 10,709.  His decline was only 2.5%, and--like Mauch--he would have won re-election with his numbers this time were it not for increased turnout on the other side.  In neither case did the supporters of these guys turn on them.  They lost only because they were inflammatory enough to motivate the opposition.


 

More on the Cold Civil War

The numbers from the election give Andrew Sullivan's theory that we're in what he calls "a Cold Civil War" a mixed verdict.  As we know, Obama carried Virginia and Florida, so Sullivan's precise prediction did not come to pass.   And for what it's worth, Romney's average margin of victory in the twelve former slave states he won was 15.9%, actually less than his 23.7% margin in the other states (two free states in 1861 plus ten that were then territories) he won. 

"For what it's worth" is a meaningful qualifier in this case, however, because the percentages above don't separate out the African American vote, 93% of which went nationally for Obama.  Sullivan is talking about the white vote.  There are a lot more blacks in the South than in the western states where Romney had most of the rest of his victories, and once this fact is adjusted for, Sullivan's theory may well be vindicated. 

That involves more research than I am willing to do on his behalf, but here are a couple of quick and rough sets of calculations.  Census data from 2010 says that black population in the twelve states Romney won that were neither in the Confederacy nor border states averages only 3.2% of population in those states.  Assuming that this percentage is roughly reflected in voter turnout, subtracting 93% of the black vote from Obama's total share in those states--38.15% to Romney's 61.85%--adjusts Romney's winning margin in those states up to 28.5%, not all that different from his actual 23.7% margin there.

By huge contrast, the census says the black population of the fourteen former slave states--including Virginia and Florida, the two Obama won--averages 19.5% of the total population of those states.  Making the same assumption about voter turnout, and making the same adjustment by removing Obama's 93% of the black vote, Romney's margin of victory across that region of the country--even still averaging in the two states he lost there--jumps from 15.9% all the way to 41.1%.

Does this prove Sullivan's inference that much opposition in the South to Obama's re-election was racially motivated?  No it doesn't, but it seems to leave the question open.

The Cold Civil War

Andrew Sullivan and George F. Will disagree about the Civil War's impact on next week's Presidential election, and in doing so demonstrate that discussions about the war's continuing resonance in our national life are frequently at bottom discussions about race.

Both their heads were talking on This Week this week when Sullivan laid out his theory that the U.S. is in "a Cold Civil War,"  by which he seemed to mean that the polarizing political division in the country is to a large degree geographically reflected in old national maps of free states and slave states.  The next day he made the same point on his Daily Beast blog:  "if Virginia and Florida and North Carolina flip back to the GOP from Obama this November, as now looks likely, Romney will have won every state in the Confederacy."  He gets into more detail by showing this map of his election-day prediction

juxtaposed with this map of how things stood in 1861:

On both maps, the grey areas are those that were not states in 1861 and therefore not part of the point he's making (Washington State was admitted in 1889 and therefore should be grey in the first map).   On the second map, the blue states are 1861's free states, all of which of course stayed in the Union.  The yellow states are the four slave states that also stayed in--Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware.  The red are the eleven slave states that seceded.

On the first map, he predicts that the Republicans will take all of the old Confederacy, split the border states 50/50 with the Democrats and pick up only Kansas and Indiana from the free states.   By using 1861 as his base year, he neglects to account for West Virginia, which broke away from Virginia in order to stay in the Union and was admitted as a separate state in 1863.  By rights he should have used a Civil War map that had it yellow, but he has it right that West Virginia is expected to go red this year.

He may be wrong about Virginia. Nate Silver, the most meticulous analyst of polls there is, currently gives President Obama a 62% chance of carrying it, which would reverse part of Sullivan's equation:  West Virginia, which fought for the North, would vote with the South, and Virginia, state of the Confederacy's capital city, would vote with the North.

But his broader point--that the states of the old Confederacy have realigned themselves politically with today's Republican Party--is both interesting (in that it illustrates how the two parties have shifted over time) and unremarkable (in that the realignment has been in process since the 1960s).  What set Will off was the conclusion that Sullivan did not quite state, but also did not disclaim when Will disputed it:  if the three formerly Confederate states that Obama carried in 2008 vote for Mitt Romney this time, there might be a racial element to that fact.  Whether that's so or not, Silver's weighted averages of state polls show that if the Confederacy were a real country right now, Romney would be coasting toward a landslide win there.

Sullivan's implied conclusion is not logically rigorous, built as it is from a less than ironclad prediction and a hunch about its causation.  It was an easy mark for a sharpshooter like George Will.  "Democrats have been losing the white vote since 1964, so that's not news ," Will responded. "Here's what we're trying to talk about.  In 2008, Obama gets this many [hand held high] whites, this time the polls indicate he might get this many [hand held lower].  We're trying to explain this difference.  Now there are two possible explanations.  A lot of white people who voted for Obama in 2008 watched him govern for four years and said, "Not so good.  Let's try someone else."  The alternative--the Confederacy hypothesis--is those people somehow for some reason in the last four years became racists."

Will here commits his own logical fallacy by excluding the middle.  Are these two mutually exclusive options, one of which he has phrased to make sound ridiculous, really the only two possibilities?  One imagines not. 

Will is also not the best spokesman for the position that race does not play a part in voting decisions, as he had, in his Washington Post column only 26 days earlier, attributed support for Obama to racial motives.  He found no reason in Obama's record to explain why he is favored to win re-election and so offered this theory:

That Obama is African-American may be important . . . the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake choosing him — seems especially reluctant to give up on the first African-American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the nation's heart, if not its head.

Some aspect of support for Obama is identifiably racial, but it is absurd to say that some aspect of opposition to him is?  Well.

Will gave the game away--except that Sullivan didn't seem to notice--by mentioning that the loss of the white vote to Democratic presidential candidates dates from the year a Democratic president signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  Certainly no one maintains that the exodus of Southern whites to the Republican Party was triggered by the Nurse Training Act or the Wilderness Act, both of which LBJ signed that same year.

Neither party has a history to brag about as regards its willingness to tolerate racism.  After being on the wrong side of the slavery issue, the Democrats spent a century courting the votes of Southern white racists.  Franklin Roosevelt brought Northern blacks into the Democratic coalition (Southern blacks mostly couldn't vote), but it was only when the strength of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s forced the Democrats to choose between these two parts of their coalition that they became clearly the party of civil rights.  The Republicans' successful "Southern strategy," originated by Richard Nixon and carried on ever since, welcomed the disaffected racists into the party of Lincoln with code words rather than with open invitations.   It's why Ronald Reagan spoke of "welfare queens" and why George H. W. Bush ran the Willie Horton ad.

Surely Reagan, Bush, Romney, Paul Ryan, Will, and the great bulk of Republicans are not racists.  They have the same political differences with Obama that they would have had with President Hillary Clinton.  Just as surely, however, the 30% of the Republican electorate who say they believe Obama is an African-born Muslim are motivated by something other than evidence.  That support for the Romney/Ryan ticket spikes in the area of the country with its least fortunate racial history suggests that there are things less fluid than political party affiliations.

Nurse uses stretcher

Though this plaque gets her maiden name wrong, Emma Edmonds is clearly the pride of Houston's Washington Cemetery.

Back from an extended summer vacation from the blog.  While I was gone, the New York Times'  excellent Civil War blog, Disunion, ran a piece by C. Kay Larson about women who served in one capacity or another, frequently disguised as men, during the war.  Larson touches on Sarah Emma Edmonds--subject of our next Civil War Project show, Comrades Mine--who served in the Second Michigan Infantry for two years under the name Franklin Thompson.  She briefly relates a remarkable event from Edmonds's memoir:  on the battlefield at Antietam, the bloodiest battle in American military history, Emma-disguised-as-Franklin comes upon a dying Union soldier who confesses to being a woman in disguise.  Emma tends her for the few moments until her death, and then, in order to preserve the secret for her sister in arms, buries the soldier in an unmarked grave there on the battlefield.

It's a great story.  We had not come across it in our preliminary research before commissioning the play, and Maureen Gallagher, our Comrades Mine playwright, had not mentioned it to me since then.  I emailed the Times piece to Maureen.  She hadn't seen the article, but she knew all about the story.  "Maybe made up.  So I didn't include that event," she emailed back.

As Huckleberry Fin once wrote about what Mr. Mark Twain put into The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "there was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."  When Emma published her memoir in 1865, she was more concerned with trying to sell copies than with whether Oprah would throw her out of the book club for making stuff up.  Maureen steers me to an Emma biography, The Mysterious Private Thompson by Laura Leedy Gansler.  This is from Gansler:

. . . her story is strangely, and suspiciously, similar in some respects to that of Clara Barton's experience there. . . . After Antietam, as the medics were collecting the wounded from the field, one approached Barton and said that he had found a soldier who refused to be treated by the doctor or any male medic; only a woman would do.  When the soldier was brought in, she confessed to Barton that she was in fact Mary Galloway, a sixteen-year-old girl from nearby Frederick who had fallen in love with a Union officer while his regiment was in Frederick at the beginning of the war.  When the fighting broke out at Antietam Creek, and she learned that his regiment was involved, she disguised herself as a soldier to come look for him.  In Emma's "experience" the female soldier died; in the case of Mary Galloway, Barton coaxed her into allowing the surgeon to operate, saving her life, and she and her lover were ultimately reunited.

Gansler even doubts that Emma was at Antietam at all, though some of Maureen's other research suggests that her regiment was there, but held in reserve, and that Emma--trained as an army nurse--might well have been employed after the battle to help retrieve wounded from the field.

Truth or stretcher, it's not part of Comrades Mine, which begins performances April 12, 2013.

All of a sudden, a widely produced Civil War play

I've made sporadic attempts to track what Civil War plays are being done elsewhere in Chicago and around the country, mostly in the hope that there would be a lot to report.  The big development currently is that there is now what didn't used to exist:  a widely produced new play about the Civil War. 

It's The Whipping Man by Matthew Lopez, which I wrote about back in October.  Three actors, one set.  Here's the playwright's synopsis, from his website:

It is Passover, 1865.  The Civil War has just ended and the annual celebration of freedom from bondage is being observed in Jewish homes across the country.  One of these homes, belonging to the DeLeons of Virginia, sits in ruins.  Confederate officer Caleb DeLeon has returned from the war to find his family missing and only two former slaves remaining.  Caleb is badly wounded and the two men, Simon and John, are forced to care for him.

Matthew Lopez, looking about 18, with the Old Globe cast

It made its world premiere at Luna Stage in
 Montclair, New Jersey (where my friend Jim Glossman works a lot, though I don't believe he was involved in this show), way back in 2006.  The website lists thirteen productions since then, omitting at least the Plowshares Theatre Company production that ran in Detroit for two weeks in January and the Curtain Call Theatre production which ran in Latham, New York, during April and May.  The play's fifth listed production was a highly acclaimed one at the Manhattan Theatre Club in February and March 2011, which gave the play a national reputation just as the Sesquicentennial period was beginning and artistic directors across the country started wondering if maybe there was a good three-actor, one-set Civil War play out there somewhere.

There are another thirteen productions listed as scheduled, including at Northlight Theatre in Skokie (or, as people outside the area persist in spelling it, "Chicago").  By this time next year, the play will have been produced at least twenty-eight times, in twenty states plus the District of Columbia and Canada.  Nice job, Matthew Lopez.

Late-breaking news from the Lincoln assassination

After one hundred and forty-seven years, the apparently never-before-read report of the first physician to reach Lincoln after he was shot has surfaced.

From The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum press release: 

Papers of Abraham Lincoln researcher Helena Iles Papaioannou came across something unexpected while searching the records of the Surgeon General in the National Archives in Washington, DC. Papaioannou discovered a copy of a twenty-one-page report by Dr. Charles A. Leale, the army surgeon who was the first to reach the presidential box to care for a wounded Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865. Leale wrote out his story just hours after the President died the next morning, but the text of that first report had remained undiscovered, until now. The newly discovered report is not in Leale’s hand, but is a “true copy” written in the neat and legible hand of a clerk. For nearly a century and a half, it has been tucked away in one of hundreds of boxes of incoming correspondence to the Surgeon General, until Papaioannou discovered it.

Page 3 of Dr. Leale's report; full report available here

Charles A. Leale was 23 years old and had held a medical license for all of six weeks when he took his seat 40 feet away from the presidential box to watch Our American Cousin.  Remarkably, this evening would be the second time in three days he would be mere yards away from both Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth.  On April 11, he had been in the crowd outside the White House when Lincoln had given what would be his final speech, from the second story window over the main door of the White House, about his hopes for Reconstruction and endorsing voting rights for blacks.  Elsewhere in the crowd were Booth and his co-conspirator Lewis Powell, to whom Booth raged,“That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”

It seems incredible to us that a large crowd of random people would have free access to the very front steps of the White House to call the President to come to a window and speak, but of course no one had ever attacked a president before.

Leale's report is a quick and compelling read, as much for the medical specifics he details as for the simple narrative of the still-shocking events of the awful evening:

When I reached the President he was in a state of general paralysis, his eyes were closed and he was in a profoundly comatose condition, while his breathing was intermittent and exceedingly stertorous.  I placed my finger on his right radial pulse but could perceive no movement of the artery.

By the way, there's no mention of Laura Keene entering the presidential box and cradling Lincoln's head in her lap.  Leale later said that this had happened, but it's nowhere in his report filed the day Lincoln died.

Lincoln's papers are scattered all over the world.

So, big kudos to The Papers of Abraham Lincoln for finding this.  It's a joint project of  the Lincoln Presidential Library and the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.  They've been at it for eight years, and will be for years to come:  locating and digitizing every document they can find that was written either by or to Lincoln.  Of course, Leale's report is neither of these, but it's hard to imagine a more important exception to make.  I believe the earliest document they've found is a heavily deteriorated page of math problems from a school workbook he had as a teenager in the 1820s, and just this spring they came across a cache of previously unknown documents held in a collection in Japan.  These include a letter he wrote in 1833 for Ann Rutledge's father on a business matter, and a very short bio of himself he wrote in the 1850s that includes this gold nugget: “Born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin county Kentucky.  Education, defective."  Next month the search moves to Australia, where they know of one document (a Presidential letter appointing a Camden, New Jersey, postmaster) and have hopes of finding more.