Welcome to Lincoln Footnotes!  This blog is dedicated to the quirky little stories about Abraham Lincoln, his friends, and his town that seldom find their way into mainstream biographies but are nevertheless fascinating bits of history.

When I worked for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, my job was to go around to libraries, archives, historical societies, museums, and universities throughout the country to locate and scan documents written by and to Abraham Lincoln.  The question I got most often was one along the lines of “what is the most ground-breaking (earth-shattering, illuminating, revelatory, interesting, etc.) document you’ve discovered?” And I’d always hem and haw a bit because the truth is, we never discovered anything that blew the lid off Lincoln scholarship.  Until someone discovers a cache of letters Lincoln wrote to his wife, or his secret diary, or a love letter to Joshua Speed, the picture we have of Lincoln isn’t going to be transformed very dramatically. The fact is that the high points of Lincoln’s life have been pretty well covered in the 14,000 or so books that have already been written about him. 

This isn’t to say that there aren’t new things to learn about Lincoln.  There are. But they probably aren’t going to be found in blockbuster document discoveries.  Instead, like flakes of gold from a mining stream, they are present in small quantities in the newspapers Lincoln read, the letters Lincoln received, and the legal documents he wrote.  Each tiny bit of evidence, seemingly mundane, is actually a story unto itself.  By taking the time to pay attention to these small footnotes of history, we can get a better sense of the era in which Lincoln lived, the people with whom he associated, and ultimately of the man himself.

But this is a blog, after all, and not a master’s thesis, so the main point is that these stories are fun, and not something you’ll run across in a standard biography.  I hope you enjoy reading them.

 
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