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In June of 1849 Abraham Lincoln received a letter from his despondent friend David Davis, Judge of the 8th Judicial Circuit in Illinois.  Lincoln at that time had just finished his first and only term in the US Congress and was scrambling for an appointment as Commissioner of the General Land Office, a powerful position with a fat salary.  The normally loquacious Davis wrote him a brief letter promising his support, then finished glumly “The untimely death of my poor friend Colton has overwhelmed me with grief.”[1]

Davis had known Colton since the early 1830s, when they were both young men studying law in Lenox, Massachusetts.  Both Davis and Colton moved west, eventually settling in Bloomington, Illinois, where they formed a legal partnership that lasted until 1844, when Colton relocated to St. Louis.  Davis and his wife “loved him as a brother & the death of but few in the world would have afflicted us more,” Davis lamented.[2]  Although Lincoln did not share the close bond with Colton that the distraught Davis did, he nevertheless knew him well, having met him in the courtroom more than twenty times.

Colton was the unlucky victim of a freak accident at the heart of what can only be described as a perfect storm of misfortune that struck St. Louis in mid-May, 1849. 

St. Louis at that time was bustling with activity.  Located at the confluence of the Missouri and Missisippi rivers, St. Louis was the last major urban center where emigrants headed for the California gold rush could stop and get supplies.  All those extra people in the city’s boundaries did nothing to help the problems of poor sanitation and overcrowding that plagued most 19th century metropolises.  In the early spring Asiatic cholera broke out, and by the warm, humid May it had killed more than 4,000 of the town’s citizens.

Wells Colton did not die of anything so pedestrian as cholera.

Adding to the city’s misfortunes, on May 17 the steamboat “White Cloud,” docked near the north business district, caught fire and burned through her moorings.  The floating inferno drifted down river, colliding with and setting fire to 22 other steamboats, plus several flatboats and barges, before coming to rest on the riverbank just opposite Locust Street.

Wells Colton also did not die in a steamboat fire.

The heat from the conflagration that was once the “White Cloud” was so intense that one of the buildings on the levee caught fire.  The flames leapt from building to building, consuming four blocks along the levee before spreading westward.  The fire reached several hundred feet in the air and could be seen for miles as it devoured block after block of wooden buildings.[3]

Wells Colton did not die in the fire on land, either.

No, Wells Colton was simply out for a stroll with a friend from the office and had the misfortune to walk right past a house that was being blown up to try to contain the fire.  A large fragment of wood struck him “between the point of his shoulder & his neck with such force as to Splinter his collar bone making a hole as large as your first which reached to his lungs.”[4]

Of course the wound was fatal, but poor Colton had no idea at first that he was done for.  He sent Davis a heartbreakingly pathetic letter on Monday the 20th of May.  Because his dominant left hand was all but useless, he wrote with his right hand, the handwriting was a laborious scrawl, the page torn roughly from the tablet.  Nevertheless, Colton was either unwilling or unable to grasp the gravity of his situation and remained stubbornly optimistic that he would survive, writing Davis that he expected “to be bed fast for many weeks.”  He summed up with the last and greatest understatement of his life: “A hard lick.”
He solidered on for three more days, but by Thursday it became cler to all that his lungs were damanged to the point where he could hardly breathe.  A visiting friend "saw too plainly that all was over with him," but Colton himself was not willing to believe that he would die until the following morning.  "You never saw a man who was so unwilling to give up this world," his friend observed, "he said to me just before his death he could hardly realize that he had to part from me, that it did not seem to him like he was really going to die although he knew he could not live."  When the end finally came on Friday morning, May 24, 1849, Colton "died easy, without a Struggle."[5]   

1David Davis to Abraham Lincoln, 6 June 1849, Davis Family Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL.
2 David Davis to Julius Rockwell, 26 June 1849, Davis Family Papers.
3Thomas Lynch, The Volunteer Fire Department of St. Louis, 1819- 1859, (St. Louis: R. & T.A. Ennis, 1880), 85-87.
4 David Davis to Julius Rockwell, 26 June 1849, Davis Family Papers.
5W.H. Barksdale to David Davis, 2 June 1849, Davis Family Papers.

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Pundits proclaim that politics makes strange bedfellows, and the politics under Lincoln’s administration are no exception.  In one notable case, a series of letters discovered at the National Archives reveals that underneath the business of ordinary political patronage lay a web of relationships connecting several of the decade’s most prominent men that ultimately linked the century’s greatest president to one of the century’s greatest writers.

            For several years following the publication of his first novel in 1846, Herman Melville enjoyed a degree of financial prosperity.  The English and American sales of his first five books and the English sale of Moby Dick netted him an average of $1,600 per year.  After 1851 sales of his work began to slow. He continued to live off royalties for the next two years, but by 1853 Melville was forced to pursue other means of income.  Between 1853 and 1860 he supported his family on earnings from magazine contributions and lecture tours.  By late 1860, however, Melville “had almost no income from magazines, lectures, or books.”[1] Living almost entirely from the generosity of his father-in-law, he was in dire need of a job.

            At the suggestion of his brother Allan, Herman Melville set his sights on a consulship to Florence, hoping to escape the increasingly fractured United States for the European haven of art and culture.  In an effort to secure this appointment, Melville turned to a web of associations that ultimately linked him to Abraham Lincoln.  First his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, late Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, contacted Senator Charles Sumner, explaining that Melville “has suffered somewhat in his health, as his friends believe, by devotion to study and a life of extreme solitude.”[2]  Melville also tapped Julius Rockwell, his neighbor in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and a former U. S. Congressman and Senator, to write to Sumner.  Rockwell obliged, urging Sumner to “let his genius- his imperfect health - …his noble wife, and his four children – plead, with trumpet tongues for him.”[3]

            Rockwell was an inspired choice to lobby on Melville’s behalf, for he had connections not only to Sumner, but to Lincoln himself, a fact Rockwell was cognizant of as he asked Sumner to “say to the President as much as you can in my name, which I trust he may remember with some kindness.”[4]  Lincoln probably first met Rockwell through their mutual friend David Davis, judge of the Eighth Judicial Circuit and husband of Rockwell’s wife’s sister.  Lincoln’s regard for Rockwell grew as they served together as fellow Whigs in the 30th Congress to such a degree that, twelve years later, when Lincoln needed a small favor from a Massachusetts resident to facilitate his son’s entry into Harvard, Lincoln wrote to Rockwell, “I think of you more readily than any other citizen of Massachusetts, as one who would be willing to oblige me.”[5]

            Rockwell joined together with nine other prominent citizens of western Massachusetts to petition Lincoln on Melville’s behalf:

            We the undersigned respectfully beg leave to recommend Mr. Herman Melville for the office of Consul at Florence.

            Mr. Melville has done much to enhance the reputation of our national literature; is a gentleman of the most estimable character, and is highly qualified for the post we earnestly recommend and request may be given him.[6]

            To bolster his case, Melville went to Washington to plead his case to Senator Sumner in person.  On March 22, he attended a levee at the White House and later wrote his wife about the event: “A steady stream of two-&-two’s wound thro’ the apartments shaking hands with ‘Old Abe’ and immediately passing on…Of course I was one of the shakers.  Old Abe is much better looking than I expected & younger looking.  He shook hands like a good fellow – working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord.”[7]

Thus, in a curious footnote in history, the Great Emancipator came face to face with the author of Moby Dick…and ultimately denied him a job.  The handshake, three petitions, and one letter Lincoln received on Melville’s behalf were all in vain, for on March 27, Lincoln appointed T. Bigelow Lawrence of Boston as Consul to Florence.[8]  Lawrence, son of onetime Minister to England and prominent Republican Abbott Lawrence, was himself a seasoned diplomat by 1861, having previously served as Attaché to the U. S. Legation at London. 

Although Melville failed to secure a diplomatic post from the Lincoln administration, he eventually met with success in securing federal patronage.  In 1867 the collector of customs for the port of New York, Henry Smythe, nominated Melville for the post of Inspector of Customs.  Melville was sworn into his new, four-dollar-a-day, six-day-a-week job on December 5 of that year and served in the post for 19 years.[9]

[1] William Charvat, “Melville’s Income,” American Literature 15.3 (November 1943), 254-55.
[2] Lemuel Shaw to Charles Sumner, 21 March 1861, Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of State, 1789-1949, Entry 760, Letters of Application and Recommendation During the Administrations of Lincoln and Johnson, 1861-1869, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
[3] Julius Rockwell to Charles Sumner, 25 March 1861, RG 59, Entry 760.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Abraham Lincoln to Julius Rockwell, 27 July 1860, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln: First Supplement, 1832-1865, vol. 10, p. 57.
[6]Petition of Julius Rockwell and others to Abraham Lincoln, 14 March 1861, RG 59, Entry 760.
[7] Quoted in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 464.
[8] Appointment of T. Bigelow Lawrence as Consul to Florence, Document 233950, The Papers of Abraham Lincoln.
[9] Parker, 603-05.
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The story of the Donner Party is one of the most grisly, macabre, and perennially interesting little episodes in American history.  A small band of hardy pioneers strike out from the safety of their Midwestern towns, bound for the promised land in the west.  While we  might not know the particulars of the  story – who made up the party?  Where did they leave from?  Where were they headed?  How many got there? – we know the important part:  that somewhere short of their destination this unfortunate party got snowed in on a mountain pass, a lot of people died, and the rest of them had to eat each other to survive.

It turns out that the particulars of the story are pretty interesting, especially the fact that Abraham Lincoln was personally acquainted with one of the party’s leaders.  James Frazier Reed was a native Irishman who moved to Springfield, Illinois in 1831.  Around 1834 he became engaged to Elizabeth Keyes, who died in a cholera epidemic that same year.  Elizabeth’s brother-in-law Lloyd Backenstoe also died, leaving a widow and infant daughter.  James Reed began courting that widow, Margret Keyes Backenstoe, his dead fiancee’s sister, and married her in 1835.  Margret was in such frail health that they were married as she lay in bed, with Reed beside her holding her hand.

The Reeds went on to have four children in Springfield, one of whom, a boy, died as an infant.  James tried his luck at a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors, including running a farm, a general store, a starch factory, a sawmill, and a furniture factory, along with railroad contracting. 

In 1845 Reed conceived the idea to go west and spent a year preparing for the journey.  In mid-April 1846 the party, consisting of Reed and his family, brothers Jacob and George Donner and their families, and their hired hands set off from Springfield, Illinois bound for California.  Reed, who had attained some level of pecuniary comfort by this point, had a special wagon built so his ailing wife and mother-in-law could ride in comfort. The group joined up with another party of settlers led by William Russell somewhere west of Independence, Missouri on May 19.

The group traveled west happily enough for a few months.  Oh, sure, they had their misfortunes – Reed’s elderly and ill mother-in-law died near Independence, for example (but then again a 70+ year old invalid woman probably had no business joining a wagon train west to begin with) – but at least no one was freezing or starving or eating people.  Yet.

Things went bad somewhere in Wyoming, when several dozen impatient souls, the Reeds among them, decided to take a “shortcut.”  They elected George Donner their leader and broke off from the rest of the group.  As anyone who has ever driven anywhere unfamiliar can attest, it’s never a good idea to take a “shortcut” in a remote area, especially when your map is the product of slipshod 19th century cartography.  Predictably, the Donner group arrived at the western edge of California weeks later than they would have had they stuck to the original route.  Their path had taken them through an alkaline desert in Utah eighty miles across and devoid of water or vegetation.  Along the way a good portion of their oxen and cattle ran off in search of water, never to be seen again.

Things went really bad when they tried to cross the Sierra Nevadas.  By then it was October, and the snow was starting to fly.  Their “shortcut” had left them physically exhausted and low on supplies.  But the worst was yet to come.  By the end of October their path through the mountains was completely blocked with snow.  The pioneers first slaughtered their oxen and cattle.  Then they started eating animal hides.  Then, weak from hunger and exhaustion, they started to die.

Then came the part of the story with which we are all familiar:  the desperate pioneers, trapped and isolated in the high mountain pass, consumed the flesh of their dead compatriots to survive.  The story has been exaggerated through the years, of course.  Not everyone resorted to cannibalism, and those that did held out for months, until February or March 1847, until they gave in.  But many did eat human flesh.

Not the Reeds, though.  They were the only family unit to survive the entire ordeal intact (excepting the loss of Margret’s mother, of course), and they did it without cannibalism.  James Reed had pushed on ahead into California in October (not quite of his own volition – he had gotten into a fight with a hired hand who was driving a team of oxen too hard with a whip.  When Reed protested, the hired hand hit him in the head with the handle of the whip.  Reed, disliking this treatment, went back to his wagon, grabbed a long knife, and “continued the argument,” by which I mean he plunged his knife into the man’s chest, killing him.  The other pioneers wanted to hang Reed, but finally they settled on “voting him off the island,” so Reed got a horse and went on alone), only to find the path back to his family blocked by snows.  He was finally reunited with them in February, when Margret and two of the children walked out of the mountains.  The other children had been left in camp under the care of a Mr. Glover, who, acknowledging the bonds of Freemasonry that united both he and Reed, declared that he would rescue the little ones or die trying.  He was as good as his word, and all the little Reeds lived to see one another again.

The foregoing is more or less well known.  Less well known is the fact that Abraham Lincoln was well acquainted with James F. Reed.  They had served together in the Black Hawk War in Captain Jacob Early’s company.  After that, Lincoln conducted a great deal of legal business involving Reed and his many mercantile endeavors. 

Lincoln represented Reed on at least three occasions. Two were debt collection cases, both of which Lincoln lost.  The third was when James F. Reed, acting as executor for the estate of his late friend, Jacob Early, sued Early’s widow and two minor children to sell some of Early’s land to pay off debts against his estate.  This time Lincoln won.

Lincoln also represented parties suing Reed on a half dozen occasions, most often for failure to pay promissory notes. 

One wonders what Lincoln thought when reports floated back to Springfield of the harrowing Donner Party debacle.  Twelve of the deceased were originally citizens of Sangamon County, and Lincoln might well have known them.  He certainly knew James F. Reed.  We can imagine him reading the newspaper's lurid accounts of deep snow, exhaustion, exposure, and starvation and shaking his head to think that the man with whom he'd gone to war and gone to trial would one day come to such hardship.
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