I Guess I Didn’t Win the Lincoln Prize

Every year, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History awards its Lincoln Prize. They’ll give you $50,000.00 if you write the book that, in their opinion, improves our understanding of Abraham Lincoln and his times more than any other book published that year.

Well, I can’t think of anything that could clarify our understanding of Abraham Lincoln and his times more than an original document proving that Lincoln owned slaves and sold them. Wouldn’t that restructure our whole understanding of Abraham Lincoln and his times?

Of course, you don’t really need a document. It’s obvious when you think about it. Lincoln married Mary Todd of Lexington, Kentucky, the daughter of one of the state’s largest slaveholders; at her father’s death she inherited slaves, and the law in those days gave control of the wife’s property to her husband. Lincoln, as allowed by the law, took control of the slaves and gave his direct order to sell them. Not to emancipate them as he could have done, but to sell them.

Having figured that out, I searched court houses, archives and libraries all across Lincoln Land for any surviving documents of the Todd inheritance. They’d been plundered, scattered and even destroyed by Lincolnolators over more than a century, but at last I found exactly that court affidavit at the Regenstein Library in Chicago, just sitting there in a dusty box of uncatalogued ephemera — bills for umbrellas and such.

That’s the sort of discovery that every investigator dreams of. Certainly scholars proceeding in good faith would be eager to acknowledge and interpret evidence of such significance in the life of The Great Emancipator.

I wrote up the history of the case, along with ten more chapters clearing up other official misunderstandings about Abraham Lincoln and his times. I put them all into a book, The Lincolns in the White House: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln’s Slave Trading Revealed.

Clearly this is exactly what the folks up at the Gilder Lehrman were asking for. It’s new information that none of their committee or their prize winners had ever mentioned before. As far as I can tell, Lincoln’s slave dealings never even dawned on anybody in Lincoln Studies. There’s no mention of anything like it in the standard histories.

They can’t deny the authenticity of this affidavit, though. It’s now listed in the online Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln (it’s doc. no. 137259, in Parker v. Richardson et al., case L05935, if you want to see it), and the committee that runs that outfit is above suspicion, presumably. Well, maybe they temporized just a little by obscuring the line in their photocopy about selling the slaves, but you have to expect that sort of thing. You can still read it plainly enough.

So, I admit, I entered the competition just to see what the Gilder Lehrman Institute would do about it. Of course, it’s their money, and they can do what they like with it. But with The Lincolns in the White House they had to do one of only two things.

If the Institute passed over my book, they’d be tacitly, but again openly, endorsing the Received Standard Version. They’d be quashing pivotal new evidence and defending the Lincoln Myth that they’ve always awarded before — articles of faith such as Lincoln Was An Abolitionist, Lincoln Saved The Union, Lincoln Freed The Slaves — everything that Lincoln Studies has promulgated since 1865.

If they did give the prize to The Lincolns in the White House, they’d be affirming that virtually every book that they’d ever awarded stands on the wrong foot. That happens to be true; a good-faith review of the Institute’s laureates shows that there’s nothing new of substance, and what’s true in them is trivial. That’s not surprising, either. The standing joke among Lincoln Studiers themselves is that they treat primary sources like nuclear waste.

Well, there hasn’t been any substantive revision in Lincoln Studies since Richard Watson Gilder himself helped Robert Todd Lincoln, John George Nicolay and John Hay write up the official version of the Myth in their Abraham Lincoln: A History and then destroy every primary document that they could get their hands on.

In fact destroying newly discovered primary documents is standard operating procedure among the most prominent figures in Lincoln Studies. Besides the documents that Robert stole by the cartload from the White House, he bought up and burned every document of or about his parents that his standing order to the nation’s antiquarians turned up. The two all-time greatest collectors of Lincolniana, Oliver R. Barrett and Henry Horner — sometime Governor of Illinois — made it their business to burn trunkloads of Mary Todd’s correspondence rather than revise their accounts to treat her fairly.

There’s no comparable case in history. Thomas Jefferson, Mother Teresa and even Hitler get re-examined every once in a while. But not Lincoln, and never his wife.

Holding out no hope for any sort of recognition from the Institute, I boxed up the required five copies and sent them off well before the submission deadline. Successful entrants, the Institute says, can expect to hear in a few months.

That was more than a year ago.

I still haven’t heard.

Kevin Orlin Johnson

Kevin Orlin Johnson holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the History of Architecture, a Master’s degree in Art History, and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History; he has also fulfilled the requirements for a Bachelor’s degree in History. His publications in his principal field, on topics as varied as Louis XIV’s first designs for Versailles or the design of the Chapel of the Most Holy Shroud in Turin, are considered definitive by many scholars here and abroad. He is the author of The Lincolns in the White House (Pangaeus Press, 2022)

View all posts