“Touch Any Aspect of the Address, and You Touch a Mystery”
Robert Todd Lincoln was exasperated but polite when he wrote to John Nicolay’s daughter, Helen, on November 6, 1908. “I venture to trouble you to ask,” Abraham Lincoln’s son began, “whether you know where the original manuscript of the Gettysburg Address is.”
Robert Todd had been searching in vain for his father’s speech in preparation for a number of activities that were being planned for the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in 1909. The Gettysburg Address had last publicly surfaced in 1894, when John Nicolay had published an article about the speech and included a facsimile copy—Nicolay had also included a detailed comparison between Lincoln’s battlefield copy and handwritten copies that he had prepared after comparing the Associated Press reports of the cemetery commemoration. Robert Todd Lincoln had originally given custody of the Lincoln papers to Hay and Nicolay as the two secretaries were researching their massive biography of the sixteenth president. When Hay died in 1905, his widow, Clara Hay, transferred the Lincoln papers to Robert Todd Lincoln, but the Gettysburg Address was not among them. “If in the course of further examinations it is found,” Robert Todd wrote to Helen Nicolay, “it will be considered as belonging to you, but I have little hope of such good fortune.”
Helen Nicolay replied with disappointing news: “I do not know where the original ms. of the Gettysburg Address is,” she said. “It is a mystery that has puzzled and distressed me for a long time.” But with Robert Todd’s inquiry, it was time for Helen to unburden herself. “Now that you have asked me,” she said, “I am going to tell you the whole story.”
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THE “WHOLE STORY” ABOUT the original manuscript of the Gettysburg Address is long, convoluted, filled with innuendo and accusations, enmeshed in arcana that scholars have sifted through for decades, and has been the subject of lengthy analyses and speculation by historians. At various points along the way, experts have raised serious questions about whether Nicolay or Hay misplaced or even stole copies of Lincoln’s famous speech; or more accurately, whether they removed copies from Lincoln’s papers before returning the papers to Robert Todd. Some of the controversy revolved around the question of whether Lincoln gave each of his secretaries a copy of the speech, whether he gave only Hay a copy, or whether his intention was to give neither a copy but to retain both the Battlefield copy and the handwritten copy he produced afterward. Years later, David Mearns, chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, would observe of the controversy: “Touch any aspect of the address, and you touch a mystery.”
In the end, both copies—which would become known as the Nicolay copy and the Hay copy—were found among John Hay’s personal papers, including the second version, which wasn’t discovered until late in November 1908, weeks after Robert Todd Lincoln had written to Helen Nicolay. Clara Hay discovered it among her late husband’s papers, apparently after inquiries from Robert Todd. Historians believe that both documents originally had been part of Lincoln’s papers, had been used for research by both secretaries, and thus wound up among Hay’s personal papers.
After numerous letters, Hay’s three children and Helen Nicolay ignored the essence of the controversy and agreed on a polite solution to the mystery of the Gettysburg Address. On April 11, 1916, they simultaneously donated to the Library of Congress four precious documents. The Hays donated both drafts of the Gettysburg Address and the draft of his inspirational second inaugural address. Helen Nicolay donated a memorandum that Lincoln had prepared on August 23, 1864, which stated that it seemed probable he would lose the upcoming election, in which case it would be his duty to cooperate with the president-elect to save the Union. (Lincoln sealed the document and after he won the election, read the memo to his cabinet.)
In its press release describing the donation, the Library of Congress noted that one of the copies of the Gettysburg Address was “held in his [Lincoln’s] hand when he delivered it.” George Herbert Putnam—who went by Herbert—could barely contain his excitement, calling the donation “the most precious individual documents that have been entrusted to me during the seventeen years that I have been in charge of the Library—priceless relics of one of the noblest figures in history.”
Putnam, who had always advocated that the Library of Congress share its collections and gifts with the American public, added: “The papers will be put on exhibition for the benefit of the many thousands of people who come to visit the library.”
February 28, 1924
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS CONTROVERSY had been long forgotten when, eight years later, a ceremony took place at the Library of Congress. The location was the second floor of the Great Hall, which visitors reached by ascending a grand staircase. There, between two pillars, stood a marble shrine that resembled an altar, consisting of a sturdy pedestal with a large display area across its top supporting a special cabinet with doors that could open and close. Small bronze eagles flanked the cabinet doors and on the gray-black marble above the shrine was inscribed: “The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.”
For Herbert Putnam, twenty-five years into his nearly forty-year tenure, this was a very special day. Irrepressible, authoritarian, a micromanager, and often combative, he had amassed substantial power during his reign at the Library of Congress. He had his sights on acquiring America’s two most important documents from the State Department for more than two decades, since a 1903 congressional act that allowed an executive branch department to turn over to the Library of Congress books, maps, records, or other material the department no longer needed. Putnam had sought many records from the revolutionary and constitutional era, writing to the State Department in 1906 that the library not only was the appropriate steward for such documents, but it could better protect the records from fire or accident “to a degree not possible in an Executive Department or in a building of the character of the State.” Such a consideration, he argued, became of “fresh and vivid importance” in view of the destruction of old Spanish records in the San Francisco earthquake and fire. Putnam’s suggestion received a cool reception at the time.
The State Department balked at turning over most of its important papers, arguing, for example, that the papers of the Continental Congress were “essential to the continuity [and] completeness of the Archives of this Department, and cannot be transferred without serious injury thereto and inconvenience.”
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SEVERAL YEARS PASSED WITHOUT action, and World War I distracted officials from the State Department from making any major moves with their records. Putnam, too, was consumed with other issues, including the details of administering the Library of Congress and providing wartime requests for information.
Finally in 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, concerned for the “care and preservation of the original Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States,” and other critical documents, appointed a committee to recommend steps for the “permanent and effective preservation from deterioration and from danger from fire, or other form of destruction, of those documents of supreme value.” Part of the committee’s review would include how the documents could be safely displayed for the benefit of the “patriotic public.” The committee examined the Declaration and, despite its deterioration, concluded that little additional harm could occur if the parchment was exhibited “between two sheets of glass, hermetically sealed at the edges, and exposed only to diffused light.” The four sheets of the Constitution were in “excellent condition,” the committee reported, and exposure to only diffused light would not adversely affect its condition. “Properly cared for,” the report said, “[the four sheets] have as reasonable a prospect of life as the parchments of the middles ages, which have survived for centuries.” Heavy glass, diffused light, sealed edges—both the Declaration and the Constitution could be safely displayed if these steps were taken.
The committee had one more recommendation: the State Department should send the two documents and many others to the Library of Congress for organization and display. State was simply not equipped to properly display the Declaration and the Constitution for the general public.
While nothing was done immediately, on September 28, 1921—after the Harding administration had assumed office—the new secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, prepared an executive order for the president to sign transferring the Declaration and the Constitution to the Library of Congress. Hughes traced the history and travels of both documents and then pointed out the benefits of relocating them: “The [Library of Congress] building is of modern fireproof construction; there is no fire in it; smoking is not allowed; it has exhibition halls which are always under guard.” Further, making the documents accessible to the general public was a responsibility of the administration, Hughes noted, pointing out that when visitors traveled to Washington “there is no document which they desire to see so much as the Declaration of Independence.”
President Harding signed and issued the order on September 29, calling for the “original engrossed Declaration of Independence and the original engrossed Constitution of the United States” to be transferred from the State Department to the Library of Congress. The following day, Hughes wrote to Putnam and announced that he was “prepared to turn the documents over to you when you are ready to receive them.”
Putnam was more than eager. That very day he presented himself at the State Department in the library’s Ford Model T mail wagon. He signed a receipt for the parchments, cushioned them on a pile of leather U.S. mail sacks, returned to the library and locked the Declaration and the Constitution in his office safe.
The wily bureaucrat, who had developed a keen political sense in his more than two decades at the library’s helm, now turned his attention to a permanent home for America’s founding documents. For that, he needed money.
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PUTNAM WAS UP AGAINST the clock: the Bureau of the Budget was about to print department spending estimates for the coming year, and he had no time to secure blueprints, plans, or precise specifications for the structure that would house the Declaration and the Constitution. He knew they needed to be “fully safeguarded,” given “distinction,” and “open to inspection to the public at large.” He consulted his building superintendent and, on his advice, requested $12,000 for the purpose of building a display for the two precious parchments. In early January 1922, Putnam told a congressional appropriations committee that with proper lighting and sturdiness, the documents could be protected and displayed, “and you could have something that every visitor to Washington would wish to tell about when he returned.” Those visitors would regard the display housing “with keen interest as a sort of shrine,” he said.
Putnam was persuasive, and on March 20 Congress made the $12,000 “immediately available” for funding a “safe, permanent repository of appropriate design, within the Library of Congress building.”
Designed by Francis H. Bacon (brother of Henry Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial), the beautiful marble shrine certainly provided the place of dignity that Putnam had demanded. The cabinet’s gold-plated bronze doors, for example, would remain swung back to display the Declaration when the library was open to the public. Both the Declaration and the Constitution cases would be covered with double panes of plate glass, with specially prepared gelatin films between the two plates to “exclude the actinic rays of light.” Gustavus T. Kirby, formerly of the American Art Association, who had demonstrated “a most helpful interest in preserving the manuscripts from injurious light,” had suggested the gelatin filters and would oversee their installation. The floor beneath the shrine was constructed of Greek marble, and surrounding the shrine would be a solid balustrade of Italian marble. From outside the balustrade, the documents would be clearly visible, and visitors who wanted a closer look could pass single-file inside. A twenty-four-hour detail of uniformed guards would protect the shrine from the “evil-disposed,” Putnam reported.
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AFTER NEARLY TWO YEARS of construction, the shrine was completed early in 1924 and dedicated on February 28 in the presence of President and Mrs. Coolidge, Secretary of State Hughes, and a contingent of congressional members.
Not a word was spoken at the dedication. In a remarkable moment—one that would later be called the “silent ceremony”—Putnam simply stood upon the desk portion of the shrine and fitted the Declaration to its frame, then arranged the leaves of the Constitution, closed the glass lid, and turned the locks. When finished, he faced the president and the members of Congress, and from the adjoining hall, the library staff began singing “America” (AKA “My Country ’Tis of Thee”). The dignitaries assembled at the shrine joined in and together the group completed two stanzas. With that, the ceremony ended “without a single utterance,” save for the voices joined in song.
Putnam recalled later the import of the moment. It appeared to him that “the impression upon the audience proved the emotional potency of documents animate with great tradition.”
Ironically, for all the lofty rhetoric and eloquent debate that had been part and parcel of the creation of the Declaration and the Constitution, the fact that they were now displayed for all Americans to see in a new permanent home had left ceremony attendees at a loss for words.
What none of the participants could have known in 1924 is that permanence is fleeting; in this case, the Declaration and the Constitution would remain on display in the Library of Congress for only the next seventeen years.
As was the case in 1814, the winds of war would force them out of Washington. They would return only after an American victory appeared imminent.