Harold Holzer & Lincoln's Legacy: Historic Americana from the Life of Abraham Lincoln

"Writing," Abraham Lincoln declared in 1858, "...is the great invention of the world... very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn at all distances of time and of space."

When Lincoln spoke those words at a lecture in Illinois (ironically, one of his rare failures as a public speaker), even he could not have imagined how "very great" his own writing would be judged-during his own lifetime and in the generations since. Indeed, Lincoln's words continue to resonate "at all distances of time and of space," extolling the virtues and exposing the vulnerabilities in our American experiment and informing our unfinished conversations about the democracy he called "the last best, hope of earth." No wonder Harriet Beecher Stowe declared that his writing deserved "to be inscribed in letters of gold."

Lincoln is said to have composed some ten million words in all, every one of them painstakingly committed to paper by hand. The most famous of his phrases-like "new birth of freedom" and "malice toward none"-now animate our national vocabulary, with many renowned examples, of course, long enshrined in public archives. Few are the originals in private hands or on public sale. Lincoln would surely have been surprised at the unquenchable yearning for such material.

For a man who knew he could not "escape history," Lincoln remained surprisingly immune to the electrifying power of what he wrote and touched. To one of the first admirers to request his autograph, he replied in 1848: "I am not a very sentimental man, and the best sentiment I can think of is, that if you collect the signatures of all persons who are no less distinguished than I, you will have a very undistinguishing mass of names." Even Lincoln could sometimes carry humility too far!

Before at last hiring a private secretary for his 1860 presidential campaign, Lincoln was a poor record-keeper, too. Once he had shepherded a piece of writing into print-for a newspaper or pamphlet-he had no qualms about disposing of his original, however consequential. Hence: no surviving handwritten copies of his House Divided address or the masterpiece he delivered at Cooper Union.

When it came to relics, what his friend Ward Hill Lamon said about Lincoln's indifference to liquor could well apply to his lack of interest in artifacts, including his own: He "abstained himself, not so much upon principle, as because of a total lack of appetite."

Lincoln's nonchalance only heightened the ardor of admirers soon determined to preserve such material. And once Lincoln slipped suddenly into immortality in 1865, enthusiasts began a relentless quest to unearth and amass anything associated with his life. That quest has never abated.

The legendary early Lincoln collectors included Osborn Oldroyd, who lived and exhibited his trove at the Washington boarding house where Lincoln died; and candy manufacturer Charles Gunther, who acquired the bed in which Lincoln died. Soon came Daniel Fish, 

William H. Lambert, Charles W. McClellan, Judd Stewart, and Benjamin Oakleaf, whose holdings grew so vast, their acquisitional pursuits so dominant, that they became known as the "Big Five" of the field now known by a new word: "Lincolniana."

A new generation followed: Henry E. Huntington (who acquired the Lambert and Stewart collections) and lawyer Oliver R. Barrett; then Justin Turner, Malcolm Forbes, Louise Taper, Benjamin Shapell, David Rubenstein and others. What keeps energizing the field is that, from time to time, some signature collections find their way back to the public domain at public sales-like the Barrett and multiple Forbes auctions decades ago-material, as Carl Sandburg once marveled, somehow "saved from flame and time."

This very catalogue heralds another milestone, as evidenced by its staggering initial lot.

For it opens with the very first piece of writing in the entire Lincoln canon-the doggerel reproduced on page one, volume one of The Collected Works of Abaham Lincoln: a tattered leaf from a copybook that the teenaged future president used to practice arithmetic and scrawl poetry:

To see this piece is, for Lincoln devotees-whether we be "fools" or not-the equivalent of glimpsing the holy grail. And those who remain under Lincoln's spell will find in this catalogue many treasures evoking his life and death, from that scribbled rhyme long preserved by the stepmother who outlived him to the bloodstained white kid gloves he took with him to Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, the very night the man became a myth.

With these and its other pieces freshly researched and authoritatively described, this very catalogue becomes a "collectible" in its own right. It is the record of a singular moment when words, relics, and images associated with our greatest leader have re-appeared from

"distances of time and space" to grip us afresh. As the Washington Post said of the Barrett holdings nearly four score years ago, "America lives in these" relics.

Even Lincoln might agree that his writing-this entire collection- enables us to "converse" with our greatest leader as if he were still here to guide us. If only he were.

- Harold Holzer

Harold Holzer is the the Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. A leading scholar of Abraham Lincoln, he has authored, co-authored, or edited over 55 books on Lincoln and the Civil War. He previously served as Senior Vice President for External Affairs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and chaired both the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and Foundation. He is also the co-founder and chairman of The Lincoln Forum. Holzer received the National Humanities Medal in 2008 by President George W. Bush. His 2014 work Lincoln and the Power of the Press won the Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize, and his other honors include the Mark Lynton History Prize from the Columbia University School of Journalism and the Goldsmith Prize from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School. Holzer has lectured nationwide for more than 45 years and has appeared in Lincoln-related on-stage performances at venues that include the White House, Ford's Theatre, the Library of Congress, and the George H. W. Bush and William J. Clinton Presidential Libraries. Holzer was the historical consultant for Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln, and was featured in 2021-2022 Lincoln documentaries on both CNN and the History Channel. Holzer has received nine honorary degrees and has written more than 650 articles along with chapters or introductions for 65 additional books. His latest book is Brought Forth on this Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration (2024).