On January 6, 1857, Abraham Lincoln wrote a testimonial for American Statesman: A Political History by Andrew W. Young, noting, “I have very briefly glanced over a new work, in the hands of Mr. T. U. Webb [a canvasser for publisher Derby & Miller of New York], called the American Statesman; and I think it may be safely said that the volume is invaluable to those desirous of accurate and full references to the political history of our country.” Lincoln and his law partner William Henry Herndon were noted on the list of subscribers.

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In January 1863, Abraham Lincoln borrowed The Atlantic Monthly, Jan-June 1861 from the Library of Congress. It is unclear whether he had read them in whole or part previously or whether he read them cover-to-cover upon borrowing them that month. If he did, he would have been treated to an incredible range of prose and poetry. For example, the January 1861 issue contained the first-ever publication of Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The April 1861 issue is a treasure trove for lovers of literary realism. In addition to a first-person account of the situation in Charleston, South Carolina including the lead up to the Battle of Fort Sumter and a piece by Charles Francis Adams, Jr. the grandson of President John Quincy Adams, on the cotton industry and slavery, the April issue contained the first-ever (albeit anonymous) printing of the groundbreaking short-story, Life in the Iron Mills, by Rebecca Harding Davis.

The piece on Fort Sumter contains the following bit of dialogue, which reportedly transpired between the journalist, John William DeForest, and one of his interviewees:

“Why do you venture on this doubtful future?” I asked of one gentleman … “Your great grievance is the election of Lincoln?”

“Yes” …

“Is Lincoln considered here to be a bad or dangerous man?”

“Not personally. I understand that he is a man of excellent private character, and I have nothing to say against him as a ruler, inasmuch as he has never been tried. Mr. Lincoln is simply a sign to us that we are in danger, and must provide for our own safety.”

“You secede, then, solely because you think his election proves that the mass of the Northern people is adverse to you and your interests?”

“Yes.”

“So Mr. Wigfall of Texas hit the nail on the head, when he said substantially that the South cannot be at peace with the North until the latter concedes that slavery is right?”

“Well,—I admit it; that is precisely it.”

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On January 16, 1863, President Lincoln borrows a copy of the second volume of David Hume’s The History of England, from the Library of Congress in January 1863. This volume covers the period between 1216 and 1485, including the civil wars often referred to as the “Wars of the Roses.”

On February 25, 1860, after arriving in New York, Abraham Lincoln reads and makes revisions to his speech, which he delivered two days later at the Cooper Institute. This fall, we published a new lesson plan on Lincoln’s Cooper Union address, created by award-winning West Virginia educator Adena Barnette-Miller. You can access it HERE.  

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In February 1861, Abraham Lincoln spent 13 days traveling from Springfield, IL to Washington, DC, making many stops and speeches along the way. A journalist reported that on February 15th, Abraham Lincoln was “less talkative” and was spending more time “reading newspapers and reflecting.”

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In February 1862, Abraham Lincoln borrowed Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men from the Library of Congress. The book, which is a collection of essays based on seven lectures delivered by Emerson, opens with a discussion on the role of “great men” in society. Each subsequent chapter highlights one of six individuals, Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. About one week later, perhaps inspired by Emerson’s essays, the household borrowed volumes of Goethe's Werke. Incidentally, a sculpture of Goethe was placed in Chicago’s Lincoln Park in 1913.

On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln, read aloud his Inaugural Address. The final paragraph is oft-quoted. Lincoln’s penultimate paragraph read: 

“Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them….In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

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In March 1862 “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” first appeared as sheet music. Its author, Julia Ward Howe, had published it in The Atlantic Monthly the previous month, for which she received only $5. Three years later, it was well on its way to becoming one of America’s canonical anthems. Howe borrowed the melody from the popular marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Abraham Lincoln surely heard that tune numerous times but it’s hard to pinpoint when he first encountered Howe’s lyrics. The first documented instance was on February 2, 1864, at the annual meeting of the Christian Commission in Washington, D. C. Chaplain C. C. McCabe, who was instrumental in promoting the “Battle Hymn,” sang it—prompting an emotional response from Lincoln. McCabe repeated the performance the following year, reportedly moving Lincoln to tears. When Lincoln was assassinated two months later, the “Battle Hymn” cemented its status as America’s newest anthem by being incorporated into his funeral ceremonies.

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President Lincoln borrowed a copy of David Hume’s The History of England, volumes 3 and 4, from the Library of Congress in March of 1863. These volumes cover the “History of the House of Tudor” in two parts.

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On March 2, 1864, Abraham Lincoln and his family attended a performance of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Earlier that same day, Lincoln recited the soliloquy of the king from Hamlet, from memory, while sitting for artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter. According to Carpenter, Lincoln called the soliloquy, “one of the finest touches of nature in the world.”

If “Our American Cousin” is remembered at all, it’s as the play Abraham and Mary Lincoln tragically attended at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Yet few ask why Lincoln went to see the play at all and what it might tell us about his theatrical tastes or even his politics.

Written by British playwright Tom Taylor, it tells the story of a frontier American named Asa who inherits an English estate. Taylor mines comedy from the contrast between Asa’s “rough and tumble” American persona and the snooty vapid aristocrats who surround him. Asa is clearly the hero of the piece, however, and his egalitarian worldview ultimately triumphs over the British class system. This mix of broad comedy and republicanism was right in Lincoln’s wheelhouse, so it’s no wonder he chose it to celebrate the successes of early April and comforting to think he likely spent his final moments in high spirits and good humor.

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President Lincoln borrowed Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh (A. H.) Clough, from the Library of Congress in April 1862. Commonly known as Plutarch’s Lives or Parallel Lives, and published in multiple volumes, the series originally contained 48 biographies. The biographies are all of famous men, presented in pairs (one Greek, one Roman) to explore character and parallel destinies. Clough was born in England and studied there, but spent a significant portion of his early childhood in Charleston, South Carolina in the U.S. He briefly returned to the States in the early 1850s, during which time he prepared his edited version of Plutarch’s Lives for publishers in Boston. In addition to his work in literature and educational theory, Clough was a devoted assistant to Florence Nightingale, with whom he was related by marriage. He was also brother to English suffragist and educationalist Anne Clough.

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In April 1862, the White House borrowed the second volume of a two-volume edition of Samuel Butler’s mock epic poem, Hudibras. Hudibras was originally published in three parts, the first of which was issued in 1663. Butler’s work has remained influential and came to define a type of “comic narrative poetry.” According to A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch and the American Academy of Poets, “Hudibrastic verse (Hudibrastics) consists of jangling eight-syllable rhyming couplets. It is named after Samuel Butler’s satirical long poem Hudibras (1663–1680), which uses deliberately absurd, iambic tetrameter couplets to ridicule and attack the Puritans.”

On Friday, May 9, 1862, in the area of Fort Monroe, Virginia, President Lincoln read aloud from Shakespeare’s King John to Colonel LeGrand B. Cannon, who wrote about the experience in his memoir.

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Several books were acquired for the library of the Executive Mansion in May 1862. Among the books ordered were Lives of the Queens of England (12 volumes) and Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses Connected with the Regal Succession of Great Britain (8 volumes), both by Agnes Strickland. Strickland was a prolific author of biography and children’s books. Her sister Elizabeth assisted her a great deal with research but purportedly refused recognition and publicity.

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According to Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, President Lincoln read dispatches from Generals Grant, Butler, and Sherman to his Cabinet on May 10th, 1864. Welles recorded in his diary that the reports were “all in good and encouraging tone.”  

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The vast resources available to the government today make it seem almost impossible to imagine Abraham Lincoln sometimes simply had no way of accurately knowing what U. S. forces were doing in the Civil War. His May 22, 1863, letter to Major General Stephen Hurlbut (then serving under Ulysses S. Grant’s command) is especially revealing in this regard.

Lincoln informs Hurlburt he’s been reading “Richmond newspapers” for information on the early stages of what would turn out to be the Vicksburg siege. This means Lincoln was so in the dark, he and his staff were turning to Confederate media to try and glean information about what was happening on the battlefront. He lists a series of events and asks Hurlbut to confirm, to which the general dutifully complied the next day. This looks like poor communication, but it mostly just reveals how information did not pass as freely in Lincoln’s time nor always through the channels we might expect.

In June 1858, Abraham Lincoln read a speech to Republican leaders that he planned to deliver if nominated as their Senatorial candidate the next day. In a recollection years later, Ward Lamon claimed almost all advised Lincoln eliminate the paragraph about a “house divided” because it was too radical. The next day, Lincoln did received the nomination as expected and read his speech in full. The reportedly controversial lines of what has come to be known as the “House Divided” speech read,”

"A house divided against itself cannot stand.

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.”

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Lincoln reportedly borrowed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded, from the Library of Congress in June 1862. The book was a compilation of primary sources on slavery, including those Stowe used for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published the year prior, and was at least in part a response to the negative reviews of that book, some of which claimed she had fabricated or grossly exaggerated the horrors of slavery. Perhaps unsurprisingly, positive and negative reviews of Stowe’s follow-up publication were split along similar lines as the original book, with anti-slavery reviews offering more favorable comments and pro-slavery critics, no longer able to deny she had primary source evidence, accusing her of seeking out and selecting only the most horrific examples to support an anti-slavery agenda.

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According to David Homer Bates, an original operator for the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, Abraham Lincoln was at the Telegraph Office on June 1, 1864. There, he read the New York Herald report on the Cleveland Convention. The Convention, held the day prior, was an assembly of approximately 300 Republicans dissatisfied with President Lincoln who intended to form a new political party with John C. Fremont as their presidential nominee. After reading the report, Lincoln asked for a copy of the Bible. He opened it to I Samuel xxii, 2, and, reportedly referring to the hundreds of delegates of the Convention, read the following to those present:   

“And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men.”

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The precise date on which Lincoln decided to issue an Emancipation Proclamation—and thereby set destroying slavery as a central pillar of the U. S. war effort—is not known. We know, however, it had to be sometime before June 18, 1862, when Lincoln read an early draft of the proclamation to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin during one of the president’s stays at the Soldier’ Home.

The story fits with other claims that Lincoln took advantage of the relative quiet and isolation of the Soldiers’ Home to work on the most consequential document he ever wrote. About a month after reading it to Hamlin, Lincoln revealed his proclamation to the rest of the cabinet but took their advice to wait for a victory before issuing it. That day came on September 22, after the Battle of Antietam, and the proclamation went into effect just over three months later.

The summer of 1834 saw Abraham Lincoln in New Salem pursuing his second campaign for the Illinois legislature. The Whig Party had fully formed since his 1832 defeat, and Lincoln now ran as a member. Fellow Whig John Todd Stuart of Springfield had also campaigned in 1832, except he had won and was now up for reelection.

Although they were competing for votes, Stuart was becoming Lincoln’s political and professional mentor. It was in July 1834, in the midst of their campaigns, that Stuart first advised Lincoln to study law and offered to lend him books to do so. Scholars debate if Lincoln was already considering a career as a lawyer, but this is when he firmly began to go down that path. Lincoln won his seat that year and passed the Illinois bar two years later. In 1837, Stuart took him on as his junior partner and the future president moved to Springfield.

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One month before the Dakota War of 1862, Lincoln reportedly borrowed a number of books from the Library of Congress including, The History of Minnesota: from the Earliest French Explorers to the Present Time, by Edward D. Neill. A couple of years later, after having served as an army chaplain to a regiment in Minnesota and at a hospital in Philadelphia, Neill served as an assistant secretary to the President. Neill reflected that Lincoln’s, “capacity for work was wonderful. While other men were taking recreation through the sultry months of summer, he remained in his office attending to the wants of the nation. He was never an idler or a lounger. Each hour he was busy.”

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Abraham Lincoln read his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation aloud to his cabinet on July 22nd, following on the previous day’s discussion about slavery. Views varied on whether, when, and how the proclamation should be issued, and what the consequences would be. Ultimately, Lincoln agreed with his Secretary of State’s recommendation to hold off on issuing the proclamation until the Union secured a military victory, which would strengthen its position. Two years later to the day, the cabinet viewed F. B. Carpenter's painting, still in progress, of Abraham Lincoln reading the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet. The final sentence of the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation read:

"And, as a fit and necessary military measure for effecting this object, I, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, do order and declare that on the first day of January in the year of Our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized, submitted to, and maintained, shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free."

Among the 23 titles Mrs. Lincoln purchased in August 1862, Mrs. Lincoln purchased was “1 set Shakespeare $12.” We cannot be certain Abraham Lincoln read a volume from the set that month and, if so, which one. A year later, on August 17, 1863, President Lincoln wrote in a letter to James H. Hackett, Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth—It is wonderful.”

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Abraham Lincoln sent a brief but unique letter on August 19, 1862. His recipient was Anna Ella Carroll, one of the few women he corresponded with directly. Indeed, Carroll was even more exceptional because, despite social norms limiting women to the “domestic sphere,” Lincoln’s letter was expressly political.

Carroll was a Unionist living in the border state of Maryland, where Unionism wasn’t widespread. Many Democrats and secessionists criticized Lincoln for his efforts to keep Maryland in the Union—including his controversial suspension of habeas corpus—but Carroll became a prominent voice supporting him and the war. In this letter, Lincoln informs her he has read her latest speech and assures her “it is just what is needed now and you were the one to do it.” The speech Lincoln is referencing was probably “The War Power of the General Government,” which he reportedly found so effective, he had multiple copies printed and distributed.

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According to John Hay, on August 23, 1863, after accompanying the President to the U.S. Naval Observatory to view the moon and the red giant star Arcturus, they retired to the Soldiers’ Home, where President Lincoln read aloud from, “the end of Henry V, and the beginning of Richard III, till my heavy eyelids caught his considerate notice, and he sent me to bed.”

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Although not proof Mr. Lincoln read the books that month, in August 1862, Mrs. Lincoln purchased twenty-three titles including works of poetry, history, and natural history. One of the books was listed as “Sigourney Poems,” undoubtedly a reference to the work of accomplished poet, educator, author, and editor Lydia Huntley Sigourney of Connecticut. Another title was listed as “Kanes Expeditions,” certainly a reference to United States Navy medical officer and Arctic explorer Dr. Elisha Kent Kane’s expeditions. While the Lincolns paid for much of the purchase with their own funds, a portion was paid from the annual appropriation of $250 for books for the Executive Mansion, managed by Commissioner of Public Buildings Benjamin B. French.

In 1846, Abraham Lincoln sends poetry he authored to Andrew Johnston in Indiana. Included is, “The Bear Hunt,” comprised of 22 quatrains including:

But woe for Bruin’s short lived fun,

When rose the squealing cry;

Now man and horse, with dog and gun,

For vengeance, at him fly.

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Presumably he read the lines of poetry he wrote in Rosaline Haggard's autograph album in September 1858. "To Rosa—You are young, and I am older; You are hopeful, I am not—Enjoy life, ere it grow colder—Pluck the roses ere they rot. Teach your beau to heed the lay—That sunshine soon is lost in shade—That now's as good as any day—To take thee, Rosa, ere she fade.” Haggard was the daughter of the owner of a hotel in Winchester, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln stayed there when he was in the area to speak.

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Prior to reading the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet in September 1862, President Lincoln shared a bit of humor, reading “High-Handed Outrage at Utica” by Artemus Ward (the pen name for Charles Farrar Browne). According to the Diary of Salmon P. Chase, President Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, “All the members of the Cabinet were in attendance. There was some general talk; and the President mentioned that Artemus Ward had sent him his book. Proposed to read a chapter which he thought very funny. Read it, and seemed to enjoy it very much — the Heads also (except [Secretary of War] Stanton) of course.” Chase noted that Lincoln then took on a graver tone, and introduced his plans regarding the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. https://www.bartleby.com/library/prose/5547.html

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The internet is flooded with pearls of wisdom from Abraham Lincoln. While many of these are fake (I’m looking at you “whatever you are, be a good one”), a common one that’s genuine is “work, work, work, is the main thing.” It comes from a letter Lincoln wrote to aspiring lawyer John Brockman on September 25, 1860.

Brockman had asked for advice on how to pursue a legal career, so Lincoln tells him to work hard and educate himself with books. He recommends several, but among them is William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Although Blackstone wrote about English law in the decades before the American Revolution, by breaking down the elements of common law in a style that was easy to read, he heavily influenced legal thought throughout the English-speaking world. It’s not hard to imagine why Lincoln believed it was a vital foundation for Brockman and generations of lawyers to come.

According to a recollection by Gibson William Harris, a former law clerk of Abraham Lincoln and William Herdon, Lincoln borrowed a copy of the works of Lord Byron from a schoolmaster in Albion, IL in “mid-autumn.” Lincoln, a Whig at the time, and Isaac P. Walker, a Democrat, were holding a debate there. Harris’s story indicated that Lincoln sought out a copy because he planned to use lines from the beginning of Byron’s poem “Lara, A Tale” in his opening statement.

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By Abraham Lincoln’s time, slavery had so thoroughly immersed itself into American life that a robust “pro-slavery theology” had developed in some religious circles claiming the Bible justified enslaving African Americans on racial and evangelical grounds. As a sort of “opposition research,” Lincoln seems to have read one of the central texts of this theology—Rev. Frederick A. Ross’s Slavery Ordained by God—soon after its 1857 publication. Outraged by what he read, in October 1858 Lincoln wrote what appears to be an unpublished attack on Ross and his beliefs. After musing on the pretzel-logic such a theology required, Lincoln sarcastically declared: “But, slavery is good for some people!!! As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself. Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it [is] good for the lambs!!!”

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In October 1861, Abraham Lincoln reportedly read, The Rejected Stone: or Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America, by Moncure D. Conway. Conway was an abolitionist minister though he was descended from slave-holding First Families of Virginia and Maryland, including one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence from Maryland. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner gave Lincoln the book. [Link to book from google books]

Also this month in 1861, Lincoln read a dispatch announcing the death of his close friend, Colonel Edward D. Baker, namesake for the Lincolns’ son Edward “Eddy” Baker Lincoln, who had died over a decade earlier at the age of three.

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According to John Hay, one of President Lincoln’s secretaries, on the night of October 11, 1864, he accompanied Lincoln to the War Department to wait for election returns. Hay reported that while waiting, Abraham Lincoln read several chapters of The Nasby Papers, a book of humorous writing by journalist and political commentator David R. Locke under the pen name, “Petroleum V. Nasby.” The fictional Nasby was a Copperhead or “Peace” Democrat.

While political commentary in America remains heated, one popular form of it that’s dropped away is the anonymous caricature. 19th century newspapers frequently published columns by fictional writers, often to ironically skewer an opposing political movement. Abraham Lincoln himself dabbled in this kind of writing but was mostly just a fan, and his favorite was Petroleum V. Nasby.

The creation of David R. Locke, Nasby was a bloviating Northern Democrat who supported the Confederacy. With biting wit, Locke made Nasby as repellant as possible—exposing the hypocrisy, ignorance, and racism of the secessionist cause. Locke’s humor and politics aligned with Lincoln’s and there are numerous stories of the president reading Nasby or even reciting pieces in meetings. For instance, when waiting for early election returns in the War Department Telegraph Office on October 11, 1864, Lincoln read some Nasby with John Hay to ease the tension.

Following the election in 1860, president-elect Abraham Lincoln was observed by a reporter reading Andrew Jackson’s 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina, also known as the “Nullification Proclamation” in which President Jackson asserted that states are not allowed to nullify federal laws. Jackson issues the Nullification Proclamation, reaffirming his belief that states and municipalities are forbidden from nullifying federal laws. Years later, Abraham Lincoln was given a copy of an 1833 letter from Andrew Jackson to Andrew Crawford, in which Jackson pronounced the nullification crisis “dead” and noted multiple times that the “nullifiers” were using tariffs as a pretext and that “disunion & a Southern confederacy the real object.”

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Also this month in 1862, Abraham Lincoln read a collection of editorials by Henry Ward Beecher critiquing the president’s administration.

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In November 1863, Abraham Lincoln read the Gettysburg Address. He also read this letter https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/gettysburg-address/ext/trans-gracious.html written the very next day, November 20, 1863, from Edward Everett, the featured speaker at Gettysburg, who was both an accomplished statesmen and orator. While the reaction to Lincoln’s address was tepid at the time, Everett wrote, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

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While awaiting election returns in November of 1864, President Lincoln read aloud from the writings of Petroleum V. Nasby, the penname of American humorist David Ross Locke. His companions included Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who reportedly expressed his indignation over the content.

A copy of Volksmärchen der Deutschen (Folktales of the Germans), by Johann Karl August Musäus was lent by the Library of Congress to the Executive Mansion in early December 1861. Musäus’s book was a satirical retelling of German folk tales.   While Abraham had owned a German-language newspaper, he himself wasn’t fluent in the language. Several members of the presidential household were, however, including his secretary John Nicolay, born Johann Georg Nicolai in the Kingdom of Bavaria.

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On December 6, 1861, the Library of Congress lent a 1841 copy of Volksmärchen der Deutschen (German Folktales) by Johann Karl August Musäus to the White House. The folktales, written in a satirical style, were originally published at the turn of the 19^th century. They were republished several times, including in the 1820s and 1840s, reportedly due to a spike in British interest in German Romanticist literature and a revival 20 years later following the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

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In December 1861, President Lincoln borrowed two items from the Library of Congress, "U.S. Constitution 1783" and "U.S. Constitution 1856." He borrowed them on two separate occasions that month, returning them on December 6th and checking them out again on December 30th. Lincoln regularly referred to the Constitution in key speeches earlier that year. For example, in his Inaugural Address in March 1861, he referenced the Constitution 34 times, underscoring the oath he had just taken to preserve, protect, and defend it. On the fourth of July that same year, he referenced the Constitution 27 times and noted, “Our popular Government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have already settled--the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains--its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it.”

By contrast, in his first annual message to Congress in December 1861, the month he checked out the items twice, he made zero references to the U.S. Constitution. Instead, he made repeated references to Union and the war, reminding Congress that, “It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government--the rights of the people.” In addition to articulating challenges and threats caused by the ongoing rebellion, the message is notable for Lincoln’s extensive treatment of foreign relations and policy. Indeed, the message is the starting point for the Foreign Relations of the United States series, the historical record of all major U.S. foreign policy decisions and activity. He was setting a course for the future.

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On Wednesday, December 24, 1862, Mary Lincoln borrowed Thomas Buchanan Read’s, The Wagoner of the Alleghanies: A Poem of the Days of Seventy-Six (Philadelphia, 1862) from the Library of Congress. The setting is described as such, “The scenes of this poem are chiefly laid on the banks of the Schuylkill, between Philadelphia and Valley Forge; the time, somewhat previous to and during a great part of the war of Independence.” And the poem takes place in three major parts.  Thomas B. Read also included a note to the reader, which begins, “The author is well aware of the justice of the remark made by his publisher, that the present is not a favorable time to expect the country to receive a volume of poetry with any marked attention….” Read may have been surprised to learn that the President’s own wife, and perhaps other occupants of the Executive Mansion, gave his poetry attention.

In 1864, Read, who in addition to being a poet was an artist, painted a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.