(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Illinois Stories is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by the support of viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Hello, welcome to Illinois Stories.

I'm Mark McDonald at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, where they recently have unveiled a very important of Illinois and national history.

The desk that you see behind me is the actual desk that Abraham Lincoln wrote his first inaugural address on and after years and years of sort of, this was an historical item, sort of sitting vacant in the, in the collection.

It was determined, well, let's get this thing restored and let's make this back to the condition it would have been in 1860.

So Dr. Christian McWhirter is the Lincoln historian.

This was a project that to you probably seemed, yeah, let's go, let's get this done.

- Oh yeah.

I mean, this is such a cool piece of history.

It's such a fascinating artifact and to get it restored and to have it looking so good.

And to be able to tell it's story was a real thrill for me.

Yeah.

- Before we really look at this thing closely, let's talk about the first inaugural address.

- Sure.

- Okay.

Lincoln's elected in 18, 1859 late, - 1860.

- In 1860.

- November, 1860.

- He'll take office in 61.

- Right.

- He's got these months between the time he's elected and the time he's going to be inaugurated.

What's going on in Springfield?

- Well, in Springfield, you know, Lincoln suddenly is, goes from being, I mean, you know, people knew who Lincoln was, but now suddenly he's one of the most famous people in the country.

And he's one of the, he's the most powerful person or about to be the most powerful person in the country.

So everybody wants a piece of Lincoln.

So, you know, everywhere Lincoln goes, he's got people crowding and they want to meet him.

They want him to give them jobs.

They want to get interviews from him.

You know, it's hard for Lincoln to find any, any kind of solitude or peace in those few months.

- So where this desk lived is where he was able to find a little solitude and do some writing and thinking.

- Yeah, you know, Lincoln's first inaugural address is, you know, probably the most important speech he ever gives.

And he certainly feels that way, even though it may not be the most remembered.

And so he needs privacy to write it.

He knows it's going to have a huge political impact.

He's looking for places in town where he can sit down and write this speech.

And his brother-in-law C.M.

Smith offers up the third floor of his store.

And it's on that third floor that Lincoln sits at this desk and starts writing the speech.

- Oh, okay.

So I had heard that he spent quite a bit of time in the governor's office at the old state Capitol as well in that time.

But this is where he could really find some privacy, was at his brother-in-law's store.

- Yeah.

Because what he's doing in the, in the old state Capitol is that's where he's taking visitors, right?

You know, one of the things that, one of the main, and this drives Lincoln crazy, one of the main things the president elect is doing in the mid 19th century is having people come to him because they want jobs, right?

They want these patronage jobs, the president can, so the way Lincoln is receiving people at the old state Capitol, but he's not been able to write a speech there for precisely that reason.

So he needed somewhere else to go where he could really be alone with his thoughts.

He's researching this speech too.

He's taking books out of the, the state library.

He's borrowing them from friends cause he's got a constitutional crisis going on.

And he needs to think about what exactly he wants to say on it.

- We don't actually have the first inaugural address here that lives in Washington, DC.

But can you tell us sort of the basic outline of what he's going to say?

- Sure.

So by the time Lincoln gets up to give his first inaugural address on March 4th, 1861, the entire deep south has already succeeded and formed the Confederate States of America.

So Lincoln very much in that speech is responding to this succession crisis.

And, you know, Lincoln is trying to avert a civil war.

So the, it's very much Lincoln the lawyer in that speech, it's Lincoln is making a constitutional argument for why he believes secession is unconstitutional.

Why, what the Confederacy is doing is illegal.

He's also telling them it's a bad idea.

He's on, you know, they're afraid that he's an abolitionists, he's assuring them he isn't, and that they're overreacting to his election.

And then at the end, he makes an emotional plea, which is more of the Lincoln we're kind of used to in the Gettysburg Address and things like that.

That's where he mentioned the mystic chords of memory and the better angels of our nature.

That's all in that last paragraph, trying to avoid a civil war.

- Gotcha.

We are dying to take a look at this desk.

Now, okay.

We mentioned that it was on the square.

It was in his brother-in-law's shop on the square.

Tell me what you know about it.

- Well, this is a merchant's desk, right?

So his brother-in-law's a merchant.

He owns a store and this is the kind of desk a merchant would have owned, right?

You can see there's all these cubby holes in it.

That's for, you know, back then they had, they didn't have computers, right?

So they had ledgers, right?

So that's what those big ones, right?

Those big shelves, that's where he would put ledger books.

And he's got all these little cubbies where you can put checks and paperwork.

This is the kind of desk someone like that would have owned.

So it's, you know, it doesn't look like the kind of desk Lincoln would have had in his house.

And that's because it wasn't that kind of desk.

- How long do you think this stayed in the store?

- Our, the people who conserved it told us it's probably from about 1850.

So by the time Lincoln gets to it, it could've been anywhere, you know, not quite a decade old, but somewhere close to that.

- Where did it go?

How did it become part of the collection, the state collection?

- It goes to a few different places.

It stays in the family.

So the merchant, you know, is Lincoln's brother-in-law, he's married to one of Mary Lincoln sisters, her daughter, it kind of goes through the family and her daughter eventually sells it to the state of Illinois in 1953.

At that time we don't exist yet.

We're still called the only state historical library and that's who they sell it to.

And then it's been in our collection ever since then.

- I see.

Okay.

And it came over here.

Or actually, went to the conservator when?

- It was with the conservators most of last year.

And then we just got it back.

So we put it on display.

- It's beautiful.

It's priceless.

It is priceless.

I'd like you, if you don't mind stay around because this exhibit includes more than the desk and the inaugural address.

There are other documents here, which are very important to our history, but I'd like to get somebody who knows the real ins and outs of how this was restored.

So we're going to take a look at this and we'll get back to you.

- Okay.

- Thank you.

Lisa Horsley, this may have been, you're the director of library services here.

This may have been one of the more fascinating projects that you've been involved in.

It would, would that be right?

- Oh yeah, this is probably the best conservation work that we've done here in quite some time.

It was really nice to be able to work with outside conservators because we don't have any furniture conservators on site.

So it was just great to be able to connect with a third party to get this restoration completed.

- At what point did you all decide, you know what, we need to do something about this.

This is, this isn't right or it needs help or how did, when did, when did that occur?

- We decided to move it over here from the old state Capitol, we wanted to get it looked at to see whether or not it was safe to be moved.

So we had a furniture conservator come down and take a look at it and give us a treatment proposal.

And we also just wanted to get their opinion on whether or not we can safely move it over here.

And it was in talking to that conservator that we realized that the 1958 restoration that had been done on this, we knew it wasn't terribly historically accurate when it was done in 1958, but we didn't realize that it could also be potentially damaging to the desk.

So when we kind of came to light on that, it was like, wait, we got to get this, we got to get this repaired and get this, you know.

- Well what did it look like?

It didn't look like this did it?

- Well, actually no, it kind of looked pretty similar, you know, to, it's a lot shinier that's for sure.

But a lot of the things that were fixed were the, like the key holes and the knobs.

Those are things that were replaced in the 1958 restoration.

And they did the best that they could for the tools at that time.

But the, the knobs were replaced with just factory knobs and they were screwed in.

So whenever they did the restoration, they actually hand-laid these knobs to make them more historically accurate.

And they installed them with period nails.

- When you said it might've been damaging to the desk, show us what, how.

- So these are the things that were done that were historically, you know, the, to change the historically accurateness.

So the, the knobs that were replaced, this key hole hardware had been added, and this was not original to the desk.

Unknown, and whether or not these were added just for aesthetic purposes kind, make it, you know, dress it up.

Cause it is a plain desk, it's a merchant's desk.

But then also whenever these were removed, there was a lot of scratching on either side of the key holes, you know, that would be consistent with keys going in and out.

So maybe these were added to, to kind of hide that a little bit, but these were removed.

This had also been replaced, so a period lock was placed in there.

And all of the, the nails and screws that were put in that were not historically accurate have been removed.

The braces that hold the legs to the side.

- Let me stop you right there.

- Oh sure.

- Are there nails or are there wood in there that now that would be historically correct?

Would there be nails?

- Nails, mhm yep.

So nails and screws had been used during the 1958 restoration.

So they're not period pieces.

So they were removed.

And during this, the latest restoration, they only use period nails.

- Okay.

But they were nails.

They were still using.

- Yes, mhm, yep.

Absolutely.

And then something else is the, the locks for the drawers.

This one was replaced.

So this is replaced in 1958.

So that one was removed.

The other one was still original, but was damaged.

So the conservator was actually able to fix that.

As far as the wood, what holds the legs to the sideboards, the braces, they were replaced in 1958, this is what they looked like whenever the conservator removed them.

This is an example of what it was replaced with.

So these were made to be more historically accurate.

And then also since it goes with the piece, so that way, future generations know that these are not, - A time capsule, huh?

- Yes, that these are not original to the desk.

So any, any piece that he added, he dated it.

- And how long did this whole process take?

I know we mentioned that, I think we mentioned a better part of a year, but it wasn't really that.

- About six months.

- About six months.

Did you ever get a chance to go up and see what they were doing?

- No, but we had regular check-in calls with them, you know, every, about every month or so, just to see the progress of the desk and, you know, cause they hit, you know, they sourced all of the materials that they were adding.

So it was like, oh, we found the, we found the perfect keyhole.

We were able to find enough nails as, as they were going.

- Now this won't be here forever.

We don't know exactly how long it'll be open for the public to see, but when it goes, where will it go?

- We have a place for it already in the stacks downstairs.

We built a platform down there, so it can rest, rest peacefully right outside our vault.

- And I guess that's climate controlled right?

- Yes, climate controlled, yep.

- So, I mean, humidity's not going to get warping it and all that kind of stuff.

- Correct, correct.

- Wow.

And do you know what kind of wood it was made?

- It is Walnut is the primary wood.

And then Poplar is the secondary wood.

All of the adhesive that had been used to during that restoration was removed, all of the glue, there was a synthetic lacquer and we talk about things, you know, historically accurate versus potentially damaging to the piece that those adhesives and that synthetic lacquer is potentially damaging to the piece.

So it's nice that we were able to get that removed now, before it was too late to get removed.

So all the adhesives, the shellac that's put on top of it, which is why it's so shiny.

That's all soluble, it's all reversible.

So in the future, if we learn something different about one of those adhesives, it can still be removed.

- Well, thank you.

I bet it was fun.

- Yes.

Yes.

It was great.

- Christian, we were talking about Lincoln's philosophy, which he was laying out in his inaugural address.

And before that, during the campaign, he had said a lot of what he was planning to say in the inaugural address.

And that's what you have here.

Some of his writings during the 1860 campaign.

- Yeah, this is part of the permanent exhibit we have here in the library now called Lincoln's life and letters where we've taken some of the most interesting documents in our collection.

And we've created high resolution scans of them with some, with a full transcription interpretation so people can see them.

So this is a letter, notice Lincoln has said private and confidential at the top.

And this is when Lincoln is campaigning for president.

It's very close to the, he's only about a week away from the presidential election.

And Lincoln walks a very fine line during that, and as all Republicans are doing during that presidential election where they're, you know, part of the Republican platform is to stop the expansion of slavery westward, but they are being characterized by, by Democrats as abolitionists.

And so Lincoln is walking that fine line.

This letter, he's saying, you know, what is it I could say which would quiet alarm?

Is it that no interference by the government, with slaves or slavery within the states, is intended?

Right?

He's trying to fight this idea that he's a radical, of course we all know Lincoln will end up being instrumental in the destruction of slavery over the course of the civil war.

But in 1860, you know, he's just trying to get elected on an anti slavery, expansion platform.

And that's what's going on in this letter.

- And this was actually going on before that, because if we move back just a couple of years during 1858, when he lost his senatorial run, he was saying largely the same thing.

I think wasn't it?

- Yeah, you know, Lincoln campaigns against Douglas in 1858, Stephen Douglas to claim Douglas's senate seat here in Illinois.

And the reason Lincoln is so vehemently opposed to Stephen Douglas is because it's Douglas's Kansas Nebraska act from 1854 that's opened the door for slavery to start expanding further westward than, you know, most Republicans, it's actually what leads to the creation of the Republican party is fighting against that movement of Stephen Douglas's.

So these are notes that Lincoln wrote before one of those debates where he's thinking about what he wants to say in response to things that Douglas might say to him.

- A brief answer to his opening.

You know, his handwriting was pretty darn good.

- Yeah.

Lincoln's pretty good.

He has some weird little quirks.

I don't know if like he loves to use, see here, he loves to use em dashes, which makes them hard to transcribe sometimes.

Cause it's clearly supposed to be a period or something else, but he's pretty easy to read.

And he loved these notes.

Lincoln has a bunch of these notes that he wrote to himself and we have some of them here and it's really great.

Cause it's a, it's more than a letter.

You know, that letter we just looked at, that's a political letter.

He's writing it to someone, right?

This is a real glimpse inside Lincoln's mind, right?

Lincoln is thinking about what he's going to say.

- Yeah, we're going to do a little time travel here.

You know, we've we went from, we actually have been moving backwards, but now we're going to move forward because actually during the civil war, you, you've got one of the really beautiful documents from during the civil war.

So let's go over that way.

- Okay.

- One of his most famous writings at one of the most famous places, historical places in the country.

This is interesting, only five copies of this is that right?

Of the Gettysburg Address.

- Yeah.

Only five copies of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's hand survive.

None of them we believe are the copy he read from that day, that's been lost.

We don't know what happened to it, but there are five that he wrote after.

At least we believe they were all written after.

And we have the third one.

And that's what is part of this exhibit here, this is a scan of that copy.

- Yeah.

You exhibit that every year, right?

Well, how did we get hold of it?

- Yeah, it's on display every year around the anniversary of the speech.

Lincoln gave it on November 19th, 1863.

And this is the third copy.

We call it the Everett copy, Lincoln actually wrote it for the main speaker that day.

It's one of the ironies of the Gettysburg Address.

He was, he was actually second billed under Edward Everett, who gave a two hour address.

Lincoln gives a two minute address.

- And nobody remembers Everett's speech.

- Nobody remembers Everett's speech.

Lincoln's speech, in which he says, people won't remember what we said here, right?

Is the most famous speech ever written in English language.

Right?

But the Everett copy is written to sell, it's to raise money for soldiers.

So it goes into private hands.

That was its intention.

And it remains in private hands until 1944, when it goes up for auction in the middle of world war II and the state of Illinois buys it and largely from donations from Illinois school children who donated pennies and nickels.

- Oh man, what a smart move that was.

- It's amazing.

And we're so proud to have it.

And yeah, we love to show it off, but we also, you know, and that's part of what this exhibit too, why we have these scans, you know, part of our mission is also to preserve these things, right?

We're supposed to keep them so the generations can come see them.

So we can only, you know, we'd love to put them out all the time, but we can only put them out so often, we have to protect them from light and temperature.

And so that Gettysburg only comes out about two weeks a year, but you can see, I mean, this is as good as it.

It really looks as good as the real thing.

And it's just a beautiful document.

It's, we're so proud to own it.

And really the state of Illinois owns it, which is great.

And you can actually see, I don't know if you can zoom in, it was bound with Everett's speech, that's how he sold it.

And you can actually see that's why there's numbers up here.

You can see the page numbers because it was at the end behind Everett speech.

So Everett's speech took, you know, 56 pages.

Lincoln's takes two.

- Christina Shutt, you're the new executive director.

- Yes.

- You haven't been here very long.

- About three and a half months now.

- When, do you remember when you first walked into the museum and into that atrium, do you remember what, what you felt when you first saw?

- The first time I walked in as a visitor, or the first time I got to walk in as director?

- Well, okay, as a visitor, as a visitor.

- Yeah, well I think I was just amazed at the sheer scope of what this institution does.

That's what continues to amaze me, even as director now, is you know, that we have so many items in our collection, which document the rich cultural history of Illinois, that we're so fortunate to have so many Lincoln items and documents in our collection.

I mean, 1500 documents in Lincoln's own hand is incredible to me.

So I think I was just sort of wowed by it actually.

- And it's a sprawling operation because between these two buildings, you've got not only all their collection, but all these people doing various things, you know, conservators, and then you've got historians and you've got people doing oral history and you've got all this going on to keep track of, it's a lot.

- It is, absolutely.

You know, we're so fortunate that the state of Illinois allows us to house it all in one building, very few institutions get to have their conservators in their building, their historians in their buildings, their librarians, their museum technicians.

So to be able to have it in-house is a great sort of resource saver because we are not constantly having to contract out for every little thing, but it also, it tells you how much Illinois values its history and how it wants it to be preserved for future generations.

- You know, when you come to an operation like this, which is so impressive and then you think to myself, you know, that when I'm in charge of, you know, fostering this and keeping it going, or it's kinda hard to think about making changes because everything is looks pretty darn good.

Do you have any changes in mind?

Are there any things, direction you'd like to see?

- You know, like Lincoln, I am a person who is always learning and always growing.

And I think our institutions have to be that way too.

We can't just kind of rest on our laurels and think that the status quo is okay or is good enough.

We always have to be thinking about ways that we can improve operations, ways that we can bring more value to our visitors, to our researchers, to the people of Illinois.

And so everything that we're kind of working on, thinking about doing, is all really based in that.

One of the things that I think has been, I wouldn't say a huge change, or maybe it's been a little more subtle change, is we have been actively soliciting feedback from the community through community meetings, through poster boards that we have in various sort of areas around the building.

And so we really are looking for that community feedback, that investment, that buy-in.

To be a really a community supported place that we're not just an entity that is separate from Springfield or Sangamon County or Illinois, but that we tell the Lincoln story and that view through the Illinois story.

- Well, thank you and good luck.

- Thank you so much.

- Well Christian, Willie writes home.

Father writes to Willie, these are, these are tough times.

- Yeah.

You know, this is one of the things we're proudest of here is not only do we have a wonderful collection of Lincoln documents, but we have the largest collection of documents related to the Lincoln family.

So as part of this exhibit, we also wanted to show off some of those.

And so we have these wonderful letters from Willie Lincoln who was extremely precocious.

I mean, you can see his handwriting is neater than his dad's and he's running back to Springfield from the white house on May 25th, 1861.

This was shortly after the civil war began, about a month after the civil war began.

- How old is Willie, now?

- Willie is 11.

And so, - Wow.

- Yeah.

And he is writing about Elmer Ellsworth, who was the first union officer killed during the civil war.

And Willie knew him personally, Ellsworth actually came here to Springfield and studied law under Lincoln and yeah, and he's passed away.

And so him and it's Henry Remand is his buddy here in Springfield.

And he's telling him how Ellsworth has been shot.

And so really sad.

You know, that, that Willie, Willie is encountering war.

And of course, Willie himself won't live another year after this event.

- Oh and he dies, he dies in the white house.

- He dies in the white house.

He's the second Lincoln child to die.

Of course, the Lincoln's lose three of their four children.

And yeah, Willie gets sick and passes away in the white house.

And it just devastates, you know, Mary Lincoln, she basically goes into permanent mourning after that.

Abraham only gives himself a couple of days to deal with it.

Cause he has a civil war to manage.

- It's really a very historic story.

He, if you would read some of this to us, so he rushed up the steps until he reached the pole.

You go ahead.

Cause you, cause you know the story.

- Yeah, Ellsworth is a, you know, he's in the union army, he's in the white house.

He can see Alexandria, Virginia from the white house.

But now you can't see that because Reagan National Airport is in the way, but then you could, and there was a Confederate flag, it's in Virginia, and there was a Confederate flag flying from the top of a building.

So Ellsworth take some men out there to take it down because he thinks it's an up-front to the white house, to be able to see a Confederate flag from there.

And he takes it down and he is shot by the owner of the hotel as he's walking away with the flag.

And then that, then the people who are with Ellsworth then shoot that man as well.

And that's how he ends up being the first officer killed in the civil war.

- Oh my goodness.

Okay.

Now let's move down the way here to the Emancipation Proclamation.

He took a lot of heat for wanting to do this in 1863, even by his own, his own staff and his own cabinet.

Didn't he?

- Yeah.

It's a controversial thing.

I mean, we mentioned earlier, you know, talking about the first inaugural in that letter from the election of 1860, that Lincoln is very careful to define himself as not an abolitionist when he's running for office.

They just don't want slavery to expand, right?

Well now a civil war has been going on and in the summer of 1862, you know, the war's not going very well for the union.

And there's a real movement to kind of retrench and think more about this war.

And that's when Lincoln decides, you know, for various reasons from, especially from pressure, from African-Americans themselves on the ground, that this war, slavery needs to now be a target of this war.

They were kind of treating slavery with kid gloves before that.

Now they're gonna go after slavery as part of their work as the Confederacy.

And he tells his cabinet in July of 1862, that he's going to issue an Emancipation Proclamation.

And some of them don't like the idea.

They're afraid that this will, there's still four states where slavery is legal, who are, who remained with the union, you know, well, they joined the Confederacy because of this.

Is it going to look like an act of desperation?

You know, because the, the war is going so well for the union, but he ends up deciding to do it.

Well, he already had decided to do it.

He just takes their advice on maybe how to do it.

The one piece of advice he takes is wait til we get a major union victory before we do it.

So he, it, he doesn't actually issue the emancipation, what we call the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, until September after the, their victory of the Battle of Antietam.

And it says that if the, unless the Confederacy stops waging, you know, a treasonous war on January 1st, 1863, all slaves and areas under rebellion will be forever free.

- Now this document, am I wrong about this?

There are no original of these left.

- The original copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in Lincoln's own hand burns in the Chicago fire.

And there is a, a clerk's copy at the national archives, but Lincoln's actual handwritten copy is lost, but he writes he and William Seward and his secretary, John Nicolay signed 48 of these printed copies.

And they are like the Gettysburg Address we talked about.

They are sold at auction for, to raise money for soldiers.

And they all end up out in the world and they all have different fates.

There's 27, I believe of them now, where we know where they are, you know, who knows if the other ones have been lost or who they belong to.

But we have one of them here at the, - So we have one with the original signatures here is we have, - Mhm, yep, and this is a, - And this is a, like you say, a scanned copy.

- Yeah.

This is a scan of it.

And like the Gettysburg Address, we put it on display every year around Juneteenth.

So yeah, you can come see the real one if you want, if you come around then.

- Christian, one thing Lincoln knew and knew firsthand was work, work, work, didn't he?

He was a worker riding that circuit all the time and handled as many cases as he could, as he could get.

- Absolutely.

And he was also very much a self-educated person.

Lincoln only had less than one year of formal schooling.

Lincoln, you know, was, you know, by I think any standard, kind of a brilliant man, you know?

And he taught himself the law.

I mean, Lincoln didn't go to law school.

A lot of his contemporaries did, Lincoln didn't go to law school.

He taught himself.

And so this document is a fairly famous Lincoln document from a young man aspiring to be a lawyer, John Brockman.

And he's writing Lincoln who, this is in 1860.

So this is, you know, when Lincoln is pretty famous, he's running for president, but he's asking for advice.

What kind of advice would you give a young lawyer?

And Lincoln recommends some books for him to read, but he finishes with work, work, work is the main thing.

You gotta hustle.

- It's the main thing.

Okay.

Well it took a lot of work to put this exhibit together, Christian.

I know you didn't do it all yourself, but I'm sure you had a lot to do with it.

So I want to thank you.

And the whole staff here that arranged this for us.

- Absolutely.

Exhibits, everything you do at a museum and a research library is collaborative, but exhibits are the most collaborative thing of all.

So yeah, you know, I wrote the copy and helped lay it out, but this was a huge team effort and this absolutely would not be able to come together without a team.

- It's very very good.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

- This exhibit that we're talking about here in the library, not the museum, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is open to the public.

There's no charge to come in and look around.

These will be up indefinitely or permanently.

The desk that you see there, that's not going to live here forever.

So if you want to see the desk, the next few months would be the time to come in.

With another Illinois Story in Springfield, I'm Mark McDonald.

Thanks for watching.

- [Narrator] Illinois Stories is brought to you by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Illinois Arts Council Agency, and by the support of viewers like you.

Thank you.

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