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- Hello, welcome to Illinois Stories.

I'm Mark McDonald in Quincy at the John Wood Mansion.

Where if you come here, you'll notice a few new items.

One is this Looking for Lincoln Wayside Exhibit.

Talks about John Wood's relationship to Abraham Lincoln.

The other also talks about relationships to Abraham Lincoln.

At the Visitors Center, the new Lincoln Gallery has some artifacts that will knock you out.

Well, Chuck Radel, it's interesting, we'll start at this new exhibit.

This new gallery.

At the end of Lincoln's life, because I think part of the really noteworthy items that you have in here have to do with the end of his life.

And then we'll work our way back around to how Quincyans, how their lives were affected and affected Lincoln's life.

But first, when you talk about the end of Lincoln's life, we were talking about his assassination at Ford's Theater.

- Yes.

- And John Wilkes Booth and those who were said to have conspired with him to kill Lincoln.

And we'll get there, but first, we show a picture here of the assassination of Ford's Theater.

- Yes.

- And you really almost have to include this background because the backstory is where the story goes from here.

When Lincoln was killed, we show a church and a bell here.

- Right.

The people in Quincy found out about it, they were among the first people in Illinois, I guess, to find out, weren't they?

- Right.

The telegraph operator when he received news brought the telegram to John Wood, who was down at the Quincy House, right there by Western Park.

And he and three others rushed over to the First Congregational Church, which was located approximately where the Herald-Whig is located now.

And their goal was to ring the historic bell that hung in the tower.

That bell had rung just a week earlier to announce the end of the Civil War.

Originally, it came from the Lord's Barn, Quincy's first church.

And when they got there, Bull insisted that John Wood ring the bell.

He said, "No, let 14-year old young Elbridge Stone ring the bell because he'll be around a lot longer to remember the event and the significance of it."

- And that bell is significant too because it was a historic bell at that time but it is still on display here in the Wood Mansion.

- That's correct.

- Which is part of the historical society.

- Right.

Very significant bell.

- Yeah, yeah.

- We're proud to have it.

- People can see that here?

- Yes.

- Now, there were a number of people that were accused of conspiring.

In fact, some were hanged- - Yes.

- For conspiring to kill Lincoln.

- Right.

- Part of the exhibit you have here, well, let's go ahead and point out those individuals.

First off, was Samuel Arnold one of those?

- No, the ones that were actually hung were George Atzerodt.

- Okay, this fellow- - We have the manacles that he wore when he was in prison.

- Mm-hmm.

- Down a little further, David Herold.

Down further yet, Lewis Powell, alias Payne.

We have- - He was a young man and so we have the hood- - Yes.

- To look at, from him.

- That's correct.

- Okay.

- And then all the way down, Mary Surratt.

We have the key from her cell and she was actually the first woman to be executed by the federal government.

- Wow.

Now let's tilt a little bit to our left here.

Back in 1865, the quality of photography was pretty darn good.

You can see that there's the gallows and the aftermath of the hanging of those four individuals.

- Yes.

That was July 7th, 1865, four of the conspirators were hung.

Most of the others were sentenced to life in prison.

Actually, John Wilkes Booth had been caught earlier, in a barn in Virginia.

And was killed instead of being captured.

- Mm-hmm.

And he was shot on the site- - Yes, he was.

- Where he was found.

- Right.

- Now this is what I really wanted to get to because I think the gems that really we wanna show first- - Right.

- in this gallery, show up here.

And these are actually the assassination artifacts which is what- - This was the motivation for creating the Lincoln Gallery.

To be able to show on a regular basis in a manner that is secure and also safe.

Protecting the items.

We have to have a controlled humidity, heat, light situation for these.

For example, the hood that was worn by Lewis Powell or Payne, his alias, is a fabric type of material.

And if it's exposed to too much light or the wrong heat and humidity, it can deteriorate quickly.

What we're looking at is the front of the hood.

You can see the nose, an opening for the mouth.

The cord wrapped around the neck and was tied from behind.

The hood was placed on Powell to keep him from killing himself by banging his head against the cell wall.

And he had actually tried to do that earlier.

I believe that all of the conspirators, except for Mary Surratt and Dr. Mudd, wore a hood like that for approximately the first seven weeks they were imprisoned there.

- Let's go on down to the other stuff.

We've mentioned the manacles that we see at the bottom there.

- Those- - Those belong to Atzerodt, I guess, is the way it's pronounced?

- Right.

- And those, my goodness, those would hold you, wouldn't they?

- Yes, they would.

And they talk about how they affected the circulation.

Samuel Arnold, another conspirator, said they fit so tightly that blood would not circulate.

His hands were swollen.

Skin changed colors.

- They didn't care that much.

They were pretty angry about this.

They had no- - Not a lot of sympathy for the accused conspirators.

- Let's work our way up to that small key.

- That is the key to Mary Surratt's prison cell.

And it's from the Old Capital Prison in Washington, DC.

Probably located at approximately where the Library of Congress is now.

We also have two other larger keys that are from the cellblock.

They are in the Old Capitol Prison.

All these items for a time had not been available for public viewing because when the John Wood Mansion was restored in the 1980s, it became a house that was furnished, period appropriate.

So no longer was it a museum.

And these items were seen only on special occasions, special showings, special exhibits by the public.

And our goal was to come up with a way of making them available to the public.

And that's why we have the Lincoln Gallery.

- Now you have the gallery.

It's, let's say, climate-controlled.

- Yes.

- So things like the hood, you feel good about having those here and you've got great security.

- Right.

- Interestingly, you were asked to loan these items to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, which you did.

- Yes.

That was before the gallery was built.

And they were preparing a special exhibit, a temporary exhibit over there called, "Blood on the Moon".

About Lincoln's assassination.

And they asked if we would be willing to consider loaning that to them, which we were happy to do.

And they exhibited in much the same manner that we see right here.

In fact, when the items were returned at the end of the exhibit, they allowed us to keep the stands and we ordered a similar vitrine and the base exhibit like they did.

- So it was good for you too?

- Yes, very much so.

- Yeah.

It's a great exhibit.

My goodness.

To think that these were the actual items- - Yes.

- From 1865.

- They're kind of our centerpiece of our gallery here.

- Well, Iris, this gallery is about not only Lincoln but it's about the Quincyans in Lincoln's life.

And how events and people of Quincy affected him.

And it was a large part of his life, including his social life.

- Yes, very much so.

And many Quincyans were very well connected to Mr. Lincoln.

And especially, of course, the Brownings.

And the Brownings, you know, remained lifelong friends with Mr. Lincoln and the family.

Lincoln probably met Orville Browning in the Black Hawk War in 1832.

We assume that he did anyway.

And Lincoln went to the legislature in 1834 but Orville Browning was elected in 1836, just in the Fall, after he had married his wife, Eliza Browning.

- So they were young state legislators together.

- Very much so.

In Vandalia, is the capitol.

- And Orville was a Quincyan.

- Yes.

- And he married, here's Orville here.

This is of course - Yes.

- in later years.

And he ended up marrying Eliza, here.

And she was also from Quincy?

Is that true?

- Well, they were both from Kentucky.

She in fact came from Kentucky - Uh huh.

- to marry Orville And he more or less went back to find a wife.

And it's hard to realize in some ways that there weren't many women out here in this small little town - Yeah.

- of about 2,000 or less in 1836.

- Yeah.

And it was a tough life so to get women to want to go to the frontier was probably not an easy thing to do.

The young men would do that.

- Not so easy.

Yes.

- Freely, yeah.

- Exactly.

And especially, he wanted a woman who wouldn't live a genteel life with him.

In other words, someone who had a similar background to him.

- Yeah.

- So Eliza then came in and they married in actually in February of 1837.

- You've got one of Orville's artifacts here.

And I guess back then everybody had a cigar case with a cigar cutter in it.

And this is his actual cigar case.

- Yes.

- And I think it's fascinating the things that you end up with, you know.

(laughs) - Well, it's very interesting too that if you think about Kentucky and some of the lifestyles of the southerners.

It is said that Eliza also smoked a pipe- - Is that right?

Yeah, yeah.

- When she first came here.

And later on, she had to give it up for health reasons but she missed her mint slings.

(Mark laughs) And her pipe smoking.

(indistinct) - It's very, very hard to picture.

- Yeah.

- But in doing some research on the South and so on, it was fairly commonplace.

But even, obviously, for people of position that it was acceptable.

So I don't know how many did in Quincy, but she did.

(Mark chuckles) - Okay.

Now, let's turn around and we can look at, they ended up doing very, very well because we have a picture of their home here at the bottom.

And many people from Quincy know this home.

Of course, it's not still there anymore but they know it because it was a beautiful historic place.

Well known.

The Browning Mansion at Seventh and Hampshire.

- Yes, the Brownings were great social entertainers.

So, of course, they had every political tie that you can imagine.

So this was a home where they held balls and they had teas and there was a very formal sense of exchanging tea with other members of the community and so on.

But this is also where Lincoln, when he came in 1854 to speak on behalf of Archibald Williams, who was running for office, that Lincoln had tea with him on November 1st, I believe it was, in 1854.

- And this is, I guess, a sugar bowl, huh?

- Yes.

You know, we don't have many pieces that are left from the Browning home.

So we're thrilled that we have a few things that represent what their table would have looked like.

And over here, we also have the Browning diary.

- And that's these pages here.

- Right.

And that page is actually scanned to represent the day that Browning talks about the tea that he had with Lincoln at the home.

- Browning was, I don't know if he was a delegate for Lincoln, but he was a big campaign supporter of Lincoln.

And in 1860- - Yes.

- When Lincoln won the presidential nomination in Chicago, Browning was there.

- Yes, he was.

- And you tell me that when they found out at the Wigwam Convention there in Chicago in 1860 that Lincoln had won the nomination for the Republican party, that Browning one of his, was chosen by Lincoln to thank the delegates and that he actually had an emotional time of it, didn't he?

- Yes.

Browning is known to have been a rather reserved person.

You know, he always was extremely well dressed and wore ruffled shirts and that sort of thing.

And not seen as being a terribly emotional type.

But it was fantastic to find a newspaper article that talked about the tears of joy after Lincoln was actually nominated.

And of course, you know, many Quincyans were there working the floor to make that nomination possible.

- Yeah.

- So I'm sure that it was a success after meeting with many delegates in private meetings during those times, and so on.

So- - They were very good friends with the Lincolns even after 1860, when they went to the White House.

You've got a piece of White House china here that may have been used when the family had friends.

- Yes.

- And this is not state-use china, but this is just the informal china that would have been used at the White House.

And that actually was used at Lincoln's White House, wasn't it?

- It was actually used there and it was probably used by the Brownings when they came very informally.

We do document that Orville Browning visited the White House 96 times during the 240 days that fall from the time he arrived there in July of 1861 until he left office at the very end of 1862.

And now as it happens, Eliza had just arrived in Washington.

The Brownings had lost their foster son, whose name was William Shipley.

And he had been killed in November of '61 at the battle of Belmont.

So she was home, certainly grieving, and was unable to get there until February of 1862.

So she was called to the White House immediately.

She stayed there with the family, took care of Tad and they stayed up with Tad, you know, till 2:00 am, one of those first mornings just consoling him.

And they did not allow Eliza to leave the White House for a full week.

And she did not leave, in fact, until Mary's sister came from Springfield, which was a good week after Willie's death.

And she had a lot of times, she writes also in a letter about the time that she spent talking to Lincoln a little bit about politics, you know, and so on.

And really, you know, supported of course his viewpoints and spent a great deal of time with him, as well as with Tad and with Mary through this grief.

- Dave Costigan.

A politician has friends in a place and what's bound to happen when you win public office is your friends kinda come along with you, don't they?

- Yes, they do.

- They used to call it patronage.

It's not a very popular usage of the term.

- No, it's kind of a negative term.

but Lincoln believed - Lots of them were Quincyans.

- in patronage, believe me.

That it was a way to cement his party which was a young party and so patronage was very important.

And he had people who would help him.

- Mm-hmm.

And part of the exhibit here, this is great.

I mean, it starts with Orville Browning who we have heard about.

And he was a very close confidant.

And this group of people that we find through the years here, these were all Quincyans who had one or other level of significant positions in the administration.

But I wanna talk about these two fellows at the bottom.

Starting with James Jaquess over here because Lincoln actually sent emissaries to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.

Sort of feeling out the possibility of, "Can we get this war to come to an end?"

- Absolutely.

Jacquess was a colonel of a regiment.

The 53rd Illinois called the Preacher's Regiment.

He was a preacher, he had been the president of what is now MacMurry and of a college called the Methodist and German College, referred to then as Quincy College but not the current college.

- Yeah.

- But he joined and set up this regiment called the Preacher's Regiment.

And he was serving on active duty.

And he had the idea that there should be some resolution.

He said, "Christians are killing christians.

So let me go into the Confederacy and see what we can do."

And so he indicates that he talked to generals, for example, General Longstreet, and he said, "You realize what we're doing?"

And they said, "Yeah, you're right."

And finally, in '64, Lincoln he says, "We can't authorize you as an actual diplomat because we don't recognize the Confederacy but unofficially, you can go and tell them the terms.

That there will be a reunion amicable on the condition that slavery is ended."

And so Jacquess tells this to Jefferson Davis and Judah P. Benjamin, who is Secretary of State.

And Davis was offended by this.

He said, "We are an independent entity."

And Jacquess said, 'You'll get a pardon."

And he says, "Pardon for what?

I've never done anything wrong."

And so Jacquess, his mission essentially looked like a failure, but he reports back.

And there was wide dissemination of his report that there was no compromise resolution that the South was going to accept.

And this gave the 1864 election of Lincoln a strong point because people were saying, "Why aren't we ending this war by compromise?"

And he was able to say, "The other side will not accept it."

- Oh, okay.

- And so Lincoln's candidacy, as Lincoln actually says, "This man helped me be reelected."

- Mm-hmm.

- So Jacquess, had an important role in that respect.

- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

- Then I know you're gonna wanna ask about Singleton.

And his role was quite different.

It was an economic idea that he promoted.

That the Confederacy was doing so poorly economic, with runaway inflation.

You know, a $1 pair of shoes at war's start was now selling for $150.

Things of this sort.

So he said, "If we go in with greenbacks and say, 'Okay, here is money that's valuable.'

And we buy cotton and tobacco, and so on.

These people would realize economically that, you know, they should call off the war."

- Right.

- So this was all done in the White House with Lincoln.

And Browning was participant too as this plan.

And they went through all of the steps that it takes you know, to make this a legitimate move.

But finally, the plan got more or less torpedoed by Grant, who said that taking this money in there is gonna give aid and comfort.

And so he actually destroyed the tobacco and cotton that they had purchased.

So these are two very contrasting stories and little known that Lincoln was always looking, "Is there some kind of resolution without fighting to the bitter end?"

- Right.

Right.

Thanks Dave.

- Yeah, appreciate it.

- Chuck, you've got a very old sketch of Quincy which gives us a chance to sort of orient ourselves- - Right.

Right - For this gallery.

And this would have been drawn as a bird's-eye view in 1859.

This is a copy of an 1859 sketch.

A very imaginative cartographer must have done this- - Yes.

- Because who thinks about getting a bird's-eye view back in 1859, huh?

- True.

The way I understand that they did it was the cartographer would spend a lot of time in the community sketching each individual building, and then take some time to, from the perspective of a bird, you know, up in the air, draw an overall map of the community.

A bird's-eye view map.

- Yeah, wow.

Okay, let's look right in the middle.

Now this square here is Washington Park, where the debate of 1858 took place between Douglas and Lincoln.

- Yes.

- The number six spot would be where the debate was actually held.

- Yes.

The footprint represents one of the areas Lincoln visited or was involved in an activity when he was here in Quincy.

And the debate was in the park.

In fact, number one is the courthouse, it was right across the street, this street there from the old courthouse.

- And there's another step here.

Lincoln would have had a connection to this building, just on this corner.

What's that?

- In 1854, when Lincoln was in Quincy, he spoke actually at site number five up the street a little ways there, Kendall Hall.

Where Grillings is now- - There in that building.

and he attacked the Kansas-Nebraska Act but he stayed that evening at the Quincy House down there at number seven.

- Oh, okay.

And that's no longer there?

- Yeah.

No, The Newcomb Hotel is located there now.

- Mm-hmm.

- Stephen Douglas maintained a room there when he lived in Quincy, in the Quincy House.

In fact, he stayed there the night of the Lincoln-Douglas debate.

- Mm-hmm.

Now this is also interesting 'cause if you look down on the river, there's steamboats, lot of steamboat traffic.

And from, looks apparently, all over the country.

Mason, Michigan, Quincy, Keokuk City, Hannibal.

Boats just going up and down.

And you tell me that there was a lot of steam traffic.

- A lot.

Quincy was a port of entry at that time in 1858, and more than 3,000 steamboats visited Quincy that year.

- 3,000 in a year.

- Quincy actually had about 12,000 people that time and was probably the third largest city in Illinois.

- I'll be darned.

Well then, you know, between St. Louis and Quincy, then there would have been a lot going on with this.

- Yes.

Yes.

- Okay, one more.

This, way down in the corner and we're looking at it.

This is the old train depot.

- Yes.

- A lot of people probably don't know that's where that was located.

But if we're talking about present-day Quincy, that's probably somewhere between Clat Adams Park and the bridge that goes out to Quinsippi Island.

- Yes.

- And there was a railroad line right along the river there, wasn't it?

- Yes.

The railroad from Chicago had just reached Quincy the year before the Lincoln-Douglas debate.

And that's the station that Douglas would have come in the night before the debate on his own private car.

And Lincoln came in the day of the debate in a regular passenger car.

I bet you people that know Quincy well would get a kick out of this because they could go through block by block and identify the buildings that are still there.

- Definitely, definitely.

And people would notice, for example, that the edge of Quincy was about where 12th Street is located now.

- Okay, we're looking up here 'cause it's all woods and hills back up in there, isn't it?

- And that's about where we're standing right now.

- 12th Street, huh?

- Yeah, 12th Street.

(Mark laughs) (Chuck laughing) - That's great.

Well, Jean Kay, there are lots of interesting original artifacts in here but when you talk about old and things that the society has just been able to sort of like stumble on and hold onto through the years- - Correct.

- We're talking about a relationship with the Mormons and Quincyans- - Yes.

- Which goes way back.

- Absolutely.

Certainly does.

Governor Boggs in Missouri ordered the Mormons, he issued an extermination order for them.

And that caused them to leave Missouri and returned to the East.

Winter of 1838-39, they crossed the Mississippi river and came to Quincy and were welcomed with open arms and well cared for.

And after a short while, then they moved on to what became Nauvoo.

- Mm-hmm.

- So they passed through here at that time and the keys that we have are to the temple that the Mormons built in Nauvoo.

There's an interesting story of how we got those keys because Artois Hamilton was an innkeeper in Carthage at the time that the Smiths were murdered there.

And as a kindness, he returned the bodies of the Smiths to Nauvoo.

And he also did other kindnesses for the Mormons.

And when the Mormons left Nauvoo, they gave Mr. Hamilton the keys.

Now later, his son became the first vice-president of our historical society in 1896.

- Okay.

- And eventually the Hamilton family donated the keys to our historical society.

- Wow.

(laughing) - Yes.

(laughs) - So those very keys opened up the famous Mormon temple, which of course is no longer there.

- That's right.

- This is one of the few remaining artifacts from that temple.

- Absolutely, yes.

- That's wonderful.

The new Lincoln Gallery is open to the public, Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 2, or call for an appointment.

With another Illinois story in Quincy, I'm Mark MacDonald.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer 2] 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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