Lincoln’s Pen
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From my personal journal, November 26, 2013, at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Largely unedited since, except for typos.
Thwarted by yesterday’s gunman hoax on Yale campus, today I obtained an opportunity to take a break from writing my essay Aspirational Moral Popular Sovereignty, wherein I analyze Lincoln’s writings on balancing popular sovereignty and transcendent law (either divine or natural), in order to check out the Yale Beinecke Library’s Lincoln’s Pen Collection, specifically, Box 1 & Box 3. Traveling to the Library at dusk under a light drizzle, I eventually descended the steps to the basement level, signed in, and was directed to wait behind the glass panels in the large reading room. During this time, I browsed the reference shelves and found a copy of D.A. Water’s The Art of Navigation. The forward by Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma inspired me; it traced the primacy of navigation as “perhaps the great achievement of man in the ancient world,” with sailing constituting “man’s first attempt to replace the labour of slaves or animals by the harnessing of natural forces.” I thought these lines befitting, as I have often contemplating the technological precedents which materially enabled the North to weed out slavery without suffering destabilizing economic pain. What role does technology play in making us humans more moral beings (or vice versa)?
The Admiral’s introduction traced the evolution of sailing from the ancients, to the Muslims who created universities in Spain whose Jewish students carried the knowledge to the Europeans, and finally, the British. Lieutenant-Commander Waters, a wholly befitting name, documents the history of navigation during the first Elizabethan era, a “magnum opus.”
Alone with this reference book and many others on photography, Norwegian literature, poetry, the history of publishing itself, I felt a sort of bliss, as if I was in the company of sincere friends who would never blame me for asking probing questions. As the Qur’an begins with a command to Read! or Recite!, I appreciated how the halls of books potentially held some of the secrets of humanity — if read with the proper heart.
Then, the kind attendant brought out the first of the two boxes with Lincoln’s writings. I gently opened it, revealing a series of folders and folios. The first document was a news clipping of 1919, detailed how Yale acquired the pen Lincoln used to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and the pen’s travails hitherto (it was first given to a messenger of Lincoln’s). I later found that another pen claims the distinction as well, this one held by the Massachusetts Historical Society, but no problem — the Proclamation was probably written in more than one draft, or more than one pen.
I will not detail every document I came across — I took about 40 pages of scans. Notably, the package included a “sum book” used by 15 year old Lincoln to practice math (1924), an autograph praecipe by Lincoln for Writ in his first case as an attorney in 1936. Of the same period there is a mundane land survey done in Lincoln’s hand, for which a W.G. Greene wrote “Preserve this paper. It is written by the noblest of God’s creation.” This startled me, and taught me that people of justice command unparalleled respected in the hearts of men and women. The most potent fragment was a page from one of Lincoln’s “lost speeches” about the Nebraska Bill, either in ’56 or ’59. As the other speeches which challenged Douglass, this fragment contained an analysis of the interpretation and misinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence, primary, regarding the equality of men and slavery. Senator Petit of Indiana in particular bears the brunt of Lincoln’s critique in the fragment.
Besides Lincoln’s own writings, the box also contained pieces of news and related writings. I found William Seward’s commencement address, “Oration on the Probable Permanency of the Union,” delivered at Union College, 1820 noteworthy for its beautiful penmanship and example of Seward’s precocious development — he was 19 years old when we wrote it. No record of the speech’s existence can be found online, reminding me that certain knowledge still remains elusive to the internet. I hope to read through and perhaps transcribe this essay by this Governor of New York, famed abolitionist, and Lincoln’s Secretary of State sometime soon.
Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, writes in a 1863 letter “This war seems to have paralyzed all pens except professional ones.” Also fascinating was a newspaper clipping critiquing Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, characterizing him as an inept statesman! The letter posits that conflicts exist in the realm of ideals and dignity (e.g., the American Revolution was spurred by a petty tax), and that Lincoln does not understand this, his declaration requiring a “voluntary self-desegregation” on part of self-respecting Southerners “worse than death.” Napoleon and others are quoted, Lincoln is basically called stupid, and a “lighter touch” is suggested. Finally, a letter from Edwin Booth, the brother of Wilkes, the assassin of Lincoln, bursts with the despair of a man whose own flesh has committed the “fearful hellish” deed of murdering the President, and whose family name is forever blackened. Edwin, who voted for and admired Lincoln, contemplates the juxtaposition of the happiness of the war’s end and agony of Lincoln’s death…
I return the first box, and then checked out the second, which contained another box, which I then opened, containing the pen which signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
“And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.”
This was a war measure not to have a lasting legal impact on slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment took over. Still, these quoted lines in Proclamation maybe some of the most, if not the most important acts of political (not theoretical) justice in the history of the United States and the modern world. The pen was of wooden handle, black, with a golden mid-section and nib, which formed a hollow space in its half-tube formation. The engraving on the nib read “5, John Foley, New York, 1862.” The pen’s box was also included, with its still working small swiveling latch. At first afraid to touch the pen — my finger oils might have ruined it — I finally ventured to gently hold it. It was an honor to hold such weapon of justice, more powerful than our swords and nuclear bombs. Of course, it was the people and the will that moved the pen, not the wood and gold pen itself, that allowed one stick of wood to halt four million whips on the backs of men and women.
