Abraham Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe: “The author of this great war”

In every article on, or edition of, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the writer is obligated to observe that Lincoln greeted Stowe in the White House as the “little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” The exact quote–and whether it was actually said–is in question, because the bon mots were published not during Stowe’s lifetime but after her death, by her biographers.

The earliest printed source for a similar version of the quote–“Is this the little woman who made the great war?”–appeared in theAtlantic Monthly (pg. 148) version of Annie Fields’s biography, entitled “Days with Mrs. Stowe” and published in August 1896, nearly contemporaneous with Stowe’s death on 1 July. When “Days with Mrs. Stowe” was republished in Authors and Friends (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1896, see pg. 181 on GoogleBooks), the quote is altered slightly: rather than the woman “who made the great war” she is the woman “who made this great war.” In both texts Fields’s version is attributed to Lincoln thirdhand, to Stowe’s daughter’s memory of the quote being reported to her, though Fields does not state whether the daughter is Hattie or Eliza.

According to biographer Joan Hedrick, Stowe was accompanied on her 2 December 1862 visit to the White House by her sister Isabella Beecher Hooker and her daughter Hattie. Although Joan Hedrick does not report the famous quote in her biography–presumably it is not mentioned in Hattie’s contemporaneous letter to her twin sister Eliza or in Harriet’s letter to her husband Calvin–she emphasizes their reports on the joviality of the occasion. When back in their rooms, according to the daughter Hattie, they “perfectly screamed and held our sides while we relieved ourselves of the pent up laughter.” Stowe likewise reports to her husband a “really funny interview with the President” (Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life [New York, Oxford UP, 1994], pg. 305).

The second relatively early printed source with family connections is Charles Edward and Lyman Beecher Stowe’s 1911 biography, which credits Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the “book” in the form of the quote given first. See page 203 on Google Books. The quote is notably absent from the earliest attempt at an official autobiography, Charles Edward Stowe’s collaboration with his mother in Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Compiled from Her Life and Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889).

If a Stowe scholar has identified additional archival evidence for this quote from an earlier date, I’m not aware of the discovery. While Stowe scholars of the literary and cultural studies bent find the quote irresistible–if not unimpeachable–Lincoln scholars hesitate to affirm the veracity of this piece of Stowe family lore. For example, Don E. and Virginia Fehrenbacher do not include the quote in Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, 1996). See James M. McPherson’s Atlantic review, which addresses this quote’s absence from the Fehrenbachers’ work. But a possible instance of corroborating evidence has appeared in a 2005 auction catalog. The online listing offers an intriguing clue, an inscribed copy of Stowe’s Sunny Memories from Foreign Lands. The inscription, purportedly from Lincoln to Stowe, is as follows (to the best of my ability from the auction site image):

Mrs. Stowe,
The author of this great war,
A Lincoln
Nov. 19, 1863

See inscription for yourself. A web site for the Auction Gallery of Florence has an auction entry for the book. (You may need to try the link more than once. The liveauctioneers.com web site is erratic.)

The Lincoln Log offers additional connections between Stowe and Lincoln. On 26 May 1862 the Library of the Executive Mansion ordered two of Stowe’s books: Pearl of Orr’s Island and Agnes of Sorrento. Note: Log lists first title as Pearl of Ord Island. On 16 June 1862 Lincoln borrowed Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the Library of Congress. It is worthy of remark that Lincoln borrowed Stowe’s book a few months before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

But despite at least some evidence that Lincoln read Stowe’s books, I’m skeptical that Lincoln would have presented a signed copy of Stowe’s book to her. That a person (even a president) presents a signed copy of an author’s book to the author seems odd. My reasons for skepticism that this book was signed by Lincoln are these:

• The auction specifically states that “There is presently no completed Authentication Report accompanying the handwriting represented in this Lot.” Given the fame of the two figures, one would think it would be worthwhile to the auction house to verify the handwriting, if it could. If it could not, then the merely vague connections among Stowe, Lincoln, and Gettysburg (implied but not authoritatively documented) are suggestive that the item could be of great value while leaving the onus of determining whether the connection is genuine on the buyer. Such a claim is in the interest of the seller whereas an attempt at definitive authentication carries with it both the possibility of significant reward or of significant disappointment to the seller.
• The date on the inscription is suspicious. According to Charles Edward’s biography (1889), the date of Stowe’s visit to Lincoln was near Thanksgiving 1862. Also see “How Mrs. Stowe Wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ” McClure’s Magazine, 36 (1911) (on ProQuest). The date is important: Stowe visited after the first Emancipation Proclamation was signed in September 1862. If Lincoln inscribed this copy of Sunny Memories when Stowe visited at the White House, the date on the inscription would be expected to correspond, December 1862. Instead, the inscription date matches perfectly with another of the war’s most famous events, the Gettysburg Address, on 19 November 1863. Stowe’s son Frederick was wounded at Gettysburg, but the connection implied in this uncanny coincidence–Lincoln signed a copy of Stowe’s book on way to, at, or on way back from Gettysburg–seems to me too cute.

I posed a version of this query to SHARP-L mailing list (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing), and the consensus of those who responded was that it would be unlikely that a prominent person would sign an author’s book in dedication.

I tend to believe that Lincoln greeted Stowe in one version of those words, as the biographers later claimed. It is sufficiently playful to qualify as memorable verbal banter. But I am too skeptical to accept this book inscription as Lincoln’s, given the evidence so far.

In the initial draft of the post, I stated that I could not address whether the signature was genuine. I contacted Daniel Stowell of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln. He shares the opinion of John Lupton, an expert on Lincoln’s handwriting, that the “signature is deficient.” Professor Stowell also informs me that the practice of dating forged signatures to significant events in Lincoln’s life (in copies of books originally published during his lifetime) was common in the late part of the century, a “cottage industry.”

UPDATE: A correction. I added Annie Field’s 1896 version of quote. I corrected misprint on date of Charles Edward Stowe’s Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Copyright page has 1889, not 1899 as I mistakenly transcribed. For both of these corrections my thanks to the SHARP-L correspondent.

UPDATE: (12/2008) A second update and correction. Added Atlantic version of Field quote in `Days with Mrs. Stowe.” Added distinction between two alternate Fields versions (the/this). Cleaned up some of the awkward parenthetical phrases referring to responses from Stowell and SHARP-L correspondents. Added a bit from Hedrick biography about Stowe’s December 1862 White House visit.

UPDATE: (5/2009) A historian offers a much better documented reading on the historiography and contemporary importance of this quote, which he designates dismissively as belonging to the “strata of pseudo-historical flotsam that increasingly defines that which is considered ‘historical’ in the digital age.” That harsh dismissal of the digital age seems exaggerated. The particular bit of flotsam was long in currency before anyone fired up a browser. See http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/30.1/vollaro.html

Otlet, Mundaneum, Classification, Books, and the Web

The New York Times today posts an interesting story about Paul Otlet, who in 1934 (before Vannevar Bush) proposed a prototype with various resemblances to the web. Otlet’s “réseau” (he wrote in French) included interlinked browsing of documents, images, and files, sharing of files, and social networking.

The title of Wright’s article, “The Web Time Forgot,” suggests the bent of this article on the Mundaneum Museum in Mons, which despite its emphasis on the work of this unknown web pioneer might also be classified under the Times section “Books” rather than under its current web sections “Science” and “Technology.” It would fit in the former section, and the article profiles a museum and a pioneer of information organization technology. The article describes card catalogs, provides a brief biography of the man (including the destruction of most of Otlet’s work by the Third Reich), and charts the correspondences between his seminal ideas and the Semantic Web.

One of the article’s most thoughtful observations is the following: “Just as Otlet’s vision required a group of trained catalogers to classify the world’s knowledge, so the Semantic Web hinges on an elite class of programmers to formulate descriptions for a potentially vast range of information. For those who advocate such labor-intensive data schemes, the fate of the Mundaneum may offer a cautionary tale.” The classification of the article–rather, its nonclassification in one section of the Times–offers yet another caution. The newspaper does not classify the article under “Books”: the oversight (in sense both of careful observation and error) speaks volumes about our conceptual split between books as paper objects (as well as the business of publishing and distributing them) and information as an abstraction tenuously related to its material form.

In digital space it only takes a link to re-classify “The Web Time Forgot” into another conceptual category. But that alternate conceptual category seems not to have suggested itself. The article is an altogether pleasing piece, one that will doubtless inform a wider range of scholars about a history that deserves greater attention. Maybe it’s time for me to open my Digg account and invest a bit in social capital by classifying this article, with every keyword that strikes my fancy. If I’ve with this post created a moral obligation to do so, then today’s inaction will have to be added to my many failings.

Edward Van Houtte just posted a marvelous piece that compares Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and, interestingly, Bush’s revision of his own ideas.

A Comma and a Thought About Textual Transmission

When I transcribe type, I sometimes find myself lost in a morass of the details of physical reality. For example, in volume I of a copy of the 1852 Jewett edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 21, line 24-26, Haley explains how he manages the unpleasant parts of the slave trade, which I transcribe as follows: “You see, when I any ways can, I takes a leetle care about the onpleasant parts like selling young uns and that,_”

I transcribed that line with care (transcribed it, digitally compared to another transcription, re-checked before posting it), but my transcription provides an unfaithful representation of physical reality in numerous ways. Let me count a few ways:

1. Digital typographic font for each character varies from typographic font inked on paper copy because the gap between analog and digital text representation makes such unavoidable.
2. Line break in original line is no longer present because (being prose) we agree to abstract.
3. The underscore character at line end is an abstraction for an em dash (which is transcribed thus as a convenience for collating and for conversion to typesetting and to text encoding systems).
4. The section is abstracted from a larger sentence, a larger page of type, a chapter, a particular copy of a book, a particular work, a moment in American cultural production, and a practically limitless range of associations.

But there are also a few ways in which I have sought to preserve items that I assume to have meaning. I assume that the words “leetle,” “onpleasant,” and “uns” inform Stowe’s reader about Haley’s level of cultural attainment. His dialect marks him as poser who cannot quite pull off the act of gentleman. At another level, while my transcription is an accurate representation of a particular copy, it does not fully represent this edition and might mislead about the work. Consider the image of the page below, which is taken from the Early American Fiction site. I apologize for the small size, but EAF provides low-res images.

Notice the comma after the word “parts”. My transcription does not have that comma. A mistake. Well, yes, but it’s not my mistake (this time, yea, but I’ve written about one of my errors here). Below is a digital image of the copy that I was using to make my transcription, a copy that is labeled on the title page as part of the 70th thousandth printing.

Why do these two copies of the same book, one from the earliest printing and one from a printing made a month or two later (a guess, which may be revised after I check Parfait)? I imagine that the stereotype plates of the 2-volume edition were inadvertently knocked or dropped, and the comma after parts on right margin was lost. Because the line below has damage also to the letter “y”, we can surmise that the damage was accidental and not a deliberate editorial removal of the comma. I would briefly note that we presume the comma derives from Stowe’s manuscript because a comma also appears in the newspaper version (on which I believe the 2-volume edition was set, at least this part of the printing).

If this damage is insignificant, if this detail is simply a matter of the damage to a physical object through heavy use, why record a detail of printing history that will not affect reading. After all, most contemporary reprints claim to be set from the first edition. They are, but as we can see different copies of the first edition vary. The first printing–often used in reprints–does not include the corrections that Stowe made for the second printing. But in printing history this missing comma may have consequences. The publisher Jewett created two new settings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in late 1852, an expensive illustrated edition and a cheap edition “for the Million”. You can probably tell from the leading and length of the type line that the illustrated edition is the top image, the cheap edition the bottom.

A number of social contexts are at work here. It seems (even from these brief samples) that the illustrated edition was more carefully proofed for superficial matters of correction. Notice, for example, the spelling of “uns” now includes an apostrophe to indicate the omitted letters, though I don’t know which letters are presumed to be missing in the dialect form of “ones.” Does the apostrophe indicate that Haley has elbowed his way up in the scale of gentlemanliness since the previous printing? The illustrated edition also has over a 100 illustrations, an elegant gold-embossed cover (not my copy, though, which was rebound and thus affordable on eBay), more generous leading, and an ample margin. The cheap copy, in contrast, has two columns, minimal margins, tight leading, and no illustrations. It was issued in paper wrappers instead of hardcover.

From the perspective of literary interpretation, the difference is unlikely to shock. But let’s lean on the comma, present or absent, to guess its significance. In the illustrated edition (and later printings of the two-volume edition), Haley identifies the “onpleasant parts” of slavery primarily with selling children from mothers (because, lacking a comma, it’s a restrictive clause). In the earlier printings of the two-volume and paperback edition, selling children away from mothers seems to be intended as but one example of the unpleasant parts. A subtle difference, yes, but its overall effect in the larger text is small because Haley’s language emphasizes the challenge of selling children away from their mothers, regardless of whether he is claiming that it is the primary unpleasantness or merely one of many.

But from point of view of textual descent (determining from which examplars of the two-volume edition the cheap and illustrated were set), the missing comma in later copies suggests an hypothesis. The illustrated edition for this page was set from a later printing, from a copy that was set from the damaged stereotype plates. So the comma was omitted. The cheap edition page, in contrast, was set from an earlier printing of the first edition, from an undamaged plate.

My current hypothesis is clearly inadequate, because it is based on the slimmest of physical evidence, one comma missing or present in a text that runs to about 700,000 character. But whether the hypothesis is ultimately convincing or a blip that is being over-read will depend on evidence from individual copies painstakingly gathered as I compare multiple copies and record physical damage to each. But since the hundreds of surviving copies represent only a part of the historical record, and since the limits of human diligence limit me to carefully reviewing a generous handful of surviving copies, all of this detail still represents a significant degree of abstraction.

But this is a reason to study textual transmission, because it suggests hypotheses about how the practice of printing altered the reading of Stowe’s work. I leave out concerns of authorial intention, the possibility that Stowe intended to alter this comma multiple times. But whether intended by the author or not, it is still a part of the text’s history.