It is a real honor and privilege to be able to speak to you today. The title of my talk is "Mr. Lincoln Goes to Cyberspace: The Presidential Papers of Abraham Lincoln Online," and I am going to tell you about a project that the Knox College Lincoln Studies Center is currently working on in which we intend to commemorate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth in the year 2009 with the online presentation of approximately 25,000 Lincoln presidential documents.

By way of introduction, I should say something about our early efforts to launch Mr. Lincoln into cyberspace. Our edition of Lincoln's presidential papers is a natural outgrowth of a collaborative project we did with the Library of Congress. From March 1999 until January of this year the editorial team at the Lincoln Studies Center produced over ten thousand annotated transcriptions for documents in the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. The Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress is the largest known collection of Lincoln presidential documents. There are just over 20,000 items in this collection that was donated to the Library by Lincoln's eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln. The collection was opened to scholars in 1947 and the Library completed a 97 reel microfilm edition of the papers in 1959. Since relatively few places possess the entire set of microfilm and the public and scholars alike seem averse to the microfilm edition, the accessibility of the collection was more apparent than real. Over 90% of the collection consists of incoming correspondence and because of faint ink and the vicissitudes of 19th century handwriting, working one's way through the collection is reminiscent of the title of the Clint Eastwood film, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. To help remedy this problem of accessibility the Library retained the Lincoln Studies Center to provide transcriptions for about half the collection. Both our transcriptions and digitized images of the entire collection are now available on the Library's website and when compared to what was previously available, this unprecedented access to Lincoln's papers is nothing short of revolutionary.

Our plan is to further this revolution and use the work we did for the Library of Congress as a foundation for a new edition of Lincoln's presidential papers. During the course of our work with the Lincoln Papers we became aware of just how extraordinary this collection of documents is and we also realized some serious shortcomings with the standard edition of Lincoln's writings, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. February 2003 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Collected Works, edited by Roy P. Basler and others. While this edition has served scholars well for the last half century, we believe that there are three main areas where the Basler edition can be substantially improved upon. In order to go beyond Basler we propose to:

1. Include annotated transcriptions for both Lincoln's writings and his incoming correspondence.
2. Conduct a comprehensive search for previously unknown Lincoln documents, with a particular emphasis on the National Archives in Washington D.C.
3. Maximize access to the edition by making the transcriptions, digitized images and relational database available on the World Wide Web.

The editors of the Collected Works had to operate under severe time and budgetary constraints. As a consequence, corners were cut and a lot of work was left for future editors. Last year our proposal for a new edition of Lincoln's presidential papers received the endorsement of the Abraham Lincoln Association. This endorsement from the organization that sponsored the Collected Works, enabled us to receive a start-up grant from the Lincoln Institute and allowed us to embark on what we believe will be the most complete, authoritative and accessible edition of Lincoln's presidential papers ever undertaken.

Incoming Correspondence

No attempt has ever been made to systematically collect, transcribe and annotate all of the incoming correspondence from Lincoln's presidency. The Collected Works includes only documents written by Lincoln and as a consequence, incoming correspondence is only occasionally excerpted in the footnotes. Very useful selections from Lincoln's incoming mail have been published in volumes edited by David C. Mearns in 1948 and more recently, Harold Holzer edited two volumes that came out in the 1990s, but these contain only a small fraction of the thousands of letters Lincoln received from the time of his nomination for the presidency in May 1860 until his assassination in April 1865. In order to better understand Lincoln's own writings and actions as president, access to this incoming correspondence is indispensable.

Scholars have long recognized the value of Lincoln's incoming mail. Benjamin Thomas once wrote, "You can feel the pressures put upon him as you never could before, and you can find the reason for some of his actions and the answers to some riddles" (Thomas, "The President Reads His Mail," Lincoln Herald, vol. 55, no. 3 [Spring 1953]: 30-34). An excellent case to illustrate Thomas's point is provided by Lincoln's decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and allow blacks to serve in the army. A sampling of Lincoln's incoming correspondence located at the Library of Congress reveals the great complexity of this issue and vividly exemplifies the variety of opinion that existed at the time. The day after the cabinet meeting where Lincoln first broached the subject of an emancipation proclamation, Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General in Lincoln's cabinet, wrote a letter to the president in which he provided a very compelling list of reasons why Lincoln should not issue the proclamation. Blair argued that an emancipation proclamation would jeopardize the outcome of the mid-term elections and would not substantially contribute to the effort to preserve the Union. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, on the other hand, advised the president to issue a proclamation that freed all the slaves and not just those in areas that were under Confederate authority. Social reformer Robert Dale Owen wrote to Lincoln on September 17, 1862 and urged him to go forward with an emancipation proclamation. Owen wrote that the day Lincoln issued such a proclamation would be: "the very turning-point in the nations fate! A day, to the rebels of despair, to every loyal heart of exultant rejoicing! A day, of which the anniversary will be celebrated with Jubilee, while the American Union endures! A day to be remembered not in our land alone, but wherever Humanity mourns over the wrongs of the slave, or rejoices in his liberation!"

Reaction to Lincoln's Final Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, was as varied as the advice he received regarding its promulgation. Benjamin Rush Plumly, a Philadelphia abolitionist, wrote to Lincoln on the evening of January 1, 1863 and reported on the celebrations that took place in the city on that historic day. Plumly spent most of the day visiting the city's African-American churches and informed the president that: "During thirty years of active Anti-Slavery life, I have never witnessed, such intense, intelligent and devout 'Thanksgiving'…Occasionally, they sang and shouted and wept and prayed. God knows, I cried, with them." Plumly informed the president that, "The Black people all trust you. They believe that you desire to do them justice." Plumly's account of the enthusiasm amongst Philadelphia's black population stands in stark contrast to the reaction of Colonel Frank Wolford, a Kentucky Unionist who had organized one of the state's first volunteer regiments. Wolford was arrested and dismissed from the army for criticizing the Emancipation Proclamation and protesting the enlistment of black soldiers. Wolford wrote a letter to Lincoln on July 30, 1864 in which he asserted that the president "had no power under the constitution to interfere with the domestic institutions of the states." In writing of the enlistment of former slaves, Wolford asked: "Do you really mean to say that the white citizen soldiers could not whip the rebels, and that, after exhausting all the wisdom, strength, resources, power, and valor of the white man, you failed to save the Union?-- That, with two millions of able bodied white men still in reserve, you had to force the negroes to fight in order to save the country? If you do, Mr President, what a compliment you pay to white men in and out of the army!" Conversely, John Proctor, a former slave of Confederate General Pierre Beauregard, wrote an admiring letter to the president on April 18, 1863 in which he informed Lincoln that he had joined the army and looked forward to the opportunity of meeting his former master in battle. Proctor thought it was time for his former master to spend some time "under me and my hot shot." Proctor added that he regretted that he had not yet been able to meet the president in person.

Arguably no decision Lincoln made as president was as controversial as his decision to issue an emancipation proclamation. Today, people continue to debate Lincoln's motives and in order for them to understand and fully appreciate the context in which this and other decisions were made, they must be able to access the incoming correspondence. Only half the story is available in The Collected Works and we hope to rectify this deficiency by providing annotated transcriptions of the entire range of Lincoln's incoming mail.

The Search

Due to the limitations under which Basler and his team operated, they were unable to make a thorough search for previously unknown Lincoln documents. Lincoln's presidential papers are a lot like a jigsaw puzzle. In this case though the puzzle is rather unique in that we are not sure how many pieces there are and we do not yet know where all of them are located. We do know that these pieces fit together to form a large picture, but they have been scattered to various institutions and some are in the hands of private collectors. Others were lost or destroyed and will never be recovered. There are about 6,600 pieces in the Collected Works and we think that our project will ultimately add at least another 20,000 pieces to the puzzle. The decision to exclude the incoming material necessarily limited the size and scope of the Collected Works and I hope that the few examples I cited have persuaded you that in order to have the most complete picture of Lincoln's presidency, access to this incoming material is vital.

There are approximately 18,000 items in the Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress that fall into the period between Lincoln's nomination for president in May 1860 and his assassination in April 1865. These documents represent the largest known collection of Lincoln's presidential papers, while the largest collection of unknown presidential papers is at the National Archives in Washington D.C. Lincoln received thousands of letters and while many were retained with his personal papers, others were sent to various government offices for disposition. The Collected Works contains about 1,400 Lincoln documents from the Archives and there are untold thousands more waiting to be re-discovered. With our start-up grant from the Lincoln Institute we were able to begin a comprehensive search at the National Archives last November. As of this July, our three part-time searchers had uncovered nearly eight hundred new presidential documents, including over one hundred previously unpublished Lincoln letters, notes and endorsements. These new documents from the Archives give us a much more complete picture of Lincoln's presidency and further illuminate previously known documents.

For example, just before our own search began, a staff member at the National Archives uncovered a previously unknown note from Frederick Douglass to Lincoln which appears to be a postscript to Douglass' August 29, 1864 letter to Lincoln. Douglass's letter was written shortly after his second meeting with Lincoln. In August 1864, Lincoln was very pessimistic about his prospects for winning reelection that November and knew that if a Democrat were elected, a negotiated peace with the Confederacy would be the likely result. Such a settlement would undoubtedly involve a retraction of the Emancipation Proclamation, so Lincoln was trying to devise a solution whereby as many slaves as possible could escape to the free states before the Democrats would be able to undermine emancipation. This was the subject of Douglass' August 29 letter which details his plan for aiding slaves to escape. In this newly-found postscript, Douglass requests a personal favor from the president and asks that a medical discharge be given to his son, Charles R. Douglass, a sergeant in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry. Lincoln sent this postscript to the War Department with the endorsement: "Let this boy be discharged. A. Lincoln August Sept. 1, 1864" and Charles Douglass received his discharge shortly thereafter. Frederick Douglass' August 29 letter has been available ever since the Library of Congress opened the Lincoln Papers in 1947, but the postscript was filed away at the Archives and forgotten until it was re-discovered last year. This discovery enables us to reunite the two parts of the letter and it also adds another layer of meaning to the relationship between Lincoln and Douglass.

Our search team has uncovered many documents that illustrate the wide variety of matters in which Lincoln involved himself and further demonstrate the need for a new edition of the presidential papers. With adequate time and resources, our project will be able to find items that the editors of the Collected Works were unable to locate and therefore assumed did not exist. For example, on June 9, 1863 Lincoln sent a brief telegram to Mrs. Lincoln, who was in Philadelphia, that simply stated: "Think you better put Tad's pistol away. I had an ugly dream about him." According to the Collected Works, "There is no reply to this telegram." As you can see, Mrs. Lincoln did indeed respond to this telegram on June 11 by informing her husband that "Taddi and myself are well dreams to the contrary." We also know that Lincoln telegraphed General Charles D. Jameson on October 21, 1862 and inquired about the general's health and asked if he wanted a particular lieutenant reinstated. Lincoln's telegram is printed in the Collected Works, however the editors again inform us that "No reply to Lincoln's telegram has been found." One of our searchers located Jameson's reply and this telegram also bears an endorsement from Lincoln.

The search has also uncovered two previously unknown Lincoln letters regarding the case of Augustus A. Gibson, the colonel of the 2nd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery. On June 16, 1864 Governor Andrew G. Curtin wrote to Lincoln and requested that Gibson be removed. Curtin's letter is in the Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress and one can consult a standard reference source such as Heitman's Historical Register of the U.S. Army and find that Gibson was mustered out of the volunteer service on July 22, 1864. But until these new letters were uncovered at the Archives, Lincoln's role in Gibson's removal was not entirely clear. As these letters show, Lincoln wrote to the Secretary of War on two occasions and directed that Gibson be removed.

The new discoveries from the Archives enable us to acquire a much more complete picture of how Lincoln spent his eighteen-hour workday. What is perhaps most striking to me is the extent to which Lincoln was truly a micro-manager who concerned himself with virtually every minute detail of administration. Washington A. Bartlett and Harry D. Whittemore wrote to Lincoln on May 18, 1861 and requested that the naval brigade they had raised in New York be mustered into the service. In response, Lincoln drafted a special order for Secretary of War Cameron to sign. The text of this order is printed in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion but there is no indication that this document was drafted by the President. Here is a letter from Henry Ward Beecher to Lincoln that is a typical example of the types of requests that came across Lincoln's desk. Beecher was the noted minister at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and the son of Lyman Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother. Here he testifies to the good character of a member of his congregation who has been dismissed from the army for drunkenness and asks that Lincoln restore Lt. Col. George Martin to his command. Lincoln's endorsement on Beecher's letter indicates that the president was amenable to this request. Once General Benjamin F. Butler learned of Lincoln's action to reinstate Lt. Col. Martin, he telegraphed the president and protested that Martin's restoration would be "utterly subversive to all discipline." Lincoln relented and suspended the order to restore Martin. This was one of the few battles Butler won during the war. So we are acquiring a lot more pieces to the puzzle but we are also finding that each piece is often a fascinating story in itself.

Much of Lincoln's mail consists of requests for favors and our search team has recovered many such letters. This is a petition from non-commissioned officers in the 14th Corps d'Afrique. The 14th Corps d'Afrique was a unit of black soldiers that had been organized in Louisiana and here some sergeants from that regiment ask Lincoln for nothing more than the same pay and treatment as their white counterparts. Mattild Burr was the wife of a soldier in the 3rd U. S. Colored Troops and here she simply asks the president if he knows when her husband will be paid. While much of Lincoln's mail consist of requests for offices, Jacob Elwell was a bureaucrat in Washington and therefore already had a position in the government. Instead of asking for a job, Elwell wanted the president to transfer him to another department. As a clerk in the Quartermaster's Department at Washington, Elwell reports on the harassment he has received due to his support for the Lincoln administration. He reports that his co-workers compare Lincoln to the Roman emperor Nero and accuse him of favoring amalgamation and needlessly spilling the blood of white men so that blacks can achieve equality. This letter vividly illustrates the extent to which there was political opposition to Lincoln amongst government employees and the resentment generated by Lincoln's policies.

There are literally hundreds of other examples I could share with you if time permitted, but I hope what I have shown you gives you an idea of the real treasure trove of new material that has been located thus far. We have every reason to believe that the search at the Archives will prove equally productive for the foreseeable future, as our team in Washington has only just scratched the surface. Once the National Archives has been adequately mined, our search will naturally branch out to include other repositories with Lincoln presidential documents. John Sellers, the research specialist for the Civil War Era and the Lincoln Curator at the Library of Congress, is heading our search effort. John has worked closely with Michael Musick at the National Archives in coordinating the search there. Mike Musick is the leading authority on Civil War records at the Archives. Our part-time searchers are all retired members of the Archives staff who each have over thirty years of experience working there. This project is very much a collaborative effort and we have a very well qualified and experienced group of people working on the search.

Technology

Perhaps the most obvious difference between the Presidential Papers of Abraham Lincoln Online and The Collected Works is that ours is an electronic edition. Given their size and scope, we think that Lincoln's presidential papers are ideally suited for online presentation. Our target of having 25,000 documents available by 2009 represents a corpus of documents that is nearly four times greater than the number of presidential items in the Basler edition. A traditional letterpress edition of so many documents could fill over twenty printed volumes and would be both bulky and expensive. Access is one of the primary goals of our project and an electronic edition will make Lincoln's presidential papers readily available to anyone with internet access. Not only will an electronic edition insure greater access but it will make more options available to users.

A letterpress edition is limited by its medium and can only present documents in one arrangement, which is typically chronological or sometimes thematic. The bedrock of our edition is a relational database that will enable users to fashion their own arrangements. Not only will the transcriptions be word searchable but each document will have a distinct database record that will contain information to enable readers to search by subjects, objects, persons, places and events. Virtually everything we know about a document will be contained in our database. Currently we are in the process of entering all the documents from the Library of Congress and all the new material from the National Archives into this database. Once these documents are entered into the database our team at Knox transcribes them and verifies the transcription. After the transcription has been verified twice, it will be annotated. When we are ready to go online this Filemaker Pro database will be converted to a structured query language database (SQL) that will optimize the retrieval of data, so it probably will not look like this when it is online. Users will be able to perform a seemingly infinite variety of searches. The database is another example of how our project is a collaborative effort, as it was done in cooperation with the Knox College Computer Center. We are fortunate in that the head of our computer center is an expert on databases and a Knox student actually did the work of setting up the look and structure of our database.

Not only did a Knox student design our relational database, but we have had Knox students working on the project since January 2000. During that time they have completed a database of employees who worked for the Federal government during the Civil War that consists of over 25,000 names. This past summer a student did a database of all the presidential documents in the Collected Works and our senior student helper is now working on transcription and verification. With this new ambitious project we hope to get even more students involved.

Book editions are also often limited due to concerns over space but this is not the case with an electronic edition. Lincoln's First Inaugural Address provides an excellent example of the advantages of an electronic edition. Several drafts and partial drafts of the First Inaugural survive in the Lincoln Papers, but to conserve space, the editors of the Collected Works reduced these to two versions: "First Inaugural Address-First Edition and Revisions" and "First Inaugural Address-Final Text." Basler's attempt to represent the revision process with a complicated system of footnotes is very difficult to follow and does not reference all the changes. Even if one has the patience to read "First Inaugural Address-First Edition" and the ninety-nine footnotes that accompany it, the process by which Lincoln carefully crafted this important speech and its various stages can not be accurately recovered. The Presidential Papers of Abraham Lincoln Online will provide annotated transcriptions for all the extant versions of the First Inaugural and digitized images of the original documents. As a result, one will be able to read each version of the First Inaugural and see how Lincoln revised his words and incorporated the suggestions he received from William H. Seward and Orville H. Browning. An important feature is the ability of any reader, if unclear about a point in the annotation or transcription, to immediately access an image of the original document with the click of a mouse. By presenting all the various drafts, people will be able to track Lincoln's creative process and obtain a better understanding of how his mind worked. There is also a real teaching opportunity here, as we can show students that Lincoln was a very careful writer who wrote drafts and was an early proponent of peer review. He did not put off the writing of his First Inaugural until the night before he had to deliver it, so perhaps students will be inspired by his good example.

Another advantage of an electronic edition is that it is very easy to make revisions. While we plan to have much of the work completed by 2009, new information will become available and new documents will be discovered after that date. It would be very expensive to print revised volumes of a letterpress edition, yet this is not the case with an online edition. We realize that the internet is a relatively new technology, especially when compared to the printed page and some may be concerned that this medium is ephemeral. When people raise these concerns I assure them that we intend the Presidential Papers of Abraham Lincoln Online to be a living project and a permanent component of the Lincoln Studies Center. Our work is in formats that are easily upgraded whenever that becomes necessary. The staff at the Lincoln Studies Center will keep up with new scholarship and incorporate this into our work as needed. And as we have experienced with the Library of Congress project, people will contact us with information about Lincoln's correspondents that can then be added to our annotations.

Advances in technology since the Collected Works was published fifty years ago have created a tremendous opportunity in the field of Lincoln Studies. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, we must, to borrow a phrase from Lincoln, think anew and act anew. This technology, when combined with a comprehensive search for new documents, will result in what we believe will be an authoritative and accessible edition of Lincoln's presidential papers. By including both Lincoln's writings and his incoming correspondence, people will be able to view Lincoln in an appropriate historical context and they will also learn a great deal about the Civil War era and the day-to-day details of Lincoln's presidency. Just as Abraham Lincoln has become a world-wide symbol of democracy, we hope that our project will democratize access to his presidential papers by making them available on the internet to scholars, students and general readers throughout the world.