Lincoln the Inventor

This is an unconventional book. It’s really an extended monograph in two sections rather than a typical book with numerous chapters. The reason is that this is simply what the book had to be. All artists say that creations have their own lives, their own directions. Michelangelo said he did not create his sculpture of David, but rather he freed the previously existing figure from the stone. Similarly, this book—the idea of which began as an article for a children’s history magazine—took hold of me from the beginning and guided me not so much to create it but to reveal it.

The topic of Abraham Lincoln’s mechanical mind and the complete story of his invention and patent have never been thoroughly examined. This surprised me, for the depth of Lincoln’s scientific thinking—which reached a physical pinnacle by inventing a tangible machine—pervaded his entire life and contributed in no small way to his greatness as man and president. His invention of “a device to buoy vessels over shoals” has been nominally mentioned numerous times in biographies, as has his patent; and his lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions” actually has been given some serious and impressive critical analyses. The more I researched, however, the more unknown and unpublished primary materials I continued to discover about this topic, and the more I began to see that to consider all of Lincoln’s mechanical inclinations and accomplishments under a new light and from a new angle allows a fresh insight into the overall character of this incomparable man.

I find it ironic that this work, the first complete consideration of a topic so long overlooked, began as a whim to simply produce something short and marketable for a kids’ magazine. As I researched, I realized this subject could be a valuable contribution to the field of scholarly Lincoln studies. So I wrote it as a scholarly article, which was accepted for publication in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, although it was never published. The problem, however, as probably all historians know and have experienced, was that after I submitted the article, I continued to find more evidence related to this topic.

I decided to augment the original essay and self-publish the longer version as a thirty-or-so-page monograph. I added Lincoln’s patent application as an appendix and then the full transcription of his lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions” as a second appendix. With the endnotes, bibliography, illustrations, title page, acknowledgments, and the like, I suddenly found myself with an eighty-five-page manuscript. That was too long for a monograph but too short for a book. Fate then smiled upon me in subsequent research at the Library of Congress, when I found a series of correspondence between Lincoln’s son Robert T. Lincoln and Lincoln’s presidential secretary John G. Nicolay concerning a currently unknown edition of Abraham Lincoln’s lecture and how Robert lost it and was trying to find it. Of course, I had to write that story, putting it within the context of the history of the physical pages of Lincoln’s speech, as well as a brief history of the creation, delivery, and reputation of the lecture. This new section, which is chapter 2, not only revealed and examined a previously unknown piece of history but also increased the size of my monograph to its present form.

I have always enjoyed and admired short works; they get straight to the meat of a subject, without extraneous rhetoric and verbiage. While relatively uncommon today, such diminutive books often were done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, usually as personal recollections, and in the Lincoln field, I can name many that I have found valuable, one of my favorites being Julia Taft Bayne’s eighty-five-page work, Tad Lincoln’s Father. Another great little book is Jacques Barzun’s fifty-page Lincoln the Literary Genius, a part of which I quote in the present work. The practice of publishing (often self-publishing) even shorter works—monographs—on specific topics of Lincoln’s life also was a popular practice back in the early twentieth century. Historian William H. Townsend published a number of monographs on his topics of specialty, the Lincolns in Kentucky and the Todd and Helm families; Wayne C. Temple, that dean of Lincoln scholars, has published numerous impressive and valuable monographs, one of which I used for the present work.

The publication of short books and monographs has lessened extensively in recent years, which I find disappointing. The page count of a work should have no impact on its overall historical, literary, or pedagogical value. Every generation offers new interpretations of history. Not all topics can be encyclopedic, and not all publications can be multivolume. Sometimes, the best examinations of a topic come in a scholarly article or monograph exactly because its length limitations necessitate poignancy. So, in harkening to a generations-old practice, I offer this little bookling as a succinct (and yet hopefully substantial) study of an overlooked aspect of Abraham Lincoln’s life.