Volunteers transcribe Lincoln letters

SPRINGFIELD — Joan Walters calls it “the best history class I've ever had in my entire life.”

Walters, a former budget director and public aid chief in the Gov. Jim Edgar administration, began April 3 to transcribe letters both to and from Abraham Lincoln as a volunteer with The Papers of Abraham Lincoln project.

The project, which began in 2001, is dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating and publishing all documents written by or to Lincoln during his lifetime.

“A part of that process is making sure we can provide accurate transcription,” said Daniel Stowell, director of The Papers of Abraham Lincoln.

Volunteers Walters and Amy Henrikson and intern Tyler Custer currently are working on correspondence to and from Lincoln in the four-month period between his election to the presidency in November 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861.

“We've been collecting documents since 2002 and have editorially been focusing on Series II (Lincoln's Illinois papers, including non-legal, pre-presidential papers) for the past three or four years,” Stowell said. Of about 20,000 documents collected for the series, 8,000 are from the period when Lincoln was president-elect, he said. Most of the documents are from the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

“People are offering advice (to Lincoln), seeking jobs, recommending others for jobs..” Stowell said. “Many patronage positions are up for grabs, and then there is the military layer. In some ways, politics remains the same.”

Stowell said the letters encompass a wide range of things that motivated people during the four months.

“Later in the presidency, you get people offering a grand invention that would end the war in two months,” he said. “They are sometimes preposterous, sometimes earnest. They sometimes would include photos.

“They give us a real slice of life during this period,” he said. “They show how fragmented the country was becoming. There were death threats, too, although many of those were destroyed by his secretaries.

“We have to remember, this is a democracy, and people felt entitled to write to the president about whatever was on their mind.”

Travel by project staff members to look for and obtain documents has dropped since 2008, and the project has been concentrating on transcribing what it has.

Stowell said the volunteer transcribers are trained by the project and work in its offices on the third floor of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

The project acquired the use of a document management system to transcribe and catalog the items in 2005.

“We get an electronic version of the letter from the National Archives or the Library of Congress, which has a great quantity of papers Robert Todd Lincoln acquired after his father was assassinated,” Walters said.

Two software programs help with the transcription and cataloging, she said. The computer also allows transcribers to enlarge the words to help identify them.

“The encoding isn't hard — it's reading the handwriting sometimes,” Stowell said. “Part of it is having a knack for it and enjoying it.”

Among the letter writers with difficult handwriting, Walters said, were prominent Republicans William H. Seward, who became Lincoln's secretary of state, and the man who succeeded him, Elihu B. Washburne of Galena.

“I have had some fabulous, fabulous letters,” Walters said. “Some are eight to 10 pages long and tell Lincoln how to hang on to Republican principles after he is inaugurated. Some have multiple signers. Some appear to be a version of the form letter.

“I'm becoming acutely aware of the burdens placed on this man the minute he was elected, and they never end,” she said.

“A man wrote to him from Denmark, giving him a 13-point plan to become a dictator. He thought that would be the only way the country could survive and offered to come over here and help guide Lincoln through it.

“We have to record the postmarks on the envelope, if we have it, too,” Walters said. “One from England had five postmarks and offered Lincoln a plan for taxing cotton to the point it would cause the South to eliminate slavery.

“I've had a couple of Indian chiefs and warriors asking him to appoint someone to the Bureau of Indian Affairs who wouldn't rob them blind.”

Walters said she only occasionally transcribes a letter from Lincoln, and those are mostly copies written by his private secretaries John Hay and John George Nicolay. Stowell estimated that about one out of every 100 letters are from Lincoln to someone else.

At the current rate with the same number of volunteers, Stowell said, the 8,000 pre-inaugural letters will be transcribed in “a couple of years.”

“I do this every day that I can,” said Walters, who doesn't take time for lunch and instead eats at her desk. “I really love it. I'll do this for as long as they'll let me.”