 Researchers
with the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a
project of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential
Library and Museum in Springfield, have
identified and electronically matched two
pieces of a page from Lincoln's arithmetic
copybook, one piece at the University of
Chicago and the other at Brown University in
Providence, R.I.
"The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is
delighted to have been able to reunite these
two fragments from a page of Lincoln's
homework as a teenager," said Daniel W.
Stowell, editor of the Papers of Abraham
Lincoln. "Although the two original
fragments are in repositories nearly 1,000
miles apart, the Papers of Abraham Lincoln
has reunited them digitally into a single
page."
The oldest existing manuscripts in
Abraham Lincoln's own hand are pages from an
arithmetic copybook that Lincoln created in
the mid-1820s while living in Indiana.
Lincoln's stepmother, Sarah Lincoln, gave
the copybook to his third law partner,
William H. Herndon, after Lincoln's death in
1865. Herndon subsequently distributed the
pages among friends and acquaintances. Ten
pages or partial pages from the copybook are
known to have survived and were published in
facsimile form in "The Collected Works of
Abraham Lincoln" in 1953.
When Stowell and research associate
Kelley Clausing scanned Lincoln-related
documents at the University of Chicago's
Regenstein Library in November 2009, they
began the process that led to the reunion of
two parts of a page from the copybook. Among
the items they scanned was a fragment of
approximately 7 inches wide by 7 1/2 inches
tall with math problems on one side and a
series of questions and answers on the
reverse. While processing the images at the
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library later,
Stowell discovered that the fragment fit
neatly with a smaller fragment that the
project had scanned at the John Hay Library
at Brown University in Providence, R.I., in
2003. Although the fragment from Brown
University had been published in the
"Collected Works," the portion of the page
at the University of Chicago had not. Using
the digital images, Stowell compared the
fragments and digitally reunited them into a
single image for the front and another for
the back of the page.
"This new discovery revives a part of
what was lost to scholars when William
Herndon dissected Lincoln's 'sum book' and
portioned it out in pieces to libraries and
collectors as a memento of Lincoln," said
Holly Snyder, North American History
librarian at Brown University. "We are
grateful to the Papers of Abraham Lincoln
for their detective work, which restores the
context of Brown University's own fragment
of this earliest known written work by
Abraham Lincoln. It is our hope that this
effort will underscore the benefits of the
growing body of digital scholarship on
Lincoln."
"The University of Chicago is pleased
that its fragment of the Lincoln sum book
has now been reconnected with another
surviving piece from the same manuscript,"
said Daniel Meyer, associate director of the
Special Collections Research Center at the
University of Chicago Library. "By carefully
reviewing the whole body of Lincoln's
writings, the Papers of Abraham Lincoln
project is reconstructing not only the life
and career of the 16th president, but the
original documents that form the basis for
our understanding of his significance."
Further research revealed that the
questions and answers were from "The
Schoolmaster's Assistant, Being a Compendium
of Arithmetic, Both Practical and
Theoretical in Five Parts" by Thomas
Dilworth. The math problems on the back of
the sheet were from the "Examples" section
of the same publication. Both the questions
and the problems related to the "Single Rule
of Three," a mathematical method for solving
proportions. Dilworth's volume was first
published in London in the 1740s. An
American edition appeared in 1769, and
additional American editions appeared
regularly for the next 60 years. Which
edition Lincoln may have used to create his
copybook remains unknown.
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Although the "Schoolmaster's Assistant"
provided the answers to the problems, it did
not detail the necessary calculations.
Reflecting the textbook's British origins,
the problems referred to money in pounds,
shillings and pence, even in editions
published in the United States in the 1820s.
"If 3 oz. of silver cost 17s.," one problem
read, "what will 48 oz. cost?" The answer is
£13, 12s. or 13 pounds, 12 shillings.
The reunited images, as well as other
images of Lincoln documents, may be seen at
http://www.papersofabrahamlincoln.org/
New_Documents.htm.
The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is a
project of the Illinois Historic
Preservation Agency and the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum. The Center
for State Policy and Leadership at the
University of Illinois at Springfield and
the Abraham Lincoln Association serve as the
project's co-sponsors. They have completed
"The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal
Documents and Cases," published in 2008 by
the University of Virginia Press; and "The
Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, Second
Edition" published online in 2009, which may
be accessed at
www.lawpracticeofabrahamlincoln.org.
Researchers and editors are currently at
work on documents relating to Lincoln's
Illinois papers and his presidential papers.
___
Additional links:
The
University of Chicago
Brown
University
[Text from
file received from the
Illinois Historic Preservation Agency]
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