Five one-page TLSs, each 8.5 x 11, dating from between August 17, 1935 up to December 24, 1939, all to Miss Betty Drown, regarding research assignments on Abraham Lincoln, undoubtably for his volume entitled “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.” A sampling of the letters follows:
August 17, 1935, signed in pencil, “Carl Sandburg”: “It has to do with the most peculiarly malicious piece of gossip that got going about Lincoln during the war. I have plenty of items about how it grew, and Lincoln’s written denial, his statement of what happened. But what seems to have been the first item about it ever printed, I don’t have…A NY harbormaster wrote to the Asst. Secy of the Navy Fox…on Dec. 30, 1862 wrote to the harbormaster, ‘The slip of paper from the Sunday Times, about Pres. Lincoln calling for a song while riding over the field of battle with Gen’l McClellan is too absurd to contradict. No one here ever heard of it.’ Which Sunday Times was it and what was the story?”
July 2, 1936, signed in pencil “C.S.”: “The New York Sun, June 30, 1889, page 3, has an article about a plan for a powerful faction in the Republican party to hold a convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Sept. 28, to throw out Lincoln as the party’s presidential candidate and put another man in his place. I will need this article before August 1 …”
November 3, 1937, signed “Carl Sandburg”: “More than once in a while a lead proves to be wrong-and it is a 100 to 1 shot that in this case our information is incorrect. Perhaps rather than you should feel humiliated it is up to me to be humble for having assumed the material was there so that you should be digging for something where there was noting. Anyhow, it did not prove to be nothing after all, for this particular sketch of Lincoln at West Point is new to me; I had not met it before.”
The remaining two letters are both signed in full by Sandburg, with one asking Drown to find an interview, and the other sending Drown a copy of the book. In very good condition, with intersecting folds, lightly affecting signatures, and scattered toning and creasing.
This correspondence represents some of the legwork done by Sandburg while researching his prestigious four-volume work. Sandburg compiled 1,175,000 words about the life and times of sixteenth president, sifting through such information as “the most peculiarly malicious piece of gossip that got going about Lincoln during the war,” tales of “a powerful faction in the Republican party...to throw out Lincoln as the party’s presidential candidate and put another man in his place,” and a writer’s worst fear—that “more than once in a while a lead proves to be wrong.” Incredibly unique documentation of the thought-process involved in creating his Pulitzer Prize-winning work. RRAuction COA.
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