Notes
369 Notes Introduction 1. Among them are Inside the White House in War Times (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1890), The Table-Talk of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1894), and Lincoln at Work: Sketches from Life (Boston: United Society of Christian Endeavor). 2. The original, created on Stoddard’s Blick typewriter and bound in two leather volumes, is in the collections of the Detroit Free Public Library. 3. According to the town historian, a silent movie theater opened in 1912 on Central Avenue in Madison, New Jersey—the same street on which the elderly William O. Stoddard lived—“so there’s a good chance he went to a movie.” Eleanor Stoddard to Harold Holzer, October 17, 2005. 4. In 1990, the city of Syracuse unveiled a “Jerry Rescue Monument,” to honor the white residents who broke into the local jail and freed the captured black man before he could be sent back into slavery. See “Jerry Rescue Saw Two Races Work Together for Good,” letter to Syracuse Post-Standard, August 23, 1990. 5. Although historian Michael Burlingame—see Inside the White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), viii—suggested that Stoddard graduated with his class in 1857, the autobiography notes that he was granted a B.A. in absentia in 1858, and an M.A. in absentia in 1861. 6. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 365, 770. 7. Central Illinois Gazette, May 4, 1859, also in Burlingame, ed., Inside the White House, ix. 8. “How Lincoln Chose a Secretary”: William O. Stoddard, in an interview with a representative of Success Magazine, undated clipping in the Lincoln Museum , Fort Wayne, Indiana. 9. Ibid. 10. New York Evening Post, September 21, 1858, quoted in Edwin Earle Sparks, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1908), 319. 11. “How Lincoln Chose a Secretary.” 12. Ibid. 13. Stoddard to William H. Herndon, December 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress. “I do not wish to inflict any more letters upon Mr. Lincoln,” Stoddard wrote in this correspondence with Lincoln’s law partner, indicating he had sent others previously—letters that have not been located. Worried that Lincoln would simply give him another of the many federal jobs within his power to confer, Stoddard added: “Should he honor me with his confidence I will set about the duties of my office with a degree of enthusiastic pride in their performance which I could hardly fill in another position. While I have reason to fear that I shall really need some position—you know how lucrative a business editing a country weekly is—there is no office with twice the net profits which would so highly gratify me as the one in question.” 14. See Lincoln to James C. Conkling, Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 6:406–10. Although Lincoln entrusted former Springfield mayor Conkling (“one of the best public readers,” the president believed) to read his letter aloud at the city’s Union rally, he was “mortified” when the letter got “botched up in the Eastern papers”—a measure of its importance to the chief executive. Ibid., 414, 430. 15. William O. Stoddard Jr., ed., Lincoln’s Third Secretary: The Memoirs of William O. Stoddard (New York: Exposition Press, 1955), 134–35. 16. Stoddard, Lincoln at Work, 72, 75–76, 81; Stoddard Jr., Lincoln’s Third Secretary, 107–8, 194. 17. Stoddard to Hay, August 13, 1875, John Hay Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University. According to Stoddard’s amusing recollection, once Lincoln’s purported preference for Johnson circulated among the delegates, “the very general response [was], ‘well, he ought to have his way in such a matter, and they’ve abused him about enough. I don’t mind going for Andy, myself.’” 18. Quoted in Burlingame, Inside the White House, vii; Burlingame, ed., Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House: The Anonymous Civil War Journalism of Presidential Secretary William O. Stoddard (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), xxiii. 19. Nicolay was paid $2,500 per year, and Hay at first received $1,600 (some $2 per week more than Stoddard, at $1,500 annually), later raised to $1,800. See 370 notes to...
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