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265 17 “I Expect Only the Greatest Satisfaction” Abraham Lincoln supposedly disliked reading history, especially biography, because he felt such works lavished praise on their subjects and suppressed imperfections. They “commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth,” he purportedly said. “History is not history unless it is truth.”1 Such a statement, of course, misses the notion that hagiographers consider their interpretations as much truth as do the harshest critics. William H. Herndon, the source of the above quote, thought only he himself, who included imperfections, told the truth about his former law partner’s life and everyone else insularly perpetuated the pristine apotheosis of the Great Emancipator. Robert Lincoln, on the other hand, had no use for Herndon or any other interpretation that soiled his father’s golden aura. But through the years, Robert, as the keeper of his father’s legacy, dealt with adherents to both theories of biography. Robert actually shared opinions, advice, and even documents with numerous biographers, some of whom he respected and helped more than others. To friends and colleagues of his father, he gave the most assistance—even to Herndon and Ward Hill Lamon before they betrayed his trust. But the men to whom Robert gave his full support and assistance were his father’s former White House secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay. Robert had faith in them not only because they were his personal friends but he also felt they were the only people intimately acquainted enough with his father’s work to write a true history of his father’s life and presidential administration. The locus of any such study was Abraham Lincoln’s papers, which had been stored in boxes in David Davis’s bank vault in Bloomington, Illinois, since immediately after the assassination in 1865. This was done at Davis’s suggestion to get them away from Washington and to protect them from “some persons” whom Davis did not want to allow access.2 The plan was then to wait a few chapter seventeen 266 years before a thorough review and classification of everything by Robert and Nicolay, with the assistance of a few of Abraham Lincoln’s intimate friends, certainly Davis and probably Leonard Swett, two men whom Robert trusted above all others.3 The purpose of such a review was to keep everything of historical value and to destroy the rest. As Robert later told multiple historians, he sought to prevent the publication of any documents private to the Lincoln family and to embargo any that could be injurious to persons still living. This sentiment was typical of nineteenth-century social mores concerning personal privacy and public dignity, to which Robert Lincoln particularly subscribed. But the job of “overhauling” his father’s papers was one that Robert dreaded, and so it was one he continually procrastinated. “I confess to a great disinclination to looking over the papers, for I will have a host of people after one thing or another,” Robert wrote in 1871 and repeated in 1873.4 Part of the delay also was because Robert, Davis, and Nicolay could not coordinate any time—­ Robert figured the job would take at least one month—during which all three were available. By mid-1873, Robert had decided to transfer all the boxes from Bloomington to his law office in Chicago and go through them himself, but even this did not occur for nearly a year.5 It was not until late February 1874—nine years after the papers were deposited in Bloomington—that Robert decided it was “impossible” for him and Davis to coordinate their schedules, and he asked the judge to send the papers to Chicago, where Robert would store them in his office vault. “I think that I can make a hasty examination here so as to weed out anything purely private and let Hay and Nicolay have the rest for their use,” Robert decided.6 But after opening only one box, Robert was so overwhelmed by the enormity of the task that he decided to postpone the review until Nicolay could travel to Chicago and assist. Nicolay was pleased and relieved by Robert’s decision. He exhorted, “I am also especially anxious—and I press this point particularly—that not a scrap of paper of any kind be destroyed. The merest memorandum, date, mark, signature, or figure, may have a future historical value, which we cannot now arbitrarily determine, and the only good rule is to save everything.”7...

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