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Acknowledgments IN UNDERTAKING THIS VOLUME, I have been blessed by assistance, support , and encouragement from friends and colleagues who have earned much more gratitude than I can begin to express. Most of all, I am indebted to my close friend, Judge Frank]. Williams of Hope Valley, Rhode Island, who again made available to me the vast resources of his incomparable Lincoln and Civil War library. More than once, in response to some urgent call for help, he traveled uncomplaining, to his Hope Valley office after a long day in court at Providence, to search through his archives and gather material to air-ship to me the following day at his own expense. Such manifestations of friendship truly go beyond the call. Reels of microfilm, copies of documents, passages from books, photocopies from the Official Records of the Rebellion, all flowed to New York as if on a conveyor belt. To say that this book could not have been written without Frank Williams's help would be a gross understatement. All I can do is thank him, again and always, for his support, generosity, patience, and enthusiasm. Along the path from conception to publication, a number of curators, archivists, and librarians helped me track down documents, and then obligingly granted permission for their publication here. I am grateful in particular to Gerald Prokopowicz, historian of the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, and his research assistant, James E. Eber; Michael Musick and Dee Ann Blanton at the Military Reference Branch of the National Archives; William]. Walsh at the Archives' Textual Reference Branch and Budge Weidman at its Civil War Conservation Corps; Illinois State Historian Thomas R Schwartz and Kim Bauer, curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Illinois State Historical Library; Don McCue of the Lincoln Shrine in Redlands, California; and Steve Nielsen, Jean Brookins, and Dallas R. Lindgren of the Minnesota Historical Society . At the Library of Congress, James R. Gilreath offered the resources of his Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Civil War Spexxiii cialist John R. Sellers helped much, Clark Evans provided expert guidance and much forbearance, and Yvonne Brooks provided special help with the William T. Sherman Papers. Larry Hackman, former New York State Archivist, now director of the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence , Missouri, pointed the way to important papers. Theresa McGill of the Chicago Historical Society generously shared important material, and Malcom S. Forbes Jr. granted permission to reprint material from the Forbes family's superb Lincoln collection. Among the many private collectors who identified unpublished material , or made letters available from their own collections, were Malcolm S. Forbes Jr. (and Catherine S. Thomas, Registrar of the Forbes Collection ); Dr. Jules Ladenheim of Jersey City, New Jersey; and William W. Layton of Washington, D.C. I must thank Bill Alexander of Alexander Autographs, Inc., in Connecticut, and Daniel Weinberg of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago. lowe a special debt of gratitude to Thomas Brencick, managing director of Transfertex in Kleinostheim, Germany, for the copy of the letter to Lincoln that hangs at the KarlMarx -Haus, and to Burton Gerber of Washington and Gene Rubin of Beverly Hills for identifying and supplying choice material. Uncovering the letters to Lincoln represented only part of the research challenge. There are few more daunting tasks than the examination and transcription of original nineteenth-century handwriting. There are times when words and sentences appear so stubbornly illegible that an editor is certain that a fabulous entry will have to be discarded because it simply cannot be read authoritatively. Fortunately, my wife, Edith, and my younger daughter, Meg, now at Yale but then at home, were always available to cast fresh eyes on the most unyielding passages and almost never failed to comprehend something I had failed to grasp. Many a superb letter was saved for inclusion in this book thanks to their patient readings and re-readings. My dose friend and frequent coauthor, Mark E. Neely Jr., of St. Louis University is the most accurate reader of documents I have ever known and was always able to decipher words that none of the Holzers could fathom. Finally, even though she was seldom at home during the preparation of this book, our older daughter, Remy, generously offered crucial words of encouragement even as she was focusing on her senior thesis at Harvard . Further indispensable help came later from Carol A. Burns, managing editor of Southern Illinois University Press, and my skillful copyeditor, Alexandria Weinbrecht. It was John F...

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