Ann & Abe Forgeries

Ann & Abe Forgeries

by Glenn W. LaFantasie

By the early twentieth century, the story of the romance between Ann and Abe rose in popularity. Newspapers published countless articles, fact and fiction, about the tragic story of young love, which served the swelling tide of public demand for details about Lincoln’s life and times. In the mid-1920s, Carl Sandburg published the first two volumes of his epic Lincoln biography, The Prairie Years, which relied on florid prose and unauthenticated anecdotes about the rail-splitter’s years in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois to a gullible readership. His focus on Lincoln as a westerner led Americans to concentrate more fully on how the young man grew into maturity, pulling himself up by the bootstraps. It is not surprising that hucksters hoped to profit from sparsely documented episodes like the mystique of Lincoln’s first love.

The Lost Love Letters

In late June or early July 1928, a California woman, Wilma Frances Minor, approached The Atlantic Monthly claiming to have letters between Lincoln and Ann Rutledge that proved conclusively that the romance had taken place. Ellery Sedgwick, the magazine’s owner and editor, despite some initial skepticism, pounced on this fortuitous development and sought to publish the letters in full. Eventually, Minor showed fourteen letters to Sedgwick, three from Abe to Ann, four to the county surveyor, and four from Ann Rutledge, two of which were addressed to Lincoln. There were also other historical documents relating to New Salem. Sedgwick sent these documents to Lincoln experts, including Sandburg and another Lincoln biographer, Ida Tarbell, who confirmed the authenticity of the documents, although William E. Barton kept wavering in his opinion. Nevertheless, Sedgwick paid Minor the considerable sum of $6,000 (about $110,000 in today’s money) and divided her Lincoln material into three parts, which he published in The Atlantic between December 1928 and February 1929 under the title, “Lincoln the Lover.” After a bevy of Lincoln experts, including Paul M. Angle and Oliver R. Barrett, an eminent Lincoln collector, denounced the Minor documents as forgeries (joined by Sandburg, who recanted his earlier authentication), Minor confessed that the letters were indeed forgeries written by her mother, a psychic, who had relied on “automatic writing” (also called psychography) to put down on paper what the spirits, including those of Abe and Ann, told her to write. In the end, Wilma Minor slipped into oblivion and Elliott Sedgwick, with egg on his face, refused to publish anything more about the nefarious incident.

The Engagement Stone

At the same time, in the opportune year of 1928, another forgery surfaced about the New Salem romance. Angle, the executive secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Centennial Association, made public a forgery that reposed in the Lincoln collection of Oliver R. Barrett, an Illinois attorney. The item, a carved stone, had been inscribed “A. Lincoln / Ann Rutledge / were betrothed here / July 4, 1833.” It had been found in July 1900 by William L. Greene, the grandson of Bowling Green, the village’s justice of the peace. The discoverer said it had been found near the site of the Lincoln-Berry Store in New Salem. The rock, however, received very little public fanfare in the press. Brief news stories about the elliptical-shaped rock, measuring approximately twelve inches long and seven inches in diameter, were used as filler by several newspapers beginning in December 1900 and running into February 1901. Then the story vanished for a time, but Lincoln biographers, including Sandburg, Tarbell, and Lloyd Lewis, revived it in their publications, even though Angle had revealed it as a fake. Among the things wrong on the rock, the chiseler had reversed the letter J, trying to make it look crudely wrought, and had put the engagement date in 1833, a time that was, by most accounts, too early by a year or more. In the late 1920s, though, the carved “betrothal stone,” as it came to be known, was acquired by a well-known collector, Charles F. Gunther, who sold it to Oliver R. Barrett. After Barrett’s death in 1950, the stone was sold two years later in an estate sale conducted by Parke-Bernet. A penciled note on the auction catalog in the collections of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign indicates that the rock sold for $75. Who purchased it, however, is not known. In 1990, historian John Y. Simon remarked that the rock “tricked nobody except the Lincoln collector who bought it.” One imagines that the present owner of the stone is too embarrassed to admit it.

The Photograph

In early 1924, newspapers around the country published a photograph purported to be of Lincoln and Ann Rutledge that had recently been “discovered” in Bloomington, Illinois. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, daguerreotype photography would not be invented until 1839, four years after Ann’s death. The woman in the photograph wears a distinctive 1920s hair style of ringlets and curls. The rather burly man sitting beside her does not look like Lincoln.

The Gift

Lincoln scholars have also expressed doubt about another possible forgery, the inscriptions found on the flyleaf and title page of an 1828 sixth edition of Samuel Kirkham’s English Grammar. On the title page, Lincoln wrote: “Ann M. Rutledge is now learning her Grammar.”  While experts have quibbled about the note’s chirography, most historians believe it to be genuine.

In 1829, the book was owned by Miller Arrowsmith, whose handwriting on a flap beneath the flyleaf looks childish. Several years later it was owned by John C. Vance, who, said Carl Sandburg, lived six miles from New Salem. Lincoln visited Vance, who either sold or gave him the book, and Lincoln used it for his lessons with Mentor Graham, New Salem’s schoolmaster. One place he may have also scrutinized it was while working as a clerk in Denton Offut’s store beside William G. Greene, who later claimed to have helped Lincoln learn grammar. By 1835, Lincoln shared the book with Ann Rutledge, who also attended Graham’s school. Ann’s sister Nancy remembered: “She was ambitious to learn and was often studying. She and Abe had a grammar in partnership. He kept it part of the time and she part of the time. I’ve often seen him walking on the streets of New Salem with that grammar open in his hand. After she died he gave it back to our folks and it’s in existence yet.” Next to use the book was Ann’s brother Robert Brannon Rutledge and her younger sister Sarah (Sally), who inscribed her name on the flyleaf.

A connection between Lincoln and Kirkham’s book was first made by William Dean Howells, who later became the dean of American letters, in a campaign biography published in 1860. Howells described how Lincoln obtained a copy of the book by walking the six miles to Vance’s farm outside of New Salem. Public attention was again drawn to the book in early May 1865, when Captain Robert Brannon Rutledge, Ann’s younger brother, showed it to the editors of the Illinois State Journal in Springfield, where he was attending Lincoln’s burial. Rutledge said the flyleaf once contained Lincoln’s autograph, but the vicissitudes of time had torn it away.

In January 1896, Ida M. Tarbell, in an article on Lincoln’s early life published in McClure’s Magazine, gave the public a look at the title page of the book in a photograph her research assistant had obtained from the Rutledge family. When Captain Rutledge died in 1881, he left the book to his widow, Samantha Jenkins Rutledge. By 1936, the Library of Congress owned the book, where it remains. It is now part of the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana.

One doubter, however, does not believe that the inscription to Ann Rutledge was rendered by Lincoln. John Evangelist Walsh, the author of a book on the Lincoln-Rutledge romance, hypothesizes that Ann may have written the words on the title page. He also believes there is confusion among historians over two different copies of Kirkham’s English Grammar that passed through Lincoln’s hands in New Salem. As I see it, the words written on the title page look like Lincoln’s longhand, although executed more formally—indeed, more carefully—than his usual style. In this, he was probably trying to impress young Ann. As for Walsh’s other assertion, the likelihood of two copies of Kirkham’s book existing in remote New Salem is too difficult to accept.