By Christopher Wills and Mark Wykoff
The holidays are a season of giving. Here at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum we want to celebrate that spirit by showcasing some remarkable artifacts that were gifts at some point in their history (and we have two bonus letters about Christmas gifts!). These items tell unique stories about Lincoln and American history and remind us that generosity transcends time and circumstance. This holiday season, we invite you to explore these items and the history behind them.
A Gift of Warmth
This Confederate Army jacket made it into our collection because it was given to a U.S. Army officer who had been taken prisoner. Lt. Thomas D. Vredenburgh of the 10th Illinois Cavalry was captured near Vicksburg in 1863 and was held for a while at a Shreveport, Louisiana, jail. A woman there gave him the jacket, and he kept it throughout his time as a POW in Louisiana and at Camp Ford Prison in Tyler, Texas. Vredenburgh eventually returned to active duty (a 1922 obituary says he escaped the prison camp “with the assistance and connivance of a number of prisoners”) and ended his service as a lieutenant colonel. The gift of a warm jacket to a chilly prisoner was a small act of kindness in a horrifying war.
A Gift of Beauty
Abraham Lincoln’s youngest son, “Tad,” was not a good student. Perhaps it was because he grew up in the chaos of a White House at war. Perhaps he had a learning disability. Whatever the reason, his educational achievements were limited when his life was turned upside down by his father’s death. So it must have been a huge relief to Mary Lincoln when Tad found a school that appealed to him. “Taddie is going to school & for once in his life, he is really interested in his studies,” she wrote while Tad was enrolled at Chicago’s Elizabeth Street Primary School in 1865-66.
This paperweight was a gift from Mary Lincoln and Tad to one of the school’s teachers, Laura Stowe. It was donated to the ALPLM in 1990 by Stowe’s granddaughter, Katherine Anderson.
A Gift of History
Gifts don’t have to be from one person to another. They can also be from group to group, which is how this statue came to New Salem, Illinois, in 1954. When the Sons of Utah Pioneers learned the historic site did not have a statue of its most famous son, the Sons decided to do something about it. They commissioned Dr. Avard Fairbanks, the first dean of the University of Utah’s College of Fine Arts and a “student of Lincoln’s life,” to produce this sculpture and then gave it to the state of Illinois. The statue portrays Lincoln in a state of transition from frontiersman to law student, a pivotal moment in Lincoln’s life that had a lasting effect on the course of American history.
A Gift of Friendship
Meet “Connie,” a doll made for a girl enduring life as a prisoner of the Japanese military during World War II. Mary Ann Ladic was 7 when she and her family were captured during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. They endured a series of prison camps with deteriorating conditions and shrinking food supplies. It must have been terrifying for a little girl caught up in a big war. Two English teachers helped Mary Ann make Connie from a tea towel so she would have something to take her mind off their troubles. You can hear about Mary Ann’s experiences at our oral history site.
A Gift of Music
This music box was purchased by Mary Lincoln and given to one of her sisters, Frances Todd Wallace. Interestingly, Frances briefly dated Abraham Lincoln, but the two didn’t have much of a spark. She wound up marrying a Springfield doctor, William Wallace. The Lincolns and Wallaces had a close relationship. Abraham and Mary named their third child after William Wallace. Made in Europe, the music box reflects not just Mary’s love of music but her willingness to share it in a technologically advanced way (for the era). It plays 10 operatic airs and still functions, giving us one of the rare opportunities to connect with people of the past by hearing exactly what they heard.
Christmas Letters
This quite formal letter with impeccable penmanship was written by Kirke Rushmore, the son of a Chicago brickmaker, to his grandparents in 1870, when he was about 13. He shares some family news and talks about giving an album to his Sunday school teacher as a Christmas present. Kirke also mentions that “we have had a Christmas entertainment” and that May (presumably his older sister Mabel) “got a set of Siberian squirrel furs and a writing desk but I didn’t get any thing for a present.” Was he fibbing so his grandparents would send him a bigger present? Had he done something to end up on Santa’s naughty list? We’ll never know.
At the other end of the formality scale is this childlike letter to Santa. We know virtually nothing about it. It was found inside a bound copy of a Christian magazine for children from the 1870s but has no signature or date. The full text of the letter is:
“Dear Santa Claus. Will you plase give me a box of [??blocks, cards??] and I want a pocketknife if you can spare it. and I would lite a little locomotive. and I would lite a magic lantern. and I want whole lot of books. but I dont want any books that I have had and I want a new sled. my sled is broken. and I want a rope with it. and I want a black bord. good bye.”
It’s a well-rounded wish list, with toys, literature, educational material and sporting goods. It’s also polite – note the “if you can spare it.” We hope this young writer had a merry Christmas. We certainly were merry about finding this peek into the past hidden in our collection!
Wills is the ALPLM's communications director. Wykoff works for the ALPLM through the Graduate Public Service Internship program at the University of Illinois Springfield.