By Christopher Wills
The Great Chicago Fire was, of course, a historic tragedy. It killed 300 people, left about one-third of the population homeless, and delivered a devastating blow to the city’s economy. But it was also a tragedy for history, destroying irreplaceable historic artifacts and documents, including many related to Abraham Lincoln.
To mark the fire’s 154th anniversary, we thought we’d take a look at the losses to history. While they pale in significance next to the human suffering, they’re still worth remembering.
The most obvious losses are the buildings. The fire claimed some 17,500 buildings. Most were small wooden structures that aren’t particularly memorable except for their flammability, but some were landmarks or certainly would have become landmarks: the original Palmer House hotel, McVicker’s Theater, the Chicago Tribune’s “fireproof” building, and many churches.
The fire wiped away much of the Chicago that Abraham Lincoln would have known. The Tremont House hotel, for instance, was where both Lincoln and Stephen Douglas spoke early in their 1858 Senate race. It also served as the Illinois Republican Party’s headquarters when Lincoln successfully maneuvered to win the party’s presidential nomination in 1860. And it’s where Douglas died in 1861. The hotel was consumed by the flames.
Flames engulfing the Tremont House, the building on the left. (Chicagology.com)
The remains of the Tremont House (from “Chicago and the Great Conflagration,” 1872)
Another Lincoln-related building lost to the fire was the U.S. Post Office & Custom House, which housed the federal courts for northern Illinois. The Northern District had been created in 1855, so the records of all federal cases Lincoln had handled in Chicago since then were destroyed. But it gets worse. When the new district was created, records from all previous federal cases had been transferred to Chicago. That meant every federal case Lincoln handled before 1855 – about 15 years’ worth – was destroyed, too. (Virtually all non-Lincoln records were lost, too – robbing us of a useful tool for understanding Illinois during this important period.)
The Post Office and Custom House, home to the federal court. (“R. H. McDonald's Illustrated History and Map of Chicago,” 1872)
Ruins of the Chicago Post Office and Custom house.
Today, the only surviving records of Lincoln’s activity in federal court are from the five years when Springfield was home to the Southern District and Lincoln was still practicing law – 345 federal cases during that five-year span. Imagine how many more we would have if the earlier records or the Chicago records had survived.
The law office of Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, was in the path of the fire, but the damage was minimal. Most of his law books and key legal papers survived. What he lost, though, was far more important historically.
The Robert Lincoln biography “Giant in the Shadows” reports: “The contents of his vault were legal documents, not his father’s papers. Those still were in [David] Davis’s bank vault in Bloomington, Illinois. Robert’s personal collection of family memorabilia and heirlooms, however, is another matter. He later said the few letters he owned in his father’s handwriting – presumably letters to Robert at college – burned in the fire.”
The Lincolns suffered another personal blow in the fire, but one of a very different nature. Mary Lincoln was present in Chicago when the city burned. Her youngest son, Tad, had died just three months earlier, and the latest disaster took a toll on her shaky mental health. In “Giant in the Shadows,” author Jason Emerson writes:
Robert had explained how ever since the Great Fire in 1871, his mother suffered constant anxiety that buildings or entire cities were either on fire or about to be. She often pointed to nearby chimney smoke and exclaimed that the city was burning down, and in April 1875, she sent eleven trunks of possessions to Milwaukee because she was convinced Chicago was about to be consumed in flames. The doctors told Robert that any person, man or woman, with such a delusion might, at any moment, suddenly leap out of a window, thinking the building to be ablaze.”
These delusions contributed to Robert Lincoln’s decision to have his mother sent to an asylum. In May 1875, he arranged for a brief hearing (in which his mother had no real representation) on Mary Lincoln’s sanity. The jury quickly ruled she was insane. She was sent to a private asylum the next day. Four months later, she was released into the care of her sister and brother-in-law in Springfield.
The most famous historic loss from the fire is Abraham Lincoln’s final, handwritten draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. The official document stayed in government hands and now is preserved by the National Archives and Records Administration, but Lincoln gave his final draft to a fair in Chicago that was raising money to assist sick and wounded soldiers. It later went to the Chicago Historical Society, now known as the Chicago History Museum.
Like many “fireproof” buildings that day, the museum proved no match for such intense heat and flames. Museum staff tried to save the document but could not get it out of the building in time. After the proclamation was issued, Lincoln signed a number of printed copies and some of those still survive. One resides here at the ALPLM. But the one that he put together personally was lost to the fire.
Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation. ("The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln," 1918)
Losing Lincoln records in the Land of Lincoln makes a certain amount of sense. What’s more surprising is losing many of the earliest photos of Yellowstone National Park.
Lincoln had signed legislation in 1864 to protect Yellowstone, but the area still had not been thoroughly explored and documented by 1871. That year, two expeditions visited, each with a photographer to capture the region’s incredible geysers, hot springs and scenery. The photographer with what was known as the Barlow Expedition was a man named Thomas J. Hine and, unfortunately, he was based in Chicago.
Hine returned from the expedition with about 200 photos, including, apparently, the very first photo of Old Faithful. That one survives, along with a handful of others. The rest went up in flames. The fame for capturing Yellowstone’s beauty, leading to it becoming a national park in 1872, went solely to the photographer on the other expedition, William Henry Jackson.
Great Falls of Yellowstone by Thomas J. Hine (YellowstoneStereoViews.com)
Old Faithful by Thomas J. Hine (YellowstoneStereoViews.com)
Wills is the ALPLM’s communications director.