Papers of Abraham Lincoln

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is a long-term documentary editing project dedicated to identifying, imaging, and publishing all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime (1809-1865). The project began as the Lincoln Legal Papers in 1985; in 2001 the project became the Papers of Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln is one of America's most famous politicians who is consistently ranked as one of the greatest presidents ever to occupy the White House. Any scholarly study of his life is reliant on his written words to understand his thoughts, motives, and actions, however his assassination prevented Lincoln from organizing his papers himself. After his father's death, Robert Todd Lincoln gathered a large collection of papers and entrusted their organization to David Davis with the assistance of Lincoln's private secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay. Nicolay and Hay subsequently drew upon these nearly 20,000 documents to write their ten volume Lincoln biography published in 1890. Robert Lincoln subsequently deposited this collection of papers at the Library of Congress in 1919 and formally deeded them to the library in January 1923 under the stipulation that they remain sealed until twenty-one years after his own death. The records were finally opened to the public in 1947. While the Robert Todd Lincoln Collection of Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress is the largest single repository collection of Lincoln documents, thousands of other items are located in repositories across the country, including the National Archives and in private collections that were either inherited or purchased. Because Lincoln documents are so voluminous and widely scattered, any attempt to identify, gather, and publish them all is a long, tedious, painstaking process.

Previous attempts to locate and publish Lincoln documents yielded limited results. One of the earliest and purportedly exhaustive attempts was Nicolay and Hay's Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, consisting of 12 volumes, and published in 1905. Some authors supplemented the work of Lincoln's former secretaries with such volumes as Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Gilbert A. Tracy and Francis H. Allen (1917), Uncollected Works of Abraham Lincoln: His Letters, Addresses and Other Papers, edited by Rufus Rockwell Wilson (1947), and Paul Angle's New Letters and Papers of Lincoln (1930), to name a few.

...
Wikipedia