Lincoln’s Power and Promise at the Huntington : ‘Last Best Hope’ Is One of the Largest Shows on 16th President

Abraham Lincoln is my name

And with my pen I wrote the same

I wrote in both haste and speed

And left it here for fools to read

John Rhodehamel is nervous.

The Huntington Library has never mounted an exhibit of this size on a popular figure such as Abraham Lincoln, and he’s not quite sure what to expect. He’s not sure how many people the large exhibition hall will hold. The fire marshal of San Marino has been muttering about the dangers of overcrowding. The library is open only for a limited number of hours.

Finally, he shrugs. “Maybe it’ll be a big flop and no one will come.”

Judging from the content of the exhibit, which opens Tuesday, that’s doubtful. “The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America” is one of the largest Lincoln shows ever attempted. It combines materials from the collections of the Huntington Library, the Illinois State Historical Library and Lincoln collectors Louise and Barry Taper of Beverly Hills. It will also be the Huntington’s longest-running exhibition: At 10 1/2 months, it will be more than three times longer than average.

This show, organized by Huntington Curator of American Historical Manuscripts Rhodehamel, with Thomas F. Schwartz, a Lincoln curator at the Illinois State Historical Library, brings together many documents never before seen by the public. One such is the verse quoted above, from a schoolboy’s copybook, believed to be one of the earliest known Lincoln writings. One of the exhibit’s greatest strengths is the way it combines documents with a clever assortment of oddities: A copy of the Gettysburg Address written by Lincoln himself sits in the same room as a chamber pot from the Lincoln White House. The chamber pot, Rhodehamel points out with a slight grin, has the seal of the President of the United States painted on its lid.

What sets this exhibit apart is the number of handwritten Lincoln documents and the emphasis on Lincoln’s political evolution.

“The point we try to make is that Lincoln hated slavery and said so often and explicitly, but he didn’t see any solution to it,” Rhodehamel said. “I don’t think anybody saw any solution to it.”

Through Lincoln’s own handwritten words, the visitor can see Lincoln’s thinking evolve from reluctant acceptance of slavery in states where it was already firmly established to the conviction that the only acceptable outcome for the war would be to free the slaves. Lincoln began his political career, Rhodehamel says, by officially opposing only the expansion of slavery into the newly acquired Western territories.

The opportunity to read Lincoln’s letters humanizes him, something that William Moffat, director of the library, says is one of the aims of the exhibit.

“We wanted to introduce him as a real person and give people a real sense of what he was like,” Moffat said. “This exhibit will let people see him as an individual, not a caricature.”

Lincoln had many moods. He was caustic in a letter to Union Gen. George Brinton McClellan, who had complained that his army’s horses were fatigued. “Will you pardon me,” Lincoln wrote, “for asking what the horses of your army have done since the Battle of Antietam to fatigue anything?” He was sorrowful in writing to his wife, Mary, to tell her that her brother-in-law, a Confederate general, had been killed in action.

And, of course, Lincoln can be seen here as a powerful and gifted writer who argues his views with vigor and logic.

“I personally think that the second inaugural address is the greatest thing he ever wrote--greater than the Gettysburg Address,” Rhodehamel said. “The crucial paragraph is here, where he says that slavery is a crime and God is punishing this country, both North and South.”

Racism is an ever-present entity in the show, as Lincoln’s opponents both North and South made increasingly virulent attacks on his determination to eliminate slavery. Two display cases are filled with anti-Lincoln material. A doll with Lincoln’s head has a face that lifts up to show the face of a black man; an illustration in the front of a book shows a black man kissing a white woman.

The emphasis on racial issues is by design, Rhodehamel and Moffat say.

“This may sound a little corny, but we wanted to get the Huntington involved in the Rebuild L.A. mentality,” Moffat said.

Nearly 200,000 African-American men enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War, Rhodehamel said, indicating a case that holds several letters by Lincoln stressing the importance of these troops to the Union.

“Lincoln said many times that their contribution probably made victory possible, that the North could not have won without those people,” he said.

“The essential message of Lincoln,” Moffat said, “is that he confronted 130 years ago the same issues we are confronting today.”