Day-to-Day Life as Seen Through a Lincoln Log

Abraham Lincoln’s life wasn’t all war and slavery and preserving the Union.

Even the Great Emancipator bought socks, talked to friends about their love lives and got bogged down in paperwork -- a fact made clear by a new Web site that records his life in exacting detail.

“The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln” lists almost everything known about the 16th president’s activities.

Visitors can find out what he was doing on a particular date (he spent Jan. 3, 1845, successfully arguing a case before the Illinois Supreme Court) or by searching on key words (“slave” produces 156 results). The site also lets you browse through the years randomly.

A day-by-day look at the president’s life has been available in book form since 1960. Now the state Historic Preservation Agency’s “Papers of Abraham Lincoln” research project has put the information online at https://dev.stg.brown.edu/projects/lincoln and will be updating it as new facts come to light.

“Lincoln has such a mythical property to him. What I like about this log is that it shows him being human,” said John Lupton, assistant director of the project. “He didn’t do great things every day of his life.”

One entry, for his birthday in 1844, shows Lincoln spending 13 cents on socks for his infant son, Robert.

Another reveals Lincoln writing to a friend who was nervous about getting married. Lincoln advised him to forget logic and focus on his love for the bride. “Candidly,” he wrote, “were not those heavenly black eyes, the whole basis of all your early reasoning on the subject?”

Entry after entry shows him signing routine documents or writing to clients -- the kind of dull work any executive today might encounter.

But amid the routine are the historic moments: being elected president (but not voting for himself) on Nov. 6, 1860; signing the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863; suffering a fatal gunshot on April 14, 1865.

Most of the entries record Lincoln’s activities as lawyer or president, since little precise information is available about his childhood. Most entries for his first few years of life actually show what his father was doing.

Lupton said the Web site should interest Lincoln buffs but also will help scholars do research and perhaps help collectors see if they have genuine Lincoln documents.