The Presidential Library and a Contested Hat

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum opened in two stages in two thousand four and two thousand five. It became the most visited state-controlled presidential museum in the country within two years, reaching one million visitors in its first twenty-one months. The museum holds the handwritten Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln's reading glasses and shaving mirror, and Mary Todd Lincoln's wedding dress and music box.

The collection spans the Illinois State Historical Library's holdings, which date to eighteen eighty-nine, along with a deep archive of Lincoln-era documents and manuscripts. There are also theatrical exhibits, including an animated Civil War map that compresses four years of conflict into four minutes, and a production called Lincoln's Eyes, designed to put visitors inside the president's perspective. And then there is the hat.

The museum displays a stovepipe hat said to have been worn by Lincoln, valued at six and a half million dollars. Questions have been raised, on more than one occasion, about the provenance of that hat. Whether it is genuinely Lincoln's hat, or whether it is one of several period hats that accumulated Lincoln associations over the decades, is a matter that historians have not fully resolved.

The museum stands by its documentation. The debate continues in the scholarly literature. It is, in some ways, a very Lincoln problem.

The man has been claimed by so many people and institutions, for so many purposes, that separating the genuine article from the accumulated mythology requires patience and sometimes humility. Springfield has been working on that project for more than a hundred and sixty years.