Excerpt
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with legalese where appropriate.
Thanks to an archivist’s curiosity and quick thinking, the San Diego History Center now has two newly-authenticated Abraham Lincoln documents.
One of these prizes is a two-page legal argument, handwritten by Lincoln; the other, the other bestowing one of his last presidential appointments on a San Diegan. While neither contain the poetic turns of phrase the Great Emancipator unleashed on other occasions, both are making historians’ pulses race.
“We didn’t know about these two documents,” said Daniel Stowell, director and editor of “The Papers of Abraham Lincoln,” a project of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill. “It’s great the San Diego History Center called us about this.”
Both documents go on display today in the center’s Balboa Park museum. While the timing is ideal — Saturday is Lincoln’s 202nd birthday — it’s also coincidental. Until recently, the center had no idea it owned these twin treasures.
The center possesses hundreds of uncataloged collections. In storage are boxes crammed with handwritten letters, official documents, charts and photographs, most from the 19th and 20th centuries.
“It’s hundreds of linear feet of material,” said David Kahn, the center’s executive director.
In January, archivist Jane Kenealy was exploring a batch of unprocessed material when she saw an unfamiliar container, about three feet across and three inches deep.
“I opened the box,” she said, still sounding awed, “and there it was.”
“It” was a framed parchment, with “The President of the United States” printed across the top. The document had been pre-printed, with blanks for someone’s name (in this case, Lewis C. Gunn) and appointment (here, Assessor of Internal Revenue for the First Collection Division of California).
There was also a space for a signature. The name flows in black ink: “Abraham Lincoln.”
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