News & Events

Arkansas History Commission Materials Digitized by The Papers of Abraham Lincoln

2/12/2008
The Arkansas History Commission recently welcomed representatives of The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a long-term project dedicated to identifying, imaging, and publishing, both comprehensively in electronic form and selectively in printed volumes, all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime (1809-1865).  John A. Lupton and Erika Nunamaker, scholars with the Illinois-based Lincoln project, created a high-resolution color digital image of each of the Lincoln documents at the History Commission. 
 
The project began with 5,300 letters to libraries and document repositories across the country. According to Lupton, the program’s Associate Director/Associate Editor, more than sixty percent of the repositories responded to the survey but only a few had documents. Nevertheless, Lincoln documents have been found in almost every state including Hawaii. In thanking Dr. Wendy Richter, Director of the History Commission, Lupton commented “Without the support of institutions like yours, we cannot achieve our long-term goal to digitize and transcribe documents to and from Abraham Lincoln. Documents like the ones held at the Arkansas represent an important segment of the documents we are now finding and will continue to find as we travel to libraries and repositories across the country.”
 
One of the documents copied is a May 11, 1864, letter from Arkansas Governor Isaac Murphy to President Lincoln expressing his fears that the rebels might regain control of the state. Murphy declares that the state is “over run in every direction by wandering bands of Rebels-Murdering and destroying-No Arkansas Union man is spared,” and requests help to secure the state for the Union. Murphy marked the letter “private and confidential,” stating that “want of confidence in the military power here has impeled [sic] me to write perhaps too freely.” To see this letter, go to Documenting Arkansas on the Arkansas History Commission website.
 
Another of the documents digitized is a March 16, 1861 communication from Lincoln to Governor Henry M. Rector concerning a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.  In February 1861, Congress passed a Thirteenth Amendment, which Nunamaker called the “ghost amendment,” to guarantee the legality and perpetuity of slavery in the slave states. President James Buchanan signed the resolution passed by the Congress on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln was inaugurated. The Civil War began before this amendment could be sent to the states for ratification. Lincoln sent a copy of a resolution to the governors of all states.  It is interesting to note that the actual Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1865, abolished slavery in the United States.
 
Working from these high-resolution digital images, project editors will create authoritative transcriptions of the documents, markup their structural features according to the guidelines developed by the Model Editions Partnership and the Text Encoding Initiative, and provide explanatory annotations. The project will then publish the text files, linked to the graphic images of the originals, on a publicly accessible website. The project is also exploring the creation of color microfilm from the color digital images as a long-term preservation medium. The project will prepare a selective print edition based on the materials published in the comprehensive electronic edition. Look on the internet to find out more about The Papers of Abraham Lincoln.
 
The Arkansas History Commission is honored to have participated in this project which will vitalize new generations of scholarship on Abraham Lincoln, antebellum America, and the Civil War era. There is scarcely a more compelling context than the American Civil War and no more central individual than Abraham Lincoln. By identifying hitherto unknown or obscure documents and making these and better-known texts readily accessible, the project will also open new vistas on a critical period of the nation's history.