 David Spriegel of Gurnee, a student at St. Mary's University in
Winona, Minn., was on the second week of a summer internship at the
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield when
he discovered two original, previously unknown documents written in
1844 by an up-and-coming lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.
"It was really a surprise," Spriegel said. "I didn't think it
could be true."
In late May, when he began to organize a 4-inch-tall stack of old
documents in the presidential library's manuscripts department,
Spriegel noticed a small inscription on two of them: "The above
memorandum is in the handwriting of Abraham Lincoln. -- M. Hay."
Milton Hay had clerked in the Stuart and Lincoln Law Office as a
young man and would have recognized Lincoln's script. Hay's
notations seem to date from late in his life, perhaps the 1880s.
Spriegel called the discovery to the attention of his supervisor,
Glenna Schroeder-Lein, manuscripts librarian at the presidential
library. She immediately contacted experts with the Papers of
Abraham Lincoln project housed at the library. Daniel Stowell and
Stacy McDermott of that project confirmed Lincoln's handwriting, as
did James Cornelius, curator of the Lincoln Collection.
The two documents, bearing no other signature or date, are long
lists of small parcels of land being bought and sold among a variety
of early Springfield settlers, including Ninian Wirt Edwards and
William Wallace, both of whom ended up as Lincoln's brothers-in-law;
Stacy Opdycke; Jesse B. Thomas; Stephen T. Logan; and others. The
papers lay among several land warranties that had been donated to
the library by a descendant of one of those settlers.
After some research Cornelius determined that the documents were
part of the legal case Opdycke et al. v. Godfrey et al., from
Christian County and that the lands in question are west of
Taylorville in that county. McDermott believes that Lincoln likely
used these two pages of memoranda to prepare a petition he filed to
initiate the case in March 1844.
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The documents will be available this fall for viewing, alongside
those from the 5,600 other Lincoln legal cases, at the Papers of
Abraham Lincoln website,
www.papersofabrahamlincoln.org.
Meanwhile, the two documents join 1,580 other original Abraham
Lincoln manuscripts at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and
Museum.
This is not the first time that a young student has made such a
thrilling discovery. In 1952, 14-year-old Ron Rietveld, a student
helper at the Illinois State Historical Library, the forerunner of
the Lincoln Presidential Library, discovered the only existing
original photograph of Lincoln lying in his coffin following his
assassination. Rietveld later became a professor of history at
California State University, Fullerton, where he had Glenna
Schroeder-Lein as a student, the same woman who is supervising
Spriegel on his summer 2011 internship at the presidential library.
"I never dreamed that my summer internship would bring me into
direct contact with an original, previously unknown Lincoln
document," Spriegel said. "I'm happy that the discovery will
increase our knowledge of Lincoln's legacy."
For more information about the Abraham Lincoln Presidential
Library and Museum, visit
www.presidentlincoln.org.
[Text from file received from
the Illinois Historic
Preservation Agency]
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