The Capitol Dome

33 THE CAPITOL DOME Representative Lincoln at Work: Reconstructing a Legislative Career from Original Archival Documents by David J. Gerleman, Ph. D. W hen Abraham Lincoln (fig. 1) arrived in Wash- ing ton in late February 1861 and prepared to take up residence at the W hite House as the nation's si xteenth president, he did so facing a sea of troubles and with the nation's ver y existence at sta ke. However, Lincoln was no stranger to the nation's capita l, having visited severa l times over the years on public and pri- vate business, and he doubtless recalled his very first arrival in the city nearly fourteen years previous, when he stepped off a train as a freshman representative. In the fall of 1846 Lincoln was elected to the House of Representatives as the lone Whig from an overwhelmingly Democratic state to represent Illinois's Seventh District, encompassing Putnam, Marshall, Woodford, Tazewell, Mason, Menard, Cass, Morgan, Scott, Logan, and Sangamon counties. Vigorous canvassing and his widespread popularity helped secure victory at the polls at a cost in campaign expenditures esti- mated at 75 cents. 1 Lincoln had to wait a year to take his seat, as the ir- tieth Congress did not formally assemble until December 1847. His time in Congress remains, perhaps, one of the less-examined periods of his life. Had he never mounted the national stage it might have remained the crowning achieve- ment of a fizzled frontier political career. Yet Lincoln's two- year congressional stint provided him with a valuable educa- tion in the way the House of Representatives operated, how policy and politicking functioned at the national level, and how patronage could be used to forward or curtail politi- cal agendas and ambitions. His time in Washington also brought him into contact with other Members who would either fight with or against him in the future—including both his vice-presidents Hannibal Hamlin and Andrew Johnson, cabinet secretaries Simon Cameron, William Seward, and Caleb B. Smith, in addition to a host of future Confederate leaders such as Jefferson Davis, Robert Toombs, and Alexander Stephens. While Lincoln's congressional career has been detailed by his biographers, they have relied largely on previously published sources, as no full accounting of Lincoln's paper trail among the records of the irtieth Congress had ever been completed. In 2009 a systematic search of those legis- lative records, now housed in the National Archives, was begun by the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a long-term docu- mentary editing project originally created to identify, image, transcribe, annotate, and publish all documents written by or to Lincoln during his lifetime. Modern presidents have all their papers automatically collected, catalogued, and prepared for inclusion in their future presidential libraries, but such organized efforts did not take root until well into the twentieth century. e Papers of Abraham Lincoln has made painstaking efforts to track down and identify docu- ments connected to the Illinois rail-splitter scattered across the country and the world. Alas, Lincoln himself has not always aided that effort. For example, when the Lincolns departed Springfield for Washington, the president-elect tossed seemingly unimportant correspondence and papers onto the fire. 2 Four years later, aer Lincoln was killed, his eldest son and private secretaries sorted through the papers at the White House, tossing many but retaining nearly 20,000 documents. For decades Robert T. Lincoln kept these papers under lock and key and subsequently deposited them at the Library of Congress in 1919 before formally deeding them to the library in 1923 with the stipulation that they remain sealed until 21 years aer his own death. ese records were finally opened to the public in 1947. 3

• Cover