"Lost" Speeches and Agrapha

[STS Lincolnite]

(09-12-2015 12:42 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  Regarding this speech Lincoln scholar Paul Angle wrote:

"The Illinois State Republican Convention met at Bloomington on May 29, 1856. It furnished the setting for one of the most dramatic episodes of Lincoln's life ... A speech by Lincoln was rarely an ordinary occurrence, but on this occasion he made one of the really great efforts of his life. So powerful was his eloquence that the reporters forgot to take notes of what he was saying. Several commenced, but in a few minutes they were entirely captured by the speaker's power, and their pencils were still." (I've seen other explanations for why the text of the speech was lost, but Angle's is the one I see most often.)

This past weekend, I heard Douglas Wilson (author of Honor's Voice and Lincoln's Sword) speak. He touched briefly on the subject. He was talking about how Lincoln often pre-wrote or pre-prepared letters for publication stating he "reacted ahead of time". Lincoln did this to organize his thoughts and anticipate his critics arguments beforehand. He would then have a response ready immediately for publication (an example would be the Greely letter). Lincoln was also known to prepare copies of speeches ahead of time so they could be distributed to newspapers. Wilson mused about the possibility that the reason why there is no text available of the Bloomington speech was that Lincoln did not prepare one and give to the newspapers as he had done in the past. He thought perhaps that the speech was so "radical" for Lincoln at that time that he did not want it distributed widely.

The idea of the reporters dropping their pencils while "captured by the speaker's power" is hard to resist but we will probably never know the real reason it was not recorded or published or what Lincoln actually said when he spoke.