He Served in Place of Abraham Lincoln

[Susan Higginbotham]

but he certainly hasn't been erased from history.>

I agree. Based on my work with students over the past 20 years this is a very common extra credit question given by teachers: to find the name of Lincoln's representative recruit.>

Really. And this was easily done by students, before the net? Before I made my initial post on Summerfield, I 'searched' this forum for any prior mention of him. In the many thousands of postings, not one mention found for Summerfield that I could find at all.

Maybe because the man's name was Staples? In any case, he's mentioned in Sandburg's biography, so a student should have been able to find that reference easily enough sans Internet. There's also an article about him in the November 1991 issue of America's Civil War, which a check in the Index to Periodical Literature would have revealed in the good ol' days.