One could not lay groundwork in the backwoods by telephoning ahead; the only way to check out leads was to appear in person. Ida gleaned valuable new material because of her thoroughness; she also took time to be kind to those she met. At a farm near Keystone Post Office in Clinton County, Missouri, she found her hostess in need of medical care and urged her to try a new doctor. The woman’s daughter later wrote Tarbell that the patient was improving, had gained ten pounds, and that in every letter she spoke of Miss Tarbell’s “constant thoughtful kindness.”
As Tarbell interviewed people she saw that even thirty years later they could not fathom how one of their own had become president. The elderly Roland W. Diller, in whose Springfield drugstore Lincoln used to relax with friends, was as interested in flirting and calling her “Tarbucket” as in recalling his old friend. His tales of Lincoln—not all of them verifiable—inspired the “Billy Brown” stories she later wrote about Lincoln’s younger days. Best of these was “He Knew Lincoln,” which appeared in The American Magazine in February 1907.
Tarbell had expected every encounter with Lincoln to be burned into people’s minds, but she found his own neighbors could recall him only with difficulty. Most had realized Lincoln was special, had looked forward to his visits, but they could not see his great gifts.
To her dismay, some fabricated recollections for her. Senator John M. Palmer of Illinois, who had been a Lincoln manager at the Chicago Convention, gave her a detailed account of the part played by a Judge Hornblower in Lincoln’s nomination, but Ida could discover no records that such a person had ever lived or functioned in Lincoln’s life.
After heroic travels through the backwoods, her story came together in a society woman’s parlor when Lincoln’s son Robert presented her with a daguerreotype of a Lincoln no one had seen or imagined: a young, clean-shaven man who had somehow been buried in all the mythologizing that had come afterward. Lincoln had always been vaunted as an uncouth man honed to nobility, but here was a confident man handsome enough to go on stage. Modern medicine has attributed the gnarled appearance and melancholy of Lincoln’s later years to Marfan’s syndrome, a genetic disorder that can distort the face, but in any event, the daguerreotype Tarbell received shed light on Lincoln’s mysterious past and infused her work with new power.
Robert Lincoln, the late president’s only surviving son, had served in the cabinets of James Garfield and Chester Arthur, and was soon to be appointed president of The Pullman Company. He was concerned about what biographers had done to his family’s reputation and was wary of them. Abraham Lincoln’s bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, had stated that the president was illegitimate; William Herndon, a law partner, had told of Lincoln’s rough manners and Mary Todd’s shrewishness. Robert Lincoln had cooperated with Nicolay and Hay at the expense of changing every paragraph in their monumental work.10
For whatever reason, either because of her cajoling or the persuasion of their mutual friend Emily Lyon, Robert Lincoln gave Tarbell the earliest daguerreotype he knew of. He withheld everything else; his papers were not opened until 1947 and other caches of material have since been revealed.
But the picture was worth all the papers he could have provided. Readers—even the experts—were dumbstruck by the frontispiece. McClure’s published a selection of comments in December 1895: Woodrow Wilson, professor of finance and history at Princeton University, wrote that he found it “both striking and singular—a notable picture.” He added that he was moved by “the expression of dreaminess, the familiar face without the sadness.” Charles Dudley Warner, a literary figure who co-wrote The Gilded Age with Mark Twain, said that it “explains Mr. Lincoln far more than the most elaborate engraving which had been produced.”
McClure’s Magazine was now in the Lincoln business. In November 1895, when the picture appeared, circulation reached 175,000. When the next article ran the following month, it hit 250,000, surpassing The Century and Harper’s Monthly and proving that Tarbell had accomplished a remarkable feat.
Her first article appeared ten months after she set out for Kentucky. Others had portrayed Lincoln’s achievement as an act of fate or the miracle of a country lout’s becoming the leader of his country. In Tarbell’s rendering, Lincoln’s rise to the presidency was the well-tended flowering of early ambition. As a boy, Lincoln told one woman he would be president, and when her daughters mocked him, he retorted, “Oh, I’ll study and get ready, and then the chance will come and I’ll be prepared.”11
Response to this new Lincoln swelled McClure’s mailbags. It seemed as if the whole country were collaborating in recovering Lincoln. People wrote in with information and invited her to call on them when she was in the area. Even Southerners wrote affectionately of him. From Nebraska came word that a Western newspaper had written of Tarbell as Lincoln’s oldest living playmate.
It may have been at this time that William Dean Howells, then America’s foremost man of letters, confessed to her the greatest mistake of his literary life. When asked to write a campaign biography of nominee Lincoln, he refused to travel way out to Illinois to see someone he thought “didn’t amount to anything,” and so he sent someone else to interview Lincoln. Tarbell had done her own research and it made her the star of McClure’s Magazine.
Hamlin Garland produced a series on U.S. Grant that ran concurrently, and biographies of Washington and Franklin also appeared, but none could boast success like this. McClure’s also featured stories on a new marvel in photography—the X ray, with pictures of X-rayed hands, tools, and frogs—and “A Century of Painting” with engraved reproductions, but it was Tarbell’s biography people talked about.
After editing three issues comprised mostly of unpublished manuscripts culled in small-town libraries, Tarbell began to write the installments under her own by-line. J. McCan Davis, a young Springfield attorney who acted as her assistant in his spare time, combed early Illinois newspapers and turned up documents on Lincoln’s early life. Tarbell’s series stretched to twenty articles over four years, which were later reprinted in book form and rewritten into a work of two volumes dedicated to her father.
Hers was a scholarly method driven by demands of magazine deadlines. She was tenacious in following leads and cross-checking them. While gathering data she could dictate as many as twenty letters a day, inviting contributions, declining others, clarifying points, and correcting dates as she worked through the “To be Answered” pile on her desk. She would ask one whether Lincoln’s hair was black or very dark brown, whether a phrase was “sown corn” or “sowed corn,” and whether Lincoln used the correct phrase. She had the historian’s pedantry, the journalist’s instinct, and the friendly guile of one seeking help. Tarbell sent off books and copies of illustrations to those she was cajoling. She read and reread proofs, and when errors did creep in, apologized contritely to McClure and Phillips.
Her Lincoln articles, like her Napoleon series, were submitted to rigorous editing. McClure read each three times. If the third reading no longer interested him, she rewrote the article. Just as he insisted that McClure’s short stories make the reader feel better, so nonfiction features, whether biographic, scientific, or general, had to present the nobler side of life. McClure felt that a magazine, to be successful, had to be edifying, but above all, it had to be lively.
Sensationalism, albeit well-documented sensationalism, was at the core of her investigation. Her passion for her subject and McClure’s desire to capture readers led her to commit several errors of fact. What, she thought, could intrigue the public more than finding a lost speech by the author of the Gettysburg Address? Tarbell was assured by two sources—an Indiana judge and noted Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill—that there was such an address, one so wonderful that reporters had been so enraptured by Lincoln’s words that they forgot to take notes. Tarbell found this hard to believe, but she uncovered one man’s recollections of the speech and Medill authenticated it. This version was generally accepted as genuine until 1930 when the actual speech came
to light in The Alton Courier of June 5, 1856.
Other biographers had claimed that Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, had been born out of wedlock. Tarbell could not accept that this was true. Thus, when a writer named Caroline Hanks Hitchcock brought “proof” of a legitimate ancestor named Nancy Hanks who married Thomas Lincoln, Abraham’s father, Tarbell wanted to believe it was so. She soon saw that Mrs. Hitchcock was flighty and tried to double-check her work, but Tarbell finally wrote an enthusiastic introduction to Hitchcock’s book. In the 1920s, Mrs. Hitchcock’s work was shown to be in error. Nancy’s mother did not marry Nancy’s presumed father until seven years after her birth. Tarbell gamely urged those biographers who could discredit Nancy Hanks’s legitimacy to do so for the sake of truth, but she was privately confident that Lincoln must have come from a more honorable marriage bed.12
Tarbell not only wanted Lincoln to be from a knotless family tree, she wanted true love for him as well. William Herndon, biographer and erstwhile Lincoln partner, had hated Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd and insisted that the only woman Lincoln had ever loved was a girl from New Salem, Illinois, named Ann Rutledge. According to Herndon, only this girl’s death prevented Lincoln from marrying her. Feeling that a lost love was highly romantic and finding Mary Todd Lincoln so unappealing, Tarbell decided to believe and repeat this story. Other biographers said that Lincoln had gone half mad with grief over her death, but for Tarbell this was too morbid. She insisted that he had only been profoundly saddened and never forgot his love for her. Most Lincoln scholars today discount the “romance” because the only testimony for it is the unreliable Herndon.
Possibly because of her indebtedness to Robert Lincoln and the hope of prying more material from him, Tarbell treated Mary Todd Lincoln more gently than she was otherwise inclined to do. She suppressed a story told her by Carl Schurz, a Lincoln confidant and appointee, that Lincoln’s wife had been the tragedy of his existence and that she tried to influence the president after accepting a diamond necklace as a bribe. After Robert died in 1926, Tarbell wrote a profile of Mary for the Ladies’ Home Journal in which she said simply that Mary felt she had a right to some of the gifts favor-seekers offered.13
In short, Tarbell accepted hearsay if she liked it, could not disprove it, and if it made for a good story. When the whole truth was disappointing, she glossed over it. Despite her biases, however, Tarbell was considered the preeminent Lincoln biographer of her day because she amplified and clarified his life.
She established that Lincoln’s father was not shiftless “white trash,” but an orphaned younger son who had overcome significant disadvantages, and that Lincoln’s early life, though crude, was honest and upright. She was exceedingly fine on detail and disproved much that had been glibly stated as fact. Herndon had cited John Hanks as the source of Lincoln’s vow against slavery at a New Orleans auction, but Tarbell found that Hanks had never been there. She contradicted William Cullen Bryant’s belief that he had seen Lincoln during the Black Hawk War by showing that Lincoln had left his command a month before Bryant ever arrived. Despite Nicolay’s contention that he had published the complete Lincoln correspondence, Tarbell discovered three hundred more letters of varying importance. “From Miss Tarbell’s books,” said Lincoln scholar Benjamin Thomas, “came new appreciation of the power of the American West and what it could do in the way of fashioning a man.”14
Having been born in the backwoods of Pennsylvania on her grandparents’ farm, Tarbell had a special feeling for the frontier and for pioneer life. Napoleon, like Lincoln, had risen from rocky soil, but Tarbell did not draw a parallel between the two. To her it seemed that a Lincoln could appear only in America and she appreciated her country the more for it. On her seventy-fourth birthday, after a distinguished career, she said that The Life of Abraham Lincoln had given her more pleasure than any other work she ever did. She revered Lincoln because he was totally self-made—he was without educational background, yet his great moral and intellectual qualities, his seriousness of thought and purpose, and the tradition of American individualism had enabled Lincoln to make himself great.
Her work provided a feast of what the public wanted to believe about Lincoln and the great nation he preserved, and reviewers approved of it. The Nation said that the aggregate of discoveries “made a story considerably softened from that which had commonly been accepted … The book deserves, on the whole, the popular welcome … because it satisfies in an honest way the cravings for details of Lincoln’s wonderful career.”
The Philadelphia American observed: “Not only has she written a book of unusual interest throughout, but what is even more to the purpose, she gives her readers a comprehensive insight into the life and characteristics of this man who rose to every occasion and emergency no matter how trying or difficult.”15
McClure had long seen that additional money could be made from Tarbell’s popular biographies, and he dreamed up McClure’s Quarterly, which would be devoted to a subject already covered in the magazine. The entire Napoleon series was reprinted in one quarterly and the Lincoln in the next. Since Tarbell’s work was the basis for the publication, he asked her to supervise production. Thus, she became the victim of his gift for turning a peak into a precipice. In a letter to Herbert Adams she described in telegraphic fashion two months of concentrated editorial work: “Since Christmas I have seen one book—a pamphlet—it is a book in size and a whole encyclopaedia in trouble—our Lincoln quarterly—through the press. And I have read all the proofs for another. A biographical study of Madame Roland.”16
Unable to project demand, McClure overprinted the Napoleon quarterly by sixty thousand copies. However, the Lincoln issue proved so popular that they could not afford to produce enough. “The Life of Lincoln saved us from absolute ruin,”17 he told her much later, attesting to her ability to balance seesawing McClure ledgers. So that he would never again be unable to meet popular demand, McClure proceeded to buy a printing plant on credit. Thus in January 1896 the McClure operation of books, magazines, and quarterlies was the success of the editorial world and over a quarter million nineteenth-century dollars in debt.18
Tarbell could not physically cope with the stresses she and McClure had placed on herself. In the summer of 1896, overcome by exhaustion, possibly complicated by neuralgia, she checked into Clifton Springs Sanitarium near Rochester, New York. Two principles guided Clifton Springs—the efficacy of chapel and the water cure. Tarbell was one of the first patients in the new six-story building that was so modern as to be fireproof, well-ventilated, centrally heated in winter, and fanatically clean. In their scrupulousness, her doctors allowed her to sit up only two hours a day. For the next thirty years she regularly repaired to Clifton to restore herself and hide out from the world. “I like it because I can hang a card saying ‘No admittance’ on my door and see no one but those who wait on me,” she told a friend. “When I am low or down I can cut out demands on my time or emotions by coming here.”19
Hazen, teaching at Smith College, teased her about wearing down her health: “I am so used to your defying laws of God and man that I am shocked to find you aren’t as superior as I thought … It’s that book of yours and all that editorial work and no golfing and no bicycling that have been your ruin. New York is all well enough if you want to see the opera or have a good dinner, but Northampton is better if you want health. Perhaps, however, you don’t care to have me continue in this somewhat highflown strain steadily getting points all the time for my own uses.”20
Once she was out of bed, Hazen went to Clifton Springs to cheer her up. Together they climbed the rocks and enjoyed the four parks and waterfall. He was her summer tradition for four years—they had joined the Vincents on Cape Cod the year before; in 1897, they met in Loches, Switzerland with Sarah and they saw each other in Boston the next year.
After leaving Clifton Springs that summer of 1896, Ida resumed her schedule, commuting continually between New York and Washington. If hostesses sought her, if people wanted to m
eet her, she was just out of their grasp. She never took herself seriously enough to appreciate the flattery, and attributed her popularity to her friendship with Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell. She would arrive in New York, check into the Fifth Avenue Hotel, or the St. Denis, or the Hotel Manhattan, and find that McClure, who had summoned her, had just left. Her ceaseless peregrinations and the logistics of transporting personal possessions, letters, and office supplies to or from Washington occupied much of her time and energy. And, adding to the confusion in the process of trying to ease it, she decided to renounce the Patterson establishment and move into an apartment at 919 I Street NW where she could have the solitude she needed to recoup her strength.
She seemed unable to comprehend the success that had come to her with apparent suddenness, but really after many years of work. A reporter from Leslie’s Weekly was astonished to find her oblivious to her fame. He observed her spending interminable hot summer days reviewing letters from readers from every town and mail station in America. Now and then some ancient visitor would arrive to tell her about Abraham Lincoln and she would give him full attention. She regarded herself simply as a worker, going to her tasks as a mechanic with his lunch pail. Leslie’s anonymous interviewer observed: “Life is an everyday matter to her, but the most ordinary incidents of its routine are too real and full of significance ever to become common. She has no pride in her success. She plods persistently through any task, meeting every new emergency with a new resource and when finished puts it aside as a cooper does his completed task … She is both sensitive and sensible … her biographies are vital because they are true … it is because she never invests her characters with anything not theirs and because she is never tempted by sentiment to conceal or evade that even Napoleon and Lincoln, heretofore rendered impossible or preserved as mummies, are now before us, alive and well, raised from the head by the hand of a plodder.”21
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