A Traveler's Tale for Presidents' Day

No matter how small the town, it's bound to have generated some history, often of far more than local interest. This lesson was reinforced for me anew last summer when I was visiting the Chautauqua Institution, in upstate New York.

Surprisingly enough, it wasn't Chautauqua itself, or even nearby Jamestown (home at one point to Lucille Ball, Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson, and ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson) that was the site of a fascinating bit of Americana, but the nearby village of Westfield, the self-described “Grape Juice Capital of the World.”

As I was traveling one blindingly sunny mid-summer afternoon on Route 3 into this town of 3,400, my eyes caught sight of a pair of facing bronze statues in a small corner park. One statue depicted a small, young girl; the other, a lanky, bearded man. I couldn't recognize the girl, but there was no doubt at all about the man. (He's in the photo I took that accompanies this blog entry; due to lighting conditions that time of day, I could not fit the girl in as well.)

I was on my way into town, in the middle of my vacation, to get some photos developed. But the sight was so arresting that I just had to stop to find out: What on earth was a statue of Abraham Lincoln with a little girl doing in such a comparatively remote part (more than 60 miles inland from Buffalo) of upstate New York?

Janice Hogenboom, a reference librarian at Westfield's Patterson Library, helped me unlock this tale. My thanks to her for allowing me to view the library’s file of clippings on onetime resident Grace Bedell—the little girl responsible for one of the iconic images in American history.

(A word of advice to researchers of all levels of sophistication: Be kind to librarians. Take it from one who has been on both sides of the reference desk: It’ll pay you dividends!)

The Face of the President-Elect
For all of our current emphasis on image, it would be a mistake to believe that appearance never entered the minds of pre-20th century statesmen. When the Second Continental Congress considered who should be appointed commander in chief of the army, George Washington showed up in the blue-and-buff uniform of his Fairfax (Va.) County militia. And Abraham Lincoln was fully conscious of his own appearance, using it as the subject of some of his best lines. (Charged with being a phony by a detractor, Lincoln responded with a joke that brought down the house: “If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?”)

In her fine study of Lincoln and his cabinet, Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin noted how his face could change. Unutterably sad in response, it lit up so much in telling a humorous anecdote that throngs of onlookers gathered around him in taverns along the court circuit he traveled in Illinois, creating a circle of friends that would be instrumental in his runs for the Senate and the Presidency.

Take a look at how Lincoln’s private secretary John Nicolay described that face in motion: “Graphic art was powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip, in the long gamut of expression from grave to gay, and back again from the rollicking jollity of laughter to that far-away look.”

Unlike conventionally handsome Presidents such as FDR, John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, who photographed as well while still as while mobile, Lincoln’s face would have benefited dramatically from the coming of the motion picture.

A Matthew Brady photo, taken at the start of the 1860 campaign, depicted Lincoln as he had appeared for his entire adult life to that point: clean-shaven. His cheekbones protruded noticeably, casting dark shadows across the face that highlighted his frequent melancholy.

Posterity's opinion of the President may have been shaped irrevocably by his subsequent decision to grow a beard. Facial hair disguised the hollowed-out look of the cheekbones without covering over the deep-set gaze. Inevitably, facial hair also gave him the appearance of an Old Testament patriarch, inspiring a subsequent nickname: "Father Abraham."

The name might have been more appropriate than many realized at the time. Just as the biblical Abraham came to be revered as “the father of nations” by the three monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Lincoln became the father of “a new birth of freedom” in what one of my Columbia University professors of history, James Shenton, liked to refer to as the “Second American Republic.”

A Little Girl’s Suggestion
During the campaign of 1860, the Bedell family of Westfield were ardent supporters of "Honest Abe." After a poster of the candidate was brought home, 11-year-old Grace told her mother that he would look much better with whiskers, then set down her opinion in a letter to Lincoln.

Of the many letters the busy candidate received in this stressful time, this one caught his attention. As he told Westfield notable G.W. Patterson, the letter “so differed from the many self-seeking and threatening ones I was daily receiving that it came to me as a relief and a pleasure.”

In mid-October, Lincoln replied to the young girl. After writing that it was too bad he did not have any daughters, he turned to her suggestion: "As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?"

But the idea began to appeal to Lincoln, and after the election he began to grow a beard in earnest. By January 1861, it had grown so substantial that his young aide (and future biographer) John Hay even composed a couplet on it.

Lincoln stopped at Westfield as part of a 12-day railroad tour of the Northeast before his inauguration. Throughout the tour, the President-elect made sure he said as little as possible about the conflict everyone knew was coming.

Under normal circumstances, Lincoln was not fond of off-the-cuff speaking. Now, with the question of war in the balance, he did not want to risk a gaffe that would exacerbate an already troubling situation. (Emotions were so high that Lincoln’s personal safety was jeopardized: Detective Allan Pinkerton persuaded him to take a night train through Baltimore, a hotbed of Confederate sentiment, to avoid an assassination plot he had uncovered.)

All the more reason, then, to keep the Westfield appearance more in the line of a photo op than a major policy address.

When Lincoln's train pulled into town, young Grace went to see it with two older sisters. At first, the large crowd blocked her view of the tall President-elect. But, hearing him ask that if she were present she should step up, she was led forward by the boyfriend of one of her sisters.

Stepping down from the platform of the railroad car, Lincoln took the girl’s small hands in his large ones, stooped down from his immense height and kissed her on the cheek, saying, “You see I let these whiskers grow for you, Grace.”

The unexpected attention from the candidate and the cheering crowd so embarrassed the girl that she forgot all about the bouquet of roses she was going to present him. She ran home, speaking to no one.

For all her consternation, however, she did not forget, then or subsequently, the expression on the great man’s face as he bent down toward her. It was so characteristic of what everyone else said of him: “He seemed so very kind but looked so very sad.” He hadn’t even started his new job yet, but, as he told his old Springfield, Illinois neighbors in bidding them farewell, he knew he faced “a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.”

A Footnote to the Lincoln Legend
Surprisingly enough, this was not the only letter that Grace would send Lincoln. In 1864, now “grown to the size of a woman,” she wrote him again, after financial reverses led her father to lose nearly all his property, requesting a job in the State Department, where, she had heard, a number of young girls were employed, at good wages, cutting Treasury notes. This time, she received no reply.

The historian who discovered this second letter in the National Archives in March of last year believes it never reached the President.

Four years later, Grace married a man named George Billings and moved with him to Delphos, Kansas. They encountered the usual hardships of prairie life and had another close encounter with American history (George became friendly with “Wild Bill” Hickok), but they eventually settled into a comfortable life—George as a banker, Grace as (this is the part I love!) the town’s first librarian.

Over the years, as reverence for the martyred President grew, every bit of lore associated with his life became fodder for journalists. For her last six decades, Grace Bedell Billings recounted to them her 15 minutes of fame. She died in 1936, at age 87.

As I faced the two statues in Westfield’s pocket-sized Lincoln-Bedell Park, I did not feel the same sense of rapt awe I experienced in the presence of the Lincoln Memorial, that immense secular temple on Washington’s great national mall. But I did find these figures located far more in a specific moment, far more approachable, and far more human than Daniel Chester French’s masterpiece.

And all because I took an unexpected drive in a remote town…